UK Charts: 1985-1986

1985

Ah, the year which you can't mention without getting SR-71/Bowling For Soup stuck in your head. Insert standard comment here about there being less time between 1985 and "1985" than there is between "1985" and now.

We open January with the usual brace of singles from the previous year hitting their peak. Madonna's "Like A Virgin" gets to #3. It's all so bright and clean. The synth bass sits in the midrange while Madonna is well into her upper register. It's bubblegum dance-pop where you wouldn't want to have to explain to a young child what the lyrics mean.

The tail end of 1984 saw a number of big-hitting ballads and that trend doesn't look like ending any time soon, with Alison Moyet's soulful "Invisible" at #21 on that first chart rundown of the year.

1985, though, was the real year of the power ballad. Taking the slow, soulful song and stretching it to breaking point with slow introductions, gentle verses and the biggest chorus it is possible to make. It's a sound designed for stadium-loads of people to sway along to, lighters extended.

There are few examples more ideal than "I Want To Know What Love Is" from Foreigner, which gives us our first #1 of the new year, ending Band Aid's three week run in mid-January.

Grandmaster Melle Mel revives his "Chaka Khan" rap briefly on "Step Off" (#8 January '85). We're just about getting hip-hop records an accepted part of the charts without needing three novelty ones for every serious one, and suddenly along comes Smiley Culture to introduce the Jamaican toasting style on "Police Officer" (#12 January '85). This was a tongue-in-cheek record with Smiley improvising a conversation between himself and a London-accented police officer, coming off the back of similar earlier non-charting "Cockney Translator", although beneath that was a serious point about how black Londoners were treated by the police - to the point 1985 would see a return to the race riots of 1981 later in the year.

It is finally the time for Prince's "1999" to shine, billed as a double A-side with "Little Red Corvette". "1999" saw a couple of re-releases in the UK, with a 1983 12" including "Horny Toad" and "D.M.S.R" but it's this one, advertised as a way to collect both hits on a single piece of vinyl, which finally caught the charts in the right mood and went to #2 in January. What I take from this is Prince was running pretty far ahead of his time given both of these are from 1982 - compare with "Like A Virgin" and then with 1982 contemporaries like the Human League's "Mirror Man" and it feels like it belongs much more with the former than the latter.

Tears for Fears found their new musical direction, the tentative (and somewhat disowned by the band) "Mothers Talk" followed by "Shout" (#4 January '85). There are some things to enjoy in there like the uncompromising synth bass and the brief organ solo but I hit my problem with the '80s again. Cool, a protest song! What's it about? Oh, no specific protest in particular, just the act of protesting in general.

Girl duo Strawberry Switchblade present one of the more confusing chart entries and you don't even have to play the record before the confusion starts, with Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall appearing on the picture sleeve with trad goth makeup and hairstyles accompanied by polka dot dresses and big bows. They existed in the orbit of Orange Juice (a largely new wave and jangle pop world) but their main hit "Since Yesterday" (#5 January '85) is more synth-pop than anything, although it doesn't take much digging to unearth strata of new wave and even gothic rock. I enjoy the oddity.

February opens with Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson at #1 with "I Know Him So Well". From "Chess", a Cold War themed musical penned by the male half of ABBA along with Tim Rice. And yes, you can hear it, with the break into the chorus coming straight out of "Happy New Year", the chorus itself based on a live-only 1977 song called "I Am An A", and vocal harmonies that feel very much like something the Swedish quartet would have produced. Plus it's a melancholy song about relationships falling apart, although that's more coincidence and what was required for the plot of the musical.

Another single doing well out of a reissue is King's "Love & Pride", a flop in early '84 but climbing up to #2 in February on its '85 re-release. They're not ahead of their time like Prince, though - this is somewhat overwrought new wave, a bit like someone's taken the spikier moments of Elvis Costello and edged the dial into the "too much" setting.

Russ Abbot's career brings to mind that point in the '50s when acts such as Norman Wisdom would drift between appearing on screen as comedians and on your turntable with semi-serious recording careers. Although his late '70s stint with soul revivalists The Black Abbots has given way to a solo career featuring that most dire of '80s contrivances, a party album.

I'm struggling to work out whether "I Love A Party" is an earnest attempt and bad, or whether it's a knowing parody. It's composed mostly of covers in the most rinky-dink Bontempi keyboard style, and flirts so uneasily with that so-bad-it's-good territory I don't know if the badness is deliberate or just the product of a cheap cash-in. Interviews from the time suggest the latter, but despite this (or perhaps because party songs are supposed to sound sorta bad) "Atmosphere" made it to #7 in February. Get the Campari and soda out, everyone, we're having a party.

Phil Collins makes a credible attempt at sounding like Prince for "Sussudio" (#12 February '85) although with its nonsense-word chorus and enthusiastic horn usage this hews a bit closer to that feeling of slick emptiness which afflicts so much of this '80s dance-pop. Even at the time critics were complaining that this sort of meaningless funk was starting to wear a bit thin.

1984 had been a bit of a lean year for rock, certainly early on in the year while Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Wham! were vying for the charts. Toward the end of the year that started to change with ZZ Top breaking the charts and Queen's "Hammer to Fall", the most rock-oriented track from "The Works" falling at a point the record-buying public felt ready to embrace simple good old-fashioned rock again.

Into this comes Bryan Adams' fourth album, "Reckless". This is an incredibly hits-dense album; six of its ten tracks were released as singles and on top of that "Kids Wanna Rock" seems to have become pervasive enough that it may as well have been.

Charts-wise this makes it one of those "everyone bought the album" cases, not unsurprising with rock being an album-oriented genre by this point. "Run To You" is the biggest hit single here with a peak of #11. If you're looking at inescapable cultural touchpoint "Summer Of '69" and wondering how that did, it didn't even break the Top 40 despite having over a billion streams to its credit in modern times.

Bruce Springsteen has been around a good while, and even "Dancing In The Dark" has been available in record stores since May '84, but demand spikes in '85 along with a newly-issued 12" extended version and suddenly it's at #4 and on track to be one of the best-selling singles of the year.

This feels familiar to me. The late '90s and early 2000s would see this happen on a regular basis: a couple of guitar-based singles climb the charts and the next week the music press is full of "guitar bands are back" articles with the premise that rock has returned to save us from whatever pop genre of the moment has become overblown and unbearable, be it girl groups or R&B or whatever else isn't produced by four pasty-faced lads with regional accents.

So I went looking to see what the 1985 equivalent of this looks like and the surprising thing is... it doesn't. Profiles of Springsteen share pages with Strawberry Switchblade and Chaka Khan. Reviews mock the trend for party bands and letters complain that Wham's entire fanbase must share no more than a single braincell between them, but even though thin rock pickings are lamented we're not getting those big "rock is back" front pages.

Kirsty MacColl gives Billy Bragg's "A New England" a jangle pop makeover and takes it to #7. It's a breezy and enjoyable treatment, with Bragg writing another verse for this version to bring the runtime up from the slight two minutes of his original. My only reservation is that some of the message of Bragg's version gets lost in the easy-going sound; the starkness of his makes it clearer that this is a sardonic commentary on the empty directionlessness of '80s society.

But if society is vapid and its pop reflects that, then perhaps the commentary to make is to take that as far as possible. Enter The Art Of Noise, another Trevor Horn project. The impetus for the group's formation was a period of goofing around with a Fairlight CMI while recording a Yes album, which resulted in a remix of "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and more importantly the notion that there was something in this idea of feeding bits of records into a sampler and chopping it up.

A 1983 EP was followed by 1984 album "(Who's Afraid Of) The Art of Noise?", and "Close (To The Edit)" from that became their first hit, peaking at #8 in February '85. It's deliberately meaningless, laden with gimmicks like the sample of band member J. J. Jeczalik starting his VW Golf, and created perhaps the most famous (or at least most-sampled) "hey!" in all of pop music. In a world of music that says nothing to me about my life, it so concertedly tries to say nothing to anybody about anything in their lives that it ends up saying everything.

It certainly says more to me than Howard Jones' "Things Can Only Get Better" at #6, more tiresomely funky synth-pop.

Having referenced The Smiths, best-of favourite "How Soon Is Now" turns up as an A-side and spends a mere four weeks in the Top 40, peaking at #24. I've mentioned previously that looking at chart positions is missing the point of indie somewhat, but those limited sales have certainly made copies of the 12" valuable. Unlike anything else they recorded and rarely played live due to the complexity of the arrangement, this nevertheless regularly takes the spot as the band's finest moment. If only it had gotten more radio airplay.

Sharpe & Numan's "Change Your Mind" (#17 February '85) comes across like an ultra-mechanical version of "Ashes to Ashes" with a bassline that wouldn't sound out of place on a techno record. It was supposed to be a one-off collaboration but Gary Numan and Bill Sharpe enjoyed it enough to release several more singles, although none were as commercially successful as this.

Killing Joke were a proto-industrial band formed in the late '70s who produced a few hard-edged albums along with uncomplimentary headlines for their use of controversial imagery and band members running away to Iceland because they were convinced the apocalypse was imminent. They started flirting with Bauhaus-style gothic rock before deciding to take that in a more melodic direction, resulting in "Love Like Blood", a quite fantastic #16 from February '85.

We're already at March and that first Top 40 countdown on Sunday 3rd would have been an interesting one. Let's ignore Mick Jagger whose '80s solo career is stalled at #32 with "Just Another Night" and not particularly distinguishable from various regrettable Stones-since-the-'80s efforts.

There's a new entry at #20 this week for Philip Bailey (of Earth, Wind & Fire) collaborating with Phil Collins on "Easy Lover". After the faux-Prince of "Sussudio" this is solidly back in the land of rock, although it is that '80s variety with lots of synths and that smooth guitar sound. One to keep an eye on.

Eddy and the Soul Band are at #13 with their version of band leader Eddy Conard's favourite record, "Theme From Shaft". The Dutch band had a couple of goes at reviving records from around the bedroom soul and early disco era, but this was their only chart success in the UK.

Above it at #12 is ex-Eagle Don Henley, that band having folded in 1980 in acrimonious fashion. "Boys Of Summer" fits in perfectly between the Bryan Adams and the Bruce Springsteen, and it's lyrically not a million miles from "Summer of '69" either.

Peaking at #7 is Prince (with The Revolution) on double A-side "Let's Go Crazy" / "Take Me With U" getting the guitars out. Both sides are energetic and fun but I have a hard time engaging with either. I'm probably stepping out to make a cup of tea at this point and Ashford & Simpson's "Solid" at #6 (on its way down from a #3 peak) is not tempting me back.

Stephen Duffy was one of the founding members of Duran Duran but left before they signed their major label record deal. He spent a bit of time recording in a band called Tin Tin, then decided to call himself Tin Tin (Stephen "Tin Tin" Duffy to be precise) as a solo artist. "Kiss Me" peaks at #4 this week. It all feels reasonably current and doesn't do much wrong, but is ultimately a bit forgettable.

At #3 are the Commodores with comeback tribute song "Nightshift" referencing Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, both of whom had died the previous year. It's smooth, relaxed R&B and as such still somewhat early in that form.

Second slot is Elaine Page on the way back down from #1, while at that top position we have Dead or Alive finding their new production company, teaming up with Stock Aitken Waterman for the first time. "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)" is the record that puts SAW on the map, the first time they top the charts, and in just two records we have a perfect illustration of the SAW problem.

Go back to Hazell Dean's "Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)" from '84 and see how many things have been lifted straight from the same parts bin. Now, it's worth mentioning here that there was always a certain level of cynicism in pop production, from bubblegum impresarios such as Kirshner realising there didn't have to be a real band involved at any point to Trevor Horn letting Frankie Goes To Hollywood court the perfect amount of controversy.

When it came to the songs, though, they broke out the craft. I have held forth on how well-made things like "Sugar, Sugar" and "Jingle Jangle" are for what is knowingly disposable pop. Horn may have approached hitmaking knowing there was a formula to what made a record commercially successful, but didn't let that stop him from making the records interesting.

SAW took the criticism oft mooted in indie journals that the public at large enjoyed dross and ran with it. That hi-NRG beat sells? Then don't bother making a new one until it stops doing so. People seem to like records with little synth stabs in them? Don't bother trying to integrate them in any meaningful way, just grab whatever's in the library and throw it in.

There's an open question of whether SAW's approach could have worked in any other decade. The '80s seemed to wear meaningless plastic disposability in its music like a badge of pride. Maybe the '50s with its parade of indistinguishable turgid dirges might have welcomed them but the problem there is the technology (or lack thereof) meant you still had to record it all from scratch. A core part of SAW's ethos was to involve the artists as little as possible and present them with ready-made tracks that were already programmed into sequencers and drum machines and ready to go.

Pete Burns hated the experience and looks back on it bitterly as only required because Epic Records refused to deal with the band unless they went into the studio with a producer, and he still had to take out a loan to pay for it. His view is that Dead or Alive came with a fully-formed record and a sound already decided on, which SAW stole and used with all their other artists. That said, he also claims that the original idea was not a hi-NRG record and it also seems quite a feat of theft for so many elements to not only be stolen but also sent back in time so they can appear on the Hazell Dean record. While "You Spin Me Round" was a long time in the making, with recording starting back in March '84, the band only approached SAW in September by which point "Whatever I Do" had already been out several months.

Sadly Burns is no longer with us to contest that point - an addiction to cosmetic surgery which started from trying to fix a broken nose for better-looking publicity photos resulted in several botched procedures which cause him severe health problems, left him bankrupt and contributed to an early death at just 57 years old in 2016.

Back in '85, having spent two months even getting so far as the top 40 and another month climbing all the way to #1, "You Spin Me Round" is displaced from that position two weeks later by this week's new entry, "Easy Lover".

Phil Collins' work as a producer had him helping Earth Wind & Fire's Philip Bailey with his solo album in 1984, and at the end of the recording sessions Bailey suggested they wrote a song together. That idea turned into a jam session, which produced the chorus along with a verse, and by the end of the night they had "Easy Lover" recorded. It released in the US in November, although it took until February to hit record shops in the UK.

Below it at #2 is Alison Moyet with "That Ole Devil Called Love". We've had a few fun pastiches of early and even pre-chart pop in this first half of the decade, but this cover of a 1945 Billie Holiday record hews closer to faithful than mocking. Thirty years on and the Template still has it, folks. Even if it is only Alison doing something as different as possible to avoid that trend of releasing nearly every good song from an album as its own single.

