UK Charts: 1987-1989

1987

1987 came with an economic boom so pronounced in the south of England that even at barely five years old I noticed it. We moved from our semi-detached railwaymans cottage to a big detached chalet bungalow. My dad bought a new car for the first time, a bright red Nissan Bluebird. The next year we had our first foreign holiday as a family; it was only a static caravan in Brittany but quite a step up from the annual camping trip to Corfe Castle or the Witterings.

Life might have been good in the South but even as Margaret Thatcher won a historic third election and proclaimed her desire to stay on until 1994 it was obvious this was a boom that disproportionately benefited the Home Counties and London. Unemployment didn't drop below 3 million until halfway through the year. Even as those figures started improving and richer members of the public saw windfalls from share sales of newly-privatised industries, Black Monday in October saw a stock market crash that warned of the dangers of an out-of-control bull market.

That contradiction played out in the charts, as the darlings of drive time radio sat next to the sounds of the streets and the clubs, echoing the trad pop vs. rock'n'roll battles of the late '50s.

Remember Farley "Jackmaster" Funk's roommate, Steve "Silk" Hurley? The year opens with him going to #1 in mid-January with "Jack Your Body", largely from copies of a 12" record with so many long remixes it was technically ineligible for the charts. By the time anybody thought to check, it was already #1 and Chicago house had definitely arrived.

But at #3 you have Robbie Nevil with "C'est La Vie". You've last heard him writing songs for DeBarge and Alison Moyet amongst others, and this is mid-'80s pop carrying on as if nothing of note happened musically in 1986 at all. Swing Out Sister provide the empty jazz funk of "Surrender" (#7 January '87) and you can almost ignore the copies of "Licensed To Ill" flying off record store shelves at this point by sticking your nose deep in all of this "same as it ever was".

Iggy Pop made one of the most aggressively commercial albums of his career in the form of "Blah-Blah-Blah" and "Real Wild Child (Wild One)" from it goes to #10 in January. "Jack Your Body" might be #1 but it's a rare outlier on a chart which is aggressively middle-of-the-road.

Curiosity Killed The Cat were a band who apparently went straight for an audience of teenagers who must have had their sights on growing up and becoming consumers of drive time radio, combining smooth jazz-funk with photogenic looks and going to #3 with second single "Down To Earth".

This is a dull January for new chart entries, with even the Italo disco of Taffy's "I Love My Radio" (#6 February '87) failing to liven things up.

Perhaps there is some small amount of cheer for lovers of gothic rock, at least. This begins not entirely cheerfully with the Sisters of Mercy splitting up at the end of 1985 due to musical differences. Lead singer Andrew Eldritch kept the name, while the remainder of the band formed what they started calling The Sisterhood. Worried by the similarity and obvious link, Eldritch decided the only way out would be by using the name first, which he did by registering it and quickly recording a single called "Giving Ground".

The would-be Sisterhood, now denied that moniker, chose to become The Mission, under which name they would record an album in 1986, from which second single "Wasteland" went to #11 in January '87. The same week Siouxsie and the Banshees land a gothic cover of "This Wheel's On Fire" at #14.

Goth was a strange one for me. I admired the aesthetic from the outside and enjoyed the music, but I never had the ability to commit to it in a way that the goths I knew did. Goth in my orbit was a thing for city dwellers, for people who left the house to go out at about the time I would be heading for the last train home. It was for people who committed, for those willing to uproot themselves to live in goth places and do nothing but goth things with other goths. You didn't find goths in the suburbs, because the suburbs are for people who never fully commit to one thing or the other. That's their entire character - part city, part countryside, but not really either.

Even SAW were attempting to get in on the act, with Dead or Alive's original intention to create a Hallowe'en single surfacing at the end of '86 as "Something In My House" and going to #12 in mid-January. There's not really enough in the SAW parts bin to properly express this concept but Pete Burns gives it a good go with some authentically gothic vocals.

"Jack The Groove" from Raze only gets to #20 at the end of the month, but it's another sign house is going to be the sound of the year. Handclaps and cowbells are very much in evidence as both TR-808 and TR-909 join forces.

Clapton decides that a little bit of "Invisible Touch"-style magic might come his way with "Behind The Mask", a version of a much-covered 1979 Japanese synth-pop song from Yellow Magic Orchestra. The original is a much more enjoyable prospect, and comes without the awkward whiff of stealing music from other cultures before going on stage to claim how great you think racism is. Eric's version peaks at #15, although it's a stalwart of later Greatest Hits albums, although I haven't seen the tracklists of anything since he started ranting about Covid so there's a possibility it's not any more.

Far more appealing as an update of a '70s classic is Dutch DJ Ben Liebrand's remix of Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing", hitting #10 in February. It preserves enough of the original record and is so unashamedly of its time that I find the thing endearingly goofy all these years later. Liebrand made a bit of a career of remixing these mid-'70s tracks, with a few efforts represented in the charts.

Wham! backing singers Pepsi & Shirlie go to #2 with "Heartache", a track which is such forgettable Landfill '80s that I did forget about it and had to come back here later to add it in the correct place.

"Jack Your Body" loses its #1 to George Michael and Aretha Franklin on "I Knew You Were Waiting For Me", a none-more-'80s slice of slightly urgent guitar line and a duet that wants you to be very aware these people are having fun in the studio.

At #5 are the Blow Monkeys with the sophisti-pop of "It Doesn't Have To Be This Way", an act who seem to have completely disappeared off the radar in modern times. That hasn't stopped me unearthing at least 3 duplicate copies of one of their records the last time I opened an unverified box of records.

The rather tragic history of Man 2 Man (original member Miki Zone died, another casualty of the AIDS pandemic, on December 31st 1986) resulted in club hit "Male Stripper" coming back for a run at the charts, going to #4 in February. Producer Man Parrish gives it a pounding hi-NRG beat with more than a hint of the Italo to that disco.

More Five Star with "Stay Out Of My Life" going to #9. I wish they would.

The Smiths are seemingly ascendant with "Shoplifters Of The World Unite" entering the charts at its peak position of #12 for February, causing some small amount of controversy in a world which still wasn't quite ready for lyrics to embrace Karl Marx and nicking stuff. However, all is not well within the band, and tensions between Morrissey and Marr's very different ideas of the direction the group should take are starting to flare up, in particular Morrissey's desire to cover 1960s records.

Speaking of old records, it's time for another couple of them. We can thank the usual suspect of a Levi's jeans advert taking 1966's "When A Man Loves A Woman" all the way up to #2 in mid-February, but even that performance is eclipsed by the film of the same name giving Ben E King's "Stand By Me" the top spot. The idea that these were flying out of record shops at the same time as house records makes my head spin somewhat.

Mental As Anything's new-wave "Live It Up" is at #3 going into March, and yet at #5 Jets' "Crush On You" is all electronic cowbells and those assertive keyboard stabs which define the later part of this decade. A few of the obvious safe picks add their voices to the charts - Simply Red, Communards, some late period Duran Duran, and we keep up the buying of old records with a #3 for Jackie Wilson.

Then along come the Beastie Boys.

"(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)" is a wild parody of the kind of good-time rebellion song beloved of glam metal, something that in the context of "Licensed To Ill" and its grab-bag of sounds makes sense but I do wonder how many people bought the album off the back of this expecting some uncomplicated hard rock and got a bit of a shock.

As the Beastie Boys themselves have later pointed out, plenty of people have stuck this on, downed a few cheap beers and started trashing the joint not realising the record is a joke on them at their expense. But I guess lack of awareness about being clowned on has never hurt a record and it went to #11 in March.

March's first chart is a whole stack of intriguing new entries to the Top 40, including two eventual number ones, but I'll start at the bottom with the eventual #6 of Alison Moyet's cover of Floy Joy's "Weak In The Presence Of Beauty". Moyet would later disown this bit of very of-its-time synth pop, saying it was recorded from a place of cynicism for no reason other than certainty it would be a hit.

Quickly rising to #4 was Freddie Mercury looking over his Queen career with more than a little self-deprecation on a cover of 1955's "The Great Pretender". I remember this being played around the house off a 1992 CD which collected some of his solo work in a combination of remixes and original versions. Sadly the impetus for this collection was as a posthumous commemoration. Mercury had undertaken several blood tests in the 1980s after exhibiting potential HIV/AIDS symptoms, and a month later in April the first one would come back positive.

Mercury and Queen would keep this secret for a long time, but fans suspected something was amiss when the band who'd made (and after Sun City, remade) their reputation standing at the front of packed stadiums stopped touring. Initial thoughts were some kind of Beatles-esque standoff of people who couldn't bear to be in the same room as each other half the time, but continued studio work and videos showed this not to be the case, and in 1991 we'd find the truth was something much worse.

That's a thing to get to in the future though, and for now the main impact was Mercury throwing himself into projects to write and record as much as possible while he still had time. The guy was a natural showman right to the end.

Elsewhere, the first of the #1s in this chart is Boy George, launching his solo career with "Everything I Own". Much-covered already, George chose a reggae-influenced style which is quite distinct from the rocksteady groove of Ken Boothe's 1974 version as previously featured in these pages. I find myself liking this quite a lot.

The other #1 is rather more significant as SAW go "fuck it, house" once more for Mel & Kim's "Respectable". The production trio treated the song lyrics as a statement to the rest of the music industry. Sure, you might sneer at us and our assembly-line pop, but that's us. We're never going to be respectable, but we're going to keep having hits whether you like it or not.

What I do find interesting is that despite their apparently low-effort approach to production, the lads Aitken, Waterman and Stock did not just throw out Mel & Kim's singles with a few of the same old bits dragged from the hi-NRG parts bin. They wholeheartedly co-opted a whole new musical style, perhaps surmising that what they heard in the clubs today was going to be the pop of tomorrow.

Bruce Willis' bizarre career as a recording artist hit the UK charts with the shouty R&B of "Respect Yourself" going to #7 in March, although it doesn't presage the future of R&B in the charts anywhere near as much as Janet Jackson's #3-placing soft soul "Let's Wait Awhile". It's even got those sparkly glissandos which became so emblematic of '90s and early 2000s pop. Yeah, in 1987. For all I talk about the excitement of house this might be the most forward-looking thing here.

It's been a while since I got to describe a record as "squelchy", but Prince's minimalist "Sign o' The Times" (#10 March '87) certainly fits that bill. He means it with that minimalism too; there are points in this which attempt to find the bare minimum of elements required to tie something together into what is recognisably a pop song.

U2 offer a kind of maximalist minimalism as Bono's idea of "sketches" hits its zenith with "The Joshua Tree" and lead single "With Or Without You" (#4 March '87). Say what you like about the band's later iPhone-hijacking antics and overt messianism, this is still a fantastic album. Find a car with a good stereo, go for a long night drive and then put this on loud while you're watching the road recede into the blackness above the glow of the dashboard lights.

Meanwhile, the genre referred to by at least one (and possibly at most one) music mag as "piss-weak soul" is launched by its leading proponent, Terence Trent D'Arby with "If You Let Me Stay", eventually peaking at #7 in early April. If you ever listened to Simply Red and thought Hucknall's voice had far too much conviction, that the arrangements weren't glossily superficial enough for you, then this is your music.

It shares chart space with the Pogues and Dubliners on raucous "The Irish Rover" at #8, and I'm starting to think that 1987 has just too many things going on at once here.

Fine Young Cannibals get to #9 with an utterly disrespectful version of "Ever Fallen In Love". I can't imagine listening to such a classic punk track and thinking, "what this needs is a sophisti-pop rendition. Maybe a good dose of fake-funk. Yes, that is the correct approach to cover this record." Bring back The Clash and their correct assumption that the most respectful way to cover "Police and Thieves" would be to nick the bass sound from Hawkwind.

March ends with a few massive 1987 hits entering the Top 40 for the first time. And also what I realise must be my first memory of a major news event. This is jogged by the presence of Ferry Aid with "Let It Be" going straight to #1. In the early evening of 6th March 1987, the car ferry MS Herald Of Free Enterprise left the port of Zeebrugge with the bow doors still open. Within ninety seconds of starting to accelerate on leaving the harbour, the ship started taking on water and quickly capsized, killing 193.

I don't remember "Let It Be", a fairly perfunctory "many celebrities get together and sing a well-known song" affair which raised a decent amount of money for victims of the disaster and their relatives, but I do remember seeing that ship on its side on the TV over and over. There's always the possibility this is jumbled up as I imagine the footage would have been shown later as inquests and salvage operations took place, but then I also have some clear memories from this time of joining school early as part of a "rising fives" scheme (and wearing a natty grey jumper with cars on!) and a quite coherent personal timeline of the Great Storm in October, so it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility I would remember this and the word "Zeebrugge" from the event itself.

(Not to crowd this with personal recollections, although that is rather the point of the exercise, but I remember getting some OO gauge car transporter wagons with a label saying "Not to be used past Zeebrugge" on them and asking why my trains referenced a ferry disaster.)

Judy Boucher had a huge lovers' rock hit with the slow and ever so slightly Casiotone "Can't Be With You Tonight", spending 12 weeks on the chart and yet not managing to get to #1 for any of those, peaking at #2. That was thanks to Madonna, who kicked off her Latin-inspired era with "La Isla Bonita", a song about a fictitious island that is supposedly a tribute to Latin-Americans.

This trio of heavyweights locks out the charts for a few weeks, although enduringly dumb "Living In A Box" from, well, Living In A Box manages to get to #5.

While tuning in to the chart countdown on 12th April would have seen Ferry Aid at #1 with "La Isla Bonita" immediately below it waiting to take over, you might have heard some iconic songs of the era entering that countdown for the first time. The Cure's "Why Can't I Be You?" is at #23 (eventual #21). Spear of Destiny's uncompromising "Never Take Me Alive" (#14 May '87).

Alright, let's pull out the big hits. Labi Siffre's "(Something Inside) So Strong" enters here on its way to a #4 in May. I remember this being played a lot when I was young, although I didn't get the significance of this being an overtly anti-apartheid record, with undertones of being gay in a world very much hostile to such things.

It's offensive in this context that Five Star's "The Slightest Touch" achieves exactly the same #4 position, and that record really is slight.

Tom Jones! "A Boy From Nowhere" seems to be a bit disowned these days, although he has sung it live a few times. It's funny hearing it here in 1987, as you could play it straight after "The Young New Mexican Puppeteer" (his last truly big hit back in '72) and I don't think you'd raise many suspicions there are 15 years between the two. If anything, people might assume "Boy" is earlier as there's much of the mid-'60s to it. #2 in May, and with 10 weeks on the chart a big seller.

It's kept off the top slot by the zombified corpse of something you can't even call a Jefferson craft any more, as Starship rule the charts with "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now". For all my ire I think time has been a little less unkind to this than "We Built This City", although maybe that's just it being harder to substitute some of the lyrics for a pastry item. That doesn't mean it isn't cloyingly overwrought with at least one dramatic gear change too many, but y'know. Time. Slightly less unkind.

Fantastic Damned cover song "Alone Again Or" only makes #27 as their final Top 40 single, but like them I want to acknowledge original artists Love. "Forever Changes" is one of those albums I played over and over during my early infatuations with 1960s music, and I do enjoy this reinterpretation.

We're far enough through the '80s that I find myself wishing sophisti-pop would have the decency to just end, but Johnny Hates Jazz are not going to give me that respite with "Shattered Dreams" going to #5 in May.

There's a bit to like entering the Top 40 in late April, though. The Cult's "Lil' Devil" (#11 May '87) is a fun rocker, and then we have the Jesus And Mary Chain's moment of calming down for "April Skies" (#8 May '87). Second album "Darklands" was the band putting into practice all those things they'd been saying about their nihilistic brand of music attracting the wrong audience.

Original drummer Bobby Gillespie had left for Primal Scream, being replaced by a machine. The precise rhythms are an unexpectedly effective counterpoint to the band's laid-back guitar work, and with the tendency to collapse into a wall of misanthropic noise denied to them the Reid brothers return what might almost be considered straightforward pop songs. I say "straightforward pop", I'm not sure, I absolutely loved "Psychocandy" and became quite inured to squalling feedback as a result.

Things move toward mid-May in predictable fashion with a bit of house here and a football squad there. The Fall's appealing cover of Northern Soul classic "There's A Ghost In My House" makes it to #30.

Marillion record their final album with Fish, and lead single "Incommunicado" (#6 May '87) does make me ponder again that I've bought three different copies of "Misplaced Childhood" over the years but have never really spent much time exploring the follow-up. It's a little bit too much urgency, not enough substance for me. In communal avocado, indeed.

Johnny Logan's second Eurovision win gives us "Hold Me Now", a reminder that returning unfathomably dull winners is not merely the preserve of the modern contest. While taking the top spot in Ireland, it only took #2 in the UK.

That is thanks to Whitney Houston. "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" is bordering on meme territory when it comes to representing the late '80s, but let's back up a bit and think about this coming toward the middle of a year which started with "Jack Your Body". SAW kinda had the idea with Mel & Kim, but this is the point at which dance-pop figures out which bits of Chicago house's jewellery drawer it wants to rifle through and comes out with at least one TR-808. Pay attention to the cowbells and the bass sound. That's the sound of the clubs being co-opted into the sound of the charts.

Somehow the early '80s and this very late '80s moment collide with Mirage, a group formed in the wake of the short-lived medley craze who just kept on making them until they hit on the idea of setting them to a house beat. "Jack Mix II" mashes together "Respectable" with "Male Stripper" and a whole bunch of other contemporary hits, and managed to be the first UK-produced house record to crack the Top 10 with a peak of #4 in late May.

Stock Aitken Waterman get another crack at it for Samantha Fox's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now" (#8 June '87), so dedicated to doing everything on keyboards that even the guitar solo Fox requested is some clever synth work. If "Respectable" was them experimenting with house and showing they could be wild if they wanted to be, this is SAW putting their sensible shoes back on, taking only those elements of the Mel & Kim records which can be stamped out a hundred times with the press of a button, and putting them to work. Because this is it - the second, and by far the most successful SAW hit factory sound.

"Goodbye Stranger" (#9 June '87) ends Pepsi & Shirlie's short Top 40 career, although not for want of trying. I remain disappointed it's not a cover of the Supertramp song.

The Beastie Boys return to the chart with "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" (#14 June '87) and this time there's no messing around or sneaking in records under the guise of parody; this is uncompromising hip-hop far beyond the stagnant world of novelty raps from a couple of years prior. Rick Rubin plays the guitar riffs while Slayer's Kerry King takes the solo.

Going from that to Bruce Willis' "Under The Boardwalk" (#2 July '87) feels like going back in time 20 years. Referencing the bizarre Bruno alter-ego that was a key part of his recording career, this is an incredibly inconsequential cover that has no business being this high up the charts, even if it took a while to get there.

This weird dichotomy of two very different facets of 1987 gets played off lower down the charts, with Run-DMC's "It's Tricky" riffing off "My Sharona" to peak at #16, while two weeks later a reissue of Tom Jones' "It's Not Unusual" goes to #17. I do not think these records had the same buyers, although I do realise I might possibly have been able to be that person had I not spent 1987 more concerned with riding around the garden on a bright red pedal tractor.

The mid-year silly season enters full flow with The Firm making the record they'd be forever known for - "Star Trekkin'" makes #1 in mid-June with a sudden race up the charts after a long time kicking around outside the Top 40. I realise that ever since "Respectable" I've been slowly turning down the volume on the headphone amplifier with a few exceptions (Beastie Boys represent) and this is the lowest it's reached. Yes, this was funny at the time and it's amusing how many of the lines invented for this record have been subsequently misattributed to Star Trek itself, but it's not exactly something you'd want to play loud, is it?

George Michael's solo career had reached the stage of putting together an album. The same impulse which made him get saxophonist after saxophonist to record the line on "Careless Whisper" until it was just right had Michael writing and producing every track but one on "Faith", and it's a bit of an insult after that for lead single "I Want Your Sex" (#3 June '87) to win a Golden Raspberry as the year's worst original song in a movie thanks to its inclusion on Beverly Hills Cop II.

I'm casting a thread back to my thoughts on "Hot Space" as I think "Body Language" is awfully prophetic of this, both in sound and lyrics. George Michael is a little more direct in his words, and I wonder if some of that worst song award was down to a little bit of squeamishness rather than musical merit or lack thereof.

"Don't Dream It's Over" was a massive international hit for Crowded House, but UK buyers weren't so keen with a mere #27 peak in '87, although a later reissue off the back of a greatest hits compilation saw it rise to #25 in 1996.

It's a soggy July near the top of the charts as Atlantic Starr take #3 with "Always" and Terence Trent D'Arby lands "Wishing Well" on #4, a record that I can listen most of the way through and still be wondering when it's going to actually start.

