Fifty years ago this week, a small London label that had been going for barely two months released a two-and-a-half-minute single by a band called the Damned. "New Rose" came out on 22 October 1976. It's generally counted as the first record by a British punk band, it didn't chart, and it was on Stiff Records. Stiff had started that summer with £400 borrowed from the singer in Dr. Feelgood. Its first release, Nick Lowe's "So It Goes," cost £45 to make. Over the next decade the label gave us Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Madness, Kirsty MacColl and the Pogues, and it lost a fair few of them along the way. This week's New Wave Friday is Stiff's hour. We start in 1976 with the Damned and with the Saints, whose "(I'm) Stranded" came out in Brisbane a month earlier and on their own label, so they beat the British to it. We also pay a visit to Propeller in Auckland, another label that started on $400 and a hunch.

There's a running story in the middle of the hour. Kirsty MacColl's first single went to number two on the radio airplay chart in 1979, but nobody could buy it because the distributors were on strike. Four years later Tracey Ullman took the same song to number two, and the high note everyone remembers on that record is Kirsty's. We also stop for two singers who died on the same day last month: Pete Byrne of Naked Eyes, whose Bacharach cover went to number two in New Zealand while it stalled at 59 in Britain, and Catherine Ringer of Les Rita Mitsouko, the voice of French new wave. The hour finishes with a Damned record from this year, Nick Lowe still going strong at 77, and a Stiff number one that spent two weeks stuck behind the Village People.

Broadcast 23 October 2026

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