1984: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 14: April 07, 1984)

More Culture Club, Rick Springfield, Bonnie Tyler, Nik Kershaw and wow I have a lot to say about a song I literally only JUST heard.

In 1984, just like today, April is when you start seeing a lot of anticipated new releases rolling out for the all-important summer months. As a result, there were 12 new entries on the chart this week, the highest being “Oh Sherrie” by Steve Perry at 47. But this week, let’s take a look at a few of the less-remembered tracks of the spring of 1984.

At #7, “Miss Me Blind” by Culture Club

This was the third of four singles from Culture Club’s best and most successful album, so it was bound to vault into the top 10 just from momentum alone. This period was Boy George’s most family-friendly moment, appearing on magazine covers next to fellow makeup devotee Joan Rivers and puckishly thanking the voters of the Best New Artist Grammy “For knowing a good drag queen when you see one.” (On the other hand, let me once again recommend the recent reissue of former Smash Hits staff writer Dave Rimmer’s 1985 tell-all Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the Rise of the New Pop, where we learn that this was also the point where the wheels were starting to come off. When you’re watching the video below, note that George and the other band members never actually appear in any of the same shots.)

What I thought about it then: The most newsworthy revelation of that book was that George and Jon Moss were in an on-again, off-again relationship throughout the first few years of the band. Like a lot of songs on Colour By Numbers, “Miss Me Blind” makes a bit more sense with that new information. Specifically, it becomes kind of a “Make up your damn mind” song directed at Moss’ apparent conflicted feelings about both the relationship and his own sexuality. All of this is set to the closest Culture Club ever came to a straightforward R&B track, albeit one that also has a vaguely metallic extended guitar solo.

What I think about it now: Unlike either “Karma Chameleon” or “Church of the Poison Mind,” this rarely shows up in ’80s playlists or oldies radio. Shame, because it stands up quite well. Also, I was surprised to learn that “Miss Me Blind” was only released as a single in North America and Japan: in the rest of the world, the album’s third single was the Elton John-style big ballad “Victims.”

At #20, “Love Somebody” by Rick Springfield

I always liked Rick Springfield’s early ’80s string of hits. It’s hard not to, even if you were too cool for Top 40 pop. As Dave Grohl once admiringly said of Springfield’s “I’ve Done Everything For You,” “Give him a different haircut and that’s the Buzzcocks.” That is 100% true, and it’s testament to Springfield’s masterful pop suss: the man made a Sammy Hagar song sound cool.

What I thought about it then: But by 1984, it seemed like Springfield was taking himself a bit too seriously. His previous single “Human Touch” was a synth-pop song about lack of communication, the sort of cheap irony that probably seemed deep and meaningful at the time. “Love Somebody,” which was the first single from the soundtrack of Hard To Hold, the musician-actor’s only film as a leading man, is a better song. But it’s also hampered by a remarkably over the top video in which Springfield’s only direction seems to had been, “I dunno, just, like, look intense, maaaan.” Also we’re supposed to think that the star of a Hollywood romantic comedy-drama has a hands-on role in the editing of the film. Which I’m pretty sure is at the very least against union rules.

What I think about it now: Rick Springfield didn’t fall off the face of the earth or anything after the critical and commercial failure of Hard To Hold, but “Love Somebody,” notably, was his last Top 10 hit. My understanding is that he still makes fun of the movie during his live act to this day.

At #30, “Runner” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band

My sister Dawn liked garage sales, and every summer weekend, there were a ton of them in our suburban neighborhood when I was a kid. That was when I discovered that a lot of people sold old 45s for practically nothing, like 10 for 25 cents. I spent several summers hitting the garage sales and taking home stacks of singles from the 1950s to a few months before. Most of them ended up in the trash after one play — often less than that — but that was how I became a pre-teen expert in pop music that was older than I was.

One band I was always excited to find in a singles pile was a London group called Manfred Mann, oddly named after their non-singing, South Africa-born keyboard player. “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and their cover of Dylan’s “The Mighty Quinn” were the big hits, but I also scored copies of “Sha La La Lee,” “Ha Ha Said The Clown” and “Pretty Flamingo,” all of which I adored. The thing was, although Manfred Mann had a strong line in super-poppy hit singles, they saw themselves as a hip, groovy R&B band whose real passion was modern jazz. During this era, they actually released a few albums that were mostly or entirely instrumental jazz workouts, and when their second singer Mike d’Abo quit to pursue a career as a songwriter, Mann broke up the band in favor of a progressive jazz-rock outfit called Manfred Mann Chapter Three.

