Listening to this song you realise that at some point the idea that a rock record should sound like a bunch of people in the same place playing the same music at the same time was completely abandoned by record producers. Not in the name of experimentation, or expanding a record’s sound, but I guess just because that kind of verisimilitude didn’t seem relevant any more. In its way this even seems a more radical shift than genres like dub reggae or techno which were clearly studio constructs from the off.

This is a long way of saying that there’s something quite off about a song like “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”: built for a movie, it has the same oddly flat, perspective-warping quality as a studio set, like it only really exists in the context of the action, when it’s soundtracking something. That eerie dead space is created pretty much entirely by the echo on the percussion: I guess it could also be filled by crowds of people singing along, which is why arena rockers took to this kind of song.

Listened to alone there’s a discrepancy between the size and effort of the sound (colossal) and the emotional take-out from it (pea-sized) that tips me into laughter when Starship try and go up a gear leading into the guitar solo. Maybe if I’d put more hours in with Grace Slick’s earlier work I’d find it in me to despise Starship but for all its vacuous, leaden bigitude, deep in its tiny heart this is affable enough to be harmless.

Madonna’s appropriation move into Latin pop is a tightrope walk between corny and respectful: on the one hand an arrangement which packs in every Hispanic signifier bar a finishing “Ole!”, on the other a performance that has far more authority, conviction and love than her last excursion into pastiche. “La Isla Bonita” on paper looks like the most awful quesa – but right from “Last night I dreamed of San Pedro” it goes in a different direction, a reverie full of the real ache of missing somewhere beautiful – there’s something close to dread in her voice.

But in a British pop context “La Isla Bonita” resonates slightly differently: here San Pedro sounded like a Mediterranean island, which meant package holidays, and at the time I disliked “Bonita” as basically a middlebrow cousin of “Y Viva Espana” and suchlike. Eyes like a desert instead of straw donkeys and sombreros, but the principle was the same. Well, I was a bit of a fool back then. Especially since the collective ache of a holiday ended was about to transform British pop culture: a bunch of DJs and partygoers determined to establish the vibe of Ibizan clubs back home, and succeeding in the most remarkable ways.

The ripple effects of the Second Summer of Love – still 15 months off at this point – have transformed how I hear “La Isla Bonita” as an adult: now it sounds like Madonna making a Balearic record. For those unfamiliar with the thin slicing of dance music genres what that means practically is that now when I listen to it I tune in to its buried spaciness, I want more of those Spanish guitar runs, more inessential prettiness, more of the dream and not so much of the song the dream created. Frankly, my ideal version of “Bonita” would be an 8-minute long disco edit which pushed the lumbering chorus to the sidelines: that’s the one bit I still agree with my younger self on, a spell-it-out wake-up call in an otherwise captivating pop track.

A newspaper is a version of the world, and a successful newspaper builds a world that not only reflects the real one, it infects it. In its 80s heyday The Sun was not only the highest circulation daily paper in Britain, it had a cultural weight that went well beyond that: it comforted its readers and haunted its enemies in the way the Mail does now. The Sun’s mix of tub-thumping, scandal, sex, games and coupons might have simply been a variation on a winning tabloid formula that stretched back to the Boer War, but editor Kelvin McKenzie pitched the paper exactly right for its brash, greedy times.

“Let It Be” is The Sun’s number one record, its logo proudly on the label and the sleeve. The disaster which sparked the single – a car ferry capsized due to crew negligence, killing 193 people – might not ordinarily have led to a charity record, but several of the dead were Sun readers, on board the Herald Of Free Enterprise because the paper had run a special offer on ferry tickets, away-day breaks to Europe being a reliable sales booster. So the Sun owned the event from start to finish, acting as chief mourner. After the disaster it hit on Stock Aitken and Waterman to produce the record and started working its, and their pop contacts book. Within a week this is what they’d come up with.

“Let It Be” itself is – like “Everybody Hurts” – one of those songs which was doomed to be a charity record sooner or later. I’ve never really enjoyed it – for all its obvious sincerity it feels too generalised and woolly for me to find it a source of comfort, and without that sentimental connection the hymnal pace is a chore. But simplicity and honesty have always suited McCartney well and it’s certainly not a song I’d sneer at. Also, its very solidity makes it – on paper – a good frame for a record that’s going to use a lot of voices.

