1980s – Page 17

Simply Red | Enough

Sweetwater.com defines sophisti-pop as “the 80s’ most elegant genre … combining pop sensibilities with refined arrangements that were inspired by jazz, avant-garde classical music, and soul … looking simultaneously to the past and the future.”

Mick Hucknall, frontman for UK band Simply Red, fits the genre well: ” … in love with ‘60s soul, which he gives a high-tech overhaul and an ‘80s pop gloss,” (LA Times, reviewing the 1989 album A New Flame). “Refracted through the Hucknall filter, some of the hard-core earthiness of the style doesn’t survive. Hucknall has created a hybrid that’s laid-back and maybe just a little too slick — but still teeming with understated passion … Most of the album’s music is dreamily romantic and fairly mellow. One of the best songs is “Enough,” which reflects the fragile, wispy style of Marvin Gaye’s great What’s Going On album.”

As an album closer and a non-single, “Enough” was granted plenty of freedom. The percolating bassline and syncopated keyboard kicks of the verse, starting in C minor, open into a more uncomplicated chorus in Ab major (0:54); the cycle repeats at 1:12. At 2:25, a bridge appears (or second chorus, as we hear it more than once?), with its lead vocal featuring only a few emphatically repeated words (the title among them). At 2:43, an instrumental verse and chorus are home to piano and guitar features, followed by an outro featuring a lithe soprano sax at 4:21; all set a tone which wouldn’t be out of place at a jazz club, yet also for a time had a place on the pop charts.

English Beat | She’s Going

“The English Beat is a band with an energetic mix of musical styles and a sound like no other,” (NPR Music). “The band’s unique sound has allowed it to endure for decades and appeal to fans, young and old, all over the world. When The English Beat (known simply as The Beat in their native England) rushed on to the music scene in 1979, it was a time of massive social and political unrest and economic and musical upheaval. This set the stage for a period of unbridled musical creativity, and thanks in large part to the Punk movement and its DIY approach to making music, artists like The Beat were able to speak out and speak their mind on the news of the day, as in ‘Stand Down Margaret’, things that mattered to them and the youth culture, as in ‘Get A Job’, and universal matters of the heart and soul, as in their classic hits ‘I Confess’ and ‘Save It For Later’.”

Massachusetts-based ArtsFuse reviewed a 2019 performance in Lowell, MA: “(The band has) always embraced both love and social justice in its music, from joy to anger. Now in its 40^th year, the Birmingham, England-bred band was born in the punk movement but based its messages and beats in ska … to form what was called the two-tone movement in England. The result was highly danceable and lyrically edgy.”

1982’s “She’s Going” packs all of that edginess into a track which clocks in at just barely over two minutes, yet seems anything but incomplete. After a start in B major, 1:00 brings an instrumental break which goes airborne at 1:17, quickly shifting through several keys and landing us in E major for a frenetic closing verse and chorus.

Average White Band | You’re My Number One

Released in 1982, “You’re My Number One” was a track from the Average White Band’s album Cupid’s In Fashion. ” … the group decided to keep things a bit funkier on this release … ” (Soulfinger). ” … they brought in some cool cats like Dan Hartman to write ‘You’re My Number One’. Say what you will about Hartman, but that man can make a fun song … AWB could do LA pop without losing their soul … “

Hartman is perhaps best known for his own release “I Can Dream About You” (which reached #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1984 and #12 on the UK Singles chart in 1985). He wrote and/or produced many other successful tunes for other artists, including “Living in America” for James Brown (1986), as well as tracks for a wide-ranging list of artists including The Plasmatics, Steve Winwood, Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Dusty Springfield, and Bonnie Tyler. Hartman passed away from HIV in 1994 at the age of only 43.

1980s LA pop could hardly have a better standard-bearer than this track. Its funk foundation, nimble horn section, glossy production, and an entire instrumental verse devoted to a sax solo all belie the fact that Average White Band is from … Scotland! The modulation kicks in at 1:46.

Liz Story | Things With Wings

Pianist Liz Story studied music at Hunter College and at Juilliard. “Although she was an accomplished pianist, (she) lost interest in a music career until she saw Bill Evans play one night at the Bottom Line in New York,” (MusicianGuide). “That concert opened up performance possibilities that she had never considered. ‘What hit me was the improvisation. I had the impression that improvising music had died in the 18th century, that it was a musical feat people knew about in some other time,’ she told DownBeat. ‘All these lights went on. I had, for the first time, a clear idea of what I would do in music.’

