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  1. The populist view is that the 80s started in 1979 and ended around 1985 (Live Aid),
    The pictures in the header re-inforce this view.
    But – they’re are other names mentioned (Bruce Springsteen, Iron Maiden, Smiths, Public Enemy) so it doesn’t sound like the usual 80s whitewash.
    And as it alludes to later, the decade was certainly more diverse (possibly) than those before, which may (just may) qualify it as the best decade
    All subjective though … and Stock Aitken & Waterman were just annoying.

  2. I think it’s the greatest pop decade but then it’s the one I grew up in. Anything that highlights some of the stuff away from the Duran/Wham/Spandau orthodoxy would be a good thing in my book. Will watch with interest, hoping that this is the case.

  3. Thanks Dai, decent article and I’ll give it a watch. My views have been repeated more than “The Greatest Songs Of The 80’s” on Channel 5 and I’ve got nothing new to add particularly. I have an observation though that certain 80’s albums and certain 80’s bands given no credit at all 10-15 years ago are now acknowledged of having some artistic merit. Rio for example is a remarkable record made by a band at the top of their game and I feel even the most fervent “it all went shit after 1973” merchant can acknowledge that now.

  4. Unconvinced.
    1956-1966 is the decade when the rise of the teenager occurred, after WWII and post-war austerity. Grey was the predominant colour and a dull grind was what young people’s lives were, until suddenly there was rock & roll, cafés with jukeboxes, motorbikes and scooters, 7″ singles and dansettes to play them on, television…

  5. The 80s is the last decade where the start and end of the decades are different worlds. From Public Image and the last days of disco to Madchester and acid house is a long and winding roads.

    • It’s also the last decade where, due to limited ‘channels’, everyone listened to the same stuff. By the time Satellite TV (late 89) came along for the masses and the WWW came along a few years later, we all had different ways of listening. I may not be able to tell your Kylies from your Danniis but at least I’d recognise a chart song from the 80s if I heard it. From the late 90’s to now, things have been far too diverse for there to be any meaningful consensus and I doubt I’ve even heard 10% of the number 1 singles of the past 20 years.

      • True that, though MTV as a subscription channel was perhaps a harbinger. How artists looked was for the first time perhaps as important than how they sounded. Again, the 80s was the last decade where free to air broadcasting was the only game in town. Also the last decade with a physical format change that changed the industry.

        • In the UK MTV was not available at all until the end of 1987 and the vast majority of households couldn’t get it even if they were willing to pay. It didn’t start to make inroads in the UK until the Sky DTH broadcasts started in early 1989 when MTV was available to everyone on the same platform but even then, the lack of boxes and installers meant that again, it didn’t have an immediate impact.

            • We briefly produced more, and certainly better, videos than US artists. It’s a side-effect of a handful of bands deeming themselves too big or cool to appear (in person) on TotP, so they made videos instead.

              This is one of the reasons that I think of Buggles as an 80s record – I think that was literally the first thing they played on MTV.

                • Yes. One way or another, radio is bigger than it’s ever been – whereas MTV has kept its cultural dominance by padding out its schedules with shows like Flavor Flav Marries Somebody Improbable and other such, essentially non-musical related soap operas.

                  • In early 80s Ireland the dead time of Sunday afternoons was filled with the awkwardly named MTUSA, in which our man Fab Vinny reported back from the States accompanied by the latest pop videos. The contrast in cool between the U.K. artists and the U.S. acts chosen put me off white American music to such a degree that I hardly listened to any WAM (voluntarily) between Blondie breaking up and Deserter’s Songs some fifteen years later..

                    • Ah, MT USA, I remember it well. I was running the record department in our local Boots in the mid-80s, and that show really boosted sales of lots of stuff. Sold bucketloads of Desert Moon by Dennis DeYoung, yet it’s pretty much unknown in mainland UK.

