Date: 1977
Release: Captain Oi! #129
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London, 1977. Its year zero of the revolution, hippy-love is out, teenage angst in. A new breed of bands are smashing it up, blasting out a mean racket known as punk rock. Its a violent break from the past—as the kids gets busy kicking in the door, hoping that the whole rotting Establishment comes tumbling down. The Sex Pistols are banned from the radio, and that’s exactly the point. Throwing a brick never felt so damn good.

Now rewind several years, to a remote and seedy corner of Brisbane, Australia, where singer Chris Bailey and guitarist Ed Kuepper are busy prototyping an aggressive, stripped down, raw rock sound that would later come to be called punk. As their 1974 demos (compiled on The Most Primitive Band In The World) demonstrate, the Saints rocked in the punk vanguard long before the arrival of the Sex Pistols, Dammed, Buzzcocks, Clash, and Ramones. Their music—an irresistibly ferocious Stooges meets Stones late ‘70s roar—won them a staunch local following, but no record deal. Their demos were rejected by EMI Australia, and their gigs were frequently broken-up by the Queensland police. The band realized that if they were to stand a chance, they had to get themselves out of their provincial cage to find a more receptive audience.

In 1976 they self-recorded and released their debut single, the devastatingly catchy “(I’m) Stranded.” Banned from Australian radio, the band took matters into their own hands, mailing out copies of the single to some open-eared rock journalists in the States and the UK. Not surprisingly, the single completely blew the minds of the British music press, with one rave review even going so far as to call it “the single of this and EVERY week.” The loud buzz surrounding the band also rattled EMI’s Aussie execs, with higher ups in the London office furiously ordering them to sign at any cost the band they had so recently shunned. In a storm of apologies and ass kisses, the newly signed Saints were quickly ushered into the studio, and a follow up LP was rush-released in 1977.

Twenty-five years later, both the album and the single are still a devastating listen, loaded with the same irresistible power that allowed “(I’m) Stranded” to sweep up the UK charts in that eternal punk summer of ’77. Comprised largely of unpolished demo tracks that the Saints never intended releasing, (I’m) Stranded has all the intense purity of a band hell bent on making a racket, regardless of its commercial viability. From the first anthematic chorus of “(I’m) Stranded” to the last blistering chords of closing track “Nights in Venice,” this cheaply recorded album crackles with a contagious energy almost entirely missing from today’s super-produced punk records. This rough and raw record is so unstoppable that even its pair of ballads, “Messin’ With the Kid” and “Story of Love,” do nothing to slow it down. If anything, these two songs add nuance and balance to the hard-fast set, with Kuepper’s mean blues-drenched guitar (“Messin’ With the Kid” pretty much lifts the opening riff from the Rolling Stones’ “Sway”) and Bailey’s youthfully snarled lyrics of discontent making them quintessential punk laments.

Heretically mop-topped and unfashionably dressed, the Saints followed their smash single from Brisbane to London, only to find their great hopes of success dashed by punk’s emerging fashion fascism. Almost as soon as punk ‘officially’ began, an influential cadre of London musicians, hipsters and journalists formed what amounted to a punk rock style-police state. The style-police showed zero tolerance for non-conformists, relying on the bully pulpit of the British punk press to excommunicate all those who didn’t tow the line. Then as now, the movement squandered much of its vitality on style over substance, consuming itself in senseless battles over what is and what is not ‘punk.’ Unwilling to follow the dress code, the Saints quickly ran afoul of the punk elite, and their superb second album, Eternally Yours, was almost automatically ignored and rejected. In a bitter twist of irony, the London punks had become just like the conformist society they were rejecting, failing to see that the Saints refusal to wear their uniform was one of the most totally punk moves of the day.

Time has helped right these sins against the Saints. Australians today worship the band, holding them in as high esteem as any other native sons who ever rocked the continent. And most serious fans of the genre would now agree that (I’m) Stranded stands as one of the single best punk albums of all time. One thing is for certain—compared to the current crop of derivative punk bands, the Saints deserve to be enshrined and worshipped.

