The eighties are in fashion. Evoking that decade brings a nostalgic air to this world of the 21st century in which everything happens so quickly. There is a certain feeling that, for some reason, all past times were better. And the 1980s were years that certainly produced some great cultural stuff: magical movies and music that has managed to survive the passing of the years.
Actually we all know the eighties. When one of those songs plays we recognize it, and we have all seen many movies of the time. We also know about the comics, games, clothes and technology that were there. Now, submerged in the second decade of the 21st century, the world seems to want to recover the essence of the wonderful ’80s. Maybe we need it to survive this modern life.
We see an example of this back to the 80s in the 8-bit fever: recreations of series and movies with the look of eighties video games. The Internet has been filled with these types of videos. But the ’80s have also returned to television, to the cinema, to the world of video games, to the fashion and clothing industry… even famous athletes are signing up to relive the eighties! Books have also been published about those years.
This obvious nostalgia for the eighties has been the subject of study in several articles, like this one, this one or this one. And if we talk about the ’80s now, it’s because they undoubtedly left their mark. At VENTURA we don’t want to miss the eighties wave and we propose to relive this wonderful decade year after year through music. We’ll go through each year’s charts to find out what the soundtrack of that era was.
1980: the arrival of electronic sounds
The seventies died with the news of the assassination of John Lennon, on December 8, 1980. A new era for music began. Culturally the eighties were also going to suppose a radical change with respect to the previous decade. This year Pac-Man was released and the CNN television network was created. 1980 was also the year of ‘Cosmos’, the famous documentary (and book) by scientific popularizer Carl Sagan. It was originally broadcast on PBS, the American public network, and reached up to sixty countries. It was a social phenomenon that glued millions of families to the television. The series was translated to countries like Spain or Mexico in 1982.
Disco music continued to fill the clubs, the hits of the year that did not stop playing were some like ‘And The Beat Goes On’ (The Whispers), ‘Celebration’ (Kool & The Gang), ‘Upside Down’ (Diana Ross) or ‘Funky Town’ (Lipps Inc.). In this first year of the decade, hits from the albums The Game (Queen) and Super Trouper (ABBA) also sounded on the radio , two groups that had already known success in the seventies.
Sounds of the seventies were still filling the radio in 1980. The purest rock held up to the push of the sounds of the clubs, especially with AC/DC and their seventh album Back in Black , produced after the death of the band’s lead singer, and which contained hits like the song that gives the album its title or ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’, and thanks also to Dire Straits, who published the fantastic Making Movies . Bruce Springsteen and The Police released hit material this year. However, these groups of electric guitars and drums were going to meet new young people armed with keyboards and synthesizers in the fight to occupy the top positions on the music charts.
In 1980 new sounds began to climb positions, which came from groups like Ultravox, an English new wave band that had not been very successful during its first years in the late seventies, but which became one of the groups most influential throughout Europe during the following decade. In 1980 Ultravox released Vienna , a key record in the history of electronic music.
Synthesizers had already been used during the seventies (a good example of this is the mythical German group Kraftwerk), but at that time the commercial successes, the TOP 5 and the radios belonged mainly to rockers such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple… etc. The greatest rock hits are from the ’70s. During the eighties, young people and the industry (or was it the other way around?) decided to change and embraced new idols like Depeche Mode, Culture Club, Eurythmics, The Human League, Pet Shop Boys, Yazoo, Cyndi Lauper… new groups that brought new sounds to the radios, placing their hits at the top of the music charts.
1981: There’s Still Rock
But Rock ‘n Roll was going to withstand the push of the eighties sound. If 1980 had produced rock hits from Queen, Dire Straits and AC/DC, 1981 was also going to be a notable year for the genre. The Rolling Stones with their famous ‘Start Me Up’, Journey with ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ or Queen and David Bowie with ‘Under Pressure’ managed to keep rock at the top of the charts. Joan Jett also helped keep the rock flame alive with the hit ‘I Love Rock ‘n Roll,’ which played on the radio all year long.
