Happy Birthday CopyCat

This morning – on a way to a client meeting – I heard the fabulous Robert Elms Show feature on Bowie’s Birthday. Seems the man touches so many different people in so many different ways (unsurprisingly RE pointed out his favourite period was the Plastic Soul of Young Americans)

Truly one of the most original and innovative performers.

And yet….yes, I know…he’s a big fat (thin?) copycat. Styles, genres, feels, tunes, instrumentation. His latest fab album (old fashioned idea, no?) is typically brave reworking of other things to make something fresh and different.

So for example, the characters and worlds of his characters Aladdin Sane and Ziggy were based partly at least on William Burroughs Wild Boys novel.

And his methods are classic examples of using copying to create variation (error) rather than replication: the cut-up technique of writing – cutting up and re-arranging words and phrases from magazines and newspapers shaped his most fertile period (from Diamond Dogs on).

And weirdly, this too was copied. From Burroughs and his collaborator, Brion Gysin.

Incidentally, my buddy John V Willshire (@willsh) shows how you can use a similar technique in proposition development towards 1.15′ of this video of how we work.

Where did he/we steal it from?

Happy Birthday, DB

More about this kind of thing here 

And a really fab insight into DB and his creative working method via this excellent window on DB’s long-term keyboard player Mike Garson by Clifford Slapper, Piano Man