The West Coast Sound photo archives are legendary among music bloggers. where the majority of sites scour Google Image to find photos for use, we've got a secret weapon: a vast world of file cabinets housing thousands of old press photos. This is an amazing collection that we could use to blackmail hundreds of new wave bands, hair metalheads and pop stars from the 1980s. Killer cuts abound; we can trace Billy Joel's hair from back then to, say, the early '00s, when record companies stopped mailing photos and started emailing digital ones. It seems silly to let this ammunition go to waste, so we're going to start digging up photos of artists in the news, and see how their style-sense fared at other times in their career. Perry Ferrell: you looked silly in 1994, and we've got the evidence to back it up.

Paula Abdul in the mid-1990s. How can you fire this temptress, American Idol?

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