Other examples that rock continued to endure the arrival of the eighties can be found in the song ‘Rock This Town’, which managed to enter the TOP 10 on Billboard in the United States and the United Kingdom, and in the figure of Bryan Adams, whose His career took off precisely in 1981 with ‘Lonely Nights’ and continued throughout the decade.
However, this year there were also hits from the world of electronics and synth pop, such as ‘Down Under’ by the young Australian band Men At Work, or ‘Don’t You Want Me’, by The Human League.
The Human League deserves a special mention when we talk about the eighties. This English group formed in 1977 was a pioneer of pop with synthesizers (synth pop), a musical genre derived from electronic music, combined with disco music, new wave and pop. Developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, synth pop served as a platform for the emergence of new styles of electronic music such as house, techno, and trance, and also gave way from the disco sound to the dance sound.
In their best known hit, The Human League introduces us to these electronic sounds perfectly. The first twenty seconds of ‘Don’t You Want Me’ are the essence of the eighties sound. It is worth listening to them to transport us to that time and imagine ourselves in a disco.
‘Don’t You Want Me’ was number one on the Christmas charts in 1981 in the UK, and managed to climb to the top position also in the US in the summer of the following year. Other hits of the year included the funk hit ‘Super Freak’ and Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’. 1981 also produced several less noisy and upbeat hits, such as the romantic ‘Endless Love’ sung by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross, the perfect ‘Bette Davis Eyes’, or the ballad ‘Lady’ by Kenny Rogers.
1982: the year of Michael Jackson
The year in which the cinema lost Henry Fonda, Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly, the world of music entered the ‘heart of the eighties’, a series of years (1982-1983-1984) that were especially productive in terms of to great songs and hits that went down in history. 1982 was a year packed with hits that we all know and recognize when they play on the radio. Reviewing the list we see that absolutely ALL the songs in our TOP 15 are extremely famous. All of them produced in 1982, a magical year for music.
The list is endless: ‘Eye of the Tiger’, ‘Thriller’, ‘Come On Eileen’, ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’, ‘Billy Jean’, ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’, ‘Eye In the Sky’, ‘Don’t Go’… Nowadays it would be hard to imagine that so many good songs would appear in a single year. Can we gather so many successful titles that will go down in music history if we review what was produced in 2012? and in 2015? How many songs from 2016 will go down in history? It is an interesting debate about how the music industry has evolved in terms of the homogenization and uniformity of the genres that predominate at the top of the charts.
‘Rosanna’ remained among the top hits on the charts for much of the year, competing with ‘Eye Of The Tiger’ and the previous year’s hit ‘Don’t You Want Me’. This hit would be the first that Toto would place at the top of the charts, to dazzle everyone with ‘Africa’ in 1983. Culture Club was another of the groups that found success in 1982, with ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me’, and Men At Work reaped success again with ‘Who Can It Be Now’, the title of which may not sound like many people. like its catchy saxophone melody.
In 1982, the album Rio was also successful , which was the worldwide consecration of Duran Duran, a band that would later manage to place up to twenty more singles on the Billboard Hot 100 list. On the other hand, this year the world met Yazoo, a British duo of synth pop formed at the end of 1981 by Alison Moyet and Vince Clarke (former composer of Depeche Mode). Their career was highly commercially successful in Europe in the early 1980s, and while they didn’t have the same luck in the US, Yazoo reached three Top 10 hits on the UK Singles earlier this decade. Among the highlights: ‘Only You’ and ‘Don’t Go’, both hits from the album Upstairs at Eric’s .
But without a doubt, above the remaining rock or pop hits, in 1982 there was an album that sold more than any other and a song that played at all hours: Thriller , Michael Jackson’s best-known work. That year ‘The Thing’ had been released, a mythical film by John Carpenter that terrified so many young people. It was no coincidence then that ‘Thriller’, by Michael Jackson, had fear as its central theme. It was not a typical love song. It was a horror story. This was well evidenced by that great video clip with the voice of Vincent Price.
