London called my nameâ
wit and snarl on vinyl hum.
Still spinning their truth.
(Todayâs piece is a longish excerpt from a book I am working on. Please enjoy.)
When I moved to Southern California in 1977, my musical diet changedâdramatically.
I wasnât starving before. I was well-fed on a balanced diet of Motown, Canadiana, hardworking Midwestern rock, British prog-rock, disco and the usual arena rock headliners. But I hadnât heard punk. And once I did, everything changed. And everything that mattered seemed to be reverberating out of London.
That discovery opened a doorâand through it walked four fierce, brilliant, and wildly different artists who hit me all at once. Each had their own sound, their own edge, their own vocabulary of rage and wit. Literate rock. If eyeliner defined glam and mohawks punk, these guys were defined by scowling in a blazer while referencing Orwell. Their idea of rebellion? Rhyming âexistentialâ with âcredential. A world away from punkâs nihilism and arena rockâs bloat. And somehow, they all stuck. Friends for life.
Nearly 50 years later and 93 studio albums between them, theyâre still with me. Each had their own restless itch to scratch, and they all spread their musical wings, constantly growing, changing, evolving, wandering into jazz, power pop, soul or protest ballads. Iâve grown older too, but theyâre still with me. And Iâve enjoyed them all liveâmany times overâand I still listen to everything they put out.
Welcome to my Class of â78: Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, Graham Parker, and Paul WellerâEnglandâs Angry Young Men. My sultans of snarl. They were the thinking manâs punk. Sardonic troubadours. And possibly the last generation of singer-songwriters who could both dance and destroy you with a line. They had a lot of quirks to go with their talent too.
They werenât punks, exactly. They didnât pogo. They glared, with rhythm. But they were pissed intellectuals with guitars. Pop but not plastic. Pub poets with permanent sneers. Wired on caffeine and cleverness.
The British music scene in the late â70s was a simmering pot of post-industrial rage when everyoneâs teeth were clenched: Thatcherism rising, racial tension, the food sucked, pubs closed between 2 and 6PM, broken unions, and broken hearts. And out of that came this class of angry, literate, snappily dressed young men who channeled their fury not into safety pins, spitting and three chords, but into tightly wound verses and horn sections.
These were not your dadâs rock stars. Or maybe they wereâif your dad had unresolved rage and a record collection full of Motown, reggae, jazz, and British Invasion 45s. They came just after punk blew the doors off the club and just before synth-pop wallpapered it in eyeliner. They werenât interested in fashion statements or chart positions. They were there to interrogate your choices. Loudly. And in 4/4 time.
Elvis Costello: Revenge in Horn-Rimmed Glasses
No one ever looked more like an insurance adjuster and sounded more like a jilted poet than Elvis Costello (b. 1954). The bastard lovechild of Buddy Holly and Raymond Chandler, Elvis arrived in 1977 looking like your substitute teacher but singing like a man possessed. His name itself a pointed deflation of a sacred rock icon. He weaponized sarcasm. My Aim Is True was all spiky nerve endings and romantic sabotage. Then This Yearâs Model turned up the aggression and Armed Forces weaponized irony into a military-grade assault on hypocrisy.
Costello was perhaps the most musically adventurous of the four, ping-ponging between pub rock, country, reggae, and chamber pop with manic intensity. His rage was often personal and romantic, wrapped in wordplay so dense it sometimes obscured meaning. Musicâs best songwriter since Dylan. There, I said it.
He sang about guilt, betrayal, fascism, and foot fetishesâsometimes in the same verse. And he did it with a sneer so sharp it could have its own BAFTA.
Elvis Costello once got so fed up with Saturday Night Live's music director during his 1977 debut, that he famously stopped mid-song and launched into âRadio Radioââa searing critique of corporate media NBC didnât want him to play. Contrary to myth, he wasnât banned. Heâd return to SNL three more times.
Elvis married Cait O'Riordan from The Pogues partly because he was obsessed with traditional Irish musicâthen divorced her when that phase passed. Heâs now married to Canadian jazz singer Diana Krall. Incredibly versatile, heâs collaborated with George Jones, Burt Bacharach, the Brodsky Quartet, Bill Frisell, The Roots, Charles Mingus Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie Von. To name but a few.
