Arguably the biggest surprise would have been if he had turned up, but David Bowie proved some stars are big enough not to have make themselves available when he won the British male solo artist award at the Brits – and used his proxy acceptance speech to ask: "Scotland, stay with us." The win made the 67-year-old pop legend the oldest ever winner of a Brit, passing Tom Jones, who won the outstanding contribution award in 2003, when he was a mere 62. Kate Moss accepted the award from Noel Gallagher on Bowqie's behalf, reading out a statement that was equal parts baffling and gracious.

It was Bowie's first recognition at the Brits since his 1996 outstanding contribution award, and his first for a specific year's work since he won best British male in 1984. He had been nominated for last year's Mercury Music Prize, but failed to win – and didn't turn up to that ceremony either.

Bowie's return to the pop fray with The Next Day last year – 10 years after his previous album, Reality – proved to be a masterpiece of campaign management. His 24th album was announced without any hint of warning in January 2013, trailed by a mournful, elegiac single, Where Are We Now?

And despite the incredible amounts of press coverage his re-emergence provoked, the man himself stayed silent, leaving his friends and collaborators to do his talking for him. The silence was in keeping with the recording of The Next Day – although the album had been two years in the making, no word of it had crept out. As Bowie insiders told the Guardian last year, he was able to keep it that way because the team around him is so small that very few people even knew he was recording.

Reading on mobile? Watch David Bowie's video for The Next Day here

Not that the silence was always willing. "I was on the cover of Guitar Player magazine," Bowie's longtime guitarist Earl Slick told the Guardian. "It was the Christmas issue, the one you want to be on the cover of, the one that's on the newsstands twice as long. And I'm making a new Bowie album and I can't tell them anything. The only person I told was my manager."

However, sales of The Next Day were, while decent, hardly spectacular. And it's notable that Bowie won the male solo artist award, rather than the best album prize, for which he was also nominated. The Next Day's sales of just over 250,000 paled in comparison to those of the other nominated albums – 550,000 for both Bastille's Bad Blood and Arctic Monkeys' AM, and around 450,000 for Disclosure's Settle and Rudimental's Home.