Let’s take 2000 as our target year to illustrate the 20-Year Cycle in culture.
In 1980, Alan Parker directed a movie about kids who attended the High School of Performing Arts in New York aka The Fame School. The Irene Cara theme song won the Grammy and two years later, the Kids from Fame were visitors to UK TV screens. Thousands of people were moved to buy the TV soundtrack that summer and it whizzed up to number one in the charts.
In 2000, Hear’Say were formed on ITV’s Popstars: five kids who would not have been out of place in the Fame school. Their debut hit Pure and Simple sold hundreds of thousands of copies because people identified with them and saw the formation of the group onscreen. Manufactured pop, either constructed in dance studios and audition rooms or on primetime with Simon Cowell giving his imperial approval, was the order of the day. Hence, Hear’Say were the 20-Year Cycle in action.
As you will see in this week’s playlist of 40 songs which prove this theorem, often it’s for reasons of nostalgia that something comes back into fashion; sometimes it’s nakedly commercial or because the initial inspiration has receded into the past and is fair game to plunder. Admittedly I’ve reached a bit too far for some examples, but I hope you agree that in each case lightning has struck twice.
A full playlist of songs is available here.
Let us begin in 1983, a time when the babyboomers had settled down to have kids and might wish to introduce them to the music of their childhood. A singles act who put out several albums a year, the Beach Boys would team up with the Fat Boys on a version of Wipeout that kept them relevant in the new era. Far better was their number one double-LP The Very Best of the Beach Boys, although the cover of a woman’s derriere would not make it out of the marketing meeting today. The album included all the classic surfing hits and sonic masterpieces from the 1960s, while in 1983 members were at war with each other while Brian Wilson had been fired due to ill health. Dennis Wilson, the only member of the group who actually surfed, sadly drowned at the end of the year.
In 1984, it was time to bring back Beatlemania in the form of Duran Duran and Wham!. Both groups included pretty boys whose videos were on heavy rotation on the new Music Television channel MTV. Wham! Just missed the Christmas Number One in the UK with Last Christmas, at which point Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go had spent three weeks as the number one song in America. The Durannies built on the success of 1982’s album Rio with Arena, a live album documenting their 1984 world tour which also included new song Wild Boys. Both acts featured on the Band Aid charity single and went on to have number ones in America in 1985: Duran Duran with the theme to A View to a Kill, Wham! with Careless Whisper and final single Everything She Wants. George Michael would go solo, having not planned on it (yeah right), that autumn.
In 1985 there was a much simpler example of the 20-Year Cycle in action when UB40 & Chrissie Hynde took the Sonny & Cher song I Got You Babe to number one. The original came out in July 1965, the cover in 1985. QED.
Let’s move to 1986 where two top performers from the 1960s returned to the UK Top 10. James Brown was Living In America two decades after he sang of feeling good with a brand new bag in a man’s man’s man’s world. Marvin Gaye’s 1969 chart-topper which he heard through the grapevine made a star of model and singer Nick Kamen when he stripped off in a laundrette to it in a Levi’s ad. Additionally, Lulu’s 1964 version of the Isley Brothers song Shout was re-recorded and re-entered the chart a place lower (8 to the original’s 7) in the UK Top 10.
Another simple exemplum from 1987, as pop starlet Tiffany took the Tommy James tune I Think We’re Alone Now back into public consciousness exactly 20 years after the original charted in the US top five (but never in the UK) early in 1967. Tommy was 19, Tiffany was 15, and by 1987 records were released on a worldwide schedule: Tiffany topped the charts in the UK and the USA.
Bill Drummond would never get past reception if he was trying to storm the barricades of US music. One of the truly great stories of British music is Bill’s involvement in The KLF, referred to as pranksters but really a situationist art project which used pop music to push their message. This was less relevant when, in 1988, they smushed together the theme to Doctor Who (written in 1963) with Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll (a UK number 2 hit in 1972) for Doctorin’ The Tardis. The putative ‘singer’ was Ford Timelord, a car owned by Jimmy Cauty, the music whizz of the KLF. It makes it the only UK number one, and the only Hot 100 number 66 hit, to be credited to a car.
