KELLY MARIE - “Feels Like I’m In Love”
One of the things that gives 1980’s number ones a queer, lopsided aspect is the way there’s not much of a middleground between hits which emerged more or less direct from youth subcultures and those shepherded into popularity by the likes of Noel Edmonds. In particular the pre-teen and tween market seems pretty dead at this point. This void would soon be filled with sound and light and ribbons and stripey noses but meanwhile pop was the stamping ground of young adults and not-so-young ones, a world in which hormone rushes had been replaced by messily consequential relationships. … read on …
Not everyone in 1980 wanted to break from the past, but “Start!” is more than just recycling – in fact it’s one of Weller’s more experimental hits. The “Taxman” riff holds the track together, taking the place of a chorus, lending beat and muscle to an otherwise piecemeal record. There’s not even an attempt to disguise the source – especially as one of the fragments the riff glues together is a solo lifted nakedly from the same place. Playing this unifying role the “Taxman” lift is working like sampled breaks will come to operate – and in fact the beatwork is the star of “Start!”, those urgent, clipped shakers and brushes upping the track’s momentum considerably. 
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 riffs or phrases jabbing across each other, somehow resolving into a song. Bowie himself starts to sing unsustainably high, his vocal line tumbling down and melting on re-entry – “Do you remember a guy that’s been” sounds like “Duhyuh remember agatherspear…”. Where you can decipher them the words are paranoid cut-ups or just nonsense playground rhymes like the chorus – “funk to funky”? 
“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 pretty much demanded that an ABBA musical come into being one day. But also in the sense that the song’s context is a performance - a final performance, with an audience of one - and the song is a sequence of desperate, doomed ploys by its singer to win over that audience, even as he’s flipping up his seat, putting on his coat and hat and walking out of the show forever. 
“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 mix-and-matching a bunch of dancefloor protocols - sweet disco backing vox; whistles and latinate rhythmic tinges; chirruping and squawking synths; steelband suppleness; and finally some lovely scat-singing on the extended version’s coda. The result is pleasingly loose and relaxed, an open-door party where how you move matters a lot more than where you’re from. 
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 commercial powerhouses, best-selling artists of the last two years. But while ELO’s disco move had made plenty of sense in 1979, it had also coincided with the peak of disco’s mainstream popularity - the film, touted as the new Grease, was a relative bomb, and it seems to me the context “Xanadu” fits into is a kind-of mopping up of the seventies. 
Pop culture songs are tricky. Just look at that current Scouting For Girls song about James Bond. I am not cynical enough to say that Scouting For Girls have picked a release date just because Quantum Of Solace just came out. But some commentators might. Just as some people may note a match up between the release of Baltimora’s Tarzan Boy a few months after Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan mopefest was released. But this would again be a case of coincidence - as the jolly Eurodisco of Tarzan resembles in no way the dull Christopher Lambert starrer. To me Baltimora’s song was a much better match to the playful Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan season shown during the 1985 summer holidays. Us indoorsy kids not playing out in that balmy summer were not big time record buyers - so our Cheeta love alone could not be why punters in their droves snapped up this pop culture special - without it being a novelty single.
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. McLean shows no such awareness – he has no dignity to lose in the first place, and his performance here sounds slick and horribly insincere. Lacking the skill to bring any emotion to the song, he opts instead to slather on the strings to a quite grotesque degree: the last minute of this record, with McLean’s puny falsetto battling an avalanche of tacky tears, is painful.
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. Snark aside, this track, and its appearance here and now, are somewhat rum - a theme from an import TV show which had been running for 8 years and which had another three to go. I know transatlantic cultural transmission used to be on the slow side, but really - why? 
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 big; upbeat songs had got even bigger - Logan’s mournful poking at crushed hopes was a smart, competitive move. 
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