The 1980s saw its fair share of “one hit wonders” - defined as those artists who had one single chart success. Indeed, the Eighties saw a number of Number One wonders – chart-topping songs which were a particular artist's sole chart success. From the likes of Fern Kinney (Together We Are Beautiful) through Steve “Silk” Hurley (Jack Your Body) to The Timelords (Doctorin’ The Tardis) the decade was littered with acts who appeared, had one smash hit and then disappeared down the Dumper (as Smash Hits would have said) as quickly as they arrived.
One such one-hit wonder, although largely by choice, was Scottish singer-songwriter Owen Paul McGee. Born in Glasgow in May 1962, McGee was actually a promising footballer in his teenage years and was an apprentice with Celtic when he decided to pursue a career in music. He was “roped in” to a band at the height of the punk boom (even though he couldn’t play an instrument) and inspired by the punk movement McGee decided that he wanted to be a singer and musician rather than a footballer.
McGee’s elder brother Brian was also a guitarist who, in the same year Owen left Celtic, formed the band Johnny and the Self Abusers alongside school friends Jim Kerr, Charlie Burchill and Tony Donald. They later became the hugely successful rock band Simple Minds and Brian remained a member of Simple Minds for four albums before leaving in 1981.
Changing his name to Owen Paul, the singer moved to London becoming involved with a number of lesser known punk and New Romantic bands before his big break came on the BBC’s Oxford Roadshow in the mid 1980s. Although his first single Pleased To Meet You failed to chart, it was his follow-up release that would become Paul’s one chart success.
My Favourite Waste Of Time was not an original song but a cover of a track written by the American singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw. Crenshaw first shot to fame after playing John Lennon in the off-Broadway musical Beatlemania and whilst perhaps not a commercially successful international artist he has a strong reputation as a talented songwriter. He has released a number of critically acclaimed albums since his self-titled debut in 1982 as well as appearing as Buddy Holly in the 1987 film La Bamba and co-writing the title track to the 2008 film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story for which he was nominated for both a Grammy and a Golden Globe.
Paul’s version of My Favourite Waste Of Time (featuring future Thunder bassist Mark Luckhurst) was a summer hit in 1986 spending fourteen weeks on the chart on its way to peaking at number Three in July. As well as Paul’s version the song has also been covered by artists as diverse as Bette Midler and New York singer-songwriter Freedy Johnston.
During the song’s climb up the UK top Forty, Paul was invited to appear on the BBC’s popular lunchtime magazine show Pebble Mill. The resulting "performance" was one of the most embarrassing television appearances of the decade as after the presenter introduced Paul and his band neither the musicians nor the singer realised the nacking track had begun. Whilst the music played happily for the viewing public Paul leant nonchalantly on a railing failing to mime along to the song for a full minute before the programme cut back to the studio.
Although My Favourite Waste Of Time was a huge success for Paul it became obvious that everything was not well with the singer. Feeling he was being taken in a musical direction that he wasn’t comfortable with, Paul engaged in an increasingly bitter fight with Sony Records and argued they were “killing” what he had to offer. His follow-up singles all failed to chart, and, disillusioned with the industry Paul turned his back on music at the end of 1986.
Paul’s second unfortunate TV appearance occurred over a decasde and a half later in 2002 during the first season of the reality sitcom The Osbournes. Upset with the noise being made by their next door neighbours the dysfunctional family protested by throwing food into the adjoining garden. Sharon Osbourne even lobbed a leg of ham in an attempt to persuade the neighbour – later revealed as Owen Paul – to quieten down.
Paul did return with the album About Time in 2002 although it is likely he will just be remembered for his one UK hit which resurfaced in 2009 on a Kellogg's television advertisement. My Favourite Waste Of Time is a superb, chirpy pop song although ironically its highly commercial sound ended up turning Paul away from the music business and the chance of further success.
Climie Fisher Love Changes (Everything) EMI EM47 Released: 12 Mar 1988 Reached: #2
Reaching number 67 in September 1987 on its original release, Love Changes (Everything) was nearly the best record of the 80s never to be a hit. As it was, a successful remix and reissue propelled it into the top Ten and, if I had to rank these 101 songs in order of brilliance, this four and a half minute slice of pure pop genius would certainly top the list.
