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1984 – the year of high energy pop singles

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1984. I was 15, and hadn’t yet gone goth. It was a great year for pop singles. Maybe a truism, but still worth celebrating.

There are the obvious hits – Born In The USA, Careless Whispers, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, I Want To Break Free, Purple Rain, Relax, Smalltown Boy, Smooth Operator, Take On Me – the list seems endless.
And there are the syrup-coated songs it was hard to avoid – What’s Love Got to Do With It?, Joanna, Solid (As A Rock), Ghostbusters and of course I Just Called to Say I Love You.

But here are 20 songs from that year that made me move, and give me wobbly nostalgia when I hear them now* –
1. Shannon – Let the Music Play
2. Chaka Khan – I Feel for You
3. The Pointer Sisters – Jump (For My Love)
4. Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder – Together in Electric Dreams
5. Prince & The Revolution – Let’s Go Crazy
6. Rockwell – Somebody’s Watching Me
7. Dazz Band – Let It All Blow
8. James Ingram – Yah Mo B There
9. Cyndi Lauper – She Bop
10. Deniece Williams – Let’s Hear It for the Boy
11. Laura Branigan – Self-Control
12. Eurythmics – Here Comes the Rain Again
13. Animotion – Obsession
14. Miami Sound Machine – Dr. Beat
15. Pat Benatar – We Belong
16. The Cars – You Might Think
17. Divine – You Think You’re a Man
18. The Bluebells – Young at Heart
19. Lionel Richie – Running With the Night
20. Evelyn Thomas – High Energy

*especially the first one – in all its glorious 11 minute extended electro –

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/100-best-singles-of-1984-pops-greatest-year-163322

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Comments

  2. Great list.

    The top 10 that Rolling Stone came up with is absolutely wild. It’s just one banger after another.

    Some of the other placements on the list are eyebrow raising (there is no year in which there were 66 songs better than Like A Virgin), but on this evidence you’d need to be truly tin eared to deny that this was a classic year for Pop.

    Thriller, Purple Rain, Let’s Go Crazy, When Doves Cry, Boys of Summer, Born In The USA, Take On Me, Drive, Jump, Careless Whisper, Somebody’s Watching Me, She Bop, Cool It Now, Jungle Love, Relax, Dancing In The Dark, The Reflex, Cruel Summer, Easy Lover, It’s My Life, Wake Me Up Before You Go Go. These are incredible tunes. Freaking I Want To Break Free doesn’t even make the top 30.

    Here’s a favourite of mine from the same year (I think) that doesn’t appear to have made the 100 at all….

  3. This wasn’t a hit (UK no 27), but it was released in 1984 and presaged a string of beautiful songs in 1985.

    What an astounding record to launch yourself into the public with.

    • No. 27 that’s a hit! In fact I believe a bigger one in 1984 than Dancing in the Dark which only exploded into the top 10 (together with I’m on Fire/Born in the USA) the following year

      • You may be right. I thought Top 10 was necessary for a hit. When I think back, it was played on the radio but felt obscure compared to the more ‘shiny’ songs of the year.

  4. That was a hell of a year for pop. Aside from all the great stuff you list, we also have Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who dominated the summer of ’84.

    There’s high energy pop songs (e.g. Two Tribes) and the Hi NRG genre. In the latter camp, we are beginning to see Stock Aitken Waterman flex their disco muscles in 1984. There’s Divine (on your list) but then we also had Dead or Alive and Hazell Dean.

    I really liked this Hazell Dean performance on TOTP. With apologies for the harrowing hairy cornflake at the beginning, I think it’s pure and joyful pop music.

    • Hazell Dean!? She sounds like a small wooded enclave on the periphery of a executive housing estate on the edge of Great Baddow – wood-chipped floor and scattered with dogwalkers.
      Rather than that bizarre lip-synced version, let’s break open the perimeter fence and let in the disco bunnies to spray paint the kids’ token play area

  9. High energy pop singles, pah! 1984 saw the release of some of the best ever albums:
    David Sylvian – Brilliant Trees. The beginning of a magnificent body of work by the best ever musical artist.
    Roger Waters – The Pros & Cons of Hitchhiking. The best ever solo Floyd album. Also featuring Eric Clapton’s best ever work.
    Fabrizio de Andre – Crêuza de Mä. The best ever Italian album.
    The Style Council – Cafe Bleu. The best ever album Paul Weller ever made. (What?)
    The Higsons – The Curse of the Higsons. The best ever Higsons album. (Er… ok, that’s enough best evers)

    • And there was me trying to offer some diversion, a little oasis from the recent heavy load of AW-typical 60s/70s legacy rock artists – Dylan, Steely Dan, Fripp, Zappa (even this thread is sandwiched between McLaughlin and Beefheart).

      Is nowhere safe?

      It’s OK – you post away with thread-irrelevant favourites. I kind of expected it. I might check out the Style Council album – that’s the closest to mainstream pop in your list.

      • The Higsons are actually high energy pop. “Funk-punk” they called it. They never went mainstream, though. But lead singer Charlie Higson eventually did, on telly with The Fast Show. You’ve never heard Cafe Bleu? It’s one of those albums where I’m surprised no one noticed they spelt “blue” wrongly in the title.

