Continuing our look back at Power of Pop posts published before our move to WordPress in 2008. Here’s a review from 2006 featuring the wonderful David Gilmour solo album, On An Island.
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THE BEST PINK FLOYD SONGS OF ALL TIME is an interesting proposition. Mainly because we tend to think of Pink Floyd as the definitive album rock band. So, THE BEST PINK FLOYD SONGS OF ALL TIME as a feature seems in appropriate. But once again think of THE BEST PINK FLOYD SONGS OF ALL TIME list as an introduction to Pink Floyd and perhaps that makes it more palatable.
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Comfortably Numb might be my favourite song ever. I mean, if push came to shove and I needed to select just one favourite song then Comfortably Numb would be it. Nestled on the end of side three of Pink Floyd’s monster hit album, The Wall, Comfortably Numb is a true highlight in a landmark best-selling (double) LP.
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Punk. 1977. Ground zero.
The torn t-shirts, the spiky coloured short hair, the spitting and most of all the back-to-basics retro-pop caused a seismic shift in musical tastes and styles that was not fully felt till the early 80s. US bands like The Stooges and New York Dolls paved the way ultimately for British punks like The Sex Pistols, The Clash and the Damned. In the wake of punk, a new approach to pop-rock (variously labelled ‘post-punk’ or ‘new wave’) emerged making superstars of the likes of Blondie, The Cars, The Police et al.
But what about the 70s prog rockers? Well, they had to adapt to stay relevant. Here are examples of 80s pop songs made by progressive rockers.
NINETEEN EIGHTY
A transitional year for me. I welcomed the new decade as a National Serviceman having enlisted on Boxing Day, 1979. But more importantly, my musical tastes were changing as well, significantly. Sometime in 1978, I had been exposed to punk when a JC friend played to my friends & I, the Sex Pistols‘ Anarchy in the UK LP (banned in Singapore but smuggled in for good measure) and to be honest I was unimpressed. For a pop-rock lover weaned on The Beatles, Deep Purple, Queen, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols seemed dumb and barbaric!
That said, by 1980 I had begun to cotton on to the post-punk movement and had already started listening to the pioneering new bands of that era, which seemed far removed from the old-school rockers of my relative youth. Fueled by the noises made by rock mags like NME, Sounds & Melody Maker, I had started to abandon the old bands (as irrelevant) and had ’embraced’ the future of rock.
