At eight years old, I didn’t understand that the country had begun to shift under my feet. I only knew that Top of the Pops looked stranger than the year before. Blokes with white faces and no expression at all. Men in pork-pie hats moving like clockwork toys. And underneath the racket, tunes that lodged in your head like a stubborn splinter.
People file 1979 under punk, and I understand why, but take a closer look, and you’ll see the year in a different light. By 1979 the actual punk moment had already come and gone; what happened next is the interesting bit. This is the year punk stopped spitting, tidied itself up, and walked politely into the charts wearing several very different disguises.
Punk’s most famous face clocked out in February
The year opened with a full stop. On 2 February 1979, Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose in New York, aged twenty-one. Whatever you thought of the man, and there’s plenty to think, he’d become the poster boy for the whole snarling business. Punk’s most recognisable face left the building six weeks into 1979.
You could read the rest of the year as everyone else deciding what to do now the noise had stopped. The energy didn’t vanish. It just found new clothes, and most of those clothes looked better than a bin bag held together with safety pins.
The children of punk, now with tunes
What arrived instead is the stuff we later learned to call new wave and post-punk, which is a polite way of saying “punk, but you can hum it.” The Jam had “The Eton Rifles.” Squeeze turned out “Cool for Cats” and “Up the Junction,” both sharp enough to cut bread and both stuck at number two in the charts. The Police went to number one with “Message in a Bottle,” Sting already sounding like a man who suspected he’d one day lecture us all about rainforests.
Then there’s the Boomtown Rats. “I Don’t Like Mondays” sat at number one for four weeks that summer, and it’s worth remembering what it’s actually about, because most of us cheerfully sang along without a clue. Bob Geldof wrote it after reading about a sixteen-year-old in San Diego who opened fire on a school playground on a Monday morning and, asked why, said she didn’t like Mondays. A pop song. Top of the charts. Half the country whistling it while queuing in Woolworths. 1979 had a strong stomach.
Black and white and absolutely everywhere
The best story of the year started in Coventry. A band called The Specials recorded a song called “Gangsters,” pressed it on their own label, and gave that label a name and a look: 2 Tone. Black and white, chequerboard everything, ska sped up and given a British accent. Within months the whole thing detonated.
On 8 November 1979, The Specials, Madness, and The Selecter all appeared on the same edition of Top of the Pops. Three bands, one scene, one small Midlands city, one Thursday night in front of the nation. Madness had “The Prince,” a tribute to a Jamaican legend most of their audience had never heard of, sung by young men from Camden who danced like they’d trapped a wasp in each trouser leg. If you wanted proof that punk’s do-it-yourself nerve had survived, there it stood, in a pork-pie hat, refusing to stand still.
The future turned up early and slightly out of tune
And in the other corner, as far from a chequerboard as a human being could stand, loomed a pale young man from Hammersmith with a synthesiser and the stage presence of a shop mannequin. Gary Numan spent 1979 dragging the future into the present about a decade ahead of schedule. “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?,” released in May under the name Tubeway Army, went to number one for four weeks. He did it again on his own with “Cars.” No guitars to speak of. No smiling. Just cold machines making warm, strange, enormous noises, and a nation of teenagers deciding this counted as music..
People sneered at the time. They always do. The sneering fell away the moment half the following decade started to sound exactly like Numan.
What actually sold the most? A song about rabbits.
Here’s where I have to puncture the whole romantic story, because the biggest-selling single in Britain that entire year came from none of the above. It came from a cartoon about rabbits.
Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes,” the theme from the film of Watership Down, outsold everything. A soft, mournful ballad about a dying rabbit, warbled over a scene that gave every British child of my age a small permanent dent, sold more copies than Sid, the Specials, and Gary Numan put together. That’s 1979 in one fact. Punk had reinvented music, synths had reinvented the future, an entire Midlands scene had reinvented dancing, and the nation queued up in its millions to buy a heartbreaking tune about a woodland creature snuffing it. I’ve never fully recovered from that film, and I suspect I’m not alone.
How the decade signed off
The seventies had one last trick. In the final weeks of 1979, Pink Floyd released “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” and it climbed to number one over Christmas and stayed there five weeks. A children’s choir from a school in Islington chanting that they didn’t need any education, which their teachers presumably found a touch rich. It became the Christmas number one, and something more permanent than that: the last number one single of the entire decade. The seventies ended with schoolkids demanding to be left alone. You couldn’t script a better exit.
Look at the whole year laid out, and you can see the join. Punk kicks the door in, then can’t decide what to do next, so it splits into a dozen pieces, and each piece evolves differently. One piece becomes 2 Tone. One becomes synth-pop. Another turns into the polished new wave that would run the whole of the eighties. And over the top of the lot, drowning out every rebel in the room, a song about a rabbit. The past always sounds better than it deserves, and yet 1979 is one of the rare years that genuinely earned the reputation, which you can hear for yourself if you want to know why nostalgia flatters the past less often than we’d like.
I’ve spent a lot of my working life writing about people who’d give anything for one more go at a particular year. Some of it, I think, started here, aged eight, in front of a television set that kept changing the rules. If a specific stretch of your own past still hums away in the back of your head like a tune you can’t switch off, a few of my novels live in exactly that feeling.
In The ’86 Fix, a stuck, unhappy man lands one weekend back in 1986, Texan bars and Space Invaders and all, to fix the life he managed to ruin. A Page in Your Diary sends a man back to the late eighties, not to save himself, but to save the first person he ever badly let down. And The Last Stop Video Shop hands a middle-aged man a VHS tape playing a memory of his late mother that nobody ever filmed, then leaves him to decide whether to keep pressing play or finally press eject. All three are for anyone who’s ever heard four bars of an old song and felt the years fold up like a road map.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is 1979 seen as the year punk turned to pop?
By 1979 the original punk explosion of 1976 and 1977 had burned out, and its energy scattered into more chart-friendly forms: new wave, post-punk, the 2 Tone ska revival, and synth-pop. The do-it-yourself attitude survived, but it arrived in the singles chart with proper tunes attached, which is why 1979 feels like the hinge between punk’s rage and the polished pop of the eighties.
Which single sold the most in the UK in 1979?
The UK’s biggest-selling single of the year came from Art Garfunkel: “Bright Eyes,” the theme from the animated film of Watership Down. A gentle ballad about a dying rabbit outsold every punk, new wave, and synth-pop record released across the whole of 1979.
What topped the charts at Christmas in 1979?
Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” reached number one in late 1979 and held the top spot for five weeks over Christmas. It featured a children’s choir and became not only the Christmas number one but the final number one single of the 1970s.
What is 2 Tone, and did it really start in 1979?
2 Tone is the black-and-white British ska revival that grew out of Coventry, launched by The Specials with their 1979 single “Gangsters.” It gave its name to a record label and a whole scene. On 8 November 1979, The Specials, Madness, and The Selecter all appeared on the same episode of Top of the Pops, which is about as clear a birth certificate as a music movement ever receives.
Which bands and artists broke through in 1979?
1979 delivered breakthroughs for Gary Numan and Tubeway Army, The Specials, Madness, The Selecter, The Police, Squeeze, and the Boomtown Rats, among others. It also marked a symbolic end for the first wave of punk, with the death of former Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious in February that year.