Drive Time sophisti-pop is the movement which refuses to die as Curiosity Killed The Cat take "Misfit" to #7. As hinted at before, they aimed at a slightly younger and largely female audience with pin-up photos to go with the vapid fake-funk, but without any posters to put up I find myself just sitting here wishing this genre will cycle out and be replaced by something else, which I will probably like even less but at least it will be new.

I have a feeling some of that is my general dislike of genres which don't evolve. The Pet Shop Boys sounded determined to drive synth pop forward on deserved late June #1 "It's A Sin", throwing in everything from Italo disco bass lines to a minor key religious penitence.

Billy Idol is atypically soft and gentle on "Sweet Sixteen" (#17 July '87) and Genesis eke a little more mileage out of "Invisible Touch" with "Throwing It All Away" grazing #22 the same week.

Somehow above both of them is Cliff Richard at #6 with "My Pretty One". Cliff has embraced the synths and in an era infested with soft sounds for Drive Time his lack of vocal heft doesn't sound so out of place as it did in the early '60s. I feel like I'm transgressing some internal boundary claiming this is sorta fine, actually, but then I guess we already had that introspective wrestling with "Throw Down A Line" back in 1969. "Line" is better, I reckon.

Heart get a #3 with "Alone", showing there's still some life in power ballads. I swear, the 1980s just kept accumulating genres without ever seeming to get bored with any of them - a glance down the list and Shakin' Stevens is still there, although here the analogy starts to break apart as it's not cod rockabilly he's purveying but mid-1970s disco on "A Little Boogie Woogie (In The Back Of My Mind)"

Bond theme success for a-ha on "The Living Daylights" (#5 July '87), a film which contains two of the coolest Bond cars as an Aston Martin V8 Volante gets "winterised" into the coupé version, before it all devolves into two boring hours about Russian geopolitics. Sorry, my heart belongs to "On Her Majesty's Secret Service".

Mel & Kim are back with "F.L.M" at #7, the 12" in particular suggesting this was about as close as Stock Aitken Waterman got to a passion project in those early days. There's something about these which sounds a little looser, more like they were having a bit of fun and showing off what they could do when they weren't churning hits off the assembly line. The title, as would eventually be revealed, is a bit of an in-joke referring to the girls' habit of describing things around the studio as "fuckin' lovely mate".

The full story behind the scenes was rather more tragic. Melanie Appleby was believed to be in remission from a cancer operation in 1985, but as the duo toured in 1987 she started to suffer from back pain, eventually being diagnosed in June with the cancer having returned. The promotional machine of the record industry rumbled on regardless, with a promotional video put together without the sisters' input, which they both detested upon seeing it.

Although initially denying the rumours, the two would later appear on television to talk about young cancer sufferers and the need for more teenage cancer wards. With the diagnosis becoming terminal they withdrew from public life and started writing songs together for a second album, but in January 1990 Mel died aged just 23.

Boogie Box High was a supergroup of sorts put together by Andros Georgiou, with collaborators floating around including George Michael who sang uncredited on bouncy July #7 Bee Gees cover "Jive Talkin'".

The absolute genre stew of mid-'87 continues with Freddie McGregor's reggae "Just Don't Want To Be Lonely" hitting #9 and even a reissue of Jackie Wilson's "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher" in there somewhere.

Although 1985's "Desperately Seeking Susan" had gone down well and had plenty of influence on fashion, Madonna's acting career had not gone so well since, with "Shanghai Surprise" bombing and an attempt to block "A Certain Sacrifice" from appearing in cinemas failing. This was an unreleased low-budget and sexually explicit art film she'd appeared in back in 1980, so you can understand why she didn't want any more attention paid to it. 1987's "Who's That Girl" was another bomb, but the title track spent a week at #1 which might have been some consolation. Sound-wise, expect more Latin-influenced pop to the point some critics were a bit upset with quite how similar it was to "La Isla Bonita".

It gave up the top slot to another film soundtrack song, this time Los Lobos covering "La Bamba" for a Ritchie Valens biopic. Los Lobos were a personal request from Valens' family and they perform all of his songs in the film, although it does feature Brian Setzer adding a bit more flair to "Summertime Blues" than I suspect Eddie Cochran ever did.

Bananarama's "I Heard A Rumour" reaches #14 but I include it here mostly as a counterpoint of how workmanlike Stock Aitken Waterman's production was on most of their other records.

Def Jam capitalised on the Beastie Boys' recent popularity by putting out a 12" with a slightly extended version of 1985's "She's On It", more rap rock with some very '70s-style riffs. It's noticeable listening to this older material how far they'd come by the time they came to record "Licensed To Ill" - it's still fun, but it's a lot more primitive.

Ridiculously catchy Italo disco number "Call Me" from Spagna goes to #2 in August with its euphoric synths. If anyone was taking a foreign holiday thanks to that southern-focused economic boom I mentioned earlier this was pretty much inescapable, taking single-digit chart positions across Europe.

New Order's "True Faith" gets to #4 that same month and again I'm looking at 1987 and thinking, "you've got to let go of some of these genres, there's not enough chart for them to fit on." I don't want to lead the past here, but please let it be the sophisti-pop.

Further to that point, in the same chart countdown we've got hip-hop, heavy rock (Def Leppard's "Animal", Motley Crue's "Girls Girls Girls"), the soft ballad "Somewhere Out There" by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram from "An American Tail", a bit of neo-prog from Marillion, and of course all those things I just mentioned.

Standing at the sides and jeering with "Respectable" wasn't quite enough for Stock Aitken Waterman, and they decided to take aim at the critics who said all their songs sounded the same with "Roadblock", initially anonymous and then crediting it to themselves once DJs had started playing it and industry beards had professed how exciting this new funk bootleg sounded. So dedicated were they to maintaining the illusion that early copies had the identifying marks of their pressing company in the deadwax melted out of recognition by hand with a soldering iron.

It made #13, and then they undermined their point instantly with dQw4w9WgXcQ - yes, it's the point at which I realise this has been a multi-year project to rickroll myself as "Never Gonna Give You Up" goes to #1 in August and then... well, just stays there.

What can I say about this that you haven't already heard, often for only a few seconds and unintentionally? It's pure assembly-line SAW, and even if it wasn't for this being one of the Internet's favourite jokes I'd already feel completely familiar with it - despite claims they were trying to make this one sound different including pinching bits of bassline from Colonel Abrams' "Trapped", it still sounds like everything is something we've already heard from the parts bin.

Perhaps that's why SAW liked making things like "Respectable" and "Roadblock" - infuriating the critics by making it clear it wasn't that they couldn't do better; it was that they chose not to.

Choosing not to was the route to chart success for Wet Wet Wet, whose "Sweet Little Mystery" landed them a #5 at the close of August, following on from May #6 "Wishing I Was Lucky". They started out playing Clash and Magazine covers, taking their eventual name from a Scritti Politti song and following that band in dropping scrappy DIY rock for the radio-friendly sounds of blue-eyed soul and sophisti-pop. I'm never going to be rid of it, am I?

The Pet Shop Boys had a keen eye for 1960s music, with Neil Tennant often suggesting "Dusty In Memphis" was his favourite album. Their manager's assistant suggested a duet with Springfield, who had languished in obscurity since 1970. EMI were sceptical, wanting them to work with someone who'd already had their comeback such as Tina Turner, and Dusty herself didn't even know who the boys were until she heard "West End Girls" and agreed to the collaboration.

"What Have I Done to Deserve This?" is the result, going to #2 in late August and selling well, although not quite well enough to break the Rick Astley lockout.

Something must have been in the air as hip-hop trio Fat Boys worked with the Beach Boys to cover 1963 Surfaris instrumental "Wipeout", taking over the #2 spot in September while again not shifting enough copies to take down Astley.

Way down the charts is an appearance for Metallica, with an EP entitled "The $5.98 E.P. - Garage Days Revisited" featuring covers of a few of their favourite songs. Quite what UK buyers made of that title, originally a gimmick to prevent US retailers overcharging for the record, I don't know. With a peak position of #27, it definitely didn't depose "Never Gonna Give You Up" from the top of the charts.

So what did?

1986 had seen two genres introduced in the UK - Chicago house and the newer, sample-heavy hip hop beloved of Def Jam. 1987 would see these both become chart regulars, but even before the public at large were aware of either, hip-hop artists and house artists were looking at each other and having thoughts.

House could give an underlying structure that felt more melodic and a lot less "a bunch of guys stood round a drum machine" than the sounds of new school hip-hop. Meanwhile, hip-hop could give house a bit more edge and structure than disconnected samples and occasionally saying the word "jack". In August 1986 (yes, 1986!) the Beatmasters got together with hip-hop duo the Cookie Crew and recorded "Rok Da House".

With neither of the parent genres having properly broken in the UK, this was a bit of a "what the hell do we do with this?" moment, and label Rhythm King didn't put the record out until mid-1987, where it peaked at #79 and sank without trace two weeks later. But it was being played in clubs, and the idea of "hip house" was beginning to spread.

A similar collaboration between Colourbox and A.R. Kane resulted in a white label 12" being sent out to clubs in July. Although collaboration is an optimistic word; the entire thing came out of a storming row between record label 4AD and A.R. Kane's previous label One Little Indian, and the suggestion in the wake that they work with Colourbox also ended acrimoniously as the two groups argued over different working styles and eventually each ended up sending the other a mostly-finished track for tweaking rather than properly working together.

Even with the two tracks finished, the arguing didn't stop. A.R. Kane's composition was "Anitina (The First Time I See She Dance)", an ever-so-arch track with strong shades of the Jesus and Mary Chain. Colourbox decided they weren't having their track on the same record as it, and threatened to stall the whole project by a year or more as they reworked their contribution and came up with their own flip side.

4AD boss Ivo Watts-Russell looked at the potential release receding into the far distance and put his foot down, with both tracks being put on a record and released to clubs as a double A side. Given its rather artier leanings, it's no surprise that "Anitina" was the less popular side.

The other was "Pump Up The Volume", based on a sample from Eric B. & Rakim's "I Know You Got Soul". Credited on wider release to M|A|R|R|S, it entered the Top 40 at the end of August, rose through the charts in September, and finally took Rick Astley off the top as that month drew to a close. Meaning that after you rickroll someone, you should send them a link to this. That's the rule now.

One of the things taken from the "hip" side of hip house was liberal abandon with samples, which soon got the group in trouble as Stock Aitken Waterman didn't take kindly to bits of "Roadblock" being stolen. Yes, pot, kettle, throwing stones in a greenhouse. This of course is still in the Wild West days of sampling where artists sought forgiveness rather than permission, and it was up to rights holders to realise something of theirs had been used and complain about it. That would be put to bed by 1991's Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros Records Inc. as Biz Markie sampled "Alone Again (Naturally)" and the court ruled that this was indeed copyright infringement. But until then, it was more a case of "don't get caught".

(Having been caught, M|A|R|R|S had to rejig samples on future international releases including the removal of "Roadblock", leading to one of those situations where there's a big table detailing exactly what sample appears in which release.)

Coming up below on the charts at #8 were the Housemaster Boyz with "House Nation", keen students of the likes of Steve "Silk" Hurley and Frankie Knuckles with a love of the kind of half-played and cut off samples repeated at ridiculous density that Paul Hardcastle and the Art of Noise had played with. If Live Aid had brought its participants a stretch of clear air in which to peddle late '70s mores that was now over and the charts were starting to feel distinctly late-1980s in nature.

There's still space in here for what I'd boldly call U2's career peak, "Where The Streets Have No Name" (#4 September '87) - an attempt to create the ultimate U2 live song, leaning so hard into the band's philosophy of "sketches" that Bono later expressed a wish to have put more time into the lyrics rather than leaving them there feeling not quite finished. I think it works just fine as is.

Jan Hammer's "Crockett's Theme" took #2 in October, having been slowly refined over uses in "Miami Vice" into the iconic record heard here, taking a little of that brooding, broad-skied feeling U2 so happily incorporated. It's nice when things line up like this and I'm not having to hop between 10 different genres in between.

1987 has so many genres they're starting to crossbreed, and LL Cool J kicks off one that's lasted until this day with the hip-hop soul of "I Need Love" (#8 October '87). Growing from the development of soft R&B and the hip-hop leanings of new jack swing, this took hip-hop's production and allied it to gentle, melodic instrumentals - in this case interpolating a recording from a demo tape by Jayson Dyall and, as was the spirit of the age, providing no credit for having done so. Whatever the murkiness of the origins, it proved that hip-hop didn't need to all be brash and aggressive.

Even Chic are back in action, with Phil Harding remixing "Le Freak" into house version "Jack Le Freak" and taking #19 with it in September. It enters the Top 40 the same week as Madonna's "Causing A Commotion", which rose to #4 at the end of the month and reminded us how much Madonna's music descended from those disco pioneers.

More names from the era as Quincy Jones produces on Michael Jackson's "Bad" (#3 September '87). It's up to the minute dance-pop and helped shift Jackson's image further away from those innocent child star days.

Must be the season for returning names, as the Bee Gees stage somewhat of a comeback and a significant updating of their sound with all-conquering #1 "You Win Again". It gave them a record of being the first act to score #1 records in three separate decades.

Kiss are back too, with the glam metal of "Crazy Crazy Nights" taking them to #4 in October. Even as it welcomed in its end-of-decade sounds the '80s clearly wasn't letting go of any genres, with gothic rock "This Corrosion" reaching #7 the same month. Andrew Eldritch had given up on his Sisterhood side project and was back as The Sisters Of Mercy, although "Corrosion" had originated as a Sisterhood record.

Fleetwood Mac got a #5 with "Little Lies". Album "Tango in the Night" was recorded with an emphasis on getting the perfect smooth pop texture, including joyless trudges through recording entire songs at half speed. The irony is not lost on me that this was done to make them sound light and airy with extra sparkle.

Billy Idol is at #7 with a heavy if otherwise faithful cover of "Mony Mony", although some of those keyboards sound a little too "tribute band at a village fête" to me and the whole thing is a little overwrought which is something on a song which was quite wrought to begin with.

The public love of gimmickry helped carry Was (Not Was) and their funk-forward "Walk the Dinosaur" to #10, a record I hope to move on from and forget just as quickly as Five Star lurking at #16.

More SAW as Bananarama's "Love In The First Degree" hits #3 in late October, bouncy synth-pop with some joyously tacky keyboard lines. Tensions rose between band and producers though, with the girls complaining this was too blatantly commercial for a single release. Waterman suggested this was kind of the point, and threatened to withdraw SAW from the album "Wow" as a whole unless the production team got their way.

Above it at #2 is George Michael with "Faith", his meticulously crafted blend of rockabilly and pure pop. Hewing far to the pop side and cranking up the production value makes this come across far better than the insincere cod-rockabilly of the early decade, and if it wasn't for the blatant use of the Bo Diddley rhythm you might not even have noticed. But that would be a very different record. The rhythm is quite a big part of it.

The last Top 40 countdown of October gives us some big November hits entering for the first time. Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again", the record Starship were desperately trying (and failing) to be would get to #9.

Rick Astley will get to #3 with "Whenever You Need Somebody" and this is one of the most blatant situations of SAW going "well, if it worked before..." as even if your only interaction with the works of Astley is being rickrolled you've already heard 90% of this. It is absolutely "same thing, different lyrics", like even changing some of the settings on the keyboards was too much effort.

It's nothing compared to the #2 peak and 11 weeks in the Top 40 for... wait, is that George Harrison? With his confidence (and prolific early '70s output) shaken by the "My Sweet Lord"/"I Feel Fine" case, Harrison's solo efforts had rarely troubled the charts other than a brief fillip around de facto near Beatles reunion "All Those Years Ago". As of 1982 he was recording only as a contractual obligation, disillusioned by a changed music world and more interested in HandMade Films. By the end of the year he'd quit recording new material altogether.

However, as 1986 got underway Harrison found that with four years out he'd quite like to record new music again, starting with some contributions to the soundtrack of "Shanghai Surprise", produced under the HandMade Films banner. Following this, a chat with Jeff Lynne proceeded to the kind of all-star sessions you'd expect. Ringo Starr resumed the two's long history of post-Beatles collaboration on drums for some tracks (Jim Keltner carrying the others), Elton John contributed some work behind the keys and Eric Clapton was even there to add some guitar.

The album was to be called "Cloud Nine", and it would be previewed by a cover of a record Harrison had first heard in 1963 while visiting his sister in America, "Got My Mind Set On You". He'd bought an album with it on way back then, before Beatlemania ever crossed the Atlantic, and something about it must have stuck.

Why am I spending so much time on this? Well, it was a big-selling record with a #2 peak position and we should discuss a few of them. But also this was one of the first records I can remember being played around the house, possibly the first one I actually knew by title rather than just references to a random snatch of lyrics as with "Somewhere Down The Crazy River". (I mean, it could have been just getting lucky with the chosen snatch of lyrics, the words in the title are repeated quite a lot).

This would not have been 1987 but 1989, when a CD player first entered our household. I know this because I have only ever known "Cloud Nine" on CD, Harrison forever frozen in that late '80s idea of cool with his patterned shirt and mirrorshades and guitar grinning from the small plastic case. Hey, mirrorshades are still cool, I bet he's about to do some awesome hacking or something like that.

Putting my first real consciousness of music as a thing with artists and titles at 1989 makes sense as so many of those early memories would be contemporary - Queen's "The Miracle" on tape, "She Drives Me Crazy" from the Fine Young Cannibals still being a recent single, and even all that Marillion coming not from a 6 year old LP copy of "Script For A Jester's Tear", but a recently-purchased CD copy.

It's possible this musical awakening may even have been down to the arrival of the CD player in our house, and the sudden excitement at being able to play music with no more difficulty than popping a plastic disc in a drawer. Not for me, I was still too young to be allowed to touch such precious technology, but my mum and stepdad were probably enjoying the hassle-free music experience.

Before you get too fancy an image here this was a cheap music centre, almost certainly an Amstrad, and attempting to line up likely dates with hi-fi catalogues and my own hazy memories of what it looked like suggest a CDX400. I don't wish to damn the achievements of the mug's eyeful too much but glancing at a brochure and its boast of a whole 5 watts RMS per channel I went "that's not a bad signal-to-noise ratio for a cheap record player" before realising I was looking at the specifications for the CD section.

This was also the point at which they stopped buying singles. For me, having been largely unaware of music before that point, it meant growing up in a world where I was always told to save up for the album, because singles are a waste of money if you're going to want the other tracks on the album anyway. This was perhaps underlined by the latter half of the Britpop era, where anyone who made good B-sides would get a compilation of them made eventually so you didn't even feel you were missing out on those.

They were not alone in this. Singles sales had fallen throughout the 1980s despite overall music sales growing, and part of the sheer diversity of the late '80s charts is that any given single needed fewer sales to reach the charts. It doesn't take that many people to hear the Coldcut remix of Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid In Full" and buy the single which features it on the B-side to have it at #15 and in the chart countdown. (And maybe a few who wanted to hear that "pump up the volume" sample from "I Know You Got Soul" again - the duo sampling themselves on this one).

"Got My Mind Set On You" takes the second spot in early November, but missed out on the top spot thanks to one of those iconic '80s records - T'Pau's "China In Your Hand". Unexpectedly geeky with the band's name referencing Star Trek and the song lyrics referencing Frankenstein, it was another one of 1987's "#1 for ages" records spending five weeks at the top.

The Communards did their usual thing to an old record, this time the Jackson 5's "Never Can Say Goodbye", going to #4 in November, but if you're buying old records look down to #5 and Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me". This is an original 1959 recording, used in a perfume commercial and therefore getting issued as a single and rocketing up the charts as is the way of such things. It was helped along by Aardman making a claymation video to go with it.

"Dirty Dancing" is one of the biggest films of the year with a $214m gross off a mere $4.5m budget, providing the breakthrough career moment for Patrick Swayze. Soundtrack leader "(I've Had) The Time Of My Life" by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes goes to #6 off the back of it in November.

Given Queen's love of the operatic, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that when Freddie Mercury met opera star Montserrat Caballé earlier in the year, a long-time wish he'd expressed on Spanish television in 1986, a collaboration album started to form. It would be a long time in gestation, eventually releasing in 1988, but ahead of this came "Barcelona" (#8 November '87), inevitable future soundtrack to the 1992 Summer Olympics in Crawley.

What's not to like? Probably a lot, but it is Mercury doing a thing he loves with what I am reliably informed is one of the greatest operatic sopranos of their generation. I wouldn't know, I'm nowhere near posh enough to understand opera. I grew up with an Amstrad tower system blasting this out in the living room. Three and a half decades I listen to it on some fairly nice planar magnetic headphones and it's suitably big and dramatic with a lot more dynamic range than I remember.

