4. David Bowie
Often labelled a chameleonic musical phenomenon by the music press due to his various and vast guises, this popular appraisal of David Bowie is fundamentally incorrect. A chameleon changes its colour in order to adapt to its surroundings and ensure of survival whereas Bowie CREATED the very environments that his countless imitators adapted to. So, if anything, his copycats were the real chameleons, feeding off Bowies innovations in order to stay relevant. He embodied the ultimate glam superstar in Ziggy Stardust, flirted with soul on Young Americans and produced the murky and alien-sounding Berlin Trilogy all in less than ten years, becoming the most diverse and trend-setting musician of his age. Despite essentially becoming what Ziggy originally intended to caricature (a ravaged, drug-reliant rock star) the enigmatic artists most famous alter ego was but one of many. Others included Aladdin Sane (a kind of Americanised Stardust), The Thin White Duke and perhaps, most surprisingly, the name Bowie itself. Born with the most bog-standard and humdrum of British surnames, Jones, David adopted this more noticeable and exotic surname to distance himself from the similarly-named Monkees member, Davie Jones. A lover of the performing arts and its experimentalism, Bowie translated his love of the theatrical into all of his numerous incarnations and ensured that the thematic content of his music was always matched by a striking and distinctive visual appearance and display. An iconoclast in every sense of the word.