This year marked 25 years since Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27. He was an Afro-Puerto Rican kid from Brooklyn who dropped out of school at 15 and ran away from home. He slept on park benches in 70s New York, starting out as a street artist tagging as "Samo" and went on to become, for me, the greatest artist of his generation and one of my biggest influences. Basquiat was one of the first to bring graffiti into the mainstream. The rise – and commodification – of modern street art would not have happened without him. For better or worse, he kicked the art world into paying attention.
I first discovered him through an unlikely source – the music of the Clash. They introduced me, as a young punk, to reggae and dub music. In 1981, tracks such as Radio Clash and The Magnificent Seven also put me on to rap and funk. This new direction was influenced by hip-hop acts such as the Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash. When the Clash's Combat Rock was released in 1982, it featured Overpowered by Funk, a collaboration with a prolific NY graffiti artist called Futura 2000 on vocals, who later namechecked Basquiat in his records. That was the year I started buying electro 12in records and met Nellee Hopper and Miles Johnson through Grant Marshall, who worked in Revolver Records, Bristol. We all shared the same interests in scratching, mixing, breakdancing and graffiti art; the Wild Bunch – our pre-Massive Attack soundsystem days – was born.
It was the New York scene that got me hooked on hip-hop and alternative electro. By 1980, Basquiat, Futura 2000 and Fab 5 Freddy had co-curated the graffiti-related art show Beyond Words at the Mudd club, which contained their own work along with Rammellzee, Keith Haring and others. That same year, Basquiat had become friends with Andy Warhol and his work was gaining serious recognition. He created epic, powerful works such as The History of Black People and The Dutch Settlers.
In Bristol, we flocked to see the seminal hip-hop film Wild Style at the Stokes Croft art centre. In those days, pre-internet and before the mass exposure of hip-hop, you had to dig deep to find tunes and graffiti art. It made everything you did find all the more precious. There would be a little bit on the radio, a magazine, then a tantalising snippet on video maybe. And the name Basquiat kept popping up.
New York – like Kingston, Jamaica, before it – began to shape and influence the subculture of Bristol and London. Before then, British youth culture in the 80s had been tribal and divided. Hip-hop changed that. It broke down class and race divisions in a way punk and the ska movement had tried and failed to do. The Wild Bunch spent three years putting on warehouse parties and underground jams, using graffiti art to spread the word. The parties attracted a cross-section of the young population: middle class and working class, black and white.
Going to Japan with the Wild Bunch in 1986 presented an unexpected opportunity to see Basquiat paintings. Some of his work was part of a collection in a big Tokyo gallery, including some of his recent collaborations with Warhol. The work had a huge impact on me. I had seen primitivism in art before, but Basquiat stopped me dead. He painted in a raw and confrontational way that was beautiful and effortless; he abused the canvas with chaotic composition and intense primary colours. It wasn't just his imagery but the juxtaposed cultural references: media saturation, brand communication, power, poverty, African history, colonialisation and exploitation. Everything was labelled for consumers and the words seemed part manifesto and part hit list. It was a slap in the face.
Soon after we returned from Japan, the Wild Bunch split up and I knew I had to do something new with art and music. I had been painting for three years, and been arrested a couple of times, so the game was up for me with graffiti, because the police knew who I was. But the graffiti scene itself had become a bit predictable and uninteresting; the Subway Art book was almost like a manual for American-style graffiti art. It gave major exposure, but suddenly everyone was literally on the same page. Everyone was tagging and it had become more a fashion thing than a meaningful art form in which you went out at night and took risks to spread a message.
We formed Massive Attack in 1988 and the influence of Basquiat was always there. He made the possibilities seem limitless. His style was not something you could copy, although you could try to steal a bit. I started to paint with brushes instead of aerosols, to work with more spontaneity and boldness. Basquiat's Warhol collaboration reopened my eyes to pop art and I moved away from graffiti as calligraphy, to see if I could paint in a more symbolic way. I started to use stencils as a method of printing Margaret Thatcher and Mike Tyson, and other media icons of the time. The repetition of cultural and industrial motifs determined the way I created record sleeves for the band.
Basquiat's influence still filters into the visuals that I create for the Massive Attack live shows, using abstract sloganeering, social and political data mining.
Back then, watching Basquiat cross over into the gallery world, the high art crowd, was fascinating. The graffiti artists would question the authenticity of his stuff – when the notion of selling out still mattered – while the art world questioned his right to be there. As an artist, he was completely intriguing, but as a person he must have been having a major identity crisis. His commercial power was inevitable as his talent transcended his street-art origins. There was always a fight about authenticity and the idea that graffiti was transient, that it belonged on the street and should never cross over to the galleries. That was never going to last because people always want a piece of something that is exotic and a piece of a world that they are not a part of.
The New York scene in the 80s didn't initially translate to the first wave of graffiti artists in the UK and Europe, but in the past 15 years it has taken off. When something has a visual identity that is so strong and has so many great ways of conveying the politics and social issues with humour and surrealism, it does well. Basquiat's ability to sell art for big bucks while he was alive in a very white art scene was amazing because that world can seem closed. In 2012, for the second year running, Basquiat was the most coveted contemporary artist at auction, with £68m in overall sales. Jay Z and Kanye both namecheck him on their most recent albums, and lyrics boast of pieces that they own.
Basquiat's life was sadly too short. He changed my way of painting and thinking about art and I'd like to believe that his style and vision inspired the reactionary urban art movement of this generation. The question over whether street art should remain a public art form became moot for me: I never had enough money to buy a Basquiat work. But the success of Soul II Soul means that Nellee Hooper has a wicked Basquiat collection hanging on his studio walls. When we recorded Protection together, I got to gaze at them every day. That was truly inspiring.
The Vinyl Factory will publish 3D and the art of Massive Attack on 28 October.
• This article was amended on 14 October 2013. The original referred to the shows Massive Attack did with film-maker Adam Curtis, rather than the visuals 3D prepared for the band's live shows. This has been corrected.