Mirage have another of their medleys at #8, "Jack Mix IV" suggesting that whatever they were spending their time on, it wasn't thinking of titles. Meanwhile, the Proclaimers have a #3 with "Letter From America", including an odd 10" single with a double groove featuring an acoustic version in one groove and a full band version in the other, for those who love putting on a record without being sure exactly what they'll end up listening to.

December arrives with a whole slew of singles vying for the festive #1 spot. We start with Shakin' Stevens throwing a somehow both faithful and yet incredibly insincere cover of Emile Ford and the Checkmates' version of "What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?" up to #5. Perhaps attempting to repeat the feat of the original taking the Christmas #1, all it makes me want to do is suggest you listen to that version instead.

Comic Relief are also making an attempt at that achievement, gently mocking Mel & Kim by releasing a Mel (Smith) & Kim (Wilde) cover of "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" and going to #3 with it. It's not good, with some very forced banter.

Alison Moyet put out another single that she later regretted as coming from a place of cynicism - I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with her version of "Love Letters" (#4 December '87) even if it was an overt attempt to trap the same magic as "That Ole Devil Called Love" but Moyet felt that the two taken together were making people want to force her into becoming some kind of lounge singer.

There must have been something to it as Rick Astley busts out a surprisingly faithful version of "When I Fall In Love". It would peak at #2 but rapidly fall down the charts as EMI saw an opportunity to reissue Nat King Cole's version (#4 December '87), splitting sales as buyers chose what they felt was the more authentic record.

Astley still ends up a position above Michael Jackson at #3 with "The Way You Make Me Feel", another single from album "Bad" that puts me in mind of "When The Going Gets Tough".

It's one of those charts so busy that some of the new entries don't hit their peak until the new year. Wet Wet Wet's "Angel Eyes (Home And Away)" (#5 January '88) is... well, wet. I have to cover it though, as this is what would become the sound of 1990s boy bands being codified. The blue-eyed soul vocals, the soft synth accents, those sudden little staccato bits which choreograph perfectly with on-stage dance moves... it all comes together here and I don't like it.

The big January hit entering the charts here is Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is A Place On Earth", taking #1 a couple of weeks in. Rick Nowels and Ellen Shipley channel Jim Steinman with the songwriting, and you can almost imagine Meat Loaf with a synth makeover. Perhaps it's a little too uplifting, a feature which has condemned it to a fate of a thousand student union cheese nights.

More novelty records with Morris Minor and the Majors on "Stutter Rap (No Sleep Til Bedtime)" (#4 January '88) which I would almost take as a reasonable parody of the Beastie Boys until it reminds me that comedy which punched down was still very much an accepted thing in the 1980s, lending an unpleasantness to this which I can't get over. When people make some variation of the "you can't make comedy like that any more" complaint it's worth remembering just how lazy some of this stuff which barely rose above the level of your typical school bully was.

(I think this is made worse for me by the knowledge band leader Tony Hawks went on to be a respected comedian and writer, and is therefore much better than this.)

1987 has room for one more comeback, with Cher covering "I Found Someone" and entering the Top 40 at the end of the month, going to #5 in January. It's an absolutely massive power ballad, and started a three-album association with Michael Bolton as producer and arranger.

I keep mentioning January though, and that's because December is dominated by the kind of multi-way battle for Christmas #1 that we haven't seen since the 1970s. I already mentioned the shenanigans which dropped Rick Astley out of the running, so who was taking the lead?

A strong contender and certainly one of the most enduring from this month is the Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl on "Fairytale of New York". A song with a troubled gestation, this had been kicking around in some form since 1985. Then-producer Elvis Costello made a number of suggestions the band found unhelpful, and as that relationship soured Costello left, taking originally earmarked female vocalist Cait O'Riordan with him.

Attempts to get the song out were further stymied by label Stiff Records entering administration in 1986 still owning rights over the band's material, meaning any potential release would involve extended negotiations. Eventually this was resolved to the point the Pogues could start recording again. In the absence of a duet partner, Shane MacGowan recorded a demo in which he sang both sides. New producer Steve Lillywhite suggested sending it to his then-wife Kirsty MacColl to put down the guide vocal for the female part, to which the band realised they didn't need to give anyone else that guide vocal - they had just found the perfect singer.

The lyrical content is overshadowed by glee that there's swearing on a record, and then later arguments about the same kind of awkward "people aren't good at identifying this word is being said by a character and you shouldn't be sympathetic at this moment" argument that afflicted "Money For Nothing", except this time the annoyance is at Kirsty MacColl editing her own vocal line, something she was doing in live performances twenty years before the worst people in the world picked up on it.

That's a shame, because the lyrical content is absolutely fucking fantastic. For me, this is one of the greatest in-the-gutter-looking-up songs ever written, capturing that mix of hope, dreams, lost opportunities, failure, bitterness, and yet somewhere beneath all of that the belief it might just still work out. Do yourself a favour and listen to it properly one of these days.

Despite the latter day recognition it's never made the top spot, peaking at #2 in that Christmas week.

Your Christmas #1 for 1987 is the Pet Shop Boys with "Always On My Mind". This stemmed from an ITV project earlier in the year to mark the tenth anniversary of Elvis Presley's death, which featured current pop acts putting their own spin on his records. Tennant and Lowe's performance went down so well they thought, "why not make a single out of it?"

When I complain about the insincerity of things like Shakin' Stevens, this is the complete opposite. It's so gloriously disrespectful to the source material that you could only make something like this if you absolutely loved those originals. Posit the question of what would have happened if Stock Aitken Waterman had produced Elvis while they were still in thrall to Giorgio Moroder, and then imagine that but done really, really well with not the slightest whiff of the assembly line to it.

The Pet Shop Boys really got the source material, in that while their version sounds nothing like Elvis it's got that sense of going ridiculously over the top, pausing for a moment, then finding a way to achieve some even higher and dramatically more unstable altitude. I have no idea how they took so many elements that in isolation are clearly wrong, and created something so deliciously right.

1988

There's absolutely no letting up as we head into 1988. January sees two exchanges of #1 as the Pet Shop Boys head back down the chart and Belinda Carlisle takes over for a fortnight, before we're back to yet another cover of an old record - this time Tiffany taking on "I Think We're Alone Now". She recorded it at the age of 15, after having possibly the most 15-year-old response to the idea at first, which was refusing to record something so ancient and uncool until George Tobin remixed it as a dance track.

She also claimed to be unaware the lyrics were about teenage sex, and the incredible skeeze factor of having a 15-year-old sing this unknowingly is about the only thing authentically 1960s here. The production is perfunctory, it often sounds painfully like two different takes have been glued together between lines, and the instrumental breaks seem to have been grafted on from a completely different record that just happened to have the same tempo. It's perhaps best experienced through the Top of the Pops performance, which adds the unshakeable feeling of bad karaoke and one of the worst jumpers to ever be worn on television [citation needed].

Somehow the Birthday Massacre managed to take the bones of this and produce the most perfect gothic rock version of it in 2008. I know I'm so far outside the remit of this I can see the Pet Shop Boys sailing way above the concept of "a cover version of Always On My Mind" from here but that record is fantastic, and yet somehow it's like 90% exactly the Tiffany version which... isn't.

Tiffany herself has rerecorded the song, with a bizarre electronic version in 2005 and a rock version in 2019. I'm spending too long on this. There's a whole "I Think We're Alone Now" rabbit hole I need to escape.

The problem is what I end up escaping it to. For 1988 is the ascendancy of Bros. The story starts well enough with twin brothers Matt and Luke Goss being given a saxophone and an electronic drum kit respectively. They formed a group at school with friend Craig Logan playing bass, calling the trio Gloss.

So far, this sounds like a much more promising beginning than the typical boy band story of "150 drama school students attend an audition, 4 are selected". They join up with Bob Herbert who is trying to break into artist management, giving the boys practice space and recording demos while he tries to get them a contract. Unfortunately everyone he approaches refuses to deal with a band whose members are under 18. (Hang on, didn't we just see Tiffany perform on Top of the Pops at 16, from an album where some of the tracks were recorded when she was just 14?)

In another universe Gloss might have gone on to record some sort of painfully beautiful indie album that sold fewer than a thousand copies, but in this one they meet producer Nicky Graham, who puts them on to manager Tom Watkins. Watkins realises that what he's got in front of him is not much use for anything, but if he completely changes the way they dress and groom themselves and replaces all of their material with new songs co-written by himself and Graham, then there are the makings of something which would be very appealing to the teen girl market.

Initial single "I Owe You Nothing" flopped on its first release, but follow-up "When Will I Be Famous?" went all the way to #2 by the end of January. Wet Wet Wet might have had the future boy band sound but Bros had the image, the picture sleeve to "When Will I Be Famous" featuring the boys in poses with brooding expressions and trousers which I could best describe as being, ah, augmented in a certain area. On the back, individual shots - Matt stares pensively at the sky, Luke glares at the camera, and Craig is flirtatiously coy. There's already a band logo, the kind that would be the work of less than a minute to reproduce if you had a biro and an exercise book to hand.

It is product of the highest order and yet... we have seen far worse things committed in this decade. Given the watchword for this kind of activity is blandness I find a surprising amount of texture here. The occasional growled vocal, the rhythm making me think of Ray Parker Jr., the building call-and-response verses; there's plenty that's corny and very much of its time and that last-minute key change is tortuous, but I'm starting to think that if you judge this purely as a piece of pop and aren't looking for some grand artistic statement Bros probably deserved that chart position.

Elsewhere, "Rok Da House" gets a reissue in the wake of people finally waking up to hip house and this time gets to #5. More abrasive than "Pump Up The Volume" and with a foot much more firmly planted in the hip-hop side of things, it's still recognisably the same sample-heavy approach with a strong rhythm underlying it all.

There's still room for house without the hip, Jack 'n' Chill's "The Jack That House Built" going to #6 in February on an absolute flurry of cowbells. Home computers are now entering the fray, with much of this sequenced using an Atari ST.

The ST had released a few weeks before the Amiga in 1985, and beat that system to general availability by nearly six months thanks to Commodore taking a while to figure out software bugs and early production problems. Also in its favour, the ST was usefully cheaper and consolidated this advantage in 1986 with the launch of the 1040ST, the cheapest 1MB computer available at the time.

The graphics hardware wasn't as sophisticated as the Amiga, it didn't have the TV-friendly clock rates, and the sound on early models with their off-the-shelf Yamaha sound chip was nowhere near what the Amiga could do with its custom hardware and four PCM audio channels.

What the ST did have was MIDI. It might not have been able to produce much more than an Amstrad CPC by itself, but if you had a studio full of equipment you could plug it into the ST and suddenly you had a device which could sequence and control everything consistently and repeatably, allowing complex tracks to be built up and edited piece by piece.

When STs started arriving in studios, musicians took to them immediately. Wikipedia has one of those typical Wikipedia lists where the cited references range from "might have used one" to "definitely did not use one on that recording" (and you can guarantee that for a list like that to stand long enough, someone will be viciously guarding it to prevent any edits in favour of historical accuracy), but we know from the provenance of machines turning up in flight cases in computer museums and the liner notes of Fatboy Slim albums that they were particularly beloved by creators of electronic music, especially those who worked alone to assemble their samples and drum machine patterns into tracks.

As a result, the Atari ST far outlived its lifespan as a home computer in the music world. Even at the point a cheap PC could have done the same job much faster and handled much of the production work itself, musicians hung on to their STs because they'd got used to C-Lab or some other vintage piece of software in much the same way a guitarist becomes familiar with their fretboard. There was enough demand for C-Lab themselves to licence and produce their own version of Atari's final Falcon model, although these are now rare and desirable enough you're as likely to find them in the hands of a retro hardware collector as you are a musician.

Oddly, this mechanisation of the process didn't attract anywhere near as much backlash as the encroachment of the synthesiser did in the '70s. Criticisms tended to stick to a practical level around these early computer-driven processes being slow or unreliable, or instruments falling out of sync in complex setups. Even relatively traditional acts like Fleetwood Mac adopted the technology as a means to make their live performances sound more like the studio records while having lighting effects no human lighting board operator could ever have kept up with.

Of course some critics at the more gatekeeping end of the spectrum were horrified that people were making music with a basic home computer almost anyone could get their hands on, but you can probably treat that sort of thing as little more than a sign the world continues to rotate.

Besides, those critics had plenty to be getting on with in 1987. Stock Aitken Waterman had a new protegé in the form of Australian soap actor Kylie Minogue, better known to UK audiences as Charlene Mitchell in "Neighbours".

"Neighbours" was a cultural phenomenon in the UK. Every teenager I knew watched it, causing me great disappointment as with two elder sisters it meant I never got to watch the Hanna Barbera Laurel & Hardy cartoon that was on the other side. Aussie TV boss Reg Watson got the idea while over in the UK working on the hopelessly low-budget "Crossroads" and watching the dour, past-obsessed world of pre-1980s "Coronation Street". That idea fermented while he worked on other soaps after returning to Australia in 1973, and in 1982 he started pitching it to networks: a realistic, relatable soap in which people talked to each other and tried to solve their problems together, rather than the lack of communication and often contrived misunderstandings on which British soaps ran.

It found an audience quickly. By 1987 the programme was sold internationally and watched by more people than lived in Australia total. This made the cast well-known enough to perform outside the show, including benefit concerts. It was at one of these that Minogue performed a duet of "I Got You Babe" with longstanding Play School actor John Waters, returning for an encore with Little Eva's "The Loco-Motion". Plans were set in motion for Kylie to record her own version for national label Mushroom Records, initially with the vocals set to a big band backing. This was then exchanged for a new and more current backing track by producer Mike Duffy, on loan from Pete Waterman's PWL label, who aimed to copy the sound of those early records Dead or Alive cut with SAW.

Meanwhile, Minogue continued to act in Neighbours. One of the most popular elements of the show was the relationship between her character Charlene and Scott Robinson (played by Jason Donovan, another name of which we will hear more anon). The writers set up a storyline where the two would move in together, but as this started unfolding on screen they received complaints from their more conservative viewers. Rather than push into heavyweight subjects such as premarital sex or even HIV/AIDS and risk damaging the programme's popularity, the production team decided to retool the storyline into a wedding.

So popular that Wikipedia has an enormous fully-edited article entitled "Episode 523 (Neighbours)", Mushroom Records decided to release the record, now titled "Locomotion", one week after the episode aired. It became Australia's best-selling single of the decade, and thanks to that Duffy/Waterman connection Kylie was soon on her way to London to record more songs with Stock Aitken Waterman.

The problem: SAW knew so little of this they managed to forget she was due to arrive. They made her wait outside the studio while they wrote a song based on what Mike Stock could half-remember about the actress, then made her sing it line by line without ever hearing it as a whole piece. Minogue went home furious vowing never to work with SAW again, and the trio put what they'd recorded on a shelf and forgot about it while keeping themselves busy with Rick Astley and other projects.

By the end of 1987 Mushroom Records manager Gary Ashley decided he'd had enough of this farce and told them if the record didn't get finished and released he'd be flying over to the UK to sort it out personally. SAW picked what they'd done so far back off the shelf, created a final mix, and released it at the end of December. (Australians got the single, with a different picture sleeve, in February '88).

The result was "I Should Be So Lucky", and while the public took a few weeks to notice it, from the end of January it burnt a trail straight to #1, where it stayed for five weeks. This is the SAW machine in action; a song written in 40 minutes, put together in such disinterested fashion you'd swear some things were still programmed for "Never Gonna Give You Up" and yet they have a huge hit on their hands.

Even the producers themselves were somewhat surprised by how easy this was, realising that not only did they have no follow-up planned for this enormous #1, they had severely pissed off the main person they needed in order to make one. Mike Stock recalls flying to Australia and grovelling until they were forgiven and an album of material recorded in the vanishingly small amount of free time Minogue had outside of her "Neighbours" duties.

Much as the record industry looked down on the trio, their sound was starting to have an influence. Taylor Dayne's "Tell It To My Heart" (#3 February '88) has those same brass-preset keyboard stabs, and the same backbeat awkwardly hedging its bets between hi-NRG and house.

Far outside this world of high gloss and TV star vehicles, Sinéad O'Connor had a difficult childhood, including 18 months in a Catholic training centre on the site of one of the notorious Magdalene laundries. In theory these were refuges for women but in practice they became strict workhouses designed to punish their inhabitants for prostitution or teenage pregnancy. where conditions were tough and sadistic punishments common. Much of the same attitude had seeped through to the training centre, with disproportionate retribution common including sending children to sleep in pitch-black rooms which stank of human excrement.

During some of the happier moments of her time there O'Connor was given a guitar and dispensation to write songs and play music. After leaving she formed a band, Ton Ton Macoute, which eventually resulted in a contract with Ensign Records and then a solo album, "The Lion and the Cobra". She wrote songs to process her feelings about the world she'd grown up in, and second single "Mandinka" (#17 February '88) was a fine example - inspired by watching the television adaptation of Alex Haley's "Roots" and seeing parallels between that and religious oppression around her. Contemporary reviews suggest few people got the meaning, thinking it was just a nice-sounding word.

Billy Ocean's last big hit was "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car", arriving with one of those live-action/animation videos and going to #3. We get a bit of Eddy Grant here and some Whitesnake there, and then all the way down at #35 are The Fall covering the Kinks' "Victoria".

Goth is still providing some surprisingly large chart hits for what you always think of as a bit of a niche, with February seeing the Sisters of Mercy go to #13 with "Dominion" and Eldritch's ex-bandmates The Mission hitting #12 with "Tower Of Strength".

Going even younger than Tiffany's first hit is French singer Vanessa Paradis, who was just 14 when she recorded "Joe le taxi" (#3 March '88), adding to the small roster of UK chart hits to be sung in French.

While Chicago house made its journey across the Atlantic, producers back in Chicago were starting to experiment with the form. It had been launched by and partly named for the "jack" of the TR-909 handclap, and the TR-808 soon found its way in from producers who couldn't get enough of that cowbell. Which begged the question - what other failed music hardware had Roland made?

In addition to providing an electronic drummer that never got bored, Roland had considered some musicians might want the same treatment applied to the bass guitar. The resulting device was the single-oscillator TB-303 Bass Line, which was so laughably bad at this task Roland made just 10,000 before discontinuing it in 1984 and selling the remainder cheaply, a rather familiar story by now.

The TB-303 allowed users to modulate its simple choice of square wave or triangle wave to sound slightly less like a computerised beep, but with the budget hardware the main effect of turning those knobs was to make it sound squelchier. Orange Juice used one on 1983's "Rip It Up" and nobody seemed to notice, with contemporary reviews more focused on sniping at a band who they felt were trying to act bigger than their scene deserved.

A couple of years later in the early days of the Chicago house scene, producers Phuture got hold of one cheap (because it was 1985 and all 303s were cheap) and fell in love with both the squelch and the strange, wobbly character of the sounds produced if you started adjusting the filters and envelopes while the sequence was already playing, against the advice of the user manual. They recorded a 12 minute untitled tape which prominently featured this bizarre sound and passed it to DJ Ron Hardy to play at the Music Box. The recording was issued on bootlegs as "Ron Hardy's Acid Track" owing to the association with drug consumption, in particular psychedelics, at the club. With these in circulation, an official release followed in 1987 titled as "Acid Tracks".

There's a great deal of contention as to exactly who named it and why, but the genre became known as acid house and its iconic sound is the unstable, squelchy pitch shifting of the controls being fiddled with on a basic single-oscillator bass synth while it plays. The TB-303 being, of course, the most iconic of these.

February brings us Coldcut entering the Top 40 claiming this is the "sound of the future" as they also introduce Yazz and the Plastic Population on "Doctorin' The House" (#6 March '88), which combines the sample-heavy abandon of hip house with a bassline that is unmistakeably acid house.

In the same Top 40 we're introduced to Bomb the Bass's "Beat Dis" (#2 February '88). There's elements of the acid house bassline, and the hip house love of sampling taken to a ludicrous extreme with even the theme from "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" making it in, but the real news here is something taken from hip-hop. As boom bap had moved away from drum machines to real drum samples and then artists like Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys drew samples from far and wide to assemble their tracks, they hit on the realisation that an ideal source for drum sounds were the breaks from '60s and early '70s soul and funk records.

One of the most popular early on was James Brown's 1970 "Funky Drummer", on which he turns to drummer Clyde Stubblefield and asks him to improvise on his own for a few seconds. The resulting drum break is laid-back, groovy, and almost perfectly loopable. Hip-hop artists in 1986 loved it, and then Bomb the Bass took it and stuck it on a house record, even fading out to just the drums at one point. This created the nascent genre of breaks, named for the way it cut out the relentless 4/4 time of an 808/909/707/etc. and put in the relaxed feel of an old soul drum break instead.

