UK, 1977-83 - who's counting and who counts?

[Rob Hall]

Yeah, but could you dance to them?

Definitely. Johnny Marr specialised in highly syncopated "pushes" and Joyce and Rourke were surely the most sproingiest rhythm section in Britain at that time. "What Difference Does It Make", "Girl Afraid", "Barbarism Begins At Home" - all intensely danceable, to name but three. "What She Said" is surely the most energetic British POP record of the '80s.

And Des - I couldn't agree with you more. My love of The Smiths defies all logic and reason and is all the fiercer for it. But, oh, how dull Morrissey became without Marr!

Fair enough, if you say so. Like I said, I'm not overly familiar with their output. But if you were DJing and you had a bunch of tunes by James Brown, Sly Stone, Al Green, Funkadelic, Curtis Mayfield... maybe a bit of Culture, a bit of Sly n Robbie, a nice bit of jazz and some Ray Charles or something, that would get me up and dancing. Where would the Smiths fit into that? When you say "intensely danceable", are you talking about shifting your weight from one foot to the other while shaking your head?

[Adam Blake]

Oh no no no no... That's a very loaded dice! Of course The Smiths aren't danceable compared to that lot but neither are any British pop/rock act.

[Peter Culshaw]

garth has a pretty good list - slaughter and the dogs !..I would like (I think) to hear that again

except - teenage depression was the best eddie and the hotrods by far- but they had the wrong trousers and so couldnt be taken seriously- saw them at the nashville just pre-punk and they were great

Buzzcocks Ever Fallen in Love - is a great single def in my top ten

X ray Spex and the Slits :New Town had a great energy

I saw the first Sex PIstols TV appearance on So It Goes - and it was so extraodinary and from another planet - I immediately had to change the way I thought (not to mention haircut/trousers etc)- as strummer said "like trousers,like brain" -

the Clash were a bit too rockist for me and never quite had the millenial/year zero/hair on the back of the neck power of the Pistols - almost with stuff like White Riot, which would be in my top ten- police and thieves is unlistenable

I was very fond of The Gorillas "She's My Gal" (I think)- Jessie Hector with those sideburns shd have been a big star

and I loved Wire's Pink Flag

Bowie 4 albums in 77 were the best he ever did Low/Heroes/ Lust For Life and The Idiot (last two with Iggy but collaborations-can we claim this as half-brit) - I occasionally even listen to the Iggy records

assuming we are sticking to brits here....(otherwise ramones/television/ talking heads/etc etc)

manu's favourite:Lew Lewis - never even heard him I think..(any recommendations?) .and wilko

Ian Dury was fab- there is talk of a musical at stratford east of dury's music - might well be better than the queen/ben elton one...

just read simon reynolds post-punk book - in which he clainms pere ubu and the like were better than all the punks -musically yes, culturally, no

a good era to be a teenager

meanwhile in africa - zombie etc

[Adam Blake]

manu's favourite:Lew Lewis - never even heard him I think..(any recommendations?)

I saw Lew Lewis many times back in the day. A sterling harmonica player in the Chicago style of Little Walter, he always rocked the house and he made one of the toughest ever British blues records: "Boogie On The Street" b/w "Caravan Man" for Stiff Records in 1976.

[Dayna]

I liked Maddness & Our House a lot


Men Without Hats; but maybe that was too much synthesizer for you guys here?

[taiyo no otosan]

I suppose I ought to chip in here with a vote for The Soft Boys. Possibly not the most important at the time, but - wow - the legacy they created. Underwater Moonlight - what a classic. Or are we talking singles only? In which case 'Kingdom of Love'. No, make that 'Only The Stones Remain'. No, hang on, make that 'I Wanna Destroy You'. In a Morrisey/Marr way, I reckon Robyn Hitchcock loses a lot when he doesn't work with Kimberly Rew.

And well done to Garth for bringing up Swell Maps. Again, highly significant because of their influence on so many later bands. I think.

Tough to dance to, I'll admit, but I guess that wasn't their intention.

Hey Rob, you gotta stop dancing sometimes you know!

[taiyo no otosan]

I should also have mentioned that The Anti-Nowhere League - bless 'em - came from my home town of Tunbridge Wells. Oooh, we were all so proud!

