opportunists knock

 

Yes that is Tears For Fears in their early mod revival incarnation: Graduate

Looking a bit like Mick Talbot's first band, the one with that song that goes "a man ain't a man with a ticket in his hand... YOU NEED WHEELS"

Good Lord, there is documentation

I don't mind the opportunism / bandwagon-jumping thing in rock'n'pop at all - in fact I rather enjoy it

Musicians are fans, just like the rest of us - they get enthused by the New Thing

(of course they also want to make it - make money, have hits)

Fans are fickle and move on, critics are constantly jettisoning one thing and jumping to the next... so why shouldn't bands? 

One thing I enjoyed in doing Still In A Dream is observing how nimbly the groups keep moving across the timespan of 1984-94.   

The Soup Dragons are mimsy C86 types and then they go baggy with a Stones cover, "I'm Free", copping a move off the equally nimble Primal Scream

Teenage Fanclub, whose "roots" similarly lay in C86 cutesy tweepop (Boy Hairdressers, BMX Bandits), i.e. un-rock 'n' roll as it gets,  suddenly start soloing like nobody's bizness on "Everything Flows" and A Catholic Education, taking their cue equally from Dinosaur Jr. and Neil Young. 

There are groups who start out a bit C86, then pass through shoegaze, and then tack to the prevailing winds of Britpop

But you get it everywhere, in every era ....  Phil Collins, in 1977, is drumming in the fusion band Brand X while also in Genesis... and then a few years later, as a solo artist, he's retro-souling ("You Can't Hurry Love") or contempo-funking (working with the Earth Wind and Fire horn section, duetting with Philip Bailey).

Sometimes it does feel slightly shameless, like "where is your aesthetic spine, your integrity, man?" - Gareth from The Pop Group, okay the jump to Rip Rig and Panic is logical, that's fine... but then Head? This relapse into raunch'n'roll is just too antithetical to previous form. 

Yet sometimes the shamelessness - the naked lust to have a Hit Single- becomes its own kind of cool.

Like who on Earth would have imagined that progger Dave Stewart (Uriel, Egg, Hatfield and the North, National Health, Bruford) would team up with Barbara Gaskin (who similarly sang in various Canterbury Scene bands) and score a  four-weeks-at-#1 hit with an 80s-synthpop rendering of "It's My Party"?  

And either immediately before or immediately after, Stewart had another hit with a similar moderne rendering of "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?" with former-Zombie Colin Blunstone handling the vocals..... 

We all need to make some bread, after all. Bills don't pay themselves.