It's all a bit of a holding pattern as March '85 comes to a close, with the void starting to be filled with oddities like Andrew Lloyd-Webber's "Requiem" producing a rendition of "Pie Jesu" by Sarah Brightman and Paul Miles-Kingston that hits #3. There's some Paul Young and some Nik Kershaw because it's 1985 and of course there is, and a lot of forgettable pop I can't figure out anything useful to write about.

Then at the end of the month Frankie Goes To Hollywood drop "Welcome To The Pleasuredome" in a stunt release where you don't know which of two quite different mixes you're going to get on the 7" single unless you closely inspect the markings inside the runout. There were also extended 12" versions, and a picture disc which at least solved the unpredictability problem by only coming in a single variant.

ZTT were so confident of another huge success they marketed it as the band's fourth number one, so it must have come as a bit of a disappointment to be kept off the top spot by "Easy Lover". They would never hit as high a position again, with a string of lowlights including leaving the UK as tax exiles and Holly Johnson splitting from the band in 1987 followed by legal battles and a complete breakdown in relationship with ZTT as they tried to prevent him from recording with another label.

Frankie and Wham! had more competition in the world of attention-grabbing pop for pop's sake, too. Go West's debut single "We Close Our Eyes" went to #5 in April and sold consistently. As ever, I find the constant onslaught on the senses (well, one sense) too much. It's like the audio equivalent of one of those 2020s TV shows that's constantly throwing plot elements and action sequences at you, terrified that you might drift away and look at your phone instead if you go a single moment without stimulation.

We're about midway between "Do They Know It's Christmas?" slipping out of the charts and Live Aid happening, and it's time for a charity single which has been all but forgotten in the UK compared to those two culture-dominating reference points. Geldof and Ure's fundraising record inspired US singer Harry Belafonte to put together an American version, with an all-star line-up (including Bob Geldof) put together for a January recording session as USA For Africa, although Prince was noticeably lacking due to some earlier beef with Bob.

The only problem here is that "We Are The World" (#1 April '85) is horrible. The thing about the original Band Aid record is that for all I joke about it being structurally Ultravox, that is a great template for a record. It's a tight, focused bit of pop and the fact it's sung by the pop music Who's Who of 1984 is incidental. "We Are The World" is little more than a schmaltzy vehicle rolling by slowly enough for you to go, "oh look, it's them" at every singer who takes a turn on the microphone.

In period, it hit most of the same story beats - record-breaking sales, people walking into record shops to buy multiple copies, and being largely popular with a mainstream audience even if acerbic rock critics didn't like it. But I still find something unlikeable about it that it took multiple anniversary re-treads for Band Aid whatever-number-it-is-now to engender. It's the feeling that where the original "Do They Know It's Christmas?" is clearly about Africa, even if written by people who don't understand the continent has a healthy supply of snow-capped mountains, "We Are The World" is more about some self-congratulatory notion of "us".

Still, within a year it had raised over $44m, most of which went directly on aid to Africa, split between short term relief and longer term sustainability projects. These days there is more of a debate around the conflict between Western aid and the need for African self-determination, but there are people who proudly say they wouldn't be here today were it not for Band Aid and USA For Africa, and if the consequence of that is I have to listen to a horrible schmaltz-fest of a record then so be it.

Below it at #2, Tears for Fears with "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" - a microcosm of mid-1980s music with Cold War pessimism set to music that even some of the band thought was a bland, calculated attempt to crack the US charts. It worked for them, going to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 helped by heavy MTV play.

That smooth pop rock sound is well-represented in the charts in April, with Glenn Frey's "The Heat Is On" seeing a relatively late peak for a late '84 record at #12 and REO Speedwagon's "Can't Fight This Feeling" at #16. It's another one where the band didn't think much of their own output, referring to it as "that stupid ballad", at least until it started making them money.

Like the Tina, I get a weird sense of nostalgia listening to this; it's not anything I'd ever seek out for myself if looking for mid-'80s music (c'mon, the Jesus and Mary Chain are right there) but it was what played in our house while countless DIY projects were embarked upon.

Phil Collins is bang on this trend with "One More Night", going to #4 in April. The bell-like electric piano, the R&B-style "oooh"s and backing chorus, the apologetic "paf" of the electronic drums, even ending with a saxophone solo; it's like someone's rocked up to his house and gone, "Phil, no time to explain, you've got to provide the dictionary definition for Soft Adult Contemporary right now".

China Crisis married this smooth style with some more early-'80s synth pop cues for "Black Man Ray" (#14 April '85). It's an interesting alternative approach, but it seems by the middle of the decade the public wanted their soft contemporary softer and their synth pop brasher, as the band's chart peaks got lower and lower.

On that brasher side, Dead Or Alive's "Lover Come Back (To Me)" (#11 April '85) might seem like an opportunity to see how many elements of the SAW parts bin we can tick off the bingo card, but that underlying synth line is the closest admission I've heard yet to how much this hi-NRG stuff takes its cues from Giorgio Moroder.

Phyllis Nelson's "Move Closer" was a flop in her native US, but UK buyers took the slow soul ballad to their hearts with it taking #1 at the end of April. When I set out to write this I knew there would be a point where I would talk about soul ballads and the reinvention of them into modern R&B, but I was expecting that all to come toward the back half of the 1990s. It feels strange for that sonic signature to exist, produce a huge hit, and yet retreat as quickly into the background for more soft rock and hi-NRG to dominate the charts.

At #7 is Breakfast Club credits favourite "Don't You (Forget About Me)" from Simple Minds. Initially reluctant to record material they hadn't written themselves, the band eventually came round and got their biggest hit out of it. Galloping Ultravox-style synth bass, pastiches of those big power ballads and even fill-ins intended to be replaced by lyrics that were never written - the band look back and wonder how they could ever not have thought it would be a hit.

May gets upended by Paul Hardcastle going to #1 with "19". The electro protest song feels like a bridge between early decade synthpop and the sample-heavy electronic music from later in the decade. With hip-hop beats still in their early drum machine phase you can hear that Afrika Bambaataa influence, too. The equipment is primitive, with some of the track's most recognisable elements coming from a sampler (the E-Mu Emulator) which could only hold 2 seconds of recorded sound. It was all new enough that figuring out who to pay and who to credit was quite a problem in itself.

Naturally, there was a cricket-themed parody version a few weeks later.

With hi-NRG about to take over the charts thanks to the SAW production line, Bronski Beat turn up to remind us where it all started with a a medley version of "I Feel Love" (#3 May '85) that veers off into a weird rendition of "Johnny Remember Me" as if to remind us that all these electronic effects and samples can possibly be traced back to that moment Joe Meek stuck a microphone down the toilet.

U2 are at #6 with "The Unforgettable Fire", launching what Bono called "sketches", a sound designed to be atmospheric while never quite resolving to an actual song, like you're somehow experiencing music happening in the distance over the next hill. I'm struck by how much this reminds me of moments from "All That You Can't Leave Behind" from 15 years in the future. Despite how much this was to be the band's signature sound, Island Records attempted to dissuade them from working with Brian Eno to create it, fearing their nascent success would turn into "avant-garde nonsense". Not quite, as it happened.

Speaking of things reminding me of much later records, Freddie Mercury's "I Was Born To Love You" (#11 May '85) would be retooled for 'definitely not an odds and ends album, honest' 1995 Queen effort "Made In Heaven". Reinhold Mack is behind the "could have sworn this was Giorgio Moroder" production on this original, and it all works much better than the cut-and-shut 1995 version.

DeBarge were supposed to be the big followup to the Jackson 5 with much of the same sound, but while they had a few hits in the US earlier in the decade they were a one-hit wonder in the UK, with "Rhythm of the Night" going to #4 in May. Must be a good time for revivalists, Paul Weller returns the Style Council to their rather enjoyable "what the Jam might have been doing had they continued" approach on "Walls Come Tumbling Down!" (#6 May '85).

With Duran Duran's near-omnipresence in these times, it's not a great surprise to find them scoring the latest Bond film, with "A View To A Kill" going to #2. In a rare situation of harmonious working relationships, the band said they enjoyed having Bond composer John Barry on board and I feel the result is pleasingly free of the band's tendency to be odd and arrhythmic to the detriment of the finished record.

Below it at #3 is "Auf Wiedersehen, Pet" actor Jimmy Nail's rather overwrought solo debut, a cover of "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" with Queen's Roger Taylor co-producing and handling the drums. It's all a bit too much, trying to be "In The Air Tonight" on material which I don't think entirely justifies it.

There are some more FA Cup football anthems but I think I've done those into the ground by now, besides which May '85 sees enough new Top 40 entries to make June a rather busy month in the charts.

Ex-Thin Lizzy bandmates Gary Moore and Phil Lynott see an early month peak at #5 with hard rocker "Out In The Fields". Given how only a few months earlier I was bemoaning how thematically lightweight chart music was becoming, it's a surprise to see so many heavyweight protest songs reaching high positions - this is unequivocally about the Troubles.

It's perhaps a sign of how busy things are getting that bubblegum revivalism "Walking On Sunshine" only goes as far as #8 when you could easily see it as a summertime chart-topper in a less congested Top 40. Katrina and the Waves deliberately went for a simple and sunny song, recording it first in 1983 and then this re-recorded version in 1985.

Similarly, Go West's "Call Me" is a mid-'80s icon but it's just #12 here in early June. Stephen 'Tin Tin' Duffy and Depeche Mode are down in mid-chart peaks. Propaganda's "Duel", which I'd assumed was enormous given how many times I've seen it on a "Best of the Eighties" list, doesn't even crack the Top 20 at #21.

So if these records aren't up at the top, what is?

It's Sunday 9th June 1985 and you're catching the last of the chart countdown. At #5 are Animotion with "Obsession", a fine synthpop cover of a 1983 film soundtrack song. You've got all the arpeggiated bass, synth brass stabs and urgent energy you could want.

Then #4 comes on and we're suddenly in soft R&B ballad mode with Billy Ocean's "Suddenly". It's not my sort of thing and I usually only ever hear it in a late night minicab, but I can't deny this is very well put together.

#3 is Paul Hardcastle on the way back down the charts, and then we get to the #2 peak of Marillion's "Kayleigh". For Marillion fans this is the band's "Bohemian Rhapsody" moment, and Queen followers don't even have to contend with there having been an entirely different singer since then.

Growing up as a kid whose parents divorced in the '80s there's a point where you suddenly start hearing an awful lot of Marillion in the background to your life, and yeah - it's around that point. Specifically the Fish era (not that there was any other era at the time) and specifically the ones focusing on loss and breakup; this, "Lavender", and the near 9 minute title track from "Script for a Jester's Tear".

Obviously I was too young to know anything more than this being a new sort of music which I hadn't heard before but also quite enjoyed, and I soon had a small collection of them on mix tapes along with plenty of other mid '80s contemporaries.

Eventually I got access to my own record player, a hand-me-down Philips music centre with which I probably did irreparable damage to a small stack of moderately valuable Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull albums. (It's fine, they were stolen while in storage at a relatives' house and I'm sure the thief enjoyed discovering everything they'd nicked was near-unsaleable). One of the bands I pulled out of boxes of records before they went to the charity shop was Marillion.

"Kayleigh" is such an outpouring of lost opportunity that its real-life inspiration heard it and went, "why didn't he tell me?" but even with the first three albums being called "the Kayleigh trilogy" they're about more than that. Fish dwells on outsiderness, the feelings of not fitting in ("Garden Party"), bitterness that you don't want to fit in with whatever this is anyway ("Heart of Lothian"), and the difficulty of trying to maintain relationships with people where the only thing you have in common is both being outsiders ("Jigsaw").

It helps that the music is absolutely fantastic for all of this.

One of the strange things for me talking to people I grew up with is how often someone mentions in passing that secretly, they really did like Marillion. Oh yeah, that's the trick, secretly liking things. Probably comes easier when you don't grow up with an overdeveloped sense of justice and objective truth. But there's a point here that for all neo-prog hit an unfortunate midpoint between being nerdy and uncool, but also not willing enough to waste 10 minutes on an extended noodling jam to be considered uncommercially doing it for the music man, it did produce music that was both complex and eminently listenable.

If I had a criticism, it would be that Fish never offers any solutions; it's all just sitting on the sidelines allowing yourself to experience pain. "Espedair Street" deals with this better than I could ever hope to on something which is still notionally supposed to be about the chart pop of the mid-'80s, but it's a notable difference when I get to life-defining album "Different Class"; Pulp offer the suggestion that after it all you can at least grow out of it and spend your morning in the Bar Italia. It's not the greatest solution but at least it's an attainable one. I'm sort of tempted to go right now, I could probably be there within the hour.

But if I did that, I'd miss the #1.

We have another charity record, and this one somewhat closer to home. On 11th May 1985, Bradford City were playing Lincoln City at home. Their wooden stadium was old, poorly-maintained and suffered from a huge build-up of discarded papers, wrappers and cigarette butts under the floorboards. This being the 1980s smoking was widespread, and the inevitable happened when a spectator attempted to put out a cigarette under their foot only for it to slip through a gap, still alight.

The stand had no fire extinguishers, no stewards present to unlock the exits or open the turnstiles, and the fire took hold so quickly there was no time to co-ordinate an exit plan. 56 people died and more than 250 were injured.

In the wake of this, Gerry Marsden decided to re-record "You'll Never Walk Alone" to aid the disaster fund, with the money eventually going to the burns unit set up in response to the disaster. Compared to the schlock of USA for Africa it's endearingly home-made, the contributing artists (credited as The Crowd) ranging from Motörhead to Tony Christie. Black Lace are on there, making this possibly the best record they ever did. There's basically one keyboard providing musical accompaniment and the odd vocal line comes in at an unexpected volume but I like that. There's a kind of honesty, a sort of "we got everyone together and made this for you" feeling.

It also gave Gerry Marsden a record of being the first person to hit #1 with two different versions of the same song.

You might think that's enough excitement for one chart countdown but we also see a peak at #15 for a band that will be spending a lot of time in these charts as a byword for terrible '80s manufactured music: Five Star with "All Fall Down". This is about as blatant an attempt to recapture the Jackson Five magic as you can think of; all siblings, youngest member Denise Pearson providing high-pitched vocals, even a 5 in the band name. The song itself is rather by-the-numbers R&B pop. As with so many of these manufactured bands, my contention is less that the music is bad than that it's bland.

We don't get much respite for the rest of June. Madonna's film-soundtracking ballad "Crazy For You" hits #2 later in the month. Even if you didn't have the cheat sheet telling you this is from a mid-'80s coming-of-age movie I reckon you could probably guess.

It's not even the most famous film soundtrack to hit the charts this month as Harold Faltermeyer's "Axel F" takes the #2 slot from it the next week. "Beverley Hills Cop" is one of those films which seemed to kick around in video rental shops until video rental shops stopped carrying VHS tapes so you can understand people buying the soundtrack but it's still somewhat fun hearing a pure instrumental synth workout this high up the charts.

