The Brits tribute did cover more ground than that. It began with a vocal sample from his breakthrough 1969 single Space Oddity, which segued to a medley of riffs played by the six-piece band that played with Bowie on his last live concert tour, in 2003 (bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, pianist Mike Garson, drummer Sterling Campbell, keyboardist Catherine Russell and guitarists Earl Slick and Gerry Leonard). This tightest of outfits played short snippets of some of his best-known songs – Space Oddity, Rebel Rebel, Let's Dance, Ashes to Ashes, Ziggy Stardust, Fame, Under Pressure and Heroes – before Lorde made her entrance. Lorde performs a tribute to David Bowie at the BRIT Awards in London on Wednesday. Credit:Getty Images She was dressed simply, in matching dark trousers and waistcoat over a white shirt, an echo of the look Bowie adopted in 1976 for the Station to Station tour (and one he reprised for the Heathen tour of 2002). As she started to sing, her voice was unsteady, uncertain, a little croaky. It wasn't until she conquered the first high notes of the plaintive query "is there life on Mars?" that she seemed to find her way fully into the song. She began to move around the stage, her hands clawing theatrically at the air, part mime act, part gothic black cat asserting its territorial rights. She made the song her own.

And when it was over, she choked up, visibly moved not by her own performance but by all that Bowie had meant to her, and to so many others. David Bowie in 1976, sporting the look that apparently inspired Lorde. Credit:Peter Cox She had written about Bowie's impact shortly after his death in January from liver cancer, describing the night in 2013 when she met him at actress Tilda Swinton's 53rd birthday party in New York. "That night something changed in me. I felt a calmness grow, a sureness. I think in those brief moments, he heralded me into my next new life, an old rock and roll alien angel in a perfect grey suit. "I realised everything I'd ever done, or would do from then on, would be done like maybe he was watching. I realised I was proud of my spiky strangeness because he had been proud of his."

No one could accuse Lady Gaga of lacking those same qualities, but her turn at the Grammys was not so much spikily strange as it was strangely lacking in spikiness. Sure, her vocal performance was perhaps more assured than Lorde's, but her rapid-change set felt like pure pastiche. The band and the dancers and the generally histrionic yet one-note tone of it all was pure Broadway, where Lorde's was something closer to rock and roll. In short, the Grammys tribute was all surface, where Lorde at the Brits had depth.

Yes, David Bowie was unashamedly committed to the surface, the capacity to reshape his image and identity. But he was equally committed to exploring what lay beneath that shape-shifting facade – the emptiness and uncertainty that made reinvention seem so crucial for survival. Lorde got that. Where some merely saw, she felt. Hers was a tribute worthy of its subject. Lorde be praised. It certainly hit the right note with Bowie's filmmaker son Duncan Jones, the director of Moon, Source Code and the forthcoming Warcraft. Having decried Lady Gaga's Grammys performance as "mentally confused", Jones was much more favourably disposed to Lorde's take on his father's career, tweeting that it was "just beautiful".

Karl Quinn is on Facebook and on twitter @karlkwin