vinyl tiger: the eighties playlist

There are a lot of references to music in my Vinyl Tiger novel.  Some of it is mainstream music, some not. Sometimes they were just themes that needed a good name drop.

I've put together a playlist on Spotify along with some comments regarding some of the entries and music themes that appear in the first volume of my novel - the 80s, all included below.

• BUZZCOCKS - EVER FALLEN IN LOVE WITH SOMEONE
  

We often generalize when it comes to punk music: that it was all about anarchy and noise, but some of the punk movement’s most enduring music comes from the melodic style that came out of fusing pop sounds with more straightforward punk.
Lovebites was the second album by the Buzzcocks. Originally formed in the mid-70s, they were pioneers in the punk music scene.  The Buzzcocks line-up changed over the years, but their influence over the indie, punk and Manchester scenes has been enduring. Read more about them here

• BLONDIE - PARALLEL LINES

If you needed  any proof of how fragmented mainstream music was at the end of the seventies, look no further than Blondie. These New York indies, led by the charismatic Debbie Harry, mixed rock, new wave, and even electronica into their trademark sound and were at the forefront of the new era in mainstream pop, even when that wasn’t their main aim.
It’s the kind of music that almost everyone loves today, but just a few decades ago Blondie signalled a complete challenge to the status quo. On Parallel Lines you got the full range of rock, disco and even reggae infused pop, and the blue print for future pop albums.

• GRACE JONES, ANDREA TRUE AND DISCO

While the mainstream was in the midst of upheaval, disco was busy keeping everyone else busy. If you could time stamp the late seventies, it would look and sound  like disco music.
The range of the disco genre was wide: artists like Donna Summer and Grace Jones, with their natural vocal flair brought some pathos [and camp] to the genre, but for every one of those divas you got more than a couple of Andrea Trues in return. No matter, it was all about the slinky grooves, and if nothing else, we can also thank disco for removing the vocal hurdle which would otherwise have stopped half of the pop/dance acts that arrived in the eighties from achieving what they did.

• LANA MANGESHKAR
  

The idea of the global superstar started to take shape in the eighties. Before that, music markets tended to be more local: while music tastes in the West often meant that each market had its own proponents of rock/disco/new wave,  usually in their own languages. In India, the fusion of the local and western markets began to arrive in the late eighties – particularly Asian underground which mixed British and Indian styles to come up with something new.
But before that, filmi, music from films, were by far the most popular song forms in India’s music market. There are certain regal figures in the Indian music scene, among them Manna Day and Lata Mangeshkar. In Vinyl Tiger, the title character spends some formative time in India, collecting music along the way. I imagined him as a kind of early eighties M.I.A, who I think remains without peer when it comes to cannabalizing from the subcontinent and producing something new and provocative.

• GRANDMASTER FLASH AND HIP HOP, MADONNA AND CLUB CULTURE
  

Back on the hop, and now in New York after leaving London, the Vinyl Tiger joined the growing underground dance music scene in NYC. No longer disco, this was the era in which street culture gave birth to non-identical twins: hip hop and club music. Either way, it was what was coined “black sound” that revolutionized pop music as the eighties revved up.
Acts like Grandmaster Flash would go on to have a lasting effect on hip hop and mainstream music, but it was a handful of artists like Madonna who rode the underground sound right into the mainstream, bringing the new club sound to the masses. And we all know what that particular arrival wound up meaning to pop music.

• SYNTH
  

The arrival of a new sound, and the breaking down of genres wasn’t just cultural. It was technical too. A new generation of synthesizers completely changed what composing could achieve. In Vinyl Tiger our hero rides his own club record into the top forty, and follows it up with more synth pop, competing in a market full of acts like Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw. Synth touched almost every element of music by the mid-80s: it formed the backbone of mainstream pop/rock (Hall & Oates), made its way as far into music by indie staples like The Cure and got to its most lofty heights with Dead Can Dance and the Cocteau Twins.
People are really hard on the eighties. But really, they shouldn’t be. The eighties was the first decade of democratization in pop music. You no longer needed to be a killer vocalist to have a hit record, and you no longer needed to sling a guitar around to be a rock star. You could now just pound away at a keyboard (and not know more than three or four chords). Hell, you could even sling it around your front.

• CHARISMA
  

That said, what you needed, musical talent or not, was charisma. Some had it in spades (Michael Hutchence, Billy Idol) others less so.  Pop’s holy trinity of Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna called the shots, but the days of being Bob Dylan were no more. If you had a dope groove, a decent choreographer or a sharp eye, you were already halfway through the door. Bonus points for creativity and making something from nothing.
We’re no longer in that wonderful place where anyone has a shot, no matter what they tell you. We live in a world which, thanks to our decade long obsession with talent shows, thinks that having a great vocal range makes you a great artist. But it’s also a piecemeal world where more and more, the mainstream means something less.