Songwriter Simon Climie had already tasted chart success by the time he met with Naked Eyes keyboardist Rob Fisher at the bar of the Abbey Road studios where both were working as session musicians. His composition I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me) had been a 1987 UK Number One for George Michael and Aretha Franklin and his songs had also been recorded by the likes of Jeff Beck and Smokey Robinson. Fisher had achieved significant success in the US and Canada with his band Naked Eyes but was perhaps most famous in the UK for his insidious bassline on Billy Ocean’s hit When The Going Gets Tough in 1986.
The urban myth tells that Climie originally offered Love Changes (Everything) to Rod Stewart and when he declined, Climie sang the vocals himself in a Stewart-esque style. Whilst Climie had submitted songs to Stewart in the past (his song My Heart Can’t Tell Me No appeared on Rod’s 1988 album Out Of Order) Love Changes… was never actually intended for Stewart. It had actually been sent to Robert Palmer (who Climie was a huge fan of at the time) but had been passed over.
After Palmer declined the song, legendary producer Steve Lillywhite encouraged Climie to record Love Changes (Everything) alongside more of his own material and the duo commenced the recording of their debut album as the band Climie Fisher. Most of the writing took place at Fisher’s Richmond home and Simon would often arrive to find that Rob had the basic components of a song (the drumbeat or a basic melody) already written. The verse of Time Changes Everything (as it was originally to be called) came pretty quickly and the whole song took the duo under two hours to pen. The album itself took eighteen months to write and record (partly due to producer Lillywhite having to leave the album half way through the recording process to work on another project) and included several collaborations with American songwriter Denis Morgan.
Eventually, the lyrics and title to the debut single were changed to Love Changes (Everything) (the duo believed it sounded better) and it was released in September 1987. Without much backing from their record company EMI the single barely scraped the top 75. On the brink of being dropped by the label, EMI asked Climie’s advice as to what to do next and he suggested they release the song Rise To The Occasion. A hip-hop mix of the record (rather than the lush ballad originally recorded) became a big hit across Europe and spent three weeks inside the UK Top Ten.
On the back of this success, Love Changes (Everything) started getting significant airplay in Germany (where it became a hit) and it was decided to re-release the song in the UK. Accompanied by a stylish black and white video, the song climbed to number two in the spring of 1988, only kept off the top of the charts by the Pet Shop Boys’ third number One single Heart. It went on to be a huge hit worldwide including reaching number 23 on the US Billboard singles chart and winning the Ivor Novello award in 1989 for “best pop song”.
Climie Fisher’s subsequent releases failed to scale the heights of Love Changes (Everything) and despite further top 40 hits (including the stunning Love Like A River) the duo split in the early 1990s. Simon Climie continued to be a successful producer for the likes of Eric Clapton and Michael MacDonald and Fisher also continued in the industry, co-writing Rick Astley’s superb “comeback” single Cry For Help in 1991. Sadly, however, Rob Fisher died in August 1999 during surgery for bowel cancer. He was just 39 years old.
Love Changes (Everything) (the brackets were included deliberately as it was Climie and Denis Morgan’s desire “to say something that someone has said before in a brand new way”) is, in my opinion, quite simply the finest pop record of the 1980’s. Andy Gill in The Independent once said that Climie’s voice “simultaneously soothes and suggests heartbreak” and this description can also be applied to this song. Simultaneously mournful yet optimistic, its magical mixture of melody, bittersweet lyrics and superb vocals have rarely (if ever) been bettered and if any record of the decade deserved to be a Number One hit, this was it.
Parlophone R 6184 Released: 20 July 1988 Reached: #2
“My A&R man said to me once that the difference between a Number One record and a Number Two record was huge. It’s only now I realise why that is”. Thus speaks Nathan Moore, the eternally youthful lead singer of Brother Beyond. “When radio stations do their “on this day” feature, they’ll play whatever was number One twenty years ago, but not what was number Two…”
Brother Beyond have Phil Collins to blame for denying them their number One record. Despite selling 400,000 copies and being number One in the midweek charts right up until Friday afternoon, The Harder I Try ended up being outsold by a mere two hundred panel sales over the course of seven days and A Groovy Kind Of Love claimed the coveted number One position on 10 September 1988.
