David Byrne on the impact of David Bowie: “Something that was needed”
Every artist will want to leave the music scene in a much different place than where they found it. Although it could be for better or worse, it takes a special kind of magic to arrive on the scene and stop the clock from the minute that you have the audience’s ear, which can also be a double-edged sword once people actually start paying attention for what you have in the pipeline next. David Byrne may have helped kick down some doors when forming Talking Heads, but he felt that David Bowie was the first to truly make music that rock couldn’t survive without.
Looking back on the pre-Bowie era of the music world, things had just turned from black and white to colour in more ways than one. Aside from people embracing the ‘Summer of Love’, The Beatles were the first to expand the possibilities of what the genre could be by embracing the album format and making wild experiments while ‘The Starman’ was still strumming his acoustic.
As soon as ‘Space Oddity’ arrived, the musical god had finally fallen down to Earth, complete with the most insane getups one could imagine. Just as the glam rock movement was kicking into gear, Bowie was unstoppable, whether that meant wearing fashions no one had considered or daring to speak out for the disenfranchised.
Then again, staying a glam-rock god forever would have been pretty boring, so Bowie made it a point to never do the same thing twice, going from krautrock on Station to Station to post-rock on “Low” and then ultimately ending up as a pop star with Let’s Dance in less than a decade. Byrne had been paying attention as the punk movement faded, though.
Talking Heads never fit squarely into the punk label anyway, so when ‘Psycho Killer’ hit the airwaves, the only reason it could afford to be there was for Bowie to knock down doors first. Otherwise, where else would anyone find someone singing in French and screaming at the top of his lungs within the span of one song?
Although Talking Heads were always their own unique entity, Byrne thought that Bowie represented people like him who dared to dream of something a bit weirder, saying at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “When David Bowie came along, rock and roll needed a shot in the arm. When I first saw him, it was a shock, but it was also very familiar,” he said. “It was something that was needed. It was essential, and like all rock and roll, it was visionary, tasteless, glamorous and perverse.”
But if Bowie was the first to do it, then Byrne would see how far he could take art rock when starting out. By working with fellow Bowie acolyte Brian Eno, their creations on Fear of Music and Remain in Light are some of the most forward-thinking albums to be released in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially when they managed to score hits out of the deal like on ‘Burning Down the House’.
If breaking down the musical side of what the genre represented, though, Byrne wouldn’t dare to say that he was on the same playing field as Bowie. Given the man’s track record all the way up to his final album, Blackstar, Bowie is one of the single most influential musicians in the history of rock and roll outside of The Beatles and Bob Dylan.