  8. Simple Minds (when they were good), Madonna (likewise), Joy Division/New Order, Bunnymen, Teardrops, R.E.M., Frankie, Cocteau Twins, Broooooce (mega stardom), Bowie (some good ones), U2 (some), Stone Roses, Prince, XTC, Talking Heads, (some) Blondie, McCartney’s solo peak (chartwise), Steve Earle, Abba (end of), ABC, AC/DC, Pet Shop Boys, Tom Petty, Smiths, Elvis Costello, Scott Walker (goes weird), Prefab Sprout, Peter Gabriel, Pogues,Pixies, Paul Simon (Graceland), Tom Waits, Squeeze, Style Council,Pete Townshend (solo), Traveling Wilburys, Kate Bush, Joe Jackson, Van Morrison (so consistent), Talk Talk etc etc

    Just parts of my record collection, not all exclusively 80s artists but many did at least comparable stuff to their best in that decade.

    • All of that and more. Eurythmics seem to have fallen deeply out of fashion for some reason but were terrific at their best. Weller had a good decade as he went from the end of the Jam to Style Council. Culture Club’s Colour by Numbers is a joyous pop album. Dire Straits did some great stuff. Thriller is unarguable. And of course it’s when hip hop became a major mainstream force.

      And as you say, @dai, several of those artists who had been massive in the 60s and 70s also kept going and producing great work. As well as those you mention, even those who had, shall we say, a mixed decade, still came up with, for example, Freedom (Neil Young), and Oh Mercy (Bob Dylan).

      It was also the decade that the ‘world music’ movement really got going, and astonishing artists like Papa Wemba, Youssou N’Dour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan came to wider prominence amongst Western pop audiences, and started to influence the work of the likes of David Byrne and Peter Gabriel.

      So, the period when a much greater diversity of voices and music came to the fore than we’d heard before. For all that, it remains the case that for me personally the template of music and artists I love was forged in the 60s and 70s, and leaving aside my own personal taste, I think it’s true that those decades continued to exercise a huge influence on what followed in the 80s, and since.

      • You’re forgiven, Dai. The first (and best) Specials and Madness LPs were ’79 and I tend to think of them as late-70s, along with rubbish in the streets, strikes, surging inflation, assassinations… I remember pre-1983 as pretty grim – my dad always seemed to be on strike, and everything was in black and white.

  9. Pop music is silly haircuts, glossy magazines, silly pretentious videos, Crackerjack, Razzmatazz, Top of the Pops, Cheggers Plays Pop!, Radio 1 Roadshow, Radio 1 DJs in satin tour jackets, trainers instead of formal shoes, t-shirt instead of a formal shirt, wearing a baseball cap askew or even backwards (!), cereal packets with Mike Read on them, crisp brands like “Rock ‘n’ Rollers”, wearing makeup, swearing and smoking on TV, guest appearances on chat shows and Saturday prime time TV comedy shows, Krazy Juergen’s Banana Pop Show, Get it Together!, wearing sunglasses indoors, dyed blonde hair sometimes, billowy shirts, impressive appearances on Top of the Pops that felt like significant cultural events, taping the top 40 rundown, gender bending, Smash Hits, Record Mirror, No 1, FlexiPop! and Woolies 49p section, picture discs, pop stars who were actually good looking, free T-shirts with singles, Pebble Mill at One, aggressive disdain from the behind the counter at the record shop, waiting to see what TV am’s pop video of the day is before leaving for school, seeing top band for 3 quid, dial-a-disc, lapel badges, stickers, novelty singles, disastrous Brit award shows, being a contender for Eurovision, crisps and sweets, snoods for goalposts, constant threat of imminent nuclear war.

    So in terms of poptasticness, the 80s wins hands down.

    That is not to say that the music and the bands that passed through this particular pop era are any better or worse than those who came before or after it. But I think, specifically, pop music and everything around it was at its peak in the 1980s.