The timing of Story’s entrance onto the music scene was fortuitous. She arrived when a new form of music, popularly dubbed New Age, was gaining wide acceptance. William Ackerman helped pioneer New Age music through his Windham Hill label, which he formed in 1976 to release his first album of guitar music … Story recorded her first solo album, Solid Colors, for Windham Hill in 1983. High Fidelity reviewed the album: ‘ … a virtually flawless technical capacity, a fine gift for melody, a great sense of creative passion … a performer-composer with the melodic power to move an audience.’ Story claims that she desires simplicity in her compositions. ‘When I sit at the piano, complexity dissolves. I want music to somehow move me, simple and stripped down as it may be. I wonder at the possibility that a melody of three notes can turn the heart.'”

Story’s 1983 track “Things With Wings” begins in F major; at 1:03, there’s a modulation to F# major, then a reversion to the original key at 1:46.

Richard Marx | Heaven Only Knows

Cleveland.com describes songwriter and performer Richard Marx as a “supremely talented, instinctual songwriter who rode the wave of MTV fame for a decade or so and then, when the heat dissipated, reinvented himself as a producer and songwriter for others. ‘It was just about 10 years straight where everything I put out had success. And then I put out a record that I joked went double plywood instead of double platinum.’ … He says it took a year for him to grasp the change. ‘I started to think, well, you know what? I had a really great turn for about 10 years. And it’s not my turn now. It’s somebody else’s turn.’”

Marx has had 14 #1 songs as a writer. Cleveland.com continues: “He and Luther Vandross’ ‘Dance With My Father’ won the 2004 Grammy for Song of the Year. He’s written or performed hits on Billboard’s country, adult contemporary, mainstream rock, holiday and pop charts.” Marx’s earlier run as a performer centered around his own material, best known for hits like “Right Here Waiting,” “Hold On to the Nights,” “Hazard” and “Angelia.” Some up-tempo tracks, such as “Should Have Known Better” and “Don’t Mean Nothing,” also hold a place in his repertoire, but Marx has a particular gift for harmony-saturated power ballads.

“Heaven Only Knows,” a fastidiously constructed track from Marx’s eponymous debut album (1987), wasn’t even a single — giving some idea of the overall quality and detail of his songwriting, right out of the gate. The verses and choruses, built with plenty of inverted and compound chords, pivot all over the place. The tune’s short phrases traverse one blind alley after another, with questioning and longing the only common factors. The bridge (3:08), built around major chords, finally transitions the forecast to partly sunny, but it leads to a key change to C# minor (4:00) for the last chorus and extended outro.

Bros | When Will I Be Famous?

Rolling Stone Australia gathered a list of “75 Greatest Boy Band Songs of All Time” in 2020: “Irresistibly catchy, unapologetically inauthentic, sexy and they know it — the boy band is the most fabulously pre-fab of all musical outfits. From the scripted TV shenanigans of the Monkees to the charming folkiness of One Direction, as long as there are junior high school notebooks to deface, there will be outfits providing pop spectacle in its purest, least filtered form.”

Coming in at #72 on the list is the 1987 track from UK-based trio Bros, “When Will I Be Famous?” The group “epitomized the late Eighties Young Conservative air of steely determination: money, power, and success at any cost. Twins Matt and Luke Goss, along with schoolmate Craig Logan, prioritized fame and fashion over brotherly bonhomie (the increasingly sidelined Logan quit, then sued the brothers). The mean streak in their lyrics, their distinctive crewcuts and bomber jackets, and their penchant for wearing Grolsch bottlecaps on their shoes made them ripe for parody and vitriol in the press … Britain had seen nothing like it since the Bay City Rollers … the Casio cowbell serves as the instant timewarp back to 1987.”

At 2:47, the relentless electronic groove downshifts a bit in terms of intensity and loudness, but goes on to add even more ruthless layers of synth shimmer instead. By its end, the bridge has tapered down to a percussion and vocals-only break. Next, the band heaves itself through a stuttering, meter-shifted portal at 3:34 before regaining its balance (just in case you didn’t notice the half-step key change).

Many thanks to regular contributor Ziyad for this submission!

Paul Davis | ’65 Love Affair

“Davis wrote this as ’55 Love Affair,'” (Songfacts). “His record company wanted the song to appeal to a younger audience and had Davis change the title. The lyrics, however, remained squarely in the ’50s, with references to drive-ins, car hops and doo-wop.” Either way, the track unmistakably features an early 80s pop sound!

Davis is perhaps best known for his ballad “I Go Crazy” (1977), which peaked at only #7 on the Hot 100 but remained in the Top 100 for 40 weeks, setting what was then the record for the longest run on that chart. He scored a 1982 hit with “’65 Love Affair,” which reached #6 on the Hot 100 and later spent 20 weeks on that chart. It also reached #5 on Billboard‘s Adult Contemporary Tracks chart.

