Album review: KIDS ON THE STREET, UK POWER POP AND NEW WAVE 1977-81 (3 CD Boxset)

Cherry Red [release date: 25.11.22]

Kids On The Street is a great title for this 3 CD, 77 track compilation, emphasising the uncomplicated vitality of that era’s popular music.

The better informed will know it’s from The Stiffs’ song of course, and is the anthology’s opening track.

Unless you lived through it, what is not immediately apparent is the humour that became part of the music. Band names like The Smirks, The Private Dicks, The Tin Openers, Penetration, The Innocent Vicars, and GRTR favourite, The Avant Gardeners show a keen sense of irreverence, a tongue in cheek, DIY riposte to the serious minded attitude of Progrock with whom they were rubbing shoulders in the charts, and a welcoming nod to Punk.

Song titles too… ‘Silicon Carne’ (The Monochrome Set); ‘Beer, Baccy, Bingo and Benidorm’ (Inner City Unit); ‘Vicky Verky’ (Squeeze); ‘Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Follow Trends’ (The Teenage Filmstars) and others point to songs with tongue in cheek lyrics that reflect everyday life as it is experienced.

Some absolutely great songs here. And again with these Cherry Red Anthologies, there’s plenty of hit material from headline acts, like The Teardrop Explodes, The Skids, The Pretenders, The Ruts, Elvis Costello and the Stranglers.

Equally welcome are the movers and shakers of the era, The Records, The Damned, XTC (whose later material became a reference point for US Powerpop bands like Jellyfish and The Apples), Eddie And The Hotrods, The Jam, The Motors (‘Dancing the Night Away’ is here, the UK smash hit single preceding ‘Airport’, culled from the same studio album), The Only Ones, and The Searchers, they of the Nietsche/Bono song,’Needles and Pins’, a No.1 UK hit in 1964.

The Mersey Beat band’s track here is ‘Love’s Melody’, taken from their final release, a fine slice of powerpop, clearly influenced by Big Star. And in fact the album of the same name includes a cover of Big Star’s ‘September Gurls’, written by Alex Chilton.
Now, you can’t get much more authentic than that. ****

Review by Brian McGowan

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