    In 1980 most bands wanted hit singles in order to sell LPs, which is why you’d still get the odd serious artist on TOTP. Post Live Aid and CDs, the older bands could bypass the pop industry entirely. By 1990 the route to pop stardom was a lot less straightforward.

  10. I’ve thought before that it never occurred to teenage me in the 80s that the music would still be the mainstay of the most popular national radio station 4 decades later. Even then I was more of a chin stroking albums kind of a guy, but every week there seemed to be a couple of new singles which were irresistible, even to me.

    The 80s were odd years for acts from previous decades mentioned in the link, even ones like Springsteen and Bowie who reached new heights of commercial success. I doubt their biggest fans would put that decade at the tops of their lists. What it was great for was pure pop, which existed for a 3 minute single which was distinctly of its time and is preserved there in all its greatness.

    • If there was a time machine we’d all be going back to the Beatles’ teenage years.

      If you refute that, you are lying (BIG, BIG lies), and I refer you to the title of the third track on the second side of the fourth album by Bob Dylan for my thoughts on the matter.

      Don’t consult me again, I don’t do also-rans.

  13. I went the full folkie in the 1980s and can report it was a terrific time for fiddle dee dee beginning to flex away from the constraints of folk-rock, trad arr or winsome acoustic singer-songwriters, applying all manner of new ideas and influences. Moving Hearts, who formed in 1981, would be as good an example as any, and little can yet beat the sheer power of them in full flight:

  14. It’s always a bit reductive comparing decades: music isn’t a competition and the bias towards one’s own youth tends to make the exercise a bit pointless. That said…

    It’s difficult to think of three people who did more to define the idea of what constitutes a pop star than Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince. There’s barely a pop star working today who doesn’t owe some sort of debt to at least one of the three, they produced some fabulous music and, in Jackson’s case at least, they were globally famous on a level I don’t think had been seen previously.

    To this day, when I hear the words “pop star” my first thought is Prince, well past his imperial phase, absolutely bodying the half time show at the Super Bowl: leading a stadium full of people through Purple Rain, in a full on downpour, wearing those shoes. The guy probably brushed his teeth like he was emperor of the entire universe.

    Also: never buy the Sun.

  15. Never underestimate the power if 80’s Top of the Pops on our subconscious or conscious memory of the music of that period. A half an hour hit of noise and image that the best made absolute use of…

  17. Surprised that nobody has brought up Scritti Politti, who epitomised the shift from post-punk to art-pop, with deft production, tunes, and overall, something to interest pop fans. To be honest, “Skank Bloc Bologna” was never going to fill the dance floor in “Sherry’s” (horrible Brighton night club), even if we liked it.

    I also note very little mention of “The Police” above. Revisionism? They were huger than huge, and probably brought a lot of new sounds and rhythms to the previously mainstream pop audience drawn by Sting with his shirt off. (I have a theory that like a child’s tastebuds, exposure to a range of new possibilities in an acceptable form, broadens the range of preferences.)

          • That is a very funny piece. Copeland in particular clearly pissed (as in drunk) and at one point defending Sting in response to something critical from the journalist.

            Interesting recording process whereby they run through a song a few times and record the 4th take, because by then some energy would have built up and mistakes dealt with.

            In later albums, putting Copeland in a separate drumming studio with a video monitor seems to have really hurt his feelings. I remember an interview backstage at their 2007 tour where Copeland says eye contact is very important to him and I remember thinking that this comment seemed to be directed at Sting, who looked a little uncomfortable. Obviously a bit of niggle there.

            • I think Sting is probably a bit autistic. Has he ever said anything about this?

              The total lack of politeness in that interview is very refreshing. They just sit there calling each other wankers like real people.

              • I think the interview indicates the affection of old friends / colleagues. At least that’s how I regard this sort of thing from my dear friends from over years being derogatory and rude. It’s the tone. It is jocular and barrack-room, rather than nasty and vicious.

