The Angry Young Men of New Wave: A Playlist

Is it stupid to sell water bottles when half the country is still freezing its collective ass off? Or is that, in fact, the perfect time for a bargain-bin like us to sell water bottles? Yes, it’s another example of how counter-intuitive shopping can save you big counterintuitive bucks. Don’t wait until everybody in America is like “Oh, man, I’d give anything for a pair of collapsible silicone water bottles, one blue and one clear, especially if they’re dishwasher-safe!” Get 'em now, ahead of the rush, while it doesn’t make any sense to the layman.

So, in an equally incongruous spirit, I now present a weekend playlist that has nothing whatsoever to do with this product. (That’s “I” as in me, Meh writer @JasonToon: dancer, dreamer, lover of life.) For reasons I can’t begin to fathom, I’ve always been into music by uptight, awkward nerds with a chip on their shoulders. There was a little period there in the late '70s and early '80s when the commercial success of Elvis Costello gave the record industry a template for a new kind of rock figure, who couldn’t be further away from the rock-god likes of Robert Plant. These guys were soon known by a name swiped from a wave of British dramatists of the '50s and '60s: the Angry Young Men.

The typical Angry Young Man was actually not that young, at least compared to the teenage punk hordes. He (always he) wore his dad’s castoff suits a few sizes too small, had short hair that looked like he cut it himself, and twitched and jerked onstage like someone straining at a straitjacket. Musically, he’d clearly learned a thing or two from his record collection, showing a working knowledge of classic pop, r&b, and rock ‘n’ roll, swiping a move or two from reggae, and stripping it all down and speeding it up like punk rock. Lyrically, he struck a too-smart-for-his-own-good stance that could range from wry to jaundiced to aggrieved; and vocally, he probably overenunciated those multisyllabic words in a nervy, not-conventionally pretty voice. Why don’t I shut up and let you listen to some? (It’s also compiled in a YouTube playlist, if that’s what you’re into.)

Elvis Costello - “No Action” (1978)
The anger and tension of Elvis Costello’s first album, My Aim is True, was leavened by the country-rock flavor of the hired-hand backing band, Clover; there are moments that could be Randy Newman or some other '70s singer-songwriter. But when Costello assembled his own tight-as-a-noose band, the Attractions, his sound moved to a higher plane of “revenge and guilt” (his words). The difference was obvious from the opening seconds of his second album, This Year’s Model, with the song “No Action”.

Graham Parker - “Saturday Nite is Dead” (1979)
Graham Parker beat Costello to the record racks by a couple of years, but his sound and persona were similar enough that the two were reflexively lumped together by the music press. Parker had more facility with r&b, his own tough backing band, the Rumour, and his own grievances to get off his chest. This is from his third and best-selling album, 1979’s Squeezing Out Sparks.

Joe Jackson - “Don’t Wanna Be Like That” (1979)
The third member of the original Angry Young Man trinity, Joe Jackson was a jazz-trained pub-rock journeyman who put together yet another crack band to squeeze his smart, witty songs into the New Wave gold rush - indeed, bassist Graham Maby might have been the best musician in any of the three bands. When the trendy punkish sound passed, he breathed a sigh of relief and spent the next three decades relaxing into reggae, jazz, swing, and classical along with the occasional flash of uptight rock, just to remind us he can.

John Hiatt - “Radio Girl” (1979)
The Angry Young Men were a very British phenomenon, but that didn’t stop record companies from trying to shoehorn in the occasional American talent they didn’t know how to sell otherwise. John Hiatt’s own tendencies were far rootsier, but he recorded a couple of excellent albums in AYM rock mode before getting back to the country/soul sound closer to his heart.

Any Trouble - “Second Choice” (1980)
Clive Gregson out-Costelloed Costello with his office-nerd look: bigger glasses, wider forehead, more rumpled suits. And he proved adept at reassembling Elvis C’s bits and pieces into songs that were just original enough to be his own. After Any Trouble broke up, he evolved into a respected Anglo-folkie; is it wrong of me to prefer his less original early stuff?

The Jags - “Back of My Hand” (1979)
The Attractions never sounded quite this jagged (no pun intended), but otherwise this is a pure Elvis Costello soundalike. It’s so monstrously catchy, who cares?

The Gas - “Definitely is a Lie” (1981)
Donnie Burke of the Gas, on the other hand, sounded like nobody but himself. Rather than rip riffs from the Costello catalog, he went deeper, drawing on the same well of itchy resentment but putting it in his own musical terms. The end result is much more powerful, sonically and emotionally.

The Exits - “Fashion Plague” (1978)
The '60s-obsessed “mod revival” of 1978-1980 overlapped some with the punkish pop of the Angry Young Men, especially in the cynical “Fashion Plague” by the Exits.

The Vapors - “News at Ten” (1980)
While you probably know them from their huge semi-novelty hit “Turning Japanese”, the Vapors were a much more interesting proposition. Their moody kitchen-sink mini-operas owed a little to the Jam but they were nobody’s imitators. It’s too bad their huge hit made everything else they did seem like an afterthought, with the band breaking up after two albums.

Sussman Lawrence - “Shelly’s Dog” (1980)
As New Wave seeped out to cities across America, budding songwriters gravitated to the Angry Young Man template: it was a cool new sound but not so new that it was radio poison. In Minneapolis, Peter Himmelman formed Sussman Lawrence with a more whimsical take on the Attractions sound. He grew up to be a much more serious, rootsy singer-songwriter, even scoring a few commercial hits.

Jo Jo Zep & the Falcons - “Puppet on a String” (1980)
Like Costello, Parker, and Jackson, Joe Camilleri was kicking around doing soul and early rock covers for years before punk came along. The difference is, he was doing it in Australia. By 1978, he too had adopted the reggae-inflected, punk-fueled sound in his band Jo Jo Zep & the Falcons. They earned the ultimate accolade when Elvis Costello covered their great song “So Young”. Even better, to my ears, is “Puppet on a String”, a 1980 Australian hit.

Xdreamysts - “I Don’t Wanna Go” (1980)
Xdreamysts (previously featured in our X is the Punkest Letter playlist) were country-rocking post-hippies in Northern Ireland who, cleansed by the fires of punk, retained enough of their musicality to wind up sounding not dissimilar to their angry English peers.

The Roms - “Your Love is Neat” (1980)
New Jerseyite Rich DaSilva was yet another wiry American nerd who found his niche in the AYM’s wake. If “Your Love is Neat” isn’t as bitter as anything in Costello’s repertoire, it’s at least as charming. This clip of their 1980 appearance on the legendary local TV show The Uncle Floyd Show was too long for this playlist, but captures their charm even better.

3-D - “Telephone Number” (1980)
All I know about 3-D is that they were an American band who released a couple of albums on Polydor. And that they proved that Yanks could imitate Costello as well as any Londoner.

You’ll notice that all of these songs were released in a three-year span: even as pop archetypes go, “bitter nerd in a thrift-store suit” was a fleeting one. '80s mainstream music moved on in a more lighthearted mood, while underground music got heavier and darker; there was less and less room for anything in between. But if there’s one thing you can say about the Angry Young Men, they wrote some brisk, clever pop tunes that have absolutely nothing to do with Life Gear Collapsible Water Bottles.

If this weekend playlist didn’t make you too angry, check out these past playlists while you’re young, man:

• The Nights are Cold: Winter Indie-Pop
• Campfire Hits: The '60s Pop-Folk Fad
• Turn On Country Style: Psychedelic Country Nuggets
• Beyond the Legend: Bob Marley Deep Cuts
• Weekend playlist archive