All the ‘flop’ singles got airplay. When I bought the GH album in 1976, I knew those songs. I wouldn’t have done if they hadn’t been played on the radio.
I liked that Harpo single Movie Star. In fact I recently added that to a Spotify list along with Jigsaw - Sky High.
Are you referring to From Me To You by the Beatles? This was basically a b-side in the USA and still charted. Not really a flop
@dwilpower, I agree with everything you said. Rod was a global superstar, Punk came and went very quickly, but NMTBHTSP entered the album chart at number one. I Don't Want To Talk About It / The First Cut Is The Deepest was priced cheap. Both sides were played. For a very short period of time and the only time it ever occurred, Virgin stores were allegedly disqualified... Of course the little old lady spoke to her suppliers, who spoke to other record stores and on several occasions when I asked, "what's the big seller this week?", her answer would be the next week's number 1. If I had been a betting man rather than a 14 year old school boy, I would have made money. The one thing that certainly did occur, was the establishment were very shaken up and to an extent, things would never be the same again. The Sex Pistols won a Young Businessmen Of 1977 award. Rod was Knighted and invited to perform at the Queen's Platinum Jubilee.
It’s true that punk was a life changing force for many who still feel it’s impact today. But it’s also fair to say that some of us saw it as a fleeting thing of little interest while we waited for the new Smokie record.
So true Bobby. Punk was mainly media hype and the darling of a section of the "edgy" music press and very London based. Kids around the country got to see the hype on TV and in Sounds etc. Although every town did have its own small group of punks most of whom dressed up for the artistic/shock value. It was popular with the art school/fashion crowd- an anti fashion movement that eventually morphed into the new Romantic movement for many- yet another short lived niche. I remember that by 1980 any punks looked out of place and a couple of years behind the curve. It's very fashionable to over emphasise Punk's true influence on music and society. The notoriety and shock value was exaggerated by the media- the punks I knew tended to be rather shy middle class misfits who hid behind the image there was of course the odd nutter. It certainly did have an impact but other artists and "genres" had a far greater impact and influence on our lives and musical development. There is so much rubbish written by music journos and other so called experts about the various musical "fads" and sub cultures from the Teds, Mods and Rockers, Northern Soul, Disco , Punk. Most of it is urban myth and hype
100% I worked in a local record shop on a Saturday from 1977-79. I remember we were told to take down the display for the album NMTB in our shop window by the shopping centre manager. We actually didn't sell that many copies of it to be honest. The Pistols were a flash in the pan whereas bands like the Clash were the real deal and had staying power surviving way beyond the 12 short months of Punk.
Punk was even more marginal in the U.S., never moved beyond cult status even in the big cities like New York and Los Angeles. Notice that genre did not gain any uptick in sales after the infamous "Disco Demolition Night" of 1979 at Comiskey Park in Chicago (to those who would argue, "Well, punk would have had more of a chance in the U.S. if not for that danged thing called disco"). Tying this to this discussion, the U.S. afterwards moved into a chart stupor that in its own way was just as dreary as the 1975-76 chart doldrums in the UK - only without dead comics hitting with a song from an old black-and-white movie (as just one example) or two actors on a TV show playing their respective characters doing a "comic" cover of an old 1920's or '30's standard - and did not recover until the advent of something called MTV. I also wonder if punk was in certain ways an excuse for those who were anti-social to start with, to keep up in their ways without having to "grow up."
Spot on! The UK charts have always been burdened with awful comedy/novelty songs soap stars and dreadful charity records and reality show winners. Truth is disco had a far bigger and wider impact on our culture than punk ever had and it continues to this day manifest in dance culture
I was a little worried about that for a while, when I first came across Homicide by 999. But it turned out to be a non-issue, thankfully.
A few U.S. novelties didn't make it to UK charts, namely Sammy Davis Jr.'s "The Candy Man," "Playground In My Mind" by Clint Holmes, "Earache My Eye" by Cheech & Chong, "Junk Food Junkie" by Larry Groce, and "King Tut" by Steve Martin. The U.S. had a few soap stars have hits, especially in the next decade in the form of Rick Springfield and Jack Wagner. The "reality show winners" didn't come along until the 2000's.
Speaking as someone who was 17 in 1977 America didn't really understand punk in the same way I suspect British would describe it. Patti Smith was on SNL in early 1976, where she played a very punk Gloria. "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side was a hit single in 1973. The Ramones hit our single charts before The Sex Pistols did in the UK. We considered bands like Tom Petty, Devo, Blondie, Talking Heads, the Clash, Pretenders, Elvis Costello, and the Ramones as punk, which to us meant loud or fast or quirky rock. Shorter songs. Shorter guitar solos. And then it was called New Wave, but at that point labels were useless to me. The nihilism of punk wasn't a factor here, but a rebellious attitude was...which wasn't new, but the music was. So, yes, punk wasn't kept off our record players and radio stations here because of disco, but the singles charts and top 40 radio stations were nearly useless because of disco after The Bee Gees onslaught of 1978/1979. Much of what we were listening to then wouldn't do much on the singles charts. Elvis Costello's Armed Forces scraped into the top 10 of the album charts and I bought a copy when it was new. I heard it on the radio and had seen Elvis on SNL at the end of 1977. The single from the album didn't even make the top 100. The B-52s were huge, but Rock Lobster didn't do much on the single chart. It was the album charts that mattered. There was indeed a change of the guard, even if much of music we were listening to wouldn't pass for punk in Britain.
Right. I never see that stuff as punk, apart from maybe the Ramones. I liked most of that stuff, like Talking Heads, Patti Smith and Blondie (we always see Blondie, who were huge over here, as honorary Brits), but I hated UK punk, apart from the Stranglers. Again, I never saw the Stranglers as punk, and I preferred their 80s work.
