“The most important” British artist in history, according to Johnny Marr
What’s best about the scissored isle of Britain? Well, it’s the culture by a long shot.
For the 22nd most populated nation on the planet to have produced William Shakespeare, The Beatles, Gillian McKeith – names who rose from humble beginnings to go down in history – is nothing short of miraculous. We have cracked the canny knack of quietly foisting artistic revolutions from the back room of a pub that warms the hearts of the proletariat the world over.
In 1972, David Bowie appeared on Top of the Pops and unveiled the latest instalment. The nation wondered en masse, ‘Who was this monster and what kind of creature bore him?’ And then it happened: with one lanky finger, he unzipped the TV screen and welcomed a million bewildered eyes into his new bohemian oeuvre.
From that moment on, the world wouldn’t just change for a couple of thousand enamoured youngsters, but for all of us, and the reverberating ripples are still shaping things to this day. Johnny Marr himself has continued to propagate them, never losing sight of the striking moment his future became possible.
The Smiths guitarist would pick up on Bowie’s unique ability to reconcile the times with melodic perfection and follow in his footsteps by rattling off emotive, tremolo-drenched riffs in an era where everyone else was turning towards stilted synths. His musicology was profound. As a guitarist, he impacted everything that followed on both sides of the Atlantic in grunge and Britpop, respectively. However, Marr happily admits that he was simply clinging to the technicolour coattails of his alien hero.
“David Bowie is easily the most influential and important artist to come out of the UK, for so many reasons – there are musicians who are influenced by him who don’t even realise it,” he told NME in 2013. ”Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory liberated so many people from the straight sensibility in the suburbs. People who I grew up admiring, like Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks or Ian Curtis, were hugely influenced by Bowie. No Bowie, no John Lydon – or lots of other people.”
He continued to recite his own unforgettable first encounter with Bowie. It’s a familiar tale with a million different personal corroborations from all of the Starman’s fans and even detractors alike. He was simply an artist impossible to ignore. As Marr explained, “I first heard of him in the glam rock days with the amazing run of RCA singles – I think ‘Suffragette City’ was played at my youth club.”
Marr was awed by its shocking sound, adding: “What was fantastic was that it was this tough, tight rock music, but the cool girls liked it, because back then, a lot of rock music was good guitar players but was just guy-zone – music for spotty, greasy boys. So many parents hated that Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane period, because it was so obviously sexually loaded and erotic. That was really liberating.”
That’s the beauty of Bowie: he was so startlingly different and yet so easily accessible that he opened your worldview up rather effortlessly. “It was naughty, and it was exciting, and it was illicit,” Marr continues, “It was about a world that I just couldn’t wait to join – he really understood what a great art form commercial pop could be.”
This insight hints at the true depths of Bowie’s influence. No artist in history has impacted quite such a wide swathe of culture as Bowie, and that, oddly, seems fairly unarguable. He was pivotal in the formation of punk. His embracing of technology transformed pop. His costumes completely changed fashion. His views on equality and daring androgyny transformed society at large…
His impact goes on and on. You go to craft fairs today, and just about every working artist carries a touch of their legacy in their work. In short, his impact hasn’t been restricted so much to a genre as it has been restricted to art at all.
Now, the term ‘influencer’ is riddled with all the connotations of social media, but when Bowie was trying to burst through onto the scene, pop culture had barely been around long enough for people to even grasp the notion. However, Bowie was always someone with an eye for trends and turfing up wisdom where possible.
So, his different coloured eyes bulged when his literary hero William S Burroughs said, “Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact”. A proverbial light bulb lit up somewhere near Bowie’s cranium. He set out to ensure that his art would inspire the most transcendent and simple of things: other people to create art of their own.
As he put it himself on Charlie Rose, “I think the great fight is that for the established art world, it is fundamental that the mystery is kept in place because once it falls into the hands of the proletariat – that the ability to make art is, in fact, inherent in all of us- it demolishes the idea of art for commerce and that’s no good for business.”
In other words, Bowie wanted us to realise that just because a Pablo Picasso is valued at £50million doesn’t mean that you couldn’t paint something just as good and as meaningful because you’re not part of that ‘world’. The act of creation is in all of us, even if the outcome isn’t deemed ‘valuable’ by the arbitrary powers that be. Somehow, and I’m not sure how, Bowie managed to convey this with more striking clarity than anyone. Which is perhaps just about everyone creating art has some form of response to him.
This was always his goal. In the beginning, Bowie wanted more than anything to be an architect of change in some way, and everything else was secondary. He merely wanted to be an influential figure. He once stated: “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.”
Whether through music, his understandably short-lived multimedia mime act or some other means, he struggles to strong-arm this aim to begin with, but by God did he get there in the end.
