UK Charts: 1982-1984

1982

There was a point a few years ago where a much younger co-worker asked me what year I was born and for the first time I said 1982 and it sounded like a date from the distant past, the way describing things from the 1950s felt on a piece of school homework.

In societal terms it is, too. There was no 4G, no World Wide Web, no universal mobile phone network and most people didn't even own the telephone in their house, renting it from state-owned British Telecom. All that living in the moment got boring fast, let me tell you. Home computers? At the beginning of the year the ZX Spectrum was yet to launch. Even once it did later in the year, in those early days a computer was something you plugged into your TV and loaded software onto from cassette tapes, most of which thankfully did not also contain an entire Shakin' Stevens album.

That TV only showed three channels and barely 10% of households owned a VCR; you were more likely to be unemployed in 1982 than have the ability to record and play back programmes as you pleased. Teletext had been around since 1974 but even fewer households had a suitably-equipped set than did VCRs; we didn't get one until the '90s.

Entire technologies have risen, dominated the world and then fallen away to nothing since 1982. At the start of the year there was no such thing as a consumer CD player, and even by the end of it you'd only be able to get one by importing it from Japan at great expense. The complete cycle of the CD era, a whole technology which once dominated both home and portable listening, doesn't manage to take up all the time between 1982 and now. Indeed, the thing which killed it - the portable MP3 player and its ecosystem of docks, speakers and car interfaces - has had enough time to be invented, to achieve near-universal status, then also dwindle away to a fascinating artefact of a previous civilisation as smartphones and streaming have supplanted it. Back in 1982, the iPod's ancient precursor the Sony Walkman is still a relatively new device and is two whole other physical music formats off someone ever thinking to put a hard disk in something that size.

And yet we're going into this ancient year with "Don't You Want Me" topping the charts, a record that's probably on more Gen-Z playlists than it is for people my age, not least because they don't remember a time when synth pop was deeply uncool. Wedding DJs play "Young Turks" without anyone noticing the irony (#14 in that first chart of 1982). "Computer Love" (rising back up the charts at #21) is still well-known, although some of that is thanks to Coldplay sampling it.

Maybe that last one gives the game away because I can take a scan down today's Top 40 as I write this and find so many knowing references to the '60s, the '70s, and particularly often the '80s. Modern pop's omnivorous fascination with the past is what inspired me to start this project, and I think that's what has kept these records feeling a lot less distant than the times which spawned them. They still feel old, but not "remote control connected to your TV with an actual physical wire" old.

This backward-looking pop ethos not a new thing. Shakin' Stevens #1 "Oh Julie" desperately wants you to think it's the 1950s, although it can't decide whether that's the rock'n'roll 1950s or the polka and accordions in the street 1950s. The Stranglers' "Golden Brown" (#2 February '82) is harking back to the pastoral baroque pop of the early '70s. Delve beneath the harpsichord and you'll find some synth bits lurking though, a reminder that we do have a new sound that has suddenly become attainable.

"Maid of Orleans (The Waltz Of Joan Of Arc)" (#4 February '82) is Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark taking the absolute piss with what can be considered to be a pop record, and quite how the Human League needed to go commercial to have this kind of success I don't know. For all I talk about new sounds much of this is the boys playing around with an old Mellotron, that Three Violins sound bank adorning many a late-'60s Moody Blues album.

Dudley Moore's late career hit film "Arthur" produced a late January #7 for Christopher Cross with "Arthur's Theme". It's all very '70s, but don't hold that against it.

Daryl Hall and John Oates have been going an incredibly long time with ten albums to their name, but somehow the '80s became their home decade in British pop history. "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)" (#8 February '82) is emblematic of a particular style of soft rock to the point it seems to top tongue-in-cheek polls of "the yachtiest yacht rock songs as voted by our listeners", although you'll be waving your fist at Simply Red for ripping large bits of this off as you sail into the sunset.

I feel like I need a bit of an injection of energy after that, and XTC's "Senses Working Overtime" (#10 February '82) is about as good an example as any. Much like Julian Cope of The Teardrop Explodes, group members Andy Partridge and Dave Gregory loved the sounds of the mid-'60s psychedelic era, so much so they would later set up side project The Dukes Of Stratosphear to explore it. While the Dukes are a few years off you hear that influence in the jangling guitars and the nagging sense this is just the Manfreds' "5-4-3-2-1" performed backward.

February's first new Top 40 entries open up with the Jam going straight to #1 on enduring tourist advertisement for Woking "Town Called Malice". It's technically a double A-side with "Precious" but we all know this one for Paul Weller writing about the town where he grew up, all set to a Northern Soul rhythm as fast as the express train out of there. (London Waterloo or Portsmouth Harbour)

There was some controversy around this chart position, with EMI complaining that Polydor had released both studio and live versions of the 3-star TripAdvisor review for Woking, which were being aggregated together with the band benefiting from dedicated fans effectively buying the same single twice.

That Sunday countdown had a couple of other notable '80s records. Toni Basil's "Mickey" (#2 February '82) is interesting in the context of modern pop looking backward, because in mid-2020s charts this is a reference point that keeps coming up; the forward percussion and the restless jumping between sections something modern pop has taken to its heart.

Then we have the J Geils Band with "Centerfold" (#3 February '82). The band have paid their dues for more than a decade of fairly standard blues-rock, but it's this perkier and more upbeat style which gives them their commercial breakthrough, only to immediately disappear from the UK Top 40 again. They're not quite one-hit wonders; follow-up "Freeze-Frame" peaked at #27 and even Toni Basil narrowly escaped that fate with "Nobody" making #52 and thus technically being more popular than at least 23 other records.

A couple of '80s chart mainstays enter the Top 40 the following week, at quite opposite ends of the musical spectrum.

Fun Boy Three and Bananarama on "It Ain't What You Do It's The Way That You Do It" (#4 March '82) miss the brief for mild nostalgic referencing of the last few decades and jump straight in with a 1939 jazz standard. The three Boys Fun are ex-members of the Specials, and Bananarama were a trio of punk-loving women in their early 20s who got invited to sing backing vocals off the strength of their flop debut single "Aie a Mwana". This is all getting too bizarre given my mental image of Bananarama so let's move on.

"Run To The Hills" (and you'd better believe I spent a long time wondering whether to make some kind of "run away" pun ending the previous entry) enters at a lowly #33 but it would propel Iron Maiden into the Top 10 for the first time, the band who were so much the leading light of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal that for years they were a byword for metal itself, the one even your granny could mention by name.

"Run" hits its peak of #7 in March but what's odd here is that the big chart hit comes so late. This is Maiden's third album and the band have been gigging in some form since 1976. Steve Harris formed the band on Christmas Day in 1975 and they spent much of their early years playing the Cart and Horses in Stratford (East London, not upon-Avon), churning through band members as they got sacked for being crap or too reliant on gimmicks. That pub had a reputation for being so rough you didn't want to go in there unless you had an overwhelming desire to glass someone and/or have a table bashed against your head, but then I'm talking about a pre-Olympic, pre-regeneration iteration of Stratford and the old Cart is now a much tidier building covered in banners advertising Robinsons Trooper on tap and proclaiming itself the birthplace of Iron Maiden.

The band continued in volatile, on-again off-again fashion until meeting vocalist Paul Di'Anno in Leytonstone in late 1978. This spurred them to create a demo tape in the hope of finding some more gigs, and eventually a recording contract with EMI.

We're now at 1980 and EMI release a compilation called "Metal for Muthas", credited with helping kickstart the NWOBHM movement (although early chartists Saxon are notable by their absence). This became a package tour with the featured artists, followed by Iron Maiden releasing their first, self-titled album in April.

Although the sleeve of "Iron Maiden" was so distinctive it put in place iconography the band would use for their entire career, the artwork was based on a pre-existing painting by Derek Riggs called "Electric Matthew Says Hello". He'd thought it would make a good cover for a punk album, but record companies decided it was too uncommercial and so Electric Matthew sat in Derek's portfolio saying hello to nobody.

While looking for a suitable album cover, Maiden manager Rod Smallwood noted the similarity between the painting and a papier-mâché stage decoration the band used, referred to as "Eddie" or "The Head". (Say "Eddie the 'ead" fast enough in a London accent and you'll get the etymology). The band suggested adding hair to make Eddie look a bit more metal and a bit less punk, and an image was born.

Debut single "Running Free" peaked at #34 in March '80, dropping out of the Top 40 after two weeks. Follow-up "Sanctuary" (an early version of which featured on "Metal for Muthas") did even better at #29, although again its chart tenure was short. This early stuff is a little rougher in places but by the time of second album "Killers" and singles like "Twilight Zone/Wrathchild" they had things dialled in and many of these early tracks are still crowd favourites at concerts.

So why now? Perhaps it's one of those situations where the time has come, and record buyers are ready to take a fringe genre to the mainstream. But also there's an important piece of Maiden chronology. In 1981 the band get fed up with Paul Di'Anno's drug-fuelled haphazard behaviour, and recruited Bruce Dickinson from "Muthas" recordmates Samson to replace him. Much as I love those first two albums, Dickinson is the voice of Iron Maiden, as would be proved by counterexample in his absence from the band in the '90s to concentrate on a solo career. Blaze Bayley is good, but that wasn't his place.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. The band recorded "The Number Of The Beast" as their third album, the first with this new line-up, and even at this early point it's what legions of fans have followed them for decades to hear; fast-paced and energetic songs full of riffs and solos that address weighty historical themes alongside pop culture and self-invented characters like Charlotte the Harlot, whose stories are explored across multiple songs.

That's a shock for people who see them as a one-note symbol of Satanic music; the band are extraordinarily well-read and not afraid to show it. You could learn more history from the Iron Maiden discography than a GCSE in the subject, especially with the kind of crappy exam boards my school used to favour. Admittedly much of it would be about world wars but then so are school history lessons.

Should I have mentioned all this earlier? Possibly, but my own self-imposed and often broken rule is that I should talk about things when they achieve mass consciousness, not when they're obscurities none but a few dedicated followers would care about. 1982 is not the opening of the Iron Maiden but it is the year they become an unavoidable chart presence.

Speaking of unavoidable things, "Run to the Hills" hits #7 in a week where Tight Fit's "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is #1. Although that line-up is even less stable than Maiden in the '70s; in the same manner that bubblegum pop was produced with the record first and the band as a later afterthought, Tight Fit is currently merely a name to attach to whoever happens to be around at the time. The session musicians here seem to be an improvement over the workmanlike performance of their "Stars on 45" knock-off and the band which would eventually be formed around Steve Grant, Denise Gyngell and Julie Harris was considered good enough to become Tight Fit permanently. I can't imagine sustained listening to this for pleasure but on the other hand, the source material is what it is and I can't think of anything I'd point to and go, "oh dear, they've ruined that compared to the other versions".

Malcolm McLaren is attempting to bottle lightning again after having finally exhausted everything which can be done with the tattered remnants of the Sex Pistols. Bow Wow Wow were formed by poaching members from Adam & The Ants after that band got in touch with McLaren (getting a cassette tape of the Burundi drums as inspiration in return) and there's a little of the same style. McLaren's affinity for stunts resulted in their first single being cassette-only "C-30 C-60 C-90 Go!" with lyrics promoting piracy, but that encouragement to go off and kill music with home taping - one side of the cassette was even left blank for this purpose - cost him any promotion from EMI and the gimmick was undermined by a 7" being pressed a few months later.

"Go Wild In The Country" (#7 March '82) saw McLaren go back to his old tabloid-baiting tricks with a picture sleeve featuring 14-year-old lead singer Annabella Lwin naked. This resulted in a police investigation for immoral exploitation of a minor and rather overshadows a bouncy new wave single which, while far from essential, is certainly better than those late '70s Pistols attempts.

I want to be nice about Imagination's "Just An Illusion" (#2 March '82) because Leee John has serious credentials in his early work as a backing singer for some great soul bands but I feel landfill '80s creeping in; maybe it's sonically rooted a little too much in the previous decade to truly be that but I posit my test for this - if you found this in a box of '80s singles would you put it in the "keep" pile or would you be lifting the tonearm and getting the next record on before it even finishes?

I have a similar problem with ABC's "Poison Arrow" (#6 March '82) - it's not even that it's bad, it's just that there is so much of this. I spent hours driving around a low-polygon rendition of Miami listening to Wave 103 and yet I still don't remember this.

One single I do remember listening to (curiously, at about the same time I would have been playing GTA: Vice City) is "Party Fears Two" from The Associates. A hymn to social awkwardness, it's one of those records that manages to just sound good. Perhaps too much so; the band wrote it in 1979, but decided it was too beautiful to exist in the world of punk. So instead it's here at #9 in March '82.

The Goombay Dance Band have oft been written off as a less successful Boney M, perhaps because there's something about "Seven Tears" that comes across a bit more obviously German than Frank Farian's effort. Neither that nor the fact they were 89 tears down on ? and the Mysterians stopped it from going all the way to #1, a fine europop oddity.

A reissued and partly remixed version of "Layla" made #4 at the end of March, put out to accompany a new "Timepieces: The Best Of Eric Clapton" album although I fear this is the momentum of 1981 starting to peter out.

More Bucks Fizz at #1 with "My Camera Never Lies" in April '82 but we've gone from endearing europop to landfill '80s. Dollar's "Give Me Back My Heart" (#4 April '82) is just boring and then I have the opposite problem with Japan's "Ghosts" (#5 April '82) - it's too self-consciously experimental and not in a soothing, soundscape-y way like you'd get from one of those OMD singles.

Even Roxy Music's "More Than This" (#6 April '82) can't distract me from a worrying-looking patch of the big spreadsheet of chart hits.

Tiresome McCartney platitude "Ebony And Ivory" tops the charts in mid-April. There's something about this kind of racial harmony record which seems near-impossible to pull off successfully, even if you don't immediately bust out a slur about the people you're trying to unite. Greyhound got close on "Black and White" back in '71 but even then you'd flip it over and play "Sand In Your Shoes", wouldn't you? At least, that's what I do with my copy.

"Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag" (#3 April '82) is a strange mix - the brass riff is the bit everyone remembers but the rest is a full-on jam session that strays into the borders of jazz more than once.

Bardo are an attempt to repeat the Bucks Fizz formula for 1982's Eurovision contest, but "One Step Further" is one of those "should have done better" years for the UK; despite being a catchy number with more than a nod to the europop the song finished 7th, Germany taking the contest win with a song that wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Heino album circa 1968. Bardo did somewhat better in the charts, peaking at #2.

Despite these '60s schlager stylings, the anglified version of Nicole's contest winner "A Little Peace" topped the charts in May '82. As I so often say, we did like our Eurovision winners.

The England World Cup Squad had qualified for a tournament for the first time in ages, but while "This Time (We'll Get It Right)" went to #2 in May the team did not deliver on that promise, unless their definition of "getting it right" happened to be failing to proceed beyond the second group stage. Similarly the Scotland World Cup Squad claimed "We Have A Dream" (#5 May '82) but I suspect that dream was not to fail to even get as far as the second of the group stages.

Bananarama return a favour by getting Fun Boy Three to support on "Really Sayin' Something", an inessential cover of a fantastic Velvelettes soul record. Also the music that plays when you open the Sim City 2000 "about" menu. The 'rama find themselves at #5 with this. Well, it's not like people have got any Sim City 2000 to be playing in 1982.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts take "I Love Rock'n'Roll" to #4 for the beginning of May '82. Really, that was this early? That makes it contemporary with Hot Chocolate, whose "Girl Crazy" is at #7 the same month.

Simple Minds finally get their breakout on their tenth single, "Promised You A Miracle". Previous efforts had done reasonably in their native Scotland, but this one sold well across the UK, netting #13 in May.

I can continue my rolling collection of '80s names with Yazoo, the fantastic "Only You" peaking at #2 in mid-May. This is ex-Depeche Mode Vince Clarke forming a synth duo with Alison Moyet and quite something for a debut single. Clarke claimed he'd left Depeche Mode because he was fed up with pop stardom, which makes this a bit of a "task failed successfully".

Tight Fit are now a stable outfit rather than a name for hire, but that doesn't mean much with "Lion" followed up by ABBA rip-off "Fantasy Island" (#5 May '82), although most of the ripping off was mostly done by Dutch group The Millionaires, who originally recorded the song as a Eurovision hopeful before finishing second in the national selection contest behind Bill van Dijk's "Jij en ik", a terrible decision as that song finished 16th with just eight points. Tight Fit certainly ramp up the ABBA impersonation though.

Iron Maiden return with album title track "The Number of the Beast" although its peak position here in 1982 is #18 - it would hit #3 in 2005 and I'm sure that's going to be an interesting story if we ever get there.

Genuine in-period high chart position for ABC's "The Look Of Love" at #4 in June '82. Something, something, landfill '80s. I don't know why ABC are the ones to make me suddenly reach for that epithet as I don't think they're doing anything particularly worse than anyone here (indeed, a lot better than many given I've recently mentioned Tight Fit and two World Cup squads) but there's something about this which tips the scale slightly too far in favour of style and not enough in favour of substance for me.

In the same week Adam Ant's "Goody Two Shoes" takes #1 from Madness with "House Of Fun". This is Ant's solo debut, although featuring enough of the Ant band early copies of the single were credited as an ensemble effort. It comes across a bit like someone's taken the thundering Burundi beat of the band, stuffed it in a cocktail shaker with a measure of rockabilly and a few drops of classic swing bands, and served the result as the house special.

"House of Fun" on the other hand, would be on the list of Unforgettables that don't even need to be on the menu because everyone just remembers them. The upbeat horns and typically back-of-the-classroom lyrics about condom purchasing confusion are typical Madness and... well, if you've read this far through one man's requiem to the thin veneer of sanity he used to have before listening to the entire 1970s then you probably already know just how omnipresent this was. Usually in contexts which completely fail to notice the lyrics and assume Suggs & Co are referring to an actual fun house. Man, it's "Young Turks" all over again.

Duran Duran's "Hungry Like The Wolf" (#5 June '82) makes a good case for how Le Bon and company became so ubiquitous in the '80s that I remember playing some sci-fi text adventure that joked you'd still be finding Duran Duran cassettes on far-flung space stations several hundred years in the future. It's great pop, simple and accessible despite a lot of complicated and interesting keyboard textures beneath the surface.

Against all of this reissued 1977 record "I've Never Been To Me" by Charlene feels an utterly incongruous #1. A soft Motown ballad that is unadventurous by '77 standards let alone five years later, it's a nice record but I have that same feeling as when I'm halfway up a mountain on a hike and suddenly find a discarded engine block and a collection of rusting chains; yes, it's interesting, but what's it doing here?

I think we might have hit one of those weird backwards-looking patches though. Bow Wow Wow's updated "I Want Candy" (#9 June '82) is an urgent-sounding rework of a 1965 number, but filter out 30 years of changes in recording technology and that hooting guitar tone could be off a record from the mid '50s.

At #10 is a strange mashup of Beatles movie soundtrack songs, "The Beatles Movie Medley". This comes from a Capitol project to create a compilation album of songs used in the various Beatle films, and is so badly executed I can see why it's never been reissued since. Stars on 45 and the DJs who inspired them worked out you had to beat-match the songs and have some kind of underlying sense of the things being linked together, but this is just unedited snatches of Beatles numbers smashed together with little care for musical style, tempo or indeed anything. I guess in terms of a spiritual ancestor for a party where someone won't stop messing with the Sonos, this is the most accurate.

The Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra" (#2 July '82) is a little harder to place; structurally it's a lot like late '70s American rock, but the keyboards and sound effects pull it forward, while also putting me in mind a little of Peter Howell's version of the Doctor Who theme. Odyssey's "Inside Out" (#3 June '82) on the other hand, you could slip that into the middle of the disco era and nobody would notice. Wasn't this supposed to have been demolished a long time ago?

(Even Stateside, where disco was supposed to have died a death back in the '70s, this still sold in reasonable numbers)

Part of this is that the US was sneaking its club sound past disapproving anti-discoists under the guise of "post-disco", as with Shalamar's "A Night to Remember" (#5 July '82). This was disco, but filtered through the bounce of the P-Funk collective, exchanging the bland emptiness of mid-'70s disco for horn fanfares, squelching electronic basslines and wiry guitars.

It's been a long time in the making but Queen finally unveil their new sound for the brave new decade with album "Hot Space" and... oh dear. What "Under Pressure" might have promised would soon be torn away upon realising that was an entirely separate project tacked on at the end of the album. Real lead single "Body Language" did OK in the US with its oddly empty not-disco stylings, but back here was a relative bomb by Queen standards hitting only #25, and the John Lennon tribute/pastiche "Life Is Real (Song for Lennon)" on the B-side is by far the better song.

"Las Palabras De Amor (The Words of Love)" is a much stronger effort and I'm a little disappointed by its relatively low peak of #17 in July '82, the world evidently not quite as ready for songs with the word "despacito" in them as it would be a few decades later.

Queen were the first band I loved so much I set out to collect the entire set of studio albums, a task which at the time of writing I still haven't completed because I don't own the "Flash" soundtrack. (Surely worth the price of admission for "The Hero" alone, given how cheap second-hand CDs are nowadays?)

I was doing this at a time when listening to "The Hero" wasn't as easy as clicking on a link, and the idea that a fiver plus postage for a used CD is on the expensive side would have had you laughed all the way from one end of the "2 for £20" bargain bin to the other. I'm pretty sure 1995's "Made In Heaven" was my first ever CD purchase because the spendier-than-usual £13.99 for a tape copy made the discounted-to-£15.99 price of the CD seem positively palatable, especially given you got a bonus 20 minutes of noodly soundscape nonsense as a hidden track, which I put to good use as a background for making "instructions from Tango HQ" tapes for a mate while clasping a violently orange Tango doll.

(Could you ever want more of a time capsule of the utter oddness of the '90s than those last few words?)

What this meant is on a teenage budget, most of which was already earmarked for bits of Pentium-era hardware, getting one of these CDs meant burning a Christmas or birthday present on something where you had no idea what it would be like musically, beyond the tracks which you'd heard on radio or Greatest Hits compilations.

Later as student loans expanded my financial capabilities and CDs started slipping toward that wonderful late-2000s point where you could buy quite decent psych compilations for less than a fiver, I found a record stall which would always have four or five of the 1994 digital remaster series Queen albums on display for £10 or so. The collection filled out until one day the internal "got, got, need" had me walking home with a copy of "Hot Space".

The overlap here with known greatest hits is "Under Pressure" so we're looking at a neglected gem, right?

Waiting for the big five-disc multichanger CD player I had back in 2002 to cycle the carousel and load the disc somewhere into the bowels of the machine I wondered what made this album so rarely mentioned even by dedicated Queen fans. Then the player made one of those watery data access sounds that used to be an integral part of listening to music and "Staying Power" started coming out of the speakers.

Oh dear. That did not go well. So why, other than reliving past disappointments, am I paying so much attention to what was near-universally assessed to be the worst Queen album until a whole lot of unfortunate post-Mercury things happened?

Because in trying to figure out the forthcoming sound of the '80s, Queen got it so right and yet also so wrong for Queen that I think it's more fascinating than any of the retreats to safer ground that followed. It's directionless, it's vapid, it's more concerned with fist-pumping choruses and funky basslines than actually saying something (even "Life Is Real" bounces between banality and making absolutely zero sense) and as a preview of the decade to come it's possibly the most prophetic Queen have ever been.

Dig deeper and maybe you can find a few things which have their sights aimed at already falling stars; the new-wave guitars on "Calling All Girls" and "Cool Cat" are noticeably late '70s and "Put Out The Fire" could have sat on a mid-decade Sweet album without feeling noticeably out of place, although those lads probably would have made it sound a bit more fun. But it still feels like a band who've figured out what the big sounds of the decade are going to be, and yet have no idea how to apply them to themselves or their rock-focused fans in a way that makes sense.

Set against this, "Las Palabras de Amor" is itself lost; hiding behind the synths is classic '70s Queen, and three minutes in they've given up all pretence and come out in full pomp, someone having pulled the cord in Brian May's back and all. It's a wonderful thing, especially the appearance on Top of the Pops where the band play it in a manner which can best be described as "apologetic". Mercury stands awkwardly in a suit, Brian May appears to have been annoyed by someone changing all the settings on his keyboard two minutes before he went on stage, the lights in Roger Taylor's drum corner keep going off like an over-eager motion sensor in a toilet, John Deacon hasn't got the memo about the dress code, and behind all this a screen displays computer-sequenced lights which are as unrelated to whatever else is going on as they were probably state of the art for 1982.

I have to move on, don't I? Captain Sensible has escaped The Damned for a solo career, and has started it in the oddest fashion with a synthed-up cover of 1949 musical number "Happy Talk". It's #1 as we go into July, and if you told me this europop-by-way-of-party-band thing came from the guy who played bass on "New Rose" and I didn't know better I think I'd be forgiven for not believing you.

A brief fillip for rock further down the early July charts, with AC/DC's "For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)" at #15 representing the harder end of the genre, while a reissue of Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1974 concert heckle "Free Bird" goes to #21. This was used to fantastic effect at the end of 2005 horror "The Devil's Rejects", but have you ever noticed the Mellotron on that record?

1980 film "Fame" got a TV series in '82, which shot Irene Cara's 1980 recording of the title theme to #1 in July. It is unapologetically disco, although at times it veers a bit closer to the more interesting territory of space disco as per "War of the Worlds".

If I said the empty vapidness of much of "Hot Space" was prophetic, perhaps that prophecy is coming true a little earlier with Trio's "Da Da Da (I Don't Love You You Don't Love Me Aha Aha Aha)" hitting #2 in July, half metronomic Casio keyboard and half the chords from "La Bamba" - for such an inconsequential result it's actually quite an interesting attempt to strip pop music down to its barest essentials of catchy chorus and catchy rhythm.

At least that spirit of experimentation gives it some character. Bananarama take a hard turn toward landfill '80s for July #4 "Shy Boy". This early on in the decade there's still a bit of interest in the synth bassline, but compared to the oddness of those Fun Boy Three collaborations this has been smoothed down and given a thick coat of commercial gloss.

Yazoo's "Don't Go" (#3 July '82) is one famous keyboard riff, but I'm minded of my point about funkiness and fist-pumping even if it's not coming from the same frequency range. That said, I feel like there's still a sense that this is a deliberate artistic statement in stripping records back to this kind of mechanical precision that would disappear later on in the decade.

Devoid of any mechanical precision whatsoever is "Driving In My Car", a Madness #4 in late July. The car in question appears to be a questionably maintained 1959 Morris Minor. Haven't they listened to "Tell Laura I Love Her"? That thing could overturn in flames at any moment!

Hot Chocolate are still making great records long after our post-Billy Elliot sensibilities give them credit for, "It Started With A Kiss" going to #5 as August rolls in.

The upper reaches of August's charts are surprisingly static with not a great deal happening despite a lot of promising new entries, and I think some of that may be that there was one single everybody was buying. "Come On Eileen", Dexy's Midnight Runners with The Emerald Express (the name of their violin section). It was #1 for most of the month and sold over a million copies, although it's not clear how many of those were original run singles and how many were later downloads - in these corrupted days of streaming it's gone triple platinum and that's a trend unlikely to end, what with all that '80s revivalism and all.

(Although perhaps it's a little early and not quite synthy enough for the aesthetic?)

Madness in their Morris were cornering at the more novelty end of their territory, and there must have been something in the air. The Belle Stars "The Clapping Song" took the 1965-written playground song to #11. Below it, session musicians John O'Conner and Grahame Lister couldn't find an artist willing to record outright novelty "Arthur Daley (E's Alright)" so they did it themselves as The Firm, the East London natives (Chas & Dave comparisons must have been forthcoming) scoring a #14 and an "of more anon" from me.

Bad Manners have a suitably silly and yet also quite faithful cover of "My Girl Lollipop (My Boy Lollipop)" at #9. Disco continues its undead state with Boystown Gang's cover of "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" (#4 August '82), and while the only reference I can find of the original single is an incredibly grotty 45 played on a suitcase record player it's enough to get a strong "nothing that couldn't have happened in '76" vibe.

As August draws to a close the record-buying public start to remember there are other singles than "Come On Eileen" and Soft Cell's odd stop-start and keyboard collection show-off "What" hits #3.

Haircut 100 put "Nobody's Fool" on #9 - another one of those '80s names that I never seem to get the time to mention with all these busy charts, and this would in fact be their last Top 40 outing. It's pleasant enough with a touch of the neo-psychedelia to it, which pretty much sums up previous single "Fantastic Day" (#9 April '82). Still, there's probably a reason the only time I ever heard the name Haircut 100 at school was in the context of mocking someone's new barnet, especially if the barber had done a number on them.

If you were listening to that chart countdown for 29th August 1982 though, you would be getting another month-long #1. Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" held the position for most of September. And yet it almost never was - had Queen allowed use of "Another One Bites The Dust" for Rocky III, Sylvester Stallone would never had approached struggling band Survivor to write a song to match the punches of the boxing scenes, and I guess we'd have just lived through another few weeks of "Come On Eileen".

Or maybe top spot would have gone to Duran Duran's "Save A Prayer" (#2 September '82)? I know this one is cliché but if you ever get several years to embark on some sort of ill-advised pop cataloguing project listen to it in context because for 1982 this is really quite something. Those synths still feel a little avant-garde even though we've had a lot of OMD and yet it's all so well-resolved as a pop song.

Another strong contender taking that #2 from Duran Duran is Dire Straits' "Private Investigations". Still just about in their art-rock phase, with the near seven minute album track from "Love Over Gold" barely edited to 5:51 for a moody, slow and quiet single whose loudest passage is the one inside your head telling you that you need to buy this on LP. My dad certainly did, and based on the likely chronology of the inherited record collection I suspect this is the first LP brought into the house after I was born. I still have that copy, and while there's a little surface noise I fear that of the two of us, it's the record that wears its near-identical age somewhat better.

These strong #2s don't let up with the Jam's "The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow)" closing out September in that spot, complete with sleeve artwork that looks like something Bauhaus would be proud of. The music is quite something else though, the Jam channelling the Walker Brothers complete with luxurious strings.

But perhaps September 1982's most notable chart peak is not Survivor nor the "what could have been" runners-up, but the presence of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five at #8 with "The Message". This is the birth of hip-hop records not as a novelty but as a vehicle for serious social commentary. Forget lyrics that are little more than "look at me, I'm rapping", we're straight in with "it makes me wonder how I keep from going under".

I came into the world with "Eye of the Tiger" on #1, but my first experience of a new #1 would have been Musical Youth's "Pass The Dutchie" taking over from Survivor at the end of September. A hyper-sanitised version of Mighty Diamonds' "Pass the Kouchie" it exchanges the entirely probable image of passing a joint around a circle with the utterly preposterous image of doing the same with a Dutch oven. Lads, you're either going to burn yourself or you're wasting valuable casseroling time.

Adam Ant gets even more bizarre on "Friend or Foe", although a peak of #9 compared to regularly chart-topping previous form suggests this might be beyond the limit of weirdness the public can tolerate.

The increasingly confusing naming of Dexy's Midnight Runners continues with "Jackie Wilson Said", credited to Kevin Rowland and Dexy's Midnight Runners and going to #5 at the beginning of October '82. The naming confusion theme continued with an in-joke where the band played the song in front of a picture of darts legend Jocky Wilson. Unfortunately the in-joke was lost on audiences, who thought the band too serious to play such a prank and so it has gone down in history as some nameless Top of the Pops producer not knowing who Jackie Wilson was.

"Pass the Dutchie" had entered the Top 40 on 19th September, along with another reggae-influenced record that would also go to #1; Culture Club's "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me", which took the spot in mid-October. Boy George had done some guest vocals with Bow Wow Wow, Jon Moss came from the Ants, and Mikey Craig invited them to form a new band along with guitarist Roy Hay. They started out as Sex Gang Children, but upon noticing the band's multi-ethnic makeup decided with a knowing wink to call themselves Culture Club.

Boy George's androgynous appearance gave the band plenty of tabloid headlines without needing a provocative name and the soft lover's rock was the right sound at the right time. Success would be short-lived as pressures from both record label and touring cut into the band's ability to craft pop songs, but there was enough of it to make Culture Club a supporting pillar of the popular recollection of '80s music.

Somehow Kid Creole and the Coconuts have disappeared into obscurity by comparison, despite a string of early '80s chart hits, with August Darnell claiming "Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy" alone represents more than enough royalties to live off indefinitely.

Oh well, back to the 1980s music canon. "Mad World" gives Tears for Fears a #3 at the end of October. I find it surprising how quickly I've gotten used to synth pop; "Mad World" is very well done indeed but I've already lost the sense of newness this would have had just one year earlier. Years ago in the comfortably stable economic climes of the early Blair years I formulated a theory that economic strife promoted rapid development in pop music, but I'm not so sure now I've lived through everything since 2016 and music has stayed more or less the same. I suspect the real answer might be something to do with accessibility of technology, especially where it related to making music.

As if to underline that pace of development, "Love Me Do" has a 20th-anniversary re-release, beating its original #17 chart position by going to #4. I find it hard to imagine seeing that much musical development in just two decades, especially when half of one of those decades is the weird mid-'70s stall.

Speaking of Bauhaus as I may have been doing a few picture sleeves ago, "Ziggy Stardust" hits #15 in late October as one of the most perfect cover versions going, somehow managing to be both perfectly faithful while also adding something undefinable. I am not qualified to give a history of gothic rock and the eventual splintering of goth into dozens of distinct genres and styles, and as a movement largely too underground to significantly trouble the charts (other than that longstanding argument about '83 versus '92 version) it's out of scope here anyway, but I do love this.

Skipping ahead to mid-November, Michael Jackson is duetting with Paul McCartney on "The Girl Is Mine" at #8. It's a weak introduction to what would go on to become the best-selling album of all time, "Thriller". I'm not saying this is a horrible track, twee spoken-word back and forth aside, but if I heard this I wouldn't exactly be counting down the days to release of the album proper. This would, of course, change in 1983.

The Human League's first post-"Dare" single "Mirror Man" hits #2 in November, mining Motown for a cautionary note to Adam Ant that he shouldn't get too caught up in his own image, although the subject of the song wasn't revealed until much later.

The Jam go out on a high at #1 with "Beat Surrender", Paul Weller's deliberate final statement as he split up the band while they were still cool. With the number of groups having a rocky start to the '80s after success in the previous decade and carrying the whiff of having lived beyond their use-by date you can kind of see what he was on about.

As one band bows out another arrives, with Wham!'s first chart success "Young Guns (Go For It)" hitting #3 at the end of November. This is from a point the group were still experimenting with rap, and is a rather odd experience if you're only familiar with their later output. It's like the Sugarhill Gang if they were 90% sugar and only 10% hill.

Getting into December, Duran Duran have "Rio" at #9 but for all this is the iconic image of the band with them all on a yacht and that, I think this isn't far from someone getting off that yacht to waterski over a shark. Previous Duran Duran records have been such meticulously crafted pop, whereas "Rio" feels like it gives in to a desire to be too clever for its own good way too often. It's twenty second snatches of that bit you remember broken up by too much electronic and found-sound noodling, especially on the longer UK mixes.

Here's a fun teaser: name A Flock Of Seagulls' big 1982 chart hit. If you answered "I Ran (So Far Away)" then sorry, it didn't even break the Top 40. "Wishing (If I Had a Photograph Of You)" is the correct answer at #10 in December '82, and it's well worth a listen. Being immersed in the time period I think I get it; "Wishing" hits many of those same highs but it's a lot more immediately accessible even compared to the shorter single mix of the former.

Culture Club are back in the charts for December with "Time (Clock Of The Heart)" at #3 in the middle of the month. The soft reggae of their first outing has given way to that smooth electronic-backed soul which the decade would drift toward as those earlier, spikier and more exciting electronic sounds got packaged into something a bit more radio-friendly.

Madness return for more social commentary with a side of nuttiness on "Our House" (#5 December '82), finishing the run of classic early Madness singles which seemed to be everywhere until well into the '90s. It makes sense; there's an immediacy and sense of fun to them, but there's also a sense of timelessness to them where the harsh analogue synths of contemporary records tie them very much to this early '80s period.

A constant presence in these charts of '82 are Shalamar, with "Friends" at #12. There's not much extra I can add that I didn't say when I first mentioned this funk-forward post-disco outfit, but it's surprising how many hits they had given their total obscurity in these times.

We're into mid-December and those runs on the Christmas chart are starting in earnest.

Bowie and Bing's 1977 recording of "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy" hits #3, luxuriously instrumented with plenty of lush strings to go between all that chat about a rubber bum pump. That this comes in the middle of the Berlin Trilogy period where things like "Low" and "Heroes" would have been on Bowie's mind adds an air of surrealism to this gentle, cosy performance.

Shakin' Stevens has an EP but as I've said that's cheating, so instead we can focus on David Essex's "A Winter's Tale" (#2 January '83), which should be on far more Christmas playlists. Mike Batt composed it, produced it, and wrote the lyrics along with Tim Rice. You can feel his influence, all wrapped up in a pastoral pop package that puts one in mind of the more pleasant parts of 1971.

A less fortunate '70s holdover is the terrible novelty record, which Keith Harris and Orville's "Orville's Song" (#4 January '83) is here to remind us of. They were another omnipresent '80s artefact, or at least I recall frequently seeing them on TV as a young child, although the twee record and homespun Top of the Pops appearance could have been straight out of the early '70s. I would write more but my computer has just temporarily frozen and refused to play this, which I am going to consider a sign.

Christmas #1 went to something else that could have been out of the '70s, probably some time around Eurovision month, and if it wasn't for the upbeat tempo and that certain sense more of glitz than dowdiness, the '50s. Renée & Renato's "Save Your Love" is the most non-indie sounding thing possible for what I am semi-reliably informed is the first truly independent #1 record, and it gets yet more bizarre when you find out that label owner and songwriter Johnny Edwards was the voice of television robot Metal Mickey.

On the plus side, if I ever need an excuse for lifelong underachievement at least I now know I can point at this and go, "look at the Christmas #1 I started out with".

1983

Phil Collins' "You Can't Hurry Love" is the first new chart-topper of 1983, although it seems the thing Phil can't hurry is a #1 record - it was released in October '82 but didn't even break the Top 40 until December. I know it would be the easy thing to stick the critical boot in on the impresario of the second Genesis era for some cheap laughs, but this is a great cover. from the "Lust for Life" drums to the tambourine-bashing fade out. Collins and producer Hugh Padgham went into this knowing that trying to do '60s classics on ultra-clean '80s recording equipment would come over all K-Tel if they didn't allow for the differences, and for my notional early '80s record-purchasing money they got the balance right.

