One metatextual break-up record succeeds another: but here David Bowie is breaking up with himself, and pop is breaking up around him, its structures fragmenting and sickening as the track lurches on. The music is a patchwork – snips and echoes of […]

“The Winner Takes It All” is pure theatre. In the sense that it’s a showstopper – Andersson and Ulvaeus had been getting itchy with the singles-albums routine and thinking towards the stage for a while, and this song by itself[…]

“Use It Up” steamed to number one on the back of its chant-friendly refrain: “one, two, three – shake your body down!”. But, effective though the surging chorus is, there’s a lot more going on here. The band are mi[…]

A splash of escapist colour, ELO’s only number one also feels rather dated, out of synch with any of the gritty or futurist or reactionary 1980s we’ve met so far. This is in one way a very unfair perception: this was a meeting of two comm[…]

1980’s summer of mope continues with this mawkish, overheated Roy Orbison cover. Orbison’s great strength as a singer was his dignity: as a performer he knew when to hold firm in the face of grief, and more importantly, he knew when to crack. McL[…]

I have to admit that if my 14-year-old son wrote these lyrics my first reaction might not be, “Hey! That’s my new film theme!”, though I’m sure little bolsters the will to live more than an endless series of royalty checks. Sn[…]

You can see why he won it even before you hear him sing: his side-saddle lounging on the Eurovision stage signalled a more intimate, warmer performance than the Contest had been used to, particularly after the ABBA insurgence. Ballads had always been[…]

The insight that took Kevin Rowland from punker to star was that the DIY aesthetic which formed some part of punk’s appeal – the idea that inspiration could and should trump technical ability – could as easily be applied to soul. If soul was a […]

After a sequence of poised hits in which Debbie Harry defined glamour for a generation, it’s almost a relief to hear Blondie sound so dishevelled here. “Call Me” is a romp, a gloriously chaotic collision of twenty different ideas – multilingu[…]

This is one of those Number Ones that feels like a long-service medal: certainly you wouldn’t begrudge the band who made “Ghetto Child” and “Mighty Love” a hit this size, but “Working” isn’t quite up to that standard. It is what it is[…]