The Crowd get knocked off #1 by Sister Sledge, now more vocal-forward and swapping disco for R&B on "Frankie". Nile Rodgers produced, initially hating the song but coming back a week later saying he couldn't stop singing it.

I find it strange how hip-hop has had so many false starts and hopeful moments where a couple of records laden with early installment weirdness chart only for it to disappear again, and yet R&B just kind of arrives and from that point it's there. Kool & The Gang's "Cherish" goes to #4 as June closes out with all of its soft vibes and wedding song potential. Below it at #5 another charity record, Marti Webb with a tender if somewhat syrupy cover of "Ben", intended as a tribute to a 3 year old liver transplant patient and to raise money for other seriously ill children.

When it comes to charity though, the big event of the moment is Live Aid. So big that I watched the BBC presentation from the start until I could no longer stay awake, although as I was only two years old at the time it didn't really register.

Live Aid was two parallel concerts, with one kicking off at noon local time on 13th July at Wembley Stadium in London, and another starting shortly before 2pm local time at John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. Once the stateside gig had started the two would run in parallel until Wembley hit curfew, with the US going it alone to provide the final 6 hours. In addition to the charity front it was to be a showcase for modern broadcasting technology and satellite transmission links, although some of the more ambitious ideas such as a live transatlantic duet between Mick Jagger and David Bowie had to be abandoned after both artists declined to fake it with television magic.

The centrepiece was a three-part rotating stage, on which one band could be playing while the next band got ready, and the previous band disassembled their gear. This also had the advantage that anyone who overran their strictly-timed slot did so under the threat they could be rotated out of view without any choice in the matter. To save home viewers having to listen through their TV speakers in mono sound, the BBC would simultaneously broadcast the concert via FM radio, adding to the already difficult problem of synchronising transatlantic audio and video feeds. (All standard broadcast TV was mono in 1985 - NICAM stereo would first be tested on the air the following year, and did not become common until the 1990s).

The rest is legend. It raised scads of money, Phil Collins was able to play both concerts thanks to Concorde, Queen performed what is often stated to be the greatest 21 minutes of live rock music ever to be rocked in front of a live audience, and Geldof was for a brief moment so messianic people feared what would happen if he did go down the route of his character in "The Wall".

Put simply, if you were exposed to any mainstream discourse on the matter for the entire period I would have been considered culturally relevant as a consumer of music, Live Aid was the greatest moment in all of music and the definitive statement on music's potential as a force for good. Better even than Woodstock, which was rainy, not for charity, and had too much traffic. Plus for Live Aid you were able to both be there and remember it, although in the TV audience sense I both was and yet don't.

You can sense there's a "but" coming, and it didn't take long - in fact, it didn't even take until Live Aid happening. Médecins Sans Frontières had warned Geldof before the concert that he would be putting money into the hands of the regime that had caused the famine in the first place, and an exposé on how charity money was supposedly being used to purchase weapons came out in 1986. In fairness, while Geldof is understandably protective about his greatest achievement, he openly admits that he would rather deal with the devil to get some money to the people who need it than sit in an office in London looking at a bank account while everyone around lets perfect be the enemy of good.

Also in his favour, such exposés have also tended to be followed by rebuttals and upheld complaints in favour of the Band Aid Trust, with no credible evidence to suggest this happened in any more than isolated instances involving smaller amounts of money which had been given to non-governmental organisations. To paraphrase Geldof, while some money was likely mislaid, if everything claimed in criticisms of Live Aid had happened then the death rate in Ethiopia would have been far, far higher. It certainly wasn't perfect, but I'm not sure it's fair to claim it was a disaster. Perhaps the more positive assessment of Live Aid back in my youth was less about some sort of buried truth (which wasn't even buried in 1986) but more it being the last gasp of an era where people could cope with the idea of something not having to be either entirely good or entirely bad, or that things falling in the middle are somehow even more offensive to our moral sensibilities than, say, Setting Fire To Puppies For Fun Aid would be.

I am not going to change the world back into one that understands compromise so let's move back to safer ground for discussion and talk about the other Live Aid controversy, again raised even before the concert started. Which is that it was... well, safe ground.

Live Aid's Wembley line-up was close to the most musically conservative list you could have put together in 1985. Alright, so Philadelphia was allowed a few more interesting choices (c'mon, Run-DMC!) especially before it took over from Wembley in the evening and Bob Dylan went off script, but for the main part what you watched in the UK was a wall of rock aristocracy and only the safest of modern pop acts.

To some extent I think this was justified. Boy George openly admitted he didn't think Culture Club as a small band could really carry the audience, and you could have had an alternative in which all the exciting indie bands, daring pop acts and synth experimentalists played which was satisfying in a musically avant-garde way but only raised about 76p. However, not having a single African musical act on the billing of an event for Africa does come across as a rather tone-deaf omission. I don't even have to caveat that with something about modern sensibilities, as it was said at the time.

The problem here is that while Band and Live Aid raised a lot of money for Africa, they also raised the stock of the artists who performed for them, or at least most of them if you ignore Led Zeppelin's chaotically bad live set. In the space of a few months Queen have gone from being sarcastically introduced as "Freddie and the Sun City Stompers" to being hailed as having played the greatest live set ever played by a rock band.

I wondered when I first looked at the big events of 1985 how I was going to reflect Live Aid in what at some point was a story of the charts. You don't see a situation where we look at the charts a couple of weeks later and there are reissues of "Bohemian Rhapsody", "My Generation" and "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" at #1, #2 and #3 respectively, although Jagger and Bowie's aborted live duet did eventually spawn a Top 40 single. However, upon doing some background reading I realised a theme that's been underlying the last six months.

1985 has been the most musically conservative year since the decade started. A year ago we had the birth of indie, the craze for breaking, ska protest songs, that enormous Frankie/Wham! chart battle... I'm not saying '85 has been utterly dull or unbearably slow in the manner of those directionless '76 charts, but it has taken a step away from that constant restlessness to the benefit of the artists who played on Band Aid and the ones who sound like them.

So do we take the most cynical interpretation, that the after-effect of these massive charity records and massive benefit concerts is a bunch of old-hat artists creating a musical environment where they could extend their careers another few years at the expense of more interesting music? There's a few things you could point at: for example, despite its promising start in '84, after Band Aid indie almost disappears from the charts until mid-'86.

The answer, I reckon, lies somewhere in the middle. Fish claims the artists involved knew how much appearing on Live Aid would benefit them as well as Africa, and that Marillion were turned down as punishment for not accepting Band Aid despite being a potentially huge audience draw in mid-'85. Perhaps a few setlists of greatest hits and predictable reunions could have been condensed to showcase some African music to the world. But ultimately it's down to the public buying the music to put it in the charts, and if we all collectively went, "well, I was going to buy an impenetrable wall of noise from the Jesus and Mary Chain but I saw that Phil Collins fly across the Atlantic for charity so I'll buy him instead" then that's on us.

Besides which, we weren't buying Phil Collins and Queen directly. In the week Live Aid takes place you're seeing Fine Young Cannibals "Johnny Come Home" peak at #8, a jazzy record which says more about their ska roots than the global pop superstars they'd be by the end of the decade. Yes, these are more musically conservative times and I doubt it'd be here if it weren't so ultra-polished, but it's not like the musical world caved and wanted only whatever the '70s rock titans were producing.

New Top 40 entries for that week include Trans-X's "Living On Video", which sounds a bit like the hand-built artisan version of whatever it is that comes out of the SAW factory. Bits of it date back to 1982 and it sounds like it (in a good way), to the point it's quite hard to find the correct "'85 Big Mix" version on streaming platforms.

If you need a comparison point Dead Or Alive's "In Too Deep" peaks at #14 the same week, although despite featuring plenty of SAW assembly line hallmarks it might not be the best as Pete Waterman thought it wasn't close enough to the established successful formula.

Maybe assembly line pop, 2-3 year old synthpop records and the presence of Denis LaSalle's near-novelty "My Toot Toot" with its party album synths don't paint an amazing picture of a chart that is varied and healthy but y'know, it's not all aging rockers just yet.

Mid-July sees a #13 peak for Simply Red with a cover of a Valentine Brothers funk-soul song from 1982, "Money's Too Tight (To Mention)". Lead singer Mick Hucknall had wandered out of punk to put together a soul band along with some Durutti Column alumni and the result is not a great help with that "1985 is a musically conservative year" assessment. The squelchy funk of the original gets a high-gloss, ultra-clean makeover and a check over for anything that might scare the horses.

This is one of those moments where you could assemble a fairly credible "greatest hits of the '80s" compilation from a single chart, as "We Don't Need Another Hero", "Money For Nothing", "White Wedding" all enter the Top 40 for the first time that Sunday after Live Aid, followed by "Into The Groove" and The Cure the following week.

As they do so, Eurythmics climb to #1 with "There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)". Stevie Wonder played harmonica and I wonder if there's a deliberate reference to the clavinet line on "Superstition" buried in that soundscape. Annie Lennox was on the list to perform Live Aid, which might have gone some way to help with the criticisms it was ignoring up and coming artists, but unfortunately had to pull out with a throat infection.

Anyway, "We Don't Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)". Tina Turner is well into her comeback, appearing as Aunty Entity in the third Mad Max film and providing this soundtrack number, which went to #3 in the same month. Implausibly big-sounding, it takes the power ballad to its most extreme conclusion, finishing up with a full choir.

If there's any doubt we're hitting the golden era of MTV, the opening lines of Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" (#4 August '85) ought to dispel it. Famous for its CGI video and the controversy of a line featuring a slur because not everyone got that it's a line sung from the point of view of an unsympathetic character, and besides it's not something you want to broadcast pre-watershed. The decision falls toward playing the radio-friendly edit so often that it's a bit jarring to listen to an original 7" now, as you really don't expect it to be there.

It's all about the video though, isn't it? Those low-polygon guys who've got to shift microwave ovens and colour TVs gawp at Dire Straits playing, with video effects turning the band and their instruments into animated characters. This was ground-breaking stuff for the time; the 3D scene had to be assembled on a custom Bosch CGI computer with an ornery system for rendering directly to analogue tape that would occasionally ruin a long render by producing a tape with a dropped frame.

(2D effects and compositing were done on a Quantel Paintbox, an industry favourite for such things)

The strange part about this being the golden era of MTV is not only did it happen so early in the channel's history, it wasn't even available in the UK yet. It first arrived on satellite television in 1987, a format which itself did not become widespread until the early 1990s, by which point the channel had already made the decision to start replacing music videos with reality TV series.

Despite this, the stylised and concept-heavy videos necessary to get the attention of the US MTV demographic filtered back to the UK, with Top of the Pops showing more videos in preference to studio performances and bands changing their images to suit; Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet going from New Romantic messiness to polished and cinematic. When it came to Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler resisted this trend: he objected to the "Money for Nothing" video on the basis it detracted from the real art, which was the music. Eventually he was won round with the idea that not being on MTV at all because they didn't want to show a guy standing there playing the guitar would detract a lot more from the art, along with their royalty payments.

As a side note, one week after "Money For Nothing" enters the charts the Commodore Amiga will be introduced in a gala event in the US, a relatively affordable computer which can produce something approximating these 3D visuals in sort of real time, if you don't ask too many questions about the frame rate. As the relatively static technology of the post-smartphone era rolls on I become more amazed at how fast technology improved through the early part of my life.

It certainly moved faster than my ability to get through these charts without getting distracted, so let's look at that other 14th July new entry - Billy Idol with "White Wedding" (#6 August '85). A strange one to be here as it's a 1982 record and very clearly a new wave holdover. A damn good one, and once more my warped musical reference points have me tempted to go and play a bit of Vice City.

The Cure's "In Between Days" is another pleasing palette cleanser between all the high gloss and radio friendliness, with a refreshingly high chart position of #15.

We don't get much time to dwell in jangly rock though, as Madonna races to #1 after just a week with "Into The Groove". There's a pleasing euro disco structure underlying this, although originally it was intended as a career launching point for US singer Cheyne before Madonna decided she wanted it while filming "Desperately Seeking Susan", the soundtrack of which this is from.

There's no let up as "Holiday" re-enters the Top 40 on a reissue as "Into The Groove" tops them. This one may be a direct consequence of Live Aid, as Madonna performed a set during the bit where Philadelphia was allowed to be more musically daring while eyes were on Wembley, coming back on stage later for a lyric-altered cover of the Beatles' "Revolution" from the Thompson Twins along with Steve Stevens and Nile Rodgers.

The Cars also see a similar bump for "Drive", going to #4 in August. Another band from that more daring Philadelphia setlist, and it makes one wonder what would have happened to the charts had Live Aid showcased some indie and African artists between the expected big hitters.

Stock Aitken Waterman add a few more parts to the bin for "Say I'm Your Number One", a #7 for Princess in August that takes them deep into R&B territory. I reckon there's probably a fun game to be had in guessing which of the new bits will be recycled over umpteen other records. I'm going with those "doof" drums and the synth brass.

Kate Bush enters the charts in August with "Running Up That Hill" and there is such a temptation here for me to calmly put (#1 June '22) and ignore that I'm probably a long way off ever writing that again. So yes, your real answer here is #3 in August '85 and then a reference back to that comment I made about mass-consciousness revivalism. Everyone watched those kid adventure movies, so everyone knew what Stranger Things was referencing, we all heard this and then we all went to our streaming platform of choice to play it. Suddenly it's #1 because streaming has broken the charts, and that's going to be a fun discussion when I get to it.

If I ever get to it. Comedic Italo Disco record "Tarzan Boy" hits #3 as September opens, with Footloose soundtrack single "Holding Out For A Hero" giving Bonnie Tyler a #2 despite its 1984 origins.

We finally get that threatened Bowie and Jagger duet on "Dancing In The Street" which goes straight in at #1 in September. It's an all-profits-to-charity situation so pointing out this is a cringingly terrible record with an awful dad-dancing video is probably churlish. I'm doing so anyway. There's a great parody version of the video out there which removes all the music and puts in only the sounds you would hear from what's on screen.

Stevie Wonder gets to #3 with "Part-Time Lover" and then we have Marillion hitting #5 in mid-September with "Lavender". On the album it's a two-parter with "Kayleigh" and covers much the same territory, this time focusing on a single incident causing Fish to remember his lost love. The single is longer and goes in hard on what the neo-prog version of a power ballad would be including a huge guitar solo that you don't get on the LP. My gleeful sense of "too much, in a good way" is tingling.

