IT has been a sad couple of weeks for anybody who loves popular music, especially for those of us who feel we grew up with recently departed heroes.

First Lemmy, then David Bowie, then Glenn Frey of The Eagles.

These people not only shaped the face of music, but also our own lives.

We lose a little piece of our past every time one of them passes away, and it doesn’t matter that we never knew them personally.

One of my own personal musical heroes, Al Stewart, now aged 70, once sang about being moved to tears on hearing of the death of Buddy Holly: “I never met him so it may seem strange. Don’t some people just affect you that way?”

Thanks to technology, the way we hear about the death of people in the public eye has changed radically, and that affects the way we handle it.

In the case of Lemmy, Bowie and Frey, I heard of all three deaths not through the news media, but rather social media, although in each case I immediately consulted the news channels to check it was true.

It was significant that when broadcasters first broke the news about Bowie, it was as much a confirmation that it wasn’t a social media hoax as a report of a death.

As if to emphasise its own unreliability, social media has also recently thrown up ‘news’ of other ‘deaths’ that turned out to be misleading.

For some reason, last week the death of comic actor Leslie Nielsen became the most read story on the BBC News website after breaking on social media.

The only problem was: he was already dead. He actually died in 2010, and many who had shared the ‘news’ on Facebook and Twitter had overlooked the date on the pages they were sharing, so mistook it for breaking news.

Artist and children’s TV presenter Tony Hart has also ‘died’ two or three times on social media.

But this is nothing new because the world’s two most famous non-deaths pre-dated our technology.

Mark Twain once famously said reports of his death were greatly exaggerated, while worldwide rumours sprang up in 1969 over the ‘death’ of Paul McCartney. Some even claimed he had died three years earlier and been replaced by a lookalike, although nobody explained how the replacement didn’t just look like him, but also managed to write and sing hits like Hey Jude.

I am glad to say Paul McCartney has so far lived to be 73 years old, and also that a friend of mine, called John, has now passed his 78th birthday.

It was mine and my wife’s privilege to be invited to a party to celebrate with him, last weekend, but this was no ordinary birthday party.

When John sent out the invitations, he had another name for it, calling it a ‘pre-wake’ – because his philosophy is a person’s family and friends shouldn’t wait until that person is dead before getting together for a sing-song.

I can honestly say that I have never met anybody who embraces life quite as much as John, a highly intelligent and wise man, with vast experience, but who is so curious about everything he encounters, every day, that he enjoys it with a child-like fascination and wonder.

Hopefully John will be around for a long time yet, but all this morbid talk of death has made me think that when people die it’s sad for their loved ones, but also for all those people they made an impression on, even if they never met.

Perhaps most sad of all, though, is they aren’t around to see how much we miss them.