1979: Crest of the New Wave, Part 2

In part one, we looked at the roots of the New Wave movement and some of the artists who helped forge it, as well as others who hopped aboard the bandwagon. But there's still so much more to the story, so let's get right down to it, shall we?

HERKY, JERKY AND QUIRKY

If you mentioned the term "New Wave" in Middle America in 1979/1980, you'd automatically hear two band names in response: The B-52s and Devo. 

Meaning that to the mainstream, New Wave was gay (The B-52s) and fit only for dorks, nerds and losers (Devo). Never mind that there were more conventional New Wave bands like Blondie, The Cars and The Police storming the charts - The B-52s and Devo represented everything that most rock fans found so alien and repellent about the new music. 

The B-52s hailed from the sleepy college town of Athens, Georgia and served up the kind of ironic nostalgia so popular amongst late Boomer hipsters. Ricky Wilson's guitar playing was strongly influenced by surf music and spy movie soundtracks, and the band evolved into a tight and powerful live unit. 

Their first LP dropped in 1979 and included a plethora of insidiously-catchy classics like "Rock Lobster" and "52 Girls." Their second LP was just as good (if not better), but the idea well ran dry shortly after. 

Meaning we won't talk about Mesopotamia.

Devo formed in the early 70s and were going nowhere slow until punk came around and gave their arty aggression a suitable bandwagon to jump on. They were also one of the first bands to embrace music video as its own artform, and not just a promotional tool. Since they'd been at it so long, Devo had already peaked creatively by the time they went into the studio with Brian Eno for their iron-clad debut LP, Q: Are We Not Men?.

Having used up all of their best songs on that, their 1979 follow-up Duty Now for the Future... well, it kind of sucks ass. Ken Scott's production is feeble and thin, most of the tunes are useless, the playing is weak and tired, and pretty much everyone at the time agreed it was a terrible follow-up to their first one. 

Devo served up a few killer tracks on their 1980 effort Freedom of Choice - "Whip It," notably - but just got worse and worse with each successive release.

The Flying Lizards worked similar territory to The B-52s and Devo, and scored a fluke hit in 1979 with their cover of Barrett Strong's old chestnut "Money." The backing track was supremely irritating yet irresistibly catchy, and Deborah Evans-Stickland's tuneless vocals were inexplicably alluring. 

However, this was lightning that was only ever going to strike once, and none of the Lizards' other records ever went anywhere near the charts. Not even their "Money" soundalike cover of "Sex Machine."

XTC were as herky and jerky as it got, but leavened the dough with solid songwriting and playing. Their 1979 UK breakthrough Drums and Wires also boasted the services of star producer Steve Lillywhite, who'd take the ridiculous amateur-hour bullshit of the young Irish band U2 and hammer it into gold the following year. 

XTC never got anywhere that level of success, but did manage a few US hits in the Eighties. Lead singer Andy Partridge's crippling stage fright and valium addiction didn't do the band any favors either, but they enjoyed a long and fruitful career all the same.

Singer/producer Robin Scott took the herky-jerky train to one-hit wonder success in '79 with his indelible "Pop Musik," released under the band name M. He'd never enjoy the same success again, but "Pop Musik" remains a brilliant time-capsule of its time and place. Amazing video, too.

New Zealand, of all places, served up a strong prototype for 80s synthpop with Mi-Sex's '79 single "Computer Games." The band stole their name from a tune off the first Ultravox LP and looked like a bunch of 30 year-old Kiwis who'd been playing country covers in rural pubs before New Wave success came a-callin', but that's 1979 for you. Little was heard from Mi-Sex again, but "Computer Games" remains a killer cut that holds up to this day.

So let's move on to another huge story in 1979 and...

PUT SOME POWER IN YOUR POP

Formed in 1973, Cheap Trick had been kicking around longer than most bands even exist before hitting it big in '79. What's more, they're still around, ages after their last hit stormed the charts. They're America's great rock 'n' roll workhouses, who've probably played more gigs than any other band in history by this point. I've seen them a few times myself, and you probably have too without even realizing it.

Cheap Trick are also the true founding fathers of power pop. Sure, you had forefathers like Sweet, Badfinger, Big Star and The Raspberries, but it was Cheap Trick who put it the random elements together and made a real style out of it. And their 1979 offerings - At Budokan and Dream Police - are as essential as any other example of that magical blend.

Cheap Trick's success in the spring set the stage for this next band to hit the jackpot in the summer...

The Knack weren't technically a one-hit wonder - "Good Girls Don't" and "Baby Talks Dirty" both made the Top 40 - but their rep is forever stapled to "My Sharona," a fluke summer hit that set off the power pop/skinny-tie gold rush, almost like a dry run for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and grunge 12 years later.

The Knack was led by Doug Fieger, who previously fronted a proto-power-pop band called Sky in the early 70s, so he had put in the time to earn his wings. Their debut, Get the Knack, earned the band a lot of comparisons to The Beatles, but the only similarities were superficial. Or less charitably, it was all just record company bullsh*t hype.

Most of The Knack were in their late 20s - downright ancient for a New Wave band in 1979 - and their gimmick wore out almost as quickly as the power pop fad itself. But you can't deny a megahit like "My Sharona," which has been duly entered into the Great American Songbook.