Another long wait to reach a chart peak for Huey Lewis and the News with "Power Of Love" entering the Top 40 in September, having a reasonable run, then coming back in February '86 for an eventual #1 in March. Indelibly associated with "Back To The Future", which arrived in US cinemas at the end of July but wouldn't premiere in the UK until December, perhaps a factor in its resurgence.

Midge Ure has recorded a solo album outside of Ultravox, and lead single "If I Was" gives him a #1 in September. Another Live Aid beneficiary? It's a good single, and while there's not much here that couldn't have come out in 1981 that's not stopped other new wave and synthpop hits from achieving respectable positions.

A confusing situation with the next #1 as Jennifer Rush gives us "The Power Of Love", resulting in two similarly titled but very different songs in the charts at the same time. A huge power ballad, the "I am your lady and you are my man" song was a huge hit in this year of power ballads, hitting the top spot in October and spending a month there.

Madonna is managing to be a one-woman hit factory, with "Angel" going to #5 in September, followed up by "Gambler" hitting #4 a month later.

TV and film are still providing plenty of soundtrack-based hits into the autumn. St. Elmo's Fire gives us John Parr's "St. Elmo's Fire (Man In Motion)" (#6 October '85) which has a fantastically grumbly synth bass. Jan Hammer's rather urgent "Miami Vice Theme" is #5 in the same month.

Underlining that point about how MTV could change careers, a-ha finally see success from an attempt to get "Take On Me" into the charts. There have been a few different approaches and remixes, but the big difference here in 1985 is the iconic part rotoscoped animation, part live action video. It took nearly four months to complete, mostly hand-drawn in an era before you just applied the "pencil sketch" filter in your non-linear video editor of choice.

Simple Minds are back up in the charts with big-sounding "Alive And Kicking" (#7 October '85), while at #12 Grace Jones suggests there might be some appetite for drama returning to public music tastes on "Slave To The Rhythm". This was originally written for Frankie Goes To Hollywood and you can hear some vestiges of that, but Grace Jones turns it into a big R&B number that dives between lean funk-soul and something that could almost be a Bond theme in places.

And somehow, somehow, Shakin' Stevens is still there at #11 with "Lipstick, Powder and Paint" as if nothing has happened in the world since the rockabilly craze of '81 and we want a really insincere version of it. I guess that's 1985 writ large though - it's been a huge year in terms of musical events and the context around music, but other than the occasional isolated record nothing has really happened musically. Maybe Mark Knopfler had a point about video distracting us from what really matters.

Well, Elton John is at #3 with "Nikita", all listenable enough in a soft and smooth way but not doing anything to disprove that conjecture. I keep mishearing the lyrics as "on that keytar" which makes it all a bit bizarre. Echo & The Bunnymen's "Bring On The Dancing Horses" is fun at #21, but again it's nothing I couldn't find a U2 or Big Country record from circa '83 that doesn't cover similar sonic ground.

Feargal Sharkey's post-Undertones solo career sees his first album and first #1 single with "A Good Heart" reaching that position in November. Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics is at the controls for production and gives us an effective summary of pop trends circa '85.

UB40 have settled into the woozy, production-heavy sound we heard on "Red Red Wine". Again, something that's been around since '83, but it gave them a #1 in August with a cover of "I Got You Babe" that could almost be mistaken for "Red Red Wine" in places and they're back with "Don't Break My Heart" (#3 November '85). This one is a little more out there, with some enjoyable dub influences in places.

Duran Duran side project Arcadia hit #7 in late October with "Election Day", scratching an itch to create pretentious art rock in its purest form, creating as they did so "the best album Duran Duran never made".

Talking Heads sum it up on their hymn to impending and obvious doom "Road To Nowhere" (#6 November '85). Maybe it's alright to be on a ride to nowhere if you're feeling good. We don't need Eurythmics/Aretha Franklin collaboration "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves" (#9 November '85) to sound as wild and alien as those first couple of Eurythmics singles did, so long as we have fun and it says something to us about our lives.

Frank Farian of Boney M fame put together a grouping of session musicians and members of contemporary bands (Toto among them) to create the Far Corporation, and a cover of "Stairway to Heaven" takes us all the way back to 1971 before breaking out into more contemporary album oriented rock. It hits #8 in November.

All of this musical conservatism takes place in a year of technical milestones. Dire Straits put out "Brothers In Arms", the first CD single. Even though the silver discs wouldn't count toward chart sales until 1987, vinyl copies were enough to take it to #16 in November. While it may seem odd that the band most closely associated with the early CD era release almost all of their classic singles as vinyl-only affairs, it makes sense why this was the one with which to go digital. Longer than a 7" could reasonably accommodate and full of quiet passages where even a 12" single would intrude with surface noise, this a real "wow" moment if you're showing off your brand new CD player.

Then finally 1985's year of "more of the same, this time with added power ballads" breaks as Doug E. Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew go to #7 with the utterly ludicrous "The Show". Six minutes of old school East Coast hip-hop! Turntablism, with the classic scratching sound! Interpolating the Inspector Gadget theme! It's one of the maddest things I've ever heard, even more so given it's come along eleven months into a year which is very much Not Mad. More of this kind of over-the-top sample heavy hip-hop would come along later in the decade, and I'm enjoying the first signs we might be shaken out of 1985's musical rut toward that.

Paul Hardcastle's "Just For Money" isn't a big hit (#19 November '85) but returns with the sample-heavy electro format, this time riffing on the Great Train Robbery.

Queen have the samplers out on otherwise straightforward rocker "One Vision" (#7 November '85), inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. They also offer a little glimpse into the creative process with the final rendition of the main lyric as "fried chicken" - this comes from the band attempting to get the song to scan correctly, where they would fill in with nonsense lyrics and the occasional bit of profanity.

Lionel Richie adds to the stock of power ballads with "Say You Say Me" (#8 December '85). Prefab Sprout have their breakthrough single with a re-release "When Love Breaks Down" (#25 November '85), on independent label Kitchenware although the smooth sophisti-pop sound is a long way from the jangle we were associating with that word in 1984.

It's a busy time at the top of the chart as December arrives. Wham! have been absent for much of the year but "I'm Your Man" quickly goes to #1 for the end of November. Absolutely nothing has changed since 1984 but that might be a good thing, as this has a sense of life and fun which all the balladry and ultra-smoothness is missing. Weirdly while it doesn't sound so different, George Michael says the production process was, being much more hastily assembled than their previous records.

It gets a couple of weeks in the top spot before we're back to those ballads, this time of the R&B quiet storm variety. Whitney Houston's "Saving All My Love For You" is the one to take the spot, which it will keep until the Christmas week.

Salute the passing of whatever dignity remains in the thing which used to be Jefferson Airplane, whose follow-up band Jefferson Starship has split amid disagreements over a new commercial-friendly direction. Paul Kantner left, then sued the band to stop them using the "Jefferson" bit of the name. From the wreckage emerge Starship and their debut single "We Built This City" (#12 December '85). Time has been unkind to this one, and that was before the sausage roll people got to it. It was initially well-received, but over time the attempt to create an anti-corporate anthem about taking music back for the kids using the most commercial, corporate rock imaginable in 1985 has soured and it's a favourite of Worst Songs Ever lists.

Madonna adds to her "hit per month" late 1985 with "Dress You Up" (#5 December '85), a restless bit of post-disco. Bronski Beat are back, entering the charts the same week with urgent hi-NRG number "Hit That Perfect Beat", going to #3 early in '86.

It's like the charts have suddenly remembered how to be wild as Sophia George has a reggae one-hit wonder with "Girlie Girlie" (#7 January '86), Amazulu have a bizarre cover of 1958 novelty record "Don't You Just Know It" at #15 for the end of December and even Iron Maiden are lurking down there with a live version of "Run To The Hills" (#26 December '85).

Down at #21 is the acknowledgement of what a lot of artists have just successfully charity-washed, Artists United Against Apartheid's "Sun City". This hip-hop/rock fusion goes way harder than it needs to, and the artists united read like the Live Aid we could have had - Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Run-DMC, Miles Davis, George Clinton - along with plenty who were there for the real thing or at least invited. It also raised $1m for anti-apartheid projects, closing out the year's string of charity records.

There's some more swapping of #1 between late-'85 records early in the New Year, but before that we have the Christmas chart battle.

Bruce Springsteen has a double A-side between "My Hometown" and rock version of traditional seasonal number "Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town" which doesn't even have the momentum to get all the way to Christmas, peaking at #9 the previous week. Keith Harris and Orville don't even get that far, only just scraping #40 for a single week.

Aled Jones was a minor sensation in 1985, the teenager featuring in a documentary called "The Treble" in June and being invited to sing on a few records off the back of it. Amongst this all, he recorded a cover of "Walking In The Air" from 1982's "The Snowman", which was at #5 for the Christmas chart countdown.

But what is Christmas #1 in this dramatic and yet musically conservative year, in which almost nothing moves on? It falls to Shakin' Stevens to combine cod-rockabilly with party album synth bounce and what is a surprisingly credible Paul McCartney impersonation for "Merry Christmas Everyone". As if you could want any more commentary on the staleness of the year it was recorded in 1984 and put aside to allow Band Aid to take the stage, and yet in those twelve months nothing has happened in mainstream pop to make it sound any less current or relevant.

1986

The year opens with the spillover from too many potential #1 singles at the end of 1985 for the number of weeks available, and the Pet Shop boys going to the top of the charts with their debut "West End Girls". A synthpop duo? Is it 1981 again? While Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe did indeed meet in that year, their sound is a new evolution, using samplers and orchestrating multiple synthesisers to produce a more complex, richer sound.

That big sound is also present on the next #1 in mid-January, a-ha's "The Sun Always Shines on TV". Impeccably constructed, almost ethereal in places, it's a treat just to listen to closely and pick out all the different elements and how they fit them together. I particularly enjoy that "Heart Of Glass"-style metronomic bass.

I almost passed over Aretha Franklin's "Who's Zoomin' Who?" (#6 January '86) but the opening is eight seconds of the most blatant use of a Roland TR-808 that I have to linger here. The TR-808 was a commercial failure, a clever piece of designing around limited technology that neither sounded fun and weird like the Syndrum, nor realistic enough to be used for serious purposes. That didn't stop a few people trying; Marvin Gaye managed to disguise the tinny sounds on "Sexual Healing" in 1982, while Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" leans into them and the almost comically unrealistic cowbell the unit is famous for.

While it might not have sounded great, it was relatively affordable at £765/$1,195 and made production of records much easier. Marvin Gaye used his because he liked the ability to work in isolation without having a drummer around. We've heard one on "One More Night", because Phil Collins didn't think a human drummer could stand the repetition for that long. New Order's "Confusion" is built around it. For a solo producer like Paul Hardcastle it was ideal.

It was discontinued in 1983 after Roland started to run into supply chain issues, as there were better drum machines around including Roland's own TR-909 which used samples to help achieve a punchier, more realistic sound. But as hip-hop producers assaulted ears with the heavyweight sounds of the Oberheim DMX and the LinnDrum propped up rhythm sections, something changed. The TR-808 might not have sounded much like actual drums, but what it did sound like was a TR-808, and therefore unlike anything else. It was distinctive, it was easy to operate and above all it was cheap, with used units selling for a tenth of their original asking price.

This isn't the first use, but outside of Afrika Bambaataa it's one of the first to accentuate the machine rather than using it as a tool with some shortcomings, and it's on a track you could easily have heard on mainstream radio. Well, assuming the DJ doesn't talk over the first eight seconds of it.

New entries for the first Top 40 countdown of 1986 include Mr Mister with "Broken Wings" (#4 January '86). We're starting to really get into the point where these records being current would have coincided with me being around to hear them, and while my memories of distinct events only properly cut in around 1987 that's still close enough for this to be current.

Which is to say I'm starting to get away from academic observations from the then-future about how I discovered '60s psychedelia as a teenager in the late 1990s, and into recalling these things when they were still only a year or two old; who listened to them; and in what context.

In the case of "Walk Of Life" (#2 January '86) the answers to that may as well be "everyone" and "everywhere". I cannot understate the omnipresence of this during my early school years. Dire Straits were massive, and yet Mark Knopfler walked away from it because he preferred playing blues in dimly-lit establishments to global superstardom. The temporary 1987-1990 dissolution did little to dent their popularity, and even in 1993 our school teacher proclaimed it to be his favourite record.

Perhaps he might not have gotten away with it had it been a class of teenagers with their own distinct musical tastes and desire for testing authority, but at the time this was a record over half the class were hearing in regular rotation at home. For me, there's one memory in particular it brings back; that of being too young to join in with an adult party but also old enough to be allowed to spend time in my room making my own entertainment (easy: there was a computer in there). I would play some then-current MS-DOS game while "Walk Of Life" drifted up from the living room below, knowing that at some point a plate of leftover party food would be proffered. I used to like the little cubes of cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks.

Does this undermine my point about remembering these at the time with memories of an early 1986 chart hit from somewhere around 1992-1993? Possibly, although that's the level of popularity Dire Straits enjoyed in the wake of "Brothers In Arms". And we didn't even have a CD player. (Most didn't. This wasn't exactly a deprivation index circa 1986.)

I also remember the odd cut from the Fine Young Cannibals, although not their version of "Suspicious Minds" (#8 January '86). I get the feeling they might also think Vegas-era Elvis is the best Elvis, as it's got that slightly uneven relationship between the levels of different instruments and despite the runtime leaving barely any change out of four minutes it has that slightly too-fast tempo which makes one think Elvis is looking at his watch and imagining the green room buffet. No farty trumpet though, sadly.

Must be a brief fillip for the 20 year nostalgia cycle, as Nana Mouskouri's "Only Love" goes to #2 at the end of the month, one of those syrupy mid-'60s records arriving two decades out of place. It was a TV theme, which may explain some of the popularity.

If I can't quite qualify for memories of the time with Dire Straits then I definitely can with February's new #1, "When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going" from Billy Ocean. There were some family friends we'd often end up round the house of, and their teenage daughter played this near-constantly. Listening to it now I can picture their house in my mind, and wish I knew the name of the stunt-jumping game they had for the ZX Spectrum so I could play it again.

Below it at #2, a reissue of Madonna's 1984 single "Borderline". I boggle at just how many hits she had over such a short space of time.

Public Image Ltd has become largely a John Lydon solo vehicle by this point, Keith Levene and Jah Wobble having departed and recordings made by whoever happened to be available. Don't let that put you off "Rise" (#11 February '86) with its huge drum sound coming from playing in the bottom of a lift shaft. Clearly the high-tech equivalent of Joe Meek's staircase.