Iâve seen Costello the most of these four bad boys, maybe 20 times. Once saw him perform five nights in a row at the intimate Beverly Theater, walking distance from where I lived in the fall of 1986. Each night was boldly different. On night country twang with T-Bone Burnett and David Hidalgo (Los Lobos). One-night oldies with Tom Petty and Cait. One night with John Doe (X) and Tom Waits. Then the âspectacular spinning songbook.â It was a musical high-water mark.
Costello didnât scream like a punk. He literally seethed. And honestly, thatâs more dangerous.
Joe Jackson: Snarling at the Piano
Joe Jackson (b. 1954) had the face of a disapproving librarian and the anger of a guy who got bumped from his own gig. An edgy sensitive guy. His debut Look Sharp! was caffeinated vitriol in a skinny tie. Where punk was raw and amateur, Jackson was classically trained and totally over punkâs BS. His rage was tightly coiled behind piano keys and pithy lines like âPretty women out walking with gorillas down my street.â
Jackson was urbane and the most jazz-influenced of the four, bringing sophisticated harmonic sensibilities to pop songs. His anger often had a more sardonic, observational qualityâhe was the most detached critic of the bunch. He famously hated being called a New Wave artist and would get genuinely irritated in interviews when journalists used the term, insisting he was just making "real music". He was allergic to being boxed in.
Joe taught me that âlove is a many-splendored thingâ with his songs having informed me that love was: like oxygen, a drug, a battlefield, blue, strange, king, a wild thing, a losing game, alive, all around, a bitch, mystical, like a heat wave, an open door, being #2, a roller-coaster, a verb, madness, and like a roseâthorns and allâŚlove is a Joe Jackson mixtape!
He followed his rage-pop debut masterpiece with genre swervesâinto reggae, swing, world-beat, jazz-pop, Tin Pan Alley even a symphony. A restless musical soul with soul. He hated playing his âcommercial selloutâ hit songs on occasion. Joe was the guy who crashed the punk party and then lectured everyone on music theory while ordering a gin and tonic.
My favorite evening spent with Joe Jackson was a hot summer night at the Sunset Stripâs Roxy (7 August 1991). In support of his newly released Laughter & Lust album, Joe was a class act, donning a tuxedo, drinking tea and bringing his biting raconteurâs wit. It was a lovefest in front of an intimate crowd. Musically, he knocked me out with his poignant âThe Other Me,â along the rousingly philosophical âYou Canât Get What You Want.â And then he smacked us atop the head with âHit Single,â a song lamenting his fate as an alleged one-hit wonder.
Call him many things, but a one-hit wonder? Thatâs just lazy.
Graham Parker: The One Who Shouldâve Been Huge
Graham Parker had the voice of a man who gargled gravel and rage for breakfast. His band, The Rumour, was tight, soulful, and criminally underappreciated. Howlinâ Wind and Squeezing Out Sparks were working-class anthems with a side of R&B swagger. If Bruce Springsteen had been born in Surrey and raised on pub rock instead of Jersey boardwalks, he mightâve sounded like this. Although Graham hated the comparison.
Parker (b. 1950) the oldest of the four, drew heavily from American soul and R&B, giving his frustration a more soulful, bluesy foundation. His delivery was more raw and emotional, less calculated than the others. âEfficient,â Rolling Stone called it. He often rewrote his lyrics live on stage. And he was notorious for his on-stage rants between songsâI remember one long one at The House of Blues, circa 1996. Graham had a lot to say about a lot of things.
Parker and The Rumor once issued a live cover of the Jackson Fiveâs âI Want You Backâ as a singleâit briefly touched the pop charts. A final kiss off to his first record label, Parker recorded the single âMercury Poisoning,â a screed that was like his version of the Sex Pistols. And then came his lyrically sophisticated Squeezing Out Sparks LP. WTF! It was so good, from beginning to end. An A+. âLocal Girls,â âSaturday Night is Deadâ and âPassion Is No Ordinary Word.â
But of all of Grahamâs songs two really spoke to me, both from his 1988 The Mona Lisaâs Sister album that I witnessed him supporting at Hollywoodâs Palace that summer. They were Parker at his most raw and honest. The song âSuccessâ just hits me hard, like the first time I heard Jackson Browneâs âThe Pretenderâ.
