With only four years separating the two singers, their contemporaneous maturation meant the analog continued into their golden years, with the grim jazz of the Blackstar swan song bearing resemblance to Walker’s latter day scriptures like 2012’s bewildering Bish Bosch. Though it seems less obvious amid the hard rocking fare of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust, their similarities prove glaring by Station To Station, with Bowie vamping left and right. Throughout his discography, Bowie never shook Walker’s performative baritone, its distinctly dramatic flair ebbing and flowing but never fully receding. Yet even without such candid if cheeky disclosure, the commonalities should be grossly obvious to anyone presented with their respective works side by side.
According to Carlos Alomar (as told in Dylan Jones’ David Bowie: A Life), the guitarist who played on just about every one of Bowie’s albums between 19 as well as both of the Iggy Pop Berlin records, the former Thin White Duke admitted as much to him while recording a cover of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” for 1984’s critically maligned Tonight. The American expat turned British pop star unwittingly bestowed upon the South London native one of his signatures: his voice. Simply put, you don’t get Bowie without Scott Walker.
Yet while all those outfits and mannerisms and lyrics and minutia unspooled from a singular genius mind, Bowie’s lengthy and storied career is but a brilliantly effective sieve.
The chameleonic singer-songwriter crafted memorable personas with iconic monikers, holistically reinventing himself again and again in ways that ultimately warranted a touring museum exhibition that has lasted some five years. All artists great and small benefit from influences, however obscure or indirect, whether via predecessor or contemporary or progeny. David Bowie didn’t just come from outta nowhere, a starman-cum-showman already fully formed and ready to dazzle.
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