Malcolm McLaren was still on the lookout for something both new and commercially exploitable, and he found it at a block party where hip-hop pioneers Afrika Bambaataa and Universal Zulu Nation were performing. Here he was exposed to scratching; the technique of moving a record by hand on a turntable to produce a variety of stylus-scraping sounds and short bursts of music. Back in the UK he got Trevor Horn to compose a rhythm, two-man crew The World's Famous Supreme Team scratched on top of a track Horn had programmed into a couple of Oberheim sequencers, rapped a schoolyard verse over the top and the whole lot (credited to Malcolm McLaren and The World's Famous Supreme Team) made its way to #9 in January '83 as "Buffalo Gals", having entered the Top 40 at the end of November '82.

Early '83 is giving us some fantastic singles, with Wah! and their soaring "The Story of the Blues" at #3 in mid-January. I'm consistently surprised how much of this era has ended up lodged in my brain as I couldn't place the band or title but within the first few seconds of playing it had an immediate, "oh, it's that!"

One-hit wonder The Maisonettes mine '60s Velvelettes-style soul for "Heartache Avenue" (#7 January '83), bringing the sound up to date with plenty of synth stabs. It's another case of an indie release with the most non-indie band origin, complete with band members being swapped out for people who could, well, sing.

The Stranglers move to Epic Records for the laid-back "European Female" (#9 January '83). It's got a lot of texture and they've come a long way from the days of "No More Heroes". I have to admit I prefer that early energy a bit.

Another enduring early '83 classic takes over from Phil Collins at the top of the charts for the end of January - Australian band Men At Work's "Down Under", the bouncy hymn to international travel also bemoaning the commercialisation and end of simple Australian life. In latter years it became embroiled in a copyright dispute; parts of the flute melody are based on 1930s nursery rhyme "Kookaburra" which turned out not to be the public domain traditional song most Australians, Men At Work included, thought it was.

Below it at #2 as January ends is another record with a long-lasting imprint on pop, Eddy Grant's "Electric Avenue". Written to replace songs lost as Grant moved from the UK to Barbados, the video became one of a batch MTV put into rotation after criticism that their first year or so of broadcasting had featured almost exclusively white faces on screen.

This may have been as much a commercial decision as an altruistic one, with Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (#1 February '83) bringing in the views. The video is clearly shot on a small soundstage but it's clever, with a mix of practical effects and digital compositing, and those light-up floor tiles. This is also the first single to give us a taste of what's really going on with "Thriller".

Incidentally, one of the albums Jackson named as a big influence on "Thriller"? "Hot Space".

I'm getting a little ahead of the chronology there though, and mid-January gives us a lot of '80s names entering the Top 40. Echo & The Bunnymen have their first Top 10 with "The Cutter", an edgy new-wave track that I feel owes a fair amount to Berlin Trilogy-era Bowie. That is a good thing.

U2 have their first hit, "New Year's Day" (#10 January '83). It's an interesting listen given you can hear so much of what the band would become, but also how they grew from a sound closer to their new-wave contemporaries. The Edge's style is just about recognisable, but it's scratchy and covered in a layer of hardworking grime rather than the ultra-clean, effects-laden guitar of later U2 records.

Somewhat lower down the charts are Level 42 with "The Chinese Way" (#24 February '83). Again I reference "Hot Space" - where else have you heard this sophisticated yet oddly empty synth-funk?

There's no letting up on those names inextricably linked with the '80s though, and the next one is Kajagoogoo. "Too Shy" goes to #1 in February and spends ten weeks in the Top 40. It's yet more of that empty-sounding synth-funk, the kind of thing which after decades of bouncing around various influences has ended up shorn of lyrics and put on hour-long YouTube playlists with the suffix "-wave" and the instruction "for doing something else to".

It's a little odd this has become the aesthetic to ultimately be spat out of history as generically representative of "the eighties", as in period I heard things like Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes' "Up Where We Belong" (#7 February '83) far more often. Might this be one of the earliest uses of that little synth glissando in the intro which signifies you're going to be listening to some seriously high-gloss pop for the next few minutes?

Co-written by Buffy Sainte-Marie, it was from the soundtrack to 1982's "An Officer And A Gentleman", adding to the pop chart's long history of elevating those big film numbers. Far from the last either, although that's a story for the '90s.

If punk took a long time to get from the sound of the streets to becoming established in the UK charts, then hip-hop's progress is positively glacial. It's been nearly four years since "Rapper's Delight" and about the only hit we've had which wasn't a novelty or stunt is "The Message". Wham! have another tilt at getting the "Wham Rap!" up the charts, to more success with a #8 in February. It's still very much in that "look at me, I am rapping" school of lyrical thought and about as far from the streets of New York as, well, Harrow.

Indeep's "Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life" gives them a moody disco #13 full of sound effects in February, and an entry on the roster of one-hit wonders. Having mentioned the slow pace of rap this does have a couple of small rapped sections, but with the sound effects interfering and pushing it down the gimmicky end it all sounds a bit dated in a world where "Billie Jean" is climbing the charts.

Well, back to the '80s revivalist canon. Toto's "Africa" hits #3 in February and 35 years later finds itself on countless yacht rock playlists. It's a bit of an unfair fate resigning this to the status of meme record, as the melding of late '70s soft rock with the up-to-date synth sound is skilfully accomplished and a very satisfying result. It bears listening to without preconceptions, the way I did back when I first handled an LP copy of "Toto IV".

Speaking of meme records, "Never Gonna Give You Up" is... er... not what you expect. This is the Musical Youth version (#6 February '82) and other than the title is unrelated. It's a decent if somewhat forgettable bit of lover's rock with some added pop polish, although the UK version being issued with a B-side featuring a cover of the "Jim'll Fix It" theme has aged badly.

The magic of Madness' run of 1982 singles is starting to fade a bit - "Tomorrow's (Just Another Day)"/"Madness Is All In The Mind" is an enjoyable listen but it's not got the recognisability of those happy-go-lucky earlier hits. Still, #8 in late February isn't a bad result.

Another name for the big book of the '80s as the Thompson Twins (not twins, also there are three of them - it's a Tintin reference) make #9 with "Love on Your Side". There's something strange going on with synth pop; the fat synth sound of those turn of the decade hits is getting pared back, made cleaner, and accented with all these sudden instrumental stabs which make it unpleasantly distracting to listen to. It's that thing Phil Collins feared - the equipment becoming too competent and too clinical, sucking the warmth and life out of the recordings.

Bonnie Tyler approached Jim Steinman after seeing Meat Loaf perform on TV, and you could imagine "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" on an alternate-universe version of "Bat Out Of Hell". Meanwhile in '83, the this-universe version of Meat Loaf's "Midnight At The Lost And Found" resulted in a breakdown of relations between the singer and Steinman, with Epic refusing to pay for the songwriter and Meat believing this and eventual Air Supply number "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" were his, damn it. You can kind of see his point, and this going to #1 in March when all of the singles from "Midnight" struggled to get as far as the Top 40 can't have helped his mood.

The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" shows us what we're missing from that much fatter, more organic synth sound of the early decade, going to #2 in March. There's a willingness to let those oscillators do the talking without covering it all in things constantly doing stuff as per Kajagoogoo. Perhaps this was helped somewhat by the record being made on a tiny budget with borrowed equipment and only a single microphone. Of course now we're in the era where video is killing the radio star I can't let this pass without mentioning the frankly menacing music video in which a short-haired, sharp-suited Annie Lennox lies on a boardroom table while a cow wanders around it.

It's a bit of a step from there to the perky lightness of Bananarama's "Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)" (#5 March '83), on which those '60s girl group and soul influences are still very strong. I'm being disappointed by that thin and too-clean production, though. Damn it Phil, you were right about how hard that '60s sound would be to reproduce.

One of the bands which seemed to keep turning up the last time I went through a box of '80s singles were Modern Romance, with copies of some things turning up in triplicate. "High Life" (#8 March '83) is inoffensive but a bit empty, and I'm remembering why none of those multiple copies got a second spin on the turntable once I knew what condition they were in.

Another band who keep turning up for me are Orange Juice. Not so much themselves, but the number of people in their orbit who went on to have hits or found musical movements makes me feel like lightning is constantly trying to strike and missing its target. Although maybe not even that over the long term, given one of the founding members is Edwyn Collins.

Their one major chart presence was with "Rip It Up" (#8 March '83) which sounds rather at odds with their earlier new wave sound and and reputation for influencing a plethora of jangle pop bands, but I guess you gotta do what you gotta do for commercial success.

March's charts also bring the curious prospect of one of my favourite '50s recording artists working together with one of my least favourite, Phil Everly with Cliff Richard on "She Means Nothing To Me" (#9 March '83). I fear I'm doomed to keep referencing "You Can't Hurry Love" every other record here (although that does give me the excuse to listen to it again), but this is the unfortunate outcome - they're trying to recreate a specific early '60s sound on vastly different equipment and the result sounds like an "original version re-recorded" of a song you've never heard of on a cheap K-Tel compilation album. It's not bad, at least by the low standards I set for Mr Richard, but if you were looking for a revival of the care and craft you'd find on an Everlys record from the late '50s it ain't here.

That ultra-clean style did suit Duran Duran though. "Is There Something I Should Know?" (#1 March '83) was a standalone single, the last they'd record in the UK before becoming tax exiles. It feels like it would be sacrilege to put something this pristine on a 7" and play it with surface roar, rumble and the inevitable scratches and dust that accumulate on a record from the moment it's taken out of the sleeve for the first time.

Not that this would be a problem for too much longer. The CD format launched in the UK in March 1983, to the delight of television programme editors who could show the disc being spread with honey, washed off in a bowl of coffee and miraculously still playing. (No, it wasn't jam and it wasn't Tomorrow's World - this clip originated from BBC Breakfast Time on 1st March 1983 and I suspect a fair amount of the "still playing" may be an artifice of the sound editor given it cuts in mid-track)

Incidentally, breakfast TV itself was a relatively new innovation in 1983, national ITV breakfast network TV-am having started only a month earlier.

While Duran Duran's next album "Seven and the Ragged Tiger" would naturally come out on the new format, we're still a way off them being entirely relevant to the singles chart. The first CD single would not arrive until 1985 from who else but that most iconic of CD-era bands, Dire Straits? But even this was a limited release on what was still an expensive audiophile format, and the official charts would not start counting CD sales towards a single's total until 1987.

If Paul Weller thought The Jam could only be cool while its members were young, what did he think was more appropriate for someone in their mid-twenties? The answer was the Style Council. with "Speak Like A Child" going to #4 in March. I'm not sure the break into a band suitable for the mature gentleman is quite so clean as legend would like though; there's an awful lot of "The Bitterest Pill" in this and I think that was the better rendition of those themes.

Joan Armatrading's "Drop The Pilot" goes to #11 and it's one of those singles that just puts a big grin on my face; it teeters on the ridiculous and I'm not sure there's any great spiritual discovery to be made as a result of listening to it but my word it's a whole load of fun, and what else do you really want out of a 7" single, eh?

Maybe a little blast of synth and some classic new wave itchiness, as per Altered Images "Don't Talk To Me About Love" (#7 March '83). A fading chart presence by this point, with future "her out of Red Dwarf" Clare Grogan on vocals. (Other Kochanskis have been found to be a noticeably inferior product). Critics moaned about the lack of musical advancement, but it's all quite listenable.

April opens with David Bowie shooting to #1 with Nile Rodgers co-production "Let's Dance". If only he'd hung around with Queen a bit longer after that "Under Pressure" session because this is how you go about melding that funk/disco sound with your own musical heritage. Perhaps Bowie's sound was that little easier to stretch before it reached the limits of credibility, but this is still turning up every so often on film soundtracks and you don't see that happening for "Las Palabras De Amor".

JoBoxers had been opening for Madness on their tour and you can hear that influence on #3-placed "Boxerbeat" although it doesn't have the charm or the winking back-of-classroom lyrical turns. I guess April '83 can't win them all, and Kajagoogoo's utterly empty and meaningless "Ooh to Be Ah" at #7 is not helping the case.

Culture Club's "Church Of The Poison Mind" rises to #2 under Bowie, although the Motown-aping single is one of their less memorable moments. I guess we're hitting one of those patches where there's not much about to buy, with Tracey Ullman's '60s girl group revivalism "Breakaway" another play-it-then-forget-it record at #4.

Kenny Everett's parody "Snot Rap" (#9 April '83) weights the scales further toward the situation where there are more novelty rap singles to have charted than the genuine article from where the music form originated. It's not without amusing moments and the treatment isn't irksome as so many parody records end up being, but I still find it odd that we're ripping the piss out of something that has barely even happened yet.

Normal service resumes with Michael Jackson's "Beat It" hitting #3 in mid-April. The rock number from "Thriller", Eddie Van Halen turned up for a guitar solo surrounded by a flurry of urban legends about knocking on studio doors and speakers catching fire. Jackson fronted up $150,000 for a music video after CBS decided that was an unnecessary expense, featuring the massed ranks of choreographed dancers that would become a hallmark of his visual style.

Eurythmics' reissued "Love Is A Stranger" is at #6 with the synths sounding like rejected town music from "Zelda II: The Adventure Of Link". (Historical note: the Nintendo Famicom released in Japan in July, although the NES wouldn't come to the UK officially until 1987). I'm an absolute sucker for this early synth stuff before they all got boring and far too precise.

Not a big hit, but Twisted Sister's "I Am (I'm Me)" (#18 April '84) introduces these pages to the wonderful world of what would be pejoratively termed hair metal, but let's be positive and use the earlier term glam metal. Taking the aesthetic sense and agricultural approach of glam rock and marrying it to the big sounds and bigger solos of heavy metal for something that was "drinking alcohol in an inflatable pool chair" levels of irresponsible fun. I'm pleased to see Twisted Sister here this early as they were one of the most fun-having bands of a generally fun-having scene.

Spandau Ballet, once the byword for new-age art pop, fully complete their transformation to massive-selling latter day blue-eyed soul with #1 "True", espousing guitarist Gary Kemp's feelings for that Clare Grogan out of Altered Images. I bet he has similar opinions to me on which Kochanski is the best.

Fine slice of French europop "Words" from F.R. David is below it at #2. This was one of those big pan-European hits and has me checking the Eurovision calendar. We're at about the right time and France did win the 1983 contest but that was with oddity "Vivre" from Guy Bonnet, one of those things which sound great on the night when you've got the big auditorium and all the surrounding craziness but take that away and it's a challenging listen.

Iron Maiden have "Flight of Icarus" at #11. Again, I state the case that their discography would make a pretty decent taster course of history, myth and a smattering of literature. Also probably the only Classics course you can take driving around in a cheap second-hand car with the tape deck turned all the way up.

"Rosanna", the "other Toto song" which isn't "Hold the Line" is below it the same week at #12. I have a bit of a soft spot for this whole album so I am as ever an unreliable narrator but I'd say this one's worth a listen if you're in the mood for some soft rock.

Tears for Fears re-record the song which got them a major label deal, "Pale Shelter" and go to #5 with it at the start of May. This was released in a flurry of special editions on picture discs and coloured vinyl, although it stands up well enough in its own right.

The Human League are back with album title track "(Keep Feeling) Fascination" (#2 May '83), their labelling scheme returning for one last hurrah with this as one of those "red" arty ones. It's got some good bits but I feel that chorus is a little under-baked even if it doesn't stand out in a decade where empty euphoria is the spirit of the age.

Appropriately enough, it gives up its #2 slot the next week to Heaven 17's "Temptation", another curate's egg of a single which has some good ideas but just doesn't have the consistency to carry them all the way across an extended 12" mix.

The '80s take on bubblegum pop by way of the Jacksons comes on New Edition's "Candy Girl", a loathsome #1 from May '83 that seems to combine just about everything that was bad about a mediocre early '70s Jacksons record with the vapid euphoria of the present decade and far too many squelchy effects. It does somehow feature a brief rap, and I'm really not happy that the counter is ticking up in this way.

Skip on to The Beat's wonderful cover of Andy Williams classic "Can't Get Used To Losing You" by way of Danny Ray's excellent ska version, at #3 the same week. Please ignore the Manchester United Incident of my youth getting closer with "Glory Glory Man Utd" at #13.

Alternatively you can wait a week and "Every Breath You Take" will be topping the charts. The sinister, stalkerish song (deliberately written so!) became a Police classic, although drummer Stewart Copeland later bemoaned the arrangement as a load of rubbish apart from the guitar part. Mind you, he did have a miserable time recording this and did also say that deep into the backlash against gated reverb on drums which this has rather a lot of.

Wham! are sliding from rap and dangerously close to landfill '80s on #2-placed "Bad Boys". Hell, I'm not even going to be that kind - this is landfill '80s. Is there anything of substance beneath those "woo"s and "do-do-do"s? It's just three minutes of sugary perkiness, no matter how much the lyrics try to evoke a tough-guy image.

I know my beautiful early '80s synth pop weirdness has to slip away as the decade wears on and the country undergoes some of the most sweeping and dramatic social changes it ever has, changes whose repercussions still echo today. But I'm determined to hang on to it as long as I can, and I think I'd be one of the people helping Yazoo's "Nobody's Diary" to #3 in the chart countdown for 5th June.

Posthumous Bob Marley release "Buffalo Soldier" (originally recorded 1978) is one slot below it at #4. I liked this when I first encountered a copy of greatest hits compilation "Legend", although many reggae albums and heavily abused Trojan singles later I find that production a bit clean for my liking.

Another late-'70s song is Bowie's "China Girl", originally created with Iggy Pop in 1977. This is a re-recording from the "Let's Dance" sessions though, and brings it up to the minute. You can hear the evolution from the '77 Iggy Pop original. The tempo increases, synths weave beneath the vocals and it's all just so much cleaner.

June 1983 laid another foundation stone for the popular image of the UK in the '80s. The country went to the polls and returned a landslide victory for Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative party. With a floundering Labour party being seen as too far to the left and too divided (oh, how that story will come back with a vengeance) the victory had been treated as a dead cert from the point the election was called in May.

In many ways this made sense. Unemployment was currently on the way down from its peak of 3.2 million in February, although it would hit a new peak in '84 and remain stubbornly high until the true boom years later in the decade, widening the divide between the prosperous services-driven South where the jobs were and the declining manufacturing-driven North where they weren't. The country had just won a war, the previous year's Falklands conflict providing a jingoistic boost to Thatcher's popularity.

Plus some things did feel like they were turning round. Perennially underperforming national carmaker British Leyland was now Austin-Rover, the Metro was topping the sales charts and a range of promising new cars co-developed with Honda were in late prototype stages. Debt-ridden British Airways was about to embark on a management turnaround that would see a massively oversubscribed stock market flotation four years later.

The term "yuppie" was starting to enter the British lexicon after early use Stateside. The young urban professional; a pushy look-out-for-number-one type who worked in a city, most likely in financial services, made a decent stack of disposable income and wasn't afraid of showing it off.