Even so the Ferry Aid “Let It Be” is a discombobulating listen. For a start, in commercial and stylistic terms the talent is more than usually mismatched. But charity records always have their lesser contributors, and things like Paul King’s inability to sing the word “be” are all part of the experience. A bigger problem is that the music won’t get out of the way – the kind of stateliness “Let It Be” needs is completely alien to SAW, who garnish the record with bibbling keyboards, horrid synth tones, a chuntering mid-paced beat, and that’s even before you get to the Knopfler and Gary Moore guitar solos: the ’something for everyone’ ethos of the charity record line up taken to an extreme. The uncomfortable thought that comes to mind hearing SAW’s backing, though, is that this is pretty much the type of thing those ill-fated passengers would have heard had the ferry sailed and they’d wandered into the cocktail lounge to hear the on-board entertainment.

At least until the ending, anyway. Kate Bush does her line, in the deep register she’d just used on “Don’t Give Up”, and it’s a revelation: her warm, sad, cocooning voice suits the song and the occasion absolutely. There are a few seconds near-silence after that, as if everybody else is suddenly thinking “Oh shit, this could actually have been good.” And then the moment passes and it’s time for the mass chant, and for the single to finish on a note of laughter, high-fiving and applause. Because that’s what charity records and newspaper campaigns are all about: happy endings. It’s The Sun wot Number One it.

The marvellous italo-house keyboard break in the middle of “Respectable” gives the game away: Stock Aitken and Waterman were Britain’s premier pop Europhiles. Their late-80s heyday is as near as UK pop has come to European Union – a joyful pan-continental pop sound with Mel, Kim, Rick et al. joining Taffy and Sinitta in vibrant, tinny one-ness.

Everything critical you can say about SAW is of course true. Were they formulaic? None more so. Exploitative? Surely. Lowest common denominator? Yes, and lower still. No hitmakers since have been as brazen about making pop into a cheap, kit-built, product, and their hit-rate wasn’t quite high enough to deflect all the distaste for that approach.

But at the same time they were inevitable and necessary. There was an enormous latent pop market that somebody was going to start catering for. The Hit Factory did so, and what’s more they did so in enjoyably confrontational style. There was a populist, rebellious streak in SAW which imagined their customers as girls who would put on the TV, see a Percy Sledge track or a worthy cover version and think, in Smash Hits terms, “Bo-RING!”. On the video for “Respectable” the set is laughably cheap, the careful, tasteful staging of mid-80s videos thrown out of the window in favour of two sisters enjoying themselves. You don’t need the proto-Spice lyrics to hear this song as a blueprint for a thoroughly achievable kind of fun.

Curing an excess of soul with a dose of soullessness seems like harsh medicine, but “Respectable” is the Hit Factory at close to its best: it hadn’t narrowed its formula down yet – there’s a lot of nice Europop touches in the background, and the “Tay-Tay-TAY-Tay” hook is splendid. Mel and Kim themselves have tons more gusto than many of SAW’s favoured vocalists. The song spins its wheels badly during the verses so I never enjoy it quite as much as I think I do – but this is still very much on the potent side of cheap.

Each song on Popular is given a mark out of 10. The year end polls are your opportunity to indicate which songs YOU would have given 6 or more to.

My own lowest marks this year were 1s for “Long Haired Lover” and (more controversially) “Vincent”. My highest was a 9 for the Pigeon. Share views on the year as a whole, appropriate lists etc. in the comments box!

Sometimes Britain hounds and ogles its flawed celebrities, sometimes it wills their redemption, often a little of both. Boy George’s turn of fortune from Britain’s top pop export to Britain’s most famous junkie was sudden enough and sad enough to put him into the group of ‘troubled’ stars who still enjoyed some level of public warmth, enough at least to send a bad solo record to the top of the charts. “Everything I Own” is the number one as sympathy vote, spun at the time as a happy ending for George.

But even if you’d left Britain in 1983, spent a few years as a hermit in the desert and returned without the faintest notion that George O’Dowd had ever been near Class A drugs, one play of this would tell you that something had gone badly wrong. George’s voice was never exactly powerful but it had a lithe presence that often carried Culture Club’s music and when it needed to stretch – on the opening of “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me”, for instance – it could. On “Everything I Own” it’s strained and hollow, trailing away particularly at the end of lines, ragged on the high notes, hiding in the (utterly uninspired) arrangement.

To George’s credit he didn’t walk this mawkish path to recovery for long: he found new direction in the club scene, made records where he sounded genuinely enthused again, rediscovered himself as a DJ and even managed to give his pop incarnation a proper send-off with “The Crying Game”. But this is the last we see of him, a spectral presence on his own comeback record.

If the Levi’s Jeans advertisers counted as a single artist they would have six Number Ones – more than Bowie or Britney, as many as Queen, Rod or Slade. Their biggest successes came as tastemakers picking new music hits in the mid-90s, but prior to that they’d helped push the late 80s soul revival out into the casual singles market, and Ben E King was the biggest beneficiary. In the US the Rob Reiner movie was the main driver of “Stand By Me”’s revival, but in Britain the jeans ad was the deal-maker.

