On the timeline, the groups are ordered by the year of their "breaktrough".
For some of the artists, this was also the high point of their career, for other
this was just the beginning of a career that is still going on to this day.
A brief history of Belgian
Pop Music :
The fifties and the sixties see only the rare exception of original music
from Belgium popping up (e.g. Ferre Grignard,
The Cousins, The
Pebbles, Wallace Collection, heck
.. even Soeur Sourire and Rocco
Granata). During those decades there was already a lot of music-making going
on, but most of the artists did adapations of the songs that were popular abroad.
Jacques Brel ... that's a totally different story
of course.
The seventies saw a huge number of Flemish Folk singers coming out, showing it
was possible to "rock" in their mother tongue (e.g. Johan
Verminnen, Raymond Van Het Groenewoud,
Kris Debruyne ...). There was also a diversification
of the music scene with new genres popping up (e.g. hardrock with Irish
Coffee, Country with Pendulum, Disco with
Two Man Sound, blues with Roland
and Tjens Couter, Symphonic Rock with Machiavel
...)
Only after the punk wave of the middle of the seventies (that has brought us The
Kids and one of the best/worst punk singles by Plastic
Bertrand ...), there was an explosion of energy and fresh new bands : first
as an underground movement (e.g. de Brassers,
Siglo XX, Front
242, Neon Judgement, Red
Zebra, ...), then also with a wide appeal in the so called "Belpop"-generation
(e.g. the Machines, T.C.Matic,
de Kreuners, Luna
Twist, Allez Allez, Lavvi
Ebbel, Arbeid Adelt, Jo
Lemaire ...).
After a first desillusion of these bands in the middle of the eighties ("Belgium
is too small"), a new generation came to the stage with a more mature and
sometimes more commercial appeal (e.g. the different groups of the New
Beat dance craze, Vaya Con Dios, Arno,
Clouseau, Pop Gun,
Soulsister, Technotronic,
Won Ton Ton ...). These bands all managed to
get a serious foothold abroad.
In the nineties, this trend gets even more visible with the emergence of new and
internationally appealing artists (like dEUS, Zita
Swoon, K's Choice, Axelle
Red, Hoover, 2
Unlimited, Metal Molly, Channel
Zero, Wizards of Ooze, Evil
Superstars, Zap Mama, An
Pierlé ...). There is also a new wave of Flemish artists who have taken
rock in Dutch to a new level (e.g. Noordkaap,
De Mens, Gorki ...)
The "average quality" of the music produced in Belgium is still definitely
"going up".
Fifties - Sixties
- Seventies - Eighties
- Nineties