Stock-Aitken-Waterman once put out a dance single called Roadblock without revealing they were behind it. The SAW method was by design very similar to Motown: they even called their operation The Hit Factory. Such was their success as indie musicians not affiliated to any major label that they were kicked out of the indie charts even as they had every right to rub shoulders with 4AD, Mute and Rough Trade. In 1989, SAW released 24 singles, 22 of which made the Top 40 and six went to number one. At one stage they produced four of them in a row, ranging from hits by Kylie Minogue, Sonia and Jason Donovan, plus the single in aid of the Hillsborough Disaster Fund, a cover of Ferry Cross the Mersey (originally released in 1965). They also did the year’s Comic Relief Song, a cover of Help! by the Beatles (another 1965 release) with Bananarama and French & Saunders on vocals.
In 1990, the England World Cup Squad were at number one, as they had been in 1970 with Back Home, as EnglandNewOrder. World In Motion included a rap from John Barnes and a chant of ‘En-ger-land!’ which was less militaristic than the marching beat of Back Home but no less singalongable.
1991 was the year Bart Simpson had a number one hit written by Michael Jackson (hence the reference to Michael in the song). In 1969 a bunch of studio musicians recorded the bubblegum pop song Sugar Sugar which was credited to the stars of Archie comics. Just over 20 years later, history repeated itself.
Returning to Motown’s influence on popular music, the wonderful vocal harmony groups imitated by Backstreet Boys and the like started on street corners in the early era of recorded music. By the 1960s, Berry Gordy made the Supremes, the Temptations and the Miracles his big earners. Incredibly, in 1992 it was still working and Boyz II Men had an enormous US number one with End of the Road, which was in the tradition of songs about love and heartbreak which built the Motown Sound. I’ll Make Love To You, released in 1994, was even bigger. Also present in culture in 1992: ABBA, whose songs made up an EP by Erasure which topped the UK charts almost 20 years after the Swedes won Eurovision.
Jimi Hendrix died in 1970. Though Prince was almost his equal on guitar, the rock deities were mainly chaps with curls from London and the home counties (Clapton, Hackett, Richards, Beck). Lenny Kravitz burst into the marketplace in the late 1980s and Are You Gonna Go My Way, released in 1993, is almost a Hendrix tribute. It sat in the top five of the UK charts – he would get to number one in 1999 with Fly Away – the week that Shaggy’s Oh Carolina was bringing back Bob Marley’s reggae sound and where the top 10 included a hard rock song by Iron Maiden.
Talking of rock music, Oasis were once described as ‘a school play about the Beatles’ but the clue to their big influence was in their cover of Cum on Feel The Noize as the B-side to their number one Don’t Look Back In Anger. With solid chords and plenty of attitude, Oasis brought back guitars in a big way and replaced Seattle grunge with the death of fellow Beatle fan Kurt Cobain. In 1995, the Beatles Anthology TV, book and compilation albums swept British culture, including two new songs (Free As A Bird and Real Love) produced by Jeff Lynne of ELO.
Having introduced himself in 1993, Shaggy called himself Mr Lover Lover AND Mr Boombastic in the same song which went straight in at the top of the UK chart in autumn 1995. Bob Marley’s Legend compilation, released in 1984 and collecting his 1970s material, has spent more weeks in the UK charts than any other album except ABBA Gold, and even then there’s only a 16 weeks in it. In the mid-1990s, as well as Shaggy (real name Orville Burrell), a rush of reggae acts including Chaka Demus & Pliers and the great Dawn Penn had chart success. Shaggy had also brought back the Mungo Jerry chart-topper In The Summertime, which laid the groundwork for Boombastic, which knocked a Michael Jackson song written by R Kelly (oof) off the number one spot.
The biggest-selling single of 1996 was Killing Me Softly, a song about Don McLean first released in 1973 by Roberta Flack recorded by the self-proclaimed ‘Refugee Camp’. With the vocals of Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean intoning ‘one time, two time’, the song hit in a big way around the world but it was never released physically in the USA. Had it been, then it would have been a US number one too, but the game at the time was to release a single to radio and make people buy the album. That record, The Score, brought back the political stands of Sly and the Family Stone from two decades earlier. It also featured a setting of No Woman, No Cry, proving the global influence of Bob Marley.
When Various Artists took Lou Reed’s song Perfect Day to number one in 1997, I didn’t know the original (I was nine years old) but I loved how Heather Small and Tom Jones both bellowed ‘you’re going to reap just what you sow’. Lou had never released it as a single but people knew it from the 1972 album Transformer, produced by David Bowie, who along with Reed is also on the new version.