Date: 1986
Release: Virgin/Geffen
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In the pantheon of post-punk new wave bands, few wrote songs with as keen an understanding of melody, harmony, and arranging as XTC, whose innovative songwriting has often been likened to that of The Kinks. Although the band’s quirky style cultivated an avid cult following over the years, the group never managed to capture much commercial recognition. The tightly crafted lyrics and dense arrangements on 1986′s Skylarking make it one of XTC’s most cohesive albums.

Like changing seasons, a prevailing theme on the album, each song flows effortlessly into the next in a production style similar to Sgt. Pepper’s. Andy Partridge’s evocative lyrics and Colin Moulding’s music combined with producer Todd Rundgren’s orchestral arrangements often propel Skylarking to the heights of pop impressionism—”Summer’s’ Cauldron,” “Ballet For A Rainy Day,” and “1000 Umbrellas” are the album’s most lyrically visual tunes. Weaving his way through “One billion salt seas/ Recalled from school atlas/Alas would be full to the “How can I be pleased/ When I’m handed the keys/To a town the call Misery/ Oh oh Misery” on “1000 Umbrellas,” Partridge’s phrasing is in a class of its own. The rich Beach Boys–influenced, multi-part harmonies on “Season’s Cycle” demonstrate that XTC are well versed students of pop history. For all of Skylarking’s supple texture, it was the stripped-down, acoustic atheistic missive “Dear God”—probably the nearest the ’80s ever came to Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”—that scored any noteworthy radio play, at least in this country.

Date: 1985
Release: Warner / Sire #25426-2
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“Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Morrissey.
Morrissey who?
See, I told you I didn’t have any friends!”

–The Fantastic Morrissey Knock-Knock Joke, from the comic strip Great Pop Things

The long-standing, long-suffering caricature of Morrissey The Melancholy (or “Morosely,” as he is sometimes dubbed in Great Pop Things) looms large in rock ‘n’ roll mythology. And with joyless underdog laments like “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want,” and “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”–bleated with his typical heart-sleeved, slit-wristed bravado–it’s no wonder The Smiths icon has attracted such a fervent following of hypersensitive bedroom hermits and other assorted asexual/pansexual pariahs. (As an aside, I must warn you single folks out there, Smiths conventions are not the places to go looking for love: If you ever meet a prospective suitor who’s a card-/Prozac-carrying Morrissey obsessive…RUN! Chances are, this charming man/woman will cause you nothing but grief.)

But anyway, contrary to his popular public persona as the celibate/vegetarian/insufferably Oscar Wilde-fixated patron saint of downtrodden indie bedwetters (Coldplay‘s got nothing on The Smiths) whose only moods are glum and glummer, the misunderstood Moz has always been a master of comic relief–the guy used to be the president of the New York Dolls‘ fanclub, for crying out loud, and surely no man can qualify for such a position unless he possesses a subversive sense of humor.

Lacing his literary lyrics with playfully self-deprecating (if at times a tad self-consciously precious) Brit wit and the kind of knowing irony with which Alanis Morissette is sadly all too unfamiliar, Morosely’s offbeat wordplay has at times strayed a little too far off the beat–by the time the plain old silly “Girlfriend In A Coma” was released in 1987, that joke wasn’t funny anymore–but on The Smiths‘ landmark third album, The Queen Is Dead, his songs strike the perfect balance between heartache and hilarity. And with the spry, nimble-fingered, and hugely influential string-plucking of indie-pop guitar god Johnny Marr–the Keef to Morrissey‘s Mick, the Page to his Plant–underlying even Moz’s most pathetically self-pitying sentiments with a bit of much-needed levity, the result is such fleeting, indefinable magic that Alternative Press magazine even declared The Queen Is Dead the best album of the ’80s. (Huh? But what about Rio, or Appetite For Destruction? Oh well, we’ll have to discuss those albums some other time…)