[Con Murphy]

...if you were DJing and you had a bunch of tunes by James Brown, Sly Stone, Al Green, Funkadelic, Curtis Mayfield... maybe a bit of Culture, a bit of Sly n Robbie, a nice bit of jazz and some Ray Charles or something, that would get me up and dancing. Where would the Smiths fit into that?

This is where miserabilist Morrissey really comes to the fore with the following view on life:-

"Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed DJ
Cos the music that they constantly play
It says nothing to me about my life"

I don't know what's more depressing - the lyrics themselves or the fact that I can remember them off the top of my head.

[garth cartwright]

Peter's right: a great era to be a rock loving teenager - new bands every week, great 45s coming out on tiny labels, a real sense of invention going on, music being made for the thrill of it - very few of the bands on my list ever got around to cracking a career in the biz (tho unfortunately some like The Fall did and hung around being awful for ever). Punk rock seemed like the wildest, funniest thing when you're 12 - which is why i guess the new punk bands still find an enthusiastic audience. A few more from the back of my mind:

Gang Of 4 - Damaged Goods
Psychedelic Furs - Love My Way, Pretty In Pink
Echo & The Bunnymen - Read It In Books
Zounds - For My Country

PS Howard - just listened to Rope again to see if SEHome is a "classic". It's not. Just the best song on an awful album. Bombastic. Soulless. Over produced. No groove. Full of shrieking rhetoric. I knew that after i bought it in Woolworths aged 14. Yeeeeee!

[Des]

Psychedelic Furs - Love My Way, Pretty In Pink

The fab Furs - loved 'em.

[howard male]

I found out how little all this talk of oldie worldie pop music interested me when I found myself more drawn to find out the fate of Dayna's poor little kittens down in the 'Funny Thing...' section (unfortunately they all died, but the delightfully named mother, Ghost, was OK, kind of) But then Garth wrote:

I realised new bands every week, great 45s coming out on tiny labels, a real sense of invention going on, music being made for the thrill of it - very few of the bands on my list ever got around to cracking a career in the biz (tho unfortunately some like The Fall did and hung around being awful for ever). Punk rock seemed like the wildest, funniest when you're 12

- and it started to make a little more sense - you were 12, Garth? Perhaps that's why you thought there was a 'real sense of adventure' in all that pointless noise which was the musical equivalent of a teenager slamming his bedroom door.

I was 17 and although I enjoyed the fizzing naughtiness of it all (I was kind of on the front-line as Peel favourite, the Users, were best mates) there was nothing inventive about it - hence the '3 chord wonders' label which was applied to all the bands.

I'm also sure that the number of bands who deliberately dumbed-down their playing ability and intellect (as the Users did - though they couldn't resist putting in a terribly unfashionable guitar solo on 'Sick of You' ) far outweighed the number who were genuinely struggling to get those three chords worked out - so the revolutionary stance of the whole thing was suspect too - it was essentially just another bandwagon to jump on from the moment every would-be punk rocker in the land heard Lydon's pantomime cackled at the beginning of 'Anarchy.'

Punk was just a necessary glitch in proceedings before the musically more interesting New Wave rolled up.

And let me guess, Garth - even though you loved the John Barry histrionics of Magazine's 'Shot From Both Sides' you hated everything else they did subsequently, as they carved out a genuinely interesting sonic universe for themselves.

One other thing: you can dance to the Smiths: my brother-in-law (with some sense of irony) requests them (ideally 'This Charming Man') on the rare occasions he's having records played to him by a DJ (at weddings I suppose) and then he proceeds to dance round in swaying, skipping circles, waving his arms about, as everyone else slowly backs away from him as if he's an unexploded bomb. It's a touching sight.

