Underground music from the 60s, 70s & 80s — better late than never.
Garage rock gets remembered for the noise, the slop, the three-chord threat. What doesn’t get said enough: the best of these records also had hooks. Not radio-safe polish. Not session-man craft. Just songs — melodies that got inside your skull and stayed there. These ten went at you with both at once.
Ten tracks from all over the place: Chicago, Los Angeles, Huntington Beach, Northern Ireland (three times), the Netherlands, Italy, New York, and Brisbane, Australia. Power pop with no fixed passport.
Belfast. Belgium. Vancouver. Milwaukee. Worcester, England — not Worcester Massachusetts, Worcester England, which is somehow further from the London punk scene than Belfast was. Power pop has rules about where it comes from: the right American city, the right English coast, the right connection to a label that knew what the Raspberries were doing. These ten records didn’t get that memo. They arrived from the wrong coordinates, made the record anyway, and were better for it.
A Los Angeles band that had to move to London to be taken seriously, hit number two, and got remembered for the wrong records. A studio ghost act fronted by a Penthouse Pet that cracked the American charts and never came back. An Australian band that went to number one at home and didn’t exist anywhere else. A drummer who had three hit singles. A fake person who sang his own songs. Ten glam records that crossed borders they weren’t supposed to cross — of geography, identity, genre, or time.
Everyone knows “Little Deuce Coupe.” Everyone knows “Little Old Lady from Pasadena.” Those records are fine. But the hot rod song as a form had a longer and stranger life than the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean would suggest — it kept turning up in British Invasion records, bubblegum sessions, proto-punk singles, and Philadelphia basements well into the ’80s. Ten tracks that took the theme somewhere nobody expected.
In 1979 and 1980, a handful of bands independently arrived at the same conclusion: the best music had been made between ’64 and ’68, and the sensible thing to do was go back and make more of it. Not nostalgia, not pastiche — something rawer than that. Built around fuzz pedals, Vox Continentals, and Back from the Grave compilations. Most of it sold nothing. All of it was right.
London SS never played a single gig. Their “discography” was rehearsal tapes. They lasted less than a year. And yet the musicians who cycled through that West London rehearsal room in 1975 and 1976 went on to form the Damned, the Clash, Generation X, the Boys, Chelsea, the Lords of the New Church, Big Audio Dynamite, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and Carbon/Silicon. Every track on this playlist has at least one person who was in London SS.
Yé-yé gets dismissed as novelty — cute girls in miniskirts doing watered-down British Invasion. That reading is wrong. At its best it was genuinely weird, genuinely catchy, and genuinely French in a way that nothing before or since has been. This is ten tracks that make the case.
You might not know Seymour Stein by name, but you know his label. Sire Records in the late seventies was punk and power pop and new wave all at once — not because Stein was chasing trends, but because he just kept signing bands he believed in. The Ramones. The Undertones. Talking Heads. The Rezillos. The Searchers, somehow. What follows is ten songs from that run. Some you’ll recognize. Some you won’t. All of them ended up on the same label because one guy had a very good ear.
The Beatles played the Budokan on June 30th, 1966. By the following spring, hundreds of Japanese bands were recording Group Sounds — a genre born from British Invasion, American R&B, and Japanese pop colliding in a country that had been waiting for permission to explode. Most of it never left Japan. This is ten of the best.
Ten tracks from the Killed By Death era — Cleveland, Indiana, Florida, Portland, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans. Small labels, tiny pressings, no distribution, no commercial traction. The songs are better than almost everything that got played on the radio. That’s why they disappeared.
Ten songs built to the same exact specification: maximum hooks, minimum running time, zero commercial traction. The Big Star lineage in full — Memphis to Melbourne, Chicago to Zion, Illinois. Every song here could have been a hit. Most of them should have been. Welcome to the neighborhood.
Kasenetz and Katz were not musicians. They were manufacturers. They had an office in Manhattan, a roster of session players, a philosophy about what seven-year-olds wanted to hear, and absolutely no shame about any of it. What they built between 1968 and 1970 is one of pop music's great absurdist monuments: dozens of band names that don't exist, hundreds of records that went nowhere, and a handful that went everywhere. This post is about the nowhere ones. Ten tracks from the factory floor.
Sweet and Slade and T. Rex were the first division. What's here is everybody else — the session players working under rented names, the regional bands who pressed five hundred copies and disappeared, the Scottish kids who recorded "Jet" before McCartney did and got buried for it. Ten tracks from the second tier of British glam. Platforms, stomp, gone.
The British Invasion sent a signal and people all over Europe picked it up. From Hamburg to Budapest to Prague, kids were forming bands, pressing singles, and making something that sounded like the Beatles but also very much like wherever they were from. Ten tracks, six countries, one great decade.
Late 70s power pop is one of my favorite pockets of music — punk energy grafted onto perfect bubblegum hooks, bands playing like they had something to prove and three minutes to do it. All of them are worth your time.
Ten regional American 45s from '66 and '67 — the stuff that never made it out of the county, recorded in basements and small-town studios by bands who had no idea what they were doing and were completely right about all of it.