The Velvet Underground of the 1980s, according to David Bowie
The streets upon which music’s great acts seem to be inextricably linked to the legacy in which they leave. Whether it’s Talking Heads being a quintessential New York band or Oasis capturing the socialist expression of 1990s Manchester, the skies under which artists sang seem to be tightly weaved into their story. But while we British may do our best to label David Bowie as one of the United Kingdom’s greats, truthfully, he exists as something more: one of the planet’s greats not suitably linked to the shores of one country.
While that may largely be down to his enigmatic artistic style that somehow captures the cosmic and deeply human in the simple utterance of one line, his role as an artistic journeyman helps support the overall idea. Beginning in the back streets of London, before heading to the bright lights of New York and then the rubble of a newly burgeoning Berlin, his artistic voice is ingrained in the world’s great cities.
Through that odyssey, he forged important relationships with the likes of Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, who would ride on the coattails of his unwavering innovation and subsequently forge singular careers in the sunlight provided by Bowie’s fierce creative integrity. They, too, would become artists not beholden to commercial expectations but rather to themselves, regardless of whether it threatened their exposure.
“It was part of my crusade to present these fantastic underground artists to the hippy world and get them an audience,” Bowie told Paul Du Noyer in an interview for Mojo. He was asked about his role as a producer for bands like The Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop and The Stooges and how it fit into his general pursuit for artistic freshness in music, be it his own projects or those of another artist.
“I thought they were just brilliant.”
david bowie
“You’d occasionally see things in the New Musical Express about The Velvets, but I would almost put money that there was never an article about Iggy in the British music press until I introduced him to England,” he added.
Continuing, he added: “And if there had been more than half a dozen articles in the five or six years before I got Lou into view again… They were totally abandoned; there was nothing about them. I had a real joy in, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet: these are two great influences who will influence rock from this point on.’ I get pangs of that every now and again. I had it in the ’80s about the Pixies; I thought they were just brilliant. In America, they just did not make a dent, apart from on several bright artists like Kurt Cobain.”
Bowie wasn’t shy in sharing his admiration for the Pixies over the years and believed they too were torchbearers in the lineage of influence, saying, “It’s a cliché, but somebody once said that The Velvet Underground didn’t sell many albums, but everybody who bought a Velvet Underground album formed a band, and I would have to suggest that the same thing really applied to the Pixies.”
It’s comforting to know that Bowie took great enjoyment from artists whose work was directly influenced by his back catalogue. Be it jarring guitar sounds placed into playfully delicate melodies or twisted irreverence being injected into profoundly human lyrics, Pixies were modernising a blueprint set out by the great chameleon that was then recycled into a world of influence for the next stage of Bowie’s genre-bending career in the 1990s and early 2000s.
