UK Charts: 1980-1981

The 1980s may be the last decade to be the subject of mass-consciousness revivalism. Whether it's the environment-friendly positivity of the '90s being too raw a memory in a world with actual fascist manifestos or the fracturing of media consumption meaning we won't all be sitting in front of the same streaming service for a hypothetical 1990s equivalent to Stranger Things (assuming it doesn't get deleted in post-production for a tax write-off), no generation has constructed a notional version of the '90s to temporarily live inside and I'm not even sure what you'd do for the decades beyond that.

The brace of modern pop punk bands have come closest, inviting Avril Lavigne along to play for extra authenticity, but this is focused on a tiny subculture of a tiny slice of the decade. Put it this way, '80s-themed cocktail bars are so numerous there's one within walking distance at the point I write this, but I've never seen a '90s one and I'm a man who's been to a bar themed around old kung-fu movies.

Maybe I just need to live a little longer, given the '80s thing hasn't fully run its course yet. It fascinates me what the notional '90s revivalist movement would pick. Would it be Britpop and the myriad of hyper-local musical genres featuring unusually baggy clothing? Would we reboot Buffy The Vampire Slayer for modern sensibilities? (OK, that comment turned out to be more prophetic than I expected when I wrote it back in mid-2024). Or would it instead celebrate trying to eat shockingly bland food - spaghetti boiled until it's white! - in time to watch Gladiators and Big Break? Probably not.

I like to think about this because I have just enough memories of the latter part of the '80s for the revivalist vision to amuse me. There's a great image which goes around detailing the imagined pastel neon '80s, accompanied by an actual photo from the '80s in which almost every item is brown. Of course this would be the case; the whole point of revivalism is to create a kind of Greatest Hits of a time period, reducing it to things which would only have been encountered in clubs, fashion shows and none but the most outlandish of furniture shops. Vaporwave and neon are just more fun than three-bar fires and dodging fallen trees after Michael Fish had told you there definitely would not be a storm that night.

1980

So what is the reality, at least as far as the charts are concerned?

Our first #1 of the decade is the Pretenders with "Brass In Pocket", tearing down The Wall for the week starting 13th January. I remember this playing in radios well into the '90s, so much so that it surprises me how early it actually is. Below it, Billy Preston and Syreeta on "With You I'm Born Again", from the Fast Break film soundtrack and about as far from that popular capsule of the 1980s as we can get.

If anything, things sound more 1970s than the tail end of 1979 did, with the Nolans' "I'm In The Mood For Dancing" up in the charts for most of January, peaking at #3 in February. There's even a reissue of "Green Onions" at #7, and that's a record six months off being able to drink in pubs by this point.

Maybe it's unfair to judge the opening to the decade with records which entered the Top 40 in 1979, and the first week of January brings us Madness with "My Girl" (#3 January '80), a more recognisably '80s record.

Soft rock was going to be one of the decade's big genres, and Styx get in there early with "Babe" at #6. One of the great things '80s revivalism has brought us is the retrospective genre classification of yacht rock, and there's a definite yachtiness to Rupert Holmes' "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" although it only made it to #23.

2 Tone is the sound of the moment though, and The Specials have a #1 with a live EP featuring "Too Much Too Young". Although that point is a bit undermined by Kenny Rogers having nearly as big a hit with "Coward Of The County" (#1 February '80). I bet the people who bought that one had brown furniture.

All of this makes for the gentlest of transitions from 1979, which makes sense. There has been no event to immediately mark that we're in a new decade on the scale of the dissolution of the Beatles. Most of the popular genres are new enough there is no overwhelming need for them to reinvent themselves, or they're ones which have stuck around precisely because their evolution is so gradual. The Whispers' "And The Beat Goes On" (#2 February '80) suggests that the only real consequence from the much-vaunted death of disco is that everyone started calling the records post-disco instead.

It's plenty fine to still slide out singles from 1979 albums, with the Boomtown Rats getting "Someone's Looking At You" to #4 in February.

There is one notable change for 1980, though. Queen have gone from "No Synthesisers!" to "Synthesisers!" while recording album "The Game" and "Save Me" (#11 February '80) is their first single to feature them. It's a bit shy about that fact though, they're buried incredibly low in the mix and if it wasn't for the single having two synthesiser playing credits (both Brian May and engineer Reinhold Mack) you could miss it entirely.

Something about the turn of the 1980s and the dawning of the plastic age (obligatory Buggles reference, #16 February '80) had bands experimenting with changing their sound like no decade before or since. Sometimes it would be a complete break, an entire album in a new style (and Queen have that one coming up in a year or so!) but sometimes just a song or two amid otherwise conventional stylings, as with the Ramones on February #8 "Baby, I Love You".

This is not what I'd call a success, even with Phil Spector behind the controls, the man who ought to know how that song works. The band wanted to escape the confines of what they had created, a narrow lane by even punk standards, but there's something far too cloyingly deliberate about this attempt to capture broad pop appeal.

A better dressing up of an old record was Elvis Costello and the Attractions with "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down", a slow 1967 Sam & Dave number they lit a fire under, sped up until it had more than a dash of the Wigan casino to it, and took it to #4 for the start of March.

At the top of the charts that week were Blondie with "Atomic", a "Heart of Glass" follow-up with some of the same timing-pulse tricks but this time hooked to guitars that could have been straight out of an Ennio Morricone film score. The lyrics were near-enough ad-libbed in places and intended to be meaningless futurism to go along with the relentless mechanical noise.

It was knocked off the top spot by Fern Kinney's "Together We Are Beautiful", a disco hangover that joined the ranks of the many one-hit wonders the singles chart has hosted over the years. Having just lived through the '70s, it does strike me that this was quite an old sound by now, and structurally wouldn't have been out of place in 1976.

Not quite so old a sound as Rainbow on "All Night Long" (#5 March '80) though. Hard rock has been around a good decade or so by this point, and while you can probably detect the cleaner commercial appeal of glam and the energy and pace of punk having their influences here, it feels like an odd genre to come out the other side of the mess of the late '70s and be going head-to-head with all those new synthesised sounds.

Indeed, when I encountered the album from which it hails, I assumed this was from the mid '70s, somehow managing to listen to it multiple times without ever noticing the copyright date right there on the label. Perhaps that makes it interesting in terms of what will happen to the loose assortment of genres gathered together under the word "metal" in the 1980s. This is our starting point, our reference scientific material for hard rock circa 1979. (And ignore that we're a year on from Judas Priest charting with "Take on the World" by this point).

Having sorted through a box of mid-'80s soft rock singles recently, The Captain & Tennille's "Do That To Me One More Time" (#7 March '80) feels awfully familiar. They're an iconically '70s act and there's a 1979 date on the record, but there's a sheen to the production that you don't find on, say, "Arms of Mary". I'd prefer the latter on my turntable.

At #3 later in the month is "Turning Japanese", the Vapors' probably-not-about-masturbation single sounding oddly precursor-ish in a world where "Pinkerton" exists. I'm probably making connections that don't exist with that itchy post-punk rhythm and referencing the same country with much the same emotions, although in this case the subject of David Fenton's emotions is not herself Japanese.

The Jam slam an absolute classic straight in at the top in March with "Going Underground" double A-sided along with the far less good "Dreams of Children" - somehow "Underground", darling of many a Greatest Singles In The World Ever list since, was originally intended to be relegated to a non-album B-side and it was only a pressing plant mix-up that enabled DJs to play it as the new Jam single.

It gets three weeks at #1 before the Spinners come along with a medley "Working My Way Back To You/Forgive Me Girl", one of the year's bigger hits although there's something about these sort of part-cover, part-medley things that makes me think of school discos for children who are not yet quite old enough to try sneaking in alcohol or, indeed, point out that they'd prefer Nirvana.

Disco's failure to die over here continues beneath it with Liquid Gold's "Dance Yourself Dizzy" (#2 end March '80) - and this isn't any of that weird French or Italian stuff, it's classic Saturday Night Fever with those swelling strings and at least one "boogie-oogie" somewhere in there.

The names of the early '80s are starting to arrive and few of them could be more definitively a symbol of the decade than UB40, their debut double A-side "King" / "Food For Thought" hitting #4 in April. Named for one of the many forms that were part of the process of claiming unemployment benefit, a feature of British life at the turn of the decade that was never far from people's minds (three million!), with the album "Signing Off" a copy of said attendance card blown up to LP sleeve size.

What surprises me about this early effort is how far from the later gloss and radio-friendly superficiality of things like "Red, Red Wine" this is. Both sides are dense, dub-influenced records recorded in primitive fashion; according to percussionist Norman Hassan you can hear birdsong in the background of the album where bits of it were recorded in the garden. It's not quite the cupboard under the stairs, but I'll take it.

From one set of horns to another - can you get much more emblematic of early '80s charts than Dexy's Midnight Runners, who hit #1 in late April with second single "Geno"? Critics didn't enjoy it but the song became a fan favourite, the band claiming it was a good idea to play it twice in one gig to keep everyone happy.

