Stuart Maconie on 6 Music this morning “after The Beatles the most influential British band there has ever been is Black Sabbath”.
This is correct isn’t it?
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Never listened to Black Sabbath so I can’t say for sure, but surely something like The Smiths or Joy Division from Pure influence on bands that aped their sound and style? You could fill a landfill of bands that are shite frm just those two bands.
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Probably, yeah.
Led Zep
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you could with bands influenced by sabbath, they just never make it out of their local toilet venue
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Probably is Sabbath.
Maybe Sex Pistols.
It’s difficult to disentangle the influence of Zeppelin from the influence of their own, very apparent, influences.
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let’s not forget the red hot chili peppers
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Very influential culturally of course but their actual musical influence is very small I think. Bands had moved on from sounding like them within two or three years and only the lamest of ‘punk’s not dead’ revivalists have sounded much like them since (although Lydon’s vocal style has had a bit of a continuing influence).
There are thriving metal scenes literally all over the world and you can hear a direct lineal Sabbath influence in almost all the music they make.
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Sure. but I bet loads of the bands influenced by them didn’t bother to disentangle it.
Plus every band takes influences from ones before them, even the beatles (though not as much as Led Zep of course)
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Yeah, especially globally. I dont think you hear many bands that sound like Sabbath apart from doom/stoner bands these days, but without them you don’t have have yer Maidens, Metallicas, Slayers, etc, and then the stupendous amount of bands that were inspired by them
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A lot of The Beatles’ influence was stuff done in the studio not even by the band themselves. Not to take away what they did musically of course.
I think the difference between them is that Sabbath created a sound (in fact a number of different sounds) that you could take in various directions and create new genres and sub-genres. Zeppelin basically just took playing amped-up 12 bar blues to an extreme - you can copy that (and many have) but it’s difficult to go anywhere creative with it.
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“Influences”. 
When I used to put on gigs in the 2000s, the number of demos that came in the post from bands who sounded like the Red Hot Chili Peppers was astounding. All of them were shit as well.
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The Shadows were pretty influential for a band that you literally never hear about, all those boring guitar bands from the 70s love a bit of Hank Marvin
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The use of the studio as an instrument is an important part of the influence of The Beatles, but also a massive part of the structure of modern popular songs comes from them and a lot of the whole idea of the ‘pop group’ writing and recording their own songs and trying to advance and expand musically. I don’t think you can argue about their pre-eminence (and I’m certainly no Beatles bore)
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Lonnie Donegan too while I’m about it
That’s a decent call - although again I think his influence is more cultural (inspiring people to,pick up guitars and make music) than actually musical and I don’t think he had much if any influence outside the U.K.
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