For all this, "Beat Dis" made its biggest contribution to acid house - by taking the smiley face from the then-current Watchmen comic and sticking it on the cover, giving acid house its defining visual identity.

Yeah, it's barely a couple of weeks into February and already a million things have happened. I like it, it makes these years fascinating to study, but my word it takes a lot longer to write than those bits of the 1950s which were basically, "four people release versions of the same song and they all sound pretty much identical" and somehow those would all maintain the same chart positions for six months.

I still haven't got to Michael Jackson's "Man In The Mirror", not a big hit originally with a peak of #21 in late February, but one of the earliest examples of the kind of quasi-messianistic lyrics which would eventually result in Jarvis Cocker's stage invasion at the 1996 Brit Awards.

The Bangles took their rather urgent rock cover of old Simon & Garfunkel song "Hazy Shade Of Winter" to #11 in early March, and the regular favourite of a Levi's commercial propelling an old reissue up the charts returned with Eddie Cochran's "C'Mon Everybody" up to #14.

We also get Morrissey's first solo single "Suedehead" going all the way to #5 for the end of February. It resulted in a lot of column inches about the skinhead-derived subculture of that name, but the only thing you can really draw from all of that is Morrissey just liked the word.

It doesn't feel hugely different from his work with the Smiths, and that offered some hints as to why the band had split up by this point. Johnny Marr had become frustrated by the band's limited musical palette and Morrissey's insistence on covering what were by then deeply uncool 1960s records for B-sides and in June of 1987 took a short break from the band. This break became permanent after the NME wrote an article speculating a Smiths split, which Marr incorrectly got the impression had been engineered by Morrissey.

The band staggered on for a few weeks trying to record new material, but eventually Morrissey walked out with new guitarist Ivor Perry not feeling great about things either. Whether Morrissey and Marr by themselves constituted "The Smiths" was the subject of a long legal battle which eventually awarded Andy Rourke equal standing in terms of royalties (Mike Joyce had settled earlier for a lump sum), but either way the band was no more.

Morrissey kept working with producer Stephen Street, taking ex-Durutti Column guitarist Vini Reilly and putting together "Viva Hate", a title deliberately referencing the last days of the Smiths.

"Suedehead" enters the Top 40 for the first time along with a few records which represent a decent sampling of the contemporary music scene. Derek B was one of the first UK rappers to achieve chart success with "Goodgroove" (#16 March '88). The influence of Def Jam is clear (Derek B even had Russell Simmons as manager) but it's more laid-back, an easygoing soul vibe underpinned by sampling the Jacksons' "A.B.C." and the American accent that was popular in London's hip-hop scene at the time really helping this feel like it's predicting the sound that would soon start coming out of the West Coast of that country.

"Dominion" (#13 February '88) is there representing the ability of gothic rock to achieve some surprisingly big chart positions in the late '80s. Belinda Carlisle's "I Get Weak" (#10 March '88) flies the flag for the softer side of rock and the power ballad, even if critics suggested it was a trifle smooth and over-produced. (What else is a soft rock power ballad supposed to be, eh?)

Morrissey may be representing early '80s indie, but the Primitives hint at the direction indie pop will take with "Crash", a huge international hit that peaked at #5 back home in March. The jangle is still there at the kind of levels twee pop bands would approve of (and there was enough overlap for Morrissey to appear wearing a Primitives T-shirt) but the songs have bit more of the heft of conventional rock to them, and the kind of pop production sheen that the more defiantly DIY world of twee shied away from. It wouldn't be long before peers such as the Soup Dragons would be taking influences from the world of dance music and turning this into something very distinctly turn-of-decade.

That's not so far off but back in February '88 it couldn't be a week representative of the current state of the charts without some Aitken, Waterman and Stock. We have not one but two singles entering the Top 40. Mel & Kim's "That's The Way It Is" (#10 March '88) was their last hit, Mel discharging herself from hospital to record the lyrics. It's a lot less experimental than SAW's other work with the duo, although possibly that's a sign of how much of that sound had been absorbed into the house style since "Showing Out".

The other SAW number is - well, what could be more representative of chart pop circa 1988 than Rick Astley? "Together Forever" is the highest peak chart position from this batch, at #2 in March, and is so brazenly "let's record the same record again" I'm slightly impressed by the audacity of it. That chart position suggests SAW knew what they were doing; that the public really did want to buy the same single over and over again, and there was no point doing work that didn't need doing.

Perhaps I dwell overlong on this, but... way back in the terms of reference I pointed out that my awareness of "chart pop" started to come in some time in early 1994, and it was treated as kind of a given that it was all repetitive "product", produced by hit factories for manufactured artists using the same basic recipe every time. To find that this was a trend only six years old at the time, and indeed that if I'd been born in 1975 I'd have come to that musical awakening during one of the most diverse and exciting years the charts had ever seen - well, that might be worth a raised eyebrow, but to see the point at which that change happens is fascinating for someone who grew up unaware there was even a change.

Aswad's "Don't Turn Around" is the single to take Kylie off #1 in March, a soft reggae cover of a Luther Ingram version of a Tina Turner B-side (yeah, that's a chain there!) which is fun although I prefer my reggae somewhat grittier. Key progenitors of that style UB40 are also present supporting Afrika Bambaataa and Family on "Reckless" (#17 March '88). It's similarly fun but I find myself missing the more uncompromising nature of Bambaataa's earlier records.

Even with all this going on Erasure land "Ship Of Fools" on #6, despite it being strongly in the early-decade synth pop mould. I may never know what music I'd have ended up buying had I become a pop consumer at this point in time, but given my character I wonder if I'd have become a synth-pop holdout. I've definitely become one during this exercise, and while things more up the Jan Hammer end have received significant attention from the lens of the 30 year nostalgia cycle I think the early British stuff is perhaps still underrated.

Erik B & Rakim's "I Know You Got Soul" finally charts in its own right with a #13 in the middle of the month, but mid-March is about the three-way teen pop lockout between Bros, Tiffany and Wet Wet Wet.

The Goss twins have the biggest hit, with "Drop The Boy" going to #2 (kept off the top by Aswad). My word is early Bros weird, with growled vocals and awkward rhythms. A hint of the kind of classic euphoric build that's been around in pop music since the Template days creeps in toward the end, but my overriding impression remains how strange this is for a band typically pinned as the most exemplary of manufactured pop acts.

It's Wet Wet Wet who have the sound, "Temptation" (#12 March '88) bringing in all those group harmonies that would eventually become a hallmark of boy band production. This is a bit of an oddity; Bros are the boy band but don't sound like one, Wet Wet Wet sound like one but come through the honest approach of a group who gigged together and wrote their own music, even if they did scrub up well for their album covers.

And then at #4 is Tiffany with "Could've Been", which is so far off "I Think We're Alone Now" that you'd be forgiven for wondering if it was two different artists with similar-sounding voices. The poppy beat and "will this do?" production of "Alone" is exchanged for a huge ballad with soaring vocals that, give Tiffany credit, she pulls off. There's maybe one or two slightly thin moments that make you realise this is being sung by someone who was 14 at the time, but given the amount of child-star obnoxiousness I went through in the '70s this is very far from that, as indeed it is from the "I swear these two lines are from completely different takes" feeling of "I Think We're Alone Now".

You wanna know what sits between Bros and Tiffany at #3 at the end of March? It's Iron Maiden and "Can I Play With Madness". (No, you can't, they're very naughty boys and they make jokes about buying condoms.) We're well past the early years of the band figuring out what's what, with their signature gallop in the rhythm section strongly evident. Well, they are on their seventh album by this point.

a-ha have their last UK top five with "Stay on These Roads" going to exactly #5 late in March, and it's a cracker. Perhaps if you wanted to criticise you could complain that it sounds huge without having anything going on to sound huge about, but then U2 have done plenty well out of their "sketches" and I feel this is in the same vein.

The Pet Shop Boys take another #1 in April with their tilt at hi-NRG, "Heart". It's a bit of a kitchen-sink production with the sampler interjections and the string stabs, and I find the whole thing a little too glossy, but record buyers enjoyed it enough to make it one of the year's biggest sellers. The boys had originally considered giving the song to Hazell Dean, who is also in the charts with "Who's Leaving Who" at #4. Yep, that's the ever-reliable SAW at the controls although it sounds like they're having a bit of throwback fun marrying up the old hi-NRG signature with their post-'87 shine. Dean was one of their few champions in the industry, pointing out that for however much people might complain about their factory approach, the trio were still underneath it good musicians and more importantly had none of the typical big producer egos, even being happy to get the teas in when it was their turn.

There's a while of their reign left to go, but the take I'm coming to is they had artists where they played it safe and did what they knew would reliably make a hit single, and others where they decided to have some fun and see what happened. It's those latter ones which show they could be a talented and very interesting production team when they wanted to be.

Natalie Cole (daughter of Nat King Cole) had a long career in the US, but other than a #32 in the early '70s didn't have a presence in the UK charts until her cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Pink Cadillac" in an arrangement she said she thought was too old to pull off hit #5 in April. I mainly know it for the brief spell it had on the school disco circuit, although bear in mind we're talking school discos for very young children. Also we thought it was cool because it's about Cadillacs.

Pebbles had a #8 with "Girlfriend" and suddenly I'm realising how close we are to the 1990s with that new jack swing sound. Pebbles herself would be influential with her work behind the scenes in that era, but I'm getting ahead of myself and there's more than enough to contend with just dealing with 1988 itself.

The workmanlike side of SAW is represented with Bananarama's "I Want You Back", #5 in April and parts so interchangeable with "I Should Be So Lucky" I'm sure they sit in in the same bin back at the factory.

It all sounds impossibly staid next to the end of April giving us the first acid house #1, "Theme From S-Express". It's label Rhythm King again, and while the squelch comes from the Rose Royce record it samples rather than anything from the Roland catalogue, it's topped with an absolute plethora of samples. Curmudgeons might complain it was too "pop" and there were more purist expressions of the form which didn't rely on such over-the-top silliness, but as a marker of how quickly acid house exploded you can't get much more visible than a fortnight at the top of the charts.

Perhaps that achievement is a little undermined by April '88 being an early start to the usual summer silly season in the charts. Radio DJs Pat Sharp (of mullet-sporting and Fun House fame) and Mick Brown formed a duo to perform cover songs as a joke, originated by Pete Waterman, that SAW could turn even them into pop stars. "Let's All Chant" was the first, "whoop whoop" nonsense backed by one of SAW's most faithful Chicago house reproductions. It made #11 and, as you would hope from '80s radio DJs, all proceeds were for charidee.

That early silly season continues with Fairground Attraction's debut single, the rockabilly pastiche "Perfect", taking that #1 spot from S-Express. Maybe lumping it with the other rather inconsequential record purchases of the time is a little unfair, but this is very out of step with the times. I'd expect maybe a #15 or something, but not a chart-topper.

No such allowance can be made for Star Turn On 45 (Pints) with "Pump Up The Bitter" (#12 May '88), inevitably a parody of M|A|R|R|S. I suppose some found it funny, it's at #12 after all, but I can't get past the unpleasant "how dare the kids have fun" air of the whole thing. The novelty band had been around for a while, as their name mocking the early decade craze for medleys suggests, but this was the one big hit.

Harry Enfield also got in on the game, "Loadsamoney (Doin' Up The House)" going to #4 that same week in May. It's a little less mean-spirited and they had the flair to pay ABBA for a proper sample (the short snatch of "Money Money Money" cost about as much as the record made!) but there's really only one basic joke here and it wears thin fast.

I don't particularly like novelty records, have you noticed yet?

Normality resumes for a bit with New Order's remixed "Blue Monday 1988" hitting #3 and Prince getting "Alphabet Street" to #9. Perhaps timely is Prefab Sprout's "The King of Rock'n'Roll" (#7 May '88), a song about a 1950s one-hit wonder remembered for a single novelty song they've grown to hate performing. It's a break from their norm, with Thomas Dolby giving it some of his typically urgent-sounding production.

One of the long-running television-affiliated charities in the UK is Childline, founded in (when else?) 1986 as an offshoot from a "That's Life" special on children whose lives were at risk. In 1988 the organisation started establishing its foundations for long-term fundraising, amidst which the NME produced a charity album, "Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father". This was an in-running-order cover of the famous Beatles LP, with artists ranging from Sonic Youth to Frank Sidebottom. No, that's not a typo, although if it was the mechanism by how it came about would be quite something.

The big draw was Wet Wet Wet covering "With A Little Help From My Friends", released on single as a double A-side with Billy Bragg and Cara Tivey doing "She's Leaving Home". There's not a huge amount to say here; both sides are faithful versions of the originals, and it's a charity record in the UK in the '80s so of course it shot to #1 in a week and stayed there until June.

This denied Kylie Minogue an otherwise inevitable top spot for follow-up "Got To Be Certain", which is pretty much "I Should Be So Lucky" played on a turntable that's running slightly too slow. This was the '80s and there were a lot of cheap music centres around, it's not as unlikely as you might think.

Below it at #3 the footballing records are once more haunting me, with Liverpool FC and "Anfield Rap (Red Machine In Full Effect)". Spirit of the age, eh? They got Derek B in to help them but that doesn't rescue it from sounding like one of the parade of terrible early '80s parody raps, complete with "I'm rapping, isn't this unusual" lyrics and badly interpolated "Twist and Shout" guitar line. Its reputation as one of the worst sporting songs of all time is, unfortunately, deserved.

I say my true pop awakening began in early '94 but we're now into the point where I'm playing some of these and remembering them playing on the radio or some similar household setting at the time they were new. Belinda Carlisle's "Circle In The Sand" (#4 May '88) is one, and Heart's "What About Love?" (#14 May '88) is another, although as with so many power ballads it takes until the chorus for those dusty old neurons to kick in and go, "oh yes, definitely".

Neither of these so much as Aztec Camera's "Somewhere In My Heart" though. The band had spent 7 years trying to break through, achieving some success with Mark Knopfler-produced 1984 album "Knife" but soon eclipsed by the rise of the Smiths. By 1987 founder Roddy Frame was the only original member left, recording largely with session musicians. He decided that if the UK would not give them any more than second-tier indie band status, it was time to move to the US, change the sound, and crack that country instead - against the wishes of record company WEA.

This was a case of "task failed successfully", as sophisti-pop third album "Love" bombed in the US but took off in the UK in the wake of "Somewhere In My Heart", which made it up to #3 in June and spent ten weeks in the Top 40. It makes sense therefore that this would be the one I'm most familiar with, but there was something about this particular tempo which appealed to my mum, my stepdad, or both. It's hard to say this without making it sound pejorative, which it really isn't, but so much of my youth was soundtracked by this kind of mid-130s beat per minute leaking from a room in which DIY was taking place. I guess it's a good tempo for DIY, you're certainly going to get a lot done working at that speed.

On the other side, Hothouse Flowers are one of those bands I never really heard or thought about until I had a summer job working for a guy who absolutely loved them. "Don't Go" (#11 May '88) was their first charting single. Bono had seen the Dublin band on television and helped them put out a single on U2's tiny Mother Records label, which led to a deal with London Records.

Yet another addition to the small number of UK hits sung in French, "Voyage Voyage" by Desireless going to #5 in June, a remix of a 1986 single. It is very French and very 1986, and I am aware neither of those particularly explain the chart position. Even the remix being part down to Pete Waterman, working alongside Pete Hammond, doesn't really count as they didn't change a huge amount from the original.

Waterman and his co-conspirators' hold on the charts was a common topic of derision in the industry, but while many claimed "anyone could have a hit doing that" few seemed willing to actually get out there and try.

This changed when two thirtysomething guys on the dole in the Wirral decided that not only was such cynical commercialism the route to fame and more importantly money, it was perhaps an art form in and of itself. The two were Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty.

Cauty had followed the kind of route you'd expect to end there, being a guitarist in several small bands including Brilliant, a band who never troubled the Top 40 (peaking at #58 in '85 with a James Brown cover) but were notable for being an incubator for future names, as well as featuring Killing Joke alumnus Youth. Brilliant's producers? SAW, and one of their rare failures to propel an act up the charts - perhaps the signature sound was a little too muted, although that bassline on Skeeter Davis cover "The End Of The World" is unmistakeable.

Drummond had not followed that route. He'd started out as a theatre carpenter and then set designer in the 1970s, then in the middle of a tour of a 12 hour stage production of "Illuminatus!" absconded after claiming he was popping out for some glue. He ended up as an A&R consultant for WEA, working with Strawberry Switchblade and, more relevant here, signing Brilliant. He should have been safely middle class for the rest of his life. Then in July 1986 he issued a bizarre press release and quit his job at the age of 33 and a third.

By 1987 he was working with Cauty, a guy "[who knew] where I was coming from", on a hip-hop record. They called the project the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, a direct reference to "Illuminatus!" along with the group's boombox-in-pyramid iconography, and styled themselves Rockman Rock and King Boy D. Where others sampled with abandon, they sampled with "there is no way in hell you're getting away with that", opening "All You Need Is Love" with a straight rip of the Beatles record slamming into the MC5's "Kick Out The Jams", likely yet another "Illuminatus!" reference. It went out as a white label which no distributor in their right mind would touch, followed by a version called "All You Need Is Love (106bpm)" which replaced the bulk of the samples with what I can best describe as "taking the piss", while still leaving just enough in to tweak a few noses.

It was followed by another short-run release, this time 500 copies of "Whitney Joins The JAMs", sampling extensively from "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" with all the permission you should expect by this point, i.e. zero. I do wonder how much S-Express borrowed from this, especially the "Is It Love You're After" horns. The sleeve was printed as "KLF Communications", and upon being asked to deliver a video to "The Chart Show" as a hot independent record the two got a friend to film them driving up there in the ex-police 1968 Ford Galaxie Cauty owned, handing in the only-just-recorded video cassette at the gate.

These releases were followed in June by an album, "1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?)" which released to a slew of terrible reviews. It was at this point the group's rather Discordian approach to sampling attracted the attention of ABBA's management, who had definitely not cleared the extensive use of "Dancing Queen" on second side track "The Queen And I". The duo were ordered by the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society to destroy everything related to the album - master tapes, stampers, unsold copies, the lot. They treated this instruction as they did everything - an art project, in which they travelled to Sweden to "find ABBA" and disposed of a gold disc of the album by giving it to a Stockholm prostitute, threw copies overboard from the ferry, and burned the rest of the stock in a field in Gothenburg.

On being towed back to England after crashing into a moose and having their Ford Galaxie shot by a farmer, they then bought up remaining copies of "1987" from record shops and sold them for £1000 apiece, claiming that this was fully compliant with the requirements as the records were not technically unsold stock at this point. The final thumb of the nose was creating a version of the album in which all contentious samples had been removed but not replaced with anything else, leaving it so bare that there were often long silent stretches between spoken word interludes from Drummond and, incongruously, a fully intact sample from The Fall which the band were presumably fine with.

By 1988 the two had paused the JAMs project and were, by their own words, "skint". They decided to spend their time making a house record based around the Doctor Who theme, but as Cauty started to work on rhythms he landed on a beat last heard in these charts when Gary Glitter was parading around with a teasingly flammable hairdo. Within three days they realised the project was unsalvageable as an underground club release, but could be something much different - a #1 single.

Drummond's time as an A&R man and Cauty's time working with SAW had taught them to look at the world of pop with that same realist, blinkers-off view. The public did not buy craft and artistic integrity. It bought familiar sounds, recognisable feelings and above all, when you got to that summer silly season, it bought cheap tacky novelty and records it thought would demonstrate its excellent comedic taste.

With the kind of panache Hagbard Celine would have been proud of, the two subverted every single part of that criteria. The familiar sound was Glitter's "Rock & Roll Part Two" from 1972. The recognition was Daleks shouting "exterminate" and snatches of the still-recent Loadsamoney record. They grabbed a "you what?" sample from Steve Walsh's version of "I Found Lovin'" and turned it into something out of a school playground. Drummond called it a celebration of trash pop, labelling it "probably the most nauseating record in the world" and in doing so created another masterstroke: either you enjoyed the record on a surface level for its dumb silliness, or you enjoyed in a highly cultured and sophisticated way for its arch commentary on such things.

I speak, of course, of "Doctorin' The Tardis", released as The Timelords.