These still feel like crossover charts where one decade bleeds into the next, Dr. Hook's "Sexy Eyes" at #4 one end of April and then that most '70s of names David Essex #4 at the other end with "Silver Dream Machine" from motorcyling Essex film vehicle "Silver Dream Racer". Like much of his output I feel this is tragically underrated and forgotten - it's a great pop single and sounds pretty contemporary in a world where you can walk into a record shop and come out with a Buggles single.

Blondie seem to have cracked the chart code, with Giorgio Moroder-penned film score "Call Me" delivering them another #1. It's dense, mean and almost certainly very cool although I've never quite got on with it. I think I want more lowbrow fun in my pop music.

Sky's "Toccata" (#5 April '80) is a reminder we still exist in a world where "The Wall" is a recent release (so recent we're still a couple of years off the film version) and my word is this proggy for something which is circulating in the pop charts, even if those are pop charts which also feature Rush's "Spirit of Radio" somewhere down there (#13 March '80). If I can't take lowbrow fun then hey, weird is a decent substitute.

McCartney is now having a crack at ruining funk on "Coming Up" (#2 April '80). I don't know what it is about the man's music which makes me bristle, although a live version on the deluxe edition of "McCartney II" I'm using as a reference doesn't come across quite so bad.

It's time for Eurovision giant Johnny Logan to make his first entry to the contest and take his first win after an attempt that ended at third place in the Irish selection contest the previous year, and good luck finding a version of "What's Another Year" online that hasn't been re-recorded into schmaltzy '90s boy band submission. As ever, a dive into YouTube with "45RPM" added to the search to find an original playing on an actual record player reveals a credible slice of soft late '70s pop, maybe not the most remarkable of records but we did like our Eurovision winners and it went to #1 in May.

Below it a week later at #2 are Hot Chocolate with "No Doubt About It". A moody number that suddenly breaks out into big choruses when you're not expecting it, this is possibly the best record about UFOs until Hüsker Dü came along. Oh wait, they already have, being formed in 1979. "Books About UFOs" is a while off yet, though.

"Off The Wall" gives Michael Jackson another hit with "She's Out Of My Life" (#3 May '80) and wow, I'm reminded just how stark a difference there is between basically everything Jacksons up to this point and "Off The Wall". This was deliberate; Michael wanted creative freedom and to put out something which didn't feel like merely an offshoot of the Jacksons ensemble, and Quincy Jones gave him an instantly recognisable sound signature. The dawning of the '80s was a chance for musical reinvention that many acts took up, but it's hard to find one more commercially successful or creatively satisfying than Michael Jackson's.

(We will find a few that are quite a lot worse, certainly once we get to 1982).

It's a time for great 2 Tone records; The Specials have double-A "Rat Race" / "Rude Boys Outa Jail" at #5 for June but I'm enjoying somewhat less enduring (if higher-charting!) "Mirror In The Bathroom" from The Beat (#4 May '80). The reflective poem about narcissism is perhaps an even more quintessentially '80s theme than the cocaine habit some people think it's about. As composer Dave Wakeling points out, "it's the mirror on the wall not the one on your knee". I'm not saying people haven't tried doing a line off a vertical surface, but it feels impractical.

We still haven't shaken off the weirdness that dogged the charts for much of the '70s, with by now ten year old "Suicide Is Painless", from the film M*A*S*H and used in various instrumental versions as the theme for the TV series hitting #1 in May. Yeah, I have no idea, although it was later covered to great effect by the Manic Street Preachers.

Don McLean's "Crying" took over from it as chart-topper in June, its eventual 11 weeks in the Top 40 a little odd for a by then two year old recording that itself is a cover of 1961 Roy Orbison record. Listening to Roxy Music's "Over You" at #5 feels like being snapped back into the correct decade.

Lipps Inc's "Funkytown" is at #2 and a strong example of the contrast between '70s disco and '80s disco - this is all spare arrangements, vocodered lyrics and those wonderfully stark-sounding analogue synths. They're still hanging on to those strings but they feel awfully dated compared to the hard-hitting, uncompromising rest of the record.

Below it are Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway with "Back Together Again" - a posthumous record on Hathaway's part, this session on 13th January 1979 being the last before his death on the same day. It's a nice slice of funky soul.

I find myself drawn back to the world of analogue synths and weird sounds though, with Gary Numan's "We Are Glass" (#5 May '80). I love this sort of experimentation, especially when it hits surprisingly high chart positions. How futuristic must this have sounded in early 1980!

Another great electronic record is Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark's "Messages" (#13 June '80). Combining the itchiness of new wave with the possibilities of a synth band and a strong pop sensibility, they may never have been overtly cool or critical darlings but that's not going to stop me enjoying this a lot.

I threatened using "All Night Long" as a reference point and Judas Priest #12 "Breaking The Law" is a good opportunity. This has all the classic hallmarks to show why Judas Priest were such a huge influence on the rising NWOBHM bands (several of whom served as opening acts for Judas Priest tours in this time period) - it's fast, it's concise, there's far more relentlessness in that constant guitar chug and it carries a certain oil-stained outlaw swagger.

So Queen's big synthesiser moment is upon us and "Play The Game" is lower placed than I thought it would be at #14. But perhaps a glance upward at Numan and OMD reveal what's going on here; this is regular late '70s Queen seasoned with a few electronic effects disconnected from the rest of the song. Those first few seconds are a hell of an album opener for a band who've sworn off the synthesisers up to this point, but strip them away and we're still left with a serviceable Queen single as opposed to, y'know, silence.

July chart-topper "Xanadu" does more electronics in its first 20 seconds, although I must admit some disappointment that Olivia Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra are performing an original number from the soundtrack of the complete flop film of the same name, and not a cover of 1968's "The Legend Of Xanadu" which I am linking once more because I want you to play that and think of the possibilities. Or just play it, because when I think of lowbrow fun in the pop charts there are few finer examples, although you'll realise we've come a long way in what has been just 12 short years. Make that 11 short years and one very long 1976.

Sadly I cannot dwell in 1968, for we have awful records to consider in the notional present day of July 1980. Stacy Lattisaw's "Jump To The Beat" is at #3 and I am reminded of how much of this forgettable, generically perky pop existed - dig into a box of singles from the decade in the hope of finding some early REM or the like and you'll throw what feels like a thousand of these in the discard pile from artists you've never heard of and won't remember. I'm coining the phrase "landfill '80s" in honour of the post-Britpop indie landscape. I fear I might be using it a lot.

I also fear what I'm going to encounter from a band called Splodgenessabounds, although it does remind me of an ex who used to say that as a phrase for feeling a bit fat and tired after you've eaten too much, usually around the Christmas period. "Simon Templar"/"Two Pints of Lager and a Packet Of Crisps Please" (#7 June '80 and a triple A-side with yet another novelty single the Official Charts Company declines to mention) is not horrible but has a certain clumsy obviousness and resort to attempting to be offensive rather than being genuinely funny that defter contemporaries such as the Teenage Filmstars' "I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape" managed to avoid.

The determination to keep the '70s totems of irksome novelty records and disco going manifests further with Odyssey's "Use It Up And Wear It Out" topping the charts in July although this is sharing chart space with Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (#13 July '80) so the 1980s are coming whether backward-looking pop purchasers like it or not.

Leo Sayer's "More Than I Can Say" (#2 July '80) is a lot less bad than you remember, even given the inauspicious circumstances that he just wanted to record an "oldie" and this one just happened to be on an advert he saw. Try not to think that the difference in time between the Crickets original and this, and the difference in time between this and now... yeah.

Kate Bush's "Babooshka" (#5 July '80) remains weird. It also introduced the Fairlight CMI sampler to the pop charts; Peter Gabriel was the first to use one but he used the samples only as subtle accents, whereas the breaking glass sample on this is unavoidable. We're a world apart from Joe Meek's toilet and the Box Tops with their aeroplane sound effect, although perhaps it doesn't feel quite so distant when you consider the CMI was viewed as sort of like a Mellotron which was a bit more reliable and didn't wander off pitch at the slightest provocation, and then ultimately as sounding boring because... well, it was reliable and didn't wander off pitch at the slightest provocation.

"Emotional Rescue" (#9 July '80) is an unfortunate demonstration of that whole "the Stones since the eighties" thing - this is the band who gave us "Play With Fire", "She Smiled Sweetly", "2000 Man" and "Dead Flowers" amongst other better-remembered numbers and here they are being so devoid of conviction, so emptily "now" that it's entirely outside the moment... like an own-brand box of cornflakes, it'll let you down my friend.

"Wednesday Week" (#11 July '80 for the Undertones) was alright, though.

With more than half the year gone, it's still feeling like a gradual introduction to the new decade, with Diana Ross hitting #2 going into August with "Upside Down", a track that sounds every bit like the Chic collaboration it is. Which is to say you wouldn't find this out of place in 1978.

Sheena Easton may be one of those names synonymous with '80s pop, but "9 to 5" (subtitled "Morning Train" to distinguish it from the Dolly Parton classic, and peaking at #3 August '80) could easily slot in to one of those child star acts from the era of Osmondmania. The dramatic gear changes near the end don't help the defence case there. This was actually her second single to be released, but entered the Top 40 and hit its chart peak earlier.

