Playlists

Precursor and blueprint of punk, a dispassionate resistance to the distortion of song form, a bastion of simplicity in the age of excess that was the early Seventies: this is often how power pop gets framed. And not without reason. The revival of the early Beatles' pop-rock lightness and the adolescent brashness so cultivated by the mods, the attachment to the verse-chorus-bridge triptych (broken up by solos, sure, but never overdone), the adoption of hard rock's cutting guitar tones, without however embracing the dark tones of heavy metal: these are all documentable elements, recognisable by anyone who's even just familiar with "My Sharona". Just as easily traceable is the influence of these ingredients on the roaring punk of Buzzcocks or on Blondie's "Hangin' On The Telephone" (itself a cover of the Nerves…), on Joe Jackson, on the Jam, and from there on a portion of hardcore punk and the nascent alternative rock and indie rock scenes, eventually arriving, yes, at Weezer and that crowd.

All true, then. Sure. But it's only half the story. Half not necessarily in a numerical sense (the "mainstream" of power pop may well move in the direction outlined above) but on a stylistic-cultural level. Because the tune-smithing school of Seventies guitar-pop also followed another path, and you don't even have to dig very deep to bring it to light. Just take a couple of key names – let's say Badfinger, Artful Dodger, Cars, just to have a sufficiently varied range – and notice how elaborate, grandiose and colorful some (most?) of their songs actually are. Essentialism? A desire for uncomplicated fun, four chords and off you go, leaving pomposity to others? That doesn't seem like the best way to frame the three tracks that open this playlist: the dazzling "Wayside", with its shifting moods (and a solo half-lifted from "Taxman"), "In The Meantime/Some Other Time" with its symphonic about-turns, heirs to the most grandiloquent Paul McCartney, and "Bye Bye Love" with an opening that seems lifted wholesale from Yes.

The fact is that, here as in many other cases, the variety of what actually exists doesn't fit neatly into the boxes we build to organize it. While some power pop songs comfortably fit the back to basics approach that critical narratives have constructed around the (non-)genre, others show a far more bombastic, maximalist streak – tune-driven, yes, but strongly drawn to the explosive array of pyrotechnic fancies that the Sixties–Seventies transition had made available. Baroque pop, sunshine pop, progressive pop and progressive rock, but also glam, pomp rock, AOR: all these strands share countless points of contact with the Seventies-era developments of power pop, and the aim of this playlist is precisely to bring them to light.

A harmonic explosion

Once past the opening trio, we start delving deeper into the connections in a kind of historical journey, from source to mouth (with all the limits that analogy implies). We begin with post-Beatles baroque flourishes, and immediately encounter – in disguise – two key figures: Jeff Lynne and Todd Rundgren. The former, before founding Electric Light Orchestra, was the mastermind and songwriter of The Idle Race, and would go on to join Roy Wood's The Move, out of which the project that made him most famous was born. The latter debuted as a member and chief songwriter of Nazz, before launching a rich and celebrated solo career and establishing himself as a producer (among others, for Badfinger and indeed for the first Cars album). Their complementary visions already fully illustrate, on both sides of the ocean, the trajectory we're looking at here: music proudly anchored to the popsong model, well aware that the usual chords are, precisely, usual because they're extremely effective at doing their dirty work; yet at the same time, music that went all the way down the psychedelic rabbit hole and back out again, emerging with eyes still dazed by wonder, but also with the ambition to spot the potential in every trick encountered or dreamed up, and put it to work in the service of songwriting, turning it into a tool of emotional design.

The tracks immediately following further explore the territory where the three-chord song gets enriched with eclectic harmonic passages, used to add color, open the door to unexpected feelings, or shift the mood even just for a brief moment. The chord-book of the Lennon/McCartney partnership serves as an instruction manual for a whole series of artists whose names are barely remembered today, though among them the American Emitt Rhodes has, over time, enjoyed a well-deserved, if minority, rediscovery.