The Queen Is Dead is certainly one of that newly nostalgia-filled decade’s top contenders, representing not only the short-lived Smiths at their creative and commercial peak (it was their first showing in the U.S. top 100, yet they disbanded only a year later), but also representing a significant shift towards the kind of guitar-oriented-yet-still-pleasantly-wussy rock ‘n’ roll that has dominated Britpop ever since (only a very, very geometrically challenged person would be unable to draw a straight line from The Smiths to such obvious disciples as Gene, James, Pulp, Marion, and Suede, not to mention America’s own Strokes and about 10 gazillion bleeding-heart emo bands). Opening with the thundering, six-minute title track–a wickedly funny and incisive attack on the Royal Family and Britain’s crusty class system (“Pass the pub that wrecks your body/And the Church, all they want is your money/The Queen Is Dead, boys”)–the album immediately deflates the Morosely Myth. Smugly howling about his fantasies of seeing Her Majesty’s head in a sling and Prince Charles in drag, the Moz-man hardly sounds spineless or sappy, and besides, the song is Marred with far too many layers of roaring guitar to ever warrant such adjectives as “wimpy” or “fey.”

Of course, Morrissey‘s mincing, foppish charm/smarm is more evident on jaunty ditties like “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” and “Cemetry Gates,” but once again, there’s scarcely a trace of his notorious woe-is-me attitude: The former is a kiss-off to an employer (a sort of “Take This Job And Shove It” for the Britpop set), and when, on the latter, he quips, “Keats and Yeats are on your side/But you lose, because Wilde is on mine,” he seems to take subtle delight in poking fun at himself. He clearly realizes that all misery and no fun makes Morrissey a dull boy, and makes sure not to take himself too seriously. And speaking of fun, “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” is a major hoot–the title says it all. (It sure would be a gas to hear a female artist cover this one, altering the lyrics ever so slightly to refer to the male anatomy…just a suggestion.)

Of course, there are weaker moments of unrelenting despair–no Smiths album would be complete without them–as evidenced by painfully bleak lines like “If you’re so very good-looking, why do you sleep alone tonight?” (from “I Know It’s Over”), “I had a really bad dream/It lasted 20 years, seven months, and 27 days” (“Never Had No One Ever”), and “Life is very long when you’re lonely” (“The Queen Is Dead“). But one track is the ultimate distillation of the band’s greatest elements (Sahara-dry humor, incredibly naked tenderness, impeccable melodicism, brilliant guitar work), and it is perhaps The Smiths‘ finest four minutes and three seconds: the epic “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.” Sweetly, hopelessly romantic but never sickly or soppy, lightly humorous (a peculiar line like “If a double-decker bus crashes into us/To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die” is guaranteed to induce a wry grin) but still heaving with the dull ache of unrequited longing, it best utilizes the infamous friction between Morrissey and Marr that made for some fabulous music but eventually, in the tradition of every band ever featured on Behind The Music, drove The Smiths to splinter apart after only five years. (When is VH1 gonna make a Smiths Behind The Music, by the way?) In short, this song is The Smiths. It’s the song that Class Of ’86 goths danced to, unsmilingly, at their prom. Somewhere, some teenhood couple is rekindling their John Hughes-esque doomed romance at a 15-year high school reunion, or maybe even waltzing at their wedding, while this ballad plays in the background. And if Morrissey and Marr (oh yeah–and the other two Smiths, Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke) ever stage a reunion, when they play this one there won’t be a dry eye or extinguished Bic lighter in the house.

So sometimes, there really is a light that never goes out–as the timelessness of the music of those great pop things, The Smiths, undoubtedly proves. The Queen may be dead, but The Smiths never will be.

“How many Morrisseys does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
None–because there is a light that never goes out!”

