Also, how about Sweet? Though their look was decidedly “Glam,” their sound had an edgy, punkish feel to it.
The Cure?
Early industrial music is related to post-punk. Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle both started around 1975.
The Ramones covered this on Acid Eaters, their album of all cover songs. I only knew it from there. Thanks.
Elvis Costello
It seems like a lot of people are having difficulty with the concept of time here. The question isn’t “who was post punk?” and it isn’t “who was proto-punk?”
The question is “who recorded albums before punk (ie before 1976) yet sounded similar to what we now think of as post-punk?”
Captain Beefheart
I know he had already been around for a while, but his heyday was post punk.
I think you are confusing punk with bubblegum pop. The Sweet were a bubblegum band who got a little bit more rocky and edgy when they picked up on Bowie-style glam rock.
In what sense did his career predate punk?
You are right. The trouble, though is that I do not think there was any clearly defined post-punk sound. Unlike punk itself, post punk music went in a lot of different directions. Punk sort of cleansed the musical palate (or palette), and made space for various sorts of experimentation.
What is more, punk itself was a punk itself was a deliberately retro style. It wasn’t really trying to be new (and often was not really new), it was trying to get away from the over-elaborate and over intellectualized prog-rock and symphonic rock that had developed in the mid '70s, and get back to rock basics, passion rather than technique.
You basically describe Sweet’s early and mid-career there, and accurately, too. However, by the mid-70’s the band’s self-penned music was edgy and Metal enough for Thrash and NWOBHM bands of the '80s to cover their songs. I hear quite a bit of Punk in their pre-1977 catalogue. Strip away the cheesy vocal and guitar overdubs, and these fit right in with the revolutionary stuff that came a couple of years later.
I guess your right. My Aim is True was released in 1977 which would place him smack in the middle of punk / pre-new wave.
Frylock has no idea what “post punk” means, but has heard Songs from the Kinks from the 60’s which he would have thought were from the 80’s. Do they count?
The question was not “What is their background?” or “How are they perceived?” The question was about their sound. And Sweet’s sound had the edginess of post-punk.
I dunno. I’ve always thought of Beefheart having a tonne of influence on the post-punk / new wave attitude, but not necessarily the sound. Beefheart was a little bit bluesy and jazzy, whereas post-punk chopped out a lot of the blues influence. Having said that, the whole New York No Wave thing was Beefheart-esque. DNA and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks were a lot more aggressive than Beefheart though. They always reminded me of that song by Fear, “New York’s Alright if you Like Saxophones”. 'cause they all had saxophones, see.
Ooh, ooh, Suicide. There you go. Formed in 1970(!), released their first album just as punk bands were getting to number fourteen in the pop charts for a week, quintessentially post-punk. I’ll quote at length from Wikipedia’s entry for 23 Minutes Over Brussels, a 1978 live bootleg of a Suicide concert that didn’t go down well (the audience were expecting Elvis Costello):
QUOTE
The audience becomes more active during the performance of “Frankie Teardrop”. At roughly 19:30 in the recording, loud applause can be heard; someone steals Alan Vega’s microphone (a woman at 20:35 can be heard saying “They took the mic”). Soon the music stops and the promoter comes on, warning them that if they don’t give it back, there will be “no show”. Vega joins in, swearing at the audience. After receiving the microphone, he continues to sing “Frankie Teardrop” a cappela.
After even more booing, the recording’s most famous moment occurs when Vega shouts “SHUT THE FUCK UP! THIS IS ABOUT FRANKIE!”. A few moments later, there is rapturous applause as the band leave the stage.
UNQUOTE
And… no, hang on, Ellis Aponte Jr pointed them out already. Damn, there I was patting myself on the back. I’ll have to pat him on the back instead.
“The Red Krayola’s first record came out in 1967 but they sound exactly like a mid-80s postpunk band to me”
The comments even point that out. They certainly have the undistorted twangy guitar sound that was popular at the time. If only they’d had a saxophonist. If you slowed that record down to half speed it would indeed sound like Suicide.
If anything, Bowie and Roxy Music skipped an even wider time gap - they planted the seeds of post-post-punk new wave, synthpop, new romantic, what-have-you in the pre-proto-punk era. The whole “I couldn’t give a damn but I’m going to dress fabulously” attitude. Post-punk bands didn’t dress fabulously. They were severe.
In the UK Sweet were always thought of as a glam band. There’s a clip of them performing “Blockbuster” that gets trotted out whenever television programmes talk about glam. Post-punk was a lot angrier and more dour than glam. Which cuts out Ian Dury, because he was never dour (he was a big influence on the parallel mod/ska revival, though - again, not so much the sound, which was closer to funk than reggae, but the attitude).
Maybe the later stuff that Toxylon refers to (I don’t know,I am not familiar with that), but their hits, the stuff they are mainly remembered for? No way!
Their earliest hits were essentially children’s songs (Wigwam Bam, and the like); then they picked up on the glam trend and started doing a more poppy version of what Bowie was doing: stuff like Blockbuster, Hellraiser, and Ballroom Blitz. It was pretty good in its way, a lot of fun, but distinctly less edgy, more top-ten and kid (meaning child and pre-teen) friendly, than what Bowie himself was doing. Like the earlier children’s songs, it relied upon very simple, catchy tunes and simple lyrics with clunking rhymes, despite the fairly hard, exciting beat. There was no anger at all in it. The only thing they really had in common with punk was that they did not seem to be much concerned with (or, probably, capable of) musical complexity or technique. (As I already said, I do not really think that post-punk is a style at all. It just refers to stuff that came soon after punk and was in some way or another influenced by it.)
A lot of garage R&B from the 60’s does; punk was in part an attempt to recapture that early untutored verve and energy: check out Social End Product by the Bluestars, back in 1966. Sssssssss-social end product!
The Sweet were always split between immaculately crafted, immensely catchy fluff on their A-sides, and a much heavier sound on their B-sides: Done Me Wrong All Right, which wouldn’t disgrace Deep Purple, yet was hidden away.
Mind you, I Wanna Be Committed was a good four years before I Wanna Be Sedated…
You could describe The Ramones the same way. They were mostly just riffing off of old Beach Boys numbers.
Catchy tunes, clunky rhymes, hard, exciting beat.
Beefheart started out bluesy but got pretty avant garde with Trout Mask Replica (1969). I think Electricity (1967) is a masterpiece. It still sounds very fresh to me today.
I’m no expert, but would the B-52a fit the bill?