(Credits: Far Out / NASA / Uwe Conrad)
Tue 9 December 2025 18:00, UK
What is classic rock exactly?
It’s a term that tumbles around in our vague intuitions without explicitly marking out any specific chapter or concrete sound. Broadly, rock’s celebrated ‘classic’ era seems to begin around the time of the counterculture’s psychedelic peak around 1967, strutting across the years with lauded, rockist primacy before facing an existential upend from the new wave cohort eager to tear down the whole bloated parody much of the AOR generation had lapsed into.
It used to be called ‘dad rock’, or at least it was 20-odd years ago before former Britpoppers started touching 60. It was always a sniffy term, many fantastic bands unwittingly subsumed into the pejorative perception of yesteryear’s dinosaur acts featured on the latest Dad Rocks! compilation CD, but it’s true that a stodginess had set in, precipitating punk’s necessary bulldoze of a gloop of soft rock, FM radio staples coasting into complacency and deathly aloof of what made rock exciting in the first place.
For whatever reason, David Bowie’s glam turn as the Martian messiah just doesn’t feel quite as ‘classic’ as the Eagles crooning ‘Hotel California’—1977’s longest held classic rock single—or The 13th Floor Elevators’ acid-fried garage conjurings somehow dwelling in a realm of unclassifiable permanence that Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac just cannot hope to reach.
Perhaps it’s the blunted political edge, aversion to the avant-garde, or unmooring away from the 1960s’ formative radicalism that springs to mind, The Doobie Brothers over Roxy Music when casting your mind back to the 1970s’ classic rock heyday.
Chin-stroking analysis aside, ‘classic rock’ encompasses some of the greatest bands of the rock and pop canon, if suffering from a Boomer perception that such a pedestal of groups is the most essential, important, and peak artistic musical efforts of all time, which can never be topped. Still, rock’s nebulous classic tag would carry a cultural stature and longstanding fascination long after the severe shoeing new wave meted out by the 1970s’ close.
Curiously enough, 1980 was not the year classic rock went into hibernation. While double denim was out and skinny ties were certainly in, the terser, keyboard-driven pop dominating the day’s singles chart was still planting a crown on the bands that punk had, rhetorically at least, waged musical war with only a few short years previously.
So, what song was number one for the longest?
Over in the States, Blondie and Kenny Rogers’ ‘Call Me’ and ‘Lady’ topped 1980’s longest held with six weeks each at the top spot, but for four weeks from late February, Queen had ridden the Second British Invasion’s simmering wave and coasted to number one with ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, curiously enough an attempt at classic, rockabilly pastiche from the otherwise new wave coated The Game.
Sharing the four-week Hot 100 premier position was Pink Floyd’s immortal excoriation of the British school system with The Wall’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’.
Following Queen’s US chart entrenchment from late March, Pink Floyd’s canonical number in fact spent five whole weeks at number one over in the UK after its November 1979 release, a gem of the so-called classic rock era that managed to trounce all the year’s new wave hopefuls.
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