You're my inspiration ... Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
I've just been looking through some of our Home Entertainment columns, which are building steadily into an impressive archive of leading musicians' inspirations. Rooting through the columns, the idle browser does begin to wonder which musician has inspired others the most. The usual suspects make their predictable appearances – but there are some rather more surprising names which come up again and again.
On an entirely unscientific basis, I've been struck by how frequently Bonnie "Prince" Billy's name crops up. Under his various aliases (Palace, Palace Brothers, Will Oldham) this uncompromising Kentuckian seems to have charged up the imaginations of a wider range of artists than his own rather claustrophobic "alt.country" pigeonhole might suggest – Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, David Byrne, Cerys Matthews, Turin Brakes and big bandsman Matthew Herbert all send shouts out in his direction. Beyond the Guardian's archive, Oldham has of course been covered by artists as various as PJ Harvey and Johnny Cash, but remains relatively little-known beyond what I should really avoid referring to as the musical community.
It's another bit of more or less empty trivia-math, but could surely fill a Sunday evening on Channel 4 entertainingly enough. Are there other relatively obscure artists deserving wider recognition for firing up their more successful colleagues?
