New Wave is often remembered more for skinny ties and silly haircuts than for musical merits. The Police, Elvis Costello, The Cars and Blondie all lent some respect to the genre,…
Browsing: Genres
In the early 1980s, UK rock magazine Sounds ardently promoted (and christened) the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal – the acronym of which is spelt NWOBHM…
A musical movement born in the industrial North of England, the Northern Soul phenomenon grew out of club-goers’ passion for black American dance music. It…
Nu metal is a subgenre that combines elements of heavy metal with elements of other music genres such as hip-hop, alternative rock, funk, industrial, and…
By the end of the 1970s, punk in Britain was splintering into several distinct strains, most of them quite “arty”. Oi! music was an attempt to keep…
While it is very easy to dismiss this sub-genre of music, the fact remains that power pop (even at its most commercially manipulated) had a…
Without Prog Rock the world would certainly be a duller place. Men in robes; songs about astronomy, mythology and numerology; banks of Moogs and Mellotrons…
Jazz and blues have always attacked injustice, as in Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, written in 1938 about the lynching of black Americans. But the pop protest song kicked…
The full story of Pub Rock can be read in Will Birch’s excellent book No Sleep Till Canvey Island (Virgin). In it, the former Kursaal Flyers drummer recounts how…
In the mid-1970s, the massive tornado of the British Invasion of the 1960s was a fading memory, and its survivors sat atop the charts with…
Rap and Hip-Hop started out as black New York underground movements at the start of the 1980s, but by the end of the decade had…
“White kids have lost their heroes; Jagger has become a wealthy socialite, Dylan a mellowed, home-loving man, even Lennon has little to say. So along comes this guy with amazing screw-top…
Shoegaze – a genre of indie music characterised by its ethereal soundscapes, use of obscured swirling vocals, heavy guitar effects, and distortion (often producing an…
In the early 1960s, Jamaican producers such as Leslie Kong, Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd and Duke Reid created a new sound to replace American R&B acts.…
September 1979. England. The Prince by Madness had entered the British charts on 1 September. The Specials (pictured above) were riding high in the Top Ten…
Without skiffle, there might have been no Quarrymen and hence no Beatles. Seen in retrospect on television, skiffle can seem entertaining yet quaint, but before…
The early and middle 60s are remembered by many as the time when The Beatles, Stones and big British beat took the world by storm. The charts were…
Originating as “soft pop” in the mid-1960s, this largely West Coast (USA) phenomenon was influenced by Easy Listening, Jingles, and Psychedelia. The songs were technically…
In terms of commercial impact, Surf Music was a short-lived phenomenon. The vast majority of popular surf recordings were waxed between 1961 and 1965; even…
The expression “Yé-Yé” first appeared in France at the beginning of the 1960s and was derived from the “yeah! yeah!” that was often heard in…