[Nigel w]

Just to be completely contrary , here's a top ten list of great stuff by so-called 'dinosaurs' from 77-83 who at the time crassly and stupidly got thrown out with the bathwater. They're obviously 'album' artists but in the spirit of Charlie's original list which started all this, I've nominated 2/3 tracks rather than LPs…

Led Zeppelin : Carouselambra/ In The Evening

Peter Gabriel : Here Comes The Flood/Biko/Shock The Monkey/Games Without Frontiers

Robert Wyatt : Strange Fruit/The Red Flag/Shipbuilding

Steve Hillage : anything from Rainbow Dome Musick, the album that invented chill-out music 20 years before its time…

Eric Clapton : Cocaine/Lay Down Sally

The Who : Who Are You/Sister Disco

Fleetwood Mac: Dreams/ You Make Loving Fun/ Sara

Pink Floyd :yes The Wall was ghastly overall, but if we are talking tracks Comfortably Numb & Run Like Hell were brilliant

Rolling Stones : Miss You/Start Me Up (not quite Satisfaction and Jumping Jack Flash but still great by anybody else's standards)

Richard & Linda Thompson : Walking On A Wire/Shoot Out The Lights/Wall of Death

First reserves: Roy Harper : One Of Those Days In England; Marianne Faithfull : Broken English/Why D'Ya Do It ; John Martyn : Dealer/Big Muff ..

Van Morrison also produced six quite brilliant albums between 77-83. one every year except 1981…

If we go Stateside, it's even richer with almost any track you care to name from albums such as Little Feat's Time Loves A Hero, Steely Dan's Aja, Capt Beefheart's Shiny Beast & Doc At The Radar Station, Leonard Cohen's Recent Songs, Dylan's Street Legal & Slow Train Coming, Joni Mitchell's Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, Bonnie Raitt's Sweet Forgiveness, Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones, Neil Young's American Stars n' Bars & Rust Never Sleeps etc etc…

Interestingly, I've just finished reading the autobiography of Horace Panter, gentleman bass player with the Specials, and he cites his influences at the time as Steely Dan and Little Feat rather than anything punk or new wave (and talking of the 2 Tone ska revival let's not forget that 77-80 also covers a quartet of great Marley albums from Exodus through Kaya and Survival to Uprising)…

I guess all I am trying to say is that the real artists did not stop making great music just because of Johnny Rotten. Put another way, contrary to received wisdom, a load of kids with spiky hair spitting and pogo-ing and wearing crap clothes did not suddenly turn all musicians over thirty into boring old farts with nothing to say overnight. 25-30 years on, the likes of Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant and Richard Thompson are still making fascinating music. What happened to Billy Idol, Rat Scabies and Jimmy Pursey?

[Adam Blake]

JSteve Hillage : anything from Rainbow Dome Musick, the album that invented chill-out music 20 years before its time…

As the old saying goes: Opinions are like arseholes, we've all got one. There's no point in being obnoxious about it.

But as for Hillage inventing chill-out, I must beg to differ. Terry Riley's "Rainbow In Curved Air" was a good ten years before Hillage and some would say that Miles Davis's "In A Silent Way" from '69 was chill-out music too.

[judith]

music being made for the thrill of it

In itself, wondrous. Someone grows up in a culture where music is neither inherent nor is it a prerequisite to remain 'cultured' and, with little knowledge or experience, is inspired to join in, explore their own sense of inventiveness, "for the thrill of it". Would that this were continuing...actually, guitar sales, until 2006 have been rising:
http://www.musictrades.com/census.html

Sorry, anyway, I have so enjoyed this thread. I may as well have been on another planet during this era & genre. With all the info, lists, and of course - the asides and personal revelations like Garth's above, and Des's beam of light, and the expressions of discomfort too - this thread has been a thorough and fascinating introduction. Thank you.

[Nigel w]

But as for Hillage inventing chill-out, I must beg to differ. Terry Riley's "Rainbow In Curved Air" was a good ten years before Hillage and some would say that Miles Davis's "In A Silent Way" from '69 was chill-out music too.

well obviously we're talking in a rock/pop context here , aren't we? Rainbow In Curved Air was my default listening every acid trip I took in the early 70s but clearly came from a classical/contemporary composition paradigm which Michaek Nyman later dubbed minimalism, I think. Never heard the meditative jazz-rock fusions of In A Silent Way called chill-out before and I thingk the late Tony Williams will be revolving in his tomb at the thought that he was a chill-out drummer!

There's no point in being obnoxious about it.

Don't understand what you are saying. there, Adam. I put forward a contrary view. Does that make me obnoxious? I enjoy your posts on this site enormously, so a bit disappointed by that gratuitous insult.