Another of those gradual but era-separating changes is the dissolution of ABBA. The two marriages at the centre of the group split apart in 1979 and 1980, and while the band would struggle on to 1981's wistful, mature and solemn album "The Visitors", the time was already up. Bjorn Ulvaeus claims it was just something he wrote while drunk, a fleeting outpouring of emotion that was nothing to do with his divorce, but the end result of August #1 "The Winner Takes It All" is much the same - a record with a sense of finality, of ending, that we've not heard since Abbey Road.

I can't stop there, because this is one of the best singles to ever make it into the wild grab-bag that is the history of the UK Top 40, and deserves every sale of that chart-topping position. I've said many a time that it was never far below the surface, but this was the moment ABBA proved that beyond the plastic gloss and the factory assembly line of their mid-'70s output they could deliver real pain and longing.

A fortnight later and David Bowie is taking that #1 slot for the most "new decade" sounding thing we've turned our attention to for a while, "Ashes to Ashes". And yet for all of that it feels like a natural progression from the Berlin trilogy, a way to take the experimentation and self-referential lyrics and turn them into something commercial. In this sequel he disassembles the myth of Major Tom and reflects on a strung-out, drug-fuelled 1970s. At the same time, it also has a firm grasp of the future, shooting the then most expensive music video ever made in a remarkably forward-looking move for a world where MTV was still a year off taking to the airwaves.

Sheena Easton single "Modern Girl" (#8 September '80) has progressed to the late '70s AM radio pop sound, although the charting chronology is messing with us there as this was actually the first to be released, all the way back in February. Television exposure on BBC reality TV programme "The Big Time" was responsible, which feels a rather anachronistic thing to write about 1980, and the show came back for a follow-up episode with the now-star afterward.

(The same series was responsible for ending the long career of 1950s TV chef Fanny Cradock, after she bullied a young hopeful into serving a completely unsuitable dessert for a fancy lunch at the Dorchester, which fell apart in the hot environment of a hotel kitchen)

The Clash's fantastic "Bankrobber" is at #12, one of their most satisfying explorations into the world of dub; utterly faithful to its inspiration and yet also instantly recognisable as The Clash.

The Jam take a different inspiration for chart-topping slice of mod pop "Start!", a bright-sounding record that according to Bruce Foxton subconsciously takes influence from the Beatles' "Taxman"

Somehow the charts are still finding time for Elvis reissues - "It's Only Love" being a flop on its original 1971 outing in the US, but hitting #3 here in September 1980 on a double A-side with even older 1966 cut "Beyond The Reef" dug out of the vaults. Play both sides back to back and you might start to see where I'm coming from with that belief post-comeback Elvis is best Elvis, complete with a little contribution from his incredibly farty trumpet just over a minute in.

September brings three more interesting entries into the Top 40. Stevie Wonder's "Master Blaster (Jammin')" (#2 September '80) is a tribute to Bob Marley, and competently nails the sound. That sound is the somewhat over-clean production of later Marley records, but don't let that take away from the feeling this man gets it.

Then we have peak Madness with "Baggy Trousers" (#3 October '80), finding their template with a brash, jaunty form of 2 Tone allied to kitchen sink drama lyrics, all tied together with a strong sense of back-of-classroom cheek. You hum it, I'll smash your face in.

Finally it's Queen with "Another One Bites The Dust" (#7 September '80). Read enough fawning liner notes and you'd be forgiven for thinking Queen invented disco with this, in which case finding it here as a competent but relatively conservative exploration of a genre that had already said its quaalude-drenched piece and departed for more interesting shores might be a shock.

It's also a bit of a strange one-off in the Queen discography, and certainly comes across rather jarring sandwiched between "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Killer Queen" on the band's Greatest Hits compilation. This was the result of John Deacon hanging around with Chic and thinking a similar bass line might be fun to do, and other than an effects processor Brian May was playing with is still true to the band's erstwhile "no synthesisers!" ethos. It wasn't ever destined to be more than one of those weird album-only experiments until Michael Jackson suggested to the band that there was some commercial potential here.

But that is perhaps the story of Queen at the turn of the 1980s - a band coming out of a decade so successful they were now being drafted in to create film soundtracks, but knowing they did so with a dated sound and an increasing dependence on novelty gimmicks and pastiches. They seemed to be searching for something and yet not quite finding it.

Perhaps they should have taken notes from the Police, whose "Don't Stand So Close To Me" went straight in at #1 at the end of September and stayed there for four weeks. This is the restless sound of new wave distilled into appealing pop, with its soaring and instantly catchy choruses carrying sparsely-instrumented verses with some rather intense lyrical themes and the odd sharp literary reference.

Perhaps Queen were on the right track when they had a tilt at rockabilly; Matchbox have Crickets cover "When You Ask About Love" on the #4 spot in October. It's a little glossy and confected for me; I like my rockabilly with a little more grit.

I'll take gritless Crickets covers over October #1 "Woman In Love" from Barbra Streisand, mind. This is still largely in that late '70s AM radio pop sound, and you can see where Sheena Easton claims hearing Streisand on the telly was a huge influence. What I do notice though is how much that chorus style with its strings would be borrowed and re-borrowed by girl bands in the '90s. At least I hope so, because it's going to be awkward if we ever get to that point and find I misremembered it.

Status Quo's "What You're Proposing" sits at #2 as October '80 closes out, and now there's a band who aren't wrestling in the slightest with what their sound for the '80s should be. It's a good thing they're so confident in that "more of the same" strategy, because this chart week of 5th October 1980 has a lot to talk about.

Bad Manners enter the Top 40 with "Special Brew", eventually reaching #3 in November. The band were desperately writing new ska songs to capitalise on the minor chart successes of "Ne-Ne Na-Na Na-Na Nu-Nu" (#28 April '80) and "Lip Up Fatty" (#15 July '80) but this quick effort based off a visit to the local offy ended up being one of their biggest hits.

Somehow Air Supply have managed to exist for five albums without having a hit, and they would soon go back to that state with "All Out Of Love" (#11 October '80) being their only Top 40 in the UK. This despite them having multiple hits elsewhere in the world and being synonymous with this era and style of soft rock. The frequency with which their albums turn up suggests that here in the UK, the people who liked this sort of thing liked it enough to save up and buy it ten tracks at a time in LP form.

If Air Supply aren't soft enough for you, then Sweet People instrumental "And The Birds Were Singing (...et les oiseaux chantaient)" enters the Top 40 this same week on its way to an eventual #4. It was a track Alain Morisod had been playing around with in various forms while existing in the Swiss Eurovision orbit, and I suppose the gentle dissolve into woodland sounds has a certain relaxing appeal.

This is not the time of gentle birdsong though, this is the time of economic strife and Protect and Survive. The booklet was originally intended to be held back until nuclear war was even more imminent than it felt for most of the 1980s, but intense public interest resulted in a public release in May 1980, along with a glimpse at the supporting films being shown in a March Panorama episode.

Far from being a comforting how-to, those weirdest episodes of Crystal Tipps and Alistair (same production company!) only exposed the futility of applying make-do-and-mend spirit and taking your doors off their hinges in the face of impending global annihilation. The uselessness of doing any of the things in Protect and Survive was lampooned on The Young Ones before 1984's bleak docudrama Threads drove the point home more effectively than anything, especially since then-recent research had undermined many of the principles on which the mid-'70s Protect and Survive films had been put together.

Was this on Andy McCluskey's mind as he wrote "Enola Gay" (#8 October '80)? He claimed it was purely a fascination with B-29s and their uses that existed in isolation from anything that was going on in the present, but it's hard to separate it from the anti-nuclear spirit of the age. Despite early doubts about whether it should be released as a single, it's become a classic and the one people instantly think of when you mention Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark.

From ever-present fear of the bomb to the Burundi beat - another icon of the early '80s enters the Top 40 for the first time with Adam & The Ants' "Dog Eat Dog" going to #4 for November. Other tracks are better known, but after some early and obscure experiments this is a band who hit the charts knowing exactly what they were going to be doing there.

One of those early '80s oddities is Dennis Waterman hitting #3 in November with theme from Minder "I Could Be So Good For You". This was its second crack at the charts, a 1979 attempt back when it was more current failing dismally. Dennis did not, as it happened, "write the theme tune, sing the theme tune". The Waterman alongside Gerard Kenny on the credits is his wife, Patricia Waterman.

Motörhead's "Ace of Spades" hits #15 in November (its official peak position is #13 from way off in the post-download, post-streaming charts of 2016) and it's fast, vicious and doesn't let up for any of its less than three short minutes. While this would be influential on multiple '80s metal scenes with the band sometimes credited as having invented speed metal, this is at odds with Lemmy's view that the thing to do after being kicked out of Hawkwind for doing the wrong sort of drugs is create a classic rock'n'roll band turned up to 11, with primary influences listing the MC5 way above any more consciously heavy metal act.

There's an absolute whiplash of #1 singles coming down the line so let's stave that off by looking at some lower-charting numbers.

