MTV transforms the way fans devour music. So do the Walkman and the boombox, putting young fans in command. Rock, rap, disco, New Romantic synth-pop, metal, electro-funk — they all start sharing bodily fluids all over the radio rollingstone

The Smiths – Reel Around The Fountain (Peel Session) a song about the loss of innocence, and one tabloid papers suggested was condoning child abuse – was stately and mournful, but never let its melancholy topple over into self pity. Again, the wit was there (though the line “I dreamt about you last night/ And I fell out of bed twice” was lifted from Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey), along with a delicious understatement (“Fifteen minutes with you/ I wouldn’t say no”) that makes love and lust and despair seem human rather than, as so often in pop, superheroic. Reel Around the Fountain was arguably the Smiths at their most perfect – a band who understood the dynamics and complexities of both music and life theguardian

The Smiths – This Charming Man  a song that summed up what Peel said was attractive about the Smiths: that you couldn’t tell exactly what they’d been listening to from their music theguardian

The Verlaines – Death And The Maiden The New Zealand rock scene was a hotbed of creativity, with nobody in the outside world butting in or paying attention. Just an island of 70 million sheep and a bottomless supply of eccentric guitar bands. The Verlaines dropped their debut single, “Death and the Maiden,” on the Dunedin label Flying Nun, gossiping about French poets over chiming guitars, with the “Verlaine Verlaine Verlaine” chorus… By the 1990s, the Verlaines’ influence was all over indie rock, from the Spinanes (their fan tribute “Hawaiian Baby”) to Pavement rollingstone

Orange Juice – Rip It Up in many ways represents the high-water mark of an entire heterogeneous movement in clever, witty, arse-kicking music that stormed the battlements of rock tradition… With its Chic-inspired scratchy guitar riff and squelching Roland TB-303 synthesiser bassline – the first such use of the soon-to-become iconic device in a noteworthy song, and thus an accidental ancestor to acid house… Throwing shade on the “humdrum” state of the early 80s music scene, it’s a classic Collins mixture of rock’n’roll retroisms, arcane wit and cheeky hubris: refrains do not come much more gloriously arch than “I hope to God I’m not as dumb as you make out”. Capping it all off is a neat little lyrical and musical quote of Buzzcocks’ Boredom and a wailing sax solo theguardian

New Order – Age Of Consent New Order truly becoming New Order after the hesitancy and mourning of their debut album… a shimmering, if strange, pop song, driven by one of Hook’s greatest bass lines – hypnotic, relentless, insanely catchy guardian

Madonna – Borderline My mum has always claimed that ‘Borderline’ is “actually about reaching orgasm” – an interpretation I didn’t appreciate hearing from her as a teenager. I still think it’s probably a song about getting a wayward partner to commit: “Honey, don’t you fool around.” But hey, this is Madonna, so a sex-positive reading is always valid nme

Cyndi Lauper – Girls Just Wanna Have Fun a timeless feminist pop manifesto, where her gaudy thrift-shop wigs-and-lipstick humor is part of the statement. She speaks up for every girl who wants to be the one to walk in the sun. She makes every “just wanna” feel like a challenge, as well as an invitation rollingstone

The Assembly – Never Never a terrific electronic arrangement from Vince Clarke and a soaring vocal from Feargal Sharkey. The track shot straight into the Top 40 and was at No.4 within a fortnight. It was joined in the Top 10 for a further two weeks by another Clarke composition, The Flying Pickets’ version of Only You, which ended up as the Christmas No.1. Clarke’s plan after Yazoo had been for an album with a host of different guest vocalists, but after recording Never Never with Sharkey, it fell by the wayside. Instead, he placed an ad in the music press looking for a new singer, eventually recruiting Andy Bell and forming Erasure classicpopmag

Kraftwerk – Tour De France the human breath drives the song, fast, hard and strong. After paeans to the car and the train, the bicycle might have seemed an odd choice – as if Kraftwerk’s whole career had been sponsored by a transport initiative – but it had a personal connection with its frontman, Ralf Hütter. A borderline obsessive cyclist by the early 80s, he suffered a fractured skull after falling from his bike in 1983 and was in hospital for several days theguardian

