Genre
Punk had run out of ideas, not musicians. Out of that come the cheap synthesisers and some of the strangest pop songs ever to chart.
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Monograph New wave
Wire
Pink Flag
Three albums in three years, and no two of them sound alike. This isn't a band growing up. It's a band setting itself a ban, keeping it to the end, then swapping it for another one. The tracklists tell the story better than any adjective could.
Genre New wave
Steve Levine
LinnDrum
Before the metronome in the headphones, bands ran faster towards the end, and not by accident: they pushed on the choruses. A study of 255 Billboard singles pins down the year the drift died, and a British producer explains the night his machine drifted instead.
Selection New wave
Post-punk
Ten records
Ten British records from 1979 to 1981, grouped by the town the band came out of rather than by year. Counted that way they say something the London version of the story leaves out: only one of the ten is from London.
Artist pick New wave
David Bowie
Confessions of a Vinyl Junkie
In 2003 Vanity Fair asked him for the records of his life. He had two and a half thousand LPs and no method, so he invented one: pull a record out blind, and if it is too obvious put it back. Four of the twenty-five that came out, each with the reason he wrote for it.
Song New wave
Kate Bush
Running Up That Hill
In 1985 it peaked at three and spent eleven weeks on the chart. In June 2022, after four episodes of a Netflix series, it entered at number eight and two weeks later it was number one. In between sit three records and a catalogue nobody controls any more.
Selection New wave
Kate Bush
The Dreaming
In 1980 a new word turns up in the credits of her records, and it takes five years before she is there alone. In the same stretch a sampler enters her albums, and the first two times somebody else is playing it. Five tracks that follow the move to the other side of the glass.
Song New wave
Klaus Nomi
In the Frost Scene of King Arthur, Purcell instructs voice and strings to quaver on every note. Klaus Nomi recorded that aria in 1981, in a register that was never its own.
New wave is a convenience term, invented by record companies around 1977 to sell punk to people who found punk frightening. Almost anything ended up under it, which is exactly its use: it describes a moment when playing badly was still an acceptable place to start and the first cheap synthesisers were beginning to arrive.
What holds together the part we care about is an attitude: short songs, arrangements that go wrong on purpose, words borrowed from somewhere else entirely, from literature, from theatre, from opera. Not all of it survived. The part that did still sounds off balance in the right way.