The Boomtown Rats have a #3 in November with reggae-tinged "Banana Republic", a critique of Ireland triggered by the Rats being banned from performing in their home country thanks to being - well, critical of Ireland.

Madness have "Embarrassment" on #4 and while it's not one of the better-known ones those lads have definitely found their style now. We gain yet another name indelibly associated with the '80s with Spandau Ballet's debut single "To Cut A Long Story Short" one position below it, this blend of new wave and synth pop feeling very contemporary.

Eddy Grant, whom we last saw in these pages with The Equals (although mainly because I passed over 1979's odd and squelchy "Living on the Frontline") has spare electronic reggae "Do You Feel My Love?" at #8 in the first week of December, but if I'm going to talk about December 1980 I need to go back to that chain of number ones.

The first is Blondie's "The Tide Is High", on the top of the countdown for 9th November. Suddenly everyone's doing reggae, with this a cover of a John Holt-penned 1967 original recorded by his group The Paragons. Perhaps we've got used to just ushering Blondie into the #1 position without asking too many questions, but this is a faithful cover well executed.

Later in the month ABBA point out that's their reserved parking spot thank you very much with "Super Trouper". What you might have considered a paean to performing under a particular brand of spotlight is in fact a melancholy tale of loneliness on the stage in a band that's falling apart, with secretly coded messages between Bjorn and Agnetha hiding in the lyrics. The band sell it too, with the theoretically euphoric choruses sounding just superficial enough you can tell it's all an act, without going so far as to ruin it as a pop single.

As ABBA hit #1 with Blondie just beneath them and Dennis Waterman rounding out the top three, John Lennon's "(Just Like) Starting Over" is hitting what looks like a peak position of #8. In another timeline perhaps that's all this is - Lennon breaking a five year absence from the music industry with an old-fashioned rock'n'roller slicked up to modern production standards, from an album which intersperses his typically laid-back late period songwriting with odder and more experimental contributions from Yoko Ono.

The relatively uninspiring comeback single had slipped to #21 when, in the evening of 8th December 1980, Lennon and Ono were making a brief visit back to their New York apartment before heading out for a night together - only for Lennon to be shot in the back multiple times as he approached the building. At just 40 years old he was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. In a bizarre coincidence a muzak version of "All My Loving" played in the background as the verdict was given.

The Beatles breaking up sat as a stake in the ground dividing the '60s from the '70s. But for much of that latter decade, there had been hope that the band would set aside their differences and record together again. Throughout the '70s there were various spots of hope; an ex-Beatle here might talk about how the terms of such a reunion would work, two ex-Beatles there might work on the same album, sometimes there'd even be a report of some of the boys having a brief sing-song together at some private party. Attitudes to a reunion were ranked, with Lennon judged to be the most amenable and McCartney the most scarred by the breakup and unwilling to go back for more.

I think this would have been inevitable, but the stories of other broken-up bands suggest we're talking a 20 year timescale rather than a 10 year one. Lennon's death put an end to that hope, that one day we would wake up and the Beatles would once more be the biggest pop act in the world, putting to shame all their '60s contemporaries. (Or at least, putting to shame whatever the Stones were doing).

"(Just Like) Starting Over" went immediately to #1 in the week of Lennon's death, which seems a reasonable response, but the fallout seemed to utterly break the pop charts.

Lennon was taken off #1 for Christmas by the St. Winifred's School Choir's "There's No One Quite Like Grandma", the worst kind of mawkish sentimentality with irksome child vocals that belongs in the dark days of 1971. Chas & Dave novelty "Rabbit" peaks at #8. The Barron Knights are even down there somewhere in the middle reaches, and that's never a great sign for the health of the charts. Neither are tired-sounding covers which feel like they belong on a K-Tel "original hits re-recorded" album, as represented by Racey's "Runaround Sue" (#13 January '81).

At least the disease isn't universal and there are still things to enjoy here. "Antmusic" peaks at #2 as we go into the New Year and while I wouldn't say it's their best it's at least a bit of fun. The Stray Cats join the Top 40 for the first time with "Runaway Boys" (#9 December '80) showing all those rockabilly bands doing half-hearted covers and pastiches how it should be done. Queen even stop wrestling with their identity long enough for film soundtrack excerpt "Flash" to hit #10 as people are singing "Auld Lang Syne" for 1981, classic Brian May guitar pomp offset with snatches of film dialogue.

Bloody hell, that #1 though. Really?

1981

We have a new #1 to open the year, or rather an old one - a reissue of "Imagine" gives John Lennon another posthumous #1. I spoke before of my complex relationship with this record, but I think in this context I can be mellow toward it. Perhaps I feel a bit more like I'm living in a world that could do with a bit more simplistic optimism than I did back when I wrote about 1975.

It's displaced from the top spot in February by a track from Lennon and Ono's "Double Fantasy" album, "Woman". Even discounting "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" and "Give Peace A Chance" also circulating around lower down the chart, this gave Lennon a record for number of singles by the same artist in the top 5 chart positions that would never be equalled for the remainder of the physical sales era.

Below this, the '80s begin in earnest. Visage's "Fade To Grey" (#2 February '81) is the slickest piece of synth pop yet, those delicious analogue keyboards brought to the fore with vocals floating in from the distance.

While quintessentially '80s, synth pop was but one genre. There was a sound that would define the '80s perhaps more than any other, appearing across records of all genres but linking them all unsunderably to that 1981-1989 time period. The record which ushers it in is Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight" (#2 February '81) and the sound is gated reverb.

Let's talk about drums.

If you want really big drum sounds off a '70s record, there's a simple recipe. You start with one of the serious idler drive turntables, the ones with ~3kg platters and high torque motors where they traded a bit of surface noise for a quality called "slam", the feeling that no matter how big a sound gets carved into a record by the lathe this thing is going to power through it without slowing down in the slightest.

You're then gonna need a big amplifier, something with enough power in reserve to take those big transients and throw them into the speaker wires without clipping or attenuating them. These are those big '70s receivers where the power outputs started hitting 70W, then 100W, then 120W and beyond.

Finally you need speakers capable of turning all that into sound energy rather than melted voice coils and blown surrounds. This was perhaps the weakest link of period hi-fi as while good speakers did exist, they were expensive, often adaptations of professional studio monitors as with the JBL L100 series.

That last point belies what was going on. While Phil Spector and Joe Meek may have engineered their sound for AM radios in cars and Dansette suitcase record players without caring if the result was clearly a distorted mess on something higher fidelity, '70s production favoured the man with the hi-fi. (And it was considered a largely male pursuit, with hi-fi shops being seen as intimidating to anyone who wasn't already deep into technical specifications before they walked through the door, as demonstrated in one Not The Nine O'clock News sketch). If you had the equipment it'd sound the part, and if you didn't... well, it'd still sound okay because well-mixed and engineered things tend to.

As the '70s came to a close, new sound engineers started adopting a different philosophy. Those people running big heavyweight turntables through big heavyweight receivers into speakers the size of several mortgage payments were a tiny minority, and the average consumer was listening on a cheap music centre or at best low end consumer mid-fi such as the classic "bachelor pad" setup of a Garrard SP-25 turntable, Amstrad Integra 4000 amplifier and midrange-heavy Wharfedale Denton speakers.

Both of those low end markets would be ripped apart in the late '70s and early '80s by Japanese manufacturers who produced stuff that was better, stuff that was cheaper, and often stuff that was both at the same time. One component in that rush was 1978's Yamaha NS-10, a poorly-received bookshelf speaker that wasn't particularly good, but whose bias toward upper-midrange tones and poor low-down frequency response made it highly representative of the kind of things people had at home.

These things came together in that the up and coming new breed of engineers would bring a pair of NS-10s into the studio, and would use those as a reference for the mix. If a record sounded fatiguing or thin on the NS-10s, it would be tweaked until it sounded full and rich, with the proper studio monitors more of a check that the few people with serious hi-fi weren't going to experience anything too untoward.

And so we come to the problem that if you're listening to a record on your basic music centre with its weedy belt drive motor, 10W amplifier and insensitive mid-biased speakers, drums are at best going to sound apologetic. An engineer could add a big pile of reverb to trick your brain into thinking the sound is much bigger, but then the low-powered amplifier and rubbish speakers are going to turn the result into mush where the sounds following the drums blend into the reverb tails.

But what if you put a noise gate on that reverb so you only get the first fleeting moment of it? It's an entirely unnatural sound, but it still has that same feeling of hugeness to your easily-fooled brain, and because it's so short you can happily isolate the drum hit in the mix so your music centre can focus all of its attention on just that drum sound before getting back to the business of things like guitars and vocals and, because it is the '80s, probably some synths as well.

This is what "In The Air Tonight" did and then not long afterward what a lot of other records did, because you only needed the kind of budget consumer mid-fi system a Japanese electronics company would be happy to sell you and it'd still sound fantastic.