âThe dreams and hopes of men are powered by addiction
And who am I to say that this is an affliction
When everybody gets suckered in and lives their lives like fiction
Writing their own stories of successâŚâ
And then there is âIâm Just Your Man.â
âI'm not a page in history not something that bold
I'm not the greatest mystery that was ever told
I may not be who you wanna spend a whole life with alone
I'm not that fascinating with features carved like stoneâŚâ
Parker never quite got the same spotlight as Costello or Jackson or Weller (Iâm sure deep down heâs angry about that too.), maybe because he never played the industry game or wore enough skinny ties. But his songs had venom, vulnerability, and more hooks than a tackle shop. He was a pressure cooker of romantic and political frustration that always sounds rather familiar to me.
And he never smiled in photos. Respect.
Paul Weller: The Modfather with a Molotov
Paul Weller is my age (b. 1958), a little younger than the others, but no less angry. In his first band The Jam, he lit a fuse under punk by dressing like a â60s Mod, sounding like Townshend on speed, and writing like a pissed-off Dickens.
Weller (with The Jam) was the most politically focused, channeling mod aesthetics and working-class consciousness into anthems about social mobility and British identity. His anger was more communal and ideological. In the City was punk on Red Bull, but by All Mod Cons, his lyrics read like social novelsâtracing working-class alienation, domestic stagnation, and Thatcherite gloom with surgical precision.
The Jam became the first band since the Beatles to perform both sides of the same singleâ"Town Called Malice" and "Precious"âon one edition of BBCâs Top of the Pops.
He never just played chordsâhe meant them. After dissolving The Jam at the height of their success (rage quit of the decade), he formed The Style Council and turned soulward (ala Marvin Gaye). It was his jazz-cafĂŠ era, and it infuriated old fans by embracing funk, house music, and French cinema aesthetics. But even in pastel blazers, Wellerâs fury never left him. It just changed keys.
Although loving The Jam, I became truly engrossed with Wellerâs soundsâlike a few other thingsâwhile living in London attending LSE grad school. I just loved the ascetics of blue-eyed soul of The Style Council and their contribution to the Absolute Beginners soundtrack. (That also included songs by Bowie, Sade, Ray Davies (The Kinks), Charles Mingus and Nick Lowe.) The year was 1986.
"My Ever-Changing Moods" and "You're the Best Thing" are just spectacularly good timeless songs.
Weller has been knighted The Modfather in England. And is an inspiring musical figure who helped usher in a lot of great music in what we call the Britpop era. Think: Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Suede and The Verveâthe third British Invasion.
Maybe not a household name in the States as he is Europe, Weller has had number one albums spanning five consecutive decades. He joins only John Lennon and Paul McCartney in having that distinction. Frankly, some compare his chameleon ways to that of David Bowie in his extremely forward musical thinking.
And heâs still every bit that forward-thinking musical force today: vibrant, alive and meaningful.
Together, these four channeled a particularly English kind of angerânot the raging fire of revolution, but the slow burn of disappointment. They were the soundtrack of men whoâd been lied toâby lovers, politicians and themselvesâand werenât going to take it sitting down. Unless it was on a barstool, writing lyrics.
They helped define the post-punk era not with distortion pedals, but with sharp minds and sharper tongues. This was punk for people who read books, who hated the government but also corrected your grammar. They were walking contradictions: stylish but scruffy, erudite but raw, cynical but secretly romantic.
And they were brilliant.
Over time they constantly evolved. Some mellowed. Some got jazzier. Some kept fighting the good fight in different keys. Their anger became wisdom, even elegance. Weller went full soul man. Jackson composed symphonies. Costello continues to write love songs that came with footnotes and passive-aggressive side eye. Parker, ever the underdog, just kept quietly recording great records.
But their early work? It all holds up. It punches through. It still speaks to me. And it still snarls. They didnât burn out or fade awayâthey just added a jazz bridge.
In an age of auto-tune and algorithmic apathy, we could use a little more righteous irritation. More wit. More bitterness with a beat. The Class of â78 didnât ask for permission. They didnât pander. They didnât care if they were likable. They just told the truthâloud, clever, and off-key if necessary.
We donât need more angry men. But we could use a few more that know why theyâre angryâand can rhyme about it.
Long live Englandâs Angry Young Men!
Thanks for the privilege of your time, it is the most precious thing we have, and I appreciate it. Be well.
William D. Chalmers Š 2025 All Rights Reserved.