A few weeks ago in this space, I located the origin of my personal anglophilia in the syndicated radio show Rock Over London, which introduced Americans to ‘80s-era British acts both major (Tears for Fears) and minor (that Boy George imitator, Marilyn). For me, the visual equivalent of Rock Over London was the Rock Yearbook series, which was published (in the U.S. at least) by St. Martin’s Press each autumn between 1980 and 1988. Many were the early-December days during college when I would blow off studying for finals to stalk the local bookstores for the latest edition, then immerse myself in the intimate details of Prefab Sprout or the Blow Monkeys’ chart positions instead of re-reading Dostoevsky or sifting through histories of the Boer War.
My grades tended to reflect these priorities, but no matter: The education found in the Yearbooks’ glossy pages eventually proved at least as valuable as the one for which my parents staved off retirement and depleted their bank accounts. For the Rock Yearbooks were a trove of both information and attitude, generously ladled by critics from the British rock rags Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Record Mirror and Smash Hits. These Brits were uniformly snarky, self-indulgent and pleased with themselves, in contrast with an American crit-corps who (for the most part) took themselves and the music way too seriously to revel in the trinket-like gaudiness of ’80s pop.
The thrills of the Rock Yearbooks were manyfold: the Acts of the Year and Quotes of the Year reviews, the Best and Worst Album Covers, the “Thanks…but No Thanks” section (from 1985: “thanks” to the Who “for finally calling it a day,” and “no thanks” to Everything But the Girl – “Why did they always have to look so miserable?”).
But for me, the mother’s milk were the year’s worth of top-20 singles and albums charts – from Billboard in the U.S. and Music Week in the U.K. – and the collected snippets of album reviews culled from the aforementioned British music mags. With the charts, the fun was in the cross-cultural comparisons – how much time passed between a song’s appearance in one country and its debut in the other, for example, or how the U.S. and U.K. charts could be at times quite similar (“I Want to Know What Love Is” dominated both countries simultaneously), at others wildly divergent. Take, for example, these Top 5’s from June 1984: (more…)
