Second British Invasion

During the late 1980s, glam metal and dance music replaced Second Invasion acts atop the US charts.^[6][7]

Background

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, music from the United Kingdom was informed by the after-effects of the punk/new wave revolution.^[8] In 1979, "Roxanne" by the Police cracked the American Top 40, followed by the more modest chart successes of Elvis Costello,^[9] Sniff 'n' the Tears,^[10] the Pretenders, Gary Numan, Squeeze, and Joe Jackson; the latter scored a new wave hit with "Is She Really Going Out with Him?"^[2] Scripps-Howard news service described this success as an early stage of the invasion.^[9]


Music videos which were a staple of British music television programmes for about five years, evolved into image-conscious short films.^[11][12] At the same time, pop and rock music in the U.S. was undergoing a creative slump due to several factors, including audience fragmentation and the effects of the anti-disco backlash that reached its peak with Disco Demolition Night.^[11][13] Videos did not exist for most hits by US acts, and those that did were usually composed of footage from concert performances.^[11][12] When the cable music channel MTV launched on 1 August 1981, it had little choice but to play a large number of music videos from British new wave acts.^[11] The Buggles' 1979 hit "Video Killed the Radio Star" was the first music video shown on MTV in the U.S. To the surprise of the music industry, when MTV became available in a local market, record sales by acts played solely on the channel increased immediately and listeners phoned radio stations requesting to hear them.^[11] Also in 1981, Los Angeles radio station KROQ-FM began the Rock of the '80s format, which would make it the most popular station in that city.^[12] With British artists featuring heavily on the station, Rick Carroll of KROQ states, "There wasn't American product worthy of being played every three hours, so we had to look and listen to British imports to fill the void."^[5] In 2011, The Guardian felt that the launch of MTV (one of the paper's "50 key events in the history of pop music") played "a huge part" in the second British invasion.^[4][14]


More hints of the impending invasion were observed in 1981 on the dance charts. Only seven of the top thirty groups of the dance rock chart Rockpool were of American origin, while later in the year, 12-inch singles by British groups began appearing on the Billboard Disco chart. The trend was particularly strong in Manhattan where import records and the British music press were convenient to obtain and where the New York Rocker warned that "Anglophilia" was hurting US underground acts.^[15]

End of the Invasion

As the 1980s wore on, US rock, heavy metal, and pop music acts learned how to market themselves using video and making catchy singles.^[12][50] Martin Fry of the Second British Invasion group ABC says that "The reality was that Madonna, Prince and Michael Jackson did it better, bigger and more global than a lot of British acts."^[2] From 1983 to 1985, several glam metal acts dented the US charts and received some airplay on MTV, but heavy metal was still seen as a genre limited in popularity to teenage boys.^[6] In the spring and summer of 1986, acts associated with the Second Invasion continued to have chart success,^[6] with eight records reaching the Hot 100's summit.^[51] That fall, Bon Jovi's third studio album Slippery When Wet topped the Billboard 200 and spent eight non-consecutive weeks there,^[6] and the leadoff single "You Give Love a Bad Name" displaced the Human League's "Human" atop the Hot 100.^[52] Such developments eventually led to decreased visibility of new music. 1987 saw only seven British acts on the Hot 100's top 40 in January,^[53] and new music exposure on MTV was limited to the program The New Video Hour.^[50] In 1988, British acts rebounded with twelve singles topping the chart that year.^[54]


As late as the mid-1990s, the Spice Girls were identified as part of the Second British Invasion;^[55] and prominent British acts such as Oasis, Blur, Take That, and the Verve (some of whom were associated with the Britpop movement in their native United Kingdom) had some limited success in the U.S., albeit less than their 1980s predecessors. US hits from these bands included "Wannabe" (Spice Girls), "Wonderwall" (Oasis), "Song 2" (Blur), "Back for Good" (Take That), and "Bitter Sweet Symphony" (the Verve). Over time British acts became less prevalent on the US charts, and on 27 April 2002, for the first time in almost forty years, the Hot 100 had no British acts at all; that week, only two of the top 100 albums, those of Craig David and Ozzy Osbourne, were from British artists.^[27][56]