In The Mix: Power Pop Perfection Vol 3

Power pop got its name in an advert. In May 1967, promoting "Pictures Of Lily" to the NME, Pete Townshend said "power pop is what we play" — and In The Mix returns to the genre with the man who named it sitting at track five, playing a record made fourteen months before the name existed. Around The Who's "Substitute" there's Split Enz at number one, The Hollies doing a top-five single about being nosy on a train, and three songs nobody involved wanted to release: The Muffs' "Sad Tomorrow", which Kim Shattuck agreed to only "begrudgingly" and thought was a ballad; Squeeze's "Up The Junction", a song with no chorus at all that Chris Difford assumed would have to come off the album; and the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night", which flopped so completely in 1973 that it sat in a drawer for two years before America made it a number one. Neil Finn, for the record, thought the chorus of "I Got You" was weak. Nobody who makes this stuff has the faintest idea.

The second half is almost entirely 2026, and one of it is younger than that: Ty Segall's "Black Paint" comes off an album released the morning of the show — and he played it at the Powerstation in Auckland back in March, five months before it existed, and told the room it wasn't out yet. There's Teenage Fanclub with a single five days old, recorded on a Hebridean island with a church organ; Trashcan Sinatras with the title track of their first album in a decade, released three days before the death of John Douglas, the man who wrote most of it; Finn Wolfhard, who would rather you heard him without knowing it was him; plus The Lemon Twigs, Fruit Bats, King Tuff and Blondie, whose drummer thought that famous take of "Dreaming" was a rehearsal. We finish with Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe, and one small thought about where all this ends up. Halfway through, Superchunk — from North Carolina, going since 1989 — turn up covering a song written in Dunedin in 1987 by five women on Flying Nun. Power pop went out from London in 1967 and came back through Look Blue Go Purple.

Broadcast 28 August 2026