Brothers Dave and Eg White, Carl Fysh and singer Nathan Moore had worked tirelessly to no avail through 1986 and 1987 to launch their chart career. Despite some reasonable airplay and publicity their first four singles had failed to trouble the top 40 and they were in danger of being dropped by their record label.
In early 1988, the multi-million selling songwriting team of Stock, Aitken and Waterman decided to auction their services for charity. EMI won the auction (for the princely sum of £20,000) and asked the team to write a song for their band the Belle Stars.
Pete Waterman had met the Brother Beyond boys on several occasions (often in their local pub), and asked EMI if he could write a song for Brother Beyond instead of the all-girl band. The record company agreed and some weeks later The Harder I Try was born.
Just as the single came about, drummer and songwriter Eg White decided he was unhappy with the direction of the group and left to be replaced by the band’s live drummer Steve Alexander. Despite missing out on their success, White continued to write great music for the likes of Joss Stone, James Morrison, Adele and James Blunt and won a coveted Ivor Novello award in 2004 for writing Will Young’s chart-topping single Leave Right Now.
It took about three hours for Moore to record the vocals for the single under the careful eye of producer Mike Stock. A video shot in Milan involving Nathan sprinting around the old town (“…the director filmed each sequence about six times and so I basically spent my day running around the city!”) helped promote the single and on 30 July 1988 it began its slow climb up the charts, peaking at number Two for two weeks in September 1988.
Despite being written at the peak of their popularity, it’s by no means a standard S/A/W record. Waterman wanted the song to have a Motown feel, and by sampling the drum introduction of the Isley Brothers This Old Heart Of Mine they created a more soulful, crafted pop record. There is less of the standard PWL keyboard in evidence – indeed many people were surprised it was a S/A/W record at all. For what it’s worth, even though it wasn’t their biggest hit I think it is the finest record the threesome ever wrote.
Brother Beyond followed up this single with another S/A/W penned single, the number Six hit He Ain’t No Competition (Pete Waterman called this “their message to Matt Goss”) and the top 20 hit Be My Twin. They were also on the receiving end of one of the multitude of gaffes at the infamous 1989 Brit awards when Samantha Fox and Mick Fleetwood failed to announce their nomination in the “Best New Band” category.
Despite their success with the Hit Factory, guitarist David White was overheard by Waterman making disparaging remarks about the songwriters during an interview on Radio 1 and their relationship was effectively ended. When the Hit Factory decided to remake Do They Know It’s Christmas? in 1989, Brother Beyond were conspicuous by their absence, a disappointment compounded only by the invitation extended to their bitter rivals Bros to appear on the record.
Without the S/A/W input, their second album Trust barely made the top 75 and the band split soon after. Nathan achieved significant further success in continental Europe with his band Worlds Apart and despite an offer to reform for the ITV series Baby One More Time, the band have yet to appear together again. Shame, really, as The Harder I Try remains one of the most recognisable and loved singles of its time.
I’ve often found it strange how frequently the term “pop music” is used in a pejorative sense. Somehow the notion that a record is “pop” means it is looked down on as a poor relation with the intimation that there will be an absence of quality and/or talent involved.
Frankly, I think this is poppycock. The enduring success over recent decades of artists like Kylie, Take That, Westlife, Will Young, the Spice Girls and Madonna, and (I hate to use the term) “revival” of pop music recently with the likes of Mika, Leona Lewis, Britney Spears, Lily Allen and La Roux means the genre has never been more popular (pun intended) or successful.
It’s easy to be snobby about three minute pop records, particularly those by artists that are deemed to have been “created”. I don’t see the need. Weren’t the Monkees or the Beach Boys “created”? Didn’t the Beatles and Slade write catchy three minute pop records? Didn’t the Blur and Oasis genre have “pop” in its name?
