Rock Music 1980s Overview

A decade and a half after the Beatles emerged from the Cavern, a new generation of Liverpudlian music arose from the subterranean shabbiness of Eric’s Club, run by Roger Eagle from 1976 until it closed in 1980. Less a distinctive sound than an attitude, the Liverpool beat of the late 1970s and ’80s first took shape on the local Zoo label, run by Bill Drummond. Both Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes (whose respective leaders, Ian McCulloch and Julian Cope, had been members of the punk group the Crucial Three) had a languid style and a sense of self-adoration that looked back to punk and glam rock and forward to the New Romantic movement led by Duran Duran. Both groups moved on from Zoo to major labels.

Another Merseyside group, A Flock of Seagulls, had some international success in the early 1980s, but the biggest act to come out of Liverpool during this period was Frankie Goes to Hollywood (“Relax,” “Two Tribes”), whose front man Holly Johnson had worked with Drummond in the art-punk group Big in Japan. Scottish-born Drummond, who managed both the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes, later cofounded KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front), the “group” whose experimental approach to music making resulted in several British number one hits constructed wholly by sampling—that is, by creating a pastiche of sounds from other recordings.