Heavy metal is back, with Ozzy Osborne going to #20 with "Shot In The Dark". Only a couple of months into the year and these charts feel so much healthier. There's a variety of genres, plenty of classic pop, and even time for some "how on Earth has that happened?" weirdness - February also sees a #3 for the Damned covering already-weird Barry Ryan song "Eloise".

Survivor get another boost from a Rocky soundtrack, this time with "Burning Heart" for Rocky IV. It's very much "Eye Of The Tiger" Mark Two, although with a less good chorus. Still, that punch-punch beat took it to #5.

Paul Hardcastle releases his take on funk-soul, swapping out the sampled news readings and interview quotes for vocals from Heaven 17's Carol Kenyon on "Don't Waste My Time" (#8 February '86). There's some healthy referencing of the P-Funk collective with that bassline.

Reggae oddity "One Dance Won't Do" from reggae original and Dandy Livingstone collaborator Audrey Hall had a #20 going into March with a few weeks in the Top 40. It's joyously weird, with dub influences, itchy guitars which could be out of the early '70s, and percussion that I can only describe as in the wrong place, sonically speaking.

If we're talking originals from the turn of the '70s then I can't ignore early March's chart-topper. The Bee Gees write and Diana Ross sings on "Chain Reaction", the result sitting somewhere between the Gibbs and Motown revivalism. This might be a bad point to mention that... er... I've never really liked it.

Yet another oddity as Su Pollard takes a break from holiday camp TV comedy "Hi-de-hi!" to record "Starting Together", the theme for the BBC documentary "The Marriage". Somehow it ends up as a #2 in February, although it's slipped into near total obscurity since. It also doesn't sound particularly out of place; the oddity is the circumstances, not the sounds.

Compare, if necessary, to March #2 "Manic Monday" from The Bangles. These are the girls who started out as Paisley Underground jangle-poppers, and you can hear that strong influence on this record, written under a pseudonym by Prince.

Despite being invited to produce it, Prince is not present on "Love Missile F1-11" (#3 March '86), deciding the record which introduced Sigue Sigue Sputnik to the charts was too violent. Instead Giorgio Moroder produces, putting his signature arpeggiated synth sound underneath a mix full of disconnected sound effects and guitar squeals. It's a short-term bit of fun but even at the time critics suggested it would date quickly, and complained that Moroder's production fell short of the "wild, writhing sex flash" the band's image suggested it should have been.

Yes, this is the band who took the way Malcolm McLaren marketed the Sex Pistols to heart, claiming their slogan was "fleece the world" and selling advertising slots on their first album, "Flaunt It". While some companies took them up, not all slots sold, the band filling out the gaps with adverts for fictitious products from Sigue Sigue Sputnik themselves. A plan to have 8 different sponsors on each of the UK, US and Japanese releases was abandoned.

It seems weirdness is in the air, as Reprise reissue Frank Sinatra's 1980 single "Theme From New York, New York" and it goes all the way to #4 despite no obvious external stimulus. Perhaps years of use in films, TV shows and even adverts had made it seep into people's consciousness to the point that when an opportunity to own a 7" of it arose, they couldn't pass it up.

Sinatra shares the Top 10 with ludicrous sample-heavy hip-hop "(Nothing Serious) Just Buggin'" from Whistle (#7 March '86), one of the most sampled records around. It's intended as a piece of fun and, well, mission accomplished.

Prince gets to #6 with "Kiss", stripping James Brown style funk down to its barest essentials. It's striking with how thin it sounds, about the only thing taking place outside of the treble region being Prince's faithful Linn drum machine. You half wonder if he'd have processed that up to the higher ranges, had the technology existed.

One of the bands I seem to have a habit of finding in boxes of old 45s are the Blow Monkeys, who had been going a few years when "Digging Your Scene" gave them their first decent-sized hit, at #12 in March. Despite the muted sophisti-pop sound, it's a protest about the backlash against the gay scene in the wake of the AIDS pandemic.

David Bowie provided the title theme for film "Absolute Beginners", and while that wasn't a commercial success the single was, peaking at #2 in March. It's not innovative but it is warm, inviting and big-sounding. Meanwhile Bowie's duet partner Mick Jagger is down at #13 with the rest of the Rolling Stones on "Harlem Shuffle" and... yeah, the Stones since the eighties, eh?

Culture Club have a new album and "Move Away" is some upbeat pop from it, taking #7 in mid-March. If you prefer your synth-led pop a whole lot more synth-led, arty and complex the Pet Shop Boys are back with "Love Comes Quickly" (#19 March '86).

We're getting a long way from things I would have heard at home, but one of the high points of the year for a child growing up in the '80s and early '90s launched in 1986. We need to go back the the Ethiopian famine for a moment, as Bob Geldof was not the only person to believe entertainers could make a difference. In the wake of Band Aid and Live Aid, charity worker Jane Tewson came up with the idea that comedians could do much the same thing, inviting the public to donate money while making them laugh.

Comedian Lenny Henry and scriptwriter Richard Curtis founded the charity, called Comic Relief. It was launched on the Late, Late Breakfast Show on Christmas Day 1985, with plans for a three-day fundraising show called "Comic Relief Utterly Utterly Live" over a weekend in April (4th/5th/6th), to be preceded by a surprise comedy single and followed by a Christmas stocking filler book for the end of the year.

As far as TV went, this was shown only as a highlights package late on a Friday evening on April 25th, rebroadcast even later in the evening on 27th December as part of the BBC's Christmas schedule. It wasn't until 1988 that the event took on its form as a live telethon, Red Nose Day introducing the iconic plastic red nose. It was repeated in 1989 from which point the event settled into its familiar form; a biennial comedy telethon anticipated by weeks of fundraising efforts in schools, each one with a special variation of red nose, an official single and a fixed date of the closest Friday to St. Patrick's Day.

In recent years it has become an annual event and sadly has lost much of its cultural sway. It's something which relied on families sitting and watching broadcast TV together, the weeks of building hype between programmes and the idea of getting the whole family in front of a "something for everyone" live telethon seeming a lot less relevant in a time when we time-shift all of our programming onto our own personal devices.

Besides, even when that was still the case there was a sense that similar to the Wembley Live Aid line-up it had become a vehicle for established, safe comedians and pop acts to prop up their careers. The anarchic feeling that anything could happen was replaced by a series of comfortable parodies, which felt like they were more about raising the profile of the show being parodied than genuinely mocking it in any way. Although maybe it was always going to be better when I was 10 and seeing someone put in a gunge tank was the height of comedic sophistication.

Back in 1986 that surprise comedy single, released a month or so ahead of the live shows, was Cliff Richard and The Young Ones on "Living Doll". Cliff did put the condition on it that they weren't allowed to go to the extremes they went to on the show, so the comedic part is reduced to slapstick, being hopelessly tuneless and a few asides from Christopher Ryan, but to Cliff's credit he does play along for the video. Hank Marvin even turns up to give the audience a smile.

By modern standards it's all rather quaint, to the point I'm most surprised by how much of it is just a straight-laced rerecording of "Living Doll". But perhaps that undermines my point about Comic Relief as a bit too establishment. In 1986 this was still fresh and transgressive, and most of the faces on Comic Relief were as alternative as the cast of "The Young Ones". It's less that the people and the format took an establishment turn, as it was that the people and format stayed the same while the world moved on around them.

Oh yes, the single entered the charts at #4 on the 16th March countdown, and went to #1 the following week. That's what we were supposed to be doing here.

What else is entering the Top 40 the same week? Well, "Living Doll" isn't the only record looking backwards. The Art of Noise record a sample-heavy version of 1959's "Peter Gunn" with Duane Eddy, whose twangy guitar feels rather at odds with all the samples whizzing about. It eventually goes to #8 in April.

Then we have Sam Cooke's 1960 "Wonderful World" (#2 March '86). This is thanks to Levi's running a series of commercials using old soul records as their soundtrack, which served to remind everyone how good they were and buy a copy that hadn't been scraped to death over two decades of use on cheap record players. Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" (#8 May '86) is the more famous usage, but this is both earlier and higher-charting if you like those tricky pub quiz questions.

Back in current influences, indie label Jive Records had seen the phenomenal hit-a-month chart performance of Madonna and decided that a British version would be in order. They chose topless model Samantha Fox, who had been trying to launch a music career since 1983 with little success. "Touch Me (I Want Your Body)" went to #3 at the end of March, featuring some rock-influenced production with a couple of guitar solos on top of the obligatory dance-pop.

Follow-up "Do Ya Do Ya (Wanna Please Me)" (#10 July '86) was a touch slower, heavier and more overtly rock-influenced but otherwise more of the same, and that was about where the dreams of having the British answer to Madonna ended, although Fox would have the occasional chart appearance until the end of the '80s.

Mick Jones' post-Clash project Big Audio Dynamite have a #11 in April with "E=MC²", which feels much like a more laid-back version of later Clash with added sound samples. There are bigger hits in that week's Top 40 to look at, though.

Six years after "Flash Gordon", Queen returned to soundtrack work in 1986, providing several songs to augment Michael Kamen's score for "Highlander". That film would not get an official soundtrack album, but contemporary Queen album "A Kind Of Magic" collects so many of them and includes so many sound effects and dialogue snippets from the film it's long been considered an unofficial one. This despite most of the album versions being quite different from those used in the film.

"A Kind Of Magic" (#3 April '86) is the advance single, released while the band are still finishing off the album for its June release. The band have rolled forward all of those ideas from "The Works" and last year's "One Vision", and created the sound which will last them through the rest of their career as the original four. Well-integrated synths, slick production, a little seasoning of effects from a sampler here or there, and one or two moments per album where they forget it all and rock out like it's still 1976.

Then there's Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus", inspired by watching the 1984 Mozart biopic. The Austrian's stuttering piece of synth-pop, featuring varying amounts of German in the lyrics depending on which country it was released in, went to #1 in May.

Beating it there despite arriving in the Top 40 a week later was George Michael with "A Different Corner". While "Careless Whisper" was partially credited to Wham! in some markets, this slow, haunting song was so different to their escapist pop that Michael decided it needed to be a distinct solo record. Going to #1 in April gave him the unique distinction of being the first artist to have both of his first two solo records top the charts.

April brings a new name to the charts, if not a new family. Janet Jackson's "What Have You Done For Me Lately?" (#3 April '86) crosses dance-pop with more overt R&B stylings, and introduces the youngest of the Jackson family as a chart mainstay. While she had been dragged into the orbit of the family business in the '70s and early '80s with sitcom roles on TV and a recording contract, Jackson found the level of control stifling and wanted to get away from it.

After two albums of bubblegum pop, she fired her father as manager, took on A&R man John McClaim from A&M instead, and recorded third album "Control" in Minneapolis far from interference but close to the influence of Prince and his production associates. "What Have You Done For Me Lately?" was one of those funk-heavy tracks, which Jackson rewrote to make the lyrics reflect her short marriage to James DeBarge of DeBarge.

That moment where I have to talk about abandoning the charts because I thought they offered nothing but wall-to-wall R&B is feeling a lot closer on the horizon.

At least Big Country can make it a wide horizon. "Look Away" is their biggest hit at #7 in April, although if I had a bone of contention it's that this is very much more of the same.

It loses that #7 the next week to Five Star with "Can't Wait Another Minute", a record that is really trying to be the Jacksons. It doesn't quite work out, with some rather awkward diction and long stretches with not much of anything going on.

"All The Things She Said" is... no, not that one. It's Simple Minds at #9 in April. Of the big-sounding Scottish rock on offer at the moment, I think I prefer this one.

Asking you to establish a strong preference are the Grange Hill cast on notorious anti-drug record "Just Say No" (#5 April '86). The three-word campaign beloved of the Reagans crossed over from the US in 1986 with the BBC's "Drugwatch" campaign, and this is the offshoot. Unfortunately the simplistic "all you gotta do is be yourself" homilies and general "howdy fellow kids, this is what we call a rap" nature of it make me want to do nothing more than go and find some tasty drugs, and I'm a pretty law-abiding guy most of the time. Besides, we all know some say no to drugs and take a stand, then after the show they go looking for the dope man.

British producers may be trying to emulate Madonna to produce a local version, but in a repeat of those Cliff-vs.-Elvis years she's a moving target. "Live To Tell" (#2 May '86) goes for the big pop ballad moment. Coming off the tail of 1985's big year for power ballads I'm not sure you'd call this a radical innovation but it's a big change from the perky dance-pop she'd been releasing up to this point.

Level 42 have spent the last few years taking their synth-funk sound, so vogueish back in early '83, and turning it into something with more of a mid-decade commercial appeal and "Lessons In Love" is the most successful result of that - a global smash with a none-more-'80s sound down to the galloping bassline. In the UK it peaked at #3 in May during 10 weeks in the Top 40.

Sammy Hagar era Van Halen kicks off with "Why Can't This Be Love" (#8 May '86). Referencing the California Welfare and Institutions Code years before Machine Gun Kelly with album title "5150", I'm still just as disappointed that they're not talking about the model code for the original IBM PC.

The album was a bit of a break from Van Halen tradition by including a number of ballads, but these are big business at the moment. Billy Ocean has a #12 with "There'll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)" and then the monster hit is Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald's duet "On My Own", spending 11 weeks on the chart and peaking at #2 in May.

Peter Gabriel's post-Genesis solo career had started to slide out of the Top 40 in the '80s, with nothing charting since "Biko" in August 1980, but that was about to change as he prepared to release his fifth album "So". Right at the end of the sessions he'd added a song inspired by the Otis Redding and other soul records he'd listened to as a teenager. It was so late the band were already organising taxis before being dragged back into the studio and the expectation was that this track would be part of a follow-up album, possibly one centred around soul covers.

The song is "Sledgehammer" and it did end up on "So". Being so different to the rest of the album, Gabriel decided to release this as the lead single to surprise fans who would be expecting more synth-y pop that could be traced quite easily back to "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" in terms of sonic influences. Take "Walk Through The Fire" (#69 June '84) as an example.

"Sledgehammer" was not that. It went to #4 in May and has remained well-known ever since. This is in no small part thanks to a music video so visually striking it's still the most played of all time on MTV. This was the breakthrough moment for Aardman Animations, where they went from the people who did "Morph" to producing pretty much the nation's entire output of Claymation for the rest of the decade, culminating in "Creature Comforts" and, of course, Wallace & Gromit.

The "Sledgehammer" video is a laborious combination of stop-motion photography, clay animation and practical effects. This is in an era before this kind of thing could be composited easily on a home computer - some shots involved Gabriel lying in the same place for 16 hours for a mere ten seconds of footage. Part of his willing endurance for the 100 hours of principal photography was in the knowledge that no-one would be willing to replicate this. Naturally, it swept the following year's MTV awards.