–The Fantastic Morrissey Light Bulb Joke, from Great Pop Things

Date: 1993
Release: Virgin #87950
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Unless you spent the entire summer of 1997 in a coma, you’ve heard the song “Bittersweet Symphony.” Found everywhere from the top of the charts to Nike ads, under the leadership of Richard Ashcroft, The Verve crafted an album’s worth of beautiful ballads — Urban Hymns — that featured intelligent lyrics, soulful singing and exquisitely crafted pop melodies. Alas, The Verve broke up after the album, and we’ll have to hope that Richard Ashcroft‘s solo career provides us with more of those type of songs.

A listener unfamiliar with The Verve might wonder why they broke up then—at the height of their fame and fortune. As is so often the case, Ashcroft — the band’s singer — didn’t get along too well with Nick McCabe, The Verve‘s psychedelic-genius guitarist. If Urban Hymns was Ashcroft’s album, giving voice to his increasing desire for ballads and other traditional song structures, then A Storm in Heaven is McCabe’s album, a masterwork of psychedelic guitar virtuosity. In the space of five minutes, he erects and dismantles shimmering walls of sound, his tools a six string, delays, effect pedals, and a stack of amps. On almost every song, Ashcroft’s vocals are buried deeper in the mix, haltingly articulating the emotions called forth by McCabe.

Opening with the track “Star Sail,” The Verve issues a challenge to the listener—the juxtaposition of thick, somewhat discordant chords, and the almost lilting melody that emerges from it. How can such starkly opposed sounds open a song? Slowly but surely, McCabe builds up an impressive edifice: a twin melody emerges — McCabe’s playing and the heavily delayed echo — before thickly distorted guitar picks up, bending the song in new directions, at each and every turn building over Ashcroft’s haunting vocals. The entire album works much the same way — suggestive, but vague, lyrics; ever-climbing squalls of guitar noise; repeated crescendos rising and falling like the tide. Other highlights include “The Sun, The Sea,” which definitely puts the ‘rock’ back into psychedelic rock and “Butterfly,” which builds off a blues riff into a majestic, ascendant crescendo.

It’s most certainly not ‘poor’ lyrics by Ashcroft that make this McCabe’s album; they are as witty, wry and evocative as on any Verve album. The guitar work is simply that magnificent. More melodic than My Bloody Valentine; bluesier than the Stone Roses; The Verve — as a unit, rather than as Ashcroft’s backups — are at the top of their form on their debut album.

Date: 1979
Release: EMI / IRS #13153
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While the albums that make up the Buzzcocks‘ sacred late-’70s trilogy (Another Music In A Different Kitchen, Love Bites, and A Different Kind Of Tension) are all must-hear masterpieces in their own right, the Buzzcocks were, first and foremost, the premier singles band of Britain’s early punk movement. Therefore, no ‘Cocks collection–hell, no record collection, period–can be complete without their A-sides compilation Singles Going Steady, which not only sounds as fresh in 2001–the year of the Manchester band’s 25th (!) anniversary–as it did in 1979, but in fact sounds much more vital than some bordering-on-parody works by such better-known punk peers as the Damned and (yes) the Sex Pistols.

The most obvious reason that SGS has aged so gracefully is its universal subject matter: While many overtly political punk bands of the ’70s tackled the dour and somewhat alienating topics of revolution and anarchy, the ‘Cocks have always focused on interpersonal politics, exploring such timeless matters of the heart as one-sided crushes, doomed romances, rejection, jealousy, betrayal, paranoia…y’know, all that fun stuff. The result? Oh, only some of the greatest unrequited-love and love/hate songs of all time–”Love You More,” “Ever Fallen In Love?” (later covered with disappointingly little passion by Fine Young Cannibals), “What Do I Get?” (later perplexingly featured in a Toyota SUV commercial), “Promises,” “Why Can’t I Touch It?”–all of which are included on Singles Going Steady, whose coy title cleverly hints at this lovelorn theme.