Music of the 50s and 60s appealed to advertisers looking to hit notes of authenticity, integrity, and timelessness – valuable coin in an era of self-conscious new wealth. But the conmercials erased the music’s historical context and development: for someone like me, only beginning to discover old music, they made soul seem hollow and predictable, pre-chewed by the admen. It was another decade before I really dug into soul music, and before I understood anything about its timelines and tensions and where these old songs fitted in.

Not that “Stand By Me” itself really needs a lot of context. The song is resolutely self-contained, a sealed bubble of togetherness, one built to withstand the end of everything if it has to. The unfussy strings, the zizz of the guiro, and King’s rich but measured voice come together as a monument to steadiness and trust, just as the song intends. And the swells of orchestration and the occasional breaks in King’s delivery are all that hint at the effort and strength that kind of steadiness requires.

“I Knew…” is step three – after the solo ballads and ditching the boy racer – of George Michael’s repositioning as an artist with credibility. In the pop landscape of 1987, getting Aretha Franklin onto your single sent signals – I mean it; I have a certain clout; I want to be big in the USA; I am in this for the long haul; I know my stuff. Unfortunately for him, “credible” in 1987 has aged worse than “laughable” in 1984 did: “I Knew You Were Waiting For Me” is long on hot air and short on delight.

This isn’t really George or Aretha’s fault, as they’re struggling with the fact that Simon Climie appears to have written the track using a set of gospel magnetic fridge poetry. Low valleys, high mountains, deep rivers, faith, destiny, spirit: all that’s missing is, well, God. Of course part of what made Franklin legendary is her ability to balance the transporting passion of gospel with the restrained and coded world of the secular love song – but even so there’s something very calculating and even patronising about this job. Let’s write the sort of song that Aretha Franklin sings, she’ll like that! Combine it with the trowelled-on guitar and gated drums and you get a record which works to deny its vocalists space.

She cuts through to a degree, he doesn’t do so well, but the suggestion in the video that this is a virtual duet is all too plausible – no heat, not much interplay, the only unexpected emotional note either strikes is Aretha’s tender, maternal “I know you did” as George leads into the chorus. Lovely to see her on Popular of course, but the circumstances aren’t ideal.

Future shock? If you’d been told before the fact that a Chicago house record was going to hit number one in the UK, you might well have put your money on the showy, song-driven side of house providing it. A record like Marshall Jefferson’s “Move Your Body (The House Music Anthem)”, maybe, with a big vocal hook to grab on to. But no: Steve “Silk” Hurley throws us in at the tracky deep end: repetition, repetition, repetition, the sweeping hiss of the hi-hat, the crack of the snare, that flexing and bucking keyboard line, and from out of the mix those snarls, cries and commands – “Jackitupoutthere!”

More than anything, early house music makes me think of darkness. Not in the sense of negativity or of terror and malice deep within the human heart – though it could provide those when needed – but the darkness of the club, where flickering patterns of light briefly let the bodies around you shine red or blue before they vanish back into the murk. It’s that darkness which seems to fill the space in “Jack Your Body”, emphasising the pure physicality of this dance. The word “jack” – mechanical, sudden, carrying the idea of uplift, a wave of energy passing through you – does an awful lot of work in an apparently meaningless record. This isn’t one of my very favourite Chicago house tracks – I tend to like the music with a little more incident – but there’s a heat and purity to it which is still tremendously exciting and shows how glorious it must have sounded in clubs.

It’s tempting to see “Jack Your Body” as the wavefront of a revolution, but as several people have pointed out you can’t quite draw a straight line between this early Chicago sound and the dance music explosion to come. Obviously house was big – to get to #1 even at this point you still had to shift a good few singles – but other club music styles had been big before. To me at the time – by now at boarding school and applying myself to learning the ways of classic rock, so about as poorly placed to comprehend house music as you could possibly be! – this didn’t register as minimal un-music: I thought it was basically along the lines of hits like Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F”, only a bit less colourful. So a little bit of the excitement I feel listening to it is the false anticipation of hindsight: “Jack Your Body” sounds more important because I know what’s coming after. Early house was vital raw material for ‘dance culture’ and its reshaping of British pop, but it wasn’t a revolutionary force by itself. Which, of course, doesn’t stop “Jack Your Body” from being an enduringly fine record.

My highest marks this year were 9s for “West End Girls” and “Papa Don’t Preach”, my lowest a brace of 1s for Nick Berry and the Horned Beast of County Wexford.