              • Great interview – the affection (remaining gang mentality?) that is so obviously there between them (even though they spend most of the time dissing each other).
                Could sort of see this in the Stewart Copeland doc a whole back when he’s interviewing Sting and the tone is very much like that – winding each other up for the fun of it.
                There’s one bit of that interview that has been reported as “fact” elsewhere – the bit when Sting throws some loose change on the table saying “There’s your Puff Daddy money” has been twisted to a story where Andy Summers confronted Sting at this home, and Sting threw the change at him and shut the door in his face.
                Different story now placed in context.

    • Revisionism? The Police have never been cool and any mention of them must be met with superior sniggering about lutes and tantric sex. Of course Sting is a twerp and often sings in a silly voice, but haven’t we all?

      Back in the real world, they were brilliant, though – as are Sting’s two 80s albums. If you want a very ordinary example of Sting as a top-drawer tunesmith try Fortress Around Your Heart.

      But Richard Thompson doesn’t like him so I’m pissing in the wind here.

  18. A bunch of important-to-me albums are hitting their 40th anniversaries this year – and in some cases there are tours planned. If there were TV shows about that era Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, OMD etc it would be the equivalent of my parents watching Looks Familiar! – a prime time panel show about acts like Flanagan & Allen and Arthur Askey.

    I was about to say that acts from the 40s weren’t still performing the same stuff 40 years later, but I think many of them went on and on and on. I certainly remember Max Wall still doing his funny walk thing well into the 1980s. In fact, at one Manchester gig, you can clearly see a young Ian Brown in the mosh pit, paying very close attention to Mr Wall’s stagecraft.

  19. I have been mulling this thread over. Really good one @dai as it’s not just ‘here’s 100 songs that show why this was the best’. So some more thoughts…
    Following up on my argument that the eighties is the last decade that isn’t ‘history’ squared off to analyse, but the start of the present.
    1. The biggest three stars of the decade (Jackson, Prince, Madonna) were all individual artists. Though Elton John sold a shedload, the seventies saw lots and lots of groups – particularly Queen, Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Bee Gees and (cough) The Eagles at the top of the all-time bestsellers of the decade list. By the end of the eighties the pendulum was swinging – particularly through rap and R and B – back decisively to solo artists. It’s still there. The oft-repeated quote that the last ‘band’ to make it enormous is the Arctic Monkeys – now well over a decade ago.
    2. To extend the argument, the enormous gravity well of the Beatles shifted the dial to groups from 63 to 84/5, but that’s twenty years. For the ten before, and the 35 after, it’s been much more about solo artists.
    3. The eighties saw the last innovation in band line-ups: the faceless muso producer and the livewire singer. Pet Shop Boys, Soft Cell, Erasure etc. This would be further developed in the 90s in which bands were the producer and a rotating cast of livewires: it’s one of the basic templates that still works today.

    • Nice summary.
      Agree about the 80s being the last grand scale innovation in bands line-ups and sounds

      To add to your point 1 re: biggest stars, and sol performers vs Groups
      The most successful Singles chart act of the decade was Shakin’ Stevens – someone who had very very minor success in the 70s, and pretty much nowt (apart from that song after the decade closed.
      Shaky might just be the anomaly here as his schtick was rooted in the 50s, and didn’t really develop from there

        • True a totally blinkered UK view on my part
          (just to get Shaky’s name on this thread).
          A quick look at his wikipedia entry shows (a) that he looks a bit like Mike Read, and (b) he was immensely popular in Ireland, and a big seller in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland and Sweden. But the US – nowt (surprisingly?)

          • Slightly too early to cash in on the second British invasion engendered by MTV. (see elsewhere in the thread)

            Still, he was good enough for Kevin Turvey and Fulchester United. Roight, Armchair Britain?