They wore suits, celebrated consumer excess and saw one-upmanship as a perpetual game. They exchanged the pub for the wine bar and the Cortina for a series of German GTIs and sports saloons. They decorated their homes with porcelain Pierrot clowns and a vast array of inessential gadgets that combined black plastic and oversized ball bearings in some manner. I could go on, but the image of the yuppie is so pervasively of the '80s that ChatGPT confidently tells me they were already heading off to work in Canary Wharf by 1983. Somewhat unexpected, given that at the time pretty much everything east of the City was a substantial wasteland of disused dockyards and about the closest you got to work around there was skidding around it in a Vauxhall Cresta for a Specials video.

While it would take the financial deregulation of 1986 and the resulting unsustainable boom to fully unleash the yuppie ideal, the term did exist and James Herbert referenced the nascent concept (if not the word) of young, upwardly-mobile workers who acted differently to their older peers in 1981's "The Jonah".

So what was on the radio as these people went to vote Conservative, perhaps even dreaming of an I-got-mine style of economic prosperity in which they'd be inserting Dire Straits cassettes into the extra-cost option Blaupunkt tape deck of their 318i?

Well, Dire Straits for a start, although still some way from the massive-selling "check out my new CD player" outfit of the mid '80s, and since most recent hit "Twisting By The Pool" had faded from the charts by the end of February it's not so relevant to a country with a brand new government and a lot of change ahead of it.

But as ever with these early '80s charts, it's all over the place.

Michael Jackson's "Wanna Be Startin' Something" (#8 June '83) is another testament to the great production on "Thriller". I could take or leave the whole four minutes because this isn't quite my thing, but those first fifteen seconds are a fantastic groove.

Bucks Fizz and "When We Were Young" (#10 June '83) is the ABBA we have at home, but they don't half make a go of it. The soaring choruses, the vocal harmonies, even the underlying sense of melancholy - they're all here, if done more at the supermarket own-brand level of things. Maybe our nascent yuppie contingent might have written it off as a bit naff, but I appreciate the effort.

With "Garden Party" at #16 we get introduced to another one of those names inseparable from the mid-'80s, Marillion. Yet another band to be divided into distinct eras, this one is the time of Fish - whose painting of himself as a tortured poetic soul with heart laid bare on sleeve and a bitter social conscience backing it up would underscore these first three albums and inspire Iain Banks when writing the lead character of Espedair Street.

It's all here on "Garden Party", a diatribe against being the odd one out at upper-class events. A feeling some yuppies may have privately admitted to; the tension between barrow boys and toffs played large in industries where the stiff suits and caution of the old guard gave way to a new contingent who wrote risky deals, made huge amounts of money while times were good, and threatened to destroy entire industries and their wealthy backers when they were bad (leading to the scandal of the Lloyd's "names" tempting in new members with promises of easy profits just in time for the whole insurance market to go tits-up).

This was one I loved from the moment I heard it, and I got my mum to record it on to a tape for me along with some other choice and probably rather embarrassing in retrospect 1980s cuts. As a young kid it was probably more about the sounds than anything else and I didn't get the lyrics, thinking that the assessment of beagling on the downs was a positive one. I hadn't experienced anything which shifted so dramatically from pounding rhythms to quiet reflection to voices bubbling under the record before. I'm not saying I was made to be an outcast, but a natural affinity for neo-prog before I even knew what prog neo or otherwise was is a strong implication there.

(I probably have a lot more to say about Marillion at some point, but maybe we can save it for 1985)

Anyway, let's stop delving in the realm of the socially awkward and pick a winner. Rod Stewart's "Baby Jane" is the new #1 at the end of June. It feels reasonably current, as Stewart usually made an effort to be to better or worse effect, but the gravelly voice, strong footing in classic rock and the fact he's been around since we didn't know what size his face was count against Rod here in the assessment of this as a truly modern record.

Perennial darling of inappropriate nightcore versions "Moonlight Shadow" is at #4 for Mike Oldfield in late June and I'm not sure I even recognise this so slow and laid-back any more. It's got a nice solo that you don't hear when it's used as the theme for Dave Angel: Eco Warrior.

Below it at #5 Elton John is beginning his set of comeback recordings with "I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues". With all that's been happening since "Song For Guy" back in '78, it's been easy to miss that Elton has been almost completely absent from the upper reaches of the charts. Album "Too Low For Zero" attempted to recapture all the things which had catapulted him to stardom after many years of dues-paying, with much of the early '70s backing band reunited and Bernie Taupin writing all of the lyrics rather than sharing duty with other songwriters.

Paul Young does well with "Wherever I Lay My Hat (That's My Home)", a soul cover that went to #1 in July '83 and spent twelve weeks in the Top 40. Somehow the cover for album "No Parlez" won awards despite the design being little more than an attempt to cover up a technical assistant who had blundered into frame on a rejected shot from a magazine photoshoot. This is heading toward territory that would become one of those irksome features of later in the '80s, a bland and ironically soulless version of blue-eyed soul, although perhaps that's a little unfair to bring up here; I don't think this is a patch on the classic blue-eyed soul of the '60s but at least there's a little bit of human emotion somewhere in there.

Freeez's "I.O.U" is below it at #2 although its average chart placing was higher over its own twelve weeks in the Top 40. It is also more of that utterly empty electronic funk. "Hot Space" had its number, but my word does this stuff wind me up. There's just nothing there; all surface gloss and no substance.

By the end of the month Eurythmics' "Who's That Girl?" is at #3. Listening to this and other tracks from album "Touch" it strikes me how much the band were bearing a torch for a sound which was fading from the pop charts, that early experimental synth-pop being supplanted by the more up-tempo and funk-tinged records whose roots were more in disco than the moodier aesthetic of new wave.

There's still a decent smattering of it around mind, Heaven 17's "Come Live With Me" at #5 that same late-July week. Pleasing as the music may be I'm not sure I'd listen to this in company with people who pay attention to lyrics, though. Half your age plus seven, people!

Actual hip-hop! Gary Byrd and the G.B. Experience on "The Crown" is below it at #6. Still with a strong disco influence on the beats at this point - lest we forget, the genre first hit the charts with Sugarhill Gang interpolating Chic and we're still at the point only a tiny handful of non-novelty rap singles have made the Top 40. I'm not complaining as it works well, and I'll take it in preference to any more of that indistinguishably perky funk.

Sounding like Paul Simon's "Graceland" arriving three years early is Malcolm McLaren single "Double Dutch"(#3 July '83). Perhaps "Duck Rock" needs a bit more retrospective credit, McLaren and Trevor Horn exploring African rhythms and the New York hip-hop culture in satisfying fashion. Yes, he may have tried to keep the Sex Pistols going long after their sell-by date but this is both forward-thinking and all rather listenable. Of course it's Malcolm McLaren so controversy is never far away; listen to 1975's "Puleng" by the Boyoyo Boys and you don't need much imagination to see how it resulted in a plagiarism lawsuit.

Bananarama have converted to the church of the vapid, soulless funky electropop with "Cruel Summer" (#8 July '83). Oh, there was so much promise and weirdness earlier on. Maybe that squelchy synth line has a cautious foot still in those gloriously weird early '80s but I feel the landfill part of the decade coming on.

As if hearing my need for an Exhibit A, August '83 delivers #1-placing "Give It Up" from KC & The Sunshine Band. Is there anything here beyond the false promise of those primitive synths in the first ten seconds? It's like a box-ticking exercise for the Landfill '80s checklist: the obligatory funk guitar, the horns, the repetition of simple words in lieu of any meaningful lyrics, the never-ending perkiness.

It kept Spandau Ballet's "Gold" off the top of the charts, a film score homage that met with mixed reviews on its release. I find myself siding with those critics; "Gold" is sophisticated, but it takes it to the point where that one concept of sophistication becomes overbearing, the record constantly beating you over the head with just how sophisticated it is.

Style Council EP "À Paris" (#3 August '83) has the same problem on lead track "Long Hot Summer". It's sophistication taken to such one-note relentlessness you end up wishing Slade will turn up (probably sideways with smoke pouring from the wheels) so we can have some fun again.

I've never been much of a fan of "Club Tropicana" (#4 August '83) either. I think there's something gnawing at me listening to these charts which brings me back to the chart landscape I grew up in. The gulf between the shaggy hair and rough edges of Britpop and the glissandos and sheen of just "pop" in the form of various girl and boy bands was vast. I'm not saying "Sugar, Sugar" and "Bad Moon Rising" were exactly attracting the same audiences back in 1969 but at least you can feel some sort of there-from-here connection that they are broadly the same type of music.

So many of these summer '83 singles bring back that feeling of pop that was, well, "pop" as a distinct genre in and of itself. Sure it draws from other things if you dig deep enough and there's probably more influences of greater variety than Britpop's love of "so, we're going to emulate this one band from the mid '60s" outfits. But while there might be a touch of disco here, a little funk there, maybe the odd jazz flourish that wouldn't be too out of place on a Blue Note record, it all fades into the background in service of the idea that pop should not merely represent a distillation of the sounds of the moment, but be a distinct sound in itself.

Is "Club Tropicana" a bad record? No, it's a competent and well-executed one which is a long way from the slightly gimmicky territory of earlier Wham!. But my word does it do that "this has a genre, and that genre is pop" thing to a level my '90s indie soul bristles at it.

There's also an argument that this is less a new paradigm than the end of a 20-year anomaly. Pop prior to 1955 had honed its craft over the decades from the advent of electric recording into what I call the Template, the slow string-laden ballads sung by crooners. Maybe you'd call it a precursor to easy listening but in its day that was the only difficulty level to be had.

The Template weathered the gimmick-laden flash of rock'n'roll and indeed by the early 1960s looked like seeing it off, with the upstart genre consumed by samey singles and all too many novelty records. While it all felt very dated by that point, it seemed like the heir apparent was the Brill Building sound, all girl groups and producers and slick commerciality, a form of music that plunged even further into the conviction there was no "thing" it should conform to, it was just pop.

Then the Beatles happened. The first phase was that '63-'65 explosion of beat groups which dominated the charts and set in place a situation I have spent many pleasurable hours writing about; that the pop of the day has a genre, and we can chart the rise and fall of these genres as the record-buying public move from psychedelia, to glam rock, to disco.

The second phase though, '66-'70, that's the one which sets the expectation that pop is something which exists in service to other genres. This is the period where the Beatles went out into the world to find influences, be they psychedelia or hard rock or reggae, and essentially Beatle-ised them into a consistent product. Pop-psych. Pop-rock. Regrettably, pop-reggae. Here we enter the muso-vs.-teenybopper world where no matter what you find in the charts, there's a band out there doing it more authentically, more real, and your musical allegiances are drawn as to whether you side with the people at #1 or the people who'll be lucky to get to #72.

(And dare I say it, we're getting close to that whole "album chart vs. singles chart" system which defined my youthful understanding of music)

Even the most disposable of novelty pop lived inside this ecosystem - "Remember You're A Womble" cannot exist outside of the early '70s fascination with glam rock and soon we're following a trail of influences that have us listening to both sides of Deep Purple's "Machine Head" and wondering if there's something even more obscure and uncompromising that we can point to those wombling tweenagers in the middle row of the classroom and go, "this is that thing but for adults".

OK, I'm getting fanciful here. But there's a point that pop as an isolated genre which might draw from things which went before but largely exists as its own distinct sound signature is something that has happened before. And it's been a gradual process. Ask someone learned for the point at which this shift to "pop as pop" happens and you'll hear a few options. Is it Michael Jackson's "Thriller"? While the album as a whole exists outside of a desire to be tied to any one genre I think the individual tracks are a bit too much "this is the x genre one" to be more than a step along the path. Prince's "1999" is perhaps the best candidate, and my narrative would be a lot neater if it had hit big on its initial release rather than bumping around at the bottom of the Top 40 for a handful of weeks in early 1983.

Wham! themselves started out with heavy nods to the world of rap but like "1999" it's the reduction of that to a tiny part in a stew of influences that draws from everything and yet itself is none of them that has me making this long and rambling point about pop.

It's refreshing after all of that to listen to Depeche Mode's "Everything Counts" (#6 August '83) which is only separated from full-on gothic darkwave by its major key chorus. I love the moodiness and sense of space.

Scratching continues to be introduced to the charts by the most unlikely of protagonists, with jazz musician Herbie Hancock's instrumental "Rockit" (#8 August '83) featuring Grand Mixer DXT on the turntables and a funky synth line tying it all together. There's also another pioneer of early hip-hop on there, the Oberheim DMX drum machine. Although it had been around since 1980, this was the year where it started seeing more use on charting records, and was joined by a budget option DX model which would become another early hip-hop staple by the mid-'80s.

The most self-referential of Elton John's comeback singles "I'm Still Standing" is at #4 in late August, the video and all of its early '80s video compositing effects going into heavy rotation on MTV.

August just about has time to give us another #1 with UB40's "Red Red Wine" going to that position on the 28th. I've never been a fan of this one - the band were going for a cover of the Tony Tribe version of the Neil Diamond original but I find the UB40 version just too clean. I guess that Collins/Padgham point rears its head again; you'd be a laughing stock for releasing something with the sound quality of early '70s reggae into these mid-'80s charts with their pristine recordings and gated reverb, but in losing those rough edges it also loses some indefinable part of the character that made it so engaging to listen to.

I have a brief moment glancing at the rest of this month-ending chart to wonder how the hell Shalamar are still going. "Disappearing Act" (#18 August '83) suggests they're doing it by hiding in the shadows of '80s landfill, adopting all that empty perkiness and exhaustingly constant energy.

On to September, where Madness are at #2 with "Wings of a Dove" although it's not up to their run of classics from the previous year, with the steel drum production coming across overwrought. I feel like I should challenge myself to get to the end of 1983 without overusing the word "emptiness" but if this is anything to go by I think I'd fail.

Rod Stewart's "What Am I Gonna Do" is below it at #3 and I didn't expect to be pondering use of the phrase "Rod Stewart redemption arc" but this is so far ahead of the lighter-baiting balladry of "Sailing" and the following regrettable disco experiments that I think it might be apt.

New Order present my rough "when it peaked" methodology with a bit of a problem, because in terms of 1983's charts "Blue Monday" has been a near-constant in the Top 75 since March, often higher in the Top 40 around its initial release and later peak, but won't hit its chart peak of #9 until October. Perhaps some of that is down to the idiosyncratic nature of this Factory Records release, initially a 12-inch only affair in a sleeve die-cut to resemble a giant floppy disk where identifying the artist and track title requires deciphering a code formed of coloured blocks.

Factory's dedication to weirdness over sound business sense in an industry which is well-known for eviscerating anyone who isn't a hard-headed ballbuster would become the subject of "24 Hour Party People", a film so consumed by the power of the legends that it has people who were there at the time cameoing with a knowing, "I don't remember this happening". That weirdness extended to accounting policy with the label losing money on each copy due to the die-cut sleeve, deemed acceptable on the basis that they didn't think it would sell that well. Later revisions cheapened the production so Factory could concentrate on its real money pit; selling drinks too cheap at the Hacienda then raising bar prices just in time for the new wave of club drugs and the resulting collapse in demand for other intoxicating substances.

Assuming this wouldn't sell so well is one of those Decca-turning-down-the-Beatles decisions; ridiculous in retrospect, but in the context of the time it makes sense. "Blue Monday" is so uncompromisingly bare; surely the time for this kind of thing had been and gone with OMD in '81? It's odd that these records which aim for so much empty space between the music are a rich and full experience to listen to, while the records which try to fill every second of their runtime with something happening feel empty.

One of the oddities of Blue Monday's long chart performance is that New Order's "Confusion" managed to pop up, go to #12 in September and then disappear from the Top 40 again before "Blue Monday" hit its peak. Mind you, it is nowhere near as good, leaning on constant sound effects where "Blue Monday" was happy to use them sparingly as seasoning.

Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack take #2 off Madness with "Tonight I Celebrate My Love" and while it is recognisably of its time I am surprised by how many of the little accents, turns and other second-order things here would be present on the syrupy R&B of the late '90s.

When I noted the differing fates of disco in the US and Europe at the end of the '70s I mentioned Italo Disco, and Ryan Paris' "Dolce Vita" (#5 September '83) is that stripped-down, electronic-led form making its way into the UK Top 40. There's a clear synth-pop influence, but the beat, soaring chorus and sparkling accents all hark back to those early days of disco. The accented singing is, of course, a key part of the aesthetic.

We're well into the Phil Collins era of Genesis by this point, and "Mama" (#4 September '83) is a strange hybrid between the uncompromising nature of the band in the early '70s and the solo Collins sound he was accused of pushing the band further and further towards as the '80s wore on. So we've got a song about a young man dreaming of the red light district, but sonically it's almost like someone set out to make a meaner version of "In The Air Tonight". I find the whole thing a little too much and prefer follow-up release "That's All" (#16 December '83), which comes with a great live version of "Firth of Fifth" on the 12" single.

Back to September and Culture Club have another #1 with "Karma Chameleon". One of those huge '80s hits and the biggest-selling single of '83, it's a bit of an oddity in a parade of empty perkiness with its subtle country influences and lyrics criticising that very convictionless please-everyone attitude.

Big Country's "Chance" is at #9 in late September, album "The Crossing" ending up a little bit of a staging post for those who were still making a last-ditch "No Synthesisers!" stand about four years too late. Don't let that discourage you; there's some great rock music here with the band observing plenty of musical heritage from their native Scotland. Based on what else is happening in the charts, I'm not sure those diatribes against "fake-funk frauds" from critics are entirely misplaced either, even if the synths are here to stay.

David Bowie's still doing well with singles from "Let's Dance", with "Modern Love" going to #2 as October rolls in. It's clever, taking that sophisti-pop sound of the moment and marrying it to rock'n'roll sax and piano.

Also mocking the fake-funk frauds and those who claimed he was one of their number was John Lydon on Public Image Ltd.'s "This Is Not A Love Song" (#5 October '83). I'm not sure this has moved on a great deal in emotional maturity from the same "if that's what you say I am" sentiment of "Anarchy in the UK" but perhaps, now as then, it sums up the spirit of the age.

Fellow Bill Grundy show alumnus Siouxsie Sioux is also in the charts with the Banshees on a gothic cover of the Beatles' "Dear Prudence" (#3 October '83). The band chose the song as a Beatles cover which didn't require anyone to learn anything new during a manic period, but something about the floaty pastoral psychedelia translates unexpectedly well to the world of gloom and ethereal vocals.

Tracey Ullman's cover of '79 Kirsty MacColl number "They Don't Know" takes the #2 from Bowie the week "Dear Prudence" hits #3. The solid girl group production fits the song well, and beyond that it's faithful to the point MacColl actually fills in a high note that Ullman can't quite hit just to keep it sounding right.

Howard Jones always denied it as coincidence, but #3-placing "New Song" doesn't half come across like a synth-pop "Solsbury Hill". My attention flicks to "(Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew" at #6, though. The breaking group Rock Steady Crew are almost one-hit wonders in the UK charts (follow-up "Uprock" had a #64 chart peak) but hey, it's nice to see a big part of 1980s culture get some chart representation. By the way, don't call it breakdancing; that's an invention of media reporting on multiple street dancing scenes and the Rock Steady Crew would refer to what they are doing as "b-boying".

Unfortunately in terms of the kind of 1980s culture I was getting exposed to in suburban Surrey, it was going to be the party song band. One of the most noxious of which was Black Lace, whose "Superman (Gioca Jouer)" started as a novelty song doing rounds in discos in Italy and Spain before the band noticed it and decided to make their own recording. It is a frankly wretched thing, a weedy and joyless studio recording like the very worst track you can find on a K-Tel "original hits re-recorded" compilation. Somehow this went to #9. Look at us wacky party folks with our good time records!