The purpose (he argues, giving much more credence to some sort of methodology than is absolutely required) of this site is to celebrate some of those pop records of a great decade that have been buried in the great landfill of time.
When presenting on University radio in the late 1990s and on the odd occasion someone has been daft enough to invite me to DJ a function or pub/club night my aim has always been one thing. I have always wanted to play records that make people stop, however briefly, before their brain searches its filing system in an often futile attempt at recollection. I love the phrase “God, I haven’t heard this for ages!”
I have been to plenty of Eighties nights and clubs in my time. Many of my friends would tell you the number is unhealthy for a man of my years, but I’ll leave that open to interpretation. My biggest gripe with them is that there seems to be a rigid 80s playlist developing of songs that attending punters are expecting to hear and that there doesn’t seem to be any significant deviation from that list.
The 80s was a fantastic decade for pop music with hundreds of memorable songs. This site is intended as testament to the “forgotten” songs of that era. That is why you won’t find Tainted Love in here, or Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go or Don’t You Want Me? Neither will you find The Reflex, Relax or Karma Chameleon. Don’t get me wrong, these records are superb pop singles in their own right but overexposure and their already-secured spot in the public consciousness eliminates them.
So what is included? I’ll be honest – it’s shamelessly arbitrary. Firstly, as above, I have tried to ignore any record which I consider is already part of the 80s furniture. That doesn’t mean I have avoided big hits – indeed there are eight Number One records on my list – but I have tried to avoid the giant behemoth 80s records played week in, week out at weddings and Christmas parties up and down the land.
Secondly, I have tried to exclude anything I don’t consider pure “pop” music. This was more difficult to define. It’s easy to take out “rock” music and so, for example, eliminated were, Van Halen’s Jump, Huey Lewis’ The Power Of Love and John Farnham’s You’re The Voice. I also excluded “dance/rap/hip-hop” music (ignorantly lumping together three utterly discrete genres) and that did for M/A/R/R/S Pump Up The Volume, Grandmaster Flash’s White Lines and Soul II Soul’s Back To Life.
I then tried to omit anything which had a purely novelty feel about it, even if it were a decent enough record. I couldn’t therefore find a place for Russ Abbott’s Atmosphere, Anita Dobson’s Anyone Can Fall In Love or the Firm’s Star Trekkin’ (all brilliantly kitsch records in their own way).
Finally, I tried to avoid anything that was too obscure. Whilst I love the phrase “I haven’t heard this for ages!”, I hate the phrase “what on earth is this?”. I therefore owe “sorries” to many, including Westworld for their great Sonic Boom Boy, to Dream Academy for Life In A Northern Town and to Robbie Nevil for C’est La Vie.
My biggest problem, and I don’t mind admitting this, was whether to include Dennis Waterman’s I Could Be So Good For You. The original “write the feem choon, sing the feem choon”, it’s a great single from, let’s be fair, a great TV series. I agonised over it, and decided it probably wasn’t quite “pop” in its truest sense, and so sorry, Dennis, it didn’t make the cut.
So, what’s left is a selection of 101 of the finest pop singles of the decade. Some might be staples in your house and not “forgotten” at all. Some you will no doubt have no recollection of whatsoever and wonder whether you were living in a parallel universe. You will no doubt clamour for the inclusion of omitted tracks and question my inclusion of others. And so it always will be – pop music will divide, but it will ultimately rule.
Owen Paul
One such one-hit wonder, although largely by choice, was Scottish singer-songwriter Owen Paul McGee. Born in Glasgow in May 1962, McGee was actually a promising footballer in his teenage years and was an apprentice with Celtic when he decided to pursue a career in music. He was “roped in” to a band at the height of the punk boom (even though he couldn’t play an instrument) and inspired by the punk movement McGee decided that he wanted to be a singer and musician rather than a footballer.
Although My Favourite Waste Of Time was a huge success for Paul it became obvious that everything was not well with the singer. Feeling he was being taken in a musical direction that he wasn’t comfortable with, Paul engaged in an increasingly bitter fight with Sony Records and argued they were “killing” what he had to offer. His follow-up singles all failed to chart, and, disillusioned with the industry Paul turned his back on music at the end of 1986.
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