The Top of the Poppers sing and play punk

By the mid-1970s, the music industry had a long history of accommodating and recuperating teenage rebellion, and punk’s defiant message of radical change also offered new opportunities for commercial enterprise. A rush to sign new bands who could be (broadly) associated with punk and the concomitant shift towards ‘new-wave’ styles led to a degree of UK chart success for a number of groups. The inclusion of punk and new-wave songs on a series of low-budget compilations featuring cover versions of contemporary hits strikes a particularly discordant tone with punk’s self-styled image of a break with traditional music industry conventions. The albums released on the long-standing budget compilation series Top of the Pops between mid-1977 and early 1982 tell an interesting story about the cultural recuperation of punk, new-wave and post-punk, and ask questions, perhaps, about the legitimacy of punk’s often mythologized ‘outsider status’. From their saccharine cover images, harking back to the pin-ups of the 1950s, to the awkwardly dated language of sleeve notes and the notion that the diversity of contemporary ‘pop’ is not tarnished by subcultural differences, these albums reflect a fascinating period in punk’s acceptance, maturity and, perhaps, reluctant commodification.