Moving on, following in the footsteps of sunshine pop leads to the increasingly progressive sounds of Crabby Appleton (a band that shares guitarist and singer Michael Fennelly with Millennium) and to Stories, founded by bassist and singer Ian Lloyd together with Michael Brown of Left Banke. "I Can't Understand It" is a song from after Brown's departure, but sadly the two previous albums aren't available on the platform hosting the playlist. The track, however, perfectly fits the brief: energetic, radiant drive, a I-V-IV big riff that's already tinged with shadow in the verse via a shift to a minor chord (IVm), then doubles down in the pre-chorus with a further minor chord, only to shuffle the deck even more thoroughly in the chorus thanks to a fresh flurry of major chords borrowed, however, from a different key.

The song's slightly camp tone is a fitting introduction to the run that follows, built on episodes as dazzling as they are chameleonic and – in some cases – genuinely hard to pin down. New Zealand's Split Enz are certainly an old acquaintance for fans of arty, off-kilter pop (in a word, obviously wacky: Zolo), but the oddities of The Quick and of the Mark & Clark Seymour duo – the height of kitsch-rock splendor for a parallel dimension that never knew Queen – probably gather very few aficionados these days. Less over-the-top but just as eclectic are Graduate, who behind a sound that's part mod, part disco and part 10cc conceal the makings of a hugely successful career: none other than Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal, future members of Tears For Fears.

Several of the tracks encountered so far give an important role to the piano, often used percussively but also highlighting passing notes and chord inversions. Here again there's a connection usually kept in the background, that with the piano-rock of Elton John or Billy Joel – whose names, incidentally, wouldn't be out of place on this list if the right tracks were chosen (for Joel, pretty much anything off "Glass Houses", for example).

A shining grandeur

It's Michael Brown again, this time with his Beckies, who opens a new section of the compilation – yet another mutation pushing this over-the-top power pop toward its most natural destination: a full-on encounter with progressive rock and with the larger than life sounds that, especially on American soil, were bending it toward the emerging AOR sound. Enter the extremely pompous and dazzlingly bright American prog-rockers Fireballet and Starcastle (among the very few in this vein ever signed to a major label, and of course also among the first to be dropped by one), along with Gentle Giant's moves toward the American market – a band far more appreciated across Canada and the States than back home – and the experience of Dutch outfit Kayak, who as early as 1973 were combining the structures of symphonic progressive rock with an eye for brevity and pop fizz.

Perhaps including Canada's Rush will raise a few eyebrows, but the chosen track (and not just that one: "Limelight" would have worked just as well) has all the hallmarks of a sharp, hard-and-progressive-tinged power pop cut. Knowing a bit about the (limited) American prog scene, it's only natural at this point to bring in Crack The Sky, remembered by some as "America's Rush" (though the track on the list, bringing things full circle, actually recalls the usual Beatles more than anything). And who better to end things than a band that, by combining hard rock, progressive, power pop, a devotion to Left Banke and an obsessive attention to the balance of its musical ingredients, helped write the history of AOR and American rock as a whole? With Boston's "It's Easy", this alternative history of power pop reaches its conclusion – not because it couldn't go on (there's the – very contemporary – playlist on Fabloo to prove exactly that!) but because it has arrived at a natural stopping point. Punk, new wave, indie-pop: all of them direct or indirect children of power pop, of course. But there's a power pop – another power pop, yet also the same one – whose outlet was the top of the American charts, not in the stripped-down, urban guise of New York new wave, but in the far more majestic, glossy garb of arena rock.

P.S. As you've probably gathered, anyone who enjoyed the tracks on this playlist would do well to check out the others closely connected to it, starting with the one dedicated to power pop in the commonly understood sense (also the subject of an episode of BlahBlahBlah Ondarock On Air), and continuing with the selections on sunshine pop and on Seventies Anglo progressive pop and on category-defying microgenres like Zolo and Fabloo. To learn more about AOR, here finally are the episodes of Rock on air and BlahBlahBlah, the ranking of the genre's best albums according to the webzine Louder, and an in-depth feature/playlist on the hi-tech AOR offshoot that developed in the Eighties. As always, happy listening!

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03/02/2026