“Reet Petite” would have fit right in on an advert: I scratched my head for a while trying to remember which it came from. No luck – so I went and looked it up, and of course it wasn’t on one at all. It got to number one on the back of an animated short – played on BBC arts show Arena – in which a triangle-headed plasticine Jackie shook and jived while mouths on stalks quivered behind him in an angular landscape which reminds me a little of Krazy Kat. As an enactment of the song’s pop-eyed restlessness and vocal flexibility it works, and it’s more a fan video than an advert. All the giant caricature lips threw me at first but as a sung performance “Reet Petite” is a real celebration of the mouth with all its trills, twists, held notes and squawks of joy.

Its easy ascent to Number One, though, is a bit more problematic than its video. We’ve occasionally seen records top the charts a half-dozen years, even a decade after they were recorded, but “Reet Petite” came from a generation away: a hit in 1957, and a hit very much of 1957 in its swinging, wisecracking urban R&B feel. As a listener I remember feeling completely alienated – not only did I think it was goofy but it felt like a betrayal of what I’d assumed the charts were for: showcasing new music, even if it wasn’t my new music. Adam Ant hits are as old now as “Reet Petite” was then, and now I can love it, thrill to “she’s AWWL-right!” But at the time its success really bothered me, and an instinctive dislike for reissues remains (meaning this and most others will grab a point or two less than they might have).

So even though “Reet Petite” wasn’t an advertising song it’s worth making a few general points now about what I think was going on. The mid-80s, and the introduction of the CD, saw record labels wake fully to the potential of their back catalogues. People were prepared to buy the old stuff, even if they already owned it. And this raised another question: if that could work for albums, why not for singles? Plenty of great records lurking in those vaults, waiting for potential audiences. What’s more, sales of new singles were in decline – none of the great pop bands of the early 80s were selling like they used to. No better time to promote old records, you’d say.

Except if any label executive did think like that, they hit a problem. The singles market was awareness- and novelty-based: kids bought a track cos they heard it on the radio or saw it on the TV. The crucial radio stations put new records on their playlists, not old ones. And there was no way of getting this stuff on TV at all. So aside from special campaigns – like the Beatles reissues in 1982 – the market for classic singles qua singles was limited to imprints like Old Gold, two old hits on one 7”, steady enough sellers to get a small rack in WH Smith or Virgin but nothing more than a sideline.

And then Bartle Bogle Hegarty helped change all that. They made a commercial for Levi’s – “Laundrette” – in which Nick Kamen stripped down to his underwear while “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” played. The ad is remembered now for its chain-reaction smashing together of sex and denim, but the music was just as important – a reissued “Grapevine” got to #8. This was the vector needed to sell old singles: license them to a well-made advert and you had the equivalent of a video on heavy rotation.

So what was the music that adverts would help sell? Soul music, first and foremost: old soul music, that constant echo in 80s music now completing its journey from style mag reference point to a nationally understood signifier of the authentic, the real, the rooted in a brittle and shallow world. After all, the only people in the world who bang on more than marketers about authenticity are rock critics – even if the two disagree deeply on what it might be or mean.

This was the context in which “Reet Petite” emerged – through quite a different channel, but another piece of proof that timely reissues of singles could really clean up. The after-the-fact success of old soul, R&B and rock’n'roll music in the late 80s charts could be seen as a vindication for songs which were often neglected at the time. But it could equally be seen as confirmation that much of pop had stagnated in the mid-80s: the growing turn to classicist values reaching a logical conclusion. If Tony Hadley, say, was working in the shadow of Marvin, why not just listen to Marvin, who wasn’t in anyone’s shadow? But this new context had a chilling effect on these old songs. A song as free and easy as “Reet Petite” had suddenly become part of a rulebook.

The late 80s are strange times for the British pop charts. They’re one of those exciting periods – like the mid-50s, like the late-70s – where different musics and different audiences seem to be at war, where the very question of what pop is – the role it plays in peoples’ lives – is up in the air. But unlike those there’s no settled consensus on who to back. You might still find people who aver that faceless dance records ruined the charts – certainly the people who marketed pop and pop radio seemed to have a horror of them at the time. You will also still find people who snarl at reissues in the Top 40 on a kind of principle. You will find some with a kind word to say about the brazenly cheap pop of the time and others who think Pete Waterman is one of British pop culture’s great monsters.

And seen from our perspective – from the top of the charts – what we have is something close to chaos, time breaking down so that a record from the fifties and a cover of a record from the fifties, and a record purpose-built for obsolescence before the nineties, and a record that sounded like it was from the next century, all these could tumble into one another at number one. Past, present and future in collision – and plenty of people despaired of all three.