The next year, 1998, saw All Saints revive the 1975 Labelle classic Lady Marmalade, bracketed with the much more recent Under The Bridge. Three years later came the version which appeared on the Moulin Rouge in 2001 featuring Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lil Kim, Mya and Missy Elliot. There was no dance routine to that tune but there was a famous one to Tragedy, when Steps put their hands beside their head and kicked the Bee Gees disco classic into the new millennium.
By 2000, the music industry was collapsing in the face of file-sharing and the reluctance of consumers to spent $20 on an album with one good song. Thus did music executives return to the bottom line and the easiest group to manipulate: kids. In the UK we saw a group assembled in front of our very eyes and Hear’Say took Pure and Simple to number one; in the US, a coterie of Mickey Mouse Club graduates had success as solo acts (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera) or as one-fifth of a male vocal harmony group in the case of Justin Timberlake. The man who brought us The Spice Girls, Simon Fuller, unveiled his next trick: a TV show following the exploits of pop group S Club 7. The model must have been Fame, the 1980 movie which became a TV show.
The trend was also shown when Tiffany from Eastenders became first a popstar then a movie star. Martine McCutcheon covered the Donna Summer song On The Radio, bringing it back in 2001 fully 22 years after Donna’s original. 1983’s Uptown Girl was a 2001 Comic Relief single and number one for Westlife, while the Change tune The Glow of Love (1980) was sampled on Janet Jackson’s tune All For You. If today is no good, go back 20 years and pilfer old music.
Or just steal the identity. In 2002, harnessing the power of the internet, The Libertines were so indebted to the music of The Clash that the old band’s guitarist Mick Jones produced their second album. The first, including two vocalists who had swallowed everything Joe Strummer ever wrote, was loved by the music press, whose influence on British music was also coming to a close. The Libertines appear at the vortex of the music press and the celebrity (gutter) press, as Pete Doherty was as much a fascination for his words as his lyrics (a memoir follows this autumn). Amy Winehouse followed this pattern, but the music she liked stretched back way beyond the 20-year cycle.
For 2003’s example of the 20-Year Cycle, I point you to the controversy surrounding TATU, a Russian pop act who shared a kiss in the video to All The Things She Said. In 1984, Frankie Goes To Hollywood had their hit Relax banned by Radio One (‘when you wanna come’? You bet) and the furore around TATU drove eyeballs to the song, which was fine.
Also in the 1980s, the fabled Roxanne Wars kept fans entertained. A band who had a song called Roxanne Roxanne didn’t show up to a show, a girl called Lolita released a record under the name Roxanne’s Revenge, the original group responded with a song by The Real Roxanne, tens of MCs jumped onto the feud. Exactly 20 years later, Eamon swore many times about how he didn’t want his girl back; answering the record, Frankee put across her side of the story in FURB. The 20-Year Cycle even influences fun rap trends and if the trend has any meaning then Eamon and Frankee will duet in 2024 to mark 20 years of the feud.
The number 20 was in the air when Bob Geldof reprised Live Aid with Live 8, a concert in Hyde Park to highlight the issue of debt in the developing world. If Live Aid brought the rock spectacle to the stadium, Live 8 reminded music fans of the power of music to raise issues and also give newer acts a platform. Keane, Coldplay, Travis, Dido, Stereophonics, Snow Patrol, Razorlight and Joss Stone all appeared, as did Strong, The Who, Madonna and Elton John. The coup was to get the original line-up of Pink Floyd onstage one last time, although the headliner was Paul McCartney who kicked off the set with the line ‘It was 20 years ago today’ from Sgt Pepper and closed it with a chorus of Hey Jude. Nobody remembers Live 8, though, even as it was preceded by a re-recording of Do They Know It’s Christmas.
In the late 1980s, the magnificent Neneh Cherry broke through with Buffalo Stance, a song full of attitude and melody. Neneh's dad was a free jazz saxophonist and the father of Lily Allen was alternative comedian Keith. In 2006, Lily had two number ones with Smile and LDN, which were full of swear words, attitude and melody and helped to make her one of the most popular acts on MySpace, which had replaced the music press and a place for music fans to congregate and, especially, to socialise.
