David Bowie’s 10 favourite songwriters
In 1999, David Bowie told the graduates of Berklee College that music had given him “over 40 years of extraordinary experiences,” he said, before adding: “It’s been both my doorway of perception and the house that I live in”. For the Starman, music was both a lens and a habitat; a way of fragmenting pre-established ideas and building new ones; a conduit of expression and a source of financial security, freedom, joy, paranoia and constant wonder.
Obsessed with music from the get-go, Bowie was constantly drawing inspiration from his idols. You can hear it in his voice, where the vibrato of Anthony Newley found a home. Bowie is regarded as a true original, but his innovative music wouldn’t sound the way it does were it not for the work of his predecessors: songwriters like Bob Dylan, Scott Walker and Little Richard, all of whom had a seismic impac ton his songcraft.
Considering he once confessed to being interested only in music he felt he could steal from, it’s unsurprising that Bowie owned a record collection containing more than 2,500 discs. As a teenager, he’d developed a love of jazz and rock and roll, but as he grew older, he became increasingly interested in songwriters who were able to float between genres, which perhaps explains his love of Lou Reed and David Byrne.
In this list, we’ll be looking at ten of David Bowie’s favourite songwriters, individuals who inspired him and shaped his approach to songwriting and performance. Here we go.
David Bowie’s 10 favourite songwriters:
Bob Dylan
Though David Bowie once took a not-so-thinly-veiled swipe at Bob Dylan with his Hunky Dory song emblazoned with the freewheelin’ troubadours’ name, ‘Song for Bob Dyan’, the folk hero was undoubtedly an icon for the young songwriter when he lived in London. The 1971 song wasn’t so much an ode to Dylan but a suggestion that Bowie was about to take the rock mantle from his idol.
Speaking about his relationship with Dylan in 1976, he added: “I saw Dylan in New York seven, eight months ago. We don’t have a lot to talk about. We’re not great friends. Actually, I think he hates me. We went back to somebody’s house after some gig at a club. We had all gone to see someone. I can’t remember who, and Dylan was there”.
Bowie continued: “I just talked at him for hours and hours and hours, and whether I amused him or scared him or repulsed him, I really don’t know. I didn’t wait for any answers. I just went on and on about everything. And then I said goodnight. He never phoned me.” Despite this, on Bowie’s Next Day, the singer penned another track for Dylan, singing: “Kennedy would kill, For the lines that you’ve written, Van Ronk says to Bobby, ‘She’s the next real thing’ on ‘You Will) Set the World on Fire'”.
Tom Verlaine
There weren’t many artists that David Bowie would let directly influence his work. However, the mercurial mind of the late great Tom Verlaine was certainly one of them. As the brooding frontman for Television, a post-punk band coining the term before it was even invented, Verlaine impressed Bowie. The singer then invited Verlaine to contribute to his 1980 album Scary Monsters… And Super Creeps.
‘Kingdom Come’ is one of the best moments on that record and sees a hefty collaboration between Bowie and Verlaine as the former takes on the latter’s song. Bowie said about the song and Verlaine: “I think he’s one of the finest new writers in New York. He’s really terrific. I think he’s got a… I wish he had a much bigger audience. I feel sure he will have a much bigger audience shortly”.
“This was one of my favourite things that he put on the last album that he had out,” continued Bowie in The David Bowie Interview. “And Carlos Alomar and myself decided it would be a great piece of music to do our own version of. So I did it as sort of a nod of the head to Ronnie Spector, really. Very slightly. Somebody else that I admire tremendously.”
Frank Black
During an interview with the Rockstar, Bowie once detailed his love for the American rockers, Pixies. He praised their “dynamic of keeping the verse extremely quiet and then erupting into a blaze of noise for the choruses”.