While others jumped right in: Bill Drummond deciding to make a hip-hop record, spending the first months of the year on the aptly named 1987: What The Fuck Is Going On?, getting sued by ABBA and then resurfacing the next year with a number one of his own before telling everyone else how to do it. The story’s not exactly typical of the times but it’s illustrative. Looking back the industry seems at its most cynical and its most gameable, both at the same time.

The ferment of the late 80s happened for a bunch of reasons. The stars of the Band Aid generation had abdicated, split, imploded or disgraced themselves and there was a stardom void ready for canny operators to exploit. There was a massive opportunity for the record business to repackage its long-neglected back catalogues, and singles could play a part in that. And there was house music, the touch paper for one of the great realignments in British pop culture. What all these had in common, I’d speculate, was the cheap money sloshing around during the Lawson boom: “dosh dosh dosh” as Harry Enfield said, and just as in the late 50s consumer boom some of that dosh went into pop. Trading up your old records for CDs; shopping for jeans and wondering about the music from the advert; queueing up for Bros calendars; buying a cut-price package trip to the Balearics – different audiences, spending their money in different ways but it all added up to a tacky, fast, strange time for pop.

(And a good time? Some of it was remarkable. Some of it was unspeakable. I can’t wait to find out what you all think…)

Just as Europe’s as close as we’re getting to hair metal, The Housemartins are our nearest brush with 80s indiepop. This isn’t their strident and strummy side, of course: instead it’s a showcase for their deep-rooted brand of socialist Christianity. “Caravan” is to say the least a radical take on Isley-Jasper-Isley’s squelchy 1985 original, turning it into slimmed down Northern gospel and by doing so giving it a sense of place and purpose.

To do this, the band make one small but important change to the song – instead of “the world in which we were born” they sing “the place in which we were born, so neglected and torn apart”. And that, of course, means England, and in the context of 1986 it turns the line into an attack not on sin but on Thatcherism. And that in turn puts a different spin on “Caravan”’s calls for unity and fraternity. But they don’t stress the point: instead they concentrate on finding the still centre of the song. “They” really means Paul Heaton, with the others used as Flying Pickets style backers – his rough-edged white soul voice has got the right amount of character for this record, stops it becoming too bland.

I would have sneered at its religiosity at the time, but really I disliked it for no more sophisticated reason than boredom. I’m no more God-fearing now but I think it’s aged quite well. I like the record’s serenity and stolidity better than I would a more evangelical or passionate reading. This is a brass band away from the Salvation Army, and I can get behind that culturally even if I can’t spiritually.

The first metal song to get to number one, which more than anything else tips you off as to what a strange, broad, inclusive-despite-itself church metal is. And yes, this surely qualifies. “The Final Countdown” puts its fanfare riff atop a gallop of power hair and Valkyrie guitars and the result is impeccably pop – so much so it split the band! – but their roots were heavier, trading personnel with Yngwie Malmsteen, paid-up members in good standing of the Swedish Metal Scene.

My experience of metal in the 1980s was entirely vicarious – people at school would buy Kerrang! or RAW or Metal Hammer, and I would read them with an amused disdain I guess I’ve never fully managed to shake, even though I’m ashamed of it: metal is the most vocational of fandoms and it didn’t choose me. I later started reading the NME instead and felt myself much smarter for it at the time – but of course what strikes me now is how similar, and how precarious, both magazines’ worlds were.

In an environment where access to music was through specialist gatekeepers – radio stations and print magazines – genres became coalitions. Metallica were truer metal than Cinderella? Perhaps, but the economics of genre meant that gatekeepers had to pitch a product that would capture fans of both. And the very existence of the umbrella thus held over them would exaggerate the similarities as well as the differences. Even so the coalitions had to be policed – the very first issue of NME I ever bought agonised on its cover over whether certain bands (The Darling Buds, The Wonder Stuff) joining major labels meant disaster. To a great extent the story of popular music in the 80s and 90s is the story of these grand coalitions – hip-hop and dance music, too – forming, winning and facing the consequences.

Even to an outsider the world of metal seemed particularly split-prone, perhaps because the temptations were greater: the marketplace seemed unlikely to put the integrity of The Wedding Present under too great a strain. But metal bands had the chops and the stagecraft and the gumption to fit right into a stadium rock world – all they needed were the songs, and “The Final Countdown” is such a song. Not that Europe necessarily realised – the riff had been kicking around since the early 80s and Joey Tempest wanted to press it into service as a tour curtain-raiser, not as a single. You can hear exactly what he meant: but the label knew a monster when they heard one.

