0006 - 20/20

I know that post-punk isn't exactly a genre and I do like a lot of music from that immediate post-punk era - in fact, I think that the period from the late-70s to mid-80s represents the pinnacle of pop music in my lifetime. So it's a bit odd that whenever I hear or read of something as being post-punk, I expect it to either sound like Dead Kennedys or Wire. Of my recent post-punk-pop-postings, 100 Flowers fit that mould reasonably well, but 17 Pygmies' jazz and synth-pop couldn't be much further removed. 20/20 are something else again - classic 80s power-pop.

Yellow Pills, the B-side of their second single, Tell Me Why, is my favourite of the three tracks I have, very much a slice of 80s power-pop, so I was surprised to note that it actually dates from 1979 - two  or three years ahead of its time, I would say. It's a good, rather than great, song, but with a fine chorus and an excellent middle eight:

Alien is a pretty good tune too, although half the fun is in spotting the songs it reminds me of (Squeeze's Cool For Cats, for starters, although the chorus somehow reminds me of INXS's Heaven Sent, which it of course pre-dates by over a decade - Heaven Sent itself sounds like The Strokes produced by Jim Steinman, which is an album I'd definitely buy):

Finally I have another track, like Alien, from their second album, Look Out!, although American Dream is by far the weakest of the three, I think (it sounds like a kind of creepy It Bites, if you can imagine such a thing).

20/20 split in 1983, having released three albums, and then reformed to release two more from 1995-2005. All the former members of the band seem to still be involved in the music business in some way and the band do appear to be fondly remembered by aficionados of this sort of thing. Which I'm pleased about - they haven't set my world on fire, but they seem like a pretty good band.