Ben Watt – On Box Hill What made North Marine Drive so special was how resolutely honest and personal it was. Few albums by male singer-songwriters could invoke the genuine angst, ennui and despondency of disenchanted youth and Drive took the aura of early ’80s romantic despair to the hilt popmatters

Marine Girls – A Place In The Sun Even before prime time, Tracey Thorn’s knack for songwriting is already intact, taking this image of a place in the sun and crafting a melody that could rip your heart out of your chest. Farout

Felt - Penelope Tree dark, despairing… In their earliest days, Felt was characterized by Deebank’s decorative playing and a near total lack of bass. Lawrence’s flat, affected vocals and cultivated, fey, witty lyrics gave the band both a sense of feminity/androgyny and an air of sophistication pitchfork

Strawberry Switchblade – Trees and Flowers a document of McDowall’s agrophobia, which causes him to hate crowds and open spaces, but the condition gives McDowall a unique perspective on social life, which is seen through the closing chapters of the track, as McDowall laments: “Can’t you see/I get so frightened/No one else seems frightened/Only me, only me…”, conveying a sense of isolation and a layer of fear that contrasts the offbeat rhythm of the curious pop influences on the track onetrackatatime

The Raincoats – No One’s Little Girl a madcap trance groove, dancing on the grave of misogynistic clichés. Gina Birch chants over her wobbly bass skank, chanting, “I never shall be in your family tree,” along with Ana Da Silva’s guitar and Vicky Aspinall’s viola rollingstone

David Bowie – Modern Love at his catchiest and most nihilistic, taking aim at the song’s namesake over jazzy saxophone and chunky guitar riffs played by legends Stevie Ray Vaughan and Nile Rodgers… By the end of the song, he makes a convincing argument — over a classic, Fifties rock & roll sound — that the emptiness he has unveiled is something worth celebrating rollingstone

The Bluebells – Cath There are songs that you forget about and then they come on and they whisk you back in time. Cath by The Bluebells was almost a hit in 1983 – number 62 apparently – and then just edged into the Top 40 in 1984 after their success with Young At Heart. Cath was always their best song in my opinion, much better than YAH. It’s got that 60s jangle going on, very Beatles For Sale, plus a big football chant chorus… Then there’s the final section of the song, where it goes all Maggie Mae for a bit and some great lead vocals. And the classic line “You spoil my day for the rest of the night” thesongsthatpeoplesing

Aztec Camera – Oblivious Was Roddy Frame, as the strapline of Glasgow’s Postcard label so often trumpeted, the sound of young Scotland? It seemed hard to believe… because the songs he wrote for Aztec Camera were nothing like the gritty post punk of many of his contemporaries.

Oblivious, with it’s lavish Flamenco touches, sun-dappled brightness and Frame’s loquacious poetry seemed like it belonged somewhere in a Mediterranean village than a dour sink estate. Complete with a guitar solo that would’ve made a beginner feel like they needed a dozen fingers, this was the sound of a happy place, the precise location a mere detail. Momentarily, Aztec Camera were the sound of a young everywhere arcticreviews

The Go-Betweens – Cattle And Cane Their most celebrated song… composed in the summer of 1982 on a borrowed guitar in London, though it sounded meticulously thought-out and crafted, rather than impulsively put together in someone’s spare bedroom… reflects a phase in the Go-Betweens’ trajectory when many of their songs dwelt on the subject of Australia, catalysed by the homesickness they felt after relocating to England theguardian

Billy Bragg – A New England Marrying heartbreak, romantic hopefulness, and chugging, Chuck Berry-guitar, “A New England” was the song that put Bragg on the map, and it remains one of the best of the 1980s… it is Bragg distilled into his most basic elements. Purportedly sung by a frustrated young man who “doesn’t want to change the world” and is “just looking for another girl”, everything else about the song indicates that Bragg is looking for true love and a better world popmatters

