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Aug 23, 2023

The art of reinvention: How artists avoid being pigeonholed

“Don’t pigeonhole me, dude,” says Super Hans to Jez during the popular sitcom Peep Show as the pair prepare to hit the road. For all of this scene’s comedic and fictional parameters, it hits the nail

“Don’t pigeonhole me, dude,” says Super Hans to Jez during the popular sitcom Peep Show as the pair prepare to hit the road. For all of this scene’s comedic and fictional parameters, it hits the nail on the head. No musician worth their salt wants to be pigeonholed. For an age now, musicians of all stripes have spurned being put in a box by fans and the media, as to do so would admit defeat and that they are what nobody wants to be: one-dimensional and supposedly, therefore, boring. Yet, for all of this fear of creative merit being diminished by the simple tag of genre or a style-specific definition, a select few over the years have shown that pigeonholing can be avoided. Whilst there are several methods to circumvent being put in a metaphorical chlorine tank like Shamu, these are masters at one of the most famous ways of doing so: the art of reinvention. Plenty of people have managed to metamorphose, and today, we are using three of the best examples: David Bowie, Talk Talk and Arctic Monkeys.

There’s no doubt that David Bowie was popular music’s ultimate shapeshifter. A creative chameleon that kept everyone on their toes, his story is a famous one. Starting his career as the forgettable Davie Jones in an era when every artist was trying to be a star, his early musical efforts in this guise and then as a youthful David Bowie were nothing but a complete and objective failure. Before his debut album arrived in 1967, the Brixton native had released six unsuccessful singles in a mixture of projects as a solo artist and in numerous bands. A factor that characterises this chapter is that he struggled for any tangible creative direction.

After the numerous failures in introducing his career to the mainstream, Bowie’s manager, Kenneth Pitt, commissioned the promotional film Love You till Tuesday. It was a PR stunt designed to showcase the talents of the 22-year-old artist and spread the word to a much greater audience. Demonstrating the genius that Bowie always had, now that he was given a theme to riff off, it was for the movie that Bowie wrote his first hit, ‘Space Oddity’, a number now regarded as one of his definitive hits. Although Love You till Tuesday wasn’t released until 1984 due to a lack of interest, the project inspired Bowie enough to pen the song that would give him a footing in the cultural conversation and prove that he wasn’t a lost cause.

In April 1969, Bowie met Angele Barnett, and the pair were married within a year. Widely credited with changing his aesthetic, it was Barnett who introduced her husband to the era’s most exciting burgeoning scene, glam rock. This proved to be another piece of the puzzle for David Bowie. After the success of ‘Space Oddity’, which reached number five in the UK, Bowie was ready to take the next step. He now felt he lacked a band “for gig and recording – people he could relate to personally”.

Accordingly, Bowie formed a group. Known as The Hype, the band featured Mick Ronson on electric guitar, Tony Visconti on bass, and John Cambridge on the drums. The quartet also had a stylistic concept and created costumes and personas to accompany the music. Before too long, Cambridge departed after an argument with Bowie and was replaced by Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey. The group recorded Bowie’s third album, The Man Who Sold the World, which was released in 1970. Featuring the acclaimed title track, it saw Bowie move further into his future, laying some of the foundations for 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which would be his real breakthrough and the album widely deemed his ultimate masterpiece.

Whilst touring The Man Who Sold the World and its successor, 1971’s Hunky Dory, Bowie constructed the concept of the Ziggy Stardust character by fusing the persona of Stooges era Iggy Pop with the music of Lou Reed, whom he described as “the ultimate pop idol”. Hunky Dory also witnessed bassist Trevor Bolder enter the fold, and after the record’s shift to a more artful style of rock, everything was in place for Ziggy Stardust. The group also changed their name to ‘The Spiders from Mars’, a highly glam-rock title.

The David Bowie we know today resoundingly arrived with his 1972 album. It kicked off a stellar career that would see him consistently metamorphose and astonish all those watching on. Finding his feet creatively and augmented by the skill of his band, not to mention guitarist Mick Ronson – with whom he formed a formidable partnership – following this success, Bowie delivered the darker, jazz-oriented follow-up Aladdin Sane in 1973, which was bolstered by the expertise of pianist Mike Garson.

The formula of always trying to develop and draw on the talents of others proved to be momentous for Bowie, as he consistently managed to dodge being pigeonholed. Later on, he worked with John Lennon on the hit ‘Fame’ from 1975’s Young Americans, Brian Eno and Tony Visconti on the ‘Berlin Trilogy’ of albums in the late 1970s, Chuck Hammer, Robert Fripp and Pete Townshend on 1980’s Scary Monsters, and of course, Nile Rodgers, Bernard Edwards, and Stevie Ray Vaughan on his best-selling album, Let’s Dance.

In the aforementioned albums, Bowie moved from glam rock to jazz, into blue-eyed soul, then krautrock and ambient-inspired areas, all until he found worldwide fame with a disco-pop mesh on Let’s Dance. This was only the tip of the iceberg, too; the Londoner still had much of his creative metamorphosis to come. Genres of industrial, experimental and dance were to rear their heads in the future.

