LimeWire Music Blog

David Bowie turns 63 today, and there’s surely an old Ziggy-era poster getting very old in someone’s attic as rock’s original Dorian Gray marches all twinkly-toed toward senior citizenship. While the ups and downs of Bowie’s mercurial muse are being detailed elsewhere on this blog, we thought we’d take a minute to asses the Thin White Duke’s impact on music by looking at some of the most memorable artists who have evinced a Bowie fixation over the years.

Roxy Music

You know you’re on the seminal side when a band every other act in the world cites as an influences is indebted to you. It may not have taken Roxy long to catch up and stand alongside Bowie as glam gods of the ’70s, but when Ferry and company started out, The Man Who Sold The World and Hunky Dory were seemingly among the few readily identifiable precedents for the band’s “it came from outer space” sound.

David Sylvian

Sylvian and Bowie may both have life-size photos of Scott Walker taped up over their beds, but from the time the former was turning heads as the frontman for Japan, the half of his moves that didn’t come from the Bryan Ferry playbook could be attributed to Bowie. And Sylvian’s later solo work bore echoes of Bowie’s more adventurous side too.

Destroyer

The sprawling art-pop suites, the elegant air of carefully framed decadence, the semi-detached but oddly intense singing style — for as much as Dan “Destroyer” Bejar has come to own all these aspects of his style, his impressive output still sometimes feels like it should sport a lowercase “c” in a circle with David Bowie’s name next to it.

Culture Club

A flamboyant, androgynous Englishman crooning soul-inflected pop tunes? The media of the era was beside itself — who’d ever seen or heard of such a thing before? Ummm…anyone who had ever owned, borrowed, or otherwise heard a copy of Young Americans, perhaps?

Suede

As the man himself once wrote, “My brother’s back at home with his Beatles and his Stones,” but it’s Bowie who really wrote the book on Britpop. Even if testosterone-filled types like the Gallaghers are too macho to own up to it, from the arch, effeminate stance of Brett Anderson to the art-pop eccentricities of Jarvis Cocker, the story of Britpop would have been a very different one without Mr. Bowie as a reference point.

Gary Numan

From his synthesizer fixation to his icy approach and his entire outward appearance, electro-pop pioneer Gary Numan should have had Bowie’s Swiss bank account on direct deposit with the royalties from his early hits, considering the debt they owed to Berlin-era, Eno-assisted albums like Heroes and Low.

Morrissey

Admittedly, the sexually omnivorous Bowie probably had little influence on Morrissey’s notoriously chaste image, but just watching the Smiths frontman sashay across a stage, let alone strut his stuff on both the Smiths’ output and his subsequent solo endeavors should leave little doubt about the Mozzer’s love for Zig.

Nine Inch Nails

Take a healthy dose of Bowie’s Scary Monsters era, mix in a pinch of Ministry and dash of Tim Burton, and damn if you don’t have a pretty reliable recipe for a Trent Reznor template. Talk about “super creeps…”

Bauhaus

Peter Murphy, frontman for goth godfathers Bauhaus, not only defined his singing style by fixating on the bottom end of Bowie’s superhuman vocal range, he also looked like he had  gone to both a stylist and a plastic surgeon with a Low album cover in hand.

Psychedelic Furs

Furs singer Richard Butler’s nicotine-soaked sound might not have had much in common with Bowie’s crystal-clear croon, but the way the band blended Bowie’s arch, angular, mid-’70s sound with post-punk defined much of what British rock sounded like in the first half of the ’80s.