Thriller is the best-selling album of all time. With this data we can already get an idea of what we are talking about. 1982 will go down in music history simply for this fact (and that many other hits by other artists were published). It was the year in which ‘Billy Jean’ and ‘Thriller’ were first heard, two of the most famous songs by a Michael Jackson who had already known success during the seventies (with the Jackson Five and also solo).
1983: To dance!
The discos were filled with people to dance to the rhythm of Lionel Richie, Irene Cara, Michael Jackson, Donna Summer or Billy Joel. David Bowie already told us in ‘Let’s Dance’, and Cyndi Lauper remembered that ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’. Young people sought refuge in the night and in music, as the hit ‘Last Night a DJ Saved my Life’ shows. With these animated rhythms we enter 1983, a year in which ‘Flashdance’ was released. The year of the dance? To show the video clip of ‘All Night Long’, by Lionel Richie.
Lionel Richie had been part of the musical band The Commodores during the seventies, but he had his greatest success from 1981, when he began his solo career, managing to place up to nine of his compositions at number one on the Billboard list, among the that stand out: ‘Lady’ (1980), ‘Hello’ (1981), ‘All Night Long’ (1983), ‘Say you, say me’ (1985) or ‘We Are the World’ (1985). Lionel Richie was also a successful music producer, and won an Oscar for Best Song precisely with ‘Say you, say me’. His songs are part of the soundtrack of that time.
In 1983, the first great success of UB40, a band formed in 1978, reached the radio stations and placed their version of Neil Diamond’s ‘Red red wine’ at the top of the music charts. It was also the year in which the mythical ‘Africa’, one of the most representative songs of the eighties, played for the first time on the radio. Although this song appeared on the Toto IV album , published the previous year, it came out as a single in February 1983, and it never stopped playing. The years 1982-1983 were important for Toto, a band that won six Grammy Awards and the Grammy for Best Album of the Year.
If 1982 had been the year of Michael Jackson, the following year Thriller continued to produce hits. In February 1983, ‘Beat It’ was presented as a single, which reached the top of the music charts and won two Grammy Awards in the categories of Best Song of the Year and Best Male Rock Voice.
The sounds of funk and disco were increasingly joined by synth-pop, the sensation of the early 1980s. We can get an idea of what kind of sounds were heard during these years with the following New Order song: ‘Blue Monday’ became the best-selling 12-inch record of all time.
1983 was also the year of worldwide success for U2 and Bonnie Tyler. The Irish band had been composing for some time and had released two albums, but it was with War that they launched themselves to an international audience. The disc contained the famous hit ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and also ‘New Year’s Day’, which was the first U2 song to reach the Top 10 in the UK. For her part, the Welsh singer succeeded with her fifth album, Faster Than the Speed of Night, his first number one in the United Kingdom and the United States: the famous ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. Bonnie Tyler was nominated for two Grammy Awards thanks to this album. It is not included in the TOP 20, but in 1983 an old star of the seventies also returned to the top of the rankings: Rod Stewart managed to sound on the radio with the single ‘Baby Jane’.
Other hits of the year were ‘Up Where We Belong’, by Joe Cocker, ‘Every Breath You Take, by The Police, ‘Gloria’, by Laura Branigan, or ‘Moonlight Shadow’, by Mike Oldfield. Singles that are still heard today and that practically everyone knows. Without a doubt, 1983 was a year in which good albums and great hits were produced that would sound for several generations. As a cultural note, it is interesting to note that Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró, universal masters of painting, died in 1983.
1984: a year full of successes
‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’, ‘Terminator’, ‘Karate Kid’, ‘Gremlins’, ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’, ‘Footlose’, ‘The Neverending Story’ or ‘Ghostbusters’ were released in theaters. Films that had a tremendous cultural impact on youth and society in general. Although at the Oscars the critics would surrender to the work of Milos Forman ‘Amadeus’, the truth is that these adventure and horror films took all the commercial success that year.
