The writer David Bowie never got over: “That guy messed me up”
An old English teacher of mine once told me that you can’t be a good writer unless you’re a reader. No art form is an island, and if you want to inspire, you first have to be inspired. Clearly, David Bowie subscribed to that, too.
We talk about the music world as one big lineage, or one giant stream of inspiration, where every artist tosses their work in, and it gets passed down person to person, or shared amongst their peers. That’s how sound evolves and how scenes are built as people’s influence becomes a shared and communal thing.
But it goes beyond just music. That one significant stream of influence is shared by artists working in all industries and styles dips into. All art eventually ends up converging when you have people like Patti Smith who places punk and poetry side by side, or people like Kate Bush who was as inspired by dance as she was by any song.
Bowie was the same. When considering his biggest influences, talking about just music doesn’t even scratch the surface. In fact, really, the majority of Bowie’s top inspirations came from outside of that world as he looked less towards musical peers or prompts, but more towards things like fashion, film, dance, photograph, literature and beyond.
There are so many examples of the way that Bowie looked beyond music to inform his own. Theatre played a huge role as his fascination with mime came back around time and time again in his different eras, as did the impact of the dancer Lindsay Kemp, who taught him how to move.
Surrealist art played a part too, as visual prompts from paintings or avant-garde films helped build his spiralling lyricism and hypnotic visual worlds. But in his own eyes, there was no influence as important, as formative or as enduring as his deep love for William S Burroughs.
“I’m definitely under his spell,” Bowie said in 1987. Ten years after his Thin White Duke era, which was massively inspired by Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch, the artist was still hooked in. Ever since learning about the beat generation writer’s ‘cut-up method’, Burroughs’ work led to Bowie getting even more abstract and avant-garde, playing around even more with form and almost completely abandoning structure.
“That guy messed me up when I first started reading him in the late ’60s, and I’ve never gotten over it,” he said as the impact lasted forever. When the two then met in 1973, Bowie moved from a fan to a complete devotee, often adopting Burroughs’ technique of cutting and chopping and playing around with random words and phrases when he was in the studio.
“That kind of writing and performance I can really throw myself into,” he said, as it was more than just an inspiration, but an influence that came to be a real cornerstone of his artistic process and vision.
He wasn’t the only one. The impact of Burroughs on music is insurmountable, as other names like Patti Smith, Kurt Cobain, and even Duran Duran spoke to the impact the writer, his characters and his wild methods had on their work.