The soft soul of Lionel Richie's "All Night Long (All Night)" took him to #2 at the end of October. I fear for the future as this stuff gets softer and softer, although with a long career in the Commodores he does have enough of a voice to carry things even if the music doesn't do much behind those horns.

"Karma Chameleon" is finally dethroned from #1 on 3oth October by Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl". A conscious attempt to capture the same magic as early Four Seasons social-divide songs (think "Rag Doll") this would stay on the top of the charts for the whole of November. Try not to think about it being "Sk8er Boi" told from the other point of view.

The top position might be locked out for the next month, but plenty is still happening elsewhere on the charts. Duran Duran's "Union of the Snake" hits #3 on that same 30th October chart, although I fear it's just a less-good retread of "Hungry Like The Wolf".

A confusion of men-based bands arrives with Men Without Hats' "The Safety Dance" at #6. See these ones explicitly say they have no hats, while these ones are men at work - no, it's not clear whether the men without hats are working, or whether the men at work are doing so without hats. That aside, lead singer Ivan Doroschuk getting kicked out of a club for pogo dancing gave us an enjoyable synth-pop single.

I like UB40's "Please Don't Make Me Cry" (#10 October '83) rather a lot more than "Red Red Wine" - the production is still clean, but the dub-influenced bassline and the more laid-back nature of the record overall make for something far more listenable.

Adam Ant's "Puss 'n Boots" (#5 November '83) tries to recapture the anarchic sense of fun from earlier Ant output, but it falls foul of its own pantomime theme in feeling like it's trying a bit too hard. If those drums feel rather prominent and also like a lot is going on behind the kit, that may be because Phil Collins guests.

Shakin' Stevens has made his way into this new '80s era with what I can best describe as synth-rockabilly, or more like a synth version of that weird cod-rockabilly which he was playing earlier in the decade. "Cry Just A Little Bit" (#3 November '83) hits that same problem of the Rollers and Showaddywaddy in that it's just too offensive to derive any real enjoyment from.

Far better to stick "The Love Cats" (#7 November '83) on the turntable. Robert Smith claims it's far from his favourite Cure song with most of the major steps in its creation being done while drunk, but at least it's got some spirit to it.

It's quite a surprise to find "Thriller" making no more than #10 for a record which was a landmark in pop video production. The mini-epic cost more than any music video up to that point, with actual film director John Landis (another first for music video) hired to produce a creature feature on 35mm film. But perhaps that's the problem; "Thriller" makes a better mini-film than it does a pop single, the last few minutes almost crying out for some visuals to go along with the slow progress. Plus by this point if you were enjoying the music, you'd already have bought the album.

Yazoo disbanded in 1983, but Vince Clarke attempted to capture the same again with guest vocalist Feargal Sharkey (ex-Undertones) on "Never Never" as The Assembly. It hit #4 in November '83 with a decent B-side in the shape of "Stop Start", but that was all the new band ever recorded, leaving them in the well-populated halls of one-hit wonders, at least as a collective if not as individual members.

When Paul Young first turned up in these charts I found myself wondering, "how did he get such a bad reputation?" November #2 "Love Of The Common People" is the point at which neo blue-eyed soul gives way to what critics would eventually label "piss-weak soul" along with the rise of Terence Trent D'Arby. Presumably quite a well-hydrated one and not after any asparagus or a few too many cans of Monster Energy.

ABBA finally bow out of the UK charts with "Thank You For The Music", a single that was released elsewhere in the world in 1978 but didn't get a UK release until now. By this point it is very dated, and while a fitting last statement it only made #33 and a mere two weeks in the Top 40.

At the other end of the chart, of all the things to dethrone "Uptown Girl", I wasn't expecting an a capella cover of "Only You", but that's exactly what the Flying Pickets took to the #1 spot in December. It's an interesting idea, sure, but I boggle at this being a huge-selling hit that was consistently in the upper reaches of the charts for nearly two months.

At #4 are the Thompson Twins with "Hold Me Now". This is the good side of '80s pop; you couldn't place it in any other decade, but it's not succumbed to blandness and the inability to have any emotion other than "perky".

Another thing indelibly associated with the '80s is the solo career of Tina Turner. As part of husband and wife duo Ike & Tina Turner she'd recorded a multitude of records both better and less well-known, my favourite of which is "Somebody (Somewhere) Needs Me" on Loma Records back in 1965. The problem here is that Ike was a terrible husband, abusive, controlling, prone to physical violence and by the late '70s suffering from a cocaine addiction which only amplified these negative traits. In 1976 Tina fled the marriage with only cents to her name, which would soon turn into debts for cancelled concert appearances as a duo.

She worked to pay off those lawsuits, playing Vegas and appearing on TV, but a couple of failed albums and a list of bookings heavy on hotels and ballrooms suggested she had been relegated to the status of a nostalgia act, the US equivalent of those whose fate is to appear on faded posters announcing gigs at the ends of seaside piers. Then she started collaborating with Heaven 17/B.E.F, followed by a cover of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" produced by the B.E.F lads.

That went to #6 in December '83, and resulted in Capitol Records approving a rush recording of an album. That would become "Private Dancer", more of which anon.

In the meantime Slade appear to have heard my pleas and turned up, a little late because they're probably doing it in a 1970s Mini and water has got into the distributor on a wet motorway. "My Oh My" goes to #2 in December and outside of the vocals is quite un-Slade; contemporary reviewers drew comparison to "We Are The Champions" and if you think the most stadium-baiting of late-'70s Queen filtered through the Black Country you won't be far off. It's well worth a listen if you had previously written Slade off as one-note glam rockers who couldn't spell their song titles correctly.

Culture Club continue their run of Top 10 singles with "Victims" (#3 December '83). It's quite unlike anything you'd expect as a follow-up to "Karma Chameleon", a weighty and personal piano ballad.

We're getting close to the point where I flip the year counter, but there's enough time for Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers to duet on Bee Gees-penned number "Islands In The Stream", which would eventually hit #7 on New Year's Day 1984.

Christmas 1983 is coming and this is the first year you could have unwrapped a "Now That's What I Call Music" album. The idea of packaging up a selection of recent hits into a compilation album was not new, and Pickwick Records did decent trade in the '70s with their "Top of the Pops" series. "Pops" did things according to a pattern first established in the '60s, where session musicians would be bundled into a studio and told to record covers of a selection of hits as quick as they could, with the results issued on LP with an attractive and often scantily clad woman on the front.

This worked well in an era where hit records were simple, although the cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on "Top of the Pops 49" clearly presented some logistical issues. It also meant lower royalty payments, as the original performances were not being used. (The same reason all those K-Tel compilations featured re-recordings in various levels of ghastliness).

In 1983, Stephen Navin and Jon Webster at Virgin Records found themselves frustrated that they were putting all this effort into having hit singles, and then people who were not Virgin Records were making money packaging them into such compilations. They came up with an idea; why not partner with EMI, who were surely experiencing similar frustrations, and produce a compilation of recent chart hits in their original versions, the ones you were used to hearing on the radio?

Label boss Richard Branson provided inspiration in the form of a vintage 1920s Danish Bacon advertisement, featuring the phrase, "now, that's what I call music". EMI MD Peter Davieson agreed the the idea, and on 28th November the first album in the series was released, covering the year from "You Can't Hurry Love" right up to singles that were still climbing the charts as the compilation came out.

"Now" obliterated the "Top of the Pops" series and its ilk. You were getting the real hits, you were getting them while they were current, and with the double LP/double cassette format you were getting a lot of them. They didn't need a bikini-clad girl on the front, and after a few aborted formats the series settled in the early '90s on a simple ray-traced "NOW" above whatever number the current iteration was, which is still in use as of 2024's "Now 119".

I'm not sure who the audience is now hardly anyone uses a CD player, but in their day they were the default stocking filler for a teenager who liked chart pop; I remember my elder stepsister getting a "Now" album without fail and then annoying me by refusing to play whichever CD had all the good Britpop stuff on. (Disc 1 earlier in the decade, Disc 2 later on when sequencing decisions front-loaded all the girl bands of the late '90s). She wasn't the only one; I regularly saw them being passed from school bag to school bag in the classroom, usually by the kind of people who'd definitely have skipped "Sorted For E's and Wizz" with a sneer of distaste.

It being Christmas time, the Pretenders have a tilt at chart success with that most subtle of Christmas songs, "2000 Miles", although it never went further than #15. The Flying Pickets already had Christmas #1 sewn up, although Paul McCartney got close with "Pipes Of Peace" referencing the 1914 Christmas truce, eventually getting that top spot in January '84. Of the two I'd much rather listen to the Pretenders, though.

Somehow the UK's obsession with having more novelty rap singles in the chart than actual rap singles continues with Roland Rat Superstar on "Rat Rapping" (#14 January '84). Oh dear, how do I explain any of this to someone who is not at least 40 years old and British?

Roland Rat was a puppet, introduced on TV-am in April to provide a bit of simple and cheap entertainment for kids in a segment called "The Shedvision Show". Despite being newly launched TV-am was already struggling, with audiences down to just 100,000, so perhaps with attention being focused on ongoing boardroom coups there was a bit more creative freedom available than there might have been on something more successful. Creator David Claridge gave the rat puppet an over-confident voice and personality and a series of animal sidekicks with similarly exaggerated personalities.

Something resonated with more than just bored kids on school holidays as soon TV-am was reporting viewing figures of over 1.5 million, although some of that was helped by popular BBC Breakfast Time hosts Frank Bough and Selina Scott being on holiday. Roland became a household name, merchandise followed, and of course pop singles and albums. In 1985 he transferred to the BBC and rat-themed programmes were made until 1991.

(And beyond, if you count Channel 5 and numerous guest appearances on other shows)

Somehow this was not an isolated incident during the decade and I'm sure I can elicit a sigh from British people of a certain age mentioning Gordon the Gopher and Edd the Duck, the latter of whom also had his own singles and computer games.

Back to more serious pop. Billy Joel's follow-up "Tell Her About It" is fine enough but it didn't hit the heights or the instant recognisability of "Uptown Girl" and the public agreed with it peaking at a still-respectable but definitely lower #4 in January.

Above it Status Quo's "Marguerita Time", darling of terrible single cover artwork with that image of cocktails trying so hard to look sophisticated and yet coming across so hopelessly naff. The single itself might be a bit of that to modern ears, too. I find myself missing the simple shuffles of latter period Quo.

One last 1983 chart entry for Tears For Fears and "The Way You Are", an attempt to be experimental that the band later decried as "the worst thing we've ever done" and an urgent signal they needed a change of direction. A disappointing #24 that would barely make it into the list of things to be investigate were it not for its seven weeks in the Top 40.

And that is 1983 over. A tumultuous year, and not just because we started it without breakfast television and ended it with a breakfast television rodent having a rap single. Musically 1983 reflects what it was economically; the bridge year between a country that seemed to be slowly falling apart and one that seemed to be on the road to economic recovery with inflation down, growth up, and redevelopment plans in motion. We've gone from charts of bleak, experimental music and backward-looking comfort food to ones where bland positivity is the order of the day.

1984 would see some backlash against both that and the destruction of long-held assumptions about social structure that were being claimed as necessary for the country's economic recovery. Time to dive in.

1984

The year starts with a little bit of looking backward. Shakin' Stevens is at #5 in January, duetting with Bonnie Tyler on a cover of 1960 record "A Rockin' Good Way (To Mess Around And Fall In Love)". It's a long way from the bombast of Jim Steinman for Tyler, and I feel I've already written the same words about these featherweight retro pastiche things enough times by now.

If we are to bring back decades past, then how about guitarist Snowy White's chart debut "Bird of Paradise" (#6 January '84), a much-modernised version of the kind of blues-heavy thing Fleetwood Mac used to put out in the '60s. Although listen to it and tell me you don't hear "Brothers In Arms" a year early.

It took some years after John Lennon's death, but Yoko Ono finally felt up to completing the planned follow-up to "Double Fantasy", 1984's "Milk And Honey". This consisted of songs recorded in 1980 by Lennon, counterpointed by new material recorded in 1983 by Ono. Some of those Ono tracks are quite fascinating, but of course it's the ex-Beatle the chart buyers are here for.

What they might realise on getting "Nobody Told Me" (#6 January '84) home is that a lot has elapsed since 1980, musically speaking. It required a bit of extra finishing in the studio in '83 but you can't hide the basic structure of Lennon in his rock'n'roll revivalist character. In that alternate universe with the 1989 reunion of all four Beatles this would have been a track for Ringo Starr's 1981 album "Stop And Smell The Roses", resulting in an album on which all four Beatles would have a songwriting credit. Back in this world Starr didn't want to record songs that were supposed to have been recorded with Lennon, so the partially-completed "Nobody Told Me" was left untouched until "Milk And Honey".

More big rock sounds from Big Country with "Wonderland" at #8, with a new wave restlessness to it that could have been straight out of '79. Of course, if you thought '79 was the last time we'd had real music around this was a good thing, and rockist critics were keen to celebrate that Big Country were making real music for serious people, and with less of that Celtic nonsense this time round.

The rockists were very much not getting their way in 1984. Frankie Goes To Hollywood enter the Top 40 at #35 on New Year's Day, and by the end of the month "Relax" is #1. It will stay in the Top 40 for most of the year, an astonishing 37 weeks. This is the kind of chart staying power we haven't seen since those big schmaltzy numbers of the late '60s from Humperdinck and his ilk. At this point in 1984 only five singles have ever equalled or exceeded such a run: Acker Bilk's "Stranger On The Shore" (1962, 52 weeks), Jim Reeves' "I Love You Because" (1964, 37 weeks), Engelbert Humperdinck's "Release Me" (1967, 47 weeks), Frank Sinatra's "My Way" (1969, 75 weeks) and Judy Collins' "Amazing Grace" (1970, 42 weeks).

(Slade's "Merry Xmas Everybody" will eventually join Bilk and Sinatra in the 50+ club thanks to Christmas playlists in the streaming era, but despite successful reissues in both 1981 and 1983 only notched up 15 weeks total during the physical sales era)

What gave it such staying power? Well, Trevor Horn obsessed over the production, recording elements of the song multiple times with different backing bands until he had the right combination of modernity, polish and attention-grabbing. That's the altruistic interpretation.

The less altruistic one is that Horn and ZTT records deliberately courted the same conditions that had seen "Je t'aime... Moi Non Plus" be a huge success despite going out of circulation and switching record labels mid-furore. The picture sleeve was deliberately sensual, quoting the lyric that within weeks was the song's open secret: whatever the band might claim, it's about sex.

Band members Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford being openly gay in a time where the establishment were prudish about such things and the gutter press easily aggravated by them couldn't have played better into the promotional plan. The video starts with a seedy doorway containing a male caricature so obviously gay-coded that even the most hard of thinking couldn't miss it, and proceeds to an orgy full of suggestive things done with bananas, torture implements and a live tiger.

The BBC let the band on Top of the Pops as a new entry into the Top 40, and this gave it just enough attention for higher-ups to notice the sleeve and the double-entendre magazine adverts and possibly that the supposed lyric "when you want to sock it to it" scanned more closely as "when you want to suck it, chew it" which is what Johnson later confirmed he was singing. The decision was made that the record was to be banned from the BBC, but before this came into effect Mike Read independently announced on his Radio 1 show that he found the record and everything surrounding it distasteful and would not be playing it.

This was a gift as rather than the corporation issuing an edict from its stuffy headquarters, it could instead come out in support of its DJ and back him up with a broadcaster-wide ban. One ignored by Kid Jensen and John Peel, the latter of whom seemed to delight in tweaking the noses of Radio 1 bosses, especially during a week in 1993 where they put him on the lunchtime show and he responded by disrespecting the standard playlist, playing The Fall and commenting it would be nice were Eric Clapton actually unplugged.

Everything was proceeding to plan. The single was now a controversial, must-have item and the "Frankie Say Relax" T-shirts printed in its aid had gone from forgettable promotional gimmick to hot fashion item. Well-timed follow-up "Two Tribes" (#1 June '84) gave it another boost, the band holding both #1 and #2 the same week on 1st July. By the end of the year the BBC realised it had made itself look a bit silly refusing to play a record that was on pretty much every other commercial station and let it play out as they revisited the biggest-selling singles of the year over the Christmas period.

In addition to banning the biggest single of the year, the BBC had also lost comedy writing duo Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement ("Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?", "Porridge") to ITV, where 17 million were watching their new show "Auf Wiedersehen, Pet". Enough of them bought theme tune single "That's Livin' Alright" by Joe Fagin to send it to #3 in January.

Fiction Factory's "(Feels Like) Heaven" (#6 January '84) shows promise but it was the band's only Top 40 hit. They did better in Europe, but as the decade wore on band members started giving up and the albums became less and less successful.

We've not even got through January and things are still happening. "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" hits #2 at the end of the month. Cyndi Lauper partially rewrote a spiky 1979 new wave demo from Robert Hazard, an unreleased record so obscure I can only find a tiny handful of low-bitrate renditions of it out there in the wild. Which is a shame because it's a great late '70s record which never was. I want that version on a 45 to confuse people with and that pleasure is denied me.

Cyndi Lauper's? s'alright, I guess. You know I don't really like that sort of thing.

From an obscure demo I've never heard before to a record with which I am intimately familiar. Queen have taken a year to regroup after the disappointment of "Hot Space" and the result is "Radio Ga Ga" (#2 February '84). This, with album "The Works" arriving at the end of the month, is the template for '80s Queen. Slick blends of synth-pop and rock, the former never allowed to get experimental and out of hand and the latter allowed to roam free for at least one good old-fashioned rocker per album, all wrapped up in videos that are little pieces of art.

As a kid I didn't understand the world of pre-MTV and post-MTV, the changing methods of music promotion, and the increase in video budgets in the wake of "Thriller". But I did understand that "Greatest Flix II" was a far more visually appealing experience than "Greatest Flix I", in which Queen mostly appeared to run around on stages, barely visible stick figures at VHS resolution, or stand about slowly freezing in Roger Taylor's garden.

Open the plastic case of "Flix II", stick it in the VCR, and after a symphony of whirring sounds you're watching Freddie Mercury play at being the male Eglantine Price in an old theatre, conjuring animated singers from his walking stick. Well, assuming someone's rewound the tape, which was a problem back in those analogue days.

"Radio Ga Ga" is third in the sequence on that tape, and here we're off to Fritz Lang's "Metropolis", the band drifting about the 1920s sci-fi cityscapes in a flying car and recreating scenes from the film. This is not quite as out-of-nowhere as it may seem; 1984 was also the year in which Giorgio Moroder attempted to restore "Metropolis", eventually releasing a shortened version with a soundtrack by, among others, Freddie Mercury.

"Radio Ga Ga" is the counterpart to "Video Killed The Radio Star", a tribute to the medium and a lamentation that it was being replaced by slick visual experiences such as, well, the "Radio Ga Ga" video. But in saying that, one of these is 1979 and the other is 1984. The Buggles were looking forward into a future they could see coming, whereas Queen were merely commenting on a situation that already was. "The Works" is musically conservative, reviving various earlier eras of the band; "We Will Rock You" for "Tear It Up", "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" for "Man on the Prowl", "Tie Your Mother Down" for "Hammer to Fall". I still love it, and it's possibly one of the most hit-dense Queen albums, but the days of singing about ogres and attempting to predict the future direction of music are over.

