Worst year for music, discuss!

[Lord Emsworth]

The real action almost always takes place away from the mainstream

Every year has truly great music but you wouldn't necessarily know that if you just listen to daytime radio

[Villain]

Aug 4, 2024 14:49:27 GMT Nightfly said:

Interesting topic, Carty. I'm going to be a bit controversial and throw in 1975:-

I think the midway mark in a great decade, between Glam and the new era of New Wave/Punk and disco brought a kind of stale no-mans land musically and left us with a mish-mash of ballads, novelty songs and all things in-between.

The Glam era was getting tired with the Glam band's success petering out. The Sweet were surviving, even without Chinn/Chapman, but the rest were fast losing popularity. 1975 brought a number of younger Glam bands who were eager to revive the genre, but most ending up as one hit wonders. The Bay City Rollers, who had spent the previous year putting out some decent jolly sing-alongs turned their attention to the soppy ballads aimed at their teen girl fans (and who can blame them when Bye Bye Baby was 1975's top selling single). He who shall not be named was churning out the same stuff which had become lame. Bowie was experimenting with a change in style which took a while to take hold and Bolan was at a low ebb, no doubt due to the fallout from his lifestyle. In my opinion he cleaned up and polished his act and was on the edge of what would have been a great comeback in 1977, had tragedy not struck. Soul and disco was in a similar position as the Philadelphia period ended and it would be another two years before the genre was cooking on gas again.

Still some decent classic hits appeared in 1975, but maybe we needed a breather before next year's hot summer, followed by a fantastic era for the rest of the decade.

I'd certainly go along with that, there was definitely a malaise in the middle of the decade, rare exceptions for me from '75 being 10cc's utterly brilliant 'I'm Not In Love' which still makes the little hairs on the back of my neck tingle, and Patti Smith's debut LP 'Horses'. Both of these still stand up today and don't sound their age at all.

Cartman mentioned The Pet Shop Boys single 'West End Girls' from 1986, this is another one that stands out from the period, I know it was released in '86 but for some reason it sounds to me like it was recorded much earlier, say around '82 / '83. I can't quite put my finger on why but it definitely has an earlier vibe about it.

Other stand outs form the '80s for me are Talk Talk's 'Life's What You Make It', Echo & The Bunnymen's 'Killing Moon', The Jesus And Mary Chain's 'Some Candy Talking' and their debut LP 'Phsychocandy', My Bloody Valentine's LP 'Isn't Anything' and Spacemen 3's LP 'Perfect Prescription'.

Villain 

[Cartman]

Interesting posts, guys, and interesting comments. I do get that 75 (and 76) didn't seem to have much in the way of musical direction or any prevailing style, and it was a bit of a mish mash. However, I did like this year and I did think there were a lot of good individual records, in a variety of styles, so I can't think of it as a poor year. Have to agree to disagree on this one😀

[Nightfly]

Aug 10, 2024 15:03:46 GMT Villain said:

Cartman mentioned The Pet Shop Boys single 'West End Girls' from 1986, this is another one that stands out from the period, I know it was released in '86 but for some reason it sounds to me like it was recorded much earlier, say around '82 / '83. I can't quite put my finger on why but it definitely has an earlier vibe about it.

You're quite right, Villain. The original was released in 1984 and sounded quite different (faster and some different lyrics) to the remake two years later. It didn't get any airplay over here but was all over the pirate radio stations in Ireland. During a holiday in Dublin in the summer of 84 I called into a radio station and asked them what the song/artist was and got a copy at one of the city centre shops. The 86 remake sounded even better IMHO.



Good call on 10cc who had a good year in 1975. They were always a band that did their own thing and would (and did) survive whatever trends were around throughout the years.

[Three Litre]

Aug 11, 2024 11:09:54 GMT Nightfly said:

Aug 10, 2024 15:03:46 GMT Villain said:

Cartman mentioned The Pet Shop Boys single 'West End Girls' from 1986, this is another one that stands out from the period, I know it was released in '86 but for some reason it sounds to me like it was recorded much earlier, say around '82 / '83. I can't quite put my finger on why but it definitely has an earlier vibe about it.

You're quite right, Villain. The original was released in 1984 and sounded quite different (faster and some different lyrics) to the remake two years later. It didn't get any airplay over here but was all over the pirate radio stations in Ireland. During a holiday in Dublin in the summer of 84 I called into a radio station and asked them what the song/artist was and got a copy at one of the city centre shops. The 86 remake sounded even better IMHO.



Good call on 10cc who had a good year in 1975. They were always a band that did their own thing and would (and did) survive whatever trends were around throughout the years.

10cc did some great stuff, not least I'm Not in Love.

[Del Boy]

1986 

I think from the second half of the 1960s there seemed to be a pattern of productive years in the singles chart, before the inevitable falling away in the amount of quality output. New bands and sometimes styles would always seem to emerge and often new directions from the established bands complimented things and quality output would be booming again.
The 1970s seemed to have three such distinct peaks, building up from the early 70s into Glam, a dip followed then the rise of Punk, a shorter dip then the New wave years closed the 70s out.
The early 80s seemed to be a dip again before exploding into a great 1983 and riding high through 1984. 1985 seems to be a year where things started to be slowing down again, and it is commonly held view that 1986 was a dip and wasn't great for singles.
Now I will say I enjoyed the post 86 chart years at the time. I bought some singles and stacks of those NOW albums   but having looked back in depth via TOTP and through my own research. I have come to the conclusion that the 86 onward output has in general aged badly. Sure there were still some great records but they lack in number compared to what went before. With this in mind 1986 does indeed feel like a full stop, a certain end point to the early 80s boom and even a book end to the traits from the previous decades.
From here I think its quite complicated why things never carried on as before. The new bands and styles were not really doing anything new and output just seemed like a rehash of what had come before. Covers were everywhere and seemed like a gap filling cash in. The likes of SAW emerged,  exploited a niche and cranked out loads of their styled records. New technology like CDs were seducing people to part with £13.99 of their budget for an album. The record companies seemed to rush into that trend to digitise past great albums ASAP to cash in ££££. Did this starve investment at the new artist end of the industry for band type music ? 

The other types of new music emerging into the chart were previously off the grid promoted and never really courted or even needed the mainstream. House and Rap and later their dance variants had been around for a while and were in successful local scenes in America and across Europe. They had their own record buying audiences, clubs, pirate radio stations to play and promote things and often sold good numbers of copies of records through independent record shops. There was a fair market for buying imports of this stuff around this time. The mainstream industry seemed to buy into all this around the mid 80s period. Combined with a lack of new traditional type bands and good new material from the established bands, by the late 80s this dance style stuff went on to dominate proceedings.

Because it was clear by the late 80s that dance based music had a strong youth based market appeal, I think attempts to recapture past glories due to sliding sales and to combat the dance heavy domination, is what led to the industry splitting the weekly charts into Indie, Dance, 12" Remix and Top 40 chart variants. As we know these efforts proved to be futile and the decline of the Top 40 charts continued. Sales continued to slide, had a small resurgence around the Britpop era then fell away again. The internet struck the final nail in the coffin at the end of the 1990s. Most had stopped buying singles by then anyway.

[Dirty Epic]

Nail on the head there Del especially the last couple of paragraphs, can't add anything more.