Then down at #22 is a remixed version of The Cure's 1979 non-charting single "Boys Don't Cry". Officially subtitled "(New Voice - New Mix)", it was released to promote then-current Greatest Hits compilation "Standing On A Beach", although that album features only the original 1979 version.

May's first Top 40 sees the introduction of two big novelty hits. Chas and Dave release "Snooker Loopy" (#6 May '86) also credited to the Matchroom Mob, a line-up of professional snooker players including Steve Davis, Dennis Taylor and Willie Thorne. It has them all sending each other up to the expected East End knees-up beat.

The other is an offshoot from TV show "Spitting Image". While synth-pop stormed the charts and SAW changed the way pop music production would be viewed, television comedy had its own revolution in the '80s in the wake of Channel 4 championing the alternative comedy circuit. Spitting Image, commissioned by ITV Central in 1984, would follow the trend of combining surrealism (a satirical puppet show), slapstick and direct barbs at government and society.

The series had an instantly recognisable image with its foam puppets, grotesque caricatures of the politicians and famous people of the day. It was known for aggressively exaggerating their negative character traits, occasionally with a rather lazy stereotype, but this made the characters even more recognisable. It was also, despite high early ratings, an expensive flop by the end of its first series.

Instead of cancelling it, ITV brought in new head writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, fresh off their Radio 4 sketch show "Son Of Cliché". They turned the series round and made it popular enough for a segment to be included in Comic Relief before departing to the BBC to turn their "Dave Hollins: Space Cadet" sketch from Son Of Cliché into the TV series "Red Dwarf".

Part of their reinvigoration of Spitting Image was to introduce comedy records poking fun at current events and trends, and "The Chicken Song" inexplicably went all the way to #1 in May. It's a deliberate parody of the party band trend, riffing heavily on Black Lace's "Agadoo" and complaining that idiotic party singles were inescapable in holiday resort bars for most of the Summer. On the B-side is anti-apartheid song "(I've Never Met) A Nice South African", with some on-the-nose lyrics mentioning P.W. Botha by name.

1986, eh? Where even the novelty records, if not exactly enjoyable, still have an interesting story to them.

Deposing Spitting Image from #1 on 1st June are fellow chart entryists Doctor & The Medics with "Spirit in the Sky", a relatively straight-up cover from a band known for their goofy dress sense and equally goofy records, alternating between self-penned comedic lyrics and New Wave covers of classic early '70s records.

Between this and the Cure it's starting to feel like a mini New Wave revival here in the middle of 1986, as reissued 1978 B-52s track "Rock Lobster" goes to #12 as a double A-side with "Planet Claire".

'80s musical canon continues with Robert Palmer's "Addicted To Love" reaching #5 in June. This and the obligatory rock tracks from each post-'84 Queen album was about as heavy as rock got in our house growing up, although part of its acceptance may have been Tina Turner adopting it for live performances. Naturally, a crunchy addition to the childhood mix tape.

As of 1985 Status Quo had split up, although the band reformed to play Live Aid in the summer. The problem is that the band had been paid a lot of money on the assumption it would continue to record as a unit through the '80s, which would have to be returned. A suggestion that Rick Parfitt could record something with bassist Alan Lancaster was rejected by their label Vertigo; to audiences, Status Quo was Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt, and anything other than that wouldn't sell.

This started to look like one of those river crossing puzzles: Rossi refused to work with Lancaster, Lancaster would sue for an injunction if they worked without him, the label wouldn't accept an album without Rossi on board, and if there wasn't an album what Rossi termed a "shitload" of money would have to be paid back. In the end they went ahead with previous session musician Rhino Edwards on bass, didn't tell Lancaster and let him sue them - a case which the band won.

"In The Army Now" was the resulting album, and ahead of its August release "Rollin' Home" goes to #9 in May. For all I've just mentioned you'd be hard-pressed to spot anything has changed since the mid-1970s. I guess consistency is kind of the point of buying a Status Quo record.

Pete Wylie is back with a new single, this time solo although still with Josie Jones around for extra vocals. "Sinful!" goes to #13 in June, although sadly the original 7" mix is hard to find on streaming services in any reasonable quality.

Simply Red get a reissue of last year's "Holding Back The Years" and it seems 1986 is the right time, as it goes to #2 in June - held off the top of the charts by Doctor & The Medics. I know there's a reputation here but far worse things were done in the name of blue-eyed soul in the 1980s. This has the good grace to be authentic to those soft '70s records it's following in the footsteps of.

Perhaps more authentic is The Real Thing who release an anniversary remix of their 1976 #2 disco hit as "Can't Get By Without You (The Second Decade Remix)". There's surprisingly little different, although some of the disco clichés and signatures of that most aimless year of chart pop have been toned down.

Back in contemporary trends, synth-funk has got its hands on samplers and Nu Shooz go to #2 late in July with "I Can't Wait". Fun bassline aside, this is doing nothing to dispel my growing feeling that synth-funk is one of my least-liked musical movements of the 1980s.

It's been at least a month since the last charity event so have Sport Aid. This was a series of two events, one in 1986 and one in 1988, combining all-star sport events with mass participation opportunities including multiple simultaneous fun runs. I have a weird feeling one of my hazy memories of my school devoting an entire day to doing sponsored sporting activities might have been the 1988 edition of this, although that said there were a lot of excuses for Kriss Akabusi to turn up and do an assembly so I may be confusing this with some other sport-a-thon.

Anyway, part of Sport Relief is to have one of the popular bands of the day re-record one of their hits with a lyric swapped to be something related to running. 1986's effort is Tears For Fears with "Everybody Wants To Run The World". And apart from some different instrumentation and a couple of dropped verses, that one word in the chorus is the only change. I know this is doing down efforts made for charity, but there is a problem here in that "run" is in fact a synonym of "rule". Nothing about the meaning of the original has changed.

It also bucked the trend of charity singles to be massive smash hits, going to a still-respectable #5 in June but disappearing from the charts soon afterward.

Another surprisingly low-charting hit is "Invisible Touch", at just #15 in June. This is a bit odd as it went to #1 on the US Billboard Charts (deposed, ironically, by Peter Gabriel) and the album itself was a multi-platinum best seller that topped the UK albums chart. Perhaps the releases were just too close together, with the LP already on store shelves at the point the single hit that #15 peak?

"Invisible Touch" is of course that point where Genesis went full pop. The band had taken a hiatus for a couple of years while the remaining members concentrated on solo careers, and what came out when they reconvened were an awful lot of current-sounding pop hits. Despite this, you could point to the 10 minute long "Domino (Pt. 1 & 2)" and overtly neo-prog instrumental "The Brazilian" as signs the band hadn't completely abandoned their roots, which critics who didn't like the pop sound or the near-indistinguishability from Collins' solo career latched on to as some sort of saving grace for the album.

Amazulu's bouncy cover of calypso-influenced 1974 soul single "Too Good To Be Forgotten" went to #5 in June. It's turning into a bit of a time for reissues, covers and revivals of old styles. Bananarama picked up the idea of covering a 1969 Shocking Blue single and take the idea to messieurs Waterman, Aitken and Stock. "Venus" (#8 July '86) is the result, and the push-button production is very much in evidence. If you pull this apart and start counting how many times the same basic elements are repeated and re-used you realise how much is assembly over creation. Earlier pop producers would have layers on accents, subtly modulated and changed themes each time they returned underneath a new verse. SAW realised that most of the audience simply weren't listening closely enough to care.

Rapper and one of two possible inventors of the term "hip-hop" Lovebug Starski updates the "Monster Mash" concept (and namechecks that very record) on "Amityville (The House On The Hill)" (#12 June '86). This minimalistic style of hip-hop where you kind of set a drum machine going and then rap over the top of it had been around in New York since 1983, along with an image that preferred everyday streetwear to the glam-influence sparkle of early crews. And yet just three years later the clock is already ticking on its existence. Two months from now we'll go from novelty records to a series of events that changed rap's relationship with the charts forever.

While it may be about to be replaced that style of hip-hop is still able to influence other genres. Janet Jackson's "Nasty" (#19 June '86) is one of the first records you could loosely call new jack swing; R&B with aggressively forward drum machines and rhythms in that hip-hop style. "Nasty" was produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, huge fans of the band Full Force who pioneered new jack swing in 1985.

That two months offers an awful lot to get through first.

As I spent a lot of 1985 pondering, it's suggested in some circles that one of the major consequences of Band Aid and Live Aid was to stifle the growth of indie music by focusing attention back on the established artists who were ready to pick up the phone at a moment's notice to play for free with the proceeds going to charity. It's entirely possible the indie artists would have done the same too but, y'know, nobody asked them.

However, we're a year on from that and music-integrated charity events are so normalised that Sport Aid didn't even get a #1 for its troubles. A new wave of indie bands was springing up in the mid-'80s, but they existed in tiny local scenes in such isolation that merely discovering each other both wearing a Pastels badge was sufficient for Amelia Fletcher and Elizabeth Price to form Talulah Gosh, whose self-titled single from 1987 features one of my favourite tracks of the era on its flip side, "Escalator Over The Hill".

While the scenes were scattered, they had several factors in common. One was a strong DIY approach inherited from the early days of punk. Another was a love of pop as an art form, with jangle pop being a starting point that, mixed with influences from late '60s bubblegum pop and doo-wop's vocal harmonies, became twee pop. Talulah Gosh's debut single "Beatnik Boy" is a prime example. Twee's high density of female-fronted and openly gay groups highlighted another common element of these indie scenes - gender equality in that women promoted gigs, wrote fanzines and ran record labels such as Sarah Records, a largely twee pop imprint that issued 100 records and then shut itself down on the party for the last one.

This did not endear it to some critics, who believed music was a world for men and women should only exist within it for the purpose of eye candy. And perhaps if the Live Aid as a force for musical conservatism theory is true, it did us a favour here. Whatever the cause, not only did 1985's bizarre musical conservativism allow these scenes to grow and flourish without the white-hot intensity of popularity thrust upon them at an immature stage, it also allowed that clock to tick down on "new school" hip-hop.

Rock music's more reactionary critics were less worried about who was playing guitar-based music in 1986 than whether they were playing guitar-based music at all. Hip-hop was becoming too big for magazines to ignore, accelerated by Rick Rubin's Def Jam record label. Def Jam's roster of artists were not producing novelty records or sampling cartoon themes, and they were rapidly developing their own sound. Magazine readers wanted to read about it and magazine writers wanted to write about it, but not all of them. Critically, those who did not care for hip-hop were often vehemently opposed to it receiving any coverage at all.

This schism was particularly evident at the NME. The mid-1980s was a highly competitive landscape for music papers in the UK, and for one to ignore an entire genre of music many of its readers were interested in would have been commercial suicide. Such was the hunger to hear about everything which was happening in the world of music that the papers were not above inventing genres themselves, knowing that for a brief moment they would have exclusive coverage and other magazines would look like their finger just wasn't on the pulse of whatever subtle difference had been co-opted into an entire micro-genre of its own.

One of the ways magazines competed for readers when not inventing new genres was the mail order tape, available cheaply with the redemption of coupons from the magazine. This was a mutually beneficial exercise for both magazines and record labels; the former would sell magazines to punters eager to collect those coupons and get their hands on some cheap music, the latter would benefit from exposure for artists those readers might not have heard of. The NME had issued 22 such tapes since 1981, most of them single-genre retrospectives for a particular label's back catalogue although the first, C81, had been a varied collection of artists signed to independent labels.

All of these various factors came together in 1986. The NME's pro-guitar faction wanted to showcase a new and healthy genre of guitar pop. They rang up a bunch of independent labels in these scattered local scenes and assembled a cassette featuring 22 tracks, released in May. It was called C86, a play on the C60/C90/C120 etc. cassette length notation system with a nod to the year. (Technically, it's a C61).

The bands were unheard of at the time - Primal Scream, The Soup Dragons, The Wedding Present, Shop Assistants, and comedy group Half Man Half Biscuit. The Pastels were on it. A few of the bands were outside the jangle pop mould but overall the cassette was so thematically consistent that C86 became a synonym for the genre.

As you might suspect from my opening comments about the more sexist corners of music criticism and the context of NME's hip-hop schism, reception was not universally positive. C86 was not representative of modern musical trends. The roster was overwhelmingly biased in favour of fey, lightweight anorak-wearers. None of the bands stood for anything or even seemed capable of standing for anything. Indie as a genre was fundamentally an awful concept and sounded terrible. Even taken on its own terms as a narrow sampling of the indie jangle pop scene it had failed. Most of these claims weren't even true, but it didn't stop enraged onlookers from making them.

The necessity to have a negative reaction points at what C86 did do; catapult indie pop back into public consciousness. Mid-1986 went from a year of no more than the occasional Smiths record propping up the bottom of the Top 40 to serious heavyweight chart positions for artists on independent records playing what recognisably fits into the "indie" genre.

Early in 1986 a guy called Norman Cook is fresh out of university. He walks into a shop near where he spent his teenage years in Surrey and announces he's going to join a band started by the friend he used to busk with a few years before, Paul Heaton. He deliberately mentions that they're going to wear tucked-in polo shirts, slacks and anoraks.

"I can't imagine seeing that on Top of the Pops," chuckles the shopkeeper after Cook leaves.

Not long after it's June and "Happy Hour" is #3. Not every band member is in the promised uniform but I count one blue polo shirt and at least one slack. The single is on independent label Go! Discs and the broad genre is indie jangle pop. The promise of 1984 has finally been delivered.

I might be starting to think that 1986 almost has too much going on, since this shares Top 40 new entry status a few weeks earlier with a-ha, Midge Ure, and Bucks Fizz. Also Owen Paul's debut single "My Favourite Waste Of Time" which deposes it from #3 in July.

"Invisible Touch" has gone down in history as the album where all the "serious" music lovers (heavy emphasis on the air quotes) were horrified at what Phil Collins had done to Genesis. Despite, y'know, it being a collaborative effort with equal contribution from Banks and Rutherford, an album they clearly wanted to make and one which a very large number of people liked enough to buy. That assessment itself may be fading as when I speak with people my age who haven't wasted most of their adult life delving into the music of the past, this is the one they have nostalgia for because it's the one their parents had.

These "everyone knows..." critical truths can indeed fade, since in period exactly the same assessment was made of "A Kind Of Magic". As "Friends Will Be Friends" climbs to #14 alongside the June release of the album, it attracts a slew of savage 1-star reviews. The divorcee-baiting banality of the lyrics comes under fire, but much of the judgement is transferred rage from the album as a whole. Queen had been a lot of things in the past, not all of them successfully, but the one thing they'd never been was bland.

