Progressive 80’s pop / sophisti-pop

Second tier: Alphaville with the great voice of Marian Gold, ABC with the great voice of Martin Fry, the Fixx (the Cy Curnin and Jamie West-Oram combo), Icehouse and OMD . Many more.....

Another missing person is Tony Mansfield (master producer with Aha, Naked Eyes, Minor Detail and many others) but his band New Musik made just that: unique and original synth pop with tons of details, pings and echoes, sounding like The Korgis (A Stackridge offshoot). 

Basia (2 albums)

The Blow Monkeys (1 album)

Deacon Blue (7 albums)

The Divine Comedy (5 albums)

Everything But the Girl (6 albums)

Bryan Ferry (6 albums)

Julia Fordham (3 albums)

Go West (1 album)

Hothouse Flowers (1 album)

Level 42 (1 album)

Lighthouse Family (3 albums)

Prefab Sprout (6 albums)

Roxy Music (2 albums)

Rumer (4 albums)

Simply Red (8 albums)

Spandau Ballet (1 album)

Swing Out Sister (3 albums)

Tears for Fears (5 albums)

From what I gather, sophisto pop is sort of an amalgamation or basket that includes both blue eyed soul and smooth jazz.  Wiki says Aztec Camera, Swing Out Sister, Simply Red, Prefab Sprout, Sade, Level 42 are all sophisto pop but that then is a very wide basket. I don't quite know why AC and Prefab Sprout should be in that group whereas I see some similarity or association between Level 42, Simply Red and SOS.  I believe the Level 42 bassist joined SOS for the latter's performance of Breakout at the Prince's Trust concert in 1989.

Whether it needed a new term is, indeed, highly debatable.  But hey, it's no worse than the millions of death metal/black metal sub genres out there which get increasingly dubious with vanishingly few differences between the sub genres. 

They’re wonderful. Have you heard their latest, 2015’s ‘Autumn in the Neighbourhood?’ It’s fantastic!:

Although I like many of the artists named so far aren't we really just sticking shiny new labels on very old bottles of 'Pop' here? I mean there was a thread recently on the equally spurious Zolo genre and now Sophisti-Pop?. It boils down to this: All people prefer certain Pop Music over others but elitists believe themselves too 'deep and smart' for Pop Music so the Pop Music they prefer they don't call Pop Music because Pop Music is also enjoyed by 'shallow and dumb' people ergo, the Pop Music elitists prefer is really Sophisto-Pop. This is pitiful. Pop Music doesn't have to be a pejorative term.

That said, this cranky rodent will enter into the discussion in the spirit I hope it was intended:

Stan Ridgway

the Specials and the Special A.K.A

the Colourfield

Heaven 17

China Crisis

OMD

Deacon Blue

the Style Council

Is Steven Wilson live Footgaze?

I’d always read the term shoegazing came from a joke about dreampop bands spending all their time looking at their pedals.

There’s a great deal of dreampop/shoegaze that I love. - on both the rockier and poppier sides.

Honestly, it is possible that over time they have come to mean different things, but certainly when they were first used, they were used interchangeably. Dreampop was coined as the name of the genre before shoegaze. In fact, from memory shoegaze as a label came about in a similar way to Krautrock - as a joke, that was never meant to become a label, but somehow stuck. I think the joke was something along the lines of “Dreampop? You may as well call it shoegazing.” And so people did, and what was once known as dreampop started to sometimes be called shoegaze as well.

But because shoegaze was coined in the UK, it took awhile for the usage to make it across to the US. (It would be different for sure these days, with the interweb as it is now.) That meant for a time, generally speaking, bands were increasingly known as shoegaze in the UK, but still known as dreampop in the US. Bands like My Bloody Valentine who are definitely more rock than pop to me, were initially known as a dreampop band. I suspect any separation of the terms has been done retrospectively.

Personally, I don’t really care, and have never used either label. Neither gives a great indication of what you are going to hear. They are as arbitrary and meaningless as grunge was. But living in NZ, where we had about 50/50 media coming from the UK and the US it was definitely noticeable at the time that the same band was called dreampop initially by both, and then shoegaze in UK media, and dreampop in US media.