They made many converts among the musically talented, even...
... snooty prog-rock "musos". For example, Joe Satriani is a big fan of Jamie West-Oram's playing. And the Fixx definitely set the standard when it came to that super-clean '80s guitar tone: active Strat pickups, brickwall compression, Dimension D stereo chorus, and tons of delay/reverb. West-Oram was also featured on a bunch of records produced by Rupert Hine (e.g. Tina Turner, the Thompson Twins).
I found West-Oram's playing to be quite liberating as well; as a young musician in the '80s, I saw the keyboard synthesizers starting to dominate so much music, and those Fixx records (as well as Alex Lifeson's playing with Rush) showed a way that guitarists could still cut through even when pitted against literal walls of keyboards. 
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