Perhaps taking inspiration from their earlier zero effort music video for "Whitney", the two credited the single not to their new aliases Time Boy and Lord Rock, but to their car, given the name Ford Timelord. The story was that Ford gave instructions to the other Timelords, which they put into effect. A promotional video was made of the song's apparent writer driving around an airfield with some of the crudest "Daleks" ever made, and that includes the bits in the Jon Pertwee era where they just used off-the-shelf toys for the distant shots.

One of the most important aspects of Drummond and Cauty's eyes-open cynicism about the music industry was they did not consider making a chart-topping single as a case of taking whatever came out of the studio and hoping it sold the most. They played all the industry tricks, releasing during the summer slow sales season and then concentrating their efforts on the small number of chart return shops which actually submitted their sales figures. The result was that even without making much money they still achieved their mission: #1, for a single week in June.

A plan to have the Top of the Pops appearance be by Ford Timelord solo was declined by the BBC, so instead the human Timelords put in a couple of delightfully trashy performances, bringing along their cuboid Daleks for June and then returning wearing hooded robes for the Christmas end of year show. And that was not the end of it. Having achieved the #1 spot, the two wrote down every step they'd taken along that way and published it later in 1988 under KLF Communications as "The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way)".

I read it in the early 2000s, a point at which the book itself stated it would be long obsolete as a practical guide. This was the time at which I was perhaps most cynical about pop, and "The Manual" is by its nature a very cynical book. I think that's reflective of when it was created, though. The industry had never exactly been an altruistic endeavour, and we've seen plenty of evidence of that from rock'n'roll's gimmickry phase to the '70s child star factories turning out unfathomably mawkish records, but it took SAW to throw open the Pandora's box of what constituted the bare minimum to have a hit and the nascent KLF to catalogue in detail exactly what had been in it.

But for all that, I think Drummond had put his finger on something that drove the 2010s pop renaissance which brought me back for a second look. That you could, perhaps, celebrate the trash in and of its own right.

Elsewhere in June, Maxi Priest sticks a thoroughly decent reggae cover of "Wild World" on #5 and we have gender-reversed Beatles cover "I Saw Him Standing There" from Tiffany at #8. There's only one of these records I'd gladly walk out of the record shop with, and it's not the curiously overwrought, somehow four minute long cover of something Lennon, McCartney and Co. got out of the way in less than three.

A late entry from the Italo Disco world as Sabrina's "Boys (Summertime Love)" goes to #3, and that's not the oldest sound about. The Pasadenas were a British soul group who felt that the likes of Terence Trent D'Arby and Johnny Hates Jazz had taken the soul classics they'd grown up listening to and massacred them, turning them into lightweight Drive Time fluff that had none of the excitement Motown and Stax represented in the late '60s and early '70s. "Tribute (Right On)" (#5 June '88) is their debut single and practically a mission statement, name-checking all those influences while trying to bring back the rawer funk of the '70s. They would have a decent chart career, lasting into the '90s.

Morrissey delivered a strong contender for the iconic Morrissey track, "Everyday Is Like Sunday" (#9 June '88). With less of the feeling of Smiths continuation project that dogs "Suedehead", this is more richly instrumented and paints a melancholy picture of life in a faded glory seaside town.

"Doctorin' The Tardis" was always about getting to #1 rather than staying there, and so a week later it's deposed by the livelier 1988 remix of Bros' original flop single, "I Owe You Nothing". It's getting poppier in there with Nicky Graham borrowing a few synth brass stabs from the SAW parts bin and more classical boy band harmonies in amongst the odd growled vocals that are a Bros specialty.

Below it are Fat Boys with another of their covers, this time working with Chubby Checker to create a part-rapped version of "The Twist (Yo Twist)" which is an entertaining throwback to those early New York days of rapping over whatever happens to be at hand. I am however well aware this is turning into a summer of novelties and frippery.

We've got a remix of Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight" at #4, and all that attention sampling Rose Royce is enough for "Car Wash" billed as a double-A with the much-plundered "Is It Love You're After" to make #20 in mid-June.

July begins to settle down a bit, with Glenn Medeiros' soft ballad cover "Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You" sitting at #1 for most of the month. Tracy Chapman peaks at #5 with "Fast Car", all laid back and acoustic to the point I always think of it as later than this. (Its eventual highest recorded position is, with a #4 in 2011 thanks to its use by a "Britain's Got Talent" contestant).

In the midst of this pop rap trio Salt-N-Pepa arrive with "Push It" (originally billed as a B-side to "Tramp" but record companies on both sides of the Atlantic figured out what was going on pretty fast), going to #2 in July and spending 11 weeks in the Top 40. It's easy to dismiss as crossover pop but the group were genuinely influential - consider for a start that they were recording crossover singles at a point the industry outside of the independent hip-hop labels considered rap mostly as a source to mine for novelty records.

Everything But The Girl have their big breakthrough with a cover of "I Don't Want To Talk About It" going to #3 in July. Being more familiar with their later work I'm surprised to find a folkish acoustic guitar cover, although that's not unusual for electronic acts of the '90s; Underworld started as a sophisti-pop outfit, and that's before we consider that Norman Cook is still in the Housemartins at this point. (Who are still bubbling along with plenty of singles in the lower reaches of the chart)

Transvision Vamp's aggressively forward "I Want Your Love" gave them their first big hit at #5. Even with everything else that's happening there's plenty of life in rock, with Pet Benatar at #19 with "All Fired Up". Public Enemy's "Don't Believe The Hype" makes #18.

Kim Wilde returned to the charts with one of the biggest hits of her career, "You Came" climbing the charts over July and hitting #3 in early August. Kylie's original Australian single "Locomotion" finally gets its UK release, although once more it's kept off the top spot by something else and peaks at #2 going into August.

Stock Aitken Waterman themselves were so resigned to their status in the music industry's eyes by this point that they put themselves up in a charity auction, the winner entitled to the production of a pop record. EMI won that auction, and assigned the gift to failing boy band Brother Beyond. SAW didn't give them their house sound but they did give them their house chart position, with an eventual #2 late in August for "The Harder I Try".

When it comes to those August charts, they're dominated by Yazz with her first solo single, a cover of the 1980 Otis Clay record "The Only Way Is Up". So definitive some people will probably read that and go, "it was a cover?", this sat at #1 for most of the month with its acid house bassline belying how faithful the rest of it is.

S-Express have another crack at capturing the magic with "Superfly Guy" but even with a #5 peak it's not quite there, the samples and ideas not dense enough to stop it feeling a bit monotonous by the time you've listened to a couple of minutes of it.

Fairground Attraction put in a decent follow-up with flamenco-tinged "Find My Love" (#7 August '88). There's a fair amount of this kind of laid-back stuff around, and I often find myself listening to the Cowboy Junkies "Trinity Session" album which would release later in the year. Not that I need to look that far - All About Eve have "Martha's Harbour" at #10 on the same chart, putting me in mind of all those wonderful freak-folk albums of the late '60s.

Perhaps no surprise that I finally find the record that started it all for me lurking in these charts. Robbie Robertson's "Somewhere Down The Crazy River" enters the Top 40 on the 7th August, peaking at #15 for the 21st. Unlike Harrison, this one I definitely remember being on vinyl.

I've also mentioned Sport Aid as one of my earliest memories and it would have been this year's one I participated in, soundtracked by Status Quo's official single "Running All Over The World" (#17 August '88), a lyric-swap of "Rockin'".

If you're looking for important things happening in rock that week though, it's a bit further down the charts at #24. Guns N' Roses had flopped with their first release of "Welcome To The Jungle" back in '87 but "Sweet Child O' Mine" found a more receptive audience the following year. A riff famously based around Slash playing a finger-stretching exercise and the kind of extended post-solo noodling that puts me in mind of "Free Bird" and within a few years we've got three albums that became such student dorm room staples that people still owned them when I went to university a decade later.

Yello's "The Race" is one of those sound signatures so ubiquitous you kind of forget it had to go from not existing to existing at some point and it's here in 1988, their first UK chart hit and a decent one, going to #7 in September.

But there's a record I'm itching to talk about before we're into that month, and it's sitting at #6 at the end of August. This is the return of Bomb The Bass with double-A "Megablast (Hip Hop on Precinct 13)" / "Don't Make Me Wait", and of course it's all about that first entry.

I played Xenon 2: Megablast on PC, a port with no soundcard support, and while they tried their best with the PC speaker it really wasn't there. But anyone with the original Atari ST version or the Amiga port fired up their copies to be treated with what was at the time an incredible facsimile of what you got on a 12" single, complete with Bomb The Bass and Rhythm King logos. The Amiga even keeps it going at the same fidelity into the game, although you lose half the sound whenever you fire, quite an essential operation in a shoot-'em-up.

The fact that (controversial opinion inbound) Xenon 2 is not the greatest example of the breed with heavily memorisation-based gameplay and some rather chugging movement when there's a lot happening on screen doesn't matter, because the undeniable coolness of having an actual proper record reproduced to a decent standard on a 16-bit home computer long before these things came with CD-ROM drives as standard propelled it to plenty of 100% and, in some cases, even more than 100% reviews. It's certainly the only 16-bit shoot-'em-up I'm going to mention on these pages, although I will cede that once you're over "Megablast" (or have to listen to it via PC speaker) it is a bastarding annoyance to play.

September 1988 saw the release of "Buster", a Phil Collins film vehicle about one of the participants in the 1963 Great Train Robbery. The film was a tone-deaf romance which added to the Sex Pistols' dalliances with Ronnie Biggs in whitewashing a brutal crime in which train driver Jack Mills was savagely beaten with a metal bar, repainting it as some sort of jolly English japery carried out by well-meaning cheeky chaps. While filming, Collins thought that having Stephen Bishop record a version of 1965's "A Groovy Kind Of Love" as a love theme for his character and wife would work well, and laid down a demo for the film's producers.

He later found out this demo had made its way onto the soundtrack, a development he was ill at ease with as it felt rather narcissistic to both star in the film and provide one of its major musical themes. Still, after watching the scene he agreed it worked well and set to recording a full version himself. The resultant "Groovy Kind Of Love" arrived ahead of the movie in August, taking #1 for two weeks in September and staying in the Top 40 for twelve. For those who needed a trudgingly slow cover of the song in the style of "Invisible Touch" era Genesis, here it is. I guess with those sales figures, that was a lot of people.

It was knocked off the top slot by slow but authentically '60s "He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother", the Hollies version of the classic featuring in a beer commercial and, well, we know how that goes from what must be nearly half a dozen jeans commercials by this point. It shared chart space with Bill Medley's version from the "Rambo III" soundtrack (#25 September '88) although a listen to that suggests most people left the record shop having made the right choice.

The Proclaimers followed up "Letter From America" with "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" (#11 September '88), the surefire way to get all of your Scottish co-workers on the dance floor at the company Christmas party and the cause of at least one punk band wondering exactly what the hell it means to "haver". Having had enough Scottish co-workers in my life to feel fairly confident about making that first point, I already knew that one.

Another remix by Ben Liebrand, this time of Bill Withers' "Lovely Day (Sunshine Mix)" hit #4, including the Art of Noise's famous "hey!" long before the Prodigy made it their own.

It's time for the "of more anon" I mentioned in respect to Jason Donovan, and yet it almost didn't happen. Donovan had followed Minogue in signing a contract with Mushroom Records, but SAW thought producing a second "Neighbours" star would be tacky even by their sometimes interesting views on what constituted the standard there. However, early meetings went very differently to Kylie's frustrating first time in the studio, with all concerned realising they'd very much like to work together.

The three producers had a song on the table that had recently been rejected by Rick Astley, "Nothing Can Divide Us". A quick retool and it was a #5 hit in September, and #3 back in Australia. Sonically it's well toward the same approach they took with Kylie, but a little heavier and with some nods back to those old arpeggiated basslines from back in their hi-NRG days.

Inner City had a #8 with "Big Fun", classic Chicago House although the band were based further around the Great Lakes in Detroit. SAW were paying attention as they had the synth line all programmed in for Rick Astley's "Take Me To Your Heart" (#8 December '88) in a matter of weeks. What were they doing objecting to the sampling of "Roadblock", eh?

While touring the US in support of "The Joshua Tree", U2 had encountered a lot of Americana and roots music, which they decided to incorporate into 1988's "Rattle and Hum" album. "Desire" is their take on the Bo Diddley beat by way of the Stooges and rather more immediate than the very abstract atmosphere of their previous year's singles. It would depose the Hollies from #1 in October, although only for a week.

Whitney Houston recorded "One Moment In Time" as a promotional song for that year's Summer Olympics in Seoul and as the contest drew to a close it went shooting up the charts, taking the top spot from U2. It is very deliberate in doing what it sets out to do, which is my way of saying I cannot find any objective fault in the slightest for an Olympic anthem but it's all a bit too saccharine for me. The Shadows did record an instrumental version the following year, which takes the edge off a bit.

I'm aware I'm operating far into the territory of personal taste here, and in not particularly enjoying either Whitney Houston or a very well-regarded Olympic song that sold a lot of copies I'm on sitting on a very thin outlying branch of the musical appreciation tree. Houston was popular enough that Rick Astley took her as a major influence in proving to SAW that he could compose his own material, "She Wants To Dance With Me" (#6 October '88) hard to take as anything other than a straight-up reference to "I Wanna Dance With Somebody".

When I say that the '80s just wouldn't let go of a genre I wasn't expecting to apply to the brief burst of popularity of a capella covers in the wake of the Flying Pickets, but Bobby McFerrin is up at #2 in October with "Don't Worry, Be Happy". A prominent showing in Tom Cruise feature film "Cocktail" can't have hurt there.

Erasure's fantastic "A Little Respect" took #4 the same month. Synth pop perfection with more than a little of a melancholy end-of-decade feel to it. The genre has been one of the highlights of the decade for me, constantly surprising with its ability to evolve and mature while still keeping much of the excitement of those early Visage and OMD records.

Wee Papa Girl Rappers, a British female hip-hop duo who started out as backing singers for Feargal Sharkey, have their biggest hit at #6 with "Wee Rule". It's more in the tradition of Jamaican dancehall than anything else, although the energetic performance does put me somewhat in mind of the work Ninja did with the Go Team in the mid-2000s.

Not that I have much hope of getting that far in just one lifetime with the rate at which things keep happening in the late '80s. The Beatmasters stick an acid bassline down as a foundation and then get '60s legend P.P. Arnold to sing over the top for "Burn It Up", a #14 late in October.

As it hits that position #1 is taken by Enya with her second single "Orinoco Flow", thankfully nothing to do with the Wombles for those casting a worried eye at the previous decade's charts. Instead it's named both for the studio it was recorded in and the river the lazy singing litter-gatherer was named after. While in some sense you could consider this as coming at the U2-esque idea of "sketches" from a different angle, one big difference is that the chorus is very catchy. As a small child I immediately paid attention to the "sail away, sail away, sail away" bit and I'm sure many others of my age or thereabouts will feel like it's been permanently seared into some dusty corner of their consciousness.

At #3, the sign that acid house has definitely both arrived and been coined as a genre with D Mob's debut single "We Call It Acieed". If you need any more evidence the BBC banned it suspecting in typically staid style the whole thing was a drug reference, although not until after Steve Wright had announced it on Top of the Pops wearing a T-shirt bearing the iconic yellow smiley. Complain as the tabloids might they were too late; the "Second Summer Of Love" was in full flow and rave culture had spread across the UK with this as its first defining sound.

We last saw Frank Farian back in the early part of the decade with post-Boney M outfit the Far Corporation, but he's back launching a pop duo. Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus are Milli Vanilli. Or are they? Farian took one listen to the pair singing and had the whole thing built by studio musicians, over which Morvan and Pilatus would lip sync as merely the public face of the band. It's a tradition going back to the days of bubblegum pop, as was having the kind of contract which allowed Farian to do exactly that.

The subterfuge was plenty effective at first. Lead single "Girl You Know It's True" went to #3 at the end of October, and the up-to-the-minute pop rap production had them lauded as hot new talents. Awards soon followed, but this would be the group's unravelling as subsequent interviews revealed them to speak with strongly accented English far from the smooth, polished performances on the records.

That was a few months away though, and the latest project further bolstered Farian's impressive collection of record certifications, with this single going platinum in the US.

Despite the title, Kylie's "Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi" was not yet another another addition to 1988's roster of French-language songs, with only the title line in that language. The presence of "Orinoco Flow" at #1 denied her yet another chart-topper with a song that would have surely achieved that otherwise, SAW throwing all of their assembly line up in the air and returning something that feels like a British interpretation of a Gallic interpretation of ABBA.

Deacon Blue's "Real Gone Kid" (#8 November '88) was notable for featuring a ridiculous number of B-sides - three of them, including a slightly unexpected Hüsker Dü cover.

As the momentum of "Orinoco Flow" finally started fading, it was replaced by everyone rushing out to buy Robin Beck's "First Time", keeping that record on the top spot until the yearly Christmas chart battle got into full flow in December. It could almost not have been; she recorded the song in 1987 for a Coca-Cola commercial, before it became mired in an argument between the beverage company and label Mercury Records over which single to promote in the wake of the TV appearance causing it to flop in the US. These problems did not trouble the European release of both commercial and record in 1988, with #1 positions across the continent.

Below it at #2, Yazz with "Stand Up For Your Love Rights". Produced this time by the Beatmasters instead of their rivals Coldcut, the regulation 303 bass squeaked past the BBC's two month blockade on all things acid house as the record did not technically mention that genre by name.

The sheer amount of things which have happened in only a few years in pop finally starts to break down the walls of reality themselves. The Art of Noise return to the charts with a cover of Prince's "Kiss" that has vocals by, and I reiterate my point about the very fabric of reality failing, Tom Jones. None of this makes any sense and yet it somehow all works. Taking a #5 at the very end of October was the result.

A surprisingly late arrival into the UK charts (they had been going since 1977, and had a huge international hit with "Conga" in 1985) was the Miami Sound Machine. 1988 was to be their year in the UK, with "Anything For You" going to #10 in September and then "1,2,3" going one position better at #9 in November. Perhaps in part due to them giving lead singer Gloria Estefan equal billing with the band name for multi-platinum album "Let It Loose".

Chris de Burgh is back with "Missing You" (#3 November '88). Think much the same except this time the lady is the one "that I adore" rather than the one in red.

Brother Beyond are back with SAW for "He Ain't No Competition" (#6 November '88) which sees them casting their influences back to before hi-NRG was a glint in Moroder's eye for something which sounds an awful lot like mid-'70s early disco with a dose of the Europop. It's slight as anything and that would definitely become a boy band production hallmark, but so outside their house style I wasn't sure if it was them at first.

The first Top 40 of November sees the entry of INXS and their first single from new album "Kick", which is "Need You Tonight". It's their sixth album but this is the point at which the UK takes them to heart and they become chart mainstays, although following up this one's peak of #2 proved a challenge.

Salt-N-Pepa put their spin on "Twist And Shout" for a #4, energetic but I think being shackled to the structure of the old Beatles record takes away a lot of what made "Push It" so much fun.

At #21, the Traveling Wilburys with "Handle With Care". This was a follow-up project to "Cloud Nine", with George Harrison and Jeff Lynne getting the idea to form a good old-fashioned supergroup of the type that had been around in the late '60s. Lynne had also been working with Roy Orbison on a similar comeback album, and over a lunch in early 1988 the three of them agreed to the idea of creating the group, albeit initially with the idea that Orbison would merely come along to the recording and observe.

Sitting on the sidelines doesn't sound much fun but then the Big O might have seemed a bit of an odd choice for a collaboration, being from a generation of musicians prior to Harrison and Lynne. His last record in the UK Top 40 had been "Penny Arcade" at #27 in October '69 and that was well in to a career slide that steepened heavily through the '70s. Not for want of quality in the music; mini-epics like "Southbound Jericho Parkway" proved that Orbison could write beautiful records but much like the Everly Brothers in the late '60s (cf. "I Wonder If I Care As Much") was working against being out of step with the times; a faded rock-n-roller dogged by stories of off-stage indiscretions.

Orbison had seen somewhat of a rehabilitation in the mid-'80s, however. Popularity in Eastern Europe and well-received Greatest Hits compilations in the UK gave him impetus to keep going, and a generation of '70s musicians were keen to highlight the influence his records had on them. He marked 1987 with a flurry of activity and over that early 1988 lunch suggested Harrison and Lynne record a single there and then to fill an obligation of the "Cloud Nine" release schedule, and that since no professional studio would be able to accommodate them at such short notice they could borrow Bob Dylan's private one.

Dylan himself was at a career low point in 1988. 1983's "Infidels" was well received, but follow-up "Empire Burlesque" invited suggestions that he'd disappeared too far into '80s-style production and both "Knocked Out Loaded" and "Down In The Groove" were disappointments. Harrison was one of the few to defend him in interviews, and the two got on well.

