from his selections, this:
fuck me, is that a find or what?!?
The opening riff is pure Franz Ferdinand.
Funnily enough I was just yesterday perusing Chuck Eddy's second edition of Stairway to Hell, his eccentric guide to heavy metal, and in the afterword he lists a whole bunch of records that he's subsequently to the first ed's publication fallen in love with and shoulda included, and one of them is Alice Cooper's Flush the Fashion. But i hadn't realised that this was AC's noo-wave-move!
Who else in America, out of the Old Wave, made a Noo Wave move?
Billy Joel, I guess, with much of his Eighties material. Although this track is not sonically a new wave move but more a kind of New Wave acknowledging yet also recuperating / deflating manifesto of catholicity ("music-is-music/there's-only-two-kinds-of-music-good-music-and-bad-music") -- which has in fact becoming the programming policy and raison d'etre of post-Ipod middle-aged geezer targeting radio stations like Jack FM ("playin' ... what we like" said in a voice that sounds like Huey Lewis).
Another one: this album El Loco by ZZ Top was their New Wave move (although hints of it were on the one before, Deguello)
And then they really went for it with Eliminator and the album after that, by which time they often had a sequencer pulse chugging along alongside the drumming (which was already getting straightened out into something pretty metronomic and Billy Idol/Keith Forsey like).
One of my LA radio revelations since moving here was hearing the Cars and realising that not only could they play but that most likely before punk, they were probably playing similar kind of blues-based rock to ZZ Top or Foghat or James Gang... it may even have been a direct segue on Jack FM from "La Grange" to "Just What I Needed It" that brought it home to me...
Well in terms of Old Wave to New Wave, they weren't Well Known before punk, but Huey Lewis & the News is old old style music given a New Wave-ish production finish and tautness
Didn't the musicians in the News play with Elvis Costello very early on (Clover?)
And then H & the News went back to the roots and did a bluesy album that totally tanked.
Here's another good example - shameless Rod Stewart
i suppose those aren't really Noo Wave as in skinny tie / Devo-jitters though, more like just trying to do a commercial post-Moroder / synthpop era club-friendly radio-ready please-help-me-keep-up-me-mortgage-payments-on-me-mansion type job (cf the Stones records in the early-mid Eighties)
More troo Noo is Robert Palmer, another bluesy-rock Brit rasper who remodelled his sound, several times...
right up to the point of doing a Gary Numan cover
and then went electrofunk/postdisco
And of course the J.Geils Band, the same Old-to-Noo syndrome...
Oh and classic old-into-Noo is the production job (dry and sparse) on this imperishable tune by all-American heartland rocker Johnny Cougar
i'm sure there's scores more examples...
postscript: how could I forget, Neil Young (Devo fan supreme) and Trans!
Neil's movie that he got Devo to do a scene for
postpostscript: and I forgot (that i'd remembered, a week or two ago) all about Bill Wyman's Je Suis Un Rockstar, which is Old Wave goes New Wave par excellence, and maybe the most successful, on all levels (middling hit; sounds reet nifty and not embarrassing like yer dad trying to dance to disco) out of all these Old-into-Noo mooves)
what i found out after posting it the first time the other week: he wrote it as a demo for Ian Dury's consideration. But nobody in the Stiff camp would actually present it to Dury! Were they afraid of incurring his wrath? I love this little fact because I once averred that the Blockheads were the best British groove group since the Stones. Ian should have done it, he'd might have arrested his decline as UK hitmaker!
of course there's a most unfortunate resonance to one of the lyrics here -- "they'll think I'm your dad/and you're my daughter" -- given Bill's love life later in the decade
