(Credits: Far Out)
Sat 3 January 2026 20:45, UK
The 1970s stand as a gobsmacking decade for popular music.
It’s been ten years since everything seems to have happened. Punk, prog-rock, glam, disco, and hip-hop all enjoy furtive beginnings, country, rock and roll revival, and folk spark back into the charts, and classic rock is having its showboating heyday. Starting from the countercultural echoes of Woodstock to new wave’s seismic upend, the 1970s doesn’t beat its decade predecessor for the dizzying pace of change, but certainly trumps the 1960s for sheer myriad musical choice.
Some artists, however, looked forward, while others looked back. Not that the latter realised it, but, as musical lore has already well and truly covered, the nascent punks kept going by glam’s sugar rush, but bored of the hippy residue clogging the charts would take to the stars unconcerned with double denimed seriousness flumping a wet flannel on all the fun and urgency that was supposed to be had during the decade’s tumultuous pass.
It was impossible to envisage how different the rock and pop climate would look in the 1980s, the decade when MTV, superficiality, and mass-commercialism ruled the day amid the sweeping political revolution hurtling across the Western world. Yet, a handful of luminaries were able to pave the era’s sonic path, chasing the shock of the new and forming the trends that would follow, for better or ill.
In salute to such pop setters, we select five songs that had their hand in shaping the 1980s’ music soundtrack.
Five 1970s songs that paved the way for the 1980s:
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