Is it much more than the riff, and the headlong charge of the rhythm guitar? Does it have to be? The lyrics are well-documented nonsense but Tempest puts in the yearning and abstract conviction they need to not spoil the record, and really they’re just placeholders to get you back to – “It’s the FIH-NAL COUNT-DOWN!”. And there’s a welcome crispness and space in the production which gives Tempest’s voice and keyboards room. It lessens “The Final Countdown”’s heaviness but if you’re heading to Venus you don’t need too much ballast.

“Take My Breath Away” is hardly the first soundtrack ballad to get to #1. But even so it feels like the start of something, a harbinger of the soon-come glory age of the film tie-in, when balladosaurus rex bestrode the charts, roaring and beating its chest and weeping for week upon emotional week. Of course the evolution of this sonic megafauna was gradual. Play “Take My Breath Away” next to something later, and functionally similar, like “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing”, and “Breath” seems thoughtful, almost delicate.

But the key species characteristics of the titan song are present: the stateliness, the sense of scale, the yearning, most of all the epic abstraction. In the parent films, after all, specific situations – fighter pilots, car racers, asteroid drillers – are just skins for archetypal ideas of Heroism and Love and Sacrifice. So the songs can drop the skins completely and just wallow in those feelings – which means you get guff like “never hesitating to become the fated ones”, but also makes criticising the lyrics feel more beside the point than usual.

What makes “Take My Breath Away” interesting, for all its bombast, is the Giorgio Moroder production. Those four-note keyboard figures, suspended placidly over its synth beds, give the song a calm, weightless feel. It reminds me slightly of Julee Cruise’s “Falling” in its sense that love is a dreamstate, a suspension of time, and for all that the lyrics evaporate on attention, their string of present participles – watching, turning, returning, watching, again and again – reinforce this. The value in “Take My Breath Away” isn’t in its weight but its stillness.

Here’s a thing: I have never watched an episode of Eastenders. Not all through. Too much shouting for me. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of this but it does mean I missed out on the astonishing storyline in which “Every Loser Wins” made its debut before it became the first soap star single to reach number one. I’m missing some critical context on “Wicksy” here, people, and I expect you to fully enlighten me in the comments box.

I’m not expecting it to change my view of the record, mind you, since free of its story context “Every Loser Wins” is beyond terrible. The work of ’stenders theme composer Simon May it’s one of the faffiest, most disheartening songs to drift our way: every loser wins, but only when they’re dreaming, but it’s still a win, and this is for the losers, who are really winners, we nearly made it. For pity’s sake it features the lyric: “every loser knows / the light the tunnel shows”, whose contortion is only marginally worse than “In time you’ll see / Fate holds the key”.

As a performer, Nick Berry is a blow-dried void, a soft-focus nullity and certainly the best thing about the record. Though listening to it he’s easily overwhelmed by that high piano trill, cutting repeatedly through “Every Loser Wins” with all the heartbreaking sensitivity of the Intel chimes. The record also boasts perhaps the clumsiest drum drop-in of the whole decade, wellington-booted snares whomping down painfully into the AOR murk. There are no winners here.

Musically, if the Madonna brand stands for anything it’s for smart, up-to-date club pop. But there’s often been a side to her that’s attracted to pastiche, as if she wants to prove she can take on styles way outside her era and range and master them as slickly as she dealt with freestyle, R&B, and electronica. “Hanky Panky”; the Evita incident; and this bouncily backwards-looking girlpop tribute.

Can she do it? Formally speaking, of course she can: she has the songwriters and the work ethic and “True Blue” bubbles and blushes in all the correct places. It’s fun! But even discounting the wall-of-tin production it seems to lack conviction. The girl group sound Madonna is playing with worked not just because of its catchy sweetness but because – whether coded or not – there was an awful lot at stake in the songs: the best of them grab a moment or a situation and freeze-frame the immense ridiculous intensity of teenage feeling. Exactly what “Papa Don’t Preach” did, in other words, and to go from that song’s frustration and dread to lines like “I’m so excited that you’re my best friend” is a shift in emphasis from content to form that sacrifices a lot. Still she could have pulled it off – the opening exchanges with the backing singers hint at something tougher and sassier than the song we get. But the rest of “True Blue” is deliberately flimsy and brittle, and before the end Madonna sounds a little bored. Like most of her pastiches it feels like a distraction.

As a straight man it’s easy for me to be complacent about this, but the Orwellian “THE COMMUNARDS ARE BANNED” business at the start of this video looks completely ridiculous to me now, and the fact that it does suggests genuine and positive social change. Around this time I remember reading a tabloid article suggesting that gay men be interned offshore, Anthrax-island style, until AIDS had burnt itself out: an extreme expression of the panic and fear surrounding the disease – and of who much of the public wanted to blame. From one angle it was a time of increasing, indulged, and with Clause 28 ultimately government-sanctioned homophobia, a lurch back between the several steps forward of 60s decriminalisation and 00s equality legislation.

