'80s Summer

Aside from Live Aid in '85 — during which the pop world encouraged the world to spend part of that summer raising funds for famine relief in Ethiopia — the decade's hottest months were variously spent lounging on the riverbank with Paul Weller, hair slicked back and jumper slung casually over shoulders, as he punted on soulful waters with the Style Council ("Long Hot Summer"), searching for a night of free drinks with the deeply tanned Wham! ("Club Tropicana"), or looking for rare birds on a large yacht in the southern hemisphere with Duran Duran ("Rio").

Squeeze spins a summer tale, and Madonna practises her Spanish, in Next Steps.

A couple of Billies brought their own heat to the summers of the '80s, as Mr. Ocean soundtracked a sultry romance on "Caribbean Queen (No More Love on the Run)" and Mr. Idol melted urban concrete with "Hot In the City". Madonna went bilingual with "La Isla Bonita" to offer the dusky fantasy of a Spanish tryst, while Squeeze kept us grounded with their poetic tale of ordinary summer madness "Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)" — with its talk of Harold Robbins paperbacks, and poseurs in motorboats — and Tina Weymouth's Tom Tom Club reinvented "Under the Boardwalk" with a dash of funk.

The Stranglers deliver mellow summer pop, in Deep Cuts.

One of the great acts of pop alchemy is to transform that base scourge of the summer — rain — into something gorgeous and radio-friendly, and back in the '80s everyone was at it, from Belinda Carlisle to Cliff Richard, and the Alarm, whose "Rain In The Summertime" from 1987 drifts along in a big cloud of rocked-up synth. Cofounder of the Damned, Captain Sensible, discovered endless sunshine in his smart cover of the Rodgers & Hammerstein tune, "Happy Talk", and former punks the Stranglers smoothed off their roughest edges for the shimmering 1986 hit "Always the Sun".

What was an '80s summer all about? It was about Martha And The Muffins riding a new wave to "Echo Beach" (no one really knew where Echo Beach was located, except that it was "faraway in time"); it was Italian Euro-disco empress Sabrina lusting after "boys, boys, boys" while engineering a notorious bikini malfunction; it was Bananarama in dungarees lamenting a "Cruel Summer"; it was Spandau Ballet flying close to the sun and extracting pure "Gold"; and it was Suggs and Madness taking us on a sky-high calypso/gospel ride on "Wings of a Dove". And you'll find loads more summer fun elsewhere here, as we recreate the hottest months of the '80s with the decade's sunniest tracks.