A Wave of Post Punk by Steve Shorter. The story of New Wave music

The Story of Pop

A Wave of Post Punk

The culture of New Wave began with the earliest punk groups. ‘Punk’ and ‘New Wave’ were, for a time, interchangeable. By the late 1970s, however, the terms had different meanings. Bands such as Talking Heads, Blondie, Elvis Costello and The Police that were experimenting with instrumentation and dance-oriented rhythms, worked with more polished productions and were called ‘New Wave’ rather than ‘punk’. Combining the elements of early punk music and fashion with a far more pop-oriented and less dangerous style, the New Wave artists became some of the most popular bands on both sides of the Atlantic.


Elvis Costello		Blondie

In the UK, a wide variety of post-punk bands also emerged, including Joy Division, and Public Image Ltd. Some bands, such as The Slits and Siouxsie & The Banshees made the transition from punk into post-punk with music that was often experimental. This defined them as ‘post-punk’ and was a sound that tended to be less pop orientated and more dark and abrasive. Smoothing the edges of their style into the direction of New Wave, a number of other post-punk bands went onto great commercial success such as New Order (descended from Joy Division) and Depeche Mode who crossed over to a mainstream audience.

Around the same time in the UK, some bands began an ‘Oi!’ movement (Cockney Rejects, Cock Sparrer, The 4-Skins and Sham 69). They sought to realign punk with the origional working-class, street-level following. Punk was meant to be of the voice of the dole queue, and in reality most of them were not. As was Punk Rock, the music was typically fast, hard, and simple and generally had lyrics reflecting the harsh realities of living in Thatcher's Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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‘Oi!’ was the reality of the punk mythology. In the places where these bands came from it was harder and more aggressive. Most Oi! participants were either left-wing or apolitical and some bands, such as Sham 69 and the Angelic Upstarts began to attract a white skinhead following (even though the bands did not support their politics). The movement soon became associated with the far right. On July 4, 1981, a concert in Hamborough Tavern in Southall, London, featuring ‘The Business’, ‘The 4-Skins’, and ‘The Last Resort’ was firebombed by local Asian youths who mistakenly believed it to be a neo-Nazi gathering. A riot ensued and as a result, most of the press saw ‘Oi!’ as a far right movement. This led to the genre quickly losing its momentum.

The underground punk movement produced countless bands that either evolved from a punk rock sound, or applied its spirit and DIY ethics to very different kinds of music. During the early 1980s, British bands like New Order and The Cure developed new musical styles based in post-punk and New Wave. The cream of the American punk rockers had also moved on. They learned how to play their instruments, discovered melody and lyrics that are more than just shouted slogans. By the end of the 1980s, these bands were classified broadly as Alternative Rock. Sonic Youth and the Pixies (as alternative bands), started to gain larger audiences and major labels sought to capitalize on them. In 1991, Nirvana achieved huge commercial success with their album, Nevermind. The band cited punk as a key influence on their music and said "Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing, and playing what you want" (Cobain). Nirvana's grunge sound was derived from garage rock, indie rock, and heavy metal. Their success fuelled the alternative rock boom that had been underway since the late 1980s and helped define that segment of 1990s popular music.


Joy Division	Sham 69

By the 1990s, punk rock had become sufficiently ingrained in Western culture so that ‘punk’ was used to market highly commercial bands as "rebels". Marketers capitalized on the punk style and its connotations of rebelliousness to such an extent that in 1993, an ad campaign for the Subaru Impreza, claimed it was "like punk rock". As the commercial mainstream continues to integrate elements of punk, numerous underground punk scenes still exist around the world.

Steve Shorter: March 2007.

Sources: Wikipedia, Media KnowAll: Popular Music, Piero Scaruffi: History of rock music, Encyclopedia Britannica 2002, BBC Online – Music.

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