Bob Dylan – Sweetheart Like You a slept-on deep cut now, but it was all over MTV at the time. It’s the ballad of two lost souls in a bar at closing time, sizing each other up with the question, “What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?” Mark Knopfler adds blues guitar, while Sly and Robbie give Dylan some muscular bottom end rollingstone

Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) A song without a chorus, its lyrics about commercial failure, Sweet Dreams has rung down the ages: covered by Lorde, Marilyn Manson and Weezer, its stentorian riff sampled by Nas, Britney Spears, Aviici and MIA among others. No subsequent version has bettered the original, which transformed hopelessness into an entirely iconic 80s pop momen theguardian

The Lotus Eaters – The First Picture Of You a hit before they had even played a gig. In its own way, this is indicative of the era of live distortion and rock ‘n’ roll energy was shunned for polished studio products… This gem is far from a classic crowd-pleaser, offering more of a voyeuristic feel instead. This spring-like wonder on display provides a near-spiritual experience. And true to the ’80s central tenet, it punctuates that hillside picnic with a joyous, catchy chorus. In truth, it almost seems fitting that the band failed to make it past 1985. They were always far too sunny for the long haul of autumn in the aftermath of a truly innocent hit farout

Spandau Ballet – True Seriously, though: Why do I find it hard to write the next line? …a song with an amazing power to send otherwise civilized people into fits of homicidal rage. But every second of it is a goddamn masterpiece (I can prove it), so if you hate it, you can just take your seaside arms and read the next song. Tony Hadley is a master at turning the word “true” into a 17-syllable sob rollingstone

Cocteau Twins – Musette and Drums a gripping combination of guitars and drum machine that sounded like waves constantly crashing on the shore, while Fraser sang with commanding, rich tones like an invocation of something from beyond, it was one hell of a marker to lay down guardian

Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel – White Lines (Don’t Do It) Higher, baby. Higher, baby… a hip-hop warning against the dangers of cocaine that was as addictive as the drug itself rollingstone

Run – DMC – It’s Like That echoes with apocalyptic fury rockthebells

Marianne Faithful – Times Square Her rough, fierce tones scrape at every song until the lyrics pierce the air. Times Square and Why D’Ya Do It are spine-shivering in their savagery guardian

Jane & Barton – It’s A Fine Day  one of the most enduring little artifacts of early 1980s indie… both haunting and enchanting in equal measure hauntedgeneration

Fantastic Something – If She Doesn’t Smile (It’ll Rain) Back in 1993 Fantastic Something decided to record an album to capture the warmth and intimacy of a small room with a set of 10 fragile and pretty songs. Pleasant and soothing music from a small room in Athens, Greece. What a modest but fascinating enterprise! theportastylistic

The Cherry Boys – Kardomah Cafe Liverpool’s Kardomah Cafe was a popular haunt for generations of bands from The Beatles to 80s heroes like The Cherry Boys who featured future La’s members John Byrne and Chris Sharrock…. somehow missed the UK charts but its dreamy psychedelia proved popular in Spain of all places where it was a huge hit getintothis

Echo And The Bunnymen – The Cutter Mixing in psychedelic and Eastern influences… realising their heady potentialshowed to everyone, including the band, that their anthemic propensity wasn’t to be ignored but to be utilised, and what a choice it was farout

The Fall – Kicker Conspiracy Smith’s brilliant dissection of football and how it is run seems ever more prescient with every fresh Fifa scandal. The lyrics comprehensively tackle footy issues from boozing footballers to hooliganism, but there’s particular currency in Smith’s uncanny predictions of how gentrification will ruin the beautiful game. Years before Roy Keane’s “prawn sandwiches” outburst or the Premier League, Smith sings of how expensive “Corporate-ulent” facilities will swell with expense-accounted suits (“Hot dogs and seat for Mr Hogg! And his grotty spawn!”) while the disenfranchised former fan stands, “hat in his hands, two lager cans, talks to himself, at the back”. Just call him Salford’s Nostradamus. theguardian

