1979: Crest of the New Wave, Part 1

These days, New Wave has come to basically mean "Eighties Synthpop," even though the term was being used before Synthpop was even really a thing. 

Indeed, "New Wave" wasn't meant to describe a style, it was an appellation referring a literal new wave, or "cohort of new bands." It wasn't until the record companies seized on the term that it came to be associated with the lightweight, colorful, poppy bands that would overpopulate MTV's airwaves a few years later.

Here's how the Wiki puts it:

Between 1976 and 1977, the terms "new wave" and "punk" were used somewhat interchangeably. In the US, Sire Records chairman Seymour Stein, believing the term "punk" would mean poor sales for Sire's acts… launched a "Don't Call It Punk" campaign designed to replace the term with "new wave".

The music's stripped-back style and upbeat tempos, which Stein and others viewed as a much-needed return to the energetic rush of rock and roll and 1960s rock that had dwindled in the 1970s with progressive rock and stadium spectacles, attracted them to new wave.

Because radio consultants in the US had advised their clients punk rock was a fad, they settled on the new term. Like the filmmakers of the French New Wave movement,  new wave bands such as Ramones and Talking Heads were anti-corporate and experimental.  

The New York Rocker, which was suspicious of the term "punk", became the first American journal to enthusiastically use the term, at first for British acts and later for acts associated with the CBGB scene. 

In hindsight, "New Wave" was a marketing masterstroke on Seymour Stein's part. The record industry was on shaky ground, as Disco had gone far beyond over-saturation and all the big hitmakers from the early 70s were starting to falter. Punk was a total nonstarter, commercially speaking, so there was a genuine need for some fresh horses to nudge sales back up. 

Music video was becoming more and more of a thing, and the art school weirdos over-represented in New Wave bands were naturals for taking advantage of the medium's possibilities. But as with all allegedly new movements, the New Wave movement was several years in the making.

Let's start with the...

FOUNDING FATHERS

Bowie went a bit Daliesque in '79 when asked by a reporter what he thought of the New Wave. He famously answered, "Darling, I am the New Wave." Sounds rather egomaniacal, but mostly true nonetheless. Although there were predecessors, Station to Station, Low and Heroes laid the basic foundation for New Wave as it came to be known as much as anything else.

Forever the plagiarist, (Bowie also once claimed, "I've never had an original idea in my life") Bowie borrowed a lot from Roxy Music and Brian Eno's first three solo albums for his post-Glam sound. He'd even go so far to borrow Eno himself for Low, Heroes and '79's Lodger, AKA "The Berlin Trilogy."

It also helped Bowie had a top producer (Tony Visconti), a crack rhythm section (Dennis Davis, George Murray and Carlos Alomar) and some of the most forward-thinking guitar players available (Ricky Gardiner on Low, Fripp on Heroes and Adrian Belew on Lodger) to help him realize his vision.

Roxy Music might quibble with Bowie for bragging rights on creating New Wave. Roxy had split up and reformed with a new lineup by the time 1979 rolled around and scored two big UK hits with Manifesto. They even worked up a disco remix for one of them ("Angel Eyes"). 

Seeing their time had come - Britain would be absolutely crawling with Roxy clones within a year or so - the lads stuck around and racked up some more hits for a spell before splitting again.

Ian Hunter peddled plodding working-class rock with Mott the Hoople, but for some reason a lot of punks loved them (particularly The Clash). It all looked and sounded to this writer like more hairy skonk (their guitarist went off to form Bad Company ffs), but their proximity to the Glam movement put them over somehow. Ian Hunter split the band in 1974, teamed up with Spider from Mars Mick Ronson and continued making records entirely indistinguishable from Mott. 

You're Never Along with a Schizophrenic got a lot of FM airplay in '79, possibly because it was recorded with the core of Springsteen's E Street Band.

Iggy Pop may not be the greatest musical talent ever, but he sure has a way with making influential friends. For instance, Bowie took Iggy under his wing when the diminutive firebrand was in a bad way after The Stooges split. Dave tried making him into a star - a kind of Mini-Bowie, if you will - by toning down all the amateurish grunge and gristle of The Stooges and creating a simulacrum of his Berlin Trilogy sound. It was reasonably successful in the UK, but went unnoticed in the US. 

Even so, the Bowie-Pop sound on The Idiot and Lust for Life would add another entry into the New Wave Influence Sweepstakes. Iggy continued in that vein for '79's New Values, but without Bowie's star power, the album underperformed. 

