Powerpop - Robyn Hitchcock

Well, you don't need me to tell you that Robyn Hitchcock is one of the finest songwriters Britain ever produced, or that his group the Soft Boys (featuring Kimberley Rew on guitar) were the best band of the post-punk era. These things are obvious - simple statements of fact.

So rich is Hitchcock's back catalogue, however, that there are some overlooked gems in there. And none of them are greater than this song. In 1984 Hitchcock released a 12-inch single on which the lead song was an okay copy of the Byrds' version of 'Bells of Rhymney' (lyrics by Idris Davies). And hiding behind it was this swooning piece of autumnal melancholia, 'Falling Leaves'. Honestly, it's gorgeous.

Powerpop - the Flamin' Groovies

For those of us who were still in primary school when the Flamin' Groovies released their classic albums Flamingo and Teenage Head, and weren't hip to that kind of thing, the first track we ever heard by them was their 1976 single 'Shake Some Action'. And nothing would ever be as good again. Of course we then explored the back catalogue and marvelled at the menacing garage rock of 'Comin' After Me', 'Teenage Head' and 'Slow Death', but 'Shake Some Action' remained in a class of its own, a masterpiece that took the spirit of 1965 and reinvented it for a new era.

Slightly overlooked, though, was the B-side of that single. For most bands, 'Teenage Confidential' would have constituted their highest achievement, a stunningly beautiful piece that's all jangly guitars and vocal harmonies, like the Byrds taking on Big Star. The song's a little slight in itself, but this recording is a masterpiece: Dave Edmunds's production positively shimmers, while the modulation to the minor key, two minutes in, during the instrumental outro, is a stroke of genius.

Like the A-side, 'Teenage Confidential' was co-written by group founder Cyril Jordan and by Chris Wilson, who'd come in as a replacement for Roy A Loney. Wilson, of course, went on to join the Barracudas, of whom more yesterday.

Powerpop - The Barracudas

The Barracudas were a fabulous band. They started out playing surf music, which was at least distinctive in London in 1979. Bizarrely, they got signed to EMI at a time when the record industry was at a loss to know what was happening to music, and they even had a minor hit single with 'Summer Fun'. Shortly afterwards, however, they abandoned surf in favour of 1960s psych-punk, and decided to become one of the world's legendary cult garage bands instead - a bit like the Flamin' Groovies perhaps.

Consequently their debut album, Drop Out with the Barracudas (1980) contained not just the bouncy summer stuff that was expected of them, but also a cover of 'Codeine' and originals like 'I Saw My Death in a Dream Last Night' and 'We're Living in Violent Times' (I used the latter as a chapter title in my book Rejoice! Rejoice!). EMI clearly figured that, whatever it was that was happening to music, it probably wasn't this, and let them go.

At which point the Barracudas really did turn into one of the legendary cult garage bands, particularly in light of them recruiting Chris Wilson, who actually had been in the Flamin' Groovies. This was, after all, the man who'd co-written 'Shake Some Action', and now he was playing with the Barracudas. The best fanzine of the time, Bucketfull of Brains, quite rightly loved them.

They carried on gigging and eventually re-emerged on Closer Records with two excellent albums, Mean Time (1983) and Endeavour to Persevere (1984). This track, 'Shades of Today', comes from the first of those, and it's a nice piece of Byrds-influenced garage pop.

I have to say, though, that it would have been more obviously poppy in the hands of another singer. Canadian vocalist Jeremy Gluck was a truly wonderful live performer, and never gave anything less than a fully committed performance, but his voice wasn't really the most subtle of instruments. Which was part of their ragged charm. I liked them a great deal.

Powerpop - Bram Tchaikovsky

Bram Tchaikovsky (not his real name) was the guitarist in the Motors, of 'Dancing the Night Away' and 'Airport' fame. He left them in 1978 for a solo career that didn't really take off as it might have done. His most celebrated single was 'Girl of My Dreams' (1979), a fine piece of powerpop that was a top 40 hit in America, but it was a hit to which he never found a successful follow-up.

His best moment, though, was 'Sarah Smiles', the solo debut released in 1978, which is all about him: his songwriting, vocals and guitar. Well, him and Nick Garvey, also of the Motors (and formerly of Ducks Deluxe), who contributes the slightly odd production. Garvey clearly doesn't like to leave a sound untreated, so everything blends together into a breathless rush. And it's lovely - there are echoes, I think, of the kind of noise that Eno made on Here Come the Warm Jets. Apart from everything else, it features one of my favourite things: a guitar solo accompanied by wordless backing vocals.

Powerpop - the Autographs

Back in 1977 there was a band called the Stukas, who released a couple of singles, most famously 'I Like Sport' (produced by our old friend Pat Collier). In a parallel universe, this is earning its writers a fortune as the theme tune to a hugely popular TV game show.

Anyway, one of the Stukas was singer Chris Gent, who'd been knocking around the music scene for a couple of years, sometimes under the patronage of Mike Batt. If you remember the Milk Marketing Board's advertising campaign 'There's a Humphrey about', you may conceivably also recall 'The Humphrey Song' written by Batt and released under the name the Mad Hatters in 1976 - that was Chris Gent.

