When music bit hard – Rediscover these artists from the 80s

This is not nostalgia. It is a homage to some of the finest artists rock and roll and pop have ever produced. It’s from a time when music bit hard. Acts like The Sisters of Mercy and The Mission may now sit slightly off the well-worn and auto-tuned mainstream path, but their work still matters. A lot.

This is about rediscovering the simple pleasure of real music played on real instruments, carrying real emotion, tension and dissent inside the lyrics. It’s from a time before everything was programmed into algorithmic bubblegum noise.

Siouxsie and the Banshees

If you were in Joburg in the ’90s and partied at The Doors or Alcatraz, then Peek A Boo would have been the bop you’d be swinging to. Siouxie and The Banshees emerged from the fringes of post-punk’s serrated edge in the late ’70s.

With killer assaults like Hong Kong through to Passenger and the gentler Kiss Them For Me, the band has a short but succinct discography that challenged gender and performance aesthetics, especially in their music videos.

The band’s restless music and influence on post punk goth culture is impossible to overstate. It was confrontational at the time. Today, it feels like the Banshees were founders of a movement we clearly trace in hindsight.

INXS

A better expert than Crocodile Dundee ever was. INXS made the kind of music that was both political, emotional and socially cognizant. It was rock and roll, but with a gentle side. Frontman Michael Hutchence gave the band a sexual energy that underlined almost every aspect of riff and lyric.

Formed in Australia in 1977, it took the band 10 years to explode with the album Kick. It featured pop culture classics like Need You Tonight and Devil Inside among a string of hits. The band’s Wembley Stadium gig is legendary in the annals of rock.

Two decades after forming the band, Hutchens died in London. His was a story of an internal struggle with fame, feelings and a life lived to the hilt. INXS was musical alchemy and the band’s earlier work, including tracks like Don’t Change and Original Sin have shown their staying power, too.

A-ha

Nordic synth pop genius. That’s probably the best way to describe the three-piece band that had an MTV moment with the Take On Me video. But there’s a lot more to the band than a single single.

Their songwriting craft was exceptional through collections like Scoundrel Days, Hunting High And Low along with the James Bond theme The Living Daylights and powerful yet emotionally restrained tracks like I’ve Been Losing You and The Swing Of Things.

Singer Morten Harket’s haunting vocals coupled with the band’s synth pop and rudder-turns for meaning still make for timeless listening.

Duran Duran

Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and company were polished, suited and smooth. But they were the bad boys of the New Romantics compared to Spandau Ballet and even the Eurhythmics. It was pop, but the kind that would eat itself alive.

Also formed in the late ’70s, in Birmingham, Duran Duran gave the world Rio, Hungry Like The Wolf and Wild Boys. Later, around 1988, tracks like Notorious and Skin Trade showed a maturing, darker mood somewhat removed from the glam of earlier releases.  

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Joy Division

This is not sunshine and summer dress music. Even though Joy Division did not leave the world with a giant catalogue, the music that the band produced was as influential as any other of their generation.

If you have not heard Love Will Tear Us Apart and the myriad of covers of same, then where have you been? It’s also Alcatraz and Doors dance floor stuff, just as much as it is protest poetry and emotion set to music.

Joy Division also had its genesis in the late ’70s and was led by Ian Curtis until his death in 1980. Tracks like Unknown and Pleasure are dark and light in various shades.

And while in today’s musical milieu the band may be an acquired taste for some, it grows on you and becomes irresistible. It’s not bubblegum, it’s like a good whiskey, single malt.  

The surviving members’ became New Order and gave the world more incredible music like Blue Monday and Bizarre Love Triangle.

The Mission

Wayne Hussey’s voice is lament incarnate, and The Mission’s larger than life, cinematic and borderline goth sound is evergreen. Formed in the wake of a split from The Sisters of Mercy, Hussey’s The Mission stripped out austerity and replaced it with boldness instead.

Along with bandmate Craig Adams the pair produced masterpieces like God’s Own Medicine, Butterfly On A Wheel and the powerful anti-child abuse track Amelia.

The Mission performed in South Africa a few times, unforgettably so. This is a band to be rediscovered if you have not listened to them for some time and if you’ve never heard of them before, take the journey and close your eyes.

The Sisters of Mercy

It’s dark, it’s like having an intimate moment with Wednesday from The Addams Family. The Sisters of Mercy helped define gothic rock for generations. Fronted by Andrew Eldritch, the band fused its drum machine called Doktor Avalanche with hard rock menace and darkly brooding vocals.

Albums like First Last and Always as well as Floodland became counterculture classics. It’s not a band that can be listened to quietly. You have got to play it loud, really, seriously loud.

Tracks like This Corrosion, Detonation Boulevard, More, Vision Thing. They are all masterpieces of driving rock that’s the austere opposite of six string big-hair music contemporaries like Aerosmith. This is not pop. But it’s genius.

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