"Welcome to the sound of the 80s"

It was with these words that presenter and Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell began the first Top of the Pops of 1980, a shiny new decade which, for anyone coming from the rather dour 1970s, smacked of 'the future'.

The sixties had been fab and swinging, but the seventies - in Great Britain at least - had been one problem after another: strikes, shortages, 'three-day weeks', terrorism and lots of beige. Popular music, however, had mercifully at least in part raged against the grim and gritty status quo of the outside world. From the glitsy and garish glam-rock, made popular by artists such as David Bowie, Marc Bolan and The Sweet, the decade later took rebellion a step further with the advent of 'punk rock' - the ultimate rage against 'the establishment'. Since the real punk rock was short-lived, it was arguably , the 'post-punk' era which began to whip the anger and DIY ethic of punk into shape and produce some of the better music.

As a young and impressionable teenager, I had observed the music scene in the closing years of the decade with some awe and trepidation. My household music during my formative years (I started school in 1970, learning decimal currency and metric weights and measures)  had been a mixture of my parents' MOR and my older sister's pop-oriented tastes: think Jim Reeves meets the Bay City Rollers. After around 1978 I had begun to develop what I believed to be my own tastes, spending early birthday and Christmas record tokens on ELO's Out of the Blue, Abba: The Album and Jean Michel Jarre's Equinoxe. I later moved on to discovering the joys of the 45 rpm, occasionally venturing into new musical realms with singles by said 'post-punks' such as Lene Lovich, Jilted John and Blondie.

The pattern with singles was however becoming clear: you heard the record played on Radio 1 (or Radio Luxembourg in those days), you saw it performed on Top of the Pops on a Thursday night, you bought the record on the following Saturday. You got the thing home, you played it endlessly, you even ventured into the B side. If you were lucky it went up the charts the week after (then published on a Tuesday) and would be played on the radio a few more times and, even better, got onto Top of the Pops again - but not the week after mind, since the 'rule' was that a song would only be featured two weeks in a row if it got to number one.

But there was no doubt about it: the appearance of an artist and a song on TOTP would make or break a record, or indeed that artist. Radio was important, as it had been for some years, but it was Top of the Pops we all looked forward to every week, and ultimately decided how our pocket (or newspaper round) money was spent. While a handful of TOTP performances towards the end of the 70s had been, for me, seminal moments - Gary Numan/Tubeway Army, Sparks among others - some of the most important TOTP performances, at least for my humble self, hail from 1980 onwards. At fifteen going on sixteen the year also brought along my first serious record purchases in a year of teenage emotional and physical turmoil (aren't they all?).

I was therefore pleased to see that at the start of this year - 2015 A.D. - the BBC ran a special feature Top of the Pops: the Story of 1980, a chronicle of the weekly show in that particular year and the changes both in the music and the style of the show. As is clearly shown, it was a year of two halves, split down the middle by the BBC orchestra strike, but after the dispute, TOTP would return with avengeance in a shiny new suit, complete with new-fangled computer graphics and a livelier audience.

Following up the documentary, BBCFour is re-showing all the 1980 TOTP episodes, week by week. This has been done before under a different format - the TOTP2 series re-purposed random performances from the programme, although this time it would seem that shows are being repeated in their entirety, without the comments or captions which often, in my opinion, spoiled what is precious archive footage.

This blog is an attempt to catalogue and chronicle each espisode as they are re-broadcasted, listing the acts and songs, with some comments and opinions by this humble blogger and, like it or not, incurable nostalgic.