During that time Harrison had also sparked a friendship with Tom Petty of the Heartbreakers, who'd been supporting Dylan on tour. Friendly enough that he realised he'd left his guitar at Petty's house before going to lunch, so popped round to retrieve it and decided that since Petty knew most of the people at the impromptu session, he ought to get an invite as well.

"Handle With Care" was the result of that, with the band named after a frequent comment from Lynne during the "Cloud Nine" sessions that any technical problems could be ignored, as "we'll bury" them in the mix. They adopted alter-egos; Harrison as Nelson Wilbury, Lynne as Otis Wilbury, Orbison as Lefty Wilbury, Dylan as Lucky Wilbury and Petty as Charlie T. Wilbury Junior. It's a subterfuge immediately undermined the moment Bob Dylan steps up to sing his vocal lines but this was never intended to be a secret project, just another little fun detail.

It was immediately deemed too good to go out as a mere bonus track and that the Traveling Wilburys should be fleshed out into a full project with their own album and, well, here we are. Maybe I'm spending a lot of time on a #21 but then I heard this playing on near-constant rotation around the house when I was younger, well into the early 2000s, and I also quite like it.

Late November settles down into a pattern broadly representative of the year's greatest hits - Iron Maiden at #6 here, Tiffany at #13 there, some house, some soft rock, Phil Collins and the Pet Shop Boys, a Rick Astley song which sounds near-identical to three other Rick Astley songs... you know how it goes.

Bomb The Bass directly reference Kiss FM on "Say A Little Prayer" (#10 November '88), although not on that frequency you don't any more. Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" goes to #8 and it's hard to find something more exemplary of the production on "Bad". I remember people being particularly fond of recreating this synth sound back in the days of tracker modules; I guess it's a nice short distinctive sample. The single also helped advance shoe engineering with its "impossible" 45-degree lean; achieved originally with cables and a harness, but later live shows used shoes which clipped into special slots on the ground.

And with that, we're into December.

The BBC give up on their short-lived acid house blockade, allowing Humanoid's "Stakker Humanoid" (#17 December '88) on to playlists. Perhaps the tabloids had run out of attention span for that particular crusade, with more exciting things to concentrate on such as the salmonella scare and the increase in interest rates as that economic boom started to unravel.

Early chart peaks for some attempts to update some very 1960s name. Petula Clark wasn't even involved for the light house makeover of "Downtown '88" (#10 December '88), claiming she was listening to the radio in the car when she suddenly realised it was her own song. It's more successful than infamously bad Beach Boys resurrection "Kokomo" (#25 December '88) which, given the lack of Brian Wilson's involvement and the (gestures vaguely in the direction of, well, everything) feels an awful lot like listening to a latter-day Starship record.

Status Quo's "Burning Bridges (On And Off And On Again)" takes a respectable #5 but sounds familiar in a way that Status Quo's signature shuffle can't explain by itself - it's the bones of this that "Come On You Reds" is based around. It's true, I really can't escape this ringing in my ears.

Bros throw in their attempt at a Christmas (or at least winter-themed) single with double A-side "Cat Among The Pigeons" / "Silent Night" but the fans were just too keen, with it entering the charts at #2 and gently descending from there. There are some dark themes on that first side, but for me both are noticeable for the first Bros singles in the charts to abandon those growly vocals and jumpy rhythms in favour of the soft, sugary texture beloved of later boy bands.

No more top five hits for a-ha, but still a #13 for "You Are The One" although it is a little on the generic side. New Order throw themselves behind the acid house movement during a trip to Ibiza with "Fine Time" (#11 December '88). Inner City's poppier and acid-free "Good Life" outsold it though, taking a #4 in the new year.

The "Buster" soundtrack continues to provide chart hits as the Four Tops rise to #7 with Phil Collins-produced "Loco In Acapulco". There's just enough of the original magic here to avoid another tragic "Kokomo" situation although I doubt it's going on my '88 mixtape.

U2 deliver one of their most straight-up rock singles for years with "Angel Of Harlem" (#9 December '88). I miss the soundscapes of "The Joshua Tree" though; other people do this sort of thing better.

I still kinda count EPs as cheating, but Erasure's "Crackers International" did sell well throughout December (eventually peaking at #2 in that first chart of January) and featured tracks like "Stop!" give a good indication as to why. As the title of the EP suggests, this is a deliberately Christmas-focused collection and I guess it's time to talk about the enormous chart battle for 1988's #1.

If Stock Aitken Waterman had initially thought producing two "Neighbours" stars on the same label was tacky, they soon softened on that idea upon seeing the commercial possibilities. British broadcasts of the soap lagged their Antipodean airings by about sixteen months, meaning Episode 523 would go out in November 1988. Those who knew where the storyline was going suggested that being signed to the same record labels with the same producers in highly tacky fashion, the two could perform a duet.

SAW responded that the idea was "crass", that even they would not be so brazenly commercial, and generally played coy knowing that behind the scenes Kylie Minogue was not keen to have attention drawn to the fact the on-screen romance was mirrored by an off-screen one between the pair. This high-minded artistic integrity lasted until Woolworths suggested that should such a record be available for Christmas 1988, they would order 250,000 copies of it.

"Especially For You" was the result and Woolworths were not being too optimistic when they placed that order. It was a giant seller, thanks to that perfect timing and pent-up demand. SAW play it as safe as safe can be - a straight-up mid tempo ballad with a hint of '70s Europop to it, like they've been tasked to produce a dictionary definition of chart pop. I guess in some sense they have.

Somehow the Kylie curse struck yet again, and while it did go to #1 in January it missed out on the festive top spot.

Christmas #1 went to Cliff Richard with "Mistletoe & Wine". I have no idea what's going on either. Perhaps the British public were in one of their typically mawkish moods, perhaps they were pining for the days when a Christmas #1 was defiantly Christmas-themed, perhaps Cliff was just unusually good at mobilising his large (if, by reputation, somewhat advanced in years) audience to get out in record shops. Whatever, it sold 750,000 copies, keeping it at #1 for most of December and making it 1988's biggest-selling single outright.

1989

I don't really know how you come back from that so let's dive into the last year of the decade and see what it manages to pack into the twelve remaining months.

Kylie and Jason finally take Cliff off the top spot in the first chart of the New Year, and there's an early peak for a single which had been climbing the charts for most of December, Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance" reaching #3. Half boom-bap hip-hop, half modern dance-pop with a healthy dose of Moroder-influenced bassline, it doesn't come as too much of a surprise to notice Bomb the Bass's Tim Simenon there in the credits as one half of the production team.

"She Drives Me Crazy" from the Fine Young Cannibals is a quick rush to its #5 peak in January '89, recorded at Paisley Park and co-produced by David Z, a longstanding Prince collaborator. Which is to say that influence is noticeable, and makes for a more pleasurable listen than my previous encounters with FYC in these pages. I think I once described that restrained burst of distorted guitar as "ultra-smooth" aged about 9 or 10, and 33 years later I'm going to stand by that.

The '80s has time for one last resurgence of the medley trend, with Will To Power's "Baby I Love Your Way / Free Bird" following up FYC at #6. This isn't really the same thing though, being more of a straight mash-up of the two songs with a light sophisti-pop makeover.

Marc Almond of Soft Cell's love for old records had already been evident on "Tainted Love", but when he cut a version of old Greenaway/Cook classic "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart" it came to the attention of Gene Pitney, and a duet ensued, with "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart (ft. Gene Pitney)" delivering a huge #1. It's an enjoyable version, with a respectfully healthy dose of mid-'60s soupiness.

Mike and the Mechanics was a side project Mike Rutherford had toyed with while things were quiet with Genesis. It started as toying around with session musicians but from 1985 he started making it more of a permanent band, with "Silent Running" scoring a #21 thanks to use in the film "On Dangerous Ground". They were bigger in the US early on, but second album "Living Years" gave them a huge UK hit with "The Living Years" (#2 January '89).

This underlines my earlier point that "Invisible Touch" was very much a Genesis collaboration, because you can draw a clear line from that sound to this one, especially given a couple of years have elapsed.

Gene Pitney is up at the top of the charts and now that Roy Orbison project which was in the works as the Traveling Wilburys were formed bears fruit, with album "Mystery Girl" hitting #2 on the album charts and "You Got It" #3 on the singles. It was unfortunately posthumous; Orbison died at just 52 from a heart attack in December 1988, and never got to see his own chart comeback.

I very much did, and "You Got It" was a household staple. With it sharing so much of its origin with "Handle With Care" it's no surprise this sits in a similar sonic place to the first Wilburys album, although that's no bad thing. I don't really want to go at 52, but if it was on a career high like this then that would be some consolation.

Roachford's "Cuddly Toy" saw a #4 on its re-release, a rather conservative version shorn of the extended mixes of the earlier 12" releases, including a somewhat genre-hopping seven minute version called the "X-Rated Acid Toy Mix".

Adeva's debut single "Respect" goes to #17, a house-tinged and mildly rewritten cover of the old Otis Redding number made famous by Aretha Franklin.

Holly Johnson (ex Frankie Goes To Hollywood) made his return in 1989 with solo album "Blast", with "Love Train" (#4 February '89) as the lead single. There's some guitar work from Brian May and when it comes in you'll notice it.

It's starting to feel very much like we're approaching the turn of a decade I am very familiar with, as Bobby Brown brings the new jack swing of "My Prerogative" to #6 in February, a long way from his career beginnings in New Edition. There are a few '80s hangovers like some very urgent keyboards but I can hear a lot of the '90s sliding into place here.

I can also hear the spectre of the '70s still rearing its head as an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical delivers a huge chart hit, this time "Aspects of Love" leading man Michael Ball on "Love Changes Everything" (#2 February '89). It's big, it's bold, and I don't think I've heard that much vibrato in a voice since Buffy Sainte-Marie was recording for Vanguard.

I suspect this was one for the grans, though. Yazz's "Fine Time" at #9 sounds much more current, and even the Drive Time audience who'd be enjoying Hue and Cry's sophisti-pop "Looking For Linda" (#15 February '89) would have been a good 20 years younger.

Sam Brown had a decent career as a backing singer, more decent than starting out with a first job on much-derided Small Faces send-off "78 In The Shade" might have suggested, and "Stop!" gave her a #2 in February '89 although she would become more of an album-only artist after this initial success.

Morrissey made his statement on the kind of whitewashing that made "Buster" a hit and Ronnie Biggs a household name with "The Last of the Famous International Playboys" (#6 February '89), ruminating on the media image of the Kray twins. Reviews complained that it was a less-good "Panic", perhaps teasing at the presence of some ex-Smiths bandmates on the records, but I think there's a good point being made here.

I had never quite credited how long Texas had been around when "White On Blonde" stormed the album charts in 1997, but the Scottish band's first hit comes with "I Don't Want A Lover" at #8 in February. There's a little Big Country influence here, a little U2 influence there, and a strong sense that somehow they managed to do more or less the same sort of thing for eight years before the pop world suddenly noticed. (Although with the collapse of Britpop feeling very impending circa '97 I do get the feeling people in certain circles were clinging on to anything which sounded vaguely like '60s revivalism, which the more overtly soul-influenced "White On Blonde" happened to coincide with)

Tone-Loc's "Wild Thing" hits #21 at the end of February and while this might seem like a very tame version of the Beastie Boys there is something pivotal happening here. Tone-Loc and label Delicious Records are both based in Los Angeles rather than the established hip-hop capital of New York.

L.A. had hosted its own hip-hop record labels since 1981, but achieved little traction outside of the local area. In the UK, what precious little attention for rap that existed outside of obvious novelties and parody records went to the East Coast.

The prevailing view, and one not entirely fair or accurate, was that New York as the birthplace of hip-hop was making all of the creative advances with its focus on lyricism and expanding the sonic palette. The West Coast was at best a secondary centre, full of party-time DJs content with 808s and electro beats as if it was still 1982.

"Wild Thing" was part of a brace of West Coast records that showed L.A. could be something more than just a local scene existing in the shadow of what was happening on the other side of the country. Smoother, more coherent, a little more laid-back rather than trying to assault the ears with as many samples as could possibly be fit on a record. (Clearing them, not so much; a Van Halen sample on "Wild Thing" eventually became a settlement for $180,000).

In the wake of Guns N' Roses hitting widespread popularity in the UK, Poison had their first big hit with "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" (#13 March '89), an uncharacteristically slow ballad from the glam metal band. Def Leppard had #15 in February with "Rocket", a late release from their 1987 album "Hysteria" of which some parts dated back to 1984. Reviews complained that it was almost a parody of the hard rock genre, but that didn't seem to do the sales any harm.

Marc Almond loses the #1 spot to Simple Minds with "Belfast Child" in mid-February, a record which is a heartfelt piece of social commentary but takes absolutely forever to get going. I wonder what the balance of sales between the 7" and CD version is as this feels very much like something you'd buy to show off the fidelity and absence of pops and clicks in the quiet bits.

S-Express continued to do their thing on Rhythm King with another acid-tinged bassline on "Hey Music Lover" (#6 February '89) although the strong disco influence makes this feel rather lighter and poppier than most.

As Michael Jackson's success as a solo artist grew, speculation about what he was doing with all that money did also. A couple of plastic surgeries and the onset of vitiligo, a disease in which skin starts losing its pigment, turned the rumour mill into a furnace. Did Jackson sleep in a hyperbaric chamber and take supplements to keep himself youthful-looking and his voice high-pitched? Was he deliberately bleaching his skin? Was he obsessed with the bones of Joseph Merrick?

People in Jackson's orbit denying these rumours seemed to add just as much fuel as those spreading them, and the singer didn't always help himself with his public persona - purchasing a pet chimpanzee called Bubbles and then taking the ape on his tour of Japan helped give rise to his media personification as "Wacko Jacko", a childlike and impulsive character who was unable to stop himself from doing weird things.

The worst was yet to come as Jackson's habit of inviting children to the Neverland ranch for sleepover parties turned into sexual abuse trials in 1993 and 2005, both with the inevitable media circus. But even before this, the singer penned "Leave Me Alone" (#2 February '89), a rant about the way he felt he was being treated whose lyrics sit somewhat at odds with the bouncy production and interjected "hee-hee"s.

Gloria Estefan follows up the success of "Anything For You" with a reissue of "Can't Stay Away From You", the Miami Sound Machine reduced to a clear second billing on the cover. It's slow and plodding but that didn't stop it from getting to #7 in March.

Comic Relief's single for 1989 is "Help!", Bananarama backed by comedians French & Saunders billing themselves as Lananeeneenoonoo. This had originated with a sketch mocking the band, but like so many things this came from a place of affection with both of them being fans of the band. By this point the Bananas had changed line-up, with Jacquie O'Sullivan replacing Siobhan Fahey. The latter had gone to form solo act Shakespears Sister, although by 1989 Marcella Detroit had bumped the number up to a duo. I'm sure we'll hear from them in due course. In the meantime, "Help!" is a fairly straightforward cover of the Beatles hit with a spoken-word intro and a few asides during the song providing the "comic" bit of Comic Relief.

Brian May's been a busy lad in the late 1988 recording season, as he's providing a solo for Living In A Box's "Blow The House Down", a #10 in a style which is starting to feel a bit dated and forgettable by this point in the decade. A man can only listen to so many unnecessarily urgent keyboards, y'know?

Tyree Cooper's hip house "Turn Up The Bass" hits #12 with a frankly silly number of different mixes to collect across multiple 12" singles, most of which feature a very current 303 bassline for at least some of the runtime. The other side of Dusty Springfield's Pet Shop Boys collaboration gives us "Nothing Has Been Proved", which went to #16 in March and featured in Profumo affair biopic "Scandal".

SAW co-opt the acid house sound and make one-hit wonders of The Reynolds Girls with "I'd Rather Jack" (#8 March '89). This is another case of them thumbing their noses at the rest of the industry, mocking DJs who played classic rock in preference to more club-influenced sounds and, naturally, the kind of Stock Aitken Waterman records that were flying off record store shelves.

Like, for example, "Too Many Broken Hearts". Absolutely straight down the middle Stock Aitken Waterman production, Jason Donovan recording the lyrics in isolated batches on the odd day here and there, and (probably untrue) rumours the entire thing had been written in ten minutes on the toilet. It was #1 a week after entering the Top 40, because of course it was.

Not for want of competition, either. Huge-selling singles entering the Top 40 that same week include Paula Abdul's "Straight Up" (#3 April '89). She started out as a cheerleader and moved on to doing choreography on Janet Jackson videos, which may explain the new jack swing sound. "Forever Your Girl", the album from which this single hails, became one of the most successful debut albums ever.

Some of that competition was internal. Donna Summer's comeback hit "This Time I Know It's For Real" (#3 March '89) is instantly recognisable as coming out of the SAW stable. This is pleasingly appropriate given the original SAW sound owed so much to "I Feel Love", although this it's the post-house Kylie/Astley/Donovan sound that powers this one.

Fuzzbox (shorn of the "We've Got A" and the "And We're Gonna Use It") take goofy and only occasionally irritating Thunderbirds tribute "International Rescue" to #11 at the end of March although this was close to the end of their commercial career, with album "Big Bang!" receiving mediocre reviews and the band splitting up in 1990 when WEA decided sales did not justify a follow-up.

Madonna's acting career had continued to underwhelm, and the singer started 1989 at a personal low point, divorcing Sean Penn in January. Entering her thirties and wrestling with feelings of Catholic guilt she decided the route forward was to make more mature music, to choose the direction of pop rather than follow it.

"Like A Prayer" was the result. Hours of painstaking work in the studio (and a few fights with co-producer Patrick Leonard where Madonna wanted her own sonic stamp on the record) combined with lyrics and a video full of overt religious iconography with a head-on confrontation of racism. It was a shrewd courting of overblown tabloid outrage and the world delivered, with open boycotts, MTV stubbornly refusing to drop the video from rotation, and even the Pope getting involved. Pepsi, who had just advanced $5m on an advertising contract with Madonna, ran out of there so fast they had no option but to let her keep the advance.

It all paid off, the single taking #1 from Jason Donovan a week after entering the Top 40 in March and garnering critical acclaim for this new, darker direction.

R&B continued to make inroads with Soul II Soul's "Keep On Movin'" going to #5 in March. Madonna had a point; the perkiness of '80s landfill and strained efforts of sophisti-pop were sounding increasingly dated.

There's still time for a few last hurrahs, though. Canadian band Kon Kan had heard what the Pet Shop Boys did for Elvis and decided the most amusing target for a wilfully disrespectful cover would be Lynn Anderson's old country record, "Rose Garden". The result was "I Beg Your Pardon", part vintage early decade synth pop, part sampler stutters, and a fair amount just throwing in whatever they were amused by. It took a #5 in early April.

Another '87 holdover from Guns N' Roses as they enjoy their sudden popularity, with "Paradise City" going to #6 at the end of March. Not the last either; "Sweet Child O' Mine" would see another reissue and also go to #6 in June before they finally found some new tracks to release.

The Bangles finally left behind all vestiges of their jangle-pop origins for "Eternal Flame", a record which presages much of the sound of those early '90s chart-cloggers which stayed in the top spot for ages. It was no slouch itself, locking out the #1 spot for most of April.

Pat and Mick are back with another SAW-produced charity cover single, "I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet" going to #9 in what is evidently a slow beginning to April.

At #11, though, we have the next big movement in house music. Italian artists had a knack for making something very distinctive out of a genre - consider the stripped-down mechanism and accented vocals of Italo Disco - and when they got hold of Chicago house decided that what it needed was a bouncy, upbeat mood, big diva vocals and the Korg M1.

The M1 was a watershed moment in synthesisers. With a whopping (for the time) 4MB of built-in ROM it featured real recordings of instruments from sitars to wind chimes, which formed the basis of its synthesis; each instrument had separate samples for attack and sustain and the M1 would combine these along with additional filters depending on how hard and how long a key was pressed. Sitting somewhere between the repetitive sound of a sampler and the unrealism of a purely oscillator and filter-based analogue synth, the result was something clearly identifiable as the instrument it was supposed to be and yet obviously fake.

Unlike most of the iconic instruments I've mentioned, this one was enormously successful from the moment it launched in 1988, having sold a quarter of a million by the time it was taken off the market in 1995. It was particularly loved for cheap stock music, where one person with a single instrument could turn out fully-instrumented pieces even if they sounded a bit obviously done on a keyboard. That same artificial sound also attracted early Italo house producers, who were enamoured of one preset in particular: the piano.

Coldcut brought the sound to the UK with "People Hold On", featuring Lisa Stansfield as the obligatory vocal "diva" (the genre also being referred to as diva house). Yeah I know, "Ride on Time" gets all the credit but that won't land for a few months yet.

