Does pop music matter now, or has it turned into pap? I find myself increasingly asking this question, and fear that I'm becoming an archetypal anti-youth, middle-aged specimen myopically revisiting a mythical golden era. But am I?It was 30 years ago when my family moved from the countryside to the town and I plunged headlong into the pop realm. It was the same year Smash Hits and the Sony Walkman were launched. I was eight years old and religiously taped the top 40 every Sunday. Though I didn't realise it then, there was a revolution happening in pop, usurping the tired old guard.
A cursory glance of 1979's top 10s shows that sandwiched between Elton John's Your Song and Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond's horrendous duet You Don't Bring Me Flowers, was Ian Dury and the Blockheads' Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick at No 6. We didn't understand the song's playful connotations then, but the line "I like to be a lunatic" was appealing.Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2), an unlikely Christmas No 1, became a playground chant for us nascent rebels: "We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control." In our Victorian primary school, we deliberately kicked our feet so we didn't have to eat spotted dick with pink custard. And as for the frequent corporal punishment, at least we had Roger Waters to stick up for us. By November 1979, the mod revival was in full flow with the Jam's Eton Rifles. At the same time 2 Tone fully reared its head, with the Specials, Selecter and Madness all appearing on the same Top of the Pops show, and new wave reached critical mass with Squeeze, Elvis Costello, Gary Numan and the Pretenders filling Smash Hits' pages. The Skids and XTC flexidisc given away with the first issue underlined the mass appeal of the new pop aesthetic.
Pop and minimalist nihilism became bedfellows with M's Pop Muzik and the Flying Lizards' Money, while Tubeway Army's Are "Friends" Electric? and the Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star both marvelled and feared a future shock. Pop was, as the Police's No 1 suggested, like Walking On the Moon.
While 1979's pop revolution negated the tacky glam-pop formula, the counter-revolution of Stock, Aitken and Waterman in the mid 80s turned pop back to meaningless manufactured mush. Never before had so many outlandish ideas as those of 1979 been so mass-consumed, and at a time when single sales were at a peak. The pop world that my eight-year-old daughter now inhabits is sadly bereft of Smash Hits and Top of the Pops, and instead is suffocated by the utter schmaltz of X Factor and High School Musical, with only the occasional, rather faux-radical, rehash of 1979-style music (yes, you, the Enemy) hitting a largely irrelevant hit parade. Given that the 1979 pop revolution coincided with the reign of Margaret Thatcher – new-funk escapism and anthems of tangible anger – our only hope now is that David Cameron's assent to PM spurs on a new dawn of hard-biting pop gems as the Tories proceed to wreck the nation.
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