It was another pop mogul, though, who gave Gent what should have been his big break. The tycoon of teen Mickie Most - trying to find himself a niche in this era of punk and new wave - saw a Stukas gig, and liked the material, particularly one of Gent's songs 'While I'm Still Young'. He wanted to sign the band, but it was too late: they had already decided to split up and this was their final gig. So Most signed up Gent and guitarist Raggy Lewis, who then recruited guitarist Jim Ward, bassist Dave Spicer and drummer Pete Tulley and named themselves the Autographs.

Released on Most's RAK Records in 1978, their debut single, 'While I'm Still Young', came with still further pop pedigree, being produced by Richard Hartley and Tommy Boyce - the former was the original musical director of The Rocky Horror Show, the latter co-wrote all the best Monkees songs.

Obviously my perception of this single is shaped by when I first heard it, but I don't know any record that captures the unfocussed hormonal rush of adolescence with quite such joyous energy. I'm convinced it's one of the great pop classics and should've been a massive hit. But it wasn't, and the Autographs never released another single.

Chris Gent himself went on to become lead singer of Will Birch's band the Records, in time for their third album, Music on Both Sides, but he's probably heard most often as the saxophonist on Secret Affair's debut single, 'Time for Action'.

Powerpop - the Favourites

I don't hold with the revisionist view that Abba were one of the great pop groups. They weren't really very good at all. We knew that at the time, and we were right. They were very competent at writing catchy melodies, but there was no fantasy, no glamour, no fun - just efficiency. Which means that they made a couple of decent singles and that was it.

The best of those singles, by a country mile, was their 1975 hit 'S.O.S.', which is a perfectly decent song. Better than the original, though, is this 1979 version by Nottingham band the Favourites, which treats it as a piece of punk-pop and makes the most of that minimalist guitar riff. It was Annie Nightingale's record of the week on Radio 1, but sadly wasn't a hit.

Fronted by Darryl Hunt, the Favourites released one further single - 'Angelica' (1979) - and then split up. Hunt himself had formerly been a member of Plummet Airlines, who'd released a very fine record 'Silver Shirt' on Stiff Records (1976), though it got completely lost, possibly because it was sandwiched in the Stiff catalogue between Richard Hell's 'Blank Generation' and Motorhead's first single. Difficult to get an elegaic pub-rock song heard in that kind of company.

After the Favourites, Hunt went on to become a member of the Pogues. But I still think this is his finest moment.

Powerpop - The Photographs

I know nothing about the Photographs' 1979 single 'Second Best', except that I bought it in a job lot at the Our Price shop round the back of Finchley Road tube station the year after it came out. Ironically, given their name, it didn't even come in a picture sleeve, so I have no idea what they looked like. They were a Bristol band, who - as far as I'm aware - never released anything else, and the Do Not Bend label was presumably their own, since it also never released anything else.

The production is sketchy, to say the least, the female vocals are flat, both in tuning and attitude, and the chord sequence is hardly a revelation. Despite all of which, I think it's lovely, a proper pop song that's all the better for being flawed. It's like the Chiffons would've sounded if there'd only been one of them, and she'd grown up on a 1970s council estate, before becoming the first in her family to go to university.

Powerpop - Ian Gomm

So I was playing some post-punk powerpop a few weeks back before I got distracted. And now I return.

Ian Gomm was a member of pub-rock band Brinsley Schwarz, and I think this was his first solo single under his own name. It's Chuck Berry's song 'Come On', as covered by the Rolling Stones for their debut, but a complete re-imagining of the piece - a slightly disturbing, paranoid version that borrows from the kind of new wave reggae associated with Elvis Costello at the time. Around a minute into it and a terrific echo-dripping guitar riff comes in, after which it gets even more tense.

Gomm had an American hit with his next single, 'Hold On', and wrote some good songs, but nothing was ever as stunning as this record.

Powerpop - Kimberley Rew

What a very strange career Kimberley Rew has had. His best known work came with Katrina and the Waves, who gave us 'Walking on Sunshine' in 1985 and the last-ever British winner of Eurovision, 'Love Shine a Light', in 1997. But for the likes of you and me, of course, he's most revered for his epic guitar-playing with the Soft Boys, one of the great live bands of the post-punk years.

Somewhere between those two groups, he also released some solo stuff, starting with the 1980 single 'Stomping All Over the World'. And it's one of my favourite-ever records: a perfect, classically constructed pop song with slightly skewed lyrics that builds into an irresistible hook. Two minutes and ten seconds - that's all you need.

Like Knox's 'Gigolo Aunt', this was produced by Pat Collier at the Alaska studio.

This is one of a series of posts celebrating the poppier end of the post-punk period in Britain. Much of this stuff was neither cool nor popular at the time, but it was what I was listening to, and I worry that too much of it is being lost to history.

Powerpop - Knox

The missing link between the Vibrators and Pink Floyd. Sort of. This is the debut solo single by Knox, former frontman of the not very fashionable punk band, covering the Syd Barrett song 'Gigolo Aunt'.

Released in 1980, it was recorded at the Alaska studio and produced by Pat Collier - just like the Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight album. To make it even more of a companion piece to that masterpiece, it features Matthew Seligman of the Soft Boys on bass, while Robyn Hitchcock plays guitar on the b-side, another fine cover, this time of Jimmy C. Newman's cajun-rock classic 'Alligator Man'.

This is one of a series of posts celebrating the poppier end of the post-punk period in Britain. Much of this stuff was neither cool nor popular at the time, but it was what I was listening to, and I worry that too much of it is being lost to history.