Originality isn’t something that anyone can fake their way into doing in the music industry. Anyone can find ways of pulling from strange influences for their music, but it’s almost an artist’s duty to find things that no one has heard and turn them into something beautiful for the world to see. Although Mick Jagger was more than happy to play the role of the blues surrogate for English kids in the 1960s, he knew when he was looking at people who were masters of their craft as well.

Then again, Jagger was always in a class by himself when working on music with The Rolling Stones. There were moments where a certain lyric might hit someone as a copy of a Muddy Waters of Robert Johnson tune, but no one was going to sing it with as much gravitas as Jagger, especially when he started to stretch his singing a bit more during the early 1970s on tunes like ‘Sway’ or harmonising with Keith Richards on ‘Happy.’

And no matter how many kids picked up guitars because of The Beatles, anyone wanting to entertain a crowd was going to follow in Jagger’s footsteps. Despite his reputation for being one of the more lowkey members of the Stones, he would come to life every time he took the stage, never resting for a second and giving the fans the kind of performance that was normally reserved for Tina Turner.

Between the blues covers in their usual setlist, Jagger was doing the beginnings of subversion rock and roll, and a young kid named Davey Jones was definitely listening. Before being known as David Bowie, the future ‘Starman’ was transfixed watching Jagger in the flesh, even remembering the days when they were playing in small clubs and the frontman taking every heckle in stride by playing the role of the punk-ass frontman.

If Jagger was the embodiment of rock and roll, Bowie had to be the rock star from another planet entirely. While his vaudeville debut was an exercise in musical theatre half the time, it did manage to pave the way for him to use different characters in his work, practically turning Jagger’s androgynous persona inside out when he started working on ‘Ziggy Stardust’ or ‘Aladdin Sane’.

Although Jagger and Bowie would become colleagues later on in life, The Stones frontman admitted that he had never seen someone of Bowie’s calibre, saying, “David was always an inspiration to me and a true original. He was wonderfully shameless in his work. We had so many good times together. He was my friend, I will never forget him.”

Bowie would ultimately return the favour by namechecking the frontman in ‘Drive-In Saturday,’ but the most important part of their relationship is ‘The Thin White Duke’ inspiring Jagger to get out of his shell. It’s important for anyone to embrace new textures, but the fact that Jagger was willing to ham it up for the camera with Bowie in the video for ‘Dancing in the Street’ only comes from someone who has learned to live without fear.

Despite not every one of their collaborations working out, Bowie and Jagger’s relationship was the best example of artists learning from each other. Bowie had learned his rock and roll chops before he even knew Jagger personally, but when The Stones started putting the blues on the backburner, the student had become the teacher when Jagger copped a few of his friend’s tricks.