Jimmy Somerville very much emerged as a pop star against this background – out and proud, making records with Bronski Beat about growing up gay, his falsetto keening over “Small Town Boy” as a lament and rebuke for the provincial towns which drove out young men like him. He was always a serious man, even when he made surging, celebratory records like this one. Partying was in itself political. In fact what gives “Don’t Leave Me This Way” its odd grain is the contrast between Somerville’s slightly aloof, elevated performance and the gusto the arrangement seems to demand.

Without that sense of hedonism the record feels too effortful. Somerville is acting the choirboy in a gospel song, floating over the listener when he needs to lift them up with him, and without his support the rest of the band try for Sylvester and end up closer to Black Lace – uncomplicated, manipulative party music. That whomping great hands-in-the-air “Whoooooooooooaaa – BABY!” is the least subtle moment all year, which probably explains why “Don’t Leave Me This Way” was ’86’s top-selling single. The sonics have aged terribly, though – it all sounds so thin now, which would block the song’s instrumental lunge for ecstasy, even if you didn’t leave it convinced Somerville is no fun to dance with.

I’m suffering from pop fatigue, readers, so Popular is off on its Christmas break, and will return after Xmas if I feel inspired, or in January otherwise. Sorry to not put 1986 to bed – it’s proved unexpectedly gruelling! You’ve been a lovely comments crew as ever and I hope you all have a terrific festive season.

(Posts on the rest of FT will keep on a-rollin’, of course.)

Alas, to wake up you must first fall asleep, and Boris Gardiner’s lovers’ rock slowie veers awful close to lullaby. The tune is sweet, the keyboard lands halfway between bounce and caress, and there’s a gentleness and humility in his creamy delivery. What might have been something as oily as “The Lady In Red” instead comes over as a harmless summer evening melody, almost chaste. “Harmless” rarely sets the blood racing though, and “I Want To Wake Up” is as heavy on the eyelids as it is on the sentiment.

In a market economy, value is not intrinsic – it’s determined by the extent to which other people desire a thing you possess. “The Lady In Red” captures this at the romantic level – Chris De Burgh’s realisation of the value of a woman occurs only when he sees higher than expected demand for her in the marketplace of a dance. A “dah-nce” no less. De Burgh lengthens and stresses the vowel, breaking its rhyme with “romance” – this is not some high street discotheque he’s in, we are given to understand: it’s a place where his lady can be properly appreciated. After all, high ticket items realise part of their value through their status as display objects and the true audience for “The Lady In Red” is that crowd of suitors, not the lady herself. The song lets De Burgh proclaim his monopoly position in this market to them: “the Lady In Red is dancing WITH ME”, and they simply vanish from the lyric. De Burgh sways across the floor victorious, an unlikely alpha male – there are many things I dislike about his performance on this soporific record, but his mock-spontaneous interjections of “’swhere I wanna be” carry off the crown for their grasping smugness.

After the song became successful, a number of women claimed – or apparently claimed – to be its inspiration, and De Burgh’s own story changed over time. Was it his wife, or a woman he had fleetingly seen, or perhaps Princess Diana, who the singer suggested had once confronted him in the knowledge that only she could be the Lady, that modern day Mona Lisa, muse of the synthpad and the fretless bass! We may never know for sure. Besides, the actual identity of the Lady In Red is quite irrelevant: what matters is her value, not her self.

“Papa Don’t Preach” is a fantastic record. Not because it’s a star getting serious, or because it raises issues, or because it ‘tackles’ anything in particular. It’s not a newspaper column. What it does is take a situation – a moment in a situation, even – and turn it into pop so urgent and convincing and exciting that you start groping around for the serious stuff as a way of giving what you’ve experienced some context.

“About” is a false friend to pop music. The idea that a song is “about” some bigger, grander thing than itself can ennoble some records. But it also works to reduce them. If the most important thing about “Papa Don’t Preach” is that it’s ‘about’ unplanned pregnancy then all sorts of temptations creep in. The temptation to look for a message in the song – the girl in “Papa Don’t Preach” is keeping a baby, therefore Madonna thinks girls should keep babies. The temptation to generalise – her decision is agonising, therefore this decision is always agonising. And above all the temptation to use “about” as a way to cushion the record’s directness, the feeling that something is at stake not in the wider world but here and now in this song and the moment it makes you live.

