1984: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 11: March 17, 1984)

Thompson Twins, Paul Young, Laid Back, Midnight Star, plus Tracey Ullman introduces me to one of my favorite songwriters

(Note: If you’re new here, you might want to read an introduction to this series to get caught up on what we’re doing. Glad you could make it.)

Welcome to the third week in March, traditionally spring break week in Texas public schools and therefore the week where I started looking forward to summer being only about eight weeks away. We’ll talk in depth about one of those weeks when we get to it. There were only seven new entries this week, the highest being “Head Over Heels” by The Go-Go’s at 58. We’ll definitely get to that one, too.

At #19, “Hold Me Now” by Thompson Twins

For the second week in a row, I’ve already written about all the songs in the Top 10, so we’re starting down a notch and adding a second bonus track. Anyway, I was an early adopter of Thompson Twins. KBCO-FM, the increasingly new wave-oriented radio station I listened to in my former hometown of Longmont, Colorado, latched on to their breakthrough single “In The Name Of Love” in the fall of 1982. Also, Arista Records cleverly priced their US debut album (a compilation of the best tracks from their first two UK albums, a common practice at the time) at something like $4.99.

So by the time a slimmed-down lineup of lead singer Tom Bailey, multi-instrumentalist Joe Leeway, and percussionist Alannah Currie released 1983’s Side Kicks (itself a slightly rejiggered version of the original UK release Quick Step and Side Kick), I was already a solid fan, and that album’s MTV hits “Love On Your Side” and “Lies” were even better: highly rhythmic synth-pop with Afro-Caribbean accents and needling hooks. Which made it that much more surprising when the lead single from their next album, 1984’s Into The Gap, was an adult-contemporary piano-driven ballad.

What I thought about it then: I’m not above a bit of adult contemporary, honestly. And Bailey was unexpectedly talented in the form, both as a songwriter and more surprisingly as a singer. The guy who had yelped his way through post-punky early Twins songs like “Bouncing” turned out to have a pleasantly emotive lower range that meshed nicely with his then-girlfriend Currie’s still rather untutored high register.

What I think about it now: But as the song became increasingly omnipresent as the spring of 1984 went on, I noticed something that irritated the hell out of me: the song is almost five minutes long (4:44, to be precise), and nearly half of that running time consists of a seemingly endless repeat of the chorus. I know that repeating the main hook over and over is a time-honored pop songwriting hack, but it’s always struck me as lazy, especially in this case. So much so that when Audacity became a common sound-editing tool a couple decades ago, one of the first things I ever did with it was making myself a three-and-a-half minute edit of “Hold Me Now” by editing one and a quarter minutes out of the coda.

At #30, “Come Back and Stay” by Paul Young

Speaking of adult contemporary. I could tell even at the time that although Paul Young was being marketed as part of the UK’s New Pop, alongside the likes of Culture Club or Duran Duran, his brand of soft blue-eyed soul had more in common with, say, Air Supply.

The difference was that Young’s producer was a guy named Laurie Latham, who had previously worked with acts like The Stranglers, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and Slapp Happy. In fact, the title track of Young’s debut, “No Parlez,” was written by Slapp Happy’s Anthony Moore and features bracing soprano backing vocals from Moore’s ex-wife and bandmate Dagmar Krause. And among the album’s many covers was…Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” (Huge numbers of post-punk purists were horrified. In retrospect, it’s not the worst cover of the song I’ve ever heard, although it’s emphatically Not Good.)

Three of the album’s songs were written by California singer-songwriter Jack Lee, who had previously been in the short-lived power pop trio The Nerves with The Plimsouls’ Peter Case and The Beat’s Paul Collins. Lee had previously scored a hit by penning Blondie’s “Hangin’ On The Telephone” before writing “Come Back and Stay.”

What I thought about it then: Ballads were Young’s specialty — he had a genuine facility for them, emotive without being mawkish, that compares favorably to early ’70s Rod Stewart — and this is one of his best. As I said, though, the difference was Laurie Latham, who seemed to use his sessions with Young as a kind of experimental place. His arrangements and production choices on both No Parlez and its follow-up The Secret Of Association seemed even at the time to be an exercise in being even more over the top than Trevor Horn and Steve Lillywhite put together. Gated drums, session man Pino Palladino’s trademark swooping fretless bass runs used as lead instruments, Fairlight CMI orchestra stabs and breaking glass sounds, and lashings of dub-like echo and reverb on seemingly every instrument and vocal. It was all so state-of-1984 that it was starting to sound dated by the time side two was half-over.

What I think about it now: Much like some other time-stamped records I’ve talked about in this series, enough time has passed that “Come Back and Stay” sounds kind of charming again. As do the bigger hits on his follow-up album, covers of Daryl Hall’s “Every Time You Go Away” and Ann Peebles’ “I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down.” However, I’ve heard from friends who have seen him on those ’80s legends live revues that tour the country that Young’s once-impressive pipes are completely shot these days.

Also, I learned from a gossip column in a 1984 issue of Creem that Paul Young supposedly named his penis “King Dong.” I’ve had to know this for 40 years, and now you do too.