As Bowie showed, drawing on the works of others and constantly trying to progress artistically can be keys to driving artistic reinvention and avoiding being pigeonholed when done correctly.

Following the first exhibit, we have the case of the British band Talk Talk. Formed in 1981, the group were led by frontman Mark Hollis and rounded out by bassist Paul Webb and drummer Lee Harris. A synth-pop act when they broke out, they scored chart hits with ‘Talk Talk’, ‘It’s My Life’ and ‘Such a Shame’ in the decade’s first half. However, in a masterstroke, they gradually moved out of the area that had earned them considerable commercial success. Talk Talk became much more experimental, informed by a jazz and free improvisation approach from the mid-1980s onwards.

Hollis and the band pioneered the genre that would become known as post-rock from their third album, 1985’s Laughing Stock, and after that moment, became increasingly artistic in their output. They released their fourth album, Spirit of Eden, in 1988, which features the indomitable ‘I Believe in You’. Yet, whilst its predecessor still sold well in the face of the shift, Spirit of Eden did not, despite being critically acclaimed. The band’s final album, 1991’s Laughing Stock, followed this path further, with engineer Phill Brown stating that the LP, like its predecessor, was “recorded by chance, accident, and hours of trying every possible overdub idea”. In short, Talk Talk were doing it for themselves and no one else.

Shortly after releasing Laughing Stock, Talk Talk split up. Mark Hollis released a solitary solo album in 1998 and then retired from the music industry, and little was spoken about him in the media until he passed away in 2019. Whilst the death of Hollis will always be heartbreaking, he left a tremendous legacy with his band. Spurning tradition, after enjoying the success of their early years, Talk Talk did what seems anathema to many musicians, giving up commercial viability for artistic credibility.

This arc remains one of the most fascinating in music, and whilst songs such as ‘It’s My Life’ are highlights of their era, the final three Talk Talk albums are simply unbeatable. Unsurprisingly, they’re cited as heroes by a wide range of artists, including Pearl Jam, Radiohead, The Mars Volta, No Doubt, Placebo, Doves, and even metal supergroup Storm Corrosion. Perhaps the ultimate refusal to be hemmed in by a tag, it is reflective of Mark Hollis and Talk Talk’s triumph that their music is fully unquantifiable by a genre, even that of post-rock, with them best-described by their name in what is undoubtedly one of their ultimate feats. Still, even that doesn’t account for the majesty of their sonics.

Last up, and bringing a contemporary angle, we have Arctic Monkeys. Ostensibly a rock band, the Sheffield outfit is one of the most consistent groups working today, maintaining a remarkably high degree of artistic quality whilst always presenting some form of shift in their sound. Not only have they managed to do this consecutively, but the Arctic Monkeys also enjoyed great creative and critical success because of it, with it facilitating their collective skill, which naturally increases with experience.

Their first album, 2006’s Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, is an indie rock masterpiece, capturing their native city at the end of Tony Blair’s Britain. Its successor from the following year, Favourite Worst Nightmare, saw the band refine their sound, getting more expansive, with frontman Alex Turner’s lyrics and songwriting taken up a level, and their instrumental repertoire increased to include keyboards and an overall more dynamic sound.

Their third album, 2009’s Humbug, saw the band grow their hair and move to the Southern Californian desert to link up with Queens of the Stone Age leader Josh Homme, who co-produced a record that saw them touch on psychedelia and stoner rock. On 2011’s fourth album, Suck It and See, the quartet further explored the American sonics they’d toyed with more forensically. It produced more sugary palettes than ever before, which came with another aesthetic transformation.

In 2013, the band returned with their most commercially successful effort, AM, a swaggering, hard-rock-focused body of work that saw Turner and the band sport quiffs and leather jackets. Following this success, Arctic Monkeys would go quiet for an extended period whilst they explored other areas, and Turner released the second album with his and Miles Kane’s side project, The Last Shadow Puppets.

When they returned with 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, things had significantly changed for Arctic Monkeys again. Their sixth album is a swooning art-rock masterpiece, touching on glam rock, lounge pop and the film soundtracks of the 1960s, which saw the band fully realise the cinematic vision they had always teased. Now older and with a wealth of experience behind them, this fully adult iteration of the group couldn’t have been further away from the spotty teenagers that captured the nation’s imagination with tales of taxi ranks, scummy men and young love.

Now, with Alex Turner mostly fixed behind the keyboard, in late 2022, they released their most recent album, The Car, which continued some of the stylistic themes of the 2018 release but with differences. Of course, the majestic orchestral sections are there, as is Turner’s newfound predilection for crooning. Still, this time, a more funky undercurrent took hold, with their clear nods to hip-hop also coursing throughout, another compelling creative shift. It begs the question of where they will go next.

So there you have it. Whilst artistic reinvention is an art in itself, when undertaken properly, it can bear many fruits, with the risk of being pigeonholed at a minimum. This can be done in many ways, through drawing upon the skill of others, by looking to create art of genuine cultural value, or by the fact that it is pretty dull to create the same product repeatedly. When taken together, these aspects can be instrumental in a musician transcending the zeitgeist and treading their own distinctive path, which fans gladly follow down, eagerly awaiting the next stop.