Nobody set out to invent a genre called new wave. The phrase was already thirty years old and had belonged to two other things first: a 1957 survey of French teenagers in the magazine L’Express, and then the young film directors who came out of the same country a year later. When British music writers borrowed it in late 1976 they used it as a near-synonym for punk, and for a good eighteen months nobody could tell you the difference — Caroline Coon’s 1977 book was titled The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion, both words on one cover. What turned it into a genre was a record company. In October 1977 Seymour Stein at Sire, unable to get American radio to play the Ramones or Talking Heads because “we don’t play punk,” launched a campaign called Don’t Call It Punk and asked programmers to use the French phrase instead. Talking Heads’ drummer Chris Frantz remembers the response exactly: “Oh really? Well, I guess we could play new wave.” New Wave Friday starts there, with a new Friday-afternoon routine on NZ Net Radio — Power Pop one week, New Wave the next — and an opening hour that goes back to the year the name stuck.
Sixteen tracks, and the hits are all here: The Cars, the Pretenders, Gary Numan, Devo, Talking Heads. But the hour is built around the smaller stories underneath them. Blondie’s very first single, from June 1976, was renamed before release because the label was nervous about the title. Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World” was written with two chords on the back of an envelope on a bench in Hull, and has never charted anywhere in the world. Mi-Sex’s “Computer Games” wasn’t on the album when the album came out, and went to number one in Australia anyway. Lene Lovich’s “Lucky Number” was a B-side knocked together because Stiff needed one in a hurry, and it reached number three in New Zealand. Elvis Costello wrote “Red Shoes” in the last ten minutes of a train ride into Liverpool, and Gary Numan wrote “Cars” in about the same time on a bass guitar he’d just bought. There are two New Zealand dates to mark in the diary — Gary Numan at Spark Arena with Simple Minds in February, and Mi-Sex at the Tuning Fork in November — and two records from 2025, by Nation of Language and Wet Leg, from people nobody calls new wave. Which, if you’ve listened to the first fifty minutes, is exactly the point.
Tracklist
- Talking Heads — Psycho Killer — Talking Heads '77
- Blondie — X Offender — Blondie (Remastered 2001)
- Elvis Costello — (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes — My Aim Is True
- The Cars — Just What I Needed — The Cars
- The Pretenders — Brass in Pocket — Pretenders
- Wreckless Eric — Whole Wide World — Wreckless Eric
- Mi-Sex — Computer Games — Graffiti Crimes
- The Vapors — Turning Japanese
- Lene Lovich — Lucky Number — Stateless
- Gary Numan — Cars — The Pleasure Principle
- DEVO — Whip It — Freedom of Choice
- Martha And The Muffins — Echo Beach — Metro Music
- XTC — Making Plans For Nigel — Drums And Wires
- Nation of Language — Under the Water — Dance Called Memory
- Wet Leg — catch these fists
- Joe Jackson — Is She Really Going Out With Him? — Look Sharp!