At #34, “They Don’t Know” by Tracey Ullman

If I ever had to choose the most perfect love song ever written, I could do a lot worse than this. But although I give full credit to British TV comedian Tracey Ullman for first making me aware of this song — much as how I credit her late-1980s Fox comedy sketch series for giving the world The Simpsons — my devotion belongs to the original by one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Kirsty MacColl.

What I thought about it then: “They Don’t Know” is a perfect pastiche of/tribute to early ’60s girl-group sounds, with Ullman and MacColl’s overdubbed vocals layered over producer Peter Collins’ Spectorized big-beat arrangement, all chimes, bells, and gloriously incongruous ’70s bubble-glam guitars, climaxing in MacColl rapturously belting out a single “BABY!” right before the swooning final verse and chorus. It’s just perfect, and somehow the fact that Ullman herself can only barely carry a tune makes it even more so.

What I think about it now: As a devoted reader of liner notes and label credits, I quickly realized that the other truly great song on Ullman’s debut album, the title track “You Broke My Heart In 17 Places,” was also written by someone named Kirsty MacColl. In a blurb in an issue of Star Hits, I learned that a) Kirsty MacColl had had a hit UK single wonderfully titled “There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis” and b) Kirsty MacColl was quite possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, a thick redhead with huge brown eyes who looked smart, playful, sexy, and tender all at once.

Kirsty’s solo career, which had started in 1979 with her own version of “They Don’t Know” (which is even better than Tracey’s), was progressing in fits and starts at the time. I found two important singles, a cover of Billy Bragg’s “A New England” and an original called “He’s On The Beach,” over the next year. Then she sang backup vocals on The Smiths’ “Ask,” Bragg’s “Greetings to the New Brunette,” and Talking Heads’ “Nothing But Flowers” (her dancing in the video is utterly entrancing) before her second solo album Kite finally came out in 1989. She kept releasing one great album after another for a decade, until she was killed in December 2000 in a fashion that still makes me so furious that I can’t write about it. Anyway, Kirsty MacColl is a damn treasure and if you don’t know her music, go listen to it.

Bonus track 1: At #70, “White Horse” by Laid Back

Sometimes a song just completely passes you by. I remember reading multiple reviews — with wildly varying opinions — of this synth-dance single by the Danish duo Laid Back. I registered that it was on Sire Records, a label that as I’ve mentioned before, I trusted so much at the time that I would just buy anything that had a Sire logo on it. And this song actually made it to #26 in the Billboard Hot 100. And yet, I heard it for the first time about five minutes ago.

What I thought about it then: I suspect there were two reasons I never heard this ultra-minimalist electro tune at the time. Even in early 1984, a time when Top 40 radio playlists were looser than they had been in years, few programmers were going to play a song that consists of basically one synthesizer riff and three couplets’ worth of lyrics. (Based on what I’ve seen from a few minutes’ googling, the single’s chart success is mostly due to its success on R&B and dance stations.) And the video wouldn’t have gotten a lot of MTV play outside of the very depths of middle-of-the-night graveyard plays, both because one of those repeated couplets is built on the incredibly hackneyed “rich”/“bitch” rhyme and because…well, basically “White Horse” is an anti-drug song whose message is most accurately summed up as, “Don’t do heroin. Do cocaine instead.”

What I think about it now: That lack of MTV play is a shame, because this video is hilarious. Honestly, the combination of the video and the song itself is so completely bizarre that you could tell someone that this is a brand new parody of a mid-‘80s European synth duo and chances are very good that they would believe you.

Bonus track 2: At #88, “No Parking on the Dance Floor” by Midnight Star

I’ve already talked about the way that synthesizers remade the sound of pop music in the early ’80s, but electronics also completely shifted the sound of R&B and funk around the same time. Between Giorgio Moroder inventing Eurodisco with Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and Bernie Worrell’s still-surprising noise squalls in tracks like Funkadelic’s 1979 single “(Not Just) Knee Deep,” it was only a short leap to the way Prince (and to a lesser extent Rick James) made synthesizers an integral part of his sound by the dawn of the ’80s. Soon, horn-driven funk bands like Kool and the Gang, Cameo, and Zapp were shedding members and reinventing themselves, even as new acts like the Jonzun Crew were outpacing them. By the time George Clinton himself released the squiggly “Atomic Dog” in late 1982, this was clearly the wave of the future.

What I thought about it then: Kentucky’s Midnight Star took to the new thing better than most. Their first couple of albums for L.A.’s Solar label were competent pop-funk, but it was when bandleader/producer Reggie Calloway went digital (and his singer brother Vincent discovered the Vocoder) that they really got good. “No Parking On The Dance Floor” wasn’t as much of a crossover hit as 1983’s wriggling “Freak-A-Zoid,” which is surprising because this feels like the poppiest, most radio-friendly track on the album.

What I think about it now: Midnight Star continued making some great singles, including their biggest hit “Operator” in early 1985. The Calloway brothers and keyboardist Bo Watson also wrote and produced “Meeting in the Ladies Room” for Klymaxx around the same time. Unfortunately, tensions between the Calloways and the rest of the band saw them split into two camps around 1986, the brothers forming Calloway and the rest of the band continuing on. Both sides were diminished by the split.