No.1 Lori and The Chameleons - The Lonely Spy

Yeah, yeah, so you can splutter on about The Beatles this and the Rolling Stones that. You can parrot the populist view that the 1980s were a ruinous time for pop music. 

But I can prove that they weren’t, that the Eighties not only produced some of the greatest pop music ever, but laid the groundwork for the flourishing, many-headed pop hydra that so enthralls us today. 

The Eighties were remarkable for the dizzying breadth of music on offer. The first few years of the decade saw fantastic disco and funk, from the likes of The Gap Band and Shalamar, mixing it up in the charts with The Jam, Motorhead, Abba, Grandmaster Flash and Bob Marley. Whichever way you slice up that cake, those are extraordinary ingredients.

The Eighties was also a decade that produced some of our most enduring bands. Like it or not, U2, New Order, Nick Cave, Pet Shop Boys, R.E.M., B-52s, Sonic Youth, Depeche Mode, Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Cure all enjoyed longer creative periods than their Sixties contemporaries. From the Seventies, only David Bowie, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello and Mark E Smith can claim a similarly continuous creative longevity – although that’s a stonking ‘only’ list, I have to admit.

Why did these Eighties bands last longer? Simple - they were all born out of the embers of punk and new wave and they retained that restless, adventurous, questing spirit.

Punk may have become a debased cultural currency now (and it was responsible for some terrible bands at the time) but its enduring ideals have inspired some of the finest music of the last 30 years.
 

So here’s the first of 100 reasons why the 1980s were pop’s golden age.

 

Lori and The Chameleons were Lori Lartey, Bill Drummond (later of KLF and dosh-burning fame) and Dave Balfe (former member of Dalek I Love You, and future keyboardist of Teardrop Explodes and inspiration for Blur's Country House) the latter, two coming pop powerhouses.

The band only recorded two singles before 18-year-old Lori opted for a spot of art school instead of pop stardom. The fact that the first single, Touch, only just scraped into the top 75 in 1979, while The Lonely Spy didn't even manage that in 1980, may have influenced her decision. Whatever, while Touch sounds slightly dated to these ears now, The Lonely Spy is sheer, windswept magnificence and early and conclusive proof that Drummond and Balfe knew their way round a pop tune.