NOW Yearbook '80 and NOW Yearbook '80 EXTRA [2022]

 

Today we’re featuring NOW Yearbook ‘80 and the companion compilation NOW Yearbook ‘80 EXTRA. They are the ninth and tenth releases respectively in this rapidly-released series.

released: 07.15.22

85 tracks/4CD

47 tracks/3LP on clear vinyl

1980. As the year dawned, I was a music-loving, girl-crazy 13-year-old eighth-grader. After that summer, I was a music-loving, girl-crazy 14-year-old high school freshman football player. The music of 1980 was, to put it mildly, pretty awesome. I was almost exclusively buying albums at this point though a few singles made the cut. Radio-wise, I was still listening to WLS primarily yet enjoying the great-sounding WLRW more and more. We also enjoyed various jukeboxes at the youth center, Pizza Hut, the high school cafeteria, and Garcia Brothers Pizza, where their jukebox was adjacent to a cigarette machine. There were also great music shows like American Bandstand, Saturday Night Live, Soul Train, and Fridays.

Listening to NOW Yearbook '80 made it clear that the US and UK charts had not converged as much as they would in the coming years. Of the 85 songs in the collection, only 30 of them made the weekly charts in both countries. Of the 24 UK Number Ones from 1980, 15 are on this album and more will invariably show up on the EXTRA collection. Looking back, I did not know a lot of these songs in 1980 and even after all these years not many of my favorite songs from 1980 made the cut for NOW Yearbook '80. 

The collection starts with a bang or rather the thump-thump-thump of Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" followed by my second favorite Blondie track "Atomic" and then Adam & the Ants with "Dog Eat Dog". And while I am a big Kate Bush fan, her "Babooshka" does nothing for me except make me smile when my wife says the word. The rest of CD1 is hit or miss though mostly miss. I don't think we've ever mentioned this before but there is no uniform mastering across the NOW Yearbook series or even within each volume. Some tracks are brick-walled and some sound inferior to their appearances on different discs while still other tracks have never sounded better.

Comparing the songs on CD2 to those on CD1, the second disc has more of my favorites and it is weird having tracks by both Judas Priest and Motorhead within a track of Air Supply's lone UK Top 20 song. Not complaining, though. The last thing I would want is genre-specific discs though you'd think chronological order would be de rigueur for a compilation highlighting one specific year.

Tracks 13-22 are as good of a run as I've heard on any of these yearbooks thus far and they are all single versions as they should be on such a collection but you know that the folks at NOW are going to put out at least a few compilations of remixes and extended 12-inch versions, right? 

The third disc in NOW Yearbook '80 kicks off with "London Calling" and manages to stay true throughout the entire disc - it just might be the very first disc in the entire series that could be issued as a stand-alone disc. True to what? The vibe, man. I've given this one a few more spins than the other discs in this compilation.

As usual in these collections, CD4 is a wildly varied listen. The disc begins with the three singles pictured above and goes all over the place after that.

released: 08.26.22

66 songs/3CD

As a listener heretofore largely unfamiliar with the 1980 chart hits in the UK, NOW Yearbook '80 EXTRA comes in pretty handy filling in those knowledge gaps.

Queen and Blondie return as the first two artists on the first disc of EXTRA and many other artists from NOW Yearbook '80 make encore appearances on NOW Yearbook '80 EXTRA. Upon an initial listen, this 1980 anthology proved more satisfying and enjoyable than the previous one.  

As a highly-biased listener from America, there lurks a really strong single CD-length playlist within the 66 tracks on NOW Yearbook '80 EXTRA for me. My favorite run in the tracklisting is on CD Three, from track 13 ("The Spirit of Radio") through track 17 (the underrated and often overlooked "All for Leyna").

As has become the custom, we pulled up Paul English's NOW Yearbook EXTRA PLUS playlist for 1980 and enjoyed it immensely, limited only by what is available via Spotify.

Would NOW continue to go back into the Seventies or spring forward to the mid or late Eighties? Or, as a few fans guessed, would they double back and gather up stray tracks from the half-decade they had already covered and issue a 1980-1984 Yearbook?

NOW Yearbook Series

01    NOW Yearbook '83 [2021]
02    NOW Yearbook '84 [2021]
03    NOW Yearbook '83 EXTRA [2021]
04    NOW Yearbook '84 EXTRA [2022]
05    NOW Yearbook '82 [2022]
06    NOW Yearbook '82 EXTRA [2022]

07    NOW Yearbook '81 [2022]

08    NOW Yearbook '81 EXTRA [2022]

09    NOW Yearbook '80 [2022]

10    NOW Yearbook '80 EXTRA [2022]
...
13    NOW Yearbook '85 [2022]