Will Hodgkinson on 1989
The massacre in Tiananmen Square, the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, Jive Bunny at No 1. Nobody remembers 1989 as a stellar year for pop, which might be why it was so important for underground music. My Bloody Valentine were becoming the most innovative indie band of their generation, while hardcore — a muscular, speeded-up take on punk — became the defining sound of youthful disenchantment.
Just out of school, I could think of nothing more exciting than stage-diving at a hardcore gig like the one at the Astoria, London, December 3: Mudhoney, Tad, and, way down the bill, Nirvana. I remember thinking Nirvana were a bunch of Black Sabbath fans in plaid shirts who would never get anywhere. I was half right, at least.
Philip Collins on 1979
In February 1979, on a football coach in Manchester, I fell in love with Elvis Costello. That year was close enough to punk for all the best people to have matured — the Clash, the Jam, Blondie, the Pretenders — and there were signs of great new movements — first records by the Specials, Madness, the Cure and Joy Division.
There was even Comfortably Numb, the only acceptable Pink Floyd song. It wasn’t to last. Soon Spandau f***ing Ballet and the new romantics would spill their frills all over this great scene but, as Gloria Gaynor gloriously said in 1979, I will survive. I will always have Going Underground.
John Bungey on 1954
Bill Haley threatens western civilisation with Shake, Rattle and Roll; Elvis records That’s All Right, Mama; Rosemary Clooney has a smash with This Ole House and Johnny “Guitar” Watson uses reverb on a record for the first time. What more could you want, pop-pickers? Everything since has been decoration.
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James Jackson on 1991
In 1991, guitar-rock was cool and dominating the mainstream in a way it hadn’t since the 1970s — Nirvana’s Nevermind, Metallica’s Black Album, REM’s Out of Time, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Grunge was breaking as a countercultural force in America.
Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion albums and tour felt like the last hurrah for heavy-rock vinyl and excess-all-areas touring, and in Britain, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, Blur’s Leisure, Massive Attack’s Blue Lines and Primal Scream’s Screamadelica were opening up avenues of sound. 1991 was about far more than Bryan Adams’s (Everything I Do) I Do It for You.
Carol Midgley on 1984
We were blessed in 1984. Not because in any week you might have, say, Bronski Beat, Culture Club or Frankie Goes to Hollywood in the charts but because the Smiths released their first and second albums — an embarrassment of riches. I saw them live for the first time in 1983 and, mouth agape at their symphonies of beautiful despair, everything changed for me musically. They also heralded a wonderful, golden age of Manchester music. No band had touched them since.
David Aaronovitch on 1969
Man, are you kidding? The best rock year is always the year you turned 15. And there was never and never will be again a year like ’69. January, and the Beatles are playing their last public gig — on the Apple roof. February, and Johnny Cash has a blast with the prisoners on San Quentin. July, and the Stones play “for Brian” free in Hyde Park.
Mid-August and Jimi, Janis, Joan and Jefferson (Airplane, man) make us stardust and golden at Woodstock. Crash for a fortnight and it’s bank holiday and you bum a lift to the Isle of Wight to freak out to Dylan, the Band and the Moody Blues. It’s the year of Space Oddity, Pinball Wizard, King Crimson. And Lulu won Eurovision, which was, admittedly, the pits.
Stephen Dalton on 1981
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The pop future was invented in 1981, but I was too busy studying for my O levels, in love with Blondie and Altered Images, Madness and the Specials. But 1981 was also the revolutionary year when shiny, sexy synth-pop colonised the mainstream with seminal high-charting hits including Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, Kraftwerk’s The Model, Laurie Anderson’s O Superman (For Massenet) and Human League’s Don’t You Want Me from their double-platinum album Dare.
The embryonic superstars New Order, Depeche Mode and Duran Duran also released debut albums, alongside game-changing masterworks including Grace Jones’s Nightclubbing and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno. Most significant of all was the birth of an obscure TV channel called MTV. Nothing would ever be the same again.