(Not that it doesn't on the kind of serious business early '70s hi-fi this process was designed to circumvent, although there it's more at the level of being able to pick out each individual truncated reverb tail in your headphones)

For all Collins is pinned as the introducer of the technique, despite it having been floating about since the end of the '70s, Ultravox aren't a million miles from the same sound on "Vienna" (#2 February '81) which had been around as an album track since 1980. Here I think all the reverb is an attempt to make those Roland CR-78 synthesised drums sound a little less thin and mechanical, and that applied to the violin is entirely natural from playing it in a marble lobby.

Blondie famously do their bit to popularise rap on "Rapture", although that bit only comes in the latter half of what is otherwise a rather forgettable single, #5 not a bad result but a little disappointing for a band who've been used to casually strolling into the #1 spot without breaking a sweat. They did do so in the US charts, which were perhaps a little readier for the idea of hip-hop, although the different markets did get different edits of the 7".

Also the UK charts are currently broken with an "out of service" sign on top of them, because famously keeping "Vienna" off #1 is the Joe Dolce Music Theatre's "Shaddap You Face", maybe not the worst novelty record ever to grace the charts but still part of a long line stretching back to Anthony Newley and beyond of things that are quite tiresome once the joke wears out. Keep your head down, pretend not to notice, and walk up to the record shop counter with the Stray Cats' "Rock This Town" (#9 February '81) instead.

In case you needed any more proof the early '70s are leaking, Slade have a #10 with "We'll Bring The House Down". I think this is more interesting than that throwaway joke suggests though, as in the intervening years Slade have got a lot harder and heavier, and this sounds a lot like later '80s glam metal. Quite an achievement since the glam metal scene is two years off its breakout moment.

As February draws to a close Talking Heads finally make their mark on the singles chart, "Once In A Lifetime" hitting a peak of #14. Somehow weaving a pop song out of snippets of an extended jam, this is tempting me to stop right here and listen to the whole of "Remain In Light".

I'd be leaving Joe Dolce at the top of the charts if I did that though, and by March we were back in the world of Lennon and Lennon accessories at #1 with Roxy Music's tribute "Jealous Guy" cover topping the charts. Below it at #2 Adam & The Ants were reaping far more success at trying to get "Kings Of The Wild Frontier" into the charts for a second time, an impressively high result for something that's so bizarre compared to their more straightforward later singles.

A couple of EPs from Toyah and Motorhead score high chart positions but I think EPs are cheating with all those tracks, and the official charts would eventually agree, relegating them to the ineligible status of "budget albums" in 1987.

Neo-psychedelic band The Teardrop Explodes had a #6 with "Reward", introducing one of the more pleasing microgenres of the '80s that would bubble happily along in indie circles even if the hits would be few and far between.

The unsettled nature of 1981's charts continues with Shakin' Stevens taking the cod-rockabilly of "This Ole House" to #1 in the back half of March. Shaky was improbably popular in the first half of the '80s, even getting his own ZX Spectrum game included, bizarrely, on cassette copies of "The Bop Won't Stop" which must have been a bit of a shock if you had it on in the car and suddenly had your road trip soundtracked by the eldritch shrieking of 8-bit microcomputer data.

Below it at #2, Kim Wilde's "Kids In America". Kraftwerk-esque car horn sound effects aside, it surprises me how fast synth pop went from the domain of nerdy-looking duos to this hook-laden record dripping with commercial appeal. You can hear some weirdness from those deliberate OMD and Gary Numan references, but the sheer pace at which this is developing from oddball electronics projects to refined pop is putting me in mind of that mad rush of the mid-'60s.

As if to underline the point Duran Duran enter the Top 40 for the first time with "Planet Earth" (#12 March '81) and it's instantly as none-more-eighties as you could hope for. Compare with Visage's "Mind Of A Toy" (#13 March '81) and you'd be forgiven for thinking one is a distant precursor of the other; the feeling of experimentation and synth pop as something new which still needs to be figured out being replaced by gloss, polish and, yes, a certain yachtiness.

"Sheffield Grinder" / "Capstick Comes Home" from Tony Capstick and the Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band seems like yet another oddity at #3, but it's explained a bit better when you play that second half and realise it's the Hovis commercial theme, a bike-up-a-steep-hill fixture of television that was still kicking around in my early teens. For all I know that lad's still pushing bike up 'ill between Deal or No Deal and The Chase.

If Johnny Logan is Ireland's iconic Eurovision presence of the '80s, then Bucks Fizz has to be the UK's. The band was assembled for the 1981 contest and won it against strong competition with "Making Your Mind Up", going to #1 in April as was the accepted destiny of contest winners. In view of that contest it's a well-judged piece of europop, pulling in a little of the rockabilly craze but not enough to start scaring people away with quiffs and unnecessarily large guitars - think more Shakin' Stevens than Stray Cats here. The skirt-ripping performance on the night was riddled with technical flaws and problems but the song pulled through by just four points, delivering the UK's last contest win until 1997.

Sugar Minott has a #4 in April with a lover's rock cover of old Michael Jackson B-side "Good Thing Going", which is all rather enjoyable. Graham Bonnet has broken free of Rainbow with solo effort "Night Games" at #6, although it's instantly recognisable as more of the same. The album even has a rainbow on the cover.

It's handy to have a Rainbow-esque point of reference, because the first band who can be placed squarely in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal rather than merely progenitors are in the upper reaches of the charts and selling big numbers. (Iron Maiden's first couple of singles grazed the Top 40 for a few weeks in 1980 as did other contemporaries, but these weren't big hits). Saxon's "And The Bands Played On" (#12 April '81) is about as perfectly exemplary of that genre as you could wish for. We have high energy, a galloping beat, constant interjections from guitars stuck firmly in the midrange and gravelly vocals that make me wish for an alternative Rod Stewart timeline that never was.

More TV theme pollination of the charts happens with the BBC using ten year old Ennio Morricone composition "Chi Mai" for their "Life and Times of David Lloyd George" series, sending the record up to #2 in mid-April.

The Spinners might have been an early warning of the craze for party-friendly medleys, but the record which really put out the cheese and pineapple cubes on cocktail sticks and cranked up the Amstrad tower system was "Stars on 45", a Dutch band who went under the name Star Sound in the UK and Ireland, and interpolated a motley collection of old Beatles numbers with disco classics and even an unholy fade of "Venus" into "Sugar Sugar" for nearly five minutes of weirdness.

Perhaps this makes more sense if you've ever suffered through one of those late-millennial parties where someone's changing what's on the Sonos every 20 seconds and nothing ever plays to completion because that's apparently our attention span for music once the caipirinhas get poured, and medleys might be the solution in an era where it takes that long for your automatic turntable to cycle. (Unless it's a Dual 1019 set to 78, an unexpectedly violent demonstration of fine mechanical engineering, although who's running their party off 78s in the heady days of mid-1981 is a question to which the answer may well be "nobody".)

Worth noting is that not only are the songs unoriginal but this sequencing of them all spliced together is copied too, from a widely-circulated bootleg record called "Let's Do It In The 80's Great Hits". This 16-minute mix was sampled from the original records by a pair of DJs, and it was by chance that rights company executive Willem van Kooten heard it playing in a record shop and thought, "hang on, they don't own the rights to that, and I know that for a fact because I do". He also realised that the bootleg creators would have little to no recourse if he were to copy the idea wholesale with licensed soundalikes, which amuses me writing about this in an era where AI companies are busy accusing each other of copying the stuff they did the hard work of ripping off from artists and writers without permission in the first place.

I also draw some wry amusement that this naffest of early '80s things has a convoluted relationship through the DJ booth to that oh-so-cool artifact of my teenage years, the Ministry of Sound mix CD. That is not necessarily so surprising; we've already had the rise and fall of the first big genre both from from and for the club (named, indeed, for the discotheque) and Italian DJs were beat-matching on old Lenco turntables long before the Technics SL-1210 became so widespread that a pair of them with a mixer in between was indisputably "the decks". This might have been just goofing around with the concept of an oldies night but the concept of making a new record out of two or more existing ones is there, on the bootleg if not the official chart entry.

Moving on through May '81, we had Madness at #4 with "Grey Day" and Shakin' Stevens at #2 with "You Drive Me Crazy". Listening to this in context I realise how much this is a natural progression from the world of Showaddywaddy, the deliberately inoffensive and bland oldies-themed recordings embodying what learned critics sneer at as "broad appeal". Also me, who is definitely not learned.

Ed Tudor-Pole finally gets to do something outside the decaying orbit of the Sex Pistols, with Tenpole Tudor on "Swords of a Thousand Men" (#6 May '81). The band had been going intermittently since 1977 but it was Stiff Records who gave them a couple of contemporary-sounding punk hits this year. ("Wunderbar" being the other, #16 in August)

The Stray Cats continue a string of mid-chart hits from their self-titled debut album with "Stray Cat Strut" at #11. I first heard this in its PC speaker rendition on the 1984 version of Alley Cat, possibly one of the few times a PC port has had the better soundtrack because despite the superior sound hardware the original version on the 8-bit Atari is awful, far too slow with unpleasant high-pitched sounds all over the place. Having mentioned that my first encounter was with such a low fidelity rendition, it now feels oddly appropriate to be in possession of one of the highest; the original LP is much fuller and richer than the rather flat-sounding versions available on digital.

