1980s Music by Stuart Maconie

1 ‘Another Brick In The Wall’

Pink Floyd, 1979

The last number one of the 1970s was also the first number one of the 1980s, and it both echoed and foreshadowed the sound of those decades. Pink Floyd were in some ways the ultimate 1970s dinosaur act (Johnny Rotten’s famous customised T-shirt read ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’) but their brooding sourness fitted the post-punk mood, and the masterstroke of adding a disco beat gave them a global hit that ushered in a decade of rock-star alienation and social concern.

2 ‘How Soon Is Now?’

The Smiths, 1984

This song combines The Smiths at their most imaginative and magisterial as a band — the soaring, meshing guitars drifting in and out like smoke and light over a shifting Bo Diddley groove — with perhaps the ultimate Morrissey lyric, a compressed tale of unfulfilment and Northern nightlife, littered with casual gems of imagery and observation: ‘I am the son/And the heir/Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.’

3 ‘Ghost Town’

The Specials, 1981

‘Ghost Town’ is like a fairground ride through a nightmare; a fractured and fragmented slideshow of images from an urban hell played out to the lush but demented strains of a Dario Argento horror movie. For a brief moment there is a ray of sunshine in the form of a nostalgic reverie when Terry Hall takes the lead vocal and remembers the peace and prosperity of boomtown Coventry. But this is shattered in seconds, and we are back in the darkened underpasses of a strip-lit city.

4 ‘Shipbuilding’

Elvis Costello, 1982

The launching of the Falklands task force inspired Costello to write about the conflict in one of the most moving and subtle artistic responses to any war, sung from the point of view of a worker at one of Britain’s declining shipyards who knows that war can bring prosperity as well as tragedy. Its genius lies in its personalisation of the dilemma, and the reminder that underlying the rhetoric of war are small human stories.

5 ‘Gold’

Spandau Ballet, 1983

Precisely what ‘Gold’ is about is anyone’s guess. But the chorus positively shouts, in Tony Hadley’s not inconsiderable voice, of self-belief, dynamism, ambition and a thrusting sense of getting on — which makes it appear the ultimate Thatcherite pop anthem. ‘Gold’ was released just after Thatcher roared back into office in imperial pomp, galvanised by the Falklands victory.

6 ‘Two Tribes’

Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 1984

‘It’s all about the bass line,’ said producer Trevor Horn. The relentless, funky motif provides the song’s spine, symbolising, said Holly Johnson, the USA, overlaid with various Russian flourishes. But the real genius was in capturing the Zeitgeist of techno-fear and the madness of nuclear war by mirroring it. It was sleek, futuristic and awe-inspiring. The first record to be recorded entirely digitally, it took three months to make and cost £200,000.

7 ‘Running Up That Hill’

Kate Bush, 1985

Bush transfixed a generation with her image and gloriously romantic musical style. ‘Wuthering Heights’ was as revolutionary as ‘God Save the Queen’, and those shock waves are still heard today in the music of Florence + the Machine, Bat For Lashes et al. By the mid-1980s she’d arrived at her mature style: dense, opaque, intense and oblique.

8 ‘Love Cats’

The Cure, 1983

By the time The Cure released ‘Love Cats’ in 1983, lead singer Robert Smith was bored of the band’s self-imposed straitjacket of gloom. ‘Love Cats’ breezes along, all swinging double bass and sassy horns, but the mood is still faintly sinister.

9 ‘Smalltown Boy’

Bronski Beat, 1984

Jimmy Somerville formed Bronski Beat with Larry Steinbachek and Steve Bronski, and together they brought a new, politicised, militant gay aesthetic to pop music. With its compellingly chilly ambience, motorik dance beat and the social realism of its lyric and video, the opening of ‘Smalltown Boy’ must have resonated with many gay and lesbian listeners: ‘With everything you own/In a little black case/Alone on the platform.’

10 ‘Into The Groove’

Madonna, 1985

Arguably the definitive 1980s icon, Madonna Louise Ciccone infuriated, empowered, aroused and exasperated for most of the decade. This may be her emblematic tune, an anthem to self-determination and the consoling, hedonistic power of music.