Transvision Vamp returned to the upper reaches of the chart with "Baby I Don't Care" (#3 April '89), brattish guitar pop with more than a little of the early Bangles to it. Several band members had cut their teeth in late '70s punk bands and it shows. Holly Johnson is one position under it at #4 with "Americanos".

Simply Red's monstrously successful third album "A New Flame" had its biggest hit with "If You Don't Know Me By Now", a typically stodgy but otherwise faithful cover of the 1972 Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes record that is pretty much etched on the musical consciousness of anyone who lived through the time. At a peak of #2, it certainly sold a lot.

U2 continue to turn out singles from "Rattle And Hum", B.B. King adding some authenticity to the Americana by providing guitar and vocals on "When Love Comes To Town" (#6 April '89). Despite a long career - the guy was still working into his late eighties - this is B.B. King's only entry in the UK Top 40, assuming something weird doesn't happen between me writing this and you reading it.

The Cure have their biggest hit with "Lullaby" at #5 in April. Which is surprising as by the time my university hallmates were rediscovering them in 2001 thanks to a well-timed Greatest Hits compilation, this was one of the least-played tracks, with "Friday I'm In Love" and "The Lovecats" being the most likely to reverberate around the hall of residence.

(This itself appears to have changed in later years, with "The Lovecats" being among the least-streamed of the well-known hits)

Metallica's "One" hits #13 in late April, an epic that's bordering on progressive rock in its combination of length and musical shifts. This was not uncommon for thrash metal bands at the time, with Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth mining similar strata. A few years later Dream Theater's "Images And Words" would codify the genre of progressive metal, and in classic prog album-focused style would leave the singles chart entirely untroubled.

A warning reminder that we're only a few months from the 1990s and therefore the soggy early '90s ballad with Natalie Cole's "Miss You Like Crazy", a May #2 that hung around in the Top 40 for 12 weeks, another worrying portent of the decade about to follow.

Also early in May, a reissue of Midnight Oil's 1987 land rights protest song "Beds Are Burning" goes to #6. The band were keen for this to be seen as distinctly rooted in Australia and not taken as the kind of generic "protest about abstract stuff, yeah" anthem which plagued the mid-'80s, filling the lyrics with local references to ensure it.

No such concerns for fellow countryperson Kylie as "Hand On Your Heart" is the most perfectly generic SAW love song. They turn up the control marked "house" by maybe ten percent or so and that's about it as far as noticeable changes go. This one did at least break the Kylie curse by not being pipped to #1 by anything, going to that position a week after entering the Top 40.

That said, it only stayed there a week before being deposed by another single SAW had a hand in, a re-recording of "Ferry Cross The Mersey" featuring Gerry Marsden accompanied by Paul McCartney, Holly Johnson and The Christians.

By 1989 the '80s dream was unravelling fast. Interest rates had started rising in mid-1988 in response to concerning inflation figures and in a country that was now fat on credit this was bad news. By the middle of the year house prices had flatlined and by autumn they were falling across much of the country. When interest rates hit their peak of 14.88% in October and stayed there for a year, it put 400,000 households in mortgage arrears and worsened the crash as banks seized properties and sold them off at rock-bottom prices.

As the accounts went into the red and the prospect of recession went from impossibility to certainty, the social cost of the "greed is good" decade started to mount up too. The divorce rate had skyrocketed. Crime was up. Communities had lost their cohesive feel as a nation took to its cars and its Drive Time radio. And on top of all this, faith in the institutions of the country was fading between scandals, badly-run institutions and underfunded public services.

One of the most impactful of these was the Hillsborough disaster of 15th April 1989. The poor safety standards of stadiums had already resulted in one charting single in the wake of the Bradford City fire in 1985, and things were little improved as Liverpool fans were hustled into fenced standing-only terraces for an FA Cup semi-final in Sheffield. Fearing overcrowding, the police match commander opened an exit gate, which had the opposite effect - fans rushed for the open gate crushing those already inside against the barriers.

In total, 97 people died and 766 were injured. What came next was worse. South Yorkshire Police doctored witness statements and invented stories about hooliganism and drunkenness to cover up that they had allowed the supporter pens to be loaded unevenly, had acted too late in opening the exit gates and then had not done even the most rudimentary crowd control to prevent more supporters entering the already overcrowded areas of the stadium.

Conservative MP Irvine Patnick fed some tall tales to The Sun newspaper, which editor Kelvin MacKenzie decided to run as an provocative front page with the ironic headline "The Truth". You'll still have a hard time finding a copy of The Sun in Liverpool to this day, even after later inquests fully exonerated the fans. And the fallout of this and things like it is a foundation of our modern political landscape. Britain is not a place of chaps in bowler hats who play by the rules and have our best interests at heart. The politicians lie. The police lie. The newspapers lie. You'd kinda hope we'd be better at spotting we're being lied to when the lies are things we want to hear, but here we are and I'm not going to change that hundreds of thousands of words deep into a history of one narrow facet of UK pop music.

All of which is to say "Ferry Cross The Mersey" was released a few weeks later as part of the charity effort for the victims of the disaster, and like Marsden's previous effort with The Crowd raised a decent amount of money as it went straight to #1. (In another callback to '85, Bradford City and Lincoln City played a charity match, their first joint fixture since that earlier disaster)

So as May begins with a flurry of strikes and declining popularity for the Conservative party, what else is happening in pop? Queen are preparing for the release of "The Miracle" with lead single "I Want It All" (#3 May '89) coming out a few weeks ahead.

I feel I'm cursed for most of this May section to be on a downer, as Queen are not having a good time with Mercury's HIV diagnosis and Brian May joining the ranks of the many people divorcing in the late 1980s. Despite this, "I Want It All" is somewhat a return to form, a straight-up heavy rocker with a singalong chorus. When I got my first radio/cassette player I was given a tape copy of "The Miracle" to play on it along with a few other tapes liberated from family cars and dusty corners of the house, so there's a solid amount of personal nostalgia here, but I've always liked that album and its slightly creepy photocollage cover, put together digitally on a Quantel Paintbox.

A house remix of Chaka Khan's 1978 "I'm Every Woman" scores #8 in May '89, and then Italo house pioneer Gianfranco Bortolotti had a minor hit with his Capella project on "Helyom Halib (Acid Acid Acid)", the title and the acid house trappings still sprinkled with a light dose of that M1 piano.

Drummond and Cauty's "The Manual" might have claimed it would be out of date immediately and it's easy to write off as an avant-garde joke, but one group of Austrian remix artists claimed to have taken it to heart and followed its every instruction. The result was Edelweiss and "Bring Me Edelweiss" (#5 May '89). It's not entirely clear whether they got permission to base the song around ABBA's "S.O.S." but somehow they got away with it and the result is gloriously silly.

Tilting gently at life in the Austrian mountain ski resorts and yodelling, I like to think I have brought it back to its origins with a small game of mine; nearly every ski resort in the Alps will have a very flat, easy blue run called "Edelweiss" and I have made it a mission of mine to ski any I encounter while listening to "Bring Me Edelweiss" at least once. It's the small things, you know?

I think "Bring Me Edelweiss" might still be less bizarre than late night showings of the then-ancient "Prisoner: Cell Block H" propelling Lynne Hamilton's 1978 theme song "On The Inside" all the way up to #3 for the end of May.

The Housemartins were one of those rare bands who broke up amicably while still critically and commercially successful, finishing with a greatest hits album "Now That's What I Call Quite Good" that was guaranteed not to become obsolete. Norman Cook went to play with electronic music, while Paul Heaton and later addition Dave Hemingway formed the Beautiful South, a reference to all of the band members being defiantly Northern.

First album "Welcome to the Beautiful South" caused a minor stir by featuring photographs of a woman with a gun in her mouth and a man smoking on the front cover; an alternative version featuring two soft toys was prepared for the more squeamish and/or family-friendly retailers, Woolworths among them.

The lead single was "Song For Whoever", and within the first line it sets the tone for the band. Wry, snook-cocking lyrics presented openly in rich soft pop songs, in this case about a songwriter who only has relationships because he can write successful pop songs about them. It was a long climb from its Top 40 entry late in May to an eventual #2 early in July.

Sinitta's "Right Back Where We Started From" (#4 June '89) feels like Pete Hammond's production owes more than a little to the SAW sound. I'm surprised this happened relatively rarely, given how reliably it produced hits for what seemed like minimal effort, but I guess the three of them would have had a field day if the industry which spent its time sneering at and snubbing them was reduced to borrowing whatever they did to have hits.

As for SAW themselves, they were in their imperial era. 1989 would see them equal George Martin's record for being behind the controls for seven #1 singles in one year, and the next off the line was Jason Donovan's "Sealed With A Kiss". This was not the usual fare though; Donovan had expressed a desire to do something outside of the usual teen-focused pop and was presented with this bizarre '60s pastiche, complete with instrumental turns straight out of Brian Hyland's 1962 version.

It lasted two weeks on the top spot before being knocked off by Soul II Soul's "Back To Life". The soulful R&B is a reminder that however successful SAW might be in 1989, we know from hindsight that theirs is a very 1980s sound and the clock is ticking on the hit factory.

For now, though, they may as well be picking the chart positions themselves. They'd even ended up producing Cliff Richard "I Just Don't Have The Heart" (#3 August '89) and there was rumour that had he chosen that to be his 100th single, they would have held back the Jason Donovan record to let it be #1. However, "Heart" was Cliff's number 101 and actual 100th anniversary celebration "The Best of Me" had to content itself with #2 underneath "Sealed With A Kiss". It also hints at the sounds of the '90s by reducing the tempo of the David Foster original and adding so much production it all becomes a soggy, cloying mess you feel like you're wading through more than listening to.

R.E.M. make their Top of the Pops debut with "Orange Crush" (#28 June '89), the lyrics referencing US actions in the Vietnam war. I feel like every record on the list is a portent of the '90s in some way at the moment but that would be the decade in which R.E.M. transcended their low-key college rock origins and became chart countdown regulars. College rock itself, so named because it was the rock music most commonly played on student-run university radio stations back in the States, was having somewhat of a vintage year in 1989, with album releases including Camper Van Beethoven's "Key Lime Pie" and the Pixies' "Doolittle".

1989 saw James Bond lean further away from the silliness of the late Moore era into the darker characterisation and greater realism of Dalton's Bond with "Licence To Kill". Gladys Knight provided the theme, which went to #6 early in July.

It's a far more conventional affair than Prince's contribution to that year's "Batman" film, "Batdance" (#2 June '89). Throwing samples around with the kind of abandon the Art of Noise enjoyed, it's an almost entirely deconstructed piece of funk.

U2 close out a run of four singles from "Rattle and Hum" with "All I Want Is You" (#4 June '89). The mining of Americana is restricted to "Everlasting Love" and "Unchained Melody" making up the single's B-sides, along with the extended six-and-a-half-minute album version. You're buying this one on CD, right?

The mildest of hip house makeovers is enough to get M's bizarre 1979 single "Pop Muzik" up to #15. But entering the Top 40 on the same June week as Prince, U2 and M is Public Enemy's definitive statement "Fight The Power". Public Enemy existed in the same Def Jam orbit as the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC, and made similarly uncompromising hip-hop that sampled with abandon.

The difference was that Chuck D made his raps political. Co-founder Flavor Flav might have had an outlandish on-stage presence including wearing a wall clock round his neck, but what went on the records was hard-hitting commentary about what life was like for Black men in the United States. First album "Yo! Bum Rush The Show" had sold like mad in 1987, and when the group came back to record their take on a latter-day "What's Going On" the following year they came out of the studio with "It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back", a landmark hip-hop album.

The mission was, as Chuck D stated, to kill the kind of hip-hop that had seen rap treated as a gimmicky novelty ripe for parody records. It needed to, in his words, "really address some situations" - it should speak for people and speak to people.

All of this delivered minor hits in the UK charts - "Rebel Without A Pause" at #37 in November '87, "Bring The Noise" at #32 in January '88, and of course "Don't Believe The Hype" later in the year. The difference with "Fight The Power" was it came as a musical theme for Spike Lee's race relations film "Do The Right Thing", and both were subject to extreme scrutiny, to the point Chuck D believed people were poring over every last word of his lyrics trying to find something to be upset about.

They found it in the third verse, where a couple of lines paint Elvis Presley as "straight up racist". Chuck D claimed in later interviews that he was alluding to the elevation of Elvis on a pedestal at the expense of all the Black artists who had pioneered the musical form and provided the foundations for much of his material. But as far as most opponents were concerned, this was an example of someone being caught bang to rights being deliberately controversial by making statements that were provably false.

This was worsened by a May interview in which Public Enemy's appointed "Minister for Information" Professor Griff made a series of anti-Semitic comments, throwing the group into turmoil in which they spent a month issuing contradictory statements to the media before ejecting Griff in June and disappearing from view while "Fight The Power" made its way up the charts.

What the relative chart success of Public Enemy belies is that while they recorded the socially-conscious lyrics for "Yo! Bum Rush The Show" back in 1986, a parallel evolution was taking place 2,500 miles away on the West Coast.

Ice-T's "6 'N the Mornin'" came out on the B-side of "Dog 'N The Wax" in 1986 and while on the surface you could write the A-side off as the kind of party time electro typical of L.A.'s scene you'd only manage that for the flip by completely ignoring the lyrics.

Where Public Enemy took a systemic view of oppression, requesting an entire audience to ignore the stories being printed in tabloids and rise up in unison, the West Coast told personal stories and let you draw your own conclusions. Ice-T openly said he took his inspirations from Philadelphia's Schoolly D but it was he who gave this style its name - gangsta rap.

Two days after Tone-Loc released his debut album "Loc-ed After Dark" in January '89, N.W.A's first true studio album "Straight Outta Compton" hit shelves. (There had been a compilation of their work back in '87, but this was merely a collection of isolated recordings, ignoring their most representative work in favour of cuts that presented them as another party-time electro band).

"Straight Outta Compton" received the usual treatment reserved for West Coast hip-hop, which was a general lack of media attention or radio airplay, even after the group provided edited versions which toned down some of the most incendiary lyrics. But the album sold nevertheless. As "Fight The Power" hit its peak of #29 in July '89, "Straight Outta Compton" is going platinum. Enough copies were bought in the UK on import that Reckless Records eventually entrusted Island subsidiary 4th & B'way Records to release an official local imprint.

Part of the media blackout and the popularity were two sides of the same coin - the record and the group that made it were just too dangerous. "Fuck Tha Police", inspired by police harassment they'd received outside the studio, got them a warning letter from the FBI. Title track "Straight Outta Compton" had its music video banned by MTV.

As well as being a landmark moment in gangsta rap, "Straight Outta Compton" was hugely influential in how it sounded. Dr Dre mined old soul and funk records with the enthusiasm of a true crate digger, and gave the production a sound far removed from both the electro beats L.A. was known for (although "Gangsta Gangsta" has some prominent cowbell!) and the more wide-ranging, aggressive sounds of the East Coast.

For the title track's backing drums he turned to an old Winstons record called "Color Him Father", or more importantly the B-side "Amen, Brother". Like James Brown's "Funky Drummer", this has a pure drum break at 1:25 that's got a wonderful, loose groove to it. Dre was not the first to use it; Salt-N-Pepa's "I Desire", an album-only track from 1986 was built around it. Kurtis Mantronik deliberately drew attention to it on 1988's "King of the Beats" and suddenly it was the beat to have. Both "Straight Outta Compton" and Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock's "Keep It Going Now" play it slightly slow, making it sound mean and punchy like one of new school hip hop's drum machines.

The Amen break had gone from being a curio to featuring on an album millions bought or otherwise heard. Within a few years it would be popping up everywhere.

All of this happened without anything from it having troubled the Top 40 in the slightest, although a 1990 reissue of "Express Yourself" did eventually make it there. So let us dive straight back into that world circa July '89, where Stock Aitken Waterman are once again at #1 with Sonia's debut single "You'll Never Stop Me Loving You". It's almost insulting at this point, with the push-button sound coming from a box of leftover ideas for a Kylie album and sounding like it.

Some relatively late Eurodisco comes courtesy of the London Boys, a British duo based in Germany who had a #4 back in May with "Requiem" and went a couple better in July with "London Nights" at #2. Queen's "Breakthru" went to #7, with a video of the band playing on an open train wagon behind a preserved steam engine.

Relatively forgotten stopgap Guns N' Roses mini-album "G N' R Lies gave them a #10 with "Patience". It's a bit of a slow July with not much happening - big hits include Bette Midler's soporific "Wind Beneath My Wings" - and your main highlight here is Kirsty MacColl's cover of the Kinks' "Days", reaching #12 at the end of the month.

Some historical interest as Norman Cook's post-Housemartins career beings with "Won't Talk About It" / "Blame It On The Bassline", an electronic makeover of "Levi Stubbs' Tears" and a hip-house track based around "Blame It On The Boogie" respectively. It's a forgotten footnote these days, but still managed #29 and four weeks on the charts in the day.

The problem with a relatively stagnant period in the charts is something silly inevitably comes along to fill the gap, and in this case it's rock'n'roll medley "Swing The Mood", introducing us to Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers. Very much a novelty act with a cartoon rabbit as its figurehead, the original mix was created by Les Hemstock as something for wedding DJs and the like to use as a convenient sampler of multiple well-known hits, but John Pickles and his son Andy developed it into something for the pop charts.

The input from "Jive Bunny" is the bare minimum not to have this technically a "Various Artists" compilation with a few interjections between tracks, glued together by Glenn Miller's "In The Mood". I suppose in that sense it isn't the most irksome novelty record ever since it is just 30-second snippets of old rock'n'roll records glued together, although later releases which ran into copyright problems and started substituting K-Tel grade re-recordings failed on even that front.

Of course it spends 17 weeks on the chart and the entire month of August at #1, continuing the Kylie curse as her "Wouldn't Change A Thing" tops out at #2.

Craig Logan left Bros after 1988 and peak Brosmania. Severe illness including chronic fatigue syndrome left him unable to walk and the pressure of that amount of fame was more than he could bear. The Goss brothers recorded follow-up album "The Time" as a duo, and "Too Much" was a healthy return to the upper reaches of the chart with a week at #2 before Kylie took the spot. It's a somewhat more rock-tinged affair than their previous efforts, together with some healthy Michael Jackson influence.

That #2 position below Jive Bunny is pretty hotly contested, as Lil' Louis' near ten minute 12" "French Kiss" takes the spot from Kylie two weeks later. The gimmick the public went mad for is five minutes in where the bpm slows to a crawl and there's the kind of presumedly orgasmic moaning Jane Birkin would have been proud of, but the rest of it is house taken to an extreme level of repetitive minimalism.

Alice Cooper switched record labels in 1988. His first release for Epic, 1989's "Trash", served as somewhat of a comeback album after spending the early part of the decade in seclusion amid battling drink and drugs. "Poison" (#2 August '89) is slick glam metal and restored him to icon status for the 1990s, helped along by that appearance in "Wayne's World".

I have a brief moment of "I'm sure I've heard this before" as Martika's "Toy Soldiers" goes to #5 but in this case it's a future echo - Eminem sampled it in the 2000s.

I mentioned Shakespears Sister the last time Bananarama came up, and "You're History" is their first UK Top 40 entry and first single as a duo - Siobhan Fahey solo "Break My Heart" / "Heroine" didn't chart on these shores. It's a much more mature affair than the rather disposable tendencies of the 'rama.

Could there be more of a sign we're about to enter the 1990s than the first Lightning Seeds single charting? The band started out as just producer Ian Broudie, playing all the instruments himself and assembling the records in the studio, give or take a little help from OMD's Andy McCluskey and Ian McNabb of the Icicle Works.

"Pure" (#16 August '89) is the first song he put together and makes an excellent case as to why we all fell in love with the Lightning Seeds over the next decade before becoming very, very sick of them. (Your personal mileage may vary). It's catchy and accessible, but not so far as to be disposable instant gratification. The sound sits between synth-pop with that prominent keyboard line, and indie jangle pop. But despite the credibility of being on a proper independent label, it's extraordinarily clean and well-produced - perhaps bordering on over-produced. There's no edge to it, and I think that might be why I so eagerly bought that Greatest Hits compilation when it came out and then a few years later so disdainfully put it in a drawer. Off the strength of "Pure" I do wonder if I should drag it back out again and start the cycle anew, though.

Jive Bunny's month at #1 gets both ended and topped by Black Box with "Ride On Time", which spends a quite ridiculous six weeks there. After hearing Italo house played in clubs in Ibiza, Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling hopped across the seas to Rimini and went scouring record shops for more. Here they heard "Ride On Time" and immediately bought every copy they could obtain.