The number of hits on the billboard is comparable to what was playing on the radio. In this case we have had to increase the ranking of songs from fifteen to twenty-five, since it was a particularly productive year in terms of musical hits. Important albums were released by Bruce Springsteen, Queen, Elton John, Bryan Adams, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Phil Collins, Prince, Madonna, Tina Turner, Wham!, Stevie Wonder, Cyndi Lauper, Paul McCartney, U2… and hits such as ‘ Relax’, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Good’, ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’, ‘Smooth Operator’ or the famous ‘Ghostbusters’ (theme of the movie).
On the album The Works , the successful band Queen again released great tracks like ‘Radio Ga Ga’, ‘Hammer to Fall’ and ‘I Want to Break Free’. Queen had already experienced worldwide success during the 1970s, and continued to top the music scene in the 1980s. It shows the enormous dimension that this band has in the history of music. Few managed to have successes during such different times: other music giants like Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd were not able to continue their brilliant career in the eighties, and Queen did.
On this occasion we have had to make a list of TOP 25 instead of TOP 15, because 1984 was an exceptionally productive year in terms of musical successes. It was “the year of…” for many artists. It was Prince’s year, because he published Purple Rain , but it was also the year of Scorpions, the year of Bruce Springsteen or the year of Bryan Adams. All of them published their most famous songs in 1984.
Madonna achieved her first US and UK number ones with the album Like a Virgin . The singles ‘Into the Groove’, ‘Material Girl’ and ‘Like A Virgin’ were huge hits. Like a Virgin is one of the best-selling albums in history, with more than 21 million copies worldwide.
1984 was also a great year for the group Wham!, one of the most successful among the youth of the eighties. They placed two hits on the radio as ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ and ‘Careless Whisper’. Without a doubt , Make It Big is the quintessential album by this British group, with which they achieved success on both sides of the Atlantic. And although no song appears in the TOP 25, this year one of Van Halen’s most successful albums is also published, precisely titled 1984 , and which includes songs like ‘Hot For Teacher’. This album came to compete for a few weeks of the year for the first place on the Billboard list with Thriller itself , which had been in the highest positions of the musical rankings for a couple of years.
At the end of the year the single ‘Do They Know it’s Christmas’ was released by Band Aid, the supergroup formed by Bob Geldof for the two mega-concerts that would take place the following year and that would be a milestone in the history of music. This single played continuously on the radio during the Christmas period between 1984 and 1985.
1985: the year of ‘Live Aid’
In October 1985, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) arrived in the United States. The world of video games was revolutionized at a time when Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games and the famous ‘Fight Fiction’ books were triumphant among the youngest.
After the successful album Private Dancer published the previous year, in 1985 Tina Turner reaped great success with the single ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’, the theme of the film ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’, in which she herself starred with to Mel Gibson. Without a doubt, 1984 and 1985 were key years in the career of the Queen of Rock, which marked her return to commercial success after a time in silence.
In 1985 , Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required albums were also important , containing the hits ‘One More Night’ and ‘Sussudio’, both number one in the United States (the British singer also went gold that year with the single ‘ Easy Lover’), and Brothers in Arms , by Dire Straits, an album that established Mark Knopfler’s band as rock superstars.
In 1985 ‘The Goonies’ was released, produced by Steven Spielberg and which had a tremendous cultural impact. It is one of the films that are used today to represent the eighties air , and that evokes a time of adventures marked by role-playing games, comics, the first video games… etc. An example of that eighties spirit can be found today in the famous series ‘Stranger Things’.
But without a doubt the most important event of 1985 in terms of music was the macro-project of ‘Live Aid’. Organized by Bob Geldof, Live Aid consisted of two massive and extensive concerts in which the world’s leading groups and artists came together with the aim of raising funds for the benefit of African countries, especially Ethiopia and Somalia.
