Since this topic is based on non-metal musicians, I imagine it should be posted here rather than the Metal Discussion forum.

Moving on, I'm primarily referring to artists who made their respective musical contributions and impacts before metal became a recognized style of music, although I am not by any means excluding musicians from the 1970's, 80's or even 90's.

In particular to start with, I have thought of James Brown as a singer who "had to have influenced some metal vocalist or another" for quite some time. However, I did not see any written evidence of this until just a few minutes ago when I found an interview Tom Araya did with VH1 in 2015. Musically speaking, Brown's music contains plenty of attitude, and it could even be considered "heavy" in some measure considering its style and time of release. One such example--in my estimation at least--is "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" from 1965.

That being said, what other artists who are generally not even remotely associated with metal may have actually influenced the style more than "most people" would think?

http://www.vh1.com/news/203635/slayer-t ... interview/

I had never heard of Kate Bush until I started listening to metal. Angra did a cover of one of her songs on Angels Cry and I've noticed one or two other metal bands reference her in interviews or such. Curious, I checked out one or two songs of hers and at least the ones I heard were pretty far from being "metal" at all.

classical music have a big influence on some metal groups.

True, but many metal musicians are widely known for taking influence from classical music and its composers. Yngwie Malmsteen, Michael Romeo, Luca Turilli, Alexi Laiho and Tuomas Holopainen are just five out of perhaps hundreds who have explicitly noted that they were inspired by Vivaldi, Paganini, Mozart and a vast multitude of others. Then there are the trained opera singers like Rob Halford, Bruce Dickinson, Geoff Tate, Tarja Turunen, and on and on...

Anyway, what I mean in this thread by "unlikely metal influences" is musicians from styles of music that are not generally associated with metal who may still have influenced metal musicians and bands more than "most people"--or even avid metal fans--may realize.

Wasn't Lemmy a huge Elvis fan?

Dave Mustaine was a huge fan of Elton John, and claims that a lot of Megadeth's melodies were inspired from him.

Yeah he's very obviously a huge fan of early 1950s rock n roll. I've heard somebody describe early Motorhead as "a bunch of sped up Little Richard songs" and that's really not entirely wrong. I can't say whether or not his vocal style was directly influenced from those artists or not, since he's pretty unique (though I suppose you could argue James Brown or Howlin' Wolf or something if you wanted to stretch a bit), but his riffing and songwriting is straight out of that era.

Yeah, I think Lemmy has said Little Richard is his biggest influence. Speaking of Howlin' Wolf, he was easily one of Black Sabbath's greatest influences.

Kind of cool to think rock 'n' roll existed in a decade that was so far removed from our world it might as well be an alternate universe.

I once read an interview of Keep of Kalessin's main writer and he explained that the Need For Speed series score was one of his influences.

Agreed. The music of any particular decade was also a product of what technology was available, if you keep that in mind, none of these are very shocking at all, in addition to the fact that musicians' influences are going to be a lot of things that they listened to growing up. I mean, if Chuck Berry had had the guitars, amps, and effects of today, maybe he would have sounded heavier, too.

I'd also add Screamin Jay Hawkins to potential influences on metal musicians, the way he sang, the themes he used in his music, etc.


Also doesn't surprise me at all because of his classical influences and all of his stuff that wasn't played on the radio so much is much better than the crap he put out in the 80s/90s. Some of his 70s stuff was fucking phenomenal (esp. the instrumentals), and I'm not surprised that some metal musicians think so, though I don't really hear a lot of his influence in Megadeth, lol.

I know Sabbath were huge fans of The Beatles, to the extent where John Lennon was one of Tony Iommi's heroes. Bill Ward sang a couple of Sabbath songs on Never Say Die and Technical Ecstasy and the Beatles influence is so strong on them; listen to 'It's Alright'.

Iron Maiden always get talked about as this weird Metal/Punk hybrid which I've never really got myself. If you watch any Maiden documentary then you hear Steve Harris talking about how much he hated punk and how much he loved prog rock. Their early sound was really inspired by Wishbone Ash (somewhat obviously) but also Jethro Tull, Genesis and Yes. Just because Paul Di'Anno had short hair and an attitude problem doesn't make them punk!

You can really hear the Thin Lizzy influence on Maiden's Killers album. That one was very old-school 70s.