  21. So basically, the ’80s were the greatest pop decade because you all came of age in that decade.
    My opinion is that the ’80s marked the corporatisation of pop.
    ’50s and ’60s it was a rising business but the people who ran it were’t really aware of that. It was hit-and-miss “What is it? Record it and let’s see if it makes us some money”.
    ’70s was “Bloody hell we’re raking it in! Sign up some more of ’em! Wahey!”
    ’80s was “Cassettes. Niiiice! Hang on! Let’s ditch vinyl and cassettes, release CDs. Vinyl and cassettes are costly and CDs are much cheaper, but we can charge twice as much. Loadsamoney!”
    ’90s was “That one was a big seller. Let’s make more records like that, by artists who sound like they do. Oh shit. The customers are getting computers. They’re copying the music and giving it away to each other instead of buying it from us.”
    Some nice stuff recorded and released in the ’80s. Studio technology was getting better by the week and stage sound was much better, but that’s when the Indies began to stop actually being independent and the accountants started to take it all over.

  22. Leading on from what @moseleymoles says above:

    The eighties brought several global megastars – solo artists, who were both front person and CEO of their own brand, with all the pressures that brings & without the support of being in a group.
    Phil Collins came through the 70s, Springsteen had the E street band, and Sting had the Police, but the five solo artists in their early 20s – Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Whitney Houston and George Michael, all had colossal success – and Madonna is the only one to have celebrated her 60th birthday.

    • Bruce (in his 30s) had the band for several tours and they played on some of the albums, but he was ostensibly a solo artist as far as the name on the records is concerned, not sure his huge stardom and inevitable tabloid exposures was shared much with the band. Good point about those who are no longer with us, many newly successful bands in the 80s split/broke up pretty quickly too.

          • 2 of Springsteen’s 4 studio albums in the 80s were more or less solo, Nebraska absolutely and Tunnel of Love (E St band members embellish solo recordings)

            Bruce was signed as a solo artist, the E St Band only get their name on the front cover and labels for live recordings (with one dodgy exception)

      • Absolutely true about Springsteen – although his mega stardom time (Glory Days?) was with Born in the USA and the mid 80s tours with the E Street Band.
        The point I was trying to make (badly) was that these artists in their 30s had their wild partying days in the 70s, and maybe had a bit more perspective when it came to the windfall 80s. Bowie deliberately set out to become commercial and make money, studying how the Rolling Stones made their cash from touring, and releasing Let’s Dance, which appealed to far more than than his usual fan base.

  23. I agree with the corporatisation bit @mike_h – my argument being not that it was the greatest decade. Pound for pound I would probably go with the 70s, but that it saw much of the modern music industry model come into being. The Stones 82 stadium tour (which I saw) I recall as being one of the first tours in which bands realised that there was serious money in touring itself, as opposed to it being a loss-leader/promo for the new record.
    Interesting you talk about indie. It’s the heyday of a single ‘indie label sound’ (C86, mute, rough trade, 4AD etc) as being something distinct from an all-genres major label sound. It saw majors set up fake indies (Blanco y negro) to try and capture this.

  25. I am again late to a thread, but this one is a good’un.

    I was born 1970, so the 80s was my pop decade and I am willing to defend some of it. 1987-90 was especially good, but that might be the “music fan at 17” rule. Sonic Youth’s run of 80s albums is still impressive; My Bloody Valentine are still the last truly innovative guitar band; the Pixies in London ’88 remains my best ever gig. Nevertheless, what continues to puzzles me is how rock bands like Husker Du or Pixies simply could not break through into the charts or at least some wider audience. Morrissey blames Rough Trade Records for not getting enough Smiths’ product out on sale, which may be true, but it seemed to happen a lot of other groups that would have clearly been bigger in the 90s. I also have noticed how the clean, studio sheen of records that I hated at the time has come back as an entire aesthetic, and now seems less offensive.

        • I love Pixies and Hüsker Dü. I love Nirvana (whose Pixies influence to my ears is pretty much limited to use of dynamics).