On getting back to the UK, they found Deconstruction Records had already signed the track, sorting out a few of the more questionable legal issues surrounding which samples had and hadn't been cleared. Black Box's Daniele Davoli had assumed any sample of less than two seconds was OK, but Deconstruction realised there was a good chance of this being Not OK once the copyright owners heard it.

Even trying to do things above board was painful, with versions withdrawn and replaced as arguments over whether a sample clearing payment was a full payment or merely an advance brewed. In addition to this, import versions floated around record shops along with the official UK ones. Not that any copy floated in a shop for long; as that chart performance suggests, this was the biggest-selling single of the year.

A few positions below it, all the elements of the '90s-style British boy band come together as Big Fun peak at #4 with "Blame It on the Boogie". Up until now, we've seen some of the elements but not all. Wet Wet Wet have the sound and the harmonies but they're a proper band who play their own instruments. Bros have the image and the important distinction that most of the backing tracks are already done when they arrive in the studio, but don't sound anything like later boy bands and do play their instruments for live shows.

Brother Beyond are perhaps the closest to the template but again they're writing their own material and frequently functioning as an actual band rather than vocal artists. Whereas Big Fun got handed over to Stock Aitken Waterman (who else?), provided with a backing track and some lyrics, and their appearances on stage and in videos were limited to dancing and singing. Ah yes, the choreography; "Boogie" was noted more for its dance moves than its uninspiring vocals. The group were also heavily stage-managed; despite all three being gay they were told to remain closeted, and in one final mark for the boy band checklist exited Jive records after their first album finding almost all of the money had ended up in the hands of labels and producers.

At 43 in late 1989, Liza Minnelli had the distinction of having a 40 year acting career, although she didn't do a huge amount appearing with her mother Judy Garland in 1949's "In The Good Old Summertime". She recorded several albums from the late '60s onward, although none produced any UK Top 40 singles and by the '80s all that came out were compilations, cast recordings from musicals and the occasional live recording.

Then in 1989 she teamed up with the Pet Shop Boys to record synth-pop album "Results", and lead single "Losing My Mind" went to #6 in August. I'm telling you, the 1980s just can't let go of a genre - not only is the input of Tennant and Lowe immediately obvious, you could sneak this back to 1983 in a time machine and I don't think anybody would notice something was amiss, providing you parked legally when you got there. Somehow despite the familiarity of the name this was her only Top 40 hit in the UK singles chart.

Another Rhythm King success as the Beatmasters go to #7 in late August with "Hey DJ I Can't Dance (To That Music You're Playing)", a reworking of a 1968 Martha Reeves and the Vandellas single in the label's trademark hip house style. It's billed as a double-A with an acid-bassline version of "Ska Train", but the notable thing here is the vocals on "Hey DJ", from Betty Boo. It was her career breakthrough, to the point the track turned up on her debut album in 1990.

Black Box's first single (billed as Starlight, the band's original name) saw some success in the wake of "Ride On Time", although "Numero Uno" is more of a stew of acid house and hip house ideas before the iconic piano and diva vocals break out four minutes in to let it sneak into that Italo house classification on Discogs. It makes #9 in early September.

I suddenly notice listening to Queen's "The Invisible Man" (#12 August '89) how much it's absorbing these influences from the pop world around it, especially on the 12" single mix. This is a pretty loose association and there are plenty of points where it gives up and goes pure pop rock, but I don't think they've pushed a bassline that hard since "Another One Bites The Dust".

A little silliness as PWL's Pete Hammond gets hold of Damian's remixed "Time Warp" (originally from the Rocky Horror Show), slathers it in a solid interpretation of the SAW house style, and somehow has a #7 with a track which until now had failed to break the Top 40.

The '80s power ballad gives way to the '90s soft ballad with Richard Marx's "Right Here Waiting". Some irony that the sound of songs which stubbornly remained at #1 in that decade is here kept off that spot by "Ride On Time" stubbornly remaining at #1, Marx having to content himself with second place.

Tears for Fears make a strong political statement along with some digs at working class heroes who inserted themselves into the Drive Time set on "Sowing The Seeds Of Love" (#5 September '89). It's also a bit of a competition to spot all the Beatles influences; there's some definite "I Am The Walrus" and a tilt or two at "Penny Lane" that you'll notice immediately, but I feel you'd be spending a lot of time cross-referencing the 1967-1970 collection to get them all.

It was originally a 1988 single by Bonnie Tyler which failed to do much on the charts, but Tina Turner's version of "The Best" is one of those performances so well-known you can easily forget it's a cover. Also that there's no "Simply" in the title, bracketed or otherwise, a misconception so widespread it's even made it into the track listing of some compilation albums.

Belgian producer Jo Bogaert, better known as Technotronic, made his debut with hip house #2 "Pump Up The Jam" featuring vocals from Ya Kid K. While Rhythm King had delivered plenty of hits in the genre here in the UK, this was the international crossover moment for hip house, the point at which it would end up being played in sports stadiums to hype the crowd. Attempting to keep on top of this newly legitimate status, the media dubbed this and many of the contemporary house-influenced genres as "techno", despite this being a distinct style. The confusion may have come from Detroit Techno itself becoming popular at raves, with UK producers starting to make their own local imitation of it.

(Part of the confusion lay with many raves being based around mobile sound systems who made their own techno, often on the spot, without releasing any records - in order to know what techno was in 1989 you'd either have to be importing records from Detroit or standing in a field, and the average tabloid journalist was doing neither of these things)

Sydney Youngblood's crossover house "If Only I Could" rounds it all out at #3 going into October '89, to which Bob Stanley noted the "Ride"/"Jam"/If" trio represented one of the greatest top threes in chart history.

It's certainly a good time for walking into a record shop, with Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" (#13 September '89), The Cure's "Lovesong"(#18 September '89), Madonna's "Cherish" (#3 September '89), Prince's "Partyman" (#14 September '89) and even Aerosmith's "Love In An Elevator" (#13 September '89) all there on the shelves.

It would be nice to think things might slow down as we enter the last three months of the decade, but Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time" is peaking at #6 in October and upsetting people as a video filmed on a US Navy ship that was expected to involve Cher wearing a jumpsuit ended up with her wearing something that was very much not a jumpsuit.

Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" made #7, a record which has received much more attention in later years as people realised how ripe it was for parody. Joel himself claimed not to particularly like it, feeling it wasn't very musical and about as pleasurable as a visit to the dentist.

Milli Vanilli had their last UK top 40 hit with "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You" taking #2 in October. This despite the fact it was obvious by now the two were lip-syncing. During a July MTV tour a computer mishap caused the two to apparently repeat the line "Girl you know it's" repeatedly, or rather make it obvious they were not doing any singing as Rob Pilatus ran off stage with his supposed voice still coming through the PA.

What finally tipped the balance was one of the three singers on the recordings, Charles Shaw, admitting that he had performed the rap on "Girl You Know It's True" despite going uncredited on any of the band's US releases. Frank Farian reportedly paid him $150,000 to retract that (far more than the supposed $6k he'd earnt for the session) but it didn't stop the criticism.

When Morvan and Pilatus won a Grammy for Best New Artist in February, that only worsened the situation. They gave interviews about being greatly talented performers (although some of these may have been poorly-worded English on their part being misinterpreted) and demanded that Farian let them sing on their next album. His response? Sack them and confirm the rumours himself. The Grammy was rescinded, "Girl You Know It's True" was dropped from Arista's catalogue in the US, and their attempt to come back as Rob & Fab sold just 2,000 copies.

Rebel MC with Double Trouble had two hip house hits in 1989, with "Just Keep Rockin'" at #11 in June and "Street Tuff" hitting #3 in October. It added a strong reggae influence to the stew, something which would become a big part of the UK's dance music scene in the next decade.

Belinda Carlisle's "Leave A Light On" is below it at #4, featuring a slide guitar solo from George Harrison. This is starting to feel like the 1980s taking a victory lap as having been, other than a brief mid-decade sag, nearly a solid ten years of great pop records.

The Bros star begins to fade as "Chocolate Box" only makes #9 after a string of #2s (no unkind jokes, you at the back). It's maybe a little tortuous, a little overwrought, more like a parody of Bros than the thing itself. Early signs that the public might be tiring of the SAW sound a little too, as Sonia's "Can't Forget You" only makes it to #17 despite being a sound that was a guaranteed top five only a few months prior.

Blondie's Deborah Harry (using that name for the first time) had a #13 with "I Want That Man", a perky bit of pop that originated with two of the Thompson Twins.

Chris Rea's "The Road to Hell (Part 2)" went to #10, not bad for a song that began with being annoyed by traffic. I've driven the section of the M25 he was inspired by many a time, and I absolutely get it. There's a lot reminiscent of early Dire Straits here, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

The unfortunate thing hanging over all of this is Jive Bunny at #1 again, another speedrun through a late '50s jukebox with awful re-recorded versions inserted wherever a few licensing costs can be saved. Mercifully it's just three weeks this time before Lisa Stansfield replaces it with "All Around The World". I never thought I'd be looking positively at the arrival of an R&B song on #1 when I started this exercise, but well here we are.

Phil Collins made an attempt at writing a socially conscious song with "Another Day in Paradise" (working title: "Homeless") but despite a #2 peak in November it did not meet with a friendly audience. Without any definitive action to go along with it, the impression was that it was a millionaire recording artists providing "oh that's terrible"-ism for middle-class households who didn't have any first-hand experience of poverty or homelessness.

There's an unfairness there in that Collins has in fact provided plenty of support for homeless charities, millions of dollars of it, and even some of those charities who haven't been direct beneficiaries are happy to say that "Paradise" has been welcome just as an awareness boost. The problem is that he's typically done so in a quiet, unshowy way. Perhaps reaction would have been kinder if this had been another big '80s charity campaign single, rather than quietly putting out the collection buckets and (according to one source) matching the contributions out of his own pocket.

Kaoma's "Lambada" was a huge European hit over the summer, although a UK peak of #4 suggests it didn't quite translate to drizzly British late autumn when it eventually arrived here in November. It's all artifice; the group was manufactured by French producers Olivier Lorsac and Jean Karakos. They'd heard the music out in Brazil, bought the rights to hundreds of songs from local publisher Continental, then employed a band to record them.

The problem is that the songs were often adaptations of adaptations, with complex chains of authorship as to who had added exactly which elements. Lorsac and Karakos attempted to sidestep this by registering the song in France as an original composition by fictional author Chico de Oliveira. This created a problem when Bolivian folk group Los Kjarkas pointed out they'd registered it several years earlier as their 1981 record "Llorando se fue", and Marcia Ferreira raised that it was essentially her 1986 Portuguese version "Chorando Se Foi" with slightly modified lyrics. Oops.

You can sidestep all of this by simply playing Marble Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog. The music's pretty much the same.

Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville duetted on "Don't Know Much", which made #2 at the end of November. Yeah, it's the soggy chart-clogging ballad again, spending 10 weeks on there in this instance. I fear I'm going to spend a lot of the first part of the 1990s waiting for this to go away and Britpop to happen.

US readers may have been spending much of my wrangling about where the boy band template got truly codified shouting "New Kids On The Block!" at the screen. Well, they're finally here and "You Got It (The Right Stuff)" went to #1 a couple of weeks after first breaking the Top 40 in November.

The story begins in 1980, when Bobby Brown (then 12 years old) and some of his Boston friends get together to form a group they call The Bricks. Brown is a big fan of the Jackson Five and the group follow in this style. In 1982 they enter a talent competition, and despite not winning, get offered a recording contract by Maurice Starr.

Now named New Edition as a nod to being the new edition of the Jackson Five, they record some bubblegum pop and go on tour. None of this is particularly notable and I gave "Candy Girl" short shrift when it turned up in the UK charts back in 1983. What is notable is that on returning from this tour as a chart-topping act, the group was paid $1.87 each for the entire thing.

Starr claimed this was due to expenses. New Edition dispensed with his services, although didn't fare much better under their next management company, eventually having to borrow half a million dollars to escape it. This still left Starr without a group. He decided the next move would be to create what was effectively New Edition, but white. The new band was to be called Nynuk.

He started with Donnie and Mark Wahlberg, teenage brothers who could both rap. Donnie brought along his friends, but singer Jamie Kelly soon left, as did Mark. Starr was still aiming at creating another Jackson Five style band, and brought in Joey McIntyre. At just 12 in a band of teenagers McIntyre struggled to fit in, but Starr kept them rehearsing and got them a recording contract with Columbia.

The contract came with one stipulation. Nynuk was a stupid name and needed to change. At this point they became New Kids On The Block, named after a track on their first, now-eponymous album. Released in 1986, it was a near-total failure and both singles flopped. The band was reduced to playing anywhere that would have them, down to school discos.

Somehow he convinced Columbia that they were worth a second try, and spent nearly two years working on that follow-up. The big difference was that the group abandoned pure Jacksons-esque bubblegum for a tougher, more streetwise sound, directly boasting of it with the album's title "Hangin' Tough". Although we're talking boy band standards here, so first single "Please Don't Go Girl" is pretty much just bubblegum with an 808 cowbell on top.

This was also on track to be a flop but started picking up radio airplay in Florida, which got it up the charts in the US and the band making TV appearances. They got another boost opening for Tiffany as her tour reached the US, and by the time "You Got It (The Right Stuff)" released over there in November '88 it was enough to attract the attention of MTV. UK releases of "New Kids On The Block" and "Hangin' Tough" soon followed, reaching #6 and #2 on the albums chart respectively.

Club music was going in an increasingly aggressive and unrelenting direction - clubs taking their direction from the rave scene and warehouse parties in introducing techno nights and playing harder and more aggressive techno far removed from the more melodic sound of the Detroit scene. The ultimate conclusion of this would be hardcore, a resolutely knucklehead genre defined by how punishing you can make a kickdrum, but it also left clubs having to offer revellers something else: a place to take a bit of a break. At Heaven in London, this became "chill out" sessions in the club's White Room section.

The music of choice early on was ambient house. Ambient house drew from the classic ambient records of the '70s and combined the found-sound approach and recordings of nature with a downtempo house backbone. Balearic vibes and the feeling of dreamingly watching a beach sunset were openly welcomed. The Orb were the standard bearers but the first chart hit went to 808 State, whose "Pacific State" was available in a multitude of different versions and went to #10 in November.

A Ben Liebrand remix of Jeff Wayne's "Eve Of The War" suggests we're maybe not as far from 1970s space disco as we might think with a #3 peak going into December, while Big Fun's "Can't Shake The Feeling" is SAW happily absorbing Italo house while also letting the boys put some of the worst vocals ever to get to #8 on a record.

Somehow with barely a month to go the 1980s manages to slip one last new musical movement in. Manchester was a hotbed of indie music in the middle of the decade, and Factory Records opened the Haçienda in 1982 to provide a venue to showcase this and some of its more dance-focused acts. The club was a financial disaster area but did pioneer house and then acid house, being regularly full thanks to these.

This gave Manchester an unusual situation where electronic music and indie music overlapped and cross-pollinated. Early on this wasn't so obvious on record. 808 State genre-hopped but mostly in the electronic world, and when member Gerald Simpson went solo as A Guy Called Gerald you wouldn't find July #12 "Voodoo Ray" out of place in an acid house identity parade.

At the other end of things, the Stone Roses might have organised warehouse parties but listen to early singles such as "Elephant Stone" and "Made of Stone" and you wouldn't think anything more than a gentle evolution of '80s indie rock, an assessment not troubled by both of them failing to make the Top 40.

Then in November out comes double A-side "Fool's Gold" / "What The World Is Waiting For". The latter cut is more competent indie rock but it's that first one which blows the lid open. Nearly ten minutes in its 12" incarnation, interpolating the "Funky Drummer" break and revealing what's going on in the Manchester scene: indie rock and dance melded into one. It reaches #8.

Factory Records give it a name with a last-minute retitling of the Happy Mondays' EP "Rave On" to "Madchester Rave On". It peaked at #19. The group themselves had been releasing records on Factory since 1985 but this EP was the point at which they stopped sounding like untidy new wave and let those dance influences flow.

With that we're finally into the first Top 40 countdown of December. New entries include Jason Donovan's "When You Come Back To Me", the assembly line of SAW back in full force as it climbs to #2 the following week. Soul II Soul's "Get A Life" is another fast climber, #3 a week after entering the charts.

Radio 1 DJ Simon Mayo's obsession with 1960 novelty record "Donald Where's Your Troosers?" sees it hastily reissued to spend most of December in the Top 40, peaking at an improbable #4.

There are plenty of familiar names playing out the decade - Erasure at #15, Wet Wet Wet at #19, Madonna's latest "Dear Jessie" going to #5, a strange but enjoyable diversion into 1960s-style toybox psychedelia. Bros and Sonia both with new singles.

Would a band comprising New Order's Bernard Sumner, Johnny Marr, and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys making a guest appearance constitute an '80s supergroup? This is Electronic, and their fantastic debut single "Getting Away With It" hits #12 at the end of the month.

None of these are #1s, and that's for a horrible reason. Jive Bunny take New Kids Off The Block down from #1 after three weeks with the execrable "Let's Party". I didn't even know there was a K-Tel grade re-recording of Slade's "Merry Xmas Everybody", and my conclusion after hearing it mashed between horns and exhortations to "let's party!" is I'd rather not have known.

This is thankfully not the #1 that plays us out as the last statement of the decade. Fittingly enough, it's the collision of both Stock Aitken Waterman and the definitive charity single from a decade full of the things as Band Aid gets its first sequel.

You've got pretty much the whole SAW roster of '89 on there, from Big Fun to Cliff Richard, along with Bros, Wet Wet Wet, Lisa Stansfield and somehow even Technotronic. I like that they made a decent fist of trying to update the sound (and the result is rather more coherent than the Coldplay/Darkness mashup of the 2004 version) and most importantly it's not Jive sodding Bunny.

Besides, could you think of anything more fitting to close out the 1980s than a massive charity Christmas #1 produced by Stock Aitken Waterman?

And that is the end of the 1980s. A point that I come to with a question weighing heavily on my mind: was the 1980s a better decade for the charts than the 1960s? The highs of the 1960s were undoubtedly high. Hendrix. The Stones. The whole '66-'67-'68-'69 run, anchored by that original Summer of Love in which "Whiter Shade Of Pale" was the sound of the summer.

But it was a decade which took a long time to get going, with more than a few false starts. Maybe those moribund, Template-laden charts of the early sixties are countered by the musical conservatism of '85 and '86. Perhaps you could look at those stumbling attempts to revive rock'n'roll before the Beatles shot 4,000 volts through it as balanced by the five year stretch in which there are three novelty raps in the charts for every genuine hip-hop record. But I think that misses what's going on here.

Much as I love those '60s charts, I find myself despairing of how quickly they fall apart once you scan further down the Top 40. The top floor sparkles but the foundations are rotten with tired trad pop, gloopy easy listening that's all production and no substance, novelty records, me-too retreads of things that were big hits six months ago and far, far more Ken Dodd than is healthy. Whereas the '80s charts are all about those #15s and #28s and #6s; there's always something interesting happening down there. We have goth, we have indie, we have synth pop constantly reinventing itself, we have the Jesus and Mary Chain emitting squalls of feedback and then we have the absolutely staggering pace at which house and then acid house establish themselves. It's much harder to get tired of listening to a run of '80s charts, because so much is constantly happening.

Maybe I'm underplaying the ability of Landfill '80s and then the morass of sophisti-pop to stink up these charts just as much as any mawkish film soundtrack number from the middle of the century, and that sudden Jive Bunny obsession is a blot on the last few pages of the copybook, but I never found myself tiring of a point where one thing takes over the charts for half a year and that one thing is also hopelessly insipid or dull. When I skipped, it was because there was simply too much to discuss and things which were enjoyable but not important on either a historical or personal level didn't make the cut. If nothing else, the fact my writing on this decade has so much detail I felt that was necessary is a commentary in itself.

Maybe some of this is excessive familiarity with the 1960s. I know it so well, because I spent so much of my time exploring that decade, whereas the one of my own birth is one I skipped over assuming it was just people with keyboards making trash. (That SAW turned out to be so interesting despite being practically the face of disposable 1980s trash was one of the biggest surprises here.)

Or maybe the 1980s really is a decade that deserves re-examining and digging beyond the odd few bits that the 30 year nostalgia cycle latched on to.

Whatever the outcome, it's also the last of these decades that I don't have any particular personal stake in. For next up is the 1990s, the decade in which I cared the most about what was happening in the charts. It's not like I've been exactly impersonal this far, but that might be about to get a lot worse.