#1, though, is "Stand And Deliver". The most Adam & The Ants single, the devil take this stereo and your record collection, especially if it's just been used to play Shaky. I've always loved this one; it's got an infectious sense of fun allied to a distinctive yet great-sounding record. The kind of thing Sweet used to do so well.

A brace of '80s names sit lower down these May '81 charts. Kim Wilde's "Chequered Love" (#4 May '81) may not have the instant recognition of "Kids In America" but I'm finding it hard to think of anything more, well, '80s. Is this the first chart single to do that thing of a sudden instrumental stab while shouting the words in the title, followed by a short but energetic theme?

Sheena Easton gets "When He Shines" on #12, but compared to stab "Chequered Love!" (do-do, do-do-da-do-do) it sounds painfully, painfully 1970s, stuck in a torpor almost as slow as the charts of '76. That #12 spot is taken the next week by the Human League with "The Sound of the Crowd".

The band took a long time to figure out their sound, starting out in 1977 as experimental group exploring what could be done with a palette of mostly electronic sounds. It's glorious science nerd stuff including that proggiest of statements, a double-sided 12" where the tracks are labelled Parts 1 to 4.

Up until 1981 they were seen as stubbornly anti-commercial, a band whose best chance at a hit would be the public getting one of those collective desires to buy something odd as happened to Kraftwerk every so often. This strained the already rocky relationship between founding members Phil Oakey and Martyn Ware, with Oakey believing that a little nod to commerciality would bring them the success Gary Numan and OMD enjoyed, while Ware refused to compromise on the vision of a starkly experimental electronic band. (In his defence, second album "Travelogue" was doing quite well on the albums chart even if it failed to produce any hit singles)

This came to a head in 1980 with Ware walking out and taking keyboardist Ian Craig March with him. The dust settled around an agreement that Oakey would keep the Human League name and the band's debts and obligations, while Ware would be free to form Heaven 17 along with Marsh and their original preferred pick for the Human League, Glenn Gregory.

Being bandless left Oakey and visuals supervisor Philip Adrian Wright about to be sued for an imminent tour they couldn't possibly complete solo. In desperation, Oakey went scouting the local nightclubs for a backup singer and found Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall. They had no previous experience and were just 17 at the time, requiring parental permission to go on tour.

The new line-up was treated as a joke by the music press, Phil Oakey running little more than a circus under the Human League name. There wasn't even a functioning band there, and yet somehow this lack of band owed an awful lot of money to Virgin Records. Despite this Oakey and Wright managed to create a rushed single "Boys And Girls" which got them to #47 and bought enough goodwill from Virgin that they were able to assemble a proper band and find, in the shape of Martin Rushent, the producer they were sorely lacking.

"The Sound Of The Crowd" was the first output of these sessions, in a new studio away from the band's past. You can still hear those experimental origins, and this was intended to be part of a deliberate marketing tactic where the band's arty output would be issued in red sleeves and its more pop-focused songs would come in blue. It didn't last long. (For reference, this is a "red" one).

It's been a while since we had a football club single in the charts, but the Tottenham Hotspur FA Cup Final Squad get "Ossie's Dream" to #5, produced by relative locals and club fans Chas and Dave. It is par for the course, with lots of shouty lyrics and a few "come on you Spurs" thrown in for good measure.

Toyah has stopped cheating with EPs and "I Want To Be Free" hits #8 at the end of May. Band leader Toyah Wilcox had almost ended up in The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle (a bullet dodged?) and despite a middle-class drama school background had solid credibility in the new wave world, which comes through on this record whose lyrics start with a punkish "I'm bored".

Champaign's "How 'Bout Us" (#5 June '81) seems to have skipped the decade entirely, and more. This kind of "ooh"-laden R&B hit such a state of chart domination at the turn of the century that... well, there's a reason I'm doing this to rediscover the charts and not to look back on 30 or so years of being glued to them. So it's odd to listen to this and not immediately hate it - perhaps it's the fascination of seeing this oh-so-smooth production with its soft vocal harmonies develop, or perhaps it's the lack of saturation in a chart filled with many interesting things.

Speaking of wall-to-wall domination, it was impossible to escape "Chariots Of Fire" (a June #12 for Vangelis) for much of my youth. From the athletics drama film of the same name, it became the de facto "look at the sports, aren't they beautiful in slow motion" soundtrack. I liked it as a kid, but I'm not sure if that wasn't just association with those lessons where you get to watch the telly in the classroom. These days I reckon its best use is the subversive one in Bennett Foddy's QWOP, although good luck remembering how to play QWOP well enough to get the music to come in after more than 15 years.

The success of Michael Jackson's "Off The Wall" was followed by a concentrated effort on the part of his previous label Motown to cash in by reassembling bits and pieces of older work into multiple compilations, with 1975 cut "One Day In Your Life" going all the way to #1 in June. Having just looked at that Champaign record this marks another interesting stop along the journey, the soft pop soul showing where so much of the signature comes from. In period it was the strings and the lush, almost over-produced sound that got bumped up in tempo and turned into early disco, but with that genre heading off in a stripped-down and mechanical direction for the 1980s we can see how they would also lay the foundation for modern R&B.

At #2 are Kate Robbins and Beyond with "More Than In Love", from an album that comes with an utterly terrifying cover once you realise that thing would have been 12 inches on a side. If Sheena Easton was the standard bearer for the '70s AM radio sound in these charts, this is the point at which it starts morphing toward the sound of '80s landfill, until eventually these all become one indistinguishable mass that's too perky at one end and an overdose of artificial sweetener at the other.

Hazel O'Connor's "Will You" (#8 June '81) is a little reminiscent of ABBA in how it's structured and that halting vocal phrasing, although O'Connor is now mentioned mostly in the context of having been supported on tour by then-nobodies Duran Duran in this period.

George Harrison is back with "All Those Years Ago" and for all its relative obscurity (#13 May '81) this is the closest we can get to a Beatles reunion in a post December '80 world; Harrison sings, Ringo Starr drums, and Paul McCartney turns up to dub in some backing vocals. The lyrics are a tribute to Lennon with references to Beatles and solo tracks.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's gradual slide down the end of musicals that can best be described with the word "batshit" gives Elaine Paige a #6 in June with "Memory" from "Cats". Perhaps pining for the era of Evita, the public send 1976 Red Sovine country single "Teddy Bear" to #4, a heartstring-tugging tale that comes across to me mainly as a somewhat more bearable "Convoy".

Bucks Fizz serve up a surprisingly credible slice of power pop on "Piece Of The Action" (#12 June '81) which in places sounds like a premonition of the Bangles, who at this point were still a newly-formed indie band called The Colours who would not release their first single (by that point as The Bangs) until December.

All this lightweight pop in the UK charts feels like a collective head in the sand against the backdrop of a country that was falling apart. Industries were closing down or relying on government life support and last-ditch survival plans, unemployment had crossed a record 2.5 million on its way to the historic 3 million in 1982, and inner-city areas were breaking out in race riots in protest at racially-motivated arson attacks and poor treatment by the police.

The Specials put a voice to this with "Ghost Town". Hell, they put a face to it with a video of the band driving around a run-down and deserted City of London, the opening shots looking up at Tower 42 juxtaposed against grim, dirty side streets and the band throwing a Vauxhall Cresta around tunnels and between shuttered, graffiti-scarred warehouses before finishing up chucking rocks across the Thames toward a dilapidated-looking Butler's Wharf.

It's all the more poignant for me because it's an area I know well; I worked in it for many years and even in these days of home offices regularly head there for drinks and other social occasions. The Specials may have been cheating a bit because until the mid-2010s it really was that deserted on weekends, but even with nobody around none of it looked quite so desolate as it does here in 1981, with not a soul appearing to have considered, y'know, cleaning up a bit.

The record went to #1 in July, a sharp commentary on the state of a nation whose pop had largely been ignoring the situation until now.

Oh well, back to normal service as Bad Manners have their other #3 with "Can Can", a mostly-instrumental number based on the Galop Infernal as used for the... well, you can guess from the title.

Tom Tom Club's "Wordy Rappinghood" has them debut with a peak at #7, although the shorter 7" mix has barely any words on it, rapped or otherwise. I find it strange that we get these records that reference rap, but other than "Rapper's Delight" back in '79 there's little of the genuine article. It was confined to a few cities in the US at this point and largely a live club phenomenon, and while Sugar Hill Records made an effort there was vanishingly little committed to vinyl at all until 1982, let alone the momentum required to help it escape the small urban scenes it existed on. Oh, how things would change.

I can't spot Kirsty MacColl classic "There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis" in the charts at #14 without mentioning it, although in the midst of all the rock'n'roll revivalism the basic sound of it suddenly makes a lot more sense.

Star Sound are back for a second crack at Stars On 45, credited as "Stars on 45 (Volume 2)" (#2 July '81) in the official charts. This time they're having a try at ABBA along with some other Eurovision references. It's a rapid-fire sequence of greatest hits and I think this is more successful that the oddball mix of Beatles snippets on the first record, although it moves so fast it makes my head spin. Just let the record you've currently got on finish playing before you start the next one, people. The real deal will be along later in the month with final Super Trouper cut "Lay All Your Love On Me" (#7 July '81).