Comic Relief, however, kept on raising millions for worthwhile causes, helped by annual telethons and charity singles. There were two of them in 2007: a collaboration between Girls Aloud and Sugababes reviving Walk This Way, and Peter Kay and Matt Lucas performing I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by Matt’s beloved Proclaimers. The Run DMC and Aerosmith version of Walk This Way came out in 1986, while I’m Gonna Be was a UK smash in 1988 (it was a US hit in 1993 after an appearance in a forgotten Johnny Depp vehicle). Average the 21-year and 19-year gaps between the covers and originals coming out and you get 20 years.
In 1988 U2 were the biggest band in the world. In 2008 Coldplay were the biggest band in the world. Both acts were propelled by the messianic zeal of their singer and primary lyricist. The popularity of Viva La Vida was propelled by a TV ad for Apple rather than a concert film called Rattle & Hum, which saw U2 tour America and get the blues.
In the late 2000s, songs were eligible to chart no matter how long ago they were released. Hence we get the phenomenon every December of a Top 40 full of Christmas songs when ordinarily they would have to be reissued and in the shops. The streaming era maximised this craze but it began when single-track downloads began to outsell physical singles; Chris Moyles got a Billie Piper song back into the Top 20 when the rule was changed in 2007. By Christmas 2009, with a decade of Pop Idols and X Factor stars holding the monopoly on the cherished Christmas Number One, a campaign took root around a song from 1992. Killing In The Name Of by Rage Against The Machine was the 2009 Christmas Number One, not quite 20 years on from the original release but more or less. When the group performed the song on the BBC, they had to be faded out because of the explicit lyrics.
In 1990 Madonna was the biggest solo act in the world. In 2010 Lady Gaga was on her way to being the same with a formula that was suspiciously like that of her fellow Italian-American. Gaga would use cinema and her stage shows to push a message of self-acceptance, while Madonna was more interested in provocation. Born This Way would have a stunning similarity to Express Yourself but early in her career Gaga pitched herself as a singing, dancing purveyor of dance-pop. She’s a better singer and dancer, although she isn’t immune to creating headlines with dresses made of meat.
In 2022, Jennifer Lopez has rekindled the romance which launched a thousand magazine spreads. In 2011, she brought back the 1989 Kaoma hit Lambada on her song On The Floor (produced by Lady Gaga’s producer RedOne). Also in 2022, Little Mix are on what could be their final tour before they settle into motherhood while Harry Styles is a performer in his own right and not one-fifth of a New Kids On The Block knock-off created to make money for Simon Cowell. Both Little Mix and One Direction were attempts to sell the same sort of teen-pop to the new generation; TikTok stars do that today, while the Spice Girls are approaching 50 years of age and New Kids are headlining a package tour which they launched with a song called Bring Back The Time.
As with Rage in 2009, an old song came back to prominence in its original form in 2013 after Ant & Dec performed their debut hit Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble on primetime television. They followed four members of 5ive (first hit in 1997), Atomic Kitten (1999) and Blue (2000), who were all taking part in a TV series of their own called The Big Reunion. Wearing their old uniforms that they wore as PJ & Duncan AKA, the Geordie scamps threw themselves into a hit that came out when they were 18 and still known as their Byker Grove characters. Royalties went to ChildLine.
By 2014, the trend for recycling old pop music was alive and well, given that streaming was decimating both downloads and CD sales: For her hit Anaconda, Nicki Minaj borrowed a couple of the hooks from Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot, which in 1992 was outsold only by End of the Road by Boyz II Men in the USA; German DJ Parra for Cuva (born in 1991) put out a trance version of Wicked Game by Chris Isaak (a hit over Christmas 1990) with vocals by Anna Naklab under the title Wicked Games; Tom Odell was picked to turn John Lennon’s song Real Love, one of the aforementioned new Beatles songs from the Anthology series in the mid-1990s, into a ballad for a John Lewis advert.
In 2015, the big movie was Straight Outta Compton, the story of reality rap act NWA, who admittedly came to prominence at the end of the 1980s but whose music permeated America to such an extent that by 1995 hiphop was becoming a rival to rock as the world’s dominant genre. In May 2022 a child of that generation, Kendrick Lamar, is releasing a new album. 2015 saw his masterpiece To Pimp A Butterfly capture a moment in American society, with songs like Alright becoming an anthem for Black Americans to chant on protests for equality.
