The artists that make up David Bowie: Six of his biggest inspirations
When it comes to someone as sui generis as David Bowie, tracing an inspiration is a bit like trying to reverse engineer an alien aircraft. He was so unfathomably original and unique that any influences seem to be subsumed in the mythical welter of his otherworldly output. Thankfully, he was very forthcoming about his passions and the art that wove its way into his oeuvre was happily extolled so that we may join him in his bohemian mausoleum.
In fact, one of the draws that makes Bowie so beloved among his army of mega-fans is just how much of an artistic guardian he proved to be. I, for one, owe a fair chunk of my bookshelf, record collection, gallery visits and cinema trips to the influence of Bowie. He was never too hung up on his own identity to not simply come across as an interesting person interested in interesting things from time to time.
This thought process made him a beacon beyond his bright new music. As he said himself: “I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture I was living in.” He achieved that feat with roaring aplomb and continues to do so.
Thus, below we have delved into the influences behind the art—the inspirations that make up the mirage of ‘The Starman’. From the outsider artists who showed him the way to explore weirdness to his literary heroes, these forces make up noticeable brushstrokes in his masterful works.
David Bowie’s six biggest inspirations:
Anthony Newley
Bowie’s act was always a lot more multimedia than many of his peers. He wasn’t quite a song and dance star, but his work was never cut and dry rock ‘n’ roll either. This sense of being a consummate entertainer was inspired by Anthony Newley, a musician and actor who started off as a solo artist before moving into musicals and cabaret. As Bowie once said: “When I was around 17-18, what I wanted to do more than anything was write something for Broadway – I wanted to write a musical. I had no idea how you did it or how musicals were constructed, but the idea of writing something that was rock-based for Broadway really intrigued me I thought that would be a wonderful thing to do.”
“I thought of myself as somebody who would end up writing musicals in a way – probably rock musicals of some nature,” he continued, “But it never actually became that, so those ideas were quashed a little bit when I realised what an ambitious thing that was to take on because you have to write dialogue and all.” With a cheeky grin and a cockney singing accent stolen straight from Newley, Bowie’s early stylings were essentially an attempt at ushering the ways of his old hero into the visceral world of rock.
William S. Burroughs
Bowie credited his half-brother Terry Burns as a force who shaped his early interests, one of which was his love for beat literature. The cutting prowess of Burroughs’ guttural curb-side scenes was something that often infiltrated into his songwriting even beyond the word-cutting technique that he borrowed.
As Bowie once said: “I have always been drawn to the Bill Burroughs of this world, who produce a vocabulary that is not necessarily a personal one, but something that is made up of ciphers and signifiers which are regurgitated, reformed and re-accumulated.” In some ways, you could say the same thing about Bowie’s highly influential music—you don’t get much of the man himself in there, but you do get an awful lot about the world around him. When you combine this with the edginess that they both also relished, you see just how seismic Burroughs was for Bowie.
John Lennon
Love them or loath them, no one can escape the influence of The Beatles. They truly transcended culture in the “influencer” fashion that Bowie always craved, but it was the ‘Smart One’ who always stood out to him. “It’s impossible for me to talk about popular music without mentioning probably my greatest mentor, John Lennon,” he once 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.”
Lennon was a driving force for expanding the mainstream with avant-garde inflexions. He pursued this uncompromisingly but made himself such a vital icon that his far-flung ways were inescapable. And that was, in part, down to how endearing he made his music. This humanised and quirky approach inspired Bowie in a literal sense too. The one thing that I really adored about Lennon’s writing was his use of the pun, which was exceedingly good,” Bowie said. “I don’t think anyone has ever bettered Lennon’s use of the pun.”
Syd Barrett
Bowie was obsessed with bohemia. When his family moved to the suburbs, he thought it was a world without culture. Thus, he became obsessed with getting back to the heart of the counterculture. This was a new bohemian world that Pink Floyd’s former frontman, the late Syd Barrett, was already a resident of. “Syd was a major inspiration for me,” Bowie declared in the wake of his death back in 2006. “He was so charismatic and such a startlingly original songwriter.”
Later adding, “Also, along with Anthony Newley, he was the first guy I’d heard to sing pop or rock with a British accent. His impact on my thinking was enormous. A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed.” It was Barrett’s sense of unbridled individualism that he adored. From his fashion to his frenzied imagination, Barrett was something fresh while his creative flame lasted. Bowie, likewise, became determined to present the most interesting version of himself that he could.
The Velvet Underground
“My manager brought back an album, it was just a plastic demo of Velvet’s very first album in 1965-ish, something like that,” Bowie recalled in an interview with PBS. “He was particularly pleased because Warhol had signed the sticker in the middle, I still have it by the way. He said, ‘I don’t know why he’s doing music, this music is as bad as his painting’ and I thought, ‘I’m gonna like this.’ I’d never heard anything quite like it, it was a revelation to me.” The literary bravura and iconoclastic cacophony of pure unbridled artistry clearly had an effect on what was to come for ‘The Starman’, but much like Lou Reed’s troupe, it would take him a while to be recognised by the wider world.
The band had pioneered something that could never be put back in the bottle. As David Bowie once opined: “It was Bob Dylan who brought a new kind of intelligence to pop songwriting but then it was Lou [Reed] who had taken it even further and into the avant-garde.” Bowie was determined to keep up that angle in his own work and disavow the usual hand-holding standards of popular music.
Daniel Johnston
Inspiration didn’t stop for Bowie when he became a mega-star. He kept looking for new ways to interact with society, looking for new impetus that would push him away from the comfort of playing to the gallery and keeping things on his own creative terms. During a stumbling block in his career, the outside art of Daniel Johnston helped to illuminate this once again for Bowie.
Bowie once dubbed Johnston a “one-man Beach Boys,” but the admiration ran beyond the outsider musicians’ unmistakable ear for melody. In a 2002 interview with Mojo, Bowie confirmed that his interest was not merely a fleeting fancy. “He comes out of Austin, Texas, also another lad who had a lot of problems with thinking,” he said. “He was in different institutions and hospitals all his life and would make funny little cassettes of all his songs, on an out-of-tune piano or guitar: beautiful, poignant, sad little pieces. And he’d take them into the local comic shop and swap the cassettes for comics.” In 2005, Bowie provided the following tagline for the superb documentary film The Devil and Daniel Johnston: “Daniel Johnston reminds me of aspects that made me love art in the first place.”