I'm inclined to agree. Within the Queen collection it's one of my least favourite, stocked with so much unadventurous filler ("Pain Is So Close To Pleasure", "One Year Of Love") that it's hard to listen to without getting bored and wandering off. The CD underlines this by including three tracks of what it calls "extra magical ingredients": backing tracks for "A Kind Of Magic", "Friends..." and "Who Wants To Live Forever" which provide a fun insight into how these were put together but are so boring in places that they had to stick the vocals back in.

Perhaps this is unfair to put on "Friends Will Be Friends" as listening to that backing track also shows how much of this is still in the mid-'70s Queen tradition, and if you're going to call them out for simple homilies as a chorus here then I think you'd need to apply the same standards to "News Of The World" and I'm not sure suggesting tracks 1 and 2 of that would be better with some more complex lyrical themes is going to win you any friends. (Or, rather, come out looking like much of a champion).

I think this reception belies an odd relationship with rock music that fans of pop music don't wrestle with to the same degree. Bands are commercial entities and ultimately pleasing critics and a tiny number of people who consider themselves to be very serious indeed about music is not a highly profitable activity. And what is "serious", anyway? Phil Collins' solo career is the story of a man from one of the most musically serious genres going out and finding that creating pop music was fun, that it offered an ability to experiment with sounds, textures and styles far beyond what the constraining world of prog allowed. That it also made him a lot of money was a bonus, and you can understand why when he turned up in the studio with the goofy electronic drum set to record "Invisible Touch" that's the direction things went.

Queen were always unapologetically commercial, and heading into the '80s realised the way to survive was to adapt to new trends. "Hot Space" might have been a step too far but as of "The Works" they had learnt how to ride multiple waves; sophisticated synth-pop, fist-pumping hard rock and even a little bit of self-referencing revivalism. Videos were the big thing so Queen made some of the best and most striking.

"A Kind Of Magic" is, for me, Queen reflecting those two years since "The Works" - the Paul Young and the Nik Kershaw and the big singalong choruses of all those charity records. They had cracked video but in the still MTV-less world of the UK there was another dimension: radio airplay.

As Queen themselves had commented on with "Radio Ga Ga", domestic radio listening had been in decline for decades and the 1980s expansion in screen-based entertainment (VCRs, home computers) had dramatically hastened that. But there was a growth area. As employment patterns changed people were no longer living and working in close proximity where they would walk or take the bus. They were driving; often long distances in the case of yuppies who worked in city centres but lived in affluent suburbs. Leisure trips were increasingly by car. And during this time the radio would be on.

Radio regularly influenced the development of musical genres. Would the singles of the American rock'n'roll boom have been cut so hot and made so attention-grabbing had they not been listened to by teenagers over the single speaker of an in-car AM radio? The entire genre of AOR existed to feed a radio format centred around people listening late at night on high-fidelity FM receivers.

Station controllers weren't slow to notice this new trend. One of Derek Chinnery's last decisions as controller at Radio 1 was a desire to "age up" the intended audience and capture the demographic of young professionals driving to and from work or leisure. When Johnny Beerling took over in 1985 he continued this, appointing more music-oriented DJs and retiring presenters with tired old formats.

The overriding principle was that the couple in the car on their way to a restaurant or theatre date did not want to hear anything unfamiliar or daring. Sade, Simply Red, UB40; all fit in to this don't-scare-the-horses approach to radio where the new epitome of the station the BBC had launched to beat the pirates at their own game was a three year old Kenny Rogers track. Drive Time was a format where even the things you hadn't heard before should feel like you had.

"A Kind Of Magic" fits right into this world. It's been a long day at work and you're on your way back home. You climb into your VW Golf, turn the key and one of those songs cuts in midway through. It's immediate, comfortable and recognisable background. Seriously, I invite you to try this now - find your nearest available copy of "A Kind Of Magic" and try starting a few of the songs about midway through. With the exception of "Gimme The Prize" they all slide immediately into a comfortable background.

This might sound inane but try the same with "A Night At The Opera" and see how many times you land on a strange "ooh", jarring sound effect or any of the countless moments in which that album is just weird in a way you don't notice when you listen to each of the songs from the start. Part of "Bohemian Rhapsody" becoming that huge #1 was Kenny Everett playing isolated bits of it because it was so striking and unfamiliar back in 1975.

But what is the point of all this? Why wallow in the minutiae of bland Queen albums and radio airplay decisions in what is already a very overstuffed section about just two years in pop history? Well, because of "Hot Space". Queen had become very good at predicting trends before they even worked out what to do with that information, and in that context "Magic" is a concerning portent.

The big news of the moment though is not Queen getting some bad reviews, it's Wham! announcing they're splitting up. George Michael feels that he's better suited to making more mature, considered music and it's the moment to call time on Wham!'s easy-going hedonistic pop. He had reached the point where he didn't believe anyone even listened to the lyrics, and leant into it with the kind of overt sexuality chart rivals Frankie Goes To Hollywood would have been proud of.

It's a fitting farewell, a healthy amount of bounce to go along with the lyrical cheek, and closed out the band's story with a final #1 in June. A couple of weeks later the #1 baton passes, appropriately enough, to Madonna with "Papa Don't Preach".

The continuing decline of the St. Winifred's School Choir from their uncredited career high on 1978's "Matchstalk Men..." continues with choir member Claire Usher and friends on "It's 'Orrible Being In Love (When You're Eight And A Half)" having a #13 in July. This was intended as a follow-up to "There's No-One Quite Like Grandma" and if by "follow-up" they were going for "even worse" then mission success. It is indeed 'orrible, the mawkish sounds of exploited children backed up by party album synths.

Early decade holdovers continued to chart, with Sly Fox getting "Let's Go All The Way" to #3 in July. It's a two year old recording so expect a New Wave synth workout with some added samplers.

The untold story of the first half of 1986 is hip-hop's evolution away from the spare and mechanical "new school" sound. There's a record coming up where I want to dump a load of this on you, but one of the first evolutions was the development in New York of a style called "boom bap". Instead of using a dedicated drum machine, boom bap production took a real drum break, fed it into a sampler, and chopped it up into pieces to produce the sound it was named for - the "boom" of a kick drum followed by the "bap" of a snare.

The Real Roxanne with Hitman Howie Tee on "Bang Zoom (Let's Go-Go)" (#11 July '86) is an example. There's still one foot firmly in the somewhat gimmicky nature of hip-hop around this point, complete with samples of Bugs Bunny, but all of the textures are a bit richer and there's less of a feeling of a bunch of guys standing around a single drum machine which new school sometimes could project.

Below it at #12, The Art Of Noise featuring Max Headroom on "Paranoimia". Dare I say it, but The Art are starting to sound a bit tired with their one trick of chopping up a sample and playing only half of it. But we've got to take a brief diversion into the world of Max Headroom, a wonderfully bizarre bit of mid-'80s culture.

Max was the first "computer-generated" TV presenter, created for a short film on Channel 4 in 1985. Of course it was actor Matt Frewer in heavy prosthetic makeup, but they nailed that janky early CGI aesthetic. Headroom appears blocky with awkward proportions, his colours are oversaturated and thanks to a little blue screen magic his backgrounds are abstract computer-generated geometry. Editing in glitches and repeats completed the illusion.

The influence was - what else? - MTV, with Headroom intended to present a music video show on Channel 4. He was made as a parody of overtly slick US TV hosts who presented youth TV while having absolutely nothing in common with the intended audience. Creator Rocky Morton had unwittingly launched a phenomenon - within a year Max had gone global, become the spokesman for New Coke, and even inspired a series of television signal hijack incidents in Chicago.

Amidst all of this Furniture's great slice of New Wave-tinged indie pop "Brilliant Mind" goes to #21 in July. An even more minor hit is Billy Bragg's "Levi Stubbs' Tears" EP (#29 July '86) which I mention as a commentary on the number of records in this decades aimed at (and in some cases created by) recent divorcees as a way to reflect what they're feeling and salve their emotions. It's a great record even if it does go to some dark places.

July's new Top 40 entries appear to be Queen's horrible prophecy coming to light. UB40 at their most Casiotone on "Sing Our Own Song" (#5 July '86). Rod Stewart back in "Sailing" territory with "Every Beat Of My Heart" (#2 July '86). And then topping it all at #1 in late July, Chris De Burgh's "Lady In Red".

Could you come up with anything more emblematic of the yuppie on a long drive home in the rain in their 318i than this? Dripping with sophistication, the slow rhythm of the TR-808 matching the wipers swishing across the windscreen. Maybe they idly dream about making this their wedding song as they tap fingers gently on the steering wheel. You concentrate on that driving, young urban imagination figment. Those BMWs can be out from under you before you know it on a wet roundabout.

Perhaps some respite is offered by the presence of Audrey Hall's "Smile" at #14, a lesson to UB40 in how to do modern reggae without sapping all of the fun out of it and therefore not be a darling of Radio 1 Drive Time playlists.

We do also get a big indie hit for Stan Ridgway with "Camouflage". On American label I.R.S., the slight country influence of early records from labelmates R.E.M. has become a full-blown soundalike for early '80s Willie Nelson. No bad thing, when the alternative is dancing cheek to cheek with Chris.

It's all a bit of a soup for most of July; there's Five Star, Robert Palmer, Lionel Richie and a host of tracks in some variety of landfill '80s, but nothing that stands out to give texture or something worthwhile to say.

Then on the 20th, "Some Candy Talking" enters the Top 40. The Jesus And Mary Chain's early history read like the Sex Pistols if they'd been formed organically. The two Reid brothers, Jim and William, formed a guitar band after being fed up with hearing nothing but synth pop on the radio. They played unreasonably short gigs with their backs to the audience, sometimes even pretending to be the support band and leaving before the headline slot. Audiences were rowdy to the point some local councils banned the group from performing in their area, and legends of full-blown riots were so widespread that audiences started showing up looking for violence and trouble, with one altercation at the North London Polytechnic leading to some opportunistic independent labels producing a record called "The Jesus And Mary Chain Riot".

(All highly unofficial - claimed by originator Fierce Recordings to be above board as no actual audio of the band performing was included)

They were equally at odds with their record label Blanco y Negro, arguing over a B-side called "Suck" and then attempting to get a song called "Jesus Fuck" on the flip side of a record, which eventually made it on as the mildly-retitled "Jesus Suck" only for it to delay the single as pressing plant employees refused to have anything to do with it.

The music was something else. The band wanted to be the Shangri-Las and they lived out that desire through buzzsaw pop taking place underneath industrial-sounding squeals of feedback. "Upside Down" is like Phil Spector got up one day and decided to produce inside a metalworks using only the equipment found therein. "You Trip Me Up" is Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" with lyrics and a two-string bassline.

The problem for the Reids was that while they were creating great songs, nobody was turning up to listen to them because the few people that were turning up to their gigs were only looking for the chance to smash something up and have a fight. Frustrated by how their image was getting in the way of their own career, the band decided that the best way forward would be to make the music less abrasive and in general write more songs - part of the reason they rarely played for more than 25 minutes was they didn't have the material.

Through 1985 the band extended their repertoire, even floating the idea of an acoustic set supporting Sonic Youth until that idea was nixed due to being leaked. By the time they came back from tours of the US and Japan in 1986, the troubles that dogged early gigs disappeared.

First album "Psychocandy" released in November 1985 and as a result of this change in sonic direction mixed the early squall with softer (relatively speaking!) numbers which showed their love of '60s pop. Album opener "Just Like Honey" even starts the whole thing with the "kick, kick-kick, snare" beat of "Be My Baby".

I could dwell further on "Psychocandy" being one of the greatest pop records ever made, a "something is happening here but you don't know what it is" two fingers up to the glossy conservatism of 1985, but I have written an awful lot already for this year and we're barely halfway through it.

In November 1985 the band play a John Peel session, going back to those Sonic Youth plans with an acoustic set. Included in that was a dense version of "Some Candy Talking" which has them almost sounding like the Jacobites. Another version, this time electrified but still very stripped back, was given away with the NME in January. By July the song they'd first started playing live in late '84 was finally an official single. Naturally, sophisticated and professional Radio 1 banned it, correctly surmising it was an appropriately '60s-style oblique reference to drug consumption.

Indie's 1986 rebound continues with The Smiths hitting #11 in August with "Panic". I've been referencing that lyric on and off for ages, and after the last two years I'm really starting to understand why Morrissey wants to burn down the disco. Particularly it's playing Lulu's horrible party band re-recording of "Shout" (#8 August '86).

Reggae original Boris Gardiner has an enormous #1 with "I Want To Wake Up With You", a soft slice of lovers' rock that has since slid into such obscurity that I'm fairly sure the digital copy I'm listening to has been taken from a record and nobody's even bothered to run click reduction over it.

Favourite trivia question "did you know the EastEnders theme has lyrics?" (yes, "everyone is going to die...") gets answered by August #4 "Anyone Can Fall In Love" from show star Anita Dobson with the Simon May Orchestra. Let's... er... let's move on from this.

1986's latest new musical signature is that school music class favourite, taking your finger and running it from one end of the keyboard to the other. The Human League demonstrate on "Human", their first single since 1984 thanks to fraught recording sessions since. It went to #8 at the end of August, although listening to it now reminds me a bit too much of mid-tempo boy band sounds of the early '90s.

Meanwhile, Jermaine Stewart goes for the lyrical polar opposite of a Frankie record with "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off". The chaste dance-pop single eventually climbed to #2 in September. Stewart claims that he was making a more serious point about people feeling they have to do all of the negative things society makes them feel they need to, but then you do have to question what's so negative about removing one's clothing in an appropriate environment. (Don't make me write a thousand words about the post-AIDS backlash.)

Peter Cetera left Chicago (the band, not the city) in 1985 to have a solo career, and power-balladed his way to #3 in September with "Glory Of Love".

The song of September though is The Communards' "Don't Leave Me This Way". Hi-NRG's shark-jumping moment, this is an unnecessary cover that is too in love with its own gimmicks for its own good. The stupid voices, the massive drop after "baby", the unsubtle piano, the synth bass that is utterly inappropriate for the soulful and emotional original.

Hi-NRG had peaked, and its adoption for such tragic exercises was a sign that the clubs it had sprung from had long moved on to other things which had not been co-opted by the mainstream. As of 1986 one of the most fertile scenes was that of Chicago. It had started at a club called the Warehouse, where a DJ called Frankie Knuckles started splicing and mixing records, producing longer versions to keep audiences on the dancefloor. In 1983 the Warehouse closed and Knuckles opened The Power House (later The Power Plant and then Music Box after Knuckles' residency ended).

