The artist Phil Collins called “one of a kind”
In a bar on the outskirts of San Diego, a performer named Jennifer Whisper channels unwritten masterpieces from deceased musicians using her clairvoyant abilities. Moondog was a blind composer who dressed as a Viking and invented his own instruments. These musicians define the tenets of being “one of a kind.” Needless to say, Phil Collins isn’t the sort of fellow who would pick one of these folks.
However, while he was frustrated to be “cast aside as some sort of Barry Manilow” of pop, there is logic to his choice for the world’s most unique musician. You see, “one of a kind” outsider stars like Whisper and Moondog are, in effect, a law unto themselves. Collins, on the other hand, has sold around 150 million records as a solo artist and a further 100 million with Genesis – he’s not playing Sinatra on a chainsaw down the local community centre.
However, a few stars have somehow managed to bring the avant-garde edges of art to the centre of commercial success. Nothing has been better on this front than the late David Bowie. As Collins reflected, “Bowie was heralded. Everybody seemed to like David. He was always interesting. He was always doing something that was not inside the box, always reinventing himself. You never knew what to expect and that made him one of a kind … Surprising.”
This was something that Collins was uber aware of—envious, in some way, of stars who were recognised as ‘cool’. As he put it to David Sheff, “There’s a tendency for people to be cynical about popularity, like you’re appealing to the lowest common denominator, which is another term for trash. It’s an insulting attitude—insulting to the audience. I mean, sometimes I feel it. Like, God, I wish I were David Byrne, with this small, tight group of fans. The critics would like me.”
With great admiration, Collins saw Bowie as someone who married the two spheres of influence. This made Bowie a giant. A lot of what Collins was both puzzled and inspired by in the 1980s was a product of the Starman’s unique heralding. The Smiths were chief among those acts, and Johnny Marr once explained, “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.
Adding, ”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.”
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, you go to craft fairs today, and just about every working artist carries a touch of his 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 David 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 and 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 his cranium. He vowed to be “one of a kind”, and Collins is far from the only one who thinks he succeeded with aplomb.
