Trends in Underground Music

Fallout.

The British punk-rock movement, which peaked in the late 1970s with the success of the Sex Pistols and other fast and loud bands, fragmented and then regrouped in the early 1980s. Many of these bands specialized in postpunk gloom and doom, the angry nihilism of 1970s punk soured into resigned alienation. After the death of Sid Vicious in 1979, the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten reemerged as John Lydon with a dirge-prone ensemble called Public Image, Ltd. (PIL). Other brooding bands included Joy Division (later reformed as New Order), The Cure, Bow Wow Wow, The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Psychedelic Furs, and Bauhaus. Several reggae-influenced new-wave bands—including Selecter, English Beat, Madness, The Police, The Specials, UB40—continued to attract a following on both sides of the Atlantic amid a short-lived ska craze. Other punk and new-wave groups continued on into the new decade, oblivious to the...

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