For reasons which are not immediately apparent, it is difficult when speaking of the late Mark E. Smith to avoid a descent into cliché. Ironic, given that an aversion to cliché was among Smith’s defining characteristics; yet predictable, given the efforts a sizeable portion of his admirers and media interlocutors consistently made to reducing him to a caricature…
Brian Bennett’s career started in grand fashion; while barely out of his teens, he became the drummer for one of the UK’s biggest pop groups, Cliff Richard’s backing band, The Shadows, taking over from original drummer Tony Meehan. Bennett’s 1978 solo effort, Voyage (A Journey Into Discoid Funk), marked his first solo effort…
By The Mutants
As the end of the 1970s approached, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the space-age fantasies the West had been nurturing for twenty years led nowhere real, or at least nowhere permanent, and that terrestrials were seeking some kind of emotional repository for the dreams they had been dreaming, as well as a pressure valve for their multiplying tensions…
In 1978, the stars were right. The previous year, the strange confluence of the artistic, political, esoteric, and scientific culture (and counterculture) that had been building up for over a decade was exploded by one George Lucas, who punctured a hole through the zeitgeist big enough to allow all manner of cosmic currents to flood through…
By J.E. Anckorn and Amy Mugglestone
At 8:35 pm on Boxing Day of 1967, the people of Britain gathered around their television sets to witness the Beatles’ new film project, Magical Mystery Tour. Their first filmed project since the daffy caper Help! (1965) accidentally created the sound of the late ’60s, the project was meant to act as a replacement for the live shows they were no longer performing…
For the pop-minded inhabitant of the British Isles in the late ’70s, the dull edifice of the passing weeks rested upon the two mighty, glowing columns that made it all bearable: the British Top 40 countdown, broadcast from 5:00 on BBC Radio 1 every Sunday evening (cancelled only once as a result of what would prove to be an inexplicably traumatic event for the nation: the 1997 death of Lady Diana) and Top of the Pops…
I first heard The Hurting in 1986. A girl in my high school—a girl I had a big crush on—taped it off her older brother’s LP and let me borrow it (older siblings were like our Spotify). She never got that tape back. I knew of Tears for Fears at the time—everybody did. Songs From the Big Chair had blown up in the US in the summer of 1985…
By K.E. Roberts
London’s Ultravox was John Foxx’s band for three increasingly brilliant albums. Their debut, 1977’s Ultravox!, is an uneven but essential distillation of Roxy Music, art-rock-era Brian Eno (who produced, along with Steve Lillywhite), prog, minimalist electronica, and dub. The same year’s Ha!-Ha!-Ha!, on the other hand—a mere eight months separated the albums—is a focused and unsparing gnashing of teeth…
‘Til Tuesday formed in the early ’80s in Boston, from the same scene that had fostered post-punk legends Mission of Burma. Vocalist/bassist Aimee Mann had been in local punk outfit Young Snakes, and both Mann and ‘Til Tuesday drummer Robert Hausman had attended Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music…
While other bands swimming in that sketchily charted ocean sometimes called synthpop are remembered as pioneers—or at the very least with some residual affection—London’s New Musik seem to have simply evaporated…
