“But The Cure weren’t even Goth! Or so I heard it argued back in the day. How can you be something that hasn’t even been named yet? What they were, was good, sometimes great, which is true of Caterpillar, a wigged out pop experiment if there ever was one. Nothing does what you expect it to, but it always works, keeps the foot tapping, the head nodding, the earworm slithering.” (Philip Random)
Note the question mark in the title. This is XTC telling it like it was in early 1978 – everybody confused about the new wild sound that was tumbling out of the punk eruptions and eviscerations of the previous year. But what was it? New Wave, claimed the marketing types, but that didn’t mean anything. That was just a way of selling stuff that wasn’t disco or metal or prog or just boring old rock. What it was, was pop, bullshit free, for the moment and all time.
“As I heard it put once, The Posies were the Seattle band of the early 90s that didn’t get mentioned much during all the grunge hype because they didn’t play to type, being more about big rich melodies and smart pop finesse than roaring chest rock. My friend Mike says they sound like the early 1970s Hollies taking on Led Zeppelin here. I’ll take his word for it. Epic and not unsweet.” (Philip Random)
“”Back in the day, I generally thought of The Cure as more of a pop band than anything else, and a damned good one. Which perhaps explains why I didn’t listen to Disintegration that much. My loss, because it’s a solid album all the way through. Though to this day, the track I keep coming back to is Lullaby which, it turns out, was their biggest ever hit in the UK. Though not so much here in the Americas, thankfully, because I’m not sick of it. Reminds me of spiders for some reason. In a good way. I mean, they’re our friends, aren’t they?” (Philip Random)
XTC were never quite punk; they were too pop savvy for that. Though they were there from the beginning, tearing up facades with the best of them. So maybe just call them a damned good band who, by 1982’s double-vinyl English Settlement, were taking off in a pile of different directions uniquely their own, with Ball and Chain reminding us that they still had the pop.
In 10cc‘s hands, pop was alive and rather brilliantly insane in 1976. Or whatever you call the kind of music they were messing around with on the album How Dare You? in general, the song I Wanna Rule The World in particular – spending big money on studio time and album art. “Art for art’s sake, money for god’s sake,” as one of the other songs on the album put it.
Randophonic 
