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music that should be/should have been more popular


Batman

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Unsurprisingly, I'd have to say Cold Chisel. They are huge in Australia, but they probably would have been much more popular overseas if they didn't generally dislike touring. They are without doubt my favourite band of the 80s, but they also recorded some good stuff in the 70s and 90s. :)

YES! And Dragon. Why the hell weren't Dragon more popular? Same with Australian Crawl, love them. And The Screaming Jets, Hoodoo Gurus, The Divinyls, The Church...man, the Oz pub-rock scene was alive and kicking back in the day.

Sometimes I think their limited overseas popularity had to do with the fact they wrote very Australian centered/themed songs which made no sense to overseas audiences (Australian Crawl did this a lot).

On the international side of things, I'd have to say Small Faces/Faces. Great bands, shoulda been way more popular.

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The Knack...Can't wait to hear the boo's and jeer's on this one. :laugh:

No boos here. I totally agree with you. The only reason they weren't more popular is that their third album kinda flopped and they went into hibernation for the next ten or fifteen years. They just gave up too quick.

Power pop-punk was big at that time, and they could have easily lasted a while. Yeah, they had some cool guitar work in their songs, and were definitely good enough to be bunched in with artists like Cheap Trick, The Ramones, Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, The Pretenders, and the like, that all became big at the end of the 70's.

Good call, Dude. :thumbsup:

:afro: :afro: :afro: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon:

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I agree with katie that The Church would have probably have achieved much greater worldwide success and acknowledgement without the disadvantage of being Australian. :P Consistently excellent band for nearly 30 years now...

Otherwise, the most criminally underrated band/artist that springs to my mind is The Auteurs, fronted by the exceptionally talented musician and songwriting genius Luke Haines,(who boasts an equally under-rated "solo career"). Despite being right there at the forefront of the 1990s "Britpop" explosion and winning the coveted Mercury Music Prize for their debut LP in 1992, everything went tits up at the vital moment; Haines breaking his legs on the eve of a nationwide tour to promote the follow-up. In their absence, and whilst Haines fought his demons, Britpop went overground with the Oasis/ Blur spectacle, and inferior contemporaries such Suede and Blur stealing into the public consciousness whilst overtly purloining The Auteurs style and content. Too articulate/intellectual and insufficiently plebeian for the Oasis-crowd, perhaps a little too dour and misanthropic for the "upbeat" spirit of the times, Haines was not one for making the necessary concessions to court popularity and self-publicity; it could be argued that he urinated on his own pommes frites, resulting in a career characterised by much critical acclaim, but very little in terms of universal recognition.

If in doubt: look at Amazon Customer Reviews of The Auteurs/Luke Haines and you'll get an insight into the consistent excellence of his work and the unstinting admiration of those "in the know". The "Luke Haines Is Dead" triple CD anthology is a substantial collection of unremitting brilliance. Every home should have one.

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