Rockpile served up a rootsy spin on New Wave. It was fronted by Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds, both of whom had been in the music business since the mid-Sixties and mark their marks as producers. They took their name from Edmunds' 1972 solo album, which included his transatlantic hit cover of "I Hear You Knocking."

They first hit the charts in '79 with their cover of Elvis Costello's "Girls Talk" and released a covers-heavy LP (Seconds of Pleasure) the following year. That turned out to be a one-off when Lowe and Edmunds returned to their day-jobs, but would have a massive influence on the roots-rock subset of New Wave in the Eighties.

Sixties-flavored power pop was all over the goddamned place in 1979, with results ranging from cringe to classic. The latter includes The Jags and their immortal earworm "Back of My Hand." Critics whined it was an Elvis Costello ripoff, but ol' Declan wishes he could have written something this effortless. 

And plus, it's actually an Easybeats ripoff.

Yet another bunch of pub rock leftovers hopping about the New Wave gravy train, The Records mined the Boomers' limitless nostalgia for The Byrds, which Tom Petty and REM also took the bank. Sadly, The Records wouldn't be quite as lucky as their American cousins, and fell apart a few years later. But they retained a cult following of rock nerds, and reformed for a victory lap in the 90s.

NEVER MIND THE MISTERS, HERE'S THE SISTERS

Some might quibble with Pat Benatar being lumped in with the New Wave, but that just goes to show how small some people's definition of the term is. And aside from her going full-bore synthpop by 1983, Benatar's 1979 debut In the Heat of the Night was a Mike Chapman production and featured tracks written by he and erstwhile partner Nick Chinn. 

Who the hell is Mike Chapman, you say?

Well, besides producing pretty much every glam rock band in the business (glam being a huge influence on the New Wave), Chapman also produced Blondie, The Knack, Toni Basil and Bow Wow Wow. Plus, Pattie and her band dressed the part and played some of those hot newfangled guitars bands like Cheap Trick were. 

So, yes, Virginia - Pat Benatar was New Wave.

Lene Lovich was certainly more recognizably New Wave than Benatar. She was a weirdo's weirdo who'd been kicking around the music business for a few years without success, like many other New Wave acts. Lene eventually fell in with the Stiff Records crowd - Stiff being the label that turned leftover pub rock losers into New Wave chartbusters - and started racking up some club hits like "Lucky Number" and "Say When." She later scored a hit in 1981 with "New Toy," a driving little bopper written by Thomas Dolby, who was blinded by science the following year.

Already a bit too old for the scene, Lene got involved with the animal rights movement and largely quit the business to raise a family with musical partner, Les Chappell.

The Pretenders were the best of the best of the New Wave, and their debut LP is one of those artifacts so perfect you sometimes can hardly believe it exists. Chrissie Hynde was a transplant from Ohio - who attended Kent State during the infamous shootings - then moved to London and hung out with members of The Sex Pistols and The Clash. 

Chrissie kicked around the scene for a while until meeting up a shit-hot band of players, namely guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, bassist Pete Farndon and drummer Martin Chambers. The quartet quickly put together a killer set and released some well-received singles in '79. They then went into the studio with ace producer Chris Thomas and then knocked the rock world on its collective ass with their debut LP at the crack of the Eighties.

Honeyman-Scott and Farndon both fell to heroin abuse shortly after the band's second LP was released and were replaced with two new shit-hot players. The Pretenders got bigger than ever in 1983 with their third LP, Learning to Crawl and the seemingly-ageless Chrissie has been out there rocking ever since.

BACKLASH IN NAME ONLY

Like the overly-mythologized backlash to Disco in 1979, New Wave got its own a few years later. But just as Disco kept chuggin' right along without the label to hold it back, so did New Wave undergo a long series of rebrandings:

In the early 1980s, new wave gradually lost its associations with punk in popular perception among some Americans. Writing in 1989, music critic Bill Flanagan said; "Bit by bit the last traces of Punk were drained from New Wave, as New Wave went from meaning Talking Heads to meaning the Cars to Squeeze to Duran Duran to, finally, Wham!". 

Among many critics, however, new wave remained tied to the punk/new wave period of the late 1970s. Writing in 1990, the "Dean of American Rock Critics" Robert Christgau, who gave punk and new wave bands major coverage in his column for The Village Voice in the late 1970s, defined "new wave" as "a polite term devised to reassure people who were scared by punk, it enjoyed a two- or three-year run but was falling from favor as the '80s began."

Lester Bangs, another critical promoter of punk and new wave in the 1970s, when asked if new wave was "still going on" in 1982, stated that "The only trouble with New Wave is that nobody followed up on it ... But it was really an exciting burst there for like a year, year and a half." Starting around 1983, the US music industry preferred the more generic term "new music", which it used to categorize new movements like new pop and New Romanticism. 

In 1983, music journalist Parke Puterbaugh wrote that new music "does not so much describe a single style as it draws a line in time, distinguishing what came before from what has come after." Chuck Eddy (said) that by the time of British new pop acts' popularity on MTV, "New Wave had already been over by then. New wave was not synth music; it wasn't even this sort of funny-haircut music. It was the guy in the Boomtown Rats wearing pajamas."