The Associates – Breakfast
In Forest of the Dead, one of Steven Moffat‘s finest episodes of Doctor Who, there is a line that made me shiver when I heard it: “I have the two […]
Propaganda – p: Machinery
If you happened to be born in the early 1970s then you probably had the curious pleasure of hitting puberty just when it seemed most likely that you would be […]
Company B – Fascinated
If you thought Sia donning a platinum blonde fright wig to wrestle back a degree of anonymity was an exciting new pop concept, please think again – Latin freestyle trio Company B […]
Bucks Fizz – You and Your Heart So Blue
Sometimes a pop singer or a group comes along and speaks directly to your soul, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it. When I was eight the group that spoke to me, […]
Black – The Big One
Woe betide the sensitive male crooner in 1988. In a pop landscape where lyrical depth didn’t go much further than “Tay tay tay tay tay-tay tay-tay tay tay tay”, any man with a faintly hangdog […]
The Kids from Fame – Desdemona
I can’t overstate the love I had for the Kids from Fame in 1982. As a ten year old pop fan, a weekly television series about young people attending the (fictional) […]
Pointer Sisters – Back In My Arms
If there's such a thing as a school for girl groups, here are your headmistresses.
Olivia Newton John – Twist of Fate
Think back to a time when you teamed up with someone at work and it turned out to be unexpectedly brilliant. For most of us that amounts to doing a presentation where […]
Philip Jap – Save Us
For many years I’ve traded on being a walking 1980s encyclopaedia, and then the other day a pal destroyed my entire world by mentioning an artist I’d never heard of […]
The Chimes – 1-2-3
A mere 9 months after Songs of Innocence-gate, the moment it became abundantly clear that Bono, The Edge and co. couldn’t even give their music away, it’s hard to imagine […]
Modern Talking – You Can Win If You Want
Guest contributor: Pete Paphides On Saturday afternoons, when we couldn’t be bothered to go all the way into Birmingham city centre, my best friend Richard and I would take […]
Sheena Easton – 101
My esteemed colleague and Popvoid’s Mr Big, Niall McMurray, has already discussed the concept of an artist entering his or her Imperial Phase, and today we explore the moment when […]
Diesel Park West – Jackie’s Still Sad
Guest contributor: Pete Paphides In the world of record collecting, I was a bottom-feeder. Faced with the challenge of buying as many records as possible with my weekly allowance, I […]
Barbra Streisand – Left in the Dark
There’s a moment when every established artist makes the decision to stop chasing chart positions and worrying about being thought of as relevant or contemporary, choosing instead to make what […]
Eurythmics – Shame
Here’s another good example of the sort of thing that happens once a band has passed its Imperial Phase – songs that would have previously sailed into the top 20 […]
Dollar – It’s Nature’s Way (No Problem)
It’s rather odd how Dollar tend to be little more than a footnote in 1980s pop history. When great duos of the decade are discussed it’s always Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, […]
Robert Palmer – You Are In My System
It’s pretty clear I’m definitely ‘one of them’. And by ‘one of them’ I mean I have a natural tendency to prefer female voices when it comes to my favourite […]
Laura Branigan – Shattered Glass
It’s almost impossible to discuss pop music at the end of the 1980s without mentioning Stock, Aitken and Waterman. For the last two years of the decade they essentially colonised the UK charts, […]
Strawberry Switchblade – Let Her Go
We shall not see their like again.
Louise Goffin/Terry Reid – 5th of July
Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said, “For a song to fall into the Popvoid once may be regarded as a misfortune, for it to happen twice looks like carelessness”? On […]
Into the Popvoid 