Matthew Wilder's "Break My Stride" (#4 February '84) has an uncomfortable habit of reminding me of the "Thomas The Tank Engine" theme and I'm not entirely sure why, although I think it might be the whistle-pooping synth sound is common to both. He is better known these days for his film score work with Disney and engineering hit albums for Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez.

Thompson Twins #3 "Doctor! Doctor!" sounds like it could be from 1981, in a good way. I feel a bit hard done by with this; all those years of listening to the same turgid nonsense as it develops by the most infinitesimal amounts over the entire 1950s and then the styles I actually like are brief flashes over in barely a couple of years.

Clearly there's something in the water as Madonna's "Holiday" hits #6 and we ratchet another click further into the '80s music canon. Post-disco, with minimalistic lyrics leaning into that disco ethos that records exist to be soundscapes, with lyrics reduced to mere "oohs" and isolated words.

Thomas Dolby's "Hyperactive!" has survived better than a lot of higher-placing singles from this era, only making it to #17 but still turning up on compilation tapes into the late '90s. I think I had it on a tape of driving music, which seems a questionable idea. You'd get distracted and crash your car!

I'm glad of Paul Weller's decision to end the Jam before they became uncool, because I'm not sure I can deal with a world where the second half their career is empty '80s attempts at sophistication like pretty much every Style Council single I ever have the misfortune to listen to. "My Ever Changing Moods" made it to #5 in February and notably wasn't on my tape of driving music, which is good as I'd rather crash my car out of distraction than boredom.

1983 brought in one of the elements that would form the charts of my teenage years; pop that existed purely in service of pop, overstuffed yet bland music which existed for people whose favourite albums of the year would be the by then thrice-yearly "Now That's What I call Music" releases.

There was another side to those charts, though. The side which kept me listening and had those "Now" enthusiasts skipping over certain tracks on their compilations.

Independent record companies had been around for as long as major labels; after all, even the biggest of the big labels must once have been little more than a gramophone repairer with a notion that they might produce some media for the machines they serviced. But in the late '70s with the DIY ethos of punk they flourished.

While these new labels had a preferred house style (new wave in the case of Stiff, 2 Tone in the case of... well, 2 Tone) they were still taking popular sounds that you'd find just as easily on the major labels. We've already seen indie labels happy to put out singles by bands just as manufactured as any studio bubblegum pop confection.

This all happened in an era where pop followed existing genres. But if pop is going back to its roots and becoming its own genre, cloaking itself in big-budget gloss and major label expenditure, what would be the equivalent for independent music?

Where I'm obviously coming in to land is the idea of "indie" as a distinct genre rather than a differentiator of record label size. And while the birth of this is difficult to pin down (what is The Shaggs' utterly amateur 1969 piece of outsider art "Philosophy of the World" if not the ultimate indie statement?) I am going to attempt to place it in 1978.

Dan Treacy's Television Personalities were about as DIY punk as you could hope for a band formed in 1977 to be; they didn't bother rehearsing, rarely thought about set lists, and started out self-releasing records in home-made sleeves. Their lyrics dealt with popular punk scene themes such as the problems of posers and the Bill Grundy incident. Early single "14th Floor" sounds like a punk band who've forgotten to turn the volume up on their guitar amp.

But listen to the songs from 1978 EP "Where's Bill Grundy Now?", including the title track's cribbing from The Association's "Windy" for its intro. "Part Time Punks" may deal with scene poseurs but sonically it's the template for indie jangle pop. By 1981 they're already predicting neo-psychedelia in joyously ramshackle fashion on "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives" b/w "Arthur The Gardener".

I could write a lot about the Television Personalities and how it took me an awfully long time to finally "get" them, but that wouldn't be a history of chart pop, although their strong influence on MGMT might be a chance to get some more references in should we ever get to the late 2000s.

The point here is that there is a distinct genre of "indie", its natural place is the independent record label (Television Personalities would partner with Rough Trade once the burden of making their own sleeves became too much) and in 1984 it's about to hit the charts in a big way with the Smiths' "What Difference Does It Make?" reaching #12 in February off the back of "This Charming Man" and its #25 back in November '83, both on Rough Trade.

Perhaps I'm overstating the importance of the Television Personalities as an excuse to spend some time with their work, as early indie owes more to taking the sound of Orange Juice and toning down the new wave edginess that it does to taking the sound of the Television Personalities and toning down the sense it was recorded in a shed. Maybe it's a reluctance to engage with the subject matter on my part.

See, these days I find it hard to listen to the Smiths. Despite the sterling guitar work of Johnny Marr the band inherits the personality of Morrissey. In the '80s that meant a man who promoted vegetarianism and animal rights; hated the monarchy and the closed shop of elitist institutions which placed public school boys on a conveyor belt straight to establishment positions in government and at the BBC; and presented himself on stage as a sexless, celibate misfit with affectations including wearing a hearing aid.

This in itself is not unusual for a musician, and Roger Waters covered much of the same ground, but Morrisey's affinity for his working class background grew into something else, going from worship of stereotypes on bonus tracks from 2004's "You Are The Quarry" to identification with far-right politicians. He has had multiple tussles with the press on whether his comments about national identity are being misrepresented or being used as fuel for deliberate character assassinations. I don't dare comment about how many times you should have your lawyers draft an "it's the children who are wrong" letter before accepting it's time to face up to something.

But why, in a body of music featuring a parade of nonces, racists and all sorts of unpalatable political opinions is it the Smiths I single out for this failure to separate art from artist? Meat Loaf spent the last few years of his life getting into climate change denial and COVID scepticism but that's never entered my mind after the first few piano notes of "For Crying Out Loud" have rung out.

The Smiths, though, are the personality of Morrissey, at least lyrically. It's like reading "Harry Potter" now and noticing what feel awfully like snatches of anti-semitism, lazy stereotypes and underlying pro-establishment themes of passivity and that you should never try to change anything at a systemic level, just live within it and hope you're one of the designated "good guys". I find myself on edge, waiting to notice a lyric which references the loss of some notional British identity or hypothesises some flow of people which should be stopped.

It's stupid because I know I'm unlikely to find it. Just as the slacker generation who claimed they'd spend their entire lives dropped out of the system grew up and became project managers, Morrissey in his twenties is not Morrisey in his sixties, and if you need evidence of that then take 1992's "The National Front Disco", a sardonic take on how far-right organisations use the imagery of some notional never-really-existed "national identity" being lost to recruit people who feel pieces of their life are being blown away outside of their control.

So perhaps I need to accept this, and unless Morrissey comes out with some public statement that listening to old Smiths records is to be taken as implicit support of the For Britain party in the manner of Rowling, listen to the young man whose main experience with anti-immigrant sentiment was his Irish family being on the receiving end of it.

Besides, documenting the fortunes of indie in the UK Top 40 is hard enough as it is without having a crisis of conscience every time the Smiths turn up. It's a scene where obscurity and low sales are celebrated as some badge of "authenticity"; one where DJs throw out "you probably won't have heard of this one" records and we dance anyway because you don't want to admit not knowing an obscure album track by a band who only released 500 self-pressed copies before disappearing in a tragic blancmange-making accident. What, you don't know it? Go back to your kiddie party music that's on the wall at Woolworths.

Indie was also an album-oriented format. This was the driving force behind Factory Records, who realised that the marginal cost of extra cardboard and vinyl that went into an album was practically nothing compared to its much higher sticker price, especially so in the case of 12" singles where the only difference was a slightly thinner sleeve and no inner liner.

Well, goodbye to my time-saving notion of filtering Top 40 records by "bigness". We are now in a world where a million-seller might be a disposable puck of vinyl that tells us nothing except a brief moment of "more of the same", and a #39 might be an influential cornerstone that informed the musical environment of my teenage years. I am henceforth referring to the 1984-on music charts as "the conditional formatting era".

I feel like this is a lot to take in so early in the year, but then maybe the people of 1984 wanted to get everything done before imminent nuclear annihilation. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their Doomsday Clock to 23:57, the latest it had been set since the nuclear arms race of the 1950s. This is the year of "Threads", the bleak documentary film which cross-referenced the latest scientific theories against known preparations for the aftermath of nuclear war and spent just shy of two hours going, "it doesn't end well".

The feeling of being one jittery over-reaction from mutually assured destruction and a chance sighting of a large collection of balloons in the sky inspired German band Nena to write "99 Luftballons", where a release of balloons is mistaken for a UFO and it all escalates from there to everyone's favourite strange game where the only winning move is not to play.

The band recorded an Anglicised version "99 Red Balloons", which hit a mood in the UK and shot to #1 within three weeks of entering the Top 40. The band hated the English version, thinking the rewriting of the original story turned it into something so unsubtle it was almost a parody of a protest song.

At #4 is Nik Kershaw's breakout hit, "Wouldn't It Be Good". Oh yes, that facet of the '80s which was so smooooth. Now the inevitable post drunken house party soundtrack of a trip across London in the back of a Toyota Prius with various interesting warnings about the state of the hybrid system on the dashboard, but I guess there's good reason someone thought this kind of stuff deserved an entire FM radio station dedicated to it and it's not like I've ever demanded my minicab driver has ever changed the station.

Something which feels rather far from today's entertainment world is someone wanting to make it without any nepotism involved, so Berry Gordy of Motown's son Kennedy signed secretly to Motown as Rockwell and first single "Somebody's Watching Me" hit #6 at the end of February. It's a pleasant enough Michael Jackson-influenced record, but not particularly distinctive and in the end Rockwell's independent solo career was not a long one.

We continue to look back at the '70s, with Kool & The Gang's "Joanna" feeling very out of place at #2. Slade, on the other hand... I'm going to stick a flag in the sand here, Slade in the '80s are a bloody excellent glam metal band and I invite you to listen to "Run Runaway" (#7 March '84) as evidence. Heavy and fast enough to sound current, but if there are people who ought to know a thing or two about the "glam" side of the glam metal equation it's going to be Slade.

The UK has decided that it's found a bit of the New York hip-hop scene that it really likes, and that is breaking. Break Machine's "Street Dance" goes to #3 in March, but I don't need to just register this with historical detachment. This was big enough and long-lasting enough that as a young child I was aware of (don't call it that!) "breakdancing" before I even had a concept of popular music. Presented with a dance floor on a cheap family holiday I even gave it a go despite having no idea of what was going on other than a vague notion people spun around on their backs at some point. "I really went for it... I was really throwing myself around," I said with the confidence only a small child can muster, having probably annoyed a lot of adults who wanted to use the Butlins nightclub for more conventional nightclub purposes.

Gosh, "Jump" (#7 March '84). That was everywhere at one point, wasn't it? Van Halen's marriage of glam metal with synth pop has a simple and obvious appeal, a go-to for injecting some energy into whatever proceedings you need energy injected into.

We might have latched on to breaking, but we're still struggling with the idea of buying rap records that aren't in novelty form. Mel Brooks' "To Be Or Not To Be (The Hitler Rap)" from the soundtrack album of the film (but not the film itself) went to #12 in March and doubtless livened up a few school lessons taught by that self-consciously "cool" sort of teacher. Alexei Sayle's collection of nonsense phrases "Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?" is at #15, with a Top of the Pops performance featuring him crawling over a bright red Mk3 Cortina. Not the last time a Ford would appear in a starring role on Top of the Pops.

Meanwhile, the genuine article Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force's "Renegades of Funk" languishes at #30.

I find this early hip-hop fascinating. When I encountered it as a teenager, the West Coast style with its sampling of soul and funk records and lyrics about daily life on LA streets full of gang-bangers and police out looking for trouble had become so dominant that even the Detroit scene which spawned chart goliath Eminem took its cues from G-funk.

"Renegades" is from before this. It's all drum machines and synth sound effects. There are long stretches with nothing but the drum machine and the rap. It delights in the rinky-dink TR-808 cowbells. How did everyone sleep on this and buy novelty records instead?

OK, yes, fine, Lionel Richie's "Hello" is #1. Barely a minute in and I'm already drifting off.

It enters the Top 40 two days before the start of the year-long (but for three days) miner's strike. While 1983 had shown enough promise of recovery to keep the Conservative party in power, things were starting to look shaky, and not in a deliberately inoffensive cod-rockabilly way. Unemployment is at a peak of 11.9% and growth has slowed significantly.

The increasingly unpopular Thatcher government had a simple view as to the cause of this: the state spent too much money propping up a vast collection of failing nationalised industries it had built up over the preceding decades, and these further impeded growth by competing with private companies who would, if left alone, devise the most efficient and profitable ways of doing things in a giant survival-of-the-fittest contest.

For much of the '70s the view had been that successful transformation would come from involving unions in the management of their businesses; participation committees would allow shop stewards to see the commercial pressures a business was under while also giving management an idea of when they were pushing too far without a strike having to occur to tell them. In practice, this often just replaced official strikes with wildcat ones as competing political factions within unions jostled for power or workers saw their stewards as too close to management for their own good.

This changed with the tenure of Michael Edwardes at British Leyland. Edwardes viewed that the way forward was to close the participation committees, shut down the factories which only existed to make antiquated and uncompetitive products which had been around since the early '60s, sack the militants who he saw as agitating strikes for the sake of strikes, and bluntly tell workers they could go on strike or they could have a factory whose doors remained open tomorrow. There is a famous story of him travelling to a press conference with two speeches in his pocket; one announcing that the future of the company was secured, the other announcing that BL had failed and the winding-up proceedings would begin immediately. The decision of which to read? What the result of a strike ballot would be.

BL's problems were at least merely the result of two decades of incompetent management and the activity of building cars was still a fundamentally sound idea. British coal was not so fortunate. The good seams had been mined out, the increasingly mechanised activity needed far fewer miners than British pits employed, and the product was quite simply not price-competitive on the international market.

Miners pointed out that the pits supported entire communities, that they were often the only work available in an area, and that part of the reason international coal was so cheap was that other countries happily subsidised the existence of their mining industry. Besides, was it really worth destroying an entire way of life for growth that would largely benefit rich southerners working in financial services?

Thatcher knew a confrontation was coming. Her solution to it was as simple as it was brutal. Stockpile coal, set up supply lines with a road haulage industry that had already broken most of its unions' power, force the strikes to happen at a point when demand was low, and hope the government's reserves lasted longer than the miners' savings. (Other than a pittance for active picketing, the NUM did not issue strike pay and miners relied on benefit gigs, soup kitchens and food collections)

On 5th March 1984 the National Coal Board announced that five pits would be subject to "accelerated closure". They followed it up the next day detailing the closure of 20 pits with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Union boss Arthur Scargill claimed the eventual aim was over 70, a position ultimately vindicated by the release of cabinet papers relating to the decision 30 years later. From the first announcement miners were out on strike at Cortonwood Colliery, which gradually spread across much of the UK's coal mining regions.

What bearing does this have on pop music? Well, the benefit gigs started quickly. The Clash organised a couple in Brixton. An organisation called "Music for Miners" was formed and had its own gigs, including one in May at the Royal Festival Hall with New Order as the headline act. Billy Bragg and Sting would write songs about it for release in 1985, Bragg's "Between The Wars" EP going to #15 in March of that year.

But perhaps the biggest bearing is not what happened in 1984 but what came later. The entrenching of the divide between "working class North" and "middle class South" was a key element of Britpop, with fey southerners like Blur and Suede pitted against grittier bands from the North and the old mining towns of Wales for chart battles. The disused industrial spaces left behind by a hollowed-out local economy helped fuel rave culture. Chumbawamba certainly became much more politically motivated as a result of what was happening around them, Alice Nutter joining the pickets.

And in Blackford, Caerphilly, a town which suffered heavily from the decline of the mining industry, a little local band called the Manic Street Preachers played their first gigs in the local Miners Welfare Institute in 1986.

Back in March 1984 though and even by the end of the month the charts are basically a repeat of the situation that had UB40 writing "One In Ten". It's a world of emptiness. Phil Fearon and Galaxy's "What Do I Do?" at #5, drearily upbeat post-disco. Bananarama's "Robert De Niro's Waiting" at #3, mildly fun but inconsequential in the extreme. The Weather Girls with "It's Raining Men" at #2, and do I really need to say any more than that? They will lose the position to Shakin' Stevens and it turns out the amount of time I can bear having that face stare at me over yet more cod-rockabilly is precisely 18 seconds.

Nik Kershaw has competition in the arena of smoothness, as Sade's Top 40 debut "Your Love Is King" goes to #6. I struggle a bit with this - the jazz which isn't jazz, the easy backgroundability, the feeling that this is cocktail party music for people who fear making musical choices. Although perhaps I'm starting to realise the reason for sparse attendance at my own cocktail parties.

Depeche Mode's "People Are People" is #4 in early April but the band quickly regretted it as too "nice" and too commercial, which in 1984 sounds a lot like Frankie Goes To Hollywood after a lot of washing their mouths out with soap. It also joins the massed ranks of racial harmony songs in being... well, if it was about a day in Bognor you wouldn't call it a musical great, would you?

1984's Winter Olympics featured the ice skating performance of Torvill and Dean, earning perfect scores across the board for artistic impression with their "Bolero" routine and becoming a household name in the process. I remember a Car Wars motorsport crash compilation tape referring to a particularly impressive skid followed by a flip as a "Torvill and Dean routine". An EP featuring "The Music of Torvill and Dean" duly entered the Top 40 after the competition and eventually went to #9 in April.

We do at least get some reference to the charts not existing in a total political vacuum with Captain Sensible's anti-Falklands war song "Glad It's All Over" (#6 April '84). It's billed as a double A-side with "Damned on 45", a mockery of all those medleys although as Billy Bragg pointed out it was played far too slow.

One political situation which did heavily influence the musical world of 1984 was the apartheid policy of South Africa. This was the policy established in 1948 that white South Africans should represent a ruling social elite and other ethnic groups should be sorted into tiers of decreasing social status, with Black Africans at the bottom.

As the decades wore on there was a growing acceptance this needed to change. The Musician's Union had requested their members not play there as early as 1957. In 1980 the United Nations called for its strongest action yet - a cultural boycott of South Africa. No music, no art, no films, no sports, no philosophy,

However, even with external pressure getting people to willingly give up unfair privileges has never been an easy task. In 1983 the ruling National Party brought a new constitution which would give limited voting rights to some of its non-white citizens for the first time. Black Africans would be excluded from this. This was about as much a "thanks, but no thanks" solution as you could get with even the people who had gained voting rights boycotting them in an expression of solidarity.

Anti-apartheid gigs started springing up, and it was at one of these that Jerry Dammers of the reformed Specials (as the Special AKA) first heard of Nelson Mandela. His was not a widely-known name in the UK at the time, although Margaret Thatcher had recently denounced him as a dangerous terrorist. Mandela had been arrested in 1962 for his role in organising a general strike and the uMkhonto weSizwe campaign of sabotage against government installations. In 1964 he was sent to Robben Island prison, notorious for its brutal conditions, hard physical labour and lack of concern for the health of inmates. (Conditions improved over the late '60s and '70s, but were always harsh compared to other prisons)

Mandela was moved to Pollsmoor Prison in 1982, the belief being that the South African government thought removing influence of Mandela and other ANC leaders on younger activists who had also been sent to Robben Island was better than continuing to punish old men as harshly as possible for things that had happened twenty years ago.

