England Falls to The Melody Makers

In the early 1980s, as the punk rock revolution hurtled helplessly into the “die young” portion of its “live fast, die young” credo, a generation of musicians decided to drop the razor blades, grow back its hair, and devise a way to alchemize the musical enema that was punk rock and the multi-hued acid trip that had characterized the pop music of the 1960s. For all its artistic upheaval and critical respect, punk had for the most part failed to alter the mainstream blueprint of what made a hit song. In 1983, Phil Collins, not the Sex Pistols, throttled the charts in Britain, and Huey Lewis, not the Ramones, ruled in America. As Mr. Lewis sang in his top 10 hit of that year, young music lovers with a hunger for punk’s rude populism and for the ’60s’ melodic majesty wanted a new drug. Apothecaries sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic, crafting elixirs for punk’s resounding kick in the guts.