A mega-concert was organized on each side of the Atlantic. At Wembley Stadium the concert began with a ceremonial act of welcoming the Princes and with the hymn ‘God Save the Queen’. Here were English groups like Queen, Dire Straits, David Bowie, Paul McCartney… etc. In Philadelphia, for their part, attendees were able to listen to Bryan Adams, Tina Turner, Led Zeppelin, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan…
At Live Aid, the stars of the eighties (Sting, Nik Kershaw, Madonna, Simple Minds, George Michael…) met the old glories of the sixties and seventies (Led Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bob Dylan, The Who… ). It was a historic event. Never before had so many stars met. And it was never achieved again.
1986: the end of the decade is near
The soul of the eighties begins to fade little by little. 1986 is not a year of many successes. In the list of songs published that year we see that there are not as many hits as in the heart of the decade (the period 1983-1985). The ones that sounded the most on the radio were the songs by Genesis, Peter Gabriel’s band now led by Phil Collins, Queen, who had released A Kind of Magic , Bon Jovi with his ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ and Peter Gabriel himself, now alone.
Genesis’s Invisible Touch album was a huge success. It continued to have the typical «80s sound», and varied songs like ‘The Brazilian’ or ‘Land of Confusion’, from very different registers. Genesis was one of the groups that filled the most stadiums in the eighties. His concert at Wembley in 1987 is good proof of this.
Special mention deserves Graceland , a Grammy-winning album for Best Album and a huge sales success. Paul Simon showed who had the talent in the famous group of the sixties Simon & Garfunkel. We dedicate a special article to this album that every lover of good music should have on their bookshelf.
For their part, the Human League returned to number one on the charts with ‘Human’, with a much more melodramatic tone than their 1981 hit. The leisurely tone predominated in 1986, with slow and tearful songs like ‘The Lady in Red’ or the famous ‘Don’t Give Up’ by Peter Gabriel. Freddie Mercury wondered who he wanted to live forever, and Mick Hucknall reflected on the passage of time in ‘Holding Back the Years’. It was “the countdown” to the end of the decade, just as Europe sang in their best-known hit.
1987: the return of the rockers
U2, an Irish rock band, had released some hits since its formation in the late 1970s, but it was in 1987 that they went gold. The release of The Joshua Tree was a worldwide phenomenon, and one after another several singles from the album managed to climb to the top of the charts: ‘Where the Streets Have no Name’, ‘With or Without You’, ‘I Still Haven’ t Found What I’m Looking For’, ‘One Tree Hill’… all of them great songs from the best U2 album and one of the best albums in history. Critics and the public immediately embraced him. Rock had returned with force.
In addition, 1987 will be remembered for the hit ‘Faith’ by George Michael, who did not stop having hits after leaving Wham!, and for ‘Bad’, by a Michael Jackson who had just been diagnosed with vitiligo, for which his skin I lost pigmentation. The Pet Shop Boys were also very successful with Actually . Madonna’s ‘La Isla Bonita’ and Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ were playing on the radio, who seemed to want to go back to 1983 and dance and dance.
Rick Astley set out to overcome the slump of 1986 and buoyed the world with his catchy ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, which reached number one internationally. It was the biggest selling single in the UK in 1987, and reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It was a sound that tried to retain the spirit of the heart of the eighties. However, it had a lot of competition, and everything presaged that the decade was coming to an end. Guns N’ Roses, Whitesnake, U2… the success of the rockers seemed incompatible with that of pop and electronic music. It was one thing or the other. Apparently the top of the charts could not accommodate both genders.
Appetite for Destruction was the first album by Guns N’ Roses. A good way to introduce yourself to the world and give rock a good push towards the top of the Billboard and sales. It ended up being one of the best-selling albums in history, and contains songs like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, ‘Paradise City’ or ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, which were released as singles between 1987 and 1988.
In 1987, ex-Beatle George Harrison also found success with ‘I Got My Mind Set On You’. Harrison had spent the ’70s exploring, experimenting, and releasing good material, but the ’80s hadn’t suited him musically. He spent a long period in silence. Towards the end of the decade, with Cloud Nine , he returned to radio and a number one hit on the charts.