THE NEW GUARD

Following some nibbles by acts like Talking Heads and Elvis Costello, New Wave began to crack open the US charts in mid-'78, largely on the strength of The Cars' classic debut LP. 

The core of The Cars (Ric Ocasek, Benjamin Orr and Greg Hawkes) had previously played together in a mega-cringe folk trio called Milkwood (warning: don't go looking for their music, not even out of morbid curiosity), but sniffed the winds of change and formed what could be seen as the Platonic ideal of a New Wave rock band.

The Cars' songwriting was tight, the sound was taut, they had a killer lead guitarist (Elliot Easton), a drummer with underground cred (former Modern Lover Dave Robinson), and were blessed with Queen's platinum-farming producer Roy Thomas Baker at the controls. They followed up their killer debut with an equally-killer sophomore effort, Candy-O, that slipped some more electro-weirdness onto Middle America's turntables.

Blondie kicked off 1979 with an uncharacteristic disco hit ("Heart of Glass") off their 1978 best-seller Parallel Lines. Despite the sales, they decided to avoid the disco dance-floors, perhaps realizing that that market had been squeezed dry. Their 1979 LP Eat to the Beat was back-to-basics Blondie, and served up a new batch of classics to fill the New Wave dancefloors.

Boasting one of the most beautiful frontwomen in Rock history, Blondie decided to make a music video for every song on Eat to the Beat and sell the batch on laserdisc. It was a canny and forward-thinking move, but the pressure of making and promoting it seemed to take the wind of the band's creative sails. They'd score two huge hits the following year (albeit one a cover tune) but the album they were pulled from sucked some serious ass.

The Police were a strange and unlikely bunch - a singer who'd plonked around the north of England in a jazz-fusion outfit, a Prog drummer with a supremely-irritating personality and a British Invasion-era journeyman guitarist - who tried to appeal to the punks. Luckily for The Police, the punks weren't having any of it, so they decided instead to shoot for the mainstream audience.

The mainstream audience were having plenty of it, thank you very much, and The Police soon became the biggest band in the world. They'd scored hits off their 1978 debut and dumped all the leftover punk pandering in favor of effects-drenched reggae-rock fusion on their 1979 effort, Regatta de Blanc. Easily this writers' favorite of the Coppers' catalog.

BAND(S) FROM THE PUBS

The New Wave tag was also helpful to the Pub Rock crowd, who seemed to be overshadowed by Punk just as they were gaining some traction. They did have to drop the backward-looking earnestness that made so much Pub Rock so insufferably tedious, but their musical chops would help get them some airplay the biggest Punk bands could only dream of.

Ian Dury and the Blockheads were a cringey clutch of Pub Rock leftovers whose wedding band-tier disco-douchery got lumped into the New Wave, largely because of Dury's obtuse Cockney ramblings. 

Dury was the absolute epitome of an acquired taste, but any muso-minded folk could appreciate his shithot backing players, particularly virtuoso bassist Norman Watt-Roy. The Clash sure appreciated them, and nicked Watt-Roy, keyboardist Mickey Gallagher and drummer Charlie Charles for various projects.

Graham Parker was probably particularly irked by Punk, seeing he was tagged as Rock's new "angry young man" while the Sex Pistols were still dicking around in the garage. Like Dury, Parker was also backed by some drop-dead players he too liberated from a host of Pub Rock go-nowhere bands.

His 1979 landmark Squeezing Out Sparks dumped the horn section and the warmed-over R&B cliches in favor of the raw, raunchy sound of seasoned players plugged directly into their Twin Reverbs. Parker rose to the occasion with some snarling, spitting wordplay, like a British Bob Dylan in a particularly bilious state.

Inevitably, Parker's horn section hopped the bus across town and played on The Clash's double LP, London Calling, also released in 1979. Ironically, while some Pub Rockers were moving forward to New Wave, The Clash were dressing up like Fonzie and steaming straight back to pure Pub Rock revivalism.

Graham Parker would be well within his rights to be even more irked by Declan Patrick McManus - better known to the world as Elvis Costello - who basically hijacked Parker's entire act and squeezed some big New Wave dollars from it. To be fair, Costello is clearly the more talented and prodigious of the two, but that might make the copying sting all the harder. 

Costello wrapped up a killer 1-2-3 combo in '79 with the classic LP, Armed Forces. His batting average - and chart performance - would go a little sideways after that, but that opening salvo shines all the same.

