From the Vaults Friday Magazine Real Life 1978

The Year: 1978
The Album: Magazine, Real Life
Who it Influenced: Radiohead, The Smiths, The Auteurs, Pulp, Momus, Tall Dwarfs

The debut album for post-punk originators Magazine —and the arch, ironic, anxious persona frontman Howard Devoto cultivated on it— cast a long, tall shadow over English indie music for two decades after its 1978 release.

Real Life is a classic due to its critical acclaim and undoubted influence, but for years it was —and still is— a cult record. Magazine were the thinking-person's new-wave band, with odd, angular songs five minutes long, and Devoto's lyrics incisively carved atop.

Devoto was a huge influence on the scene-defining rakes and wits of English music through the '80s; he begat Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker, Momus (who wrote an ode to Devoto in 1998 called "The Most Important Man Alive"), Luke Haines, and Thom Yorke. His appeal isn't, truth be told, as immediate and obvious as any of his successors, and Magazine aren't the kind of polished pop band that The Smiths, Pulp, and Radiohead, for three, would be.

But Real Life is a glorious study in anxiety and antagonization: the album, and the band, a rebellion against the orthodoxy of punk-rock, which, by 1978, was starting to feel less like liberation theology and more a stylistic straitjacket.

• Full review: Magazine, Real Life