Another of the successes of the year came from the hand of Zucchero, with ‘Senza una donna’, which managed to reach the top of the charts in Europe. In the United States the Italian singer was not so successful. At that time the country was immersed in several issues, one of them the approval of zidovudine, the first virostatic treatment against AIDS. An interesting social and political issue that is masterfully dealt with in ‘Dallas Buyers Club’, nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture.
1988: goodbye to the ‘eighties sound’
Again without as many successes as years ago. In 1988 there were not so many good albums, and only a few occasional singles. It was evident that the period 1982-1984 had been exceptional. This year Phil Collins and Michael Jackson were once again successful with singles like ‘Two Hearts’ or ‘Smooth Criminal’, and new faces appeared at the top of the charts such as Tracy Chapman with ‘Fast Car’ and Bobby McFerrin with his extremely famous ‘ Don’t Worry Be Happy’.
Gun’s N’ Roses had saved a single from 1987 to release in 1988 (‘Paradise City’) and they also recycled ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. The single had been released in September 1987 and was reissued in October ’88. The Irish U2 did not repeat the success of the previous year with ‘Angel of Harlem’, nor did Madonna with ‘Spotlight’.
Among the hits of the year were less common artists at the top of the charts such as Enya, Leonard Cohen or The Proclaimers, a sign that Lionel Richie and company were no longer producing as before. There was no news from Queen, nor from Tina Turner, nor from purely eighties groups like Ultravox, The Human League, Yazoo, Cyndi Lauper, Toto, Men at Work, Culture Club… etc. The Pet Shop Boys did have more success at the end of the decade.
1989: we prepare for a new world
In many respects, 1989 marked a radical change. In geopolitics, in the economy, in politics, in technology… Society is not a reality alien to these other dimensions, and it was affected by the arrival of new winds: what was to come would be the last decade of the century. XX, and you had to prepare.
The world of culture also changed. Technical advances improved cinema, and new styles and sounds made their way into music. We can find an example in the single ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, by Neil Young, an author who had spent the eighties experimenting and far from the commercial success he had had during the sixties and seventies. This song is considered by many as the inaugurator of the grunge sound that would predominate during the early nineties. In addition to the style, the content is also important: letters more involved in social and political problems.
A change that was very well reflected in a chapter of The Simpsons (a series that started precisely in 1989), in which the town’s record store, formerly called ‘Good Vibrations’, is now called ‘Suicide Notes’. A change of name that evidences the change in culture, in music and in the new youth. From good vibes to suicide notes. From dancing in the disco to listening to distorted guitars in bed.
Although ‘Wicked Game’ became a hit in 1990, it was written in 1989. A sad song about frustrated love. Another good example that the good vibrations transmitted by the songs of Lionel Richie, Nik Kershaw or Stevie Wonder were already far away. The 80’s were over.
Even Phil Collins, who had made people dance so much with ‘Easy Lover’, ‘Two Hearts’ or ‘Sussudio’, was now going to compose gray and melancholic songs like ‘Another Day in Paradise’, a single that addressed the subject of homeless people. Also the funny Cyndi Lauper was no longer jumping on her video clips and driving lost at night in a dark city. The change was more than evident.
We find more examples of this change of tone in songs like ‘Right Here Waiting’, by Richard Marx, ‘Sacrifice’ by Elton John, or ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’, the hit by Bette Midler. The electronic sounds also abandoned the synthpop rhythm of the early eighties to embrace a less explosive tempo: ‘Personal Jesus’ is one of the songs that marks the end of the decade.
In 1989 the group Roxette, formed just three years ago, released two great songs: ‘The Look’ and ‘Listen to Your Heart’. The group would know success immediately, and even more so when the following year, in 1990, they would put music to the movie ‘Pretty Woman’ with ‘It Must Have Been Love’.
Cher wanted to go back in time in ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’, the single she released to end the decade and get back on the radio. All the past time was better? The nineties were coming and the new youth would choose a change in music. The distorted guitars of Nirvana appeared with force and suddenly the eighties disappeared.
