Originally Posted by Gavin B.

I'm not sure where you grew up but I never heard the Beat on any radio station, let alone a station that also played Rick Springfield and Air Supply.

I'm not even sure how Foreigner sounded, so I'll have to leave that call to your judgement, since you're familiar with the music of both bands. And please don't ask me to listen to Rick Springfield or Air Supply or Foreigner to verify your assessment because there isn't a lot of MOR pop that I can listen to without getting an urge to commit suicide within 2 minutes.

That being said, there's plenty of commerical sounding music that is worth listening to and I don't hold commercial success against any band.

But let's face it, none of the 2 Tone bands were not selling zillion units of musical product, be it the Beat, the Specials, Selector or Madness. I checked at the RIAA site none of the 2 Tone albums sold enough units to chart at 100,000 sales in the USA, even thirty years after their initial release.

Forward thinking bands rarely gain a mass audience, no matter how commerical they sound. Elvis Costello is probably the most enduring artist from that era and his music has the purest pop sound of any of the punk and post punk bands.