What’s at stake is a woman’s relationship with her father, whose approval she wants, and thinks she needs. “Papa Don’t Preach” draws a lot of its urgency from being a real-time, direct address – a form that’s the equivalent of the cinematic close-up on a face: you can feel building, warring emotions flicker and play across the record. This song – after steeling itself with that wonderful faux-formal intro – moves from nerviness, into flattery, desperate hope, panic, steeliness and anger. Sometimes the singer’s unsure of herself, other times surer than anything in the world. In the chorus she’s a mix of defensive and defiant. She commands, then pleads, in the space of a line or two – “You give us your blessing now, cos we are in love – please!”.

Those long throaty howls of “please!” seal it – this is Madonna’s best vocal on a single yet. The immediacy of “Papa” was nothing new for her – in “Burning Up”, “Into The Groove”, even minor stuff like “Gambler” she’d manifested that kind of fierce in-the-moment presence. But she hadn’t sung those songs like she sings “Papa Don’t Preach”, teasing her voice around the light, genteel synthpop arrangement then smashing against it, as as the record lurches between cry for help and declaration of independence.

Tempting to give this one the deep consideration G. Michael did when writing it, i.e. none at all. A final Wham! single was required, yes, but “Edge Of Heaven” doesn’t round them off in any particularly satisfying way. Instead it rather coldly underlines quite how vestigial Wham! had become to him, as a band and brand. It’s another pop-soul pastiche, full of dutiful yeah-yeahing, differentiated from previous Wham! number ones mostly by the bitchin’ axe solo that wanders through on its way to someone else’s record. It could have been written specifically to fill a gap in a future megamix.

It’s not terrible, but there’s no fun in it either, and Wham! without the vigour are nothing. “I’m a maniac!” pleads George, followed rather deflatingly by “I’m a doggie barking at your door”. In truth he’s neither, he’s a man marking time until the end of an awkward date.

Every year has its flukes but this is one of the more inexplicable – unknowns before and since, amiable psych revivalists by the look of their discography, scoring a massive international hit with this unexceptional cover. Everyone I knew hated it, but even so I suspect it was one for the kids, powered along by Doctor’s big-haired visual hook – part Arthur Brown, part Roy Wood, all panto.

The band turn “Spirit In The Sky” into a glam stomper at the expense of its witchy campfire atmosphere, closing the gap between ’70 and ’73 to produce a mulch of hand-me-down seventiesness. But their approach could have worked – what kills it is the biscuit tin drums and particularly Doctor’s polite, diffident voice. Aptly for a song about the afterlife, the three hit versions of “Spirit In The Sky” make a kind of reverse Divine Comedy, and here we are in purgatory.

I wouldn’t say I was a ever a fan of “Agadoo”. But I danced to it – like “The Birdie Song” and Russ Abbot’s “Atmosphere” it was played at school discos when I was 12 or 13, to entertain the segment who were there to jump around and didn’t care about girls. I saw Black Lace as quite harmless, a thing apart from the rest of pop and not really to be judged on its terms: they were the soundtrack to marshmallow eating contests and birthday congas, nothing more. So in a way “The Chicken Song” taught me to hate them. Because “The Chicken Song” was something more: it was satire. Not only that, the B-Side was political satire.

Actually, I’m not even sure “I’ve Never Met A Nice South African” qualifies as satire – it’s just sheer nastiness and all the more effective for that. It uncovers the secret of Spitting Image – the show was all about dehumanisation: the reduction of the famous to latex tics was also a way of creating the distance needed to really lay into them. “South African” worked because it was dehumanising the dehumanisers, damning a proud and prejudiced culture as a stinking, rubber-faced joke. Unfortunately, it was only the B-Side, and the A-Side dealt far less well with a far less worthy target.

Not that I thought so at the time: I loved “The Chicken Song”. But I was wrong: it’s asking you to make a straight comparison between a record which, however dreadful, is designed to help people enjoy themselves, or a record which is designed to sneer at people enjoying themselves. Which “The Chicken Song” does, very effectively: I don’t know who sang it but his voice is a black hole of disdain. Ah, you might say, but the problem with Black Lace and their Roadshow-fodder ilk is that they were a kind of enforced fun. If you weren’t joining in you could be seen as a killjoy. And this is a good point. I would counter that if you had the good luck to be a student in the 80s or 90s the kind of tupenny-ha’penny ’surrealism’ peddled by “The Chicken Song” was far more grindingly inescapable and orthodox than any pineapple-pushing heartiness, and makes it exhausting to hear now.

And I’d add the very obvious point that Spitting Image are destroying the charts in order to save them – all that happened was “The Chicken Song” found its way onto disco playlists and people had the same kind of inane fun they were having before, only now with added air quotes. As Nietzsche said, battle not with funsters lest ye become a funster.