Definition:

New Wave, for me, is the genre which acts as a conduit betwen 60s Pop/Rock beat groups and the various Indie Pop genres which prominently emerged in the 1980s. It often has an punky attitude without being punk, and can just as easily be driven with guitars as synthesizers. By definition, it often exists as a time-period genre, at it's peak between 1978 and 1982, although my tags range from the 1960s to the 2010s. To qualify that, my earliest New Wave genre tag lies with Silver Apples in 1968, and the tag appears in the early 70s with Can and Roxy Music; it will always exist as a retro-genre as long as musicians keep harking back to it in the 21st century. Many commonly recognised sub-genres in the orbit of New Wave give tagging problems and it's purely my judgement as to which is the strongest primary category. Some key examples of this include: Power Pop (Cerebral Pop, Pop or New Wave); Pub Rock (Blues Rock / Soul Rock, Cerebral Pop, New Wave or Rock); Synth Pop or New Romantic (Cerebral Pop, Electronica, Pop or New Wave).

The Jukebox Pick (of 4,041):

 Save It For Later

 (Dave Wakeling, Roger Charlery, Andy Cox, David Steele, Everett Morton, Lionel Martin)

 The Beat

  “Utterly perfect” New Wave

 The sophisticated branch of The Beat was in full-flow in this strings-enhanced classic, the mature production at odds with the teenage-angst at the heart of the song. “Save It For Later” first appeared as a single in April, 1982, several years after it had been written by singer-guitarist Dave Wakeling: “I wrote it when I was a teenager, before The Beat started. We did try it out the first few times in The Beat’s rehearsals, but David Steele [bassist] put the end to that; it was too “old-wave” for him. I don’t know how or why, but he always considered he had a veto in the group. I mean, he was quite a bit of a genius as well [laughs], but he’d have had trouble sharing the stage with Mozart. It was about turning from a teenager to someone in their 20s, about not knowing what to do, because you knew people looked at you as though you were a man, but you knew you didn’t know how to operate in a man’s world. You still were responding to things the same way as you always had as a boy. It was about being lost, about not really knowing your role in the world, trying to find your place in the world, and you'd have all sorts of people telling you this, that, and the other, and advising you, and it didn't actually seem like they knew any better. So it was like keep your advice to yourself. Save it – for later.”.

Some favourite artists:

Roxy Music, Blondie, The Only Ones, Adam & The Ants

The Jukebox pick: