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  4. NWOBRBWSABLTSFAOBC

    aka New Wave Of British Rock Bands Who Sound A Bit Like The Stones Faces And Or Bad Company

    featuring Quireboys, Dogs D’Amour, Thunder and Sweet Addiction

    • a scene promoted by Simon Price featuring such bands as Dex Dexter, Plastic Fantastic, Orlando and Sexus

      I have revisited the Orlando album on Spotify … I rather liked it

    • I digitised the Melody Maker “Fiddling While Romo Burns” cassette recently and have been playing it fairly regularly, though I’m hardly shocked that none of the associated bands ever got anywhere…

    • Never sure what it actually was. Mentioned in the pages of Kerrang.
      D*A*D – No Fuel Left For The Pilgrims has been played at least twice in the last 6 years. Maybe not dead, but doesn’t smell too good.

    • A magnificently pithy comment, Tiggerlion.

      And in many ways you are right. Our son, who is 22, is totally uninterested in any track featuring a guitar.

      BUT……give it time. Even the deadest genre can rise again from the grave.

      The Skiffle Revival starts here. here’s an excellent review.

      • Best book on skiffle?
        The bit (200 pages!) in Lewisohn’s massive tome when the Quarrymen were doing it. Seriously, it’s the definite take on the subject.

        Didn’t Bragg’s one repeat the oft-quoted and wrong line that skiffle came before rock ‘n’ roll? Might be mis-remembering it. Anyway, they went hand-in-hand.

        Also, a doc he fronted made ‘Rock Island Line’ seem far more important than it actually was.

        The pivotal Lonnie Donegan release was his ‘Showcase’ LP in December 56. ‘Rock Island Line’ charted in January 56… there are more cups in Tottenham’s trophy cabinet than there were skiffle groups in the U.K. by the end of 56, let alone the beginning of 56, and hardly any of them did ‘Rock Island Line’!

    • Also by John Peel.

      I love/loved Dubstep. It kind of got absorbed into a number of other genres/turned into a cartoon version of itself by the Americans, but every now and then it still throws up a gem.

  19. Easy Listening! And I mean real “Easy Listening” music that had its own section in record shops back in the 60s. It was played on the radio station my parents listened to. These days if you search for “easy listening” you’ll get Carole King or Cat Stevens. No! THIS is easy listening…

  20. Crusty (a big part of early 90s Brighton)

    New Wave of New Wave (e.g. S*M*A*S*H).

    Actually, no music genre truly dies: Cherry Red will do a 3 CD clamshell boxset sometime soon.

    • As an outsider of the scenes (I’ve written before about how my university chum Vicky became a ‘Traveller’ after seeing the Levellers), I was never really able to tell the difference between Crusty and Fragglerock (as mentioned above by exilpj).

      I went to the gigs, liked the music, bought the records (I still have a couple of Back To The Planet tapes somewhere) but thought that they all just needed to wash their hair.

      • There was an Irish version of that genre “Raggle Taggle”, that kind of followed the Waterboys move to Spiddal. The Frames were seen as part of it at the time but they’re better than that. I can’t remember any good songs that emerged from it but I think I had a Fatima Mansions t-shirt that had “Raggle Taggle, Nein Danke”, on it. They were a great band for t-shirts.

      • I can’t help you with Fragglerock (although I think the Terrahawks may have been one of theirs), but having lived in Brighton in the early 90s, I can help you with Crusty: basically, a bunch of poshos asking you for spare change on the Level.

      • Fraggle Rock was a muppet tv show wasn’t it?

        Mega City 4, Senseless Things and Carter – that sounds about right – like Snub TV versions of Jesus Jones and EMF.

  22. You don’t hear much psychobilly, raggle taggle, or grindie these days. And I speak as someone who was in the room when the NAM (or stool rock) and No Name were born. Bring back the Camden Lurch.

  23. Some might think neo-medieval folk rock is a somewhat lapsed genre. But no! Ritchie Blackmore is keeping that flame alight, silly clothes and everything.

      • Neo-medieval folk rock is absolutely thriving in Germany. Bands like Faun, Feuerschwanz, d’Artagnan (“musketeer folk-rock”), Saltatio Mortis, etc., all seem to be doing very well. Some are more folky than rock-y, but there’s not an Arran sweater or warm ale to be seen, and they can often whip a German-speaking crowd in particular into a right proper frenzy.

        Here are Faun (one of my faves) rocking a festival crowd with the thumping ‘Baldur’:

    • Hmmm…reading social media comments, invariably by boomers, would have you believe that everything – but EVERYTHING – produced by the raft of current population princesses is ‘bubblegum’.

  28. Rock and Roll Revival – the whole thing from Wizzard through Showaddywaddy and eventually the Stray Cats. Probably about 10 years of wistful remembrance for something that maybe never happened. It dominated pop music at times and then went quiet for a bit. I think maybe Shakin’ Stevens was the end of it.

    • The early/mid 70s Rock & Roll revival was pretty pervasive – movies like “That’ll Be The Day” and “American Graffiti” were big hits and had mega-selling soundtrack albums, Sha-Na-Na were big for a while in the US, and you might well argue that Glam Rock was just Rock & Roll in new clothes, especially T Rex, Wizzard, G*ry Gl*tt*r, even Bowie… and in the shadow of the New Romantics, everyone forgets the mini 80s Rock & Roll comeback – not just the aforementioned Stray Cats & Shaky, but Matchbox, The Polecats and a few other “Cats” IIIRC…

      • Mott The Hoople were arguably in the general area too, the nostalgia thing was in some of their songs like ‘Saturday Gigs’ which is a yearning for a time that probably never happened. There was a sense that Rock and Roll had gone away, and that singing about that was the way forward.