The Kraftwerk moment may never have come for the original incarnation of The Human League, but it came around again for Kraftwerk. 1978's "The Model" enters the Top 40 briefly in July with newly-recorded "Computer Love" as a double A-side. It then drops straight out of the Top 40 only to come back six months later and hit #1 at the end of January '82. I boggle at these Kraftwerk moments, but this one also has me boggling at exactly where in the history to put it!

Spandau Ballet's "Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On)" gives them a #3 in July, although it's Shaky taking the top spot that week with "Green Door". Sigh. Motörhead have a live version of Hawkwind-era classic "Motorhead" at #6 and Saxon are back with "Never Surrender" at #18.

Somehow the record-buying public are finding yet more ways to close the curtains and pay no attention to what's going outside, you just ignore those nasty Specials boys now. Tight Fit are formed to capitalise on the medley trend, and "Back To The Sixties" goes to #4 in August. The transitions are jarring and the covers half-hearted compared to the finely honed rip-off machine that is Star Sound, although "Black Is Black" is a bit of an interesting choice for a party-focused sampler.

But the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, that eminently sensible-sounding organisation, realises that maybe old pop songs aren't the only possible subject for a medley, giving a bunch of classical pieces the ADHD playlist controller treatment and ripping through more than a dozen of them in a few seconds apiece on "Hooked On Classics", all backed by the same synthesised bassline and handclaps as you'd find on a more conventional pop medley. Only Shaky kept it away from the top spot and I'm glad I speculatively introduced medleys with the word "craze" because this is definitely crazy, even if I do find myself reminded quite a bit of "A Fifth of Beethoven".

Duran Duran are back and with "Girls on Film" (#5 August '81) we're starting to check off the well-known ones. There's some surprisingly dense funk going on beneath the surface. Check out that bassline!

Electric Light Orchestra's "Hold On Tight" (#4 August '81) is... I'm not even sure where to begin with this one, but I think this is what Shakin' Stevens wants to be. Or at least what I want him to be, because this here is the way to do rock'n'roll pastiche - a few of the themes and some recognisable sound signatures, but also some distinctive and new bits thrown in so it doesn't come across as an edges-sanded-off version of something that was done better the first time around.

The Human League release another "red" single, "Love Action (I Believe In Love)" going to #3 despite its designation as one of the weird ones. They're now settled into the status of a functioning band and album "Dare" is already in the works. Maybe one of these days we'll get one of their "blue" numbers and find out what their idea of pop music is.

The Vice City soundtrack is starting to come together with Aneka's "Japanese Boy" taking #1 in August '81. There's a little of the Mickey Rooney to the song with its kimono-clad performances, overt chinoiserie and whatever synth drum that is (Syndrum? Simmons SDS3? Pearl Syncussion?) used to what you could certainly call excess. I like it, but I think I like it because it's a mess. Or perhaps it's those fond memories of playing Grand Theft Auto games back before they became too full of themselves.

"Japanese Boy" gets one week at #1 before it's knocked out of the spot by Soft Cell with "Tainted Love". There's something strangely menacing about these early '80s synth pop records, isn't there?

UB40 join the narrow ranks of those pointing out there's a world beyond those drawn curtains with "One In Ten" (#7 August '81) - by this point it was one in nine according to some sources and the band dived headlong into the issue that the people in charge were hiding inside with their medleys on 45 and just ignoring anyone who lost their job as if they were invisible.

Phil Collins may have set in motion one of the sounds of the '80s on his post-divorce rumination album "Face Value", but he was also busy changing still-extant Genesis to a level where people would start referring to the band's output with the suffix "era", so different would they become by the mid-decade. "Abacab" (#9 August '81) is a further step on that path, still looking back at their proggy past but well into the flowerbeds of radio-friendliness and the elegantly manicured lawn of tortured analogies.

It is the time of '80s reinventions, and Cliff Richard finds himself "Wired For Sound" (#4 September '81), a synth pop inspired oddity that is probably the best thing he's done since that record Hank Marvin thought he was writing for Hendrix. I think it helps that he's finally found a style where superficial and convictionless vocals help rather than hinder. You don't want to show too much emotion, people might remember there's 2.8 million unemployed outside, more than at any point since 1932.

The Rolling Stones land future Windows 95 advert "Start Me Up" on #7 and have thankfully abandoned their lame attempts at disco for something which is a bit more like a glossed-up version of what they were doing circa "Exile On Main Street" although with none of the ramshackle charm; this is firmly in the category of things which do little more than place bums upon stadium seats. And sell operating systems, I guess, although the only one you could get on your PC at this point was DOS with the IBM PC itself barely a month old and alternatives CPM/86 and UCSD p-System yet to be released. Not that you were buying a PC with the economy the way it was, whatever operating system you might dream of running on it.

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark get haunting "Souvenir" to #3 in September. "Architecture and Morality" is a fantastic-sounding album for something that regularly turns up in the ungraded cheap bin. Topping the charts the same week are Adam & The Ants with "Prince Charming", a somewhat overwrought single that goes a lot of places in three minutes.

Somehow Alvin Stardust has ended up on Stiff Records alongside Tenpole Tudor. "Pretend" (#4 September '81) is much in that vein of Shaky-style revivalism. It's a bit more authentic, although you'd hope so given he was there at the time.

Star Sound have another "Stars On 45" out but this one is only making #17 - with the medley craze fading it's about to metastasise into one of the most unwelcome developments of the 1980s: the party song band. The basic approach is simple: take an old novelty song, reel or chant. Record a knowingly silly and/or wacky version of it. Release for people who have no appreciation for the constituent components of "a good time" to purchase and play at parties.

The first of these and one of the biggest selling is concocted band The Tweets (read: producer Henry Hadaway) with a synth version of 1950s Swiss accordion piece the Chicken Dance (originally "Der Ententanz" or "The Duck Dance") as - well, you probably know this already, "The Birdie Song". We have Adam & The Ants to thank for keeping it off the top spot and I now have a new appreciation for "Prince Charming" but it still peaked at #2 and hung around in the Top 40 like a bad smell for twenty weeks.

Despite it being voted the most annoying song of all time in a 2000 poll, I somehow remember enduring this at parties in what I retrospectively realise is the point at which all the adults have got slightly tiddly on drink and decided to self-consciously Have Fun. Quite how they even got the record from the shops in order to be able to play it is a question, but then there was a lot of drink-driving in the '80s. Once more, the devil take this stereo and more importantly your godforsaken record collection.

10cc alumni Godley and Creme get the subdued synth pop tale of a haunted train commute "Under Your Thumb" to #3 in October, a welcome respite from a chart which I fear is about to start including an awful lot of Tight Fit and Black Lace, the latter also attempting to bring the Chicken Dance to the Top 40 but beaten to it by Tweets.

Dave Stewart takes over the job of keeping this nonsense off the top of the charts with Barbara Gaskin on an odd stop/start cover of Lesley Gore classic "It's My Party". It keeps getting weirder, devolving into spoken-word monologues and sound effects before suddenly coming back for a perky synth-pop chorus as if nothing had ever happened.

Dutch band De Electronica's attempted to cash in on the Chicken Dance craze with a straight-up polka recording more in keeping with earlier uses but "The Original Bird Dance" went no further than #22. We know better than to be fooled by that "the original" tag winking back at us from the bargain rack when a vastly more popular version of something already exists, it's the kind of thing which gets attached to Dingo Pictures DVDs.

Depeche Mode are having a good '81, with "New Life" going to #11 in August and "Just Can't Get Enough" topping that with a #8 in October. I know some of this is the invention of a whole new class of instrument (or rather a class of instrument becoming affordable, reliable and portable because analogue synths have been around since the '60s) but I struggle to think of any point where a new pop sound has gone from experiments on the fringes of the charts to being established as the standard style so fast.

Rock'n'roll took a year from its inception to even break the charts in any meaningful sense, and you can find jump blues records from 1949 that have the exact same guitar tones and flourishes so it was hardly a new sound even in 1955. Disco was a similarly slow build from bedroom soul to the handclaps and Syndrums of '79, and as we've seen it never truly displaced other genres from the charts except during the slowest of slow periods.

But here we go from the abrasive "Are 'Friends' Electric?" to the anthemic synth pop of "Just Can't Get Enough" in a mere two years. Yes, "The Model" and indeed "Autobahn" show us that this is the culmination of a build-up that's been going ever since I exhaustively listed all those versions of "Popcorn" but the absolute explosion in popularity of synth pop bands puts to shame the pace of even the first psychedelic era. One year heading ago I was talking about how you could put out a record that sounded like "Arms of Mary" without it feeling too out of place, and now... you just couldn't.

The Police, right? A year ago they're all itchy guitars and spiky new wave minimalism but put #2-placed "Invisible Sun" on the turntable and the first thing to greet you is a throbbing triangle wave oscillator. That restless sort of new wave was still viable - Altered Images took "Happy Birthday" to that same #2 spot in October, but it's feeling rather less current than the same sort of thing did in 1980.