Furthermore, he praised lead singer Black Francis’ lyricism and how “the permutations he created within the different subjects that he dealt with were so unusual that it caught my ear immediately. […] It’s done so effortlessly, and it’s done with such a sense of fun and enthusiasm; there’s a great sense of humour underlying everything [Francis] does.” Later, with Tin Machine, Bowie would pay tribute to the band wit his cover of ‘Debaser’.
When Bowie hit a creative wall, disillusioned by the failure of 1987’s Never Let Me Down and the Glass Spider Tour, the musician sought to return to making music solely for himself and used the work of Pixies to be a guiding light for the coming decade.
Lou Reed
No artist on our list had a bigger influence on the inspirational figure of David Bowie than Lou Reed. not only did his band, The Velvet Underground, entirely embolden the very nature of Bowie’s dramatic rise to rock god stardom, but their bountiful friendship would inspire one another as they grew into their new status.
When Bowie first heard Velvet Underground and Nico, the singer became privy to the genius of Lou Reed fairly quickly and played a pivotal role in bringing Reed’s music to a greater audience. As Ziggy Stardust, Bowie performed cover versions of ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ and ‘White Light/White Heat’. Upon hearing of Reed’s death, Bowie would comment, “He was a master”.
Ziggy Stardust’s ‘Queen Bitch’ is an obvious tribute to Lou Reed’s style of songwriting, channelling Lou Reed’s indelible eye for street life. At Bowie’s last concert as the alien, Ziggy Stardust, at the Hammersmith Odeon, right before breaking into a Reed song, Bowie introduced Reed as the “greatest and most important underground songwriter currently working on the scene”. As time went on, Bowie would continuously lean on the cantankerous Reed as a faithful walking stick to aid his journey on the rock and roll path.
John Lennon
Though David Bowie had been interested in music and the performing arts before The Beatles arrived as the saviours of pop music in the early 1960s, it wasn’t until the end of the decade that the Starman would find his feet. By that time, The Beatles’ influence on not only him but the whole world was incomparable. And, just like every other audience member, Bowie had his own favourite member of the band.
With countless covers of Lennon’s work, it’s clear that Bowie thought of the Liverpudlian as one of the greats, even employing his acerbic wit on the hit ‘Fame’. Speaking to MTV in 1995 about his love of Lennon and why it was his favourite member of the Fab Four, Bowie opened up about his adoration: “He [Lennon] was probably one of the brightest, quickest-witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life. Socialist in its true definition, not in a fabricated political sense, a real humanist, and he had a really spiteful sense of humour which, of course, being English, I adored.”
Bowie famously also said these great words about his contemporary during his induction to the Berklee College of Music’s Class of 1999: “It’s impossible for me to talk about popular music without mentioning probably my greatest mentor, John Lennon,” he said. “I guess he defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other art forms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful and imbued with strangeness.”
Scott Walker
Hailed by his record label as “a solo artist, producer and composer of uncompromising originality,” Scott Walker was one of the most inventive songwriters of the 1960s and ’70s. He crossed continents with his group, The Walker Brothers, before embarking on a series of dark and immersive solo albums that, to this day, sound unlike anything else.
In 1997, Bowie appeared on Mary Anne Hobbe’s BBC Radio 1 show for a special 50th birthday broadcast. During the show, David received a surprise message from Walker. “Hi David, This is Scott Walker,” it began. “I’m coming to you via a very crappy handheld tape machine, so I hope it’s alright. I’m going to be a devil today and not ask you any questions.”
“I’m certain that among the many messages, there will be those about how you embrace the new, and how you’ve freed so many artists – and this is, of course, true,” Walker continued. “Like everyone else, I’d like to thank you for all the years and especially your generosity of spirit when it comes to other artists. I’ve been the beneficiary on more than one occasion, let me tell you.” Touched by the message, Bowie responded: “That’s amazing. I see God in the window. He really got to me there, I’m afraid. I think he’s probably been my idol since I was a kid. That’s really moved me. I want a copy of that!”
