Ten essential post-punk records

Punk gets told as a London story. Post-punk doesn’t survive that telling, and if you want to know why, the quickest route is not an argument about influence or attitude but a look at what the record labels were printing on the spines.

These ten came out between 1979 and 1981. They aren’t in date order. They’re grouped by the town each band came out of, and that arrangement makes one thing obvious straight away.

One in ten is from London. Nine aren’t.

Listen while you read

London, one

Public Image Ltd, Metal Box (Virgin METAL 1, 23 November 1979). Twelve pieces, and not an LP among them: three twelve-inch discs cut at 45 rpm, sitting inside a metal tin built to the pattern of the ones that hold rolls of cinema film, with the band logo pressed into the lid.

The catalogue number isn’t up there. It’s on a white sticker three and a half centimetres by two and a half, stuck to the underside.

Bristol, one

The Pop Group, Y (Radar RAD 20, 20 April 1979). Nine pieces. Dennis Bovell produced it with them, and Bovell had come up through British dub rather than through anything that called itself rock, which is audible from the first bar.

Don McCullin is credited on the cover photograph. Britain sent that man to its wars. Malcolm Garrett did the sleeve.

Leeds, one

Gang of Four, Entertainment! (EMI EMC 3313, 25 September 1979). Twelve pieces on a major label, released a year and a bit after a debut single that had been put out by an outfit operating from a rented flat several hundred miles north, in Edinburgh.

Sheffield, two

The Human League, Travelogue (Virgin V 2160, 14 May 1980). Ten pieces. It’s the only record on this page we couldn’t find on Spotify, which is odd, because Reproduction is a year older, came out on the same label, and is sitting there.

Cabaret Voltaire, The Voice of America (Rough Trade ROUGH 11, July 1980). Ten pieces. The name isn’t musical. It was a nightclub in Zurich, and Dada began inside it.

Manchester, two

Joy Division, Closer (Factory FACT 25, 18 July 1980). Nine pieces. Look at the label and the number isn’t in Arabic figures at all: it reads FACT·XXV, because Factory treated a catalogue entry as an object to be designed rather than a way of keeping the stock room in order.

A Certain Ratio, To Each… (Factory FACT 35, April 1981). Nine pieces. The name is a lift from a Brian Eno lyric.

Liverpool, one

Echo & the Bunnymen, Crocodiles (Korova KODE 1, 18 July 1980). Ten pieces, and the first number Korova ever issued, which is less of a coincidence than it looks: Rob Dickins had opened the label in 1979 as an outlet for this band and no other.

Same day as Closer. Different city. Different label. Two records, one Friday.

Birmingham, one

Au Pairs, Playing with a Different Sex (Human HUMAN 1, 1981). Ten pieces. Another number one, and the Human catalogue begins here.

Edinburgh, one

Josef K, The Only Fun in Town (Postcard 81-7, 3 July 1981). Ten pieces. The band was from Edinburgh and the label from Glasgow, where Postcard had set up in 1979 and announced itself, with no visible embarrassment, as the sound of young Scotland.

What the catalogue numbers say

Two records here carry the number one of their label. Korova opens with the Bunnymen. Human opens with the Au Pairs.

That’s not collectors’ trivia. In both cases the label was brought into existence so that the record could exist, which is the reverse of the usual order of business, and Korova is quite open about it.

The rest spreads thin. Two Factorys, two Virgins, a Rough Trade, an EMI, a Radar, and a Postcard that had already adopted a band from its own city.

The sticker on the underside

One object tells you how little of this was an industrial operation. The PiL tin went out in fifty thousand copies, ten thousand more for export, and the catalogue number that identified all sixty thousand of them lived on a hand-applied sticker underneath.

The second side ends in a locked groove. It repeats the last seconds of Swan Lake, and it does not stop, so somebody has to get up.

None of the other seven towns here was waiting for London to say go. They pressed, they numbered, they posted the boxes out themselves.