Farewell to 1983’s Popular hits.

Billy Joel, “Uptown Girl”, 5 November 1983

From my 15-year-old perspective, this was smug, self-satisfied, and entirely irrelevant to today (i.e. 1983): never mind that we were bathed in original 1960s close harmonies every time we switched on AM radio, now our new number ones had to have them too? Along with “Can’t Hurry Love” and “True”, this was a sign that pop was being hijacked by middle-aged nostalgia, and there’s nothing less relevant to a teenager.

From my 41-year-old perspective... pretty much all of that, still. Joel was born in 1949, so he was a young teenager when Frankie Valli was having hits, and he was 34 when this was released. It would be as if my peers had started releasing New Romantic tributes in 2002... oh, hang on, they did. And I did like Welcome to the Monkey House. But I didn’t expect the kids to like it. The kids were listening to their Pinks and Eminems and R. Kellys and stuff that mattered to them, not having to put up with number ones their mums and dads were buying. More power to them, and less power to Mister Piano Man. 3.

That said, my feelings towards this may be as much a rejection of Billy Joel’s entire oeuvre as of this song in isolation.

The Flying Pickets, “Only You”, 10 December 1983

This was one of those UK hits that earned a 30-second snippet in the Countdown world charts round-up but never made an impact in Australia (our Christmas number one was Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long”). I doubt I’d ever seen the video before, because my mental image of the Flying Pickets was completely wrong (big peroxided hair—guess I was thinking of Vince Clarke). But what a video! It’s like a buncha Guy Ritchie geezers singin’ all posh, like. Ahh, for the days when the local rubbity was a good-enough video set.

I quite like the Yazoo version, so I’ll give this marks for the source material. 5.

Popular ’83

And so farewell to my first year of pop obsession. Some other personal highlights from the year will get a mention in upcoming entries, but here are a few that won’t: Midnight Oil’s “The Power and the Passion”, one of the two very first singles I bought, and would happily buy again tomorrow; Blancmange’s “Living on the Ceiling”, which turned up on the Oz charts in early ’83, and was bound to appeal to a gangly teenager like me; the early hits of Tears for Fears, whose The Hurting spent 65 weeks in the UK charts; Michael Sembello’s “Maniac”, the better of the Flashdance hits; Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science”, which does more than John Hughes’s Weird Science in 4% of the running time; Def Leppard’s “Photograph”, gateway drug for many a metal-head; and someone I find it astounding never had a 1980s UK number one, Prince, whose “1999” was the canniest long-term investment a songwriter could make. Oh, and a band who played some small part in determining where I’ve spent the past eight years.

22 July 2009 · Music