At the suggestion of Derrick May, Knuckles obtained a drum machine to keep the rhythm going while he mixed records. This was a Roland TR-909, the successor machine to the TR-808. The 909 addressed criticism about the dull synthesised thuds of the 808 by incorporating samples, the crushed bit depth giving it a punchier sound with a lot more going on in the treble region. Knuckles and the DJs in this growing Chicago scene were particularly enamoured of the TR-909's handclap sound, which they likened to someone saying "jack" repeatedly.

That gave the name to one of the scene's dance moves and might have named the entire genre were it not for a chance encounter with a sign saying "we play house music". In context this meant a bar which played the records you might have lying around at home, typically old soul and disco records, but one of Knuckles' friends laughed and suggested that was the kind of music played at the Warehouse.

If hi-NRG had been defined by the inability of early synthesisers to play a convincing chord or perform more than a couple of bars before going out of tune, then house was defined by the ability of the TR-909 to consistently put down a 4/4 beat without a hint of complaint. It soon spread from the gay clubs of Chicago (even more so than disco, house music's origins were in communities that were both black and gay) to local producers.

One such producer was Farley "Jackmaster" Funk, who in 1985 set up a record label called House Records along with Chip E. They released a few records, then in 1986 Funk's roommate Steve "Silk" Hurley produced a house cover of the old Isaac Hayes record "I Can't Turn Around". It sold well locally so Funk decided to have his own crack at making a version. He changed the lyrics, made the mix punchier, and came up with "Love Can't Turn Around", sung by Darryl Pandy.

As you might guess from its inclusion here, it was more than a local hit. This was the moment house music crossed over, going to #10 on the UK singles chart in September. It's hard to get across just how fresh this sounds after two years of increasingly commercialised hi-NRG culminating in that awful Communards record. Chicago House broke through with such impact that within a year it had spawned an unfathomable number of related genres.

And now I have to somehow get from there to Bon Jovi. The band's story starts in 1980, with Jon Bon Jovi recording a song called "Runaway" with session musicians. He spent the next few years working in a commercial studio producing things like radio jingles, sending off demos and trying to get airplay for "Runaway", re-recording it along the way.

In 1983 the song took off on radio around the New York area and started to go national. With a record deal likely, Bon Jovi went about forming a band to play it live and record an album. The group didn't have any strong ideas for what to call themselves other than wanting a two-word name like Van Halen, and eventually accepted a suggestion of Bon Jovi with limited enthusiasm. Two albums of glam metal followed with unspectacular chart positions, although both sold well enough for the band to continue touring.

Then in 1986 they record "Slippery When Wet" and somehow discover a way to make glam metal radio-friendly. While this did not endear them to critics, with complaints that they sounded like a "Xerox of Quiet Riot", it did bring glam metal back to the charts, starting with "You Give Love A Bad Name" going to #14 in September.

Power ballads are still going strong as Cutting Crew go to #4 with their debut single, "(I Just) Died In Your Arms". Genesis are at #19 with their own take on the genre, "In Too Deep". And that's #19 for a single where everyone bought the LP.

The end of August brings an absolutely wild slew of new Top 40 entries and I am feeling very aware we're only just about three quarters through the year and I have even more to talk about. The Psychedelic Furs re-record "Pretty In Pink" for the film of the same name and get a #18 out of it in September. It takes the position from Iron Maiden whose "Wasted Years" peaks a week earlier.

After an early career of cutting edge synthpop the Eurythmics come over all retro pastiche with "Thorn In My Side" (#5 September '86), lyrics almost an echo of "Da Doo Ron Ron". Frankie Goes To Hollywood are back with "Rage Hard" and they seem to have grown up with some rather mature and considered art rock. It's the first of theirs to be available as a CD single, but despite those not yet being eligible to be counted for chart sales still takes #4 in September.

Then we have Cameo's much-covered "Word Up" (#3 September '86). This was a student dorm favourite of my university years in its Korn incarnation, which I am now finding was very faithful.

Of all the places for hip-hop to expand beyond New York, about the last I was expected was the Netherlands, but that's exactly where MC Miker G and DJ Sven hail from. "Holiday Rap" interpolates bits of Madonna's "Holiday" and feels very much like it could hail from 1979. Well, if you ignore that "Holiday" wouldn't have existed at that point.

At this point you'd be forgiven for thinking that hip-hop is following the trajectory of early rock'n'roll; over-reliant on gimmicks and novelties, and not innovating to any great degree. You would however be missing what has been happening beyond the charts. Rick Rubin and the artists in his orbit are changing the very structure of hip-hop.

A hip-hop record needs something for the MC to rap over; the beats. Early on this amounted to interpolating a popular disco record. Then drum machines came along; the electronic blips of the TR-808 for early artists, the punch of the Oberheims for the new school. And for most of the records released around '84 that was all the beats were; the drum machine is so dominant it sounds like a bunch of guys have set it going and started rapping around it.

Through '85 artists start adding loops and samples, making those as much of a focal point as the drums. Often silly and deliberately bizarre choices, but nevertheless a progression on from simple drum patterns. Then a couple of artists on Def Jam started going wild with the idea. When putting together their album "Licensed To Ill" the Beastie Boys pulled from everywhere, particularly hard rock.

Many of the beats were original compositions, but others like "She's Crafty" sampled Led Zeppelin so blatantly you couldn't miss it. Within a couple of years fellow Def Jam artists Public Enemy would turn this style into an impenetrable assault of sample after sample, and the Beastie Boys themselves would produce a definitive statement on the collage style of hip-hop with 1989's "Paul's Boutique".

Back in 1986, "Licensed To Ill" was an attack on the senses, so unpredictable you had no idea what each new track on the album would bring other than being loud and punishing. In the US it topped the album charts, and was a respectable #7 on these shores. Even the cover with its 727 tailplane is an icon.

The Beastie Boys hadn't come up with the idea of using rock as the basis for their beats, though. Run-DMC were one of the pioneering acts of "new school" hip-hop from their formation in 1983, toning down the disco attire in favour of Kangol hats and Adidas trainers, and using sparse beats based around drum machines. But they also added crunchy guitars for records like "King of Rock".

While they were on early hip-hop label Profile, Run-DMC chose Def Jam's Rick Rubin to produce their third album. The group had been using the first couple of bars of by then near-forgotten 1970s hard rock band Aerosmith's "Walk This Way" as a drum loop to rap over. (In itself quite pioneering!) Rubin decided it would be fun to play them the whole song, to which Joseph Simmons and Darryl McDaniels (the "Run" and "DMC" of Run-DMC) announced it was "hillbilly gibberish" and covering it would be a terrible idea.

Third group member Jason "Jam Master Jay" Mizell thought it would be something fun to put on the album as a filler track, and they could do it as more of a rap than a straight cover. Rather than try to interpolate or sample the original record, Rubin got Steve Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith to come in and perform the backing track.

Somehow it ended up being released as a single despite the group's wishes, and all concerned were surprised when it started picking up airplay. A video was recorded along with Tyler and Perry, who spent most of the shoot worried that they were being sent up in some way they weren't aware of. Members of obscure band Smashed Gladys stood in as the rest of Aerosmith.

"Walk This Way" went to #8 in September. Not only was it the breakthrough moment for hip-hop but it also revived Aerosmith's career, making them chart regulars in the early '90s. And then we go from that to the bubblegum of Five Star's "Rain Or Shine", their highest-charting single at #2 in late September.

As with Aerosmith, Paul Simon was considered to be a spent force creatively in the early '80s. As he bounced between projects he started listening to tapes of South African artists including Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the Boyoyo Boys. Simon resolved to go to South Africa and record music with some of those artists and... oh dear. South Africa, in 1985, at the peak of the anti-apartheid movement and the cultural boycott.

He was not unaware of this, and agonised over the decision. He asked for counsel while recording "We Are The World" with USA for Africa. Quincy Jones said to go. Harry Belafonte also, but with the proviso that Simon should discuss his plans with the ANC. Other contacts were so horrified by the idea that their relationships fell apart over it.

Without talking to the ANC, Simon went to Johannesburg. The local black musicians' union had voted to let him, believing the exposure would do good. Recording sessions were productive, but marred by public hostility and the musicians he worked with worried about breaking curfews.

I've spent a lot of time reading around this that could have been spent listening to tedious dreck like Five Star, and I think it's hard to find something more morally grey. Especially when you add in dimensions such as Simon coming back from South Africa and immediately getting Sun City performer Linda Ronstadt to play on the album. He paid African artists well including offering them royalties, but also stole ideas from other collaborators such as Los Lobos. And where is the boundary between exposure and colonialist appropriation anyway? Some point out that the exposure angle is the same white saviour syndrome that dogs Band Aid, certainly in its more recent incarnations.

Ultimately I think his aims were good, but there were better ways to go about it and certainly the level of sensitivity to how actions will be perceived was not sufficient. It's a shame this overshadows an album which was influential, pioneering in its use of digital editing and did fulfil its mission of introducing African music to an audience who hadn't heard it before.

All of this out of the way, "You Can Call Me Al" goes to #4 in October.

Madonna is at the top of the charts because of course she is, "True Blue" a paean to 1960s girl groups and her then-husband Sean Penn. Although it's only there for a week before being knocked off by Nick Berry's month-long #1 "Every Loser Wins". I don't know what it is about EastEnders but it seems every offshoot in it is destined to become a chart success. By this point the show was leaning into it with a fictional band becoming one of the major storylines of the year.

Status Quo sit underneath at #2 with "In The Army Now", a rather atypical cover of a 1981 protest song. At #8 the Pet Shop Boys return with more immaculate synthpop on "Suburbia". The duo credit this with preventing them from being a one-hit wonder and sliding into obscurity.

Julian Cope scores for indie rock on "World Shut Your Mouth" at #19, although by this point he was fed up with being a pop star and the industry that surrounded it. His view was that people got a certain amount of success and then they started saying "yes" to everything they were asked in order to keep the success going.

Down at #21 and not a big seller are DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince with "Girls Ain't Nothing But Trouble". Yes, it is West Philadelphia born and raised Will Smith on the mic and while this feels like a step back into the goofy, TV theme-sampling world of new school after the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC it highlights the playful nature the two would be known for.

Into November and "Walk Like An Egyptian" is climbing up to #3. I'm always surprised how much of their early Paisley Underground you can still hear in these records despite all the efforts to make them sound like chart-pop contemporaries. Bon Jovi are back with "Livin' On A Prayer" going to #4 and I can hear the student union cheese nights from here, hundreds of sozzled 18-21 years olds pointing their hands in the sky and shouting the chorus out of tune. University ruined that record for me, I swear.

But the end of the year is about improbably huge #1 records. Our first comes in the wake of the UK release of "Top Gun" in October, and no prizes for guessing it's Berlin's "Take My Breath Away". I now find myself idly wondering if I can find a Peugeot 405 for sale, this being the soundtrack for a high-budget 1989 advert. As a car-obsessed child I remember it well, far more than a remember Top Gun which was just a load of nonsense about planes and kissing.

A little down the chart Mel and Kim get to #3 with "Showing Out (Get Fresh At The Weekend)". The two sisters attracted the interest of Stock Aitken Waterman, with Mike Stock writing them a single. What's weird is this didn't then get an underlying track straight out of the SAW hi-NRG pipeline. Pete Waterman felt the duo needed something with a tougher image and with Farley "Jackmaster" Funk climbing the charts as they recorded the single in September went for the new Chicago House sound.

There's something here that makes the SAW trio interesting, because they were quite happy to do the least amount possible to have a hit and yet with a single record having only just entered the Top 40 they look at house and go, "yes, we should cast aside everything we've been doing up to now and make that the sound".

Shakin' Stevens tries his hand at Chris De Burgh style pop and the tiresomely bland "Because I Love You" gets to #14, from an album that seems to be throwing everything against the wall from Gary Glitter covers to trying an interpretation of doo wop.

"Take My Breath Away" holds the top slot for almost all of November and then at the end of it along come Europe with "The Final Countdown". The synth riff set to a glam metal backing has achieved the kind of widespread recognition where it manages to hold solid placings on both "best songs ever" and "worst songs ever" lists, likely in both cases thanks to its gleeful excess. Hey, there's a proud tradition here that you can probably trace back to "The Legend Of Xanadu", if you can be bothered.

Further down the chart is Spandau Ballet's "Through The Barricades" (#6 November '86), a tribute to a member of their road crew who had been murdered in Belfast during the Troubles in 1983. Memories of the barricades drove Gary Kemp to write this affecting love song, the band's last Top Ten hit in the UK.

Debbie Harry has her biggest solo hit with "French Kissin' In The USA" (#8 November '86) but I pine for the energy of Blondie. Down at #10, a strange resurgence for the 1960s whistling record trend with Roger Whittaker and Des O'Connor's cover of trad Scottish folk song "The Skye Boat Song". This seemed to be a popular reference in the 1980s, having even turned up in an episode of Dangermouse.

1986 seems determined to give us yet another twist to the year with a punk resurgence, although it doesn't go much further than late era Damned having a #32 with "Anything" and fun-loving girl group We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It!! going one better at #31 with "Love Is The Slug"

With that we're in December and reaching #2 under Europe's final week at #1 are Erasure with "Sometimes", an enjoyable bit of synth-pop. Def Jam get their teeth into new jack swing with Oran "Juice" Jones' "The Rain", a record heavy on the TR-808 cowbell and a one-hit wonder at #4.

The Housemartins almost repeat the Flying Pickets success with an a capella Christmas #1, in this case "Caravan Of Love", a cover of a 1985 record from Isley Brothers splinter group Isley-Jasper-Isley. It lost out to a posthumous re-release of Jackie Wilson's "Reet Petite". This was due to the popularity of a Claymation animation shown on BBC Two's "Arena", but I'm not entirely unsure so much has happened this year that it's finally broken music buyers.

With Christmas #1 sewn up the rest of the charts are a collection of usual suspects - Madonna, Alison Moyet, a-ha, Status Quo, The Pretenders, Lionel Richie and even an unexpected return for Dexy's Midnight Runners with country-tinged "Because Of You" making #13.

Oh, and Spitting Image do a Christmas record.

It's going to be hard to top 1986. Certainly in terms of presenting me a challenge; a year I knew so little about musically, and yet in which so much happened. I dimly knew that there had to be some bridging point where we got from the world of the mid-'80s to rave, G-funk and grunge being the musical lingo of the early '90s, but for so much of it to happen concentrated mostly in the latter part of 1986 surprised me.

Not to say I wish for pop to get boring again, but I'm hoping 1987 is a little easier to write.