On a more fun side, one of the dancefloor smashes of 2016 was a mash-up. The genre had proliferated in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of digital production software and mp3 files. In the tradition of acts like Soulwax, Danger Mouse and Freelance Hellraiser, 99 Souls spliced together The Boy Is Mine by Brandy & Monica and the song Girl by Destiny’s Child and had a top five hit with The Girl Is Mine. Going back a little further in time, Bruno Mars recorded 24K Magic, a love letter to the swingbeat sound of the early 1990s which won the Album of the Year GRAMMY. The music video to the single Finesse, featuring Cardi B, was a homage to the great promo videos of TLC and other acts from that era.
In 1996 Macarena was a 14-week number one in America. Justin Bieber was born in 1994, so is too young to remember doing the dance that year; perhaps that was why he was chosen to bring the Luis Fonsi song Despacito to prominence in 2017. That year was big for Spanish-inflected pop: Camila Cabello’s heart was in Havana; J Balvin called together Mi Gente to dance; Little Mix hopped on a version of the CNCO song Reggaeton Lento; and DJ Khaled sampled the Latin groove of Maria Maria by Santana (produced by Wyclef Jean) on his hit Wild Thoughts. Drake was also preparing to release a track called Nice For What, which featured a sped-up sample of the 1998 track Ex-Factor.
In 2018, two songs quoted years roughly 20 years in the past. Charli XCX and Troye Sivan wanted to go back to 1999 when Baby One More Time was in the charts and JTT (Jonathan Taylor Thomas) was the kid on Home Improvement. The video referenced The Sims, TLC, Titanic, Backstreet Boys, Eminem, Spice Girls, The Matrix and the Nokia 3310. Anne-Marie, with an assist from Ed Sheeran, quoted Baby One More Time, 99 Problems, Bye Bye Bye, Ride Wit Me by Nelly and The Next Episode by Dr Dre on the chorus of 2002. With streaming services making the entire history of pop available to fans, it was only sensible for record labels to beckon songs which quote old tunes which could also make them some money, especially if Anne-Marie’s audience were not alive in 2002.
Country music is one of the worst offenders at referencing past songs and artists. Morgan Wallen brought back the mullet in 2019, sported in the 1990s by Joe Diffie, as he prepared to become a bankable A List star with a double-album that spent most of 2021 at number one (albeit in a singles-led genre). Luke Combs, meanwhile, profited from performing the muscular country-rock of his heroes Brooks & Dunn, a big deal in country music whom he namechecked on his song Lovin’ On You. Luke more than held his own when he teamed up with Kix and Ronnie on a version of their song Brand New Man.
In the 2020s, culture collapsed in on itself. While Old Town Road broke the record for weeks at number one in the UK, the world could not go out to see live performances and instead scrolled through applications like TikTok on their phones. The biggest story of the current era has been the renaissance of Craig David, who was a teenage prodigy with a debut solo album in 2000. Alongside this has been the acceptance of young black talent like Dave and Stormzy, whose records have been produced by the very white Fraser T Smith, the superstar hook writer MNEK and producer Inflo aka Dean Josiah Cover. He spends his time producing tracks for Adele and masterminding the Sault project which defies categorisation. I suppose one can compare him to Aphex Twin aka Richard D James, a composer who also likes to be anonymous and who had a brief chart career in the late 1990s.
Rapper ArrDee is 19 and he wasn’t yet born when Born To Do It came out. Nor did he exist when Flowers, a song by Sweet Female Attitude, almost topped the UK charts in a time where the twostep garage of Craig David spread to pop production. ArrDee sampled the song on his own hit Flowers (Say My Name) at the end of 2021 and followed SFA into the top five.
For ArrDee’s generation, culture moves so much faster than it did when the previous generation were growing up. iTunes only opened its store in 2004, and Netflix and Lovefilm were rivals in the DVD rental market, given that technology did not allow streaming.
In 2022, the 20-year cycle is still present in global culture. Witness the pop-punk revival which accommodates a new album from Avril Lavigne doing the same thing as a 37-year-old mum that she was doing as a 17-year-old teenager. The four-year reign of Donald Trump as US President was chronicled on network TV and newspapers, but also by Sarah Cooper, who lipsynched his words and got a Netflix special out of it. Jackie Weaver woke up as a viral sensation one morning for kicking someone out of an online meeting and became the only story in time for several days.
A full playlist of songs is available here.
You can hear my song 20-Year Cycle here, which quotes a beloved song which was played in the clubs (!) in 2002.