100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #36 The B-52’s – Rock Lobster

Released: 1978

Ah. Urrgh. ‘New wave’. A marketing term designed to placate nervous parents and record label executives alike, arguably it applied better to America’s underground because they had – whisper it quietly – invented punk anyway, well before those cheeky Brits gave it one of the most successful makeovers in the history of music.

In practice it gave a license to the country’s weirdos to escape their neon-lit basements, from Ohio to New York to California and gleefully subvert whatever people already knew about pop culture.

The B52’s hailed from Athens, Georgia, a quintet who took a deep glug from the bottle labelled kitsch and then hotwired the bones of old rock n’ roll and fleshed them out with surf schtick, sci-fi and southern charm. Never less than a party in a bag, their appeal was best summed up via the NME headline writer who entitled Paul Rambali’s piece on them in late 1979 as ‘Hot Pants, Cold Sweat And A Brand New Beehive Hair Do’.

Rock Lobster was their debut single and would end up an unlikely staple in some British nightclubs. Like Duane Eddy on a date with The Shangri-Las at a Star Trek convention, it was fiendishly danceable, absurdly unhip and everything else punk wasn’t – and by definition, met every criteria to be damned as new wave. The hairdo might’ve fit – but to their credit, the band never wore it.