The David Bowie albums that inspired Elvis Costello
David Bowie needs no real introduction. In reality, his contributions to the advancement of popular culture speak for themselves. It reflects just how pioneering the Brixton native was that his oeuvre still retains the freshness it had when he first broke through.
Although his earlier albums were cultish at the time, it wasn’t until 1972, with the taboo-busting Ziggy Stardust, that people would start to take Bowie seriously. He followed it up with the darker, jazz-oriented romp Aladdin Sane, which closed the book on this early chapter brilliantly.
However, it didn’t just represent an ending. Crucially, the record also signalled what was to come in his next forms, Halloween Jack, the protagonist of Diamond Dogs, and the succeeding persona, the much more refined Thin White Duke, which to many is his ultimate guise.
Notably, The Thin White Duke gave us the game-changing Berlin Trilogy and Lodger, and by the time the 1980s arrived, Bowie was widely-regarded as one of the greatest musicians of his generation.
This was only the beginning, though. As many in America would argue, the best was yet to come. Bowie quickly delivered the atmospheric opus Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980, which featured classics such as ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Fashion’, and by this point, he won significant swathes of his critics over, as yet again, he showed that his penchant for reinvention wasn’t just a gimmick, it was a legitimate means of artistic exploration.
Bowie’s most successful commercial moment soon followed in 1983 in the form of Let’s Dance. Produced by Nile Rodgers and featuring performances from Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bernard Edwards and Omar Hakim, it spawned mammoth crossover hits such as the title track and ‘China Girl’. Afterwards, Bowie’s place in the history books was unquestionable. The respect he garnered with the record allowed him to free himself from any creative chains and continue his experiments touching everything from industrial to world music.
Since Bowie’s back catalogue is so eclectic, most fans have their favourite. For English rocker Elvis Costello, 1971’s Hunky Dory, Low and Heroes from the Berlin Trilogy rank right at the very top of the list. The man behind the overplayed ‘Oliver’s Army’ even went as far as to say that these albums significantly impacted the conception of his masterpiece Armed Forces.
“(I remember) seeing an interview with David Bowie where he said he tried to write the words for ‘My Way’ for a publisher, and they turned down his lyrics, so he wrote ‘Life on Mars'”, Costello said.
He concluded: “You know, that tells you everything about, like, where he lived. You can hear the Anthony Newley, you can hear the ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’ – kind of – in so many of his early songs; I love those songs from Hunky Dory. The Attractions and I really decoded Low and Heroes; it doesn’t sound like they had much impact on us, but as much as ABBA influenced Armed Forces, so did those records.”