In an interview with ClassicBands.com, Davis was asked about the lyric stating that the earlier era’s music was “simple and clear.” His response: “There’s something magical and inspirational about the discovery of what was the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll. The songs were simple. They weren’t real complicated. All of them didn’t deal in real heavy thoughts, either. It was just fun back then, and much simpler, easier to understand.”

Starting in C mixolydian mode, the tune shifts to regular old C major for the chorus at 0:37, then back to C mixolydian at 1:02. At 3:15, there’s a shift up a whole step to D major just before the tune starts a long fade.

Belinda Carlisle | Heaven is a Place on Earth

Belinda Carlisle, lead singer of the girl group synonymous with early 1980s pop, The Go-Go’s, later left for a solo career. Stereogum reports that in December 1987, “Carlisle had the #1 single in America, and she had it with a fiercely, fervently, almost defiantly mainstream song. Carlisle’s big hit is a simple, straightforward love song built around terms so overstated that they cross over into actual religious territory. In the video, Carlisle makes out with her husband, a Hollywood scion who was once part of the Republican political machine … (In the decade proceeding the hit), Belinda Carlisle went full normie. Along the way, though, she made a hell of an impact.”

“‘Heaven Is a Place on Earth’ is a glimmering, expensive-sounding pop record, with that shiny-synth/big-drum thing that you hear on practically every successful record of the era … On his Hit Parade podcast a couple of years ago, Chris Molanphy points out that (songwriters Rick Nowels and Ellen Shipley) took that trick from Bon Jovi, who’d used it on ‘You Give Love A Bad Name.’ Later on, that chorus-up-front move became a go-to trick for late-’90s boy-band producers. It’s some effective shit! When a chorus is big enough, there’s no need to be subtle about it. You can just bludgeon it directly into somebody’s brain before the song even starts.” Songwriter Ellen Shipley sang backup on the song, as did Diane Warren and Michelle Phillips (of The Mamas and The Papas fame); synth-driven songwriter and music tech groundbreaker Thomas Dolby served as a session keyboardist for the track. Stereogum continues: “You almost certainly can’t pick out those individual voices or keyboard tones … but you can definitely hear that there’s money in the song … it’s the sound of ’80s blockbuster pop cranked all the way up to full power. It sounds like Top Gun.”

After a start in E major, 3:23 brings an unprepared shift upward to F# major — if “unprepared” is a broad enough term to include a bombastic instrumental chorus (starting at 3:09), plenty of percussion pyrotechnics, an insistent re-statement of the keyboard hook, and a 2/4 bar thrown into the 4/4 mix to bring us to the key change with the g-force of a hairpin rollercoaster turn.

Billy Joel | Tell Her About It

“When Joel made 1983’s An Innocent Man, he was rich, famous, and single for the first time ever,” (Stereogum). He was dating supermodels like future second wife Christie Brinkley. He’d been asked to write a song for Easy Money, a Rodney Dangerfield movie, and he’d come up with a peppy, stagey facsimile of early-’60s soul. Joel was into it, so he just went ahead and made a whole album like that. With that album’s first single, Joel made it to #1 for the second time.

When he wrote ‘Tell Her About It,’ Joel was trying to pay tribute to the feeling of early Motown — an even more difficult sound to recapture than the doo-wop of ‘The Longest Time.’ As a songwriting exercise, ‘Tell Her About It’ hits its marks. Joel and his band effectively tap into the classic Holland-Dozier-Holland four-four big-beat stomp. Joel comes up with a memorable hook, and he keeps the structure sharp and uncluttered. There’s nothing revolutionary about it, but that fits the conceit. It’s pastiche. There’s not supposed to be anything revolutionary about it … In a period of great pop-music futurism, Billy Joel looked backwards. If The Nylon Curtain was Joel’s attempt to evoke the frustrations of working-class Reagan-era America, then ‘Tell Her About It,’ and An Innocent Man in general, are Joel capitalizing on the rose-tinted simpler-times nostalgia that helped Reagan get elected in the first place.”

After the tune starts in Bb major, the chorus shifts to F major at 1:11, then back to Bb for the intro to the next verse (1:32). From 2:25 to 2:46, the bridge drops to Ab major. The video, complete with its oddly Nixonian take on Ed Sullivan, only adds to the retro feel!

Boz Scaggs | Look What You’ve Done To Me

“Look What You’ve Done To Me” was originally written for the 1980 motion picture Urban Cowboy. Penned by Scaggs and legendary producer David Foster, the tune peaked at #14 on the Billboard Top 100, and features background vocals by The Eagles.

The song fluctuates between E minor for the verses and instrumental interludes, and its relative major, G, for the choruses.