'80s Pop 2

Such is the current state of revivalism, you might be forgiven for thinking that we live in a permanent state of '80s nostalgia. So, to make sure you can tell the genuine oldies from the young pretenders, here's another helping of quintessential '80s pop, from the star-studded altruism of Band Aid to the kinky club-thumping of "Relax".

Pasts and futures met in the '80s, as Kenny Rogers looked back a country mile for "Coward of the County" while Laurie Anderson bemused us with the art-pop of "O Superman". Boy George and Culture Club slapped a well-embroidered gauntlet in the face of "normality", while one-hit Nena considered the apocalypse in "99 Luftballons".

The remnants of disco, loose shards of light from the previous decade's glitter-ball, illuminated some corners of the '80s, thanks to dance-floor troopers like Kelly Marie ("Feels Like I'm In Love") and Lipps Inc. ("Funkytown"), and ABBA delivered their most heartbreaking line of Swedo-English: "Nothing more to say/No more ace to play".

People tend to remember the '80s in starkly different ways: if your ears were set to Wham! you might recall Britain as a palace of hedonism, where heavily tanned men attended parties dressed for a game of badminton; if you favoured the Specials, the country was a nightmarish inner city wasteland devastated by the creed of Thatcherism. This selection of the decade's chart hits refracts pop history through multiple prisms . . . and lets you clench your fist like a Neanderthal to "Eye of the Tiger".