        • Well, it’s got “You’re the Best Thing” , which might equal “Walls Come Tumbling Down” as their best song, but I never went deep on their albums. I got their last one free, (Confessions of A Pop Group), but it seemed a bit pop-prog, so tired of it quickly.

          The Higsons are funk-punk? Sounds more like Gang of Four than pop. Angular nonsense that involves dislocating your shoulder joints to dance to. No thanks!

      • I’d agree regarding Roger Waters, Sal – but surely David Sylvian is the epitome of a 1980s artist, and Brilliant Trees certainly not a 60s/70s throwback. Nothing in common with the acts you listed…

        …anyway, it’s your thread, so you set the rules!

        • It’s a broad brush I’m painting my slurs with here, fitter. I’ve got nothing against ‘woody’ Dave, as I’m sure he’s known to his pals, but I’ve never listened to any of his songs, except to rate him as somewhere between a genuine 4AD artist and Simon Le Bon.

          No offence to Gary, who I know has a shrine to the fop-haired chanteur in his manor house.

          Anyway, out here on the frontier of AW acceptability there are no rules.

  11. Think 7 year old me would disagree with Ghostbusters going under the syrupy column there! Kids’ party classic (and still is, almost 40 years later).

    Being a relative youngster here, the ones that stick for me are generally nearer the novelty end of the market. Used to enjoy this very much, and I doubt there’s been as much energy as a room full of under 10s going nuts after the “ooooooooooooh…”

    • We’ll have to agree to disagree about Ghostbusters. But Nellie is another case altogether – I think it’ll go down a storm with my 9 year old. Her class mascot is a toy elephant. Nice one.

    • Does anyone here recall the piece in the OGWT about Black Lace? It was one of the funniest pieces of television I’ve seen. Interview with the manager by his pool as the drizzle fell, and ‘fans’ outside the Frontier (formerly Batley Variety Club).

  14. The year I discovered pop music so this thread has been a major nostalgia rush. Reminds me of endless repeat plays of the early Now That’s What I Call Music compilations on cassette.

  15. Yazoo had split, and Alison Moyet started her solo career.
    I think of the album as (like Sade above) one of the first “coffee table albums” – seemed to be in the collection of those who sort of liked music, but no longer wanted the edgy, happy clappy, pop stuff.
    Ignoring that redux thought, Alf contained some great pop singles – this being a great pick
    Love Resurrection

  16. Cannot believe bearing in mind the OP title that this monster stomper that gave an entire genre its name has not been checked so far .1984. The basis of the Relax bass line as well.

  18. New Order – Thieves Like Us. Also features their best B-side in Lonesome Tonight.

    You’d have thought, though, after the Blue Monday car crash, they’d have skipped ToTP.

    • Perfect pop, rather overshadowed for me by its dancier successors, Perfect Kiss, Subculture, BLT and True Faith.
      Other thoughts – good to see Barney in his angelic, less cherublc form. How great to have a TOTP performance that isn’t lip synced? And is this the first TOTP clip on the thread without Janice Long? And Lonesome Tonight is good – pre-Technique, what NO song isn’t? But better than 1964 or Murder?

  22. I spent the year working in the Isle Of Man. Possibly the best year of my life. I had a brilliant time, including through the winter.

    At the weekends, the casino disco was compulsory and this banger was guaranteed to fill the floor:I

  24. Although having older brothers and sisters, I’d been aware of pop since being practically a foetus, 1984 was definitely the first year I started using pop. And by using I mean taping songs off the radio, and learning the lyrics to try and impress girls. It just seemed such a bountiful year, with all the Frankie furore, plus hi-NRG smashes by Divine, Dead or Alive and Hazel Dean, plus Borderline, I Feel for You, Let the Music Play, We Belong, Self Control, The Word Girl, When Doves Cry and Smalltown Boy. I don’t know whether it was all just a happy accident, but 1984 seemed a VERY good year for pop.

    • Interesting to hear you say that. My recollection of 1984 is there was a sense that a golden period that had spanned 1978-83 was coming to an end and the arteries of the charts were beginning to clog with the acts getting older again (hate to pick on Tina Turner, but Bruce and Eurythmics etc) which would become epidemic in the wake of Live Aid, a strong American rock presence (Ver Jovi, John Waite, ZZ Top etc) prompted by MTV and having an unhealthy influence on previously sound hitmakers (New fist pumping Simple Minds, Gang of Four going all ‘Merika) which is not to say the above didn’t produce a few top records, but the youthful, stylish, diverse new sounds were being overtaken by familiar old rockisms – I mean, I will always defend Wild Boys by Duran Duran, but it’s so obvious that the bandwagon they were on in 80/81 was Roxy/Bowie synthystuff, in 82/83 was post-Chic whiteboy funk and only in 1984 would they have thought WB was the way the wind was blowing.
      But yeah, as with most years, you can always compile a list of ace hits. One that’s not been mentioned, which, I think, fits the bill here is Love Is A Wonderful Colour by Icicle Works. While its influences too are grown up rock – Ian McNabb comments elsewhere “you could always tell what tapes we were playing in the van” – it does have a rush of energy and proper pop chops in its monster chorus..

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