Upon hearing all this, Dammers wrote "Nelson Mandela", deliberately making it upbeat and catchy with influences from South African music. It went to #9 in April, but the cultural impact was bigger. The South African government banned it, but it was soon playing at football matches and anti-apartheid rallies anyway. Thatcher went from denouncing Mandela to suggesting that South African president P. W. Botha release Mandela as a means to calm escalating anti-government violence in the country. (Botha did offer release to Mandela, but always with conditions that the latter felt would be a betrayal of his countrymen to accept)

Despite this, artists did perform in South Africa. The most notorious venue was Sun City, a luxury resort where they would be paid handsomely to stand in front of an audience that while not officially segregated was almost entirely white. and pretend that all of this was fine. Rod Stewart played it in July 1983. Elton John was there in October. Status Quo were there in 1987 and surprised to find on returning home that employing black stage crew did not excuse them from playing gigs that would be used to claim apartheid had international support from major rock bands. Within a year they had apologised for the ill-advised tour.

Perhaps the most controversial of the Sun City performances was Queen. They performed there in October 1984, at a point where cultural awareness of apartheid and the treatment of political prisoners was at its highest. Upon being challenged their public statements doubled down, claiming they were a "very non-political group" who played for all who want to listen, and that they had given tickets away for free to ensure they were playing to a mixed audience rather than the usual Sun City situation of one de facto segregated by expensive tickets.

This did not go down well in a music world well aware by late 1984 that Sun City was inherently political, it existed in service of pro-apartheid propaganda, and playing there was a political act. Queen eventually donated some money to charity as an olive branch without really having to say they were sorry, for years maintaining it had been an altruistic decision. It's only in more recent years band members have admitted in interviews that playing there was a mistake, driven in part by having seen so many other artists get away with it with little or no backlash.

I'm starting to get to the point where I'm looking at 1984 and thinking, "can things stop happening?" I'm barely getting chance to listen to any music, so let's get back to that with Madonna's "Lucky Star" (#14 April '84). Madonna has this appreciation of pop as a product. It's not just a catchy, danceable single (although "Lucky Star" is that), it's being so recognisable people only need to catch a tiny glimpse of the picture sleeve to know who it is. This is the first of those images, the Material Girl, the girl other girls want to be. Looking at the cover is like ticking off a list of '80s fashion tropes: the impractical number of bangles, the bold eyeshadow and lipstick, the huge earrings, the hair which probably represents a fist-sized hole in the ozone layer's worth of CFCs by itself. I'm not getting an amazing wave of nostalgia from the music, but one freeze frame from the video and I can remember my elder sisters and their friends trying to look like this.

In more obscure news, the Psychedelic Furs are at #29 with "Heaven". I'm not sure you'd call them indie - they were on CBS for a start - but like The Cure (whose "The Caterpillar" reaches #14 in April) they bridged a gap between their more angular new wave peers and the ramshackle sounds of early indie. Enough later bands tagged them as a significant influence that I picked up a copy of 1988 compilation "All Of This And Nothing". I admit to finding it a little disappointing at the time; I was hoping for something which was more like the bands I was listening to and less like a lot of early '80s things I hadn't heard of yet. Hearing the Furs in the correct chronological order works a lot better.

Scritti Politti started out as a heavily political punk act on indie label Rough Trade, but by 1984 only lead singer Green Gartside remained and the new band had taken a hard turn into commercial pop and signed with Virgin Records. "Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)" is their breakthrough hit (#10 April '84) and Gartside achieves his aim of producing something which sounds like contemporary pop. Listen a bit closer to those drums and you can hear a certain hip-hop influence from Gartside living in New York.

Pete Burns is with Dead Or Alive on a cover of "That's the Way (I Like It)" (#22 April '84). This was something they'd been kicking around for a while as parts of another song, and this mashing together of different song ideas would be used for their next record, although Burns decided that would benefit from inviting a new production company in to handle things. Hold that thought...

"Hello" might be a bit dull but it helped keep two big-selling records off the top spot. Phil Collins' "Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)"spent three weeks at #2 between late April and mid-May and I'm not entirely sure why. It's a bit laid-back for a potential chart-topper, the film it came from was successful enough but well outside the top ten for the year, and it's not like this is tapped in to any current pop trends. I think the main thing I'm learning after a six-figure word count is I still don't understand the charts.

This left Queen's "I Want To Break Free" down in #3 despite being by far the one of the three you're most likely to hear now. I continue my theory about "The Works" by immediately going, "hang on, that's exactly what they did on A Day At The Races" to that intro bit. Well, anyway, let's get on to the bit you at least have some chance of caring about; this vies with "Bohemian Rhapsody" to be the iconic Queen video, the opening rooftop shot and boiling-over Teasmade giving way to the band in drag: Freddie the miniskirted housewife working the hoover, John Deacon the grandmother, Roger the schoolgirl, and Brian in a dressing gown and fluffy slippers with hair in curlers. (Ah, so that's how he gets it like that!)

Any hopes these bands had of making #1 as Lionel Richie finally drifted down the charts were ended by Duran Duran's "The Reflex" shooting almost immediately to #1. Every time they return to the charts they seem to have become weirder, and Le Bon's vocal register a little higher.

The Flying Pickets seemed to be creating a one-group genre to themselves with another a capella cover, this time "When You're Young And In Love" (#7 April '84). The gimmick was wearing a bit thin though, and this was their last big hit.

After many years as a label used by Decca to market British singles in the US, and in the UK for releases licensed from US record labels, in 1980 London Records had turned in a semi-independent label although their roster of indie bands was bolstered at one end by Banarama and at the other by continuing reissues of old Rolling Stones records in the States.

One of these bands were early jangle-poppers The Bluebells, with "I'm Falling" going to #11 at the end of April. Jangle pop went back to '60s pop, and in particular the period circa 1965 when the Byrds had been most active and the chime of Rickenbacker guitars was regularly in the charts. Add a little psychedelia and you have the Paisley Underground movement, a largely LA-based sound which went largely unnoticed in the UK, although it would influence much bigger artists and was the spawn point for The Bangles (whose 1983 "The Real World" is a good example of the more psych-influenced genre).

The Smiths overlapped strongly with the style, and I mention them because they appear backing Sandie Shaw on a cover of "Hand In Glove" (#27 April '84). This bizarre situation came out of Morrissey mentioning her in interviews, and our old friends the BEF having tempted her out of retirement earlier in the decade.

Cross that love of mid-'60s guitar pop with the ethereal romanticism of goth and you have dream pop. Indie label 4AD was the home of most early progenitors, with Cocteau Twins the most influential of them. "Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops" managed to graze the charts (#29 April '84) and is a quite wonderful example of the genre.

For all of his fame and status among artists as the sign that a parody from him is the sign you have finally made it, "Weird Al" Yankovic has but one hit in the UK Top 40, Michael Jackson parody "Eat It" peaking at #36. During the MP3-swapping era of the Internet Weird Al songs were everywhere; usually uncredited (or credited to Adam Sandler), often at criminally low bitrates and sometimes cut off halfway through. If I dig through my old backups I'll probably find 96kbps copies of "Amish Paradise", "Livin' In The Fridge" and "Jerry Springer". Or I would, had I not always purchased all of my music legitimately even in 1999, honest.

Indeed, Weird Al is so synonymous with the well-executed parody cover that you sometimes find other songs in the genre mistakenly credited to him, such as Manic Larry Baker's "Cat's In The Kettle".

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark have become disappointingly commercial for fifth album "Junk Culture", with single "Locomotion" going to #5 in May. The band viewed this as a necessary evil after the experimental "Dazzle Ships" endangered their contract with Virgin Records, but I know which I'd rather be listening to.

The Human League attempt a political song on "The Lebanon", and as if I haven't delved into enough political context in these pages we now have the Lebanese civil war. It sounds good but the lyrics are torture, and by Human League standards #11 if disappointing even if I've just been looking at a bunch of indie singles which got nowhere near that.

"Automatic" is the Pointer Sisters' biggest hit in the UK, most likely a #1 were it not for "The Reflex", but I can feel no strong emotion about it. Kenny Loggins' "Footloose" is at #7 but I have a worrying feeling I'm starting to develop an immune reaction to these '80s songs which constantly demand your attention with energetic shouts and stuff constantly going on. I'm just disappointed that when I and a classmate thought the lyrics were "cut loose... the goose" we'd misheard it.

More message T-shirts as a fashion item, this time "CHOOSE LIFE" for Wham! on the video to "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" (#1 May '84). This has since been ruined in a good way by the opening few minutes of "Zoolander", and I think that jeep scene says more about this particular subset of '80s music than I ever could.

The "Footloose" movie also gives Deniece Williams a hit with "Let's Hear It For The Boy" going to #2 at the end of May. You know, having the GTA Vice City soundtrack as my main cultural reference point for music circa 1985 gave me a lot of hope for these years but I'm starting to realise how tightly edited those choices were and how much of the reality is like trying to exist on a diet solely of sugar.

In contrast, as a 20-year-old I would have screwed up my face in disgust at the idea of listening to Alvin Stardust, but his career on Stiff turns up some surprises there. I'm not saying "I Feel Like Buddy Holly" (#7 May '84) is going to the top of the Liked Songs playlist but it's a listenable bit of soft rock.

Another nuclear annihilation song, this time from Ultravox on "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes" (#3 June '84). Inspired by a scene in a Nevil Shute book where people in Australia wait for the nuclear fallout to arrive, it's a reminder that while the '80s could produce the most plastic and disposable of music it could also create wonderful moments that couldn't have come from any other decade.

The Smiths get up to #10 with "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", condensing pretty much every Morrisey theme into one abstract statement: "I was doing a thing, and now I'm miserable".

Hazell Dean had already released "Searchin' (I Gotta Find A Man)" to limited success in '83, but a reissue got to #6 in June '84. This is closer to straight-up '70s disco than a lot of the funk-cribbing tracks we've heard in the last few years, and that's by design. The genre is hi-NRG, a corruption of Donna Summer describing "I Feel Love" (the first high tempo, all-synthesiser disco record) as "high energy". Like pretty much all of disco it had kept going whether or not people were paying attention to it, and in '84 it was time to come back to the UK charts.

It might sound dated, with little having moved on since Giorgio Moroder first painstakingly assembled those arpeggiated basslines a few bars at time in 1977, but after the vapid fake-funk of post-disco I realise how much I've been missing stuff that sounds like it has intent, disco that is willing to be mechanised and moody rather than constantly ask whether you're having fun yet.

I have the strangest feeling I might regret this lionising of hi-NRG. Hazell Dean is soon looking for a new production team.

1984 has the fewest #1s over the year of the entire 1980s by quite a margin, and it certainly feels like some of them are here forever. I've already mentioned "Two Tribes" but it stayed up there for two whole months, only dropping down the charts in August.

Not that much is happening, with business as usual only broken by Evelyn Thomas underlining the arrival of hi-NRG with name-dropping "High Energy" (#5 June '84) although this one's a bit overwrought.

What I haven't mentioned yet is that this resurgence of hi-NRG originated, more than usual even for disco, in gay clubs. It has a tragic element as so many early pioneers died from the AIDS pandemic which was particularly prevalent in the early '80s.

Bronski Beat tackled this head-on with "Smalltown Boy" (#3 June '84) with lyrics referencing the "family values" approach of the time which assumed withholding love and acceptance from family members for as long as they continued to be gay would somehow cure them of it.

Elton John suggests the answer is to listen to some sad songs on the radio on "Sad Songs (Say So Much)" (#7 June '84). I think Billy Bragg did it better on "Levi Stubbs' Tears", although that wouldn't be around for two years yet.

The decision to release ballad "So Tired" from Ozzy Osbourne's "Bark at the Moon" album was one which mystified fans, although it made it to #20 which isn't bad for a metal act at this point.

Mid-'84 must be the time to have a go at reissuing '83 singles that didn't do so well, as Nik Kershaw hits #2 with oddly perky "I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me". It's a subtle anti-nuclear protest song, and I enjoy the subtle reggae influence.

The film "Breakin'" entered cinemas in May, giving us (via its sequel) the snowclone "__ 2: Electric Boogaloo" and more immediately Ollie and Jerry's "Breakin'... There's No Stopping Us" (#5 July '84). I'm surprised we've got this far and there's no flurry of novelty records about breaking swamping the charts, some of them presented by comedy rodents.

Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" is a bit of a whiplash after "Girls Just Want To Have Fun", a solid bit of soft rock that wouldn't be out of place next to your Toto records. Lauper knew this, and feared being pigeonholed as a purveyor of soft ballads if this was her first single as Epic Records wanted. So instead we got "Girls" first and this second.

A piece of media which didn't shy away from the 1980s political situation was "The Young Ones", which in June 1984 had just finished its second and final series. Compared to the comedy of the late '70s which was often staid and over-reliant on the same few recurring innuendos, the Young Ones was a riot. It was surrealistic, it was violently slapstick, it made barbed fun of the government but it also made fun of the kind of people who'd make barbed fun of the government.

The BBC weren't exactly sure what they'd been presented with on reviewing the first series in 1982, but feared that if they didn't run some sort of alternative comedy then they would haemorrhage audiences to the newly-launched Channel 4. In the end they liked the result enough to commission a second series, and repeated it over the '80s and '90s.

Unfortunately by the time I saw it in the second half of the '90s that strong political grounding made it rather dated. Nuclear paranoia, three million unemployed and the media panic over "video nasties" seemed like ancient history in the '90s, although you were still in a world where it might be feasible for the police to have enough resources to attend a party that got out of hand. Still, as teenagers we enjoyed the slapstick and it was the first place I heard "11 + 11" and "Jackie Wilson Said".

Back in 1984, it was popular enough to spawn tie-in media, including a notional psychedelic album from Neal as played by Nigel Planer. This included a cover of Traffic's "Hole In My Shoe" which went to #2 in July '84. (Funnily enough, the same position as the original made in late 1967).

Prince gives us the hit to have that "pop as a genre" discussion again, as "When Doves Cry" goes to #4 in July. Wikipedia tries, bless it, assigning a list of genres nearly as long as a Wikipedia article in itself. Discogs assigns it a genre which, upon expanding the detail, paraphrases to little more than "music from Prince or artists produced by Prince".

Melle Mel's "White Lines (Don't Do It)" hits #7, with an erroneous credit to Grandmaster Flash who had already left Sugar Hill Records. It's a typical Sugar Hill track, more than seven minutes long with the house band playing the bassline from an existing record, Liquid Liquid's "Cavern". Liquid Liquid's label 99 Records sued Sugar Hill and won, but it was a hollow victory as Sugar Hill immediately declared bankruptcy and the legal costs sunk 99 Records.

The Bluebells covered labelmates Bananarama's "Young At Heart", going to #8 with it, although violinist Bobby Valentino was disappointed not to be recognised for his contribution to the song and sued for a co-author credit. The violin part is quite an important bit. It would chart again in 1993 after use in a Volkswagen advert, but more of that when we get there.

Alison Moyet launches her solo career with "Love Resurrection" (#10 July '84) although this hews a lot more commercially middle of the road than the joyously weird output of Yazoo.

Mighty Wah! (Pete Wylie seemed to go through band names faster than he went through guitar strings) score a #20 with "Come Back", a quite fantastic rock single which deserves more latter-day recognition. In period, John Peel made it his single of the year, preferring it over listeners' pick "How Soon Is Now" (although they did put The Mighty Wah! at #5 on the Festive Fifty)

If you wonder why I've wasted so much of everyone's time talking about the social background to 1984, this is why. Wylie saw the Liverpool he loved being slowly run down to nothing along with the rest of the industrial North, and friends leave in droves following Norman Tebbit's "on your bike" policy that people should just give up on their city if there was no work to be found there.

"Come Back" is a soaring anthem to the idea that if you want the kind of Liverpool that gave birth to "She Loves You" and "You'll Never Walk Alone", you need to come back and fight for it. Suddenly the whole indie-versus-mainstream positioning of my teenage years comes flooding back. (Wah! at this point have lost their major label deal and are on indie Beggars Banquet).

You know, this might not be the most technically accomplished record. The video might look like it was made on a budget of about 50p, Pete Wylie's dancing is comedically bad and the band give a confused Top of the Pops performance from not knowing whether they were playing live or miming until getting an unexpected "you're on next". But hell, did they care about something.

That was the battleground of the mid '90s, especially if you were into indie and you had a similarly aged step-sibling who was very much into pop. "Your music sounds like a bunch of people smashing bin lids together because they can't afford actual drums"... "well the only person yours means anything to is the accountant entering sales numbers and cost of material into a spreadsheet". (For reference, actual musical arguments between 13 year olds are not that sophisticated and mostly involve settlements as to where the volume controls can be set on stereo systems in adjacent bedrooms).

While I struggle to get more than about 40 seconds into some of the worst of the overproduced fake-funk, I can listen to this over and over. It's a real, "it's 2am, but I've just found another live version" record. For four minutes I'm transported to living in a declining city in the early '80s; the pain, the weight of the past, the optimism that one day this could be a great place again if only people would care about it.

(In a later live performance, late in the song Wylie lets the band drop to a low background and proudly says to the crowd, "it eventually happened... I can't afford to live there any more, but I'm happy it did.")

As an adult I have come to realise that not everybody wants every time they put a record on to be an emotional workout, and myself have started to appreciate the joys of a record that's a simple uncomplicated bit of fun. Besides, my "tortured indie soul" and "angry punk soul" phases were punctuated by listening to a lot of psychedelic nonsense about magic rocking horses and the man who brings the ice round so I'm not sure I was even that consistent as a teenager. Besides, I also liked Queen.

"It's A Hard Life" was Mercury winkingly saying that for him, it was anything but, with this at #6 as July draws to a close. Continuing the theme of much of "The Works" this is a reworking of "Play The Game" although it rejects the '80s reimagining to push the style even further back in time, as if "Play The Game" had turned up on the "Opera"/"Races" pairing. And I guess that #6 placing shows where they were wrong in '82; people didn't want an '80s album from Queen, they wanted a Queen album from Queen.

Queen's '80s output was a constant in the years before I grew up enough to buy my own music and listen to Queen's '70s output instead, but more than anything we were a Tina Turner household. "Private Dancer" on LP, greatest hits compilation "Simply The Best" on CD. In the days when concert tickets were not yet orders of magnitude more expensive than a babysitter I was taken at the age of 13 to see her at Wembley Stadium, and while we all swayed in unison to "On Silent Wings" perhaps the longest-lasting musical impact was hearing this lad called John Fogerty run through classics like "Proud Mary" and "Who'll Stop The Rain". Also Toto threw a giant inflatable beach ball into the crowd. I grew up in Surrey, I'm not used to fun like that.

I'm getting distracted again. "What's Love Got To Do With It" spent a while climbing the charts, eventually peaking at #3 in August '84. Yeah, we were definitely a Tina Turner household; hearing this unlocks memories of it playing on a CD boombox during countless DIY projects, it soundtracking long drives in the kind of base model doom blue hatchbacks my stepdad liked buying, and just being there. That's a lot of staying power for a record from 1984. If only we could have been a Mighty Wah! household, although as middle-class southerners we were definitely on the other side of that treatment of Liverpool.

Having to stop every few paragraphs to once more listen to "Come Back" at high volume (seriously, this is one of the greatest records ever made) is not helping the pace at which I can write this, but it is staving off a few lines on the spreadsheet I'm not looking forward to.