Dolly Mixture – Remember This to the casual observer of musical history Dolly Mixture, were little more than a footnote; the three girls in cute frocks from Cambridge who supported Captain Sensible on his hits Wot and Happy Talk, the latter a number one smasheroo. Of course we, with our nappers chock full of far cooler bands, know they were more than just that. For Dolly Mixture invented indiepop. Ok, they didn’t work long into the early hours and cobble up a formula for all music that fits that loose label. And I’m sure Orange Juice, the Smiths, the Field Mice and the Pastels, amongst many, will claim their patents were pending too but Dolly Mixture, with their new wave take on the 60s girl group sound certainly went some way to inspiring a lot of female fronted jangly C86 bands including Talulah Gosh, the Flatmates and Shop Assistants, as well as many new bands from distant shores, particularly Brooklyn and Scandinavia, to this day soundsxp

Violent Femmes – Add It Up their music is permanently preserved by the elixir of youth. They’re patron saints of adolescence, their self-titled debut album in particular capturing a certain kind of playfulness and knowing naiveté, awkward and strange but nonetheless carefree, a paradox mirrored by their own loose and unconventional take on post-punk.

…maybe it fit in comfortably next to the sing-song melody of “Blister in the Sun,” only swapping lyrics about…well, whatever “Blister in the Sun” is about (Gano says it’s not about masturbation, for the record) for verses about a desperate need to get “just one fuck.” And in that sense it’s still very much reflective of teenage feelings and frustrations, a primal scream from a cracking voice. But it’s a little dirtier, a little more adult—or at least the protagonist wants to be, however unlikely that is treblezine

Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton – Islands In The Stream At a time when pop music was going through a youth revolution, they sang “Islands in the Stream” like a pair of sassy seniors in a lavender haze, drawling every “ah-haaaa” with a sensual post-coital glow. The Bee Gees wrote this for Kenny, Nashville’s silver fox, but it didn’t really cook until his old friend Dolly got on the mic. “Islands in the Stream” was totally out of step with every pop fashion, but it proved true greatness never goes out of style. These two were never a couple — as he told Rolling Stone in 2014, “We just flirted with each other and loved every minute of it” rollingstone

Billy Joel – Uptown Girl The Piano Man had just made The Nylon Curtain, an excellent yet somber art record, but this time, he decided to ditch all the next-phase new-wave malarkey and go for cheap rock & roll kicks. rollingstone

The Rain Parade – I Look Around at the center of the “Paisley Underground”, a loosely affiliated group of like-minded Los Angeles-area musicians with a common appreciation for 60s garage rock, bubblegum pop, and psychedelia, but with a broad variety of interpretations in terms of modernizing those sounds… Emergency Third Rail Power Trip is the album that empowered me to stop caring about how I fit in or didn’t, with others, to become myself, whoever that self would turn out to be popmatters

The Suede Crocodiles – Stop The Rain Single of the Week in both NME and Melody Maker, this jagged-edged, spiky pop-punk single caught the ear of many. The Suede Crocodiles went on to tour the UK with Nick Heyward. The band split before releasing their second single roughtrade

Swallow Tongue – Got To Be There electronic new wave with funky drum programming, jazz-influenced sax and clarinet, and somewhat flavorful vocals that strangely match organicmusic

The Human League – Keep Feeling Fascination almost a futurist update of Sly and the Family Stone’s template for having the whole group sing (bar Adrian Wright), and they sound as though they’re having the time of their lives guardian

SSQ – Synthicide Stacey Q voices the erotic yearning of every California girl who ever dreamed of having sex with a synthesizer… “Synthicide” was the highlight of SSQ’s cult fave Playback, along with “Screaming in My Pillow,” “Synth Samurai,” and the song about the girl who can only have sex with her “Walkman On.” It also appeared on the soundtrack of one of the Eighties’ dumbest teen comedies, Cavegirl. (You’re not missing a thing.) rollingstone

Paul McCartney – So Bad an impossibly delicate and bittersweet ballad, the kind of melody any other songwriter would have sold a kidney to compose, with Paul lobbing high notes across the room to Linda like it’s no big deal rollingstone