Ironically, Costello was reportedly irked by the junior partner of New Wave's angry young man triumvirate, Joe Jackson. It must have rankled all the more, given that Jackson scored a US Top 20 hit with "Is She Really Going Out with Him?"

Jackson released two albums in 1979: his impeccable debut (Look Sharp) and a only-slightly-less-impeccable follow-up (I'm the Man). The two are identical in sound and feel, and could easily have been released as a double LP without anyone noticing the difference.

"It's Different for Girls" didn't chart as well as its predecessor, but it's by far the better song, boasting a beautiful melody and a moody - even vaguely creepy - atmosphere

Squeeze were another batch of slick players trapped in the rainy drudgery of the pubs. Perhaps straining too hard for New Wave cred, they hooked up with Velvet Undergrounder John Cale, who apparently made hash of their first album whilst trying to force the band into making a John Cale record (give or take). 

They apparently recovered in 1979 with Cool for Cats, which played to their strengths and racked them up some hits in the UK and Australia.

The Stranglers started off as a hairy crew of Doors obsessives from the 'burbs. They worked the dreary Pub circuit until Punk rolled around and lent them a fresh bandwagon to hop on. The Stranglies never really drank the Punk Kool-Aid, but their keyboard-heavy sound was a cinch for the New Wave. Even their rampant Doors-isms would seem a lot less unfashionable when fellow Doors-obsessives like Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen rolled around and stormed the charts.

The Stranglers dropped The Raven in 1979, an LP which many now see as their finest hour.

JUMPING SOMEONE ELSE'S TRAIN

As with the Pub Rock castoffs, New Wave offered an opportunity for older musicians who never quite fit into the record racket before to reinvent themselves and find some success. Most of those would come around a year hence, but here are a few notables from 1979.

Marianne Faithful is a survivor's survivor. Born from noble Astro-Hungarian stock, she began her career as one of legions of underaged Rolling Stones groupies, but eventually wheedled her way into a record contract and a special slot in Mick Jagger's harem. She later quit Jagger for some Baron Someone-or-Other, but soon took the heroin highway to homeless Hell, which also shredded her vocal cords.

But this was all a blessing in disguise, since her world-weary tonsils (and MILF-tastic good looks) gave just the right bite to her 1979 New Wave move, Broken English. The LP was a chart hit in Europe and filled the clubs stateside. But old habits die hard, and Faithful's pesky habit crippled her comeback. Happily, she'd ultimately reinvent herself as a hip lounge singer after a series of dry-out hospitalizations in the Eighties.

The Easybeats were an Aussie tagalong on the British Invasion Express, scoring one bulletproof hit in 1966 with "Friday on My Mind." Some years later, primary Easybeaters Harry Vanda and George Young recorded a very, very strange record under the name Flash and the Pan, whose debut LP reached the US in 1979. 

Though predating New Wave, Flash and the Pan's bizarre mix of theatrical rock, surreal humor, and deadpan, electronically-treated vocals was weird enough to catch the attention of the skinny-tie set.

Bonus Factoid: George Young was the older brother of Malcolm and Angus Young.

Flash and the Pan's music wouldn't have been out of place in a Rocky Horror Show sequel, so it's no surprise that Mr. Frank N. Furter himself would throw his hat in the nascent New Wave ring in 1979. Unsruprisingly, Tim Curry's stab at rock stardom gave way to all the money Hollywood was throwing at him, so it never really went anywhere

On the face of it, Hall and Oates 1979 entry into the New Wave Sweepstakes seemed like an unlikely move. But it followed on Daryl Hall recording Sacred Songs, a weird set of Thelema-inspired tracks with Robert Fripp production. Moreover, Hall would record a number of tracks for Fripp's prog-goes-postpunk classic, Exposure, also in '79. 

Hall's label wasn't having any of it, though. They shelved Sacred Songs and forced Fripp to scrub most of Hall's vocals on Exposure and replace them with fellow Prog vet Peter Hammill at the mic.

Hall and Oates' LP X-Static would also premiere the band MTV viewers would come to be so familiar with, featuring T-Bone Wolk and G.E. Smith. Those two would later go on to play in the Saturday Night Live band.

TO BE CONTINUED

click on the Moon for details

Want to talk all this over with your fellow seekers? 

You can click on that Moon there to enter a whole new world of mystery and wonder.

For as little as three dollars a month you can join in the most immersive and elaborate database of Synchromysticism anywhere in the world.  

You know the old saying: "Come for the scholarship, stay for the fellowship."