George Michael's solo chart debut "Careless Whisper" is another one of those big and long-lasting #1 singles of 1984. Originally featuring on a Wham! album and sometimes even credited to the band, this soft pop was a world away from what the duo normally did. Perhaps the second most famous sax line after "Baker Street", it's hard to imagine this springing from a quick end-of-session demo performed in one take. Obviously a lot of work took place between that 1982 tape and the final version, with nine different saxophonists brought in to record the solo until it was just right. (Ironically the performance they were trying to replicate was one from a hobbyist friend of George Michael's, and I think that moment where someone who doesn't really know what they're doing creates something more perfect than any seasoned professional is one of the things I love so much about indie music).

Unfortunately below it at #2 and nearly as popular (eighth biggest-selling record of the year!) is horrible party travesty "Agadoo" from Black Lace. A definite #2 of a record, this one lurks in the habitat of tower systems and bad discos. The kind of thing where you spin up the disco lights you bought for £9.99 at Maplins and go, "put it on for the kids, they don't have any discerning critical faculties, they grew up in a Tina Turner household".

I usually find at least some way to be contrary when one of these popular kicking posts come along, but this has nothing to redeem it beyond the funny things which are sometimes written about how terrible it is. My expression becomes even more aghast as I discover the band recorded their own innuendo-laden parody version called "Have A Screw". How wacky and hilarious that must be if you're the kind of person who cannot say the word "sex" without falling into a half hour chortling fit. (Must have been a difficult time when the Sex Pistols were in the news).

Incidentally, I gave "Agadoo" 30 seconds to be sure I'd remembered it correctly and I've written most of that with "Come Back" in the headphones.

The success of "Searchin" gave Hazell Dean a problem; how do you follow up a hit single? She went looking for a new production team, and ended up meeting a trio of (at that point) virtual unknowns. Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman. Dean was not entirely sold on what they presented to her, a song called "Dance Your Love Away" which had already been given the Michael Prince.

Stock and Aitken rewrote part of it to result in "Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)", and it went to #4 in August, much to the chagrin of Michael Prince who hadn't been told any of this was happening. It would be convenient for the narrative if SAW had immediately ruined pop and we can skip through the rest of the '80s to the point at which rave happens, but the reality is a bit more complex.

"Whatever" is like an ultra-mechanised version of late-'70s ABBA, that same collision between disco and pop. Here the disco is hi-NRG and the pop is that variety which can't go more than about ten seconds without pressing one of the effects buttons on the keyboard, but the result is fresh. And that's perhaps the Stock Aitken Waterman problem; they turned production into an assembly line of songs with this exact same beat and structure.

Iron Maiden's "2 Minutes To Midnight" makes it to #11 in August. In keeping with the band's historical bent, this references the clock's setting from 1953 rather than its contemporary setting of 3 minutes to midnight, and it's about the general commercialisation of a never-ending state of war or near-war rather than the current specific situation of imminent nuclear annihilation.

Laura Branigan was an artist who would eventually turn to Stock Aitken Waterman for their hit-making prowess, but in 1984 is working with Jack White and Robbie Buchanan for Italo Disco cover "Self Control" (#5 August '84).

September opens with the Smiths' "William, It Was Really Nothing" at #17, a rather slight track in my opinion but this is the one where Morrissey wrote "MARRY ME" on his chest and ripped his shirt open during Top of the Pops.

Elton John may be atoning for those Sun City performances on "Passengers" (#5 September '84) - it's never been confirmed, but Bernie Taupin's lyrics about denying the passenger who wants to get on and hypocritical fools are rumoured to be an anti-apartheid protest and there may be something in that, given they took inspiration from a South African folk song and credited writer Phineas Mkhize on the label.

It's also time for another massive #1, Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called To Say I Love You" spending a month and a half there with 21 weeks in the Top 40. A little soft and soggy for me, and I would make extended comparison to those soft, soggy, chart-squatting singles of the early '90s but if I keep finding ways in which 1984 informs the charts of my youth I'm still going to be writing about this year on my deathbed.

Bucks Fizz are somehow back having reinvented themselves as a Toto-style rock band for "Talking In Your Sleep" (#15 September '84). It's a cover of a new wave record with a slight seasoning of jangle from the previous year by the Romantics, which didn't chart in the UK.

Stevie Wonder and Phil Collins may have hits that are disproportionately large given the impact of the film soundtracks they came from, but Wonder's extended time at #1 creates the opposite for Ray Parker Jr. I don't even need to mention the name of the record after that name, as of course it is "Ghostbusters".

1984 is a little early for me but I heard this blaring from a TV once a week as I settled down in front of CITV to watch "The Real Ghostbusters" cartoon. We hummed it as the kid who lived next door invited me round to play with his huge collection of "The Real Ghostbusters" toys; the plastic Ecto-1, the ghost traps, the big firehouse with a grate in the top through which you could push slime and no doubt create some sort of cleaning nightmare for the parents. We didn't care; we were six years old and it was funny.

"Dr Beat" (#6 September '84) isn't really notable unless you really like tracking this endless swamp of perky dance-pop, apart from the name of their lead singer: Gloria Estefan.

Alphaville's "Big In Japan" (#8 September '84) serves as a reminder of how great synth-pop used to be when it was still close to its German origins and people were satisfied with just programming a synthesiser to do something without having to have about a hundred of them constantly blaring all over the record. Must have been something in the water, as Kraftwerk's "Tour De France" goes to #24 on reissue.

Late September brings some decent chart peaks, with "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" getting to #3. Here are U2 sounding like you expect U2 to sound, the delay pedals returning half a dozen notes for every one the Edge plays and Bono's vocals existing in a space which feels somewhat detached from the rest of the record. Incidentally, for those of us who are used to later criticism of U2's unjustified messianic tendencies, that criticism was right there from the start; the Village Voice complained about a moral structure which mostly required someone else to do something, and Rolling Stone found the sentiments "unremarkable".

Bowie's "Blue Jean" (#6 September '84) from holding-pattern album "Tonight" is surprisingly listenable; Bowie wrote it off as a simplistic bit of rock'n'roll revivalism and called it "sexist" just three years later, but compare to Shakin' Stevens' "A Letter To You" (#10 September '84) as an example of how horrible rock'n'roll revivalism can get and it is not bad.

Queen's "Hammer To Fall" rounds out the hits from "The Works" at #13 before they're off to Sun City. (Although non-album single "Thank God It's Christmas" came from the same sessions; it was a productive point in the band's career). I loved this one and it was one of the main reasons I chose "The Works" as one of the earliest Queen albums I collected. There's a time in your life when you just want simple straightforward rock, y'know?

There's also also an extended 12" mix intriguingly titled the "Headbanger's" version although you'll be disappointed going into it expecting some glam metal reimaging based on the bones of good old "Hammer" - it's some extra solos pasted on so crudely you can hear the drum sound change as they come in and once more as it cuts back to the standard outro.

Regrettable concert venue decisions aside, Queen are having a busy 1984 as they're also on "Love Kills" (#10 September '84), credited as a solo Freddie Mercury effort most likely due to record label compilations; this was for the Metropolis soundtrack on CBS and rumour has it Queen's EMI contract forbade them from appearing under that name anywhere else. That soundtrack won awards for being uniquely terrible, although I think "Love Kills" is interesting for Queen letting loose and doing a bit more of that "Hot Space" style of trying to make current-sounding pop. It helps that Moroder's synthesised basslines are the foundation of the current hi-NRG trend.

Prince ballad "Purple Rain" gets to #8, and I really don't want to get distracted by references to the '90s again but, hey, giant-sounding film score ballads, where else have I heard those before?

One last note for September as Dio's "Mystery" peaked at #34 right at the end of the month, and now seems to have disappeared so totally from online services in any decent quality that I'm glad I have it on a CD compilation somewhere.

It's about a failing relationship, but I feel like "Drive", an October #5 for The Cars, sums up my feeling towards so much of pop in these charts contrasted against the social situation. You can't go on thinking nothing's wrong. At one point my dad ended up with this massive old '70s jukebox which contained just two singles; this and Deep Purple's "Black Night". Both sound fantastic at such a combination of high volume and low fidelity.

Culture Club are perhaps aware of this with "The War Song" (#2 October '84). Their intentions are good, but maybe I shouldn't be so keen in my desire for '80s pop to tackle weighty themes. The lightweight feel and simplistic lyrics undermine the message for me, at times it's almost like they're mocking the simplicity of protest songs. There's a way to express heavy emotions and, well, you know I'm looking for any excuse to listen to "Come Back" again.

Wham! are up for a full 14% of the year's #1 singles with "Freedom" and finally, here's a Wham! single I actually like. See, I'm not a complete philistine! The '60s soul influence lands just right, and it's catchy without feeling like it needs to constantly throw things at you to grab your attention.

There must be something about as I'm feeling the same about a Style Council record, "Shout To The Top" (#7 October '84) bringing to mind epic late '60s film scores together with its own dose of period soul.

Sade's self-descriptive "Smooth Operator" is at #19 and I think I can get on with this a little more. It feels like there's stuff going on and you can pay attention to it without it slipping immediately out of your mind. Maybe I might even be able to play it at a cocktail party without hating myself. Before, of course, sticking on "Come Back" so loud the walls shake and the neighbours come round to complain. Did I ever tell you how nobody comes to my parties?

Paul McCartney's "No More Lonely Nights" (#2 October '84), so much a thing designed to do a thing the Official Charts Company even credits it as "(Ballad)". Not the worst thing he's done with the odd nod to Beatles history including those "Eleanor Rigby" strings, although in typical fashion it does go on for about as long as the average 1984 #1 stays at the top of the charts.

Below it at #3 is the Phil Oakey/Giorgio Moroder collaboration "Together In Electric Dreams", one of those near-perfect pop songs coming unexpectedly after a run of disappointing Human League singles. Moroder was a firm believer in the "first take is the best" approach that George Michael had nine saxophonists trying to replicate, and Phil Oakey reckons the performance on the record is something he thought was only a rehearsal.

We're getting some more euphoric songs to lead us into the last part of the future, with Meat Loaf's "Modern Girl" at #17 in late October. Status Quo are back doing what they do best with the straightforward blues-rock cover of "The Wanderer" going to #7 at the end of October.

Above it at #6, Julian Lennon with "Too Late For Goodbyes". Whatever happened to Julian Lennon, eh? Lennon was one of the first to publicly voice the disconnect between his father's outward proclamations of peace, love and simple living when the world around him was one of rejection, pettiness and adultery. In the end he decided to be the opposite of that, abandoning his music career for one of philanthropy and even ultimately forgiving his dad because holding on to the anger would be... well, what John Lennon would have done.

Chaka Khan's "I Feel For You" may be an early crossover hit - Melle Mel raps on it - but after a brief run without it I'm even more aware how exhausting this, "oh look, everything" production style is. Still, it's the spirit of the age as it takes #1 away from "Freedom" in November.

Duran Duran's run of getting steadily odder continues with "The Wild Boys" (#2 November '84), full of staccato shouts, yelps and seemingly no respect for the traditional structure of a pop song.

We last saw Billy Ocean in the '70s but he's back with "Caribbean Queen (No More Love On The Run)" at #6. Maybe it's the juxtaposition but this feels a lot like the kind of place Duran Duran were in a couple of years ago. A better place, perhaps, or at least one less exhausting to listen to.

ZZ Top hit #10 with "Gimme All Your Lovin'", bringing some old-fashioned hard rock and a pub quiz favourite gotcha question; remember, Frank Beard is the one without a beard. They had been going since 1969 and were decently successful over the '70s across the Atlantic, but in the UK only arrived along with the rise of MTV-friendly rock.

Whatever the assessment of the "Metropolis" soundtrack, Giorgio Moroder is having a good year with Limahl's "Never Ending Story" (from the film) going to #4. It's par for the Moroder course with the repeated arpeggiated synths and sense of the backing track being carefully assembled piece by piece.

"I'm So Excited" from the Pointer Sisters is at #11. If I wasn't so caught up with just about everything else I might have had time to trace the evolution of post-disco into dance-pop, dialling the funk down and aiming at a hybrid which could still be played in clubs, but also had a more easy-going radio-friendliness to it.

More soft balladry with Jim Diamond providing an unusually short-lived #1 for 1984, "I Should Have Known Better" spending just one week there. It's all a bit soggy though, and I think Slade did it better on "All Join Hands" (#15 November '84) even if it is a bit of a deliberately commercial chart-baiting one.

I comment on Wham having two #1s in a year which had very few of those things, but Frankie Goes To Hollywood had three, the last of which peaks at the start of December. I may say Slade did the ballad thing better with a little tongue in cheek but in terms of the two singles I just mentioned "The Power Of Love" obliterates them. That said even with the huge and dramatic sound of the finished article I prefer the borderline-gothic version they recorded for December 1983's Peel Session.

Nik Kershaw's "The Riddle" (#3 December '84) leans into the trend of '80s pop to have no real deep meaning by just recording the guide vocal and releasing that. There's no puzzle to work out here, it's nothing more than a bunch of words which happened to fit the correct rhythm. Also there's something oddly Big Country about the sound on this.

While in today's world we know Huxley had the correct nightmare vision of the future (people so distracted by trivial entertainment they wouldn't care about what went on in the world, and for the fleeting moments they did it would only be to gravitate to the biggest spectacle available) in 1984 it was still assumed that George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was the more likely worst possible outcome. With that in mind, of course you can't get through 1984 without a film of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and so we have one, with John Hurt as Winston Smith and a soundtrack by the Eurythmics.

This was controversial, with Virgin records overruling director Michael Radford's wishes and replacing many of Dominic Muldowney's orchestral cues with the Eurythmics. Adapted versions formed a companion album, from which "Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)" went to #4 in December.

Another disappointing Human League single as "Louise" drags its way to #13, sounding more like Frank Sidebottom than someone who's just had "Electric Dreams" in the charts.

It's December though, and we're starting to line up those attempts at Christmas #1. The Toy Dolls are missing the brief on just about every single front including the dominant musical styles of 1984 with a novelty punk rock cover of "Nellie The Elephant" but somehow ended up at #4 on the Christmas '84 chart.

Sadly the novelty aspect and lack of awareness of the band's punk origins has made this rather a darling of the kind of people who buy albums by party bands, and most likely to be played loudly at half past midnight in a garden by someone who wants to signal how much wacky fun they're having in the most obnoxious of ways.

Familiar territory for them would be Black Lace's "Conga" at #14, on its way down from a #10 peak. Oh yes, I remember this from the '80s. Tiddly adults forming a gigantic line, recruiting any available children, grandparents and probably somewhere trapped in there the family dog. Weaving through every room in the house going, "ah-la-da-da-da-DA-DA". Can I get compensation for my childhood yet?

More child-friendly is Paul McCartney and the Frog Chorus, "We All Stand Together" being #3 on the Christmas chart. McCartney's love of the Rupert Bear character is endearing, and he owned rights to make a Rupert film for so long it became a bit of a running joke in fan circles as to when he'd finally make it. 1981 is the answer, with animated short "Rupert and the Frog Chorus" spending two years in production and releasing in 1984. At two years for a mere thirteen minutes you can bet the quality of the animation was high and the record has an obvious appeal to very young children even before you put the rich visuals on it.

At #2 are Wham! with, of course, Whamageddon or rather "Last Christmas". This would probably have given them a third #1 to equal Frankie were it not for Reasons, but let's save that discussion for a bit and dig into the bridging Christmas meme song that took us from Slade to Mariah Carey as the thing everyone knowingly references.

First is that this is a double A-side, with "Everything She Wants" making up the other half. It's also more typically Wham!, that bit more up-tempo and funky although we're a long way from the "Wham Rap" on either side. So does this mean if you listen to "Everything" during December you are also Whamageddoning yourself and must report the date on which the incident occurred?

Well no, because it turns out Whamageddon has a quite strict and comprehensive set of rules, the most important of which is that it has to be specifically Wham! and it has to be specifically the mix as heard on the 7" single; you can listen to remixes and covers as much as you like. It is also not a new game, and derives from a '90s game called The Little Drummer Boy Challenge, something which these days is trivially easy to complete even though LDBC removes you from the game for hearing any version, cover or otherwise. (Bing and Bowie is the most common according to inventor Michael Alan Peck).

One other notable difference is that LDBC specifically prevents ambushes in its rules; rickroll your friends with the rubber bum pump song or play it at a party and they don't lose, you do.

Even without this clause Whamageddon has had the effect of radio stations playing it less, with not a single US station using it to start their Christmas programming in 2024.

You'd think with only the Christmas #1 to deal with I've only got a few more sentences to be finally done with 1984, but that particular record happens to be "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

For all the benefit gigs and protest records and other bits which took place against the social backdrop of 1984, this is the big one. The Ethiopian famine of 1983-1985 was covered in detail by the BBC, affecting Bob Geldof (Boomtown Rats) and his partner Paula Yates. They decided to create a charity single, aiming at the Christmas #1 for the maximum opportunity to sell records and raise awareness even among people who didn't normally pay attention to the chart.

Geldof wrote some lyrics and sent them to Midge Ure of Ultravox to come up with a melody and something to sing along to. Then he started calling people, the more famous the better. If someone with a big following appeared on the record, then their fans would be sure to buy it, and if this were repeated across enough artists then that would be a very large number of sales. Not everyone was available for the November recording session, but even so the list is a Who's Who of pop circa '84; U2, Phil Collins, Spandau Ballet, Heaven 17, Culture Club, Duran Duran, Kool & the Gang, Sting, Status Quo, Paul Weller, even Bananarama. Paul Young got the opening lines, performing under the weight of knowing they were intended for the not-available David Bowie.

ZTT Records gave them the studio time for free, part of which was used to film a video that set the template for the artist collaboration video; everyone arriving at the studio, followed by shots of singers crowding around microphones, then cut with scenes of in-between breaks.

What I like about this is for all the famous names playing it's structurally so much an Ultravox song I half imagine it with lyrics about some rainy city in Central Europe. Well, except for that bit which is straight off the rarely-played middle eight of the Doctor Who theme. But that is kind of what makes the original Band Aid work in a way that the later retreads don't: underneath there is a great pop record. Once it became more about who was invited to perform on that year's anniversary than how the record sounded that got lost.

Still, that's a way in the future. The original released on 7th December and instantly became the fastest-selling single ever up to that point. It was straight in at #1 on the first chart it appeared in, and the stories around it became legend, tales of people walking into a record shop, buying every copy they had, then leaving them all on the counter to be put back on the shelves for someone else to buy them. The first week saw a million copies sold and after five weeks at #1 that figure was three million.

The Thatcher government said this was all very nice, but they would still be collecting the VAT. Geldof became one of the few people to stand up to the government and win, with an eventual promise that while the VAT would be collected, a sum equalling the amount would be sent to charities working in the famine-affected area.

On 22nd December, with the Christmas #1 spot as good as secured, a selection of Band Aid artists joined Culture Club at one of their tour-ending Wembley Arena gigs to perform "Do They Know It's Christmas?" as an encore. Boy George suggested that maybe this was something they could do for real, putting together a similar roster of well-known artists for a benefit gig. Geldof's mind went immediately in motion to the point that by interviews in early January he already had a strong idea for a global concert involving two venues and how the logistics of that would work.

Of course the pop world of 1984 couldn't discover its social conscience without one final white T-shirt with bold black lettering - in this case, "FEED THE WORLD".