Simon – Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War One day in 1983, Paul Simon gave Art Garfunkel a phone call. The bad news: He was wiping Artie’s vocals off the reunion album they’d just recorded. The good news: Garfunkel was invited to his wedding to Carrie Fisher, just a few days away. Simon decided he didn’t want another voice singing these personal songs. “He makes the sound of them more agreeable to many, many people,” Simon told the L.A. Times. “But I don’t care.” Hearts and Bones holds up as his most underrated album, full of stormy adult romance; as you can hear, Simon and Fisher went through even more drama than Simon and Garfunkel. But it’s got a moment of romantic bliss in “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War.” It’s a fantasy of the Belgian surrealist painter and his wife dancing naked in the moonlight, to their favorite Fifties doo-wop records. (“The Penguins, the Moonglows, the Orioles, the Five Satins.”) It’s one of the most hopeful love songs in his catalog rollingstone

R.E.M. – Talk About The Passion You know about the mumbling, the muttering, the indie success story, the simultaneous conquest of college radio and Rolling Stone—and subsequently, the world. But maybe you don’t know how punk never quite married Rickenbacker arpeggios until “Radio Free Europe” and “Sitting Still”… Maybe in retrospect it’s amazing how “Talk About the Passion” and “Perfect Circle” were such power ballads. And maybe you don’t have to understand a word of “Moral Kiosk,” “Catapult” or “We Walk” to hear how every odd harmony, surf lick and overdubbed billiard ball made perfect sense pastemagazine

The Chameleons – Up The Down Escalator The Chameleons really left their mark. Not just on a decade that was blessed with opportunist mavericks rallying against the impending rise of Thatcherism and catastrophic recession her reign bestowed upon the nation, but also in years to come, with many artists such as The National, Interpol, Slowdive, and Fews citing them as an influence on their own careers. Indeed, it’s debatable whether Turn On The Bright Lights or Boxer would have existed in their present forms without this record. Released in August 1983, not only was Script Of The Bridge ahead of its time back then, it has also managed to remain fresh and relevant ever since…

Lead single ‘Up The Down Escalator’ … the record’s most instantly accessible number bursts into life. Released as a 45 on New Year’s Day 1983, it rivals U2’s ‘New Year’s Day’ or ‘Fire’ as one of the most anthemic rock songs of its time drownedinsound

U2 – Sunday Bloody Sunday a non-sectarian, pacifist view of the Troubles – but its power lies in the way its sound keeps lurching back and forth from a clattering racket strafed with feedback and scraping violin to something more straightforward and palatable: a killer riff coupled with the singalong-inducing refrain: “How long must we sing this song?” guardian

New Order – Blue Monday A patchwork of thefts (from Donna Summer, Kraftwerk, Ennio Morricone and Klein & MBO’s Dirty Talk) and mistakes (the melody line was incorrectly entered into the sequencer) was transformed into one of the greatest, most instantly recognisable songs of its era theguardian

Game Theory – Nine Lives To Rigel Five a love song to the brightest star in the Orion galaxy, a blue supergiant 870 light years away. It soars with Miller’s jagged guitar, sci-fi B-movie keyboards, and the invitation, “Let’s get out the Twister game and get down on all fours” rollingstone

Talking Heads – This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) Meeting his new girlfriend and future wife Adelle Lutz in 1982 presumably encouraged him to give writing love songs a go… piecing together a bunch of affectionate sounding non sequiturs each romantic in their own ambiguous fashion (“The less we say about it the better / We’ll make it up as we go along”, “love me ’til my heart stops / Love me ’til I’m dead”) but wholly unrelated as a narrative guardian

Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse Of The Heart From its very inception, pop music has been an ideal vehicle for melodrama — for heartbreak, anger, lust, obsession, and naked, near-religious levels of need… But there’s melodrama, and then there’s melodrama. “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” is melodrama

Nobody’s entirely sure what “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” is about, and nobody needs to know. “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” overwhelms the idea of songwriting specificity in the same way that a tidal wave overwhelms a rowboat. Spend enough time with “Total Eclipse,” and you might find yourself wondering if that isn’t the only way to write songs. stereogum