When that outfit was about as successful as you might expect, Mann formed a new, more rock-oriented group called Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, and returned to the original band’s fondness for mixing jazz and classical-influenced originals with poppier songs by outside songwriters. Along with Mann’s ongoing love of Bob Dylan, he found the first album by a kid from New Jersey who clearly loved Van Morrison and recorded his song “Spirit In The Night” on 1975’s Nightingales and Bombers. The following year, as this kid Bruce Springsteen was breaking through nationally, they recorded another of his early songs, “Blinded By The Light,” and scored his first (and only!) number one hit as a songwriter. (Not to mention a generation of American adolescents sniggering at the fact that Earth Band singer Chris Thompson was clearly unaware of the US colloquialism “deuce,” meaning a 1932 V-8 Ford, and therefore sang a key word in the chorus as “douche.”)

That one success was enough to keep Manfred Mann’s Earth Band going for the next few years without much more chart action in the states: even a third turn at the early Springsteen well with 1980’s “For You” (which has always been my favorite of the three covers) didn’t get past some late-night FM airplay. But by the time of 1982’s Somewhere In Afrika, Warner Brothers had dropped the Earth Band in the States. The LP, an anti-apartheid concept album produced by Mann and a younger musician from South Africa, guitarist Trevor Rabin, didn’t seem like a likely hit. And yet Arista Records agreed to belatedly release it in the US if they added a potential hit. So Mann and Rabin (who was in the process of writing and recording the comeback album for a reformed Yes) went back into the studio to record a new song called “Runner.”

What I thought about it then: Honestly, this is one of those songs I have come across while researching this series that I have absolutely no memory of whatsoever. When it first started appearing in the Hot 100 a few weeks ago, I assumed it would hover in the 80s and 90s for a couple weeks and then disappear. But then it just kept rising, eventually landing at an entirely respectable no. 22. So I listened to the song and watched the video on YouTube, assuming I’d recognize the tune or video if not the title. Nope. Wikipedia tells me that the song appeared in a couple of films later in 1984, The Philadelphia Experiment and Firstborn, but I never saw either of them.

I have to assume that the song was as successful as it was because of the Olympics-themed video. If you weren’t there, I’m not sure I can explain how insanely hyped people were for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Remember, these were the summer Olympics, taking place in August, and this song was a hit in the spring. (The Pointer Sisters’ “Jump (For My Love)” had a similarly sporty video around the same time, and was an even bigger hit.) In fact, that may well be why I have no memory of this song or video: outside of the Denver Broncos, whose new quarterback John Elway was clearly going to be one of the greats, I had little interest in sports. And the rah-rah politicization of the 1984 Olympics by the Republican Party, especially after the Soviet Union and its satellites pulled out, rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like cheering on athletes who were no longer on a level playing field. So honestly, by April of 1984, I was probably turning off this video the second it started just as my own little silent protest.

What I think about it now: This song kinda sucks. Which is a shame, because it turns out it was written by Ian Thomas, a Canadian singer-songwriter I’ve kinda liked ever since I saw him appear on an episode of SCTV back around 1982. (Ian is the younger brother of Dave Thomas, one of the SCTV cast.) Not only that, it turns out to have been inspired by one of the few sports heroes I’ve ever had, Canadian long-distance runner Terry Fox, who after losing a leg to cancer attempted to do a cross-country run with a prosthetic. (Sadly, he only made it from the Maritimes to Toronto before he got too sick to continue — Toronto, one of my favorite cities in the world, hosts a memorial fundraiser run the second Sunday of every September, so it always coincided with the Toronto International Film Festival that my wife and I used to go to every year.) Plus, it has backing vocals by the New Zealand singer-songwriter Shona Laing, whose 1987 single “Soviet Snow” remains a favorite lost classic of the college-rock era. But…sorry, yeah, this is not great.

At #35, “Holding Out For A Hero” by Bonnie Tyler

I feel like I spent the entire summer of 1978 on the patio of our house, sprawled on one of those aluminum-framed chaise lounges (it feels pretentious to either say or spell it properly in this context) with the red and white tartan plaid webbing latticed across it. We bought a new set every Memorial Day weekend and the webbing was always starting to fray by the Fourth of July. There was a square plastic table next to me, holding a metal tumbler full of strawberry Kool-Aid and ice cubes, a library book, and a transistor radio that was always tuned to KIMN, Denver’s Top 40 station. And aside from the singles from the Grease soundtrack and Wings’ “With A Little Luck,” the main song I remember from that summer is Bonnie Tyler’s “It’s A Heartache.”