And the sharp, sour lyrics–sniveled with nasty, neurotic abandon by the Buzzcocks‘ brilliant main singer-songwriter Pete Shelley–resonate just as powerfully in today’s Tony Blair-era as they ever did during Thatcher’s reign. (Note that Shelley’s songs are never gender-specific, never mentioning the words “he” or “she”–whether this is because he wants to make his lyrics relevant to listeners of all sexual orientations or because he’s clouding the issue of his own uncertain sexuality is still up for debate, but regardless, the tactic works wonderfully.)

However, SGS’s lovesick laments are hardly tedious exercises in pre-grunge angst. Remember, its 16 cuts (with eight more being added to this year’s UK reissue) are singles, the type of songs specifically engineered to win the listener over in three breathless minutes or less with impeccable melodies and singalong choruses. By applying punk rock’s spotty-faced adolescent aggression to the radio single’s hooks-and-harmonies-oriented format, the Buzzcocks have created short, sharp, souped-up powerpop (emphasis on “power”) that sacrifices neither the snottiness of the former nor the sweetness of the latter. Only the ‘Cocks could write an obnoxious two-minute ode to frantic teenage masturbation (“Orgasm Addict”) and make it sound as catchy and carefree as a Partridge Family tune; only they could write a song about a sexy yet innocuous topic like lipstick (“Lipstick”–duh) and come up with a sad, twisted (but still extremely hummable) tale of a spurned lover’s anguish. It’s Shelley’s coquettish, brazen vocals that always lend his caustic words just the right smidge of playful pitch-black humor, and when they pair with the blistering guitars and airy, almost Spectorian harmonies of axe-slinging partner Steve Diggle, it’s pure punk-pop perfection.

It’s also the perfect post-breakup soundtrack. Without delving too much into my personal life here (I will spare you the gory/pathetic/boring details), suffice it to say I have suffered my unfair share of Cupid’s slings and arrows, and the extremely cathartic Singles Going Steady–which combines all the emotional bloodletting of the mopiest of woe-is-me breakup songs with the feelgood vibes of finger-snapping, toe-tapping, chart-topping powerpop–has helped me cope during those troubled times more than Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough ice cream or voodoo-doll replicas of my ex-boyfriends ever did.

Date: 1977
Release: VIRGIN #91343-2
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Hands down, this is Iggy Pop‘s best post-Stooges record as well as one of the hardest rocking pop albums to come out of the 1970s. Along with the legendary live shows of Kiss, Lust For Life rescued American music in 1977 from total disco oblivion. British-born David Bowie was the crucial element here, producing, playing, writing, and singing throughout the record with the drive and delivery of an over-achieving genius.

Still, this is Iggy’s show, as he makes perfectly clear with his classically black-edged vocals on the title track (revived in the heroin-chic film, “Trainspotting”). Drummer Hunt Sales‘ relentless pounding on “Lust For Life” holds a candle to the drumming machine known as John Bonham. Bowie-veteran Carlos Alomar plays a mean guitar that defines much of the album’s sound.

Iggy’s brash and irreverent vocals are inescapably punk, whether he’s cutting his teeth on the R&B styled “Tonight” or thrashing things out with the menacing “Neighborhood Threat.” On “Some Weird Sin,” he and Bowie harmonize to great affect on this autobiographical rant on boredom-inspired moral decadence. “The Passenger” rolls forward with a Jamaican-tinged punk beat, a strangely effective backdrop for Iggy to slip into his weirdly deep singing and aggressive phrasing.

It’s tracks like these that show why Iggy couldn’t be labeled anything but the Godfather of Punk, a title that he has always rejected, no matter how deserving. As the record heats up with his unstoppable energy, his characteristically dark humor, and his in-your-face flamboyance, we understand why Iggy will surely go down as one of the greatest front men in history. A tough kid from the middle class streets of Ann Arbor, Iggy struggled with the vagaries of stardom, a fact that he addresses with “Success.” Whatever price he may have paid for living the life-on-the-edge that he sang about, he still proved with ferociously good records like this, that nothing succeeds like excess.