Our first power-pop entry: UK's Squeeze with the first single from their Argybargy album (released in February 1980). Watch the video here.
It's fun and infectious - and timeless too. In the music press, Difford and Tilbrook endured comparisons to a hugely-successful UK pop writing partnership that certainly influenced their style and direction. It could have also served as a distraction. Did us music fans care at the time?
What a start to the new decade - the knock-out debut single from a British interracial reggae outfit! In Britain, UB40 (with minimal lineup changes) would spend the next 30 years charting in the Top 50. They would also score several Top 10 hits in the US in the late 1980s and 1990s.
What anyone's favorite recordings of a particular era is completely subjective. Sometimes your tastes coincide with the general public; sometimes your tastes are ahead of a trend; sometimes your tastes steer toward "guilty pleasures." What I will be presenting here is popular music from the 1980s as I experienced it - and still enjoy it. There are some big international hits, there are some obscure ones. The last I counted, there were 1000 songs to get through - so I have attempted to list them chronologically by release date in the US or UK. If that was not available, chart date or other data from various internet resources (such as Wikipedia and Discogs.com) was used.
Although I grew up and lived in the midwestern part of the US, my recollections are based upon the sounds I heard at independent record stores and college (and other non-commercial) radio stations as well as other non-mainstream sources. So, you won't find anything by rock acts such as Foreigner, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Bon Jovi and the like. Nor will you find those mainstream acts that emerged in the video era, such as Duran Duran or Cyndi Lauper. I have kept the list to only rock and pop performers that caught my ear - although a few R&B performers make appearances here. Very little country music - we'll save that for another blog. Same with World music, jazz or other genres.
Some of these tracks were never released in the USA (at least during the 1980s). Also, it has taken some time for some of these tracks to become legitimately available digitally (on compact disks and/or digital downloads).