          Pixies and Hüsker Dü’s lack of mainstream success isn’t any kind of mystery: the anomaly is Nirvana’s success *despite their weirdness*, not the others’ lack of it.

          The thing about Nevermind is the ferocious immediacy of its hooks, alongside its weirdness. Teen Spirit, Lithium and Come As You Are are the spoonful of sugar that makes Breed and Stay Away go down. Pixies are amazing, close to being my favourite band, but they’re just plain weird. They never wrote a pop hook comparable to anything on Nevermind. Their catchiest pop song is Here Comes Your Man, which is a retro pastiche of surf, a minority-interest subgenre even at its height. Kurt had an ear for a pop tune which Charles Thompson just doesn’t.

          And then there’s the production and mix. Vig’s production gives Nevermind a fat wallop that just isn’t there on Doolittle, and that’s vastly heightened by Andy Wallace’s mix. And you’ve got to remember that hard rock and metal were already mainstream in 1991: Metallica, Guns n Roses – the pop audience was used to huge distorted guitars. The mainstream hard rock audience was ready to hear a Nirvana. They’d had their gateway drugs already. Not a Pixies – who aren’t remotely a hard rock band.

          With Hüsker, the problem is much easier to explain: those records sound like shit. Amazing songs. Appalling recordings.

          • It’s usually pretty grim when, usually for royalties-related reasons, a heritage act of whatever vintage decides to record carbon copies of their old catalogue in the hope that radio stations/films etc will now license those instead of the original recordings which don’t earn them a penny. In the case of Hüsker Dü though, I’d have been first in line to hand over my money if they could have just made those brilliant songs sound like they do in my head and not like they do on the records.

          • As I observed during their Saturday afternoon 1992 Reading Festival set, Nevermind-era Nirvana sounded like a cross between Pixies and The Police. Later on they sounded even more Pixies-like (partly due to Steve Albini’s production).

            Agree about Hüsker Dü, though – awful recordings. Sugar sounded so much better.

            • Monkey Gone To Heaven is three minutes of a nonsensical spoken-word narrative about “an underwater man who controlled the sea”, a chorus which goes “this monkey’s gone to heaven”, and ends up with yer man literally *screaming* IF THE DEVIL IS SIX THEN GAAAAAD IS SEVEN, GAAAAD IS SEVEN, GAAAAAAAD IS SEVEN!

              It’s not Papa Don’t Preach, is it?

              • Fun fact: Show Me Heaven by Maria McKee is the same song, written from the perspective of the underwater guy who controls the sea (generally presumed, by a very short process of elimination, to be Aquaman).

                The lyric is addressed directly to the monkey, and represents an extended plea for that sainted primate to grant to Aquaman an extended tour of his new abode.

                In that sense, Maria McKee is also an important Nirvana influence. They were basically Maria McKee meets the Police meets the Pixies. Amazed no one thought of it before them, and they certainly can’t be allowed to take the credit for it.

                • Another Fun Maria McKee 80s Fact:
                  Sheargal Farkey recorded “A Good Heart” – written by Maria McKee about Benmont Tench.
                  The follow-up single was a cover of “You Little Thief” written by Benmont Tench about Maria McKee

                  (this “fact” has apparently been debunked by Mr Tench himself, but why let the truth get in the way of some prime trivia)

    • The Smiths were on the radio and in the charts – just not the top ten. I don’t know if that can be blamed on distribution but it was interesting that Morrissey’s first solo single (on HMV/EMI) went straight to number 3.

      • Yes his first few solo singles all made top 10, after only 2 top 10s for the band. Just took a look at his chart history, 51 top 40 hits in total with The Smiths and solo, that’s pretty impressive

      • I don’t recall him personally promoting those singles. Every Day is Like Sunday in particular was a really good song and 100% on-brand Morrissey, who was still widely adored at the time. if he’d done TOTP, Wogan, The Tube and all the trimmings I think he would have had the number one he clearly craved.

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