Maybe the best approach is to be consciously dated, Elvis Costello's "A Good Year For The Roses" (#6 November '81) bringing to mind the countrypolitan tones of the George Jones original with the languid rhythm and steel guitar. If you hadn't realised until now this was a cover then congratulations, that makes two of us. It is very faithful. Maybe country is the sound of the moment, as Squeeze land "Labelled With Love" at #4 for the start of November.

Finally it is time for a Human League "blue" record, "Open Your Heart" (#6 October '81). So pop for Oakey and the girls means euphoric synth tones, piccolo beeps and a sense of calm scale rather than the restlessness of their "red" output.

Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" is improbably long for a 7" single at what is described on the label as "approximately 8:21" - those grooves must be so thin you won't be able to hear the music once there's there's the slightest bit of dust on it. John Peel's affinity for the weird got it enough radio airplay to push all the way up to #2 in October, and it's one of the strangest things to take such a big chart position since "Autobahn".

The sheer pace of 1981 continues with the Police having another #1, "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic". I wasn't prepared for how many of these legendary '80s hits were front-loaded toward the start of the decade. As a reminder, the '60s didn't do much of anything until 1963. The '70s stumbled aimlessly around for a couple of years before finally fixating on glam as the thing to kick start the decade's musical ethos. But here we're not even through 1981 and we've got multiple definitive tracks of the decade.

There are still plenty of opportunities to partake in early decade weirdness, mind. Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark's "Joan Of Arc" (#5 November '81) is little more than a wistfully abstract soundscape, almost resolutely un-pop. I love it for that, but I wonder quite what it's doing in the upper reaches of the charts.

Even Rod Stewart is taking a tilt at the old synth pop with "Tonight I'm Yours (Don't Hurt Me)" (#8 November '81) and it's a somewhat easier listen than his disco efforts, although that's not saying much. Haircut 100 have some disjointed and also disinterested funk on "Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)" (#4 November '81) although I can see why they weren't looked back on kindly in my day.

Queen and David Bowie spend a bit of time together in the studio and their playing around results in "Under Pressure", which enters the Top 40 in November and a week later is at #1. What's odd about this is that Queen have found their '80s sound of big, mature rock and yet they respond to this by going off and making an album which is very much not that.

More of that later, and I'll also get to the inevitable question of "did Vanilla Ice copy it?" when I get to it.

Because November has another #1 left in it, and despite all of this urge to innovate it is 1978 soft disco number "Begin The Beguine (Volar a Empezar)", a Julio Iglesias record which feels dated even for its year of origin, let alone here. Maybe it's the genre going out with a last hurrah, with Earth, Wind & Fire contemporary in these charts ("Let's Groove" a late November #3) although at least they have the decency to record something in 1981 which sounds like they're trying to take things to a new place.

There's only a month to go, but an overwhelming number of records only hitting their peak position in 1982 (and we've already had "The Model"!) suggests one of those end-of-year charts that's so busy people don't have time to get all the records bought until February is knocking on the door.

The chart for 29th November 1981 to 5th December 1981 is one of those ones that must have left people gawping slack-jawed at the radio as it counted down the Top 40 with all of the new entries for that week. The easiest to deal with is Status Quo's "Rock 'n' Roll", peaking at #8 in December, although even that deserves mention as it's not a typical rocking 12-bar shuffle, but instead a slow and reflective number looking back at the journey they've taken to become stadium-filling monsters, even if "Pictures of Matchstick Men" is only mentioned by the implication of what would have been playing on Radio Caroline in its heyday. There's a part of me that wonders how genuine the weary tone of voice is from those two actually quite talented musicians who've ended up making simple 12-bars their stock in trade.

Meat Loaf is back and singing a duet with Cher for "Dead Ringer For Love" (#5 January '82). If we're going to stick things which sound like they haven't moved on since 1978 in the charts then I'd rather have it this way than all of those disco holdovers.

Dollar's "Mirror Mirror (Mon Amour)" (#4 January '82) is sadly not a cover of the Pinkertons classic, but we are underlining that point about the takeover of synth pop, the duo settling on this as the genre of the moment after their late '70s singles hunted between styles without ever finding a home.

A week earlier on that #4 spot in '82 (and remember, we're still talking about the new entries of 29th November here) were Madness with "It Must Be Love". It's a cover of a late 1971 single, which has now been buried under the commercial weight and multiple advert soundtrack deals of the Madness version.

This same week also gives us two eventual #1s. The second of which is Bucks Fizz with "The Land Of Make Believe" hitting that position in January. There's not a huge amount to comment on here, it's the usual bit of bouncy but ultimately forgettable europop.

The other eventual #1 and the last noteworthy chart entry for this week is a single the band didn't want to release, that they believed was album-only filler which would harm their career from the public getting fed up with too many singles in too short a space of time. This band is the Human League, abandoning their red/blue categorisation scheme in favour of a cryptic "100" (a reference to a club in Sheffield, not the more famous Soho one) on the sleeve of "Don't You Want Me" (#1 December '81).

Must this year tease me any more with the sheer amount of things that have happened? This is the signature Human League song, a contender for the signature song of synth pop outright. Not even two years in and we've defined the decade. I started this exercise thinking 1967 was the definitive "when charts were good" year and now nearly a decade of writing later I not only sincerely doubt that, I'm starting to wonder if the real answer might in fact be 1981.

Well, I guess there's "Ant Rap" (#3 January '82) as a counter-example. This is more like one of those deliciously bizarre moments, though. I complain that we don't really have much recorded evidence of rap as a developing genre and then one of the first proper rap records as opposed to just a rap tacked on to a regular pop record comes from Adam & The Ants.

Half of me wonders if this was a parody but I think that could be just as much the naïveté of a band from a completely different genre making an earnest attempt at a rap. This is a proper crew-style boast record (aside from Ant not sharing the vocals) that name-checks the band members and disses their critics. Yes it self-consciously explains the idea of rapping but then so did The Sugarhill Gang. If you need any further rap credibility the established critics utterly hated it, as they would dismiss all hip-hop until long after it was a clear commercial force.

I've got to move on but this is the second or third ever rap single in the UK Top 40, depending on how you count "Rapture" which is only half-rapped and even that bit of it is on the slow side, flow-wise. Two and a halfth ever rap single?

"The Visitors" is the best ABBA album. If I'm going to drive a loaded truck through the history of hip-hop, this side of the Atlantic at least, I'm going to put that opinion in for free. "One Of Us" (#3 December '81) is a fine example of why I think that, a tear-streaked record about breaking up. The '80s was the decade where divorce became a household word, usually split across two households with the kids ferried between each at weekends. ABBA got in there early with the soundtrack to having cosy suburban life ripped in half by affairs, economic pressures, and people who realised they just didn't like each other very much any more.

Foreigner's "4" is one of those albums no respectable collection of '80s yacht rock could be without, and "Waiting For A Girl Like You" enters the Top 40 in December on its way to a #8 peak in January.

Yacht rock may have enjoyed a post-ironic comeback but divorce is one of those '80s fashions that has been in decline since the mid-'90s, despite the number of couples who will choose to play "Young Turks" at their wedding. Fewer of them since it's been widely pointed out the whole song is about running away from responsibility and being tied down, then having a baby out of wedlock anyway with no means of supporting a family. (They usually miss out that last bit. It's such an unexpected non-sequitur in the song itself that I don't entirely blame them.)

This is also that rare thing in these post-Faces-of-unclear-dimensions times of a genuinely good Rod Stewart record. Will I ever escape 1981 or is this going to turn into a Zeno's paradox of infinitely divisible smaller and smaller things happening, with me still writing years later about the things which happened at 11:58pm on December 31st and believing earnestly that I might even get as far as 11:59:30 within my lifetime?

Well thankfully these things are not infinitely divisible as we only get a maximum of 40 new chart entries per week. One of those is Kool and the Gang's "Get Down On It" (#3 January '82) but other than laying some bricks to discuss Peter Andre should we make it all the way to 1996 I don't have much else to do here.

Perhaps the way to finally close off this year is with Chas and Dave ripping the piss out of the medley craze with "Stars Over 45". It only made it to #21, peaking a week after its mid-December introduction, which is a shame as for all the horrible novelty records we've seen this one is genuinely funny because they have the good grace to take the mick out of themselves as much as the external influences they're mocking. Maybe I'm overstating that. The "Laughing Policeman" segment gets a little grating.

But that, barring the Four Tops' "Don't Walk Away" (#16 January '82) as the very last thing on my list of Top 40 entries for the year, is it for 1981. Maybe my claim that this is one of the vintage chart years is undermined by it being the year of Shakin' Stevens, "Shaddap You Face", endless medleys and "The Birdie Song". But perhaps that is in itself vintage; the charts need their villains, their horrible records that make people go out and determinedly buy "Prince Charming" or "Vienna", to keep us honest in a year full of fantastic synth pop and great new wave.

Well, anyway. It's time for 1982.