        • Just checked up in 74 I went to see the Kinks at Leeds University supported by Bill Haley and his Comets. There were lots of revival Teds at it, I recognised one as someone I’d been at school with a few years younger than me. As someone wrote ” It was quite comical to watch all the teddy boys file out as Bill’s show ended”
          There was the Rock n Roll revival show in London 72 I believe Dr Feelgood was a backing band for several of the acts.
          I saw Chuck Berry in 76 and his backing band was the John Verity Band who later went on to play guitar for Argent.

        • … and also that those kids born between 1940-55 were grown up and wanted to relive their youths, if not as musicians then as fans… there may even have still been the last vestiges of the notion that Rock & Roll and pop music was a fad that would eventually die out…?

          • I was born in 1950, and I guess I was dimly aware of Rock n Roll as a kid – I listened to the radio a lot from 1959ish onwards (as an aside, I am in the middle of compiling a playlist library for a Gold radio station, and going through hundreds of tracks from, say, 1955 to 1979, has reminded me of when I started hearing stuff), but it was all just music and genres weren’t really referred to – maybe jazz and pop were about it. Some records I liked and some I didn’t.
            In the 60s nostalgia wasn’t a thing, certainly not in my age group, although I remember a certain appreciation for some artists that had gone before, particularly Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry who were being covered, but you didn’t hear old music from the 50s…or even last year!….on the radio. There was far too much happening week to week, month to month. The term Rock n Roll came to mean old music, epitomised by Elvis. When the Stones were called the ‘Greatest Rock and Roll band in the world’ it seemed quite…well…odd, because Rock and Roll meant the 50s.
            Sha Na Na in the Woodstock movie were the first hint to me that things were maybe changing, and I thought that was great – music was getting far too serious – and, as has been pointed out, that accelerated in the early 70s as a bit of a reaction, I think, to all that progressive rock in the album charts, although it blurred into that genre through Bowie and glam rock.

  31. The original name of the NME, Accordion Times and Musical Express, suggests a world of music that has been forgotten. The instrument must have been popular if it had its own paper and even championships but from a cursory look on Google, I can’t see what kind of music was actually played – dance music of some kind I’d guess.

    I remember reading that Gary Brooker’s father played steel guitar in the popular act Felix Mendelssohn’s Hawaiian Serenaders – another genre that was everywhere and then disappeared from the mainstream, in the UK anyway.

    • When my Dad was learning the guitar, in the early 50s, he got a magazine called BMG – Banjo Mandolin Guitar. It had a lot of sheet music transcriptions of popular tunes of the day, and the guitar was (at the time) the lowest priority of the three instruments. There were Spanish and Plectrum guitar pieces. I think there might be a couple of copies of it in the stuff that he left me, but I haven’t found them yet.

  34. Isolationism / isolationist ambient: scary chill out music from mid 1990s as championed by Kevin Martin’ s Techno Animal as part of Virgin’s ambient anthology series. Think Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works volume 2 or Disco Inferno. Too difficult to really take off, perhaps.

  35. Indie Dance.
    That period in the late 80s/early 90s when every indie band had to insist to the NME ‘we’ve always had a dance element to our music’. The likes of the Soup Dragons, Beloved, The Farm, even the Lilac Time did an indie dance single for God’s sake. And Chapterhouse cross-bred it with shoegaze. Does anyone still listen to this stuff any more, let alone talk about it? (Apart from the Lilac Time obvs).

  37. Pub Rock – much good stuff, some not so good stuff, arguably adjacent to the aforementioned 70s Rock & Roll Revival. And the venues it spawned gave a ready-made circuit for Punk bands.
    And a couple of prominent figures started Stiff Records
    No longer happening as one so rarely finds a live band in a Pub.
    (I have trouble finding decent beer in some Pubs, let alone a live band)

    • A Mickey Jupp live vid popped up on my YouTube feed recently. Utterly charming. Ropey sound, terrible lighting and crappy guitars. As said, charming.

      It was either filmed in France or was made for French tv. He played a guitar solo. ‘I played that solo in French’ he deadpanned before continuing the song.

    • I must say lots of pubs have live music where I live – mostly covers bands, but some original stuff too. I have never thought of this as unusual – is it..?

      Pub Rock was very much part of a return to basics movement and punk was part of the same thought process, although that has been mythologised to death.

    • “Shamstep”, my computer says, is a Levantine genre of electronic dance music that combines the traditional forms of Dabke music with electronic instruments.

  47. There are now more posts in genrification than a picket fence: post rock, obviously, but post folk, post dub, post jazz seem all to be a thing. I am sure cardigan was once thing, so I await post card with eager anticipation.

  48. Spotify come up with some new ones just via playlists. Sad indie for example. Quite a nice list actually despite sounding laughable. There’s so many of these creations they just get lost.

  54. On this subject I have just been talking to someone who has explained that the jazz in ‘jazz and blues’ is somewhat different than the jazz in, well, just jazz. Not sure if the blues is completely different as well.

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