Robert Wyatt
Former Soft Machine member Robert Wyatt rose to fame as key player in the Canterbury scene. In 1973, at a birthday party in Maida Vale, he fell through a fourth-floor window and broke his spine. Paralysed from the waist down, he released a string of inventive covers before putting out a new album of original material titled Old Rottenhat in 1984.
But perhaps his most notable contribution to British music was his 1982 single, ‘Shipbuilding’, for which he wrote the music and Elvis Costello penned the lyrics. A poetical interrogation of the Falklands conflict, the song was, for Bowie, one of the most important records of the entire decade.
David Bowie often cited ‘Shipbuiling’ – and specifically Robert Wyatt’s version of it – as a masterpiece, once describing it as “a well-thought-through and relentlessly affecting” piece of music. “Wyatt’s interpretation is the definitive,” he said. “Heartbreaking—reduces strong men to blubbering girlies”.
Little Richard
In the early 1960s, David Bowie was still a relatively unknown fringe musician, performing folk-leaning songs in small venues around London. It would take a series of creative epiphanies for him to hit his stride, one of which occurred during a Little Richard concert. Describing Richards as one of his teen “idols” during an interview on Parkinson, he recalled: “I saw him first in 1963, I think it was. And I think it might have been at the Brixton Odeon”.
By then, Richards had already penned some of his most beloved singles, abandoned rock ‘n’ roll for spiritual music, and reembraced the genre with renewed vigour. In 1963, he was added to the bill of the tour Bowie attended – which also featured Bo Diddley and The Rolling Stones – in an attempt boost interest. Bowie would later include The Fabulous Little Richard on his “favourite albums” list for Vanity Fair.
In 1991, Bowie gave a TV interview in which he explained that the first record he ever bought was single called ‘I’ve Got It’, “which [Richards] later rewrote as ‘She’s Got It’.” When he saw the photograph on the sleeve, Bowie was stunned to discover just how many horn players he had in his band. “So I went out and bought a saxophone intending that, when I grew up, i’d start working in Little Richards band as one of his saxophonists.”
Tucker Zimmerman
In Bowie’s opinion, ’60s singer-songwriter Tucker Zimmerman was “way too qualified for folk”. A classically-trained string player from Healdsburg, a small town in California’s Wine Country, he released his first album, Ten Songs By Robert Zimmerman, in 1969, before turning to novels, poetry and orchestral composition in the 1980s.
“Now there’s a title with cool clarity,” Bowie said of Ten Songs, “The guy’s way too qualified for folk, in my opinion. Degrees in theory and composition, studying under composer Henry Onderdonk, Fulbright scholarship, and he wants to be Dylan. A waste of an incendiary talent? Not in my opinion.”
“I always found this album of stern, angry compositions enthralling and often wondered what ever happened to him,” Bowie continued. “Tucker, an American, was one of the first artists to be produced by my friend and co-producer Tony Visconti, also an American, after they found each other in London. I wonder? Ah, yup, he’s got a Web site. Lives in Belgium.”
David Byrne
One of the most prolific songwriters of the new wave era, David Byrne rose to fame with Talking Heads, releasing a series of infectious albums, including Remain in Light, Fear of Music and Speaking in Tongues, before forming a collaboration with Brian Eno and establishing himself as revered solo act in his own right.
Like Bowie, Byrne has always had an insatiable appetite for variety. As well as writing countless solo albums, he’s composed music for theatre and film, written books and developed stage shows. No wonder they were so close. “When David Bowie came along, rock ‘n’ roll needed a shot in the arm,” Byrne said at the glam star’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “When I first saw him, it was a shock, and yet it was very familiar.”
Bowie felt much the same way about Byrne’s music. Introducing Talking Heads during his guest appearance on BBC Radio 1 in March 1979, Bowie said: “Here’s a band I admire very much, some very charming people—David Byrne, in particular.” He then went on to play ‘Warning Signs’ from More Songs About Buildings and Food. “We’re talking about Talking Heads, of course.”
