Elvis Costello arrived at the tail end of punk with short, incendiary tunes about revenge and guilt, and a visual image to match, looking like a pissed-off Buddy Holly. But the pose belied his musical range and lyrical sophistication, and he came to …

Proving you could rock despite having attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Talking Heads' innovative brand of downtown art-pop featured David Byrne's manic yelp, pointed lyrics about mundane subjects, and R&B-meets-Velvet Underground grooves, …

This Athens band's initial mix of Velvet Underground strum, Byrds-like Rickenbacker jangle, and charismatically oblique singing, became the sound of the 1980s as legions of bands followed suit. But even as imitators codified R.E.M.'s approach into th…

The Clash was one of the first and most important British punk bands. In the 1970s, they were the Beatles to the Sex Pistols' Stones, and went on to incorporate elements from all the roots music they loved--reggae, rockabilly, soul, blues--without ev…

Led by depressive pop prince Robert Smith, the Cure have taken their legions of fans on a journey from post-punk to gothic to new wave to art rock, stopping only for refills of hairspray along the way. An amazing band both live and in the studio, the…

The Jam were at the forefront of two musical movements at once in late-'70s England--punk and the mod revival. While the young trio posessed just as much brashness and raw energy as the Sex Pistols or the Clash, they also had the pop smarts and soul …

John Flansburgh and John Linnell, the two singer/songwriters behind Brooklyn avant-pop cult band They Might Be Giants, were childhood friends who have been working under the TMBG banner since the '80s. The words "nerdy," "geek-rock," and "quirky" hav…

The mercurial David Bowie is the original pop chameleon. He's been everything from inoffensive pop singer to glam icon to white soul man to art-rocker and more in the course of his long, prolific career. Although Bowie's first hit was 1969's "Space O…

Led by Black Francis (AKA Charles Thompson), this Boston band reveled in the raw, loud energy of punk, but harnessed it in service of catchy melodies laced with bizarre lyrics. Their 1989 album, DOOLITTLE, is widely considered to be one of the best a…

Pair a disciple of Oscar Wilde (Morrissey) with an innovator of the electric guitar (Johnny Marr) and you have the most clever cult band of the 1980s, the Smiths. Though they made some of the most effortlessly catchy music of the era, the tension bet…

No other band has had quite the same impact as the four lads from Liverpool. Over the course of eight years and more than a dozen albums, the Beatles changed popular music and culture forever, spearheading the 1960s British Invasion and shaping rock …

Born in the early 1980s out of the ashes of U.K. post-punk pioneers Joy Division, New Order became one of the first electro-pop bands to find mainstream success in the US. Their single "Blue Monday" was a landmark in dance music, and subsequent recor…

Squeeze first came to fame as part of the late-'70s/early-'80s British new wave influx. Their songwriting skills immediately set them apart from the crowd, with Chris Difford and Glen Tillbrook drawing comparisons to Lennon and McCartney. Though the …

The Replacements came out of Minneapolis, at the forefront of the indie rock scene that was exploding there in the early-to-mid-1980s. After dropping its initial hardcore leanings, the group caught fire with a skewed take on classic rock, mixing Ston…

The Beat (dubbed English Beat in the US due to conflict with an American band) began as part of Britain's early-1980s second-wave ska movement, which was also influenced by punk. Eventually, the band expanded to include pop, R&B, and other influences…

Along with Teardrop Explodes and Wah! Heat, Echo & the Bunnymen were part of the early-1980s Liverpool scene that was somewhat misleadingly dubbed "neo-psychedelic." While the Bunnymen bore elements of the Doors' dark, mysterious sound and decidedly …

Despite the band's name, the Love Generation touches that brought the Psychedelic Furs great acclaim came only after they'd established their initial style. Theirs was a dark, swirling sound that mixed Bowie-ish art-rock and post-punk guitars with Ri…

In its crude initial formation in 1976, Siouxsie & the Banshees consisted of members of the "Bromley contingent," a group of notorious Sex Pistols groupies. In various permutations, the band survived for almost 20 years. Featuring core members Siouxs…

Formed in 1996, and hailing from Scotland, Belle & Sebastian are a musical collective with a penchant for ellipticism, declining to have their pictures on album covers or in the press, shying away from interviews, and never listing their individual n…

Like most mid-1960s British rockers, the Kinks started out as an R&B group before they helped invent hard rock and ventured into sardonic, Beatles-inspired pop and refreshingly unpretentious rock opera with an English music-hall tinge. Ray Davies' bi…