Least influential big bands

Ocean Colour Scene's entire guitar sound and production is largely influenced by Queen. Also, Extreme was highly influenced by Queen.

I'd rather say ELP. They represented a culmination of something that people simply didn't want any more of at that stage.

o...wait

...it seems a lot of AOR bands sell millions of records but influence no-one, or at least in the way that you or I would understand "influence". All of the above (correctly identified) un-influential acts tread tha AOR path.

er, oasis? or quo-asis as we so aptly dubbed them back in 1993?

(Qu)Oasis, Motorhead, a whole lot of 80s metal bands paid respect to the Quo.

The Manics is an interesting one as they are quite derivative of a lot of other influences and didn't arguably have a unique distinguishable sound. It could also be argued that they are too recent to be seen as influential and that current climates mean that quasi-political indie rock just isn't in fashion.

Masked Gazza on Queen: Do you really think Axel Rose and Billy Corgan were directly influenced by Queen? I see what you're getting at but as they sound kind of similar - some of the guitar tones and stuff, but the songwriting, singing style and general aesthetics are totally different. You don't get many bands banging on about how "Good-Old Fashioned Loverboy" or "Killer Queen" were a big influence on their sound. I only remember "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead being compared to "Bohemian Rhapsody" as it was a pop epic made of several different bits.

The Eagles
Fleetwood Mac
Bryan Adams

The Eagles must have influenced so many people. Hotel California alone has been referenced in loads of songs which..err.. which escape me right now... but but they must!

Fleetwood Mac is tricky, I haven't heard a whole lot by them but I know that guitarists round the world are mad for them. I know the Pumpkins were big fans and covered "Landslide".

Bryan Adams suffers for the same reasons as the Manics. It's just mainstream rock that sounds like a whole lot of other people. His songs are famous but they're not famous for being Bryan Adams songs - they're famous for being played everywhere.

There's negative influence too.

(And as mark s would say, a million other words that are more accurate and descriptive than 'influence')

Anyway, that said...The Police?

Tears for Fears = Mansun

(just you wait, people, just you wait - they are Rumours-era Mac incarnate, with bloody great slices of Brian Wilson and Wayne Coyne and mmm...)

Also: U2? Apart fro maybe The Stereophonics, U2 haven't had much effect.

If there are any bands out there influenced by Huey Lewis & the News, I sure as shit never want to hear them.

1994, sorry. i just remember i was living in student halls at the time. first time i heard those fuckers was on an NME cover-tape - cigarettes and alcohol - and i thought it was one of the shittest things i'd ever heard in my entire life. o well.

Simple Minds?

The U2 copyists were mainly Irish weren't they - Zerra One, Cactus World News etc etc?

and a raft of electroclash tripe. I could happily blame Lennox and Stewart for Miss Kittin.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_250/MI0000/448/MI0000448494.jpg?partner=allrovi.com

Hmmm. Among the most influential big bands, I guess you may count Glenn Miller's and Duke Ellington's. No idea which ones were the least influential ones...

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Wednesday, April 20, 2005 5:37 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

supertramp

I'm sure I read some thing where the guy from Tame Impala was waxing lyrical about Supertramp's influence on his work

Supertramp are tough because I can't separate their sound from the lead vocals at all, so I wouldn't really recognize it if a band was like, oh yeah, let's totally jack Supertramp's rhythm section or whatever.

Men at Work were Police-influenced maybe?

Supertramp is a good one, having a hard time thinking of anything that reminds me of them. Probably time for a revival.

"divine" by sebastien tellier really reminds me of supertramp, for some reason.

Feel like they may have influenced later bands to adopt "Super" names - Superdrag, Supergrass, etc.

When everyone was comparing Radiohead to Pink Floyd, I thought they reminded me more of Crime of the Century-era Supertramp. Probably not intentional, though?

And it was kind of vague and impressionistic.

I second Moka's nomination of Santana within the rock universe, though I'm sure there's a deep well of Latin jazz fusion he influenced.

Supertramp can be blamed for some loopier moves by Styx.

"Do It Again" has to be Santana-influenced?

(by Steely Dan)

Without Supertramp we probably wouldn't have Digital Love.

mars volta
311

(re: santana)

w/r/t 311 it's specifically carlos' guitar tone.. pretty sure the dude plays a PRS

A lot of these do seem like good answers, tbc, considering that the question is about "least" and not "zero". It's just fun to think about exceptions.

Paul Young

(not a band, I guess)

http://www.band-graph.com/paul-young.html

lol wow, that site. How did we our discussion of Supertramp overlook their influence on Spock's Beard, Big Wreck, Rocket Scientists, and Erik Norlander (formerly of Rocket Scientists)??!

(They might actually have something with Air, but i feel like actually using that site to further this thread would sorta take the fun out of it. The Phoenix namecheck just baffles me.)

Always thought that Deserter-era Mercury Rev was going to be the next-Supertramp.

It's the Wurlitzer. They're infrequently-enough used so that whenever one shows up on a record, it instantly evokes Supertramp.

(For that reason, I thought the same thing about Mercury Rev.)

Oh yeah, Deserter's Songs!

I still stand by my initial post upthread. Actually nowadays there are probably some perky Brit school types for whom Simply Red were a profound influence but I can't imagine even the lamest band citing UB40 as an influence.

Primus?

the answer is The Pretenders. never met any fans of them, never heard of any bands being influenced by them. they're totally a critic-wank band.

UB40 were so commercially successful that they must have been a gateway into reggae for a lot of people though, so I'd guess they have some influence to that extent even if ppl don't tend to explicitly cite them. and I thought that "actually, UB40's first three/four albums are really good" was practically orthodoxy now (and they are!)

I mean.... Pretenders had three albums go gold and two platinum (US), six UK top-ten hits including a #1, two US top-tenners... definitely interesting to think about whether they influenced anybody but them having no fans seems kinda implausible. There aren't that many critics out there!

Slash is a noted pretenders fan.

Coming from a UK perspective, Deserter's Songs felt like the first of the modern arty Amerindie stuff that would come to more prominence in the 2000s. Maybe Aeroplane Over The Sea also holds this title but it wasn't half as popular here at the time.

UB40 is interesting. I always felt like my band had an unacknowledged UB40 influence thanks mostly to me having grown up with my parents playing them a lot.

A lot of the 90s ska revival bands were probably influenced by UB40?

UB40 weren't ska

Did I say it was?

I dunno... there's not a lot of crossover between the two sounds in my opinion. Those ska bands were more about Americanising things like Bad Manners and the Specials or looking towards the more mod-influenced reggae from the late 60s. Save for their very early work, UB40 occupied an easy-pop hemisphere shared by the Police and Simply Red. During the great yacht-rock phase at the turn of the decade, I wondered if some hip band would ever come out that directly referenced those bands, all of whom came from vaguely punkish backgrounds but were so influenced by lovers rock and soul that they ended up doing blue-eyed pop versions of these styles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_music_artists

"I saw her play in Central Park [when the Pretenders played in August 1980]," Madonna recalled. "She was amazing: the only woman I'd seen in performance where I thought, Yeah, she's got balls, she's awesome! . . . It gave me courage, inspiration, to see a woman with that kind of confidence in a man's world."

xp Kind of amazed that Rihanna has outsold Mariah, who have each vastly outsold Beyonce.

Coming from a UK perspective, Deserter's Songs felt like the first of the modern arty Amerindie stuff that would come to more prominence in the 2000s.

I wasn't commenting on whether Deserter's Songs was influential, esp because I don't really think of Mercury Rev as a 'big' band in the sense that most of these bands are. I just meant that I can see how it recalls Supertramp.

Seems to me that a lot of these groups were very influential at a certain moment-- like when I saw RHCP mentioned earlier I assume the poster was nowhere near an American college in the early 90s, like every other unsigned band was funk-punk-metal.

amazed that Rihanna has more certified sales than Michael Jackson

Of the people on that wiki list I'd have to go with Chicago.

Chicago were extremely influential in the 70's, but then everyone stopped taking trombone lessons and bought drum machines.

Ha, ever since a friend pointed out similarities between Bon Iver and Chicago, I couldn't un-hear it.

so much wrongness at the start of this thread. genesis and moody blues? even if the moody blues had died in a hot air balloon mishap after the release of days of future passed they would have been one of the most influential prog bands on earth.