A week ago, David Bowie died. Unless you’ve been living under a rock this month then you are probably already painfully aware of that fact. Personally, I only quite recently discovered the joy of Bowie’s music for myself: before then to me he was just a name synonymous with murky childhood memories, cult movie soundtracks and a pantheon of pop icons that seemed to matter far more to my parents than to me. I bizarrely feel that I’ve let him down by not spending more of my life with his albums on repeat as I have this week. The hypnotic last album that he left us with, Blackstar, feels like a parting gift. But Bowie can be felt and heard in so much of the music of the last forty years.

The print and online media have been buzzing all week about the indelible mark that Bowie left on so many areas of cultural life; music, fashion, or simply just what it means to be a popular icon. Lists of bands have been thrown together, united by a musical debt to the great man. The list is endless; Arcade Fire, Lorde, Lady Gaga, Roxy Music, Joy Division, Moby, The Pixies: all have professed being influenced by him, his style or his music. Other than just saying ‘this sounds a bit like Bowie’, what do people actually mean when they describe his musical influence though? Visual phenomena are somehow easy to trace: the Thin White Duke and heroin chic, for example, androgyny, or that Aladdin Sane red lightning bolt. But when bands describe their debts to Bowie it can be far more complex: they might refer to his influence over their early development, or what and how they chose to deal with lyrically, or which sound they strive to develop towards between albums. Sometimes Bowie himself would appear on the backing tracks of a band he admired, as he did for Arcade Fire in the mid-noughties, or musicians he played with would splinter off into different groups: creating a complex and infinite web of developing musical phenomena.

Last night The 1975, who have bounced back from their early grungey pop-rock to a style and sound that it clearly influenced by the 70s and Bowie, dropped their new single ‘The Sound’. It includes the line, “sycophantic prophetic junkie wannabe”. Among other things, this reminded me of how bands manage to take the best from Bowie’s work and constant artistic developments without ending up just sounding like said ‘wannabes’. He blazed a trail that left behind an environment in which musicians could be inspired by his ideas and then augment them with their own. Bowie’s genius and importance surely lies in the originality he brought time and time again to popular musical culture. Imagine, for a minute, that you’re a teenager in a pre-Bowie world. The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and others had already started changing the face and consumption of pop music, but who can even begin to imagine the way that music would have developed without Bowie? Bands like Joy Division and The Smiths would sound pretty different, if they even existed at all. He defined the waves of musical culture that engulfed the late 20th century: from soul to funk to glam rock to ambient rock to electronica, right up to the mesmerising, lethargic free jazz of Blackstar.

His constant reinvention was itself a gift to music. Kanye West has cited David Bowie as one of his “most important inspirations” - describing how fearless and creative the English star was, surely two of West’s own distinguishing characteristics. It may sounds clichéd, too, to constantly refer to Bowie’s appeal to outsiders, or to those who don’t fit in. But for music to evolve and beautifully eclectic acts to emerge, this appeal and inspiration is everything. Lorde summed this up in her tribute to Bowie when she said, “I realized I was proud of my spiky strangeness because he had been proud of his… an old rock and roll alien angel in a perfect grey suit.” Bowie’s influence is so much more, then, than just inspiring the glam rock tone of The 1975’s new album, or Grimes’ experimentation with spacey themes. He embodied originality, while fostering a musical culture that lets sounds borrow from each other in order to grow. Bowie was so many different things and invented so many different personas, but just like he always had his anisocoric eyes and terrible teeth, he was, and always will be, inspirational.