1980: Weirdos (Patreon)

The concept of this bracket isn’t so much weird or difficult music - though there’s a sprinkle of that here too - but acts with a singular vision that was slightly orthogonal to the main streams of 1980. The kind of thing John Peel championed, and there’s several acts here who were Peel favourites, but plenty of bigger names too - it was a fertile time for the individual and off-kilter.

Some people love to be on the margins - some people get pushed there (I’ve not checked, but this is probably the bracket with the highest proportion of women). But these groups are a feast of DIY energy, oddities, scams, great ideas, and things which could probably only have existed at this precise point in time and pop.

It’s a bracket which accommodates Hazel O’Connor’s histrionic new-wave machine-apocalypse hit “Eighth Day“ and the skeletal anger of Young Marble Giants’ “Credit In The Straight World”. Buggles’ “Elstree” is here, a lament for a waning era of broadcasting, and so is Bow Wow Wow’s “C30 C60 C90 Go!”, a hallelujah for home-taping. Adam And The Ants break into the Top 10 with “Kings Of The Wild Frontier”, while ...And The Native Hipsters record one of the most baffling singles ever, “There Goes Concorde Again”. And it’s not all Brits - the B-52s and Devo get to do their respective things aswell.

If this playlist seems short, it’s because this is the first time (I think) I’ve organised an entire group of not-on-Spotify tracks. The weirdos you’re missing out on are Lori And The Chameleons’ “The Lonely Spy”, from the short-lived art-pop project by poll perennial Bill Drummond; Hungary’s finest Neoton Familia, with “Don Quixote ‘80”; Sue Wilkinson, with the unforgettable cult pop one-off “You Got To Be A Hustler If You Want To Get On”; and, er, Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly, because why not?

POTENTIAL WINNER: Wellll…. Pretty much by design, this bracket is full of tracks which will be cheered on before making a noble exit against one of the proper contenders. But I wouldn’t be too surprised to see Kate Bush’s prog-pop nuclear-doom masterpiece “Breathing” getting to the Final Groups at least.

DARK HORSE: There was a lot of love for Young Marble Giants’ “Final Day” in the Debuts poll. “Credit In The Straight World” is more conventional, but also one of their best-known songs (thanks to Courtney Love) and it’s in a relatively escapable group. Could go further.

BEST TRACK: Probably “Breathing”! But I’ve mentioned that, so I’ll say “Getting Nowhere Fast” by Girls At Our Best, a great tune by a band whose crisp, chiming, snarky sound still echoes through UK indie-pop to this day.

DISCOVERY: Devo’s “Gates Of Steel” was new to me and I approached it with caution, finding all their well-known songs colossally annoying. But this one is great - just a big, beefy New Wave jam without any obvious gimmicks and baggage.

DON’T MISS…: the Burundi Beat battle between Adam And The Ants (using the ideas Malcolm McLaren supposedly suggested) and Bow Wow Wow (using the same ideas, plus the original Ants McLaren definitely stole).