post-punk

Well if Cultural Amnesia needs a label for its 79-83 output, post-punk is probably the correct one. It's a pretty broad church though, and in my mind refers to all the 'weird stuff" that fell out of the disintegration of punk but that happened before the new romantics appeared and the idea of popular music seemed to become interesting again (post-punk being unquestionably un-pop music). At its best it was a period when nobody had any clear idea what music ought to be.

The last similar moment seems to have been post-rave.

Anyone interested couldn't do much better than read Simon Reynolds' book Rip It Up and Start Again. Certainly the discography of that book reads as a pretty precise list of Cultural Amnesia's key influences (without any of our secret progressive rock leanings, of course). (Ben)