I remember it so strongly partially because it’s a great song, but also because of something that the DJs on KIMN kept pointing out whenever they played the song, a rap that always went something like “2:35 on a hot Wednesday afternoon and you’re on the mighty KIMN 950 Denver. That was ‘It’s A Heartache’ by Bonnie Tyler. We still get people calling the request line wanting to hear the new Rod Stewart song. You guys, we keep telling you, that is NOT Rod Stewart. She sure SOUNDS like Rod Stewart, but apparently the reason for that is that she had surgery on her vocal cords recently to fix a problem and it gave her that raspy voice.” On occasion, the nighttime DJ Steve Kelly would be a little more daring and allude to an urban legend that was going around at the time: “And she didn’t used to be a dude, either, no matter what your friend says he heard.” (I heard this exact same urban legend three years later when the song KIMN kept playing all summer was Kim Carnes’ similarly husky “Bette Davis Eyes.”)

So I was surprised a little over five years later when one of my favorite childhood one-hit wonders suddenly came back with an even bigger hit, the utterly insane Jim Steinman mini-operetta “Total Eclipse Of The Heart.” That song was even more inescapable, especially when local radio started playing the seven-minute album cut instead of the shortened single mix. Honestly, Steinman’s stuff, even his giant hits with Meatloaf, has always left me kind of cold, and I can still pretty much take or leave this song, although I get why the people who love it love it.

What I thought about it then: Bonnie Tyler’s third and last American top 40 hit was one of the many hits spun off the Footloose soundtrack. I only saw the movie once, so I have no memory of where it appears in the film, but I assume it’s from the third act or so, where some kind of big dramatic action is happening. It has that vibe.

You can easily think about the songs in Footloose in that musical theater sense because — unlike any other film soundtrack 1980s that I know of — all of the songs in Footloose were co-written by the film’s screenwriter, a cabaret singer and off-Broadway musical actor named Dean Pitchford, who worked with all of the soundtrack writers to make sure the songs fit his script. Steinman was brought in with Tyler for this song, and honestly, this may be why this is the only Jim Steinman song I genuinely love. Steinman’s obvious primary inspiration is Andrew Lloyd Webber-style bombast, and working with someone who is actually from that theatrical world restrains Jim’s excesses and channels that energy into something that works.

What I think about it now: I’m genuinely surprised to learn that unlike a lot of the Footloose singles, “Holding Out For A Hero” stalled out at 34 in the charts. Given how much I remember hearing it on the radio at the time — and since — I would have guessed at least the mid-teens.

Bonus track: At #79, “Wouldn’t It Be Good” by Nik Kershaw

Even more so than Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw is a mid-‘80s pop star that even people (like me) who like this style of confectionary synth pop can’t believe we ever much liked. Much of that is down to this, Kershaw’s signature song, absolutely the kind of thing that a melancholy 14-year-old (raises hand) would respond to, but which sounds maudlin and laughably self-pitying if you’ve outgrown that vibe even by a little bit.

What I thought about it then: If memory serves, I bought this album several months after it came out, when it appeared in the clearance sale section of the Columbia House monthly flyer. Or maybe it was a buy one get one free delivery and I couldn’t see anything else I wanted more. I remember being slightly surprised to learn that most of the rest of the album (more-than-competently produced by Tracey Ullman producer Peter Collins) was considerably less morose than this single, and at times actually suggested a functioning sense of humor. One track, “Gone To Pieces,” even features a Chipmunks homage where a trio of sped-up Kershaws harmonize on a go-round of the chorus.

What I think about it now: I think I still have that copy in my LP bins, though I suspect I last listened to it at some point in 1985. This is just the sort of album that dates poorly, although it probably has its period charm now. But here’s part of what I mean about it dating poorly. Barely two years after this song came out, screenwriter John Hughes, director Howard Deutch and their music supervisor decided that “Wouldn’t It Be Good” would be a good fit on the soundtrack to Pretty In Pink: rather than use Kershaw’s original, they re-recorded the song with, inexplicably, former Three Dog Night lead singer Danny Hutton on lead vocals.