Listening now to their debut single, Tell Me Your Plans, it’s hard to see (or hear) how The Shirts were ever considered a punk band. Yet they were staples at CBGBs in that golden era of the mid-Seventies that spawned The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads and Blondie.

(more…)

Sometimes a song just hits you right there, regardless of genre or anything else. In 1978 this one-hit wonder got me right from that opening acoustic guitar.

(more…)

It’s hard to overestimate the sense of anticipation and mystery surrounding the return of Johnny Rotten after the dismal demise of The Sex Pistols onstage in San Francisco in January 1978.

(more…)

Say what you like about Boney M, they were an entertaining fixture in the singles chart all through the second half of the Seventies.

(more…)

As punk was mutating and evolving in 1978, a new band called Japan surfed in on the New Wave. I went to see them at the Music Machine, attracted mainly by their image.

(more…)

Like most music fans, I first set eyes on Amanda Lear in 1973 as the coquettish vamp on the cover of Roxy Music’s second album, For Your Pleasure, sheathed in black leather with a black panther on a leash.

(more…)

This was a kind of guilty pleasure during my disco-hating days as a punk. It came out in 1978 and I probably noticed it because of Alicia Keys’s provocatively punky hairstyle – somewhere between Bowie and Billy Idol.

(more…)

It wouldn’t take long to write down everything I know about this song, or the girl who sang it. At the height of punk, Stiff Records had a hit single with B-A-B-Y, sung by a 15-year-old girl from Akron, Ohio called Rachel Sweet.

(more…)

Zones were the short-lived band the even shorter-lived PVC2 became when frontman Midge Ure buggered off to join Rich Kids. Which is also to say they were also once teenybop band Slik.

(more…)

Dead Fingers Talk are another of those bands that shone brightly for a brief moment before slipping through the cracks in the immediate aftermath of punk.

(more…)