'80s One-Hit Wonders

Mousse abuse, giant shoulder pads, shoes with no socks . . . some things just scream’80s, don’t they? Well, these folks didn’t scream it — they sang it, their solitary grab at the brass ring forever frozen in time, one-hit wonders evermore. Like the Boomtown Rats, before Bob Geldof reinvented himself as a candidate for sainthood, prying into the warped mind of a deranged teen murderess in “I Don't Like Mondays.” Or the Buggles, unwittingly ushering in an industry-transforming revolution with the sugar-pop confection that launched MTV, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Or the unlikely trio of Norwegian boy-toys known as A-Ha, jumping out of real life onto the page of a comic book in the synthpop splendor of “Take On Me.” They may all have had but a single hit . . . but what hits they were.

In Next Steps, we’ll turn to the screen — both big and small — for inspiration.

Even before America let loose with the non-negotiable demand “I want my MTV!” we’d long turned to the screen, both big and small, for an ever-flowing stream of hits. As John Travolta and Debra Winger don their dude-ranch duds in Urban Cowboy, Johnny Lee — who’d actually played at Gilley’s before the movie was shot — raises the bar for beer-goggle romance in “Lookin' for Love.” On the Gulf of Mexico’s other side, synth stylist and jazz fusioneer Jan Hammer hammers out a double-GRAMMY®-winner with the pulse-pounding power of the “Miami Vice Theme.” And while it didn’t come directly from a TV show or movie, Bertie Higgins’ sweetly nostalgic ballad “Key Largo” conjures up images of Bogie and Bacall at their golden-age-of-Hollywood finest.

In Deep Cuts, we’ll take you from a sizzling SoCal dance floor to our flash-frozen neighbor to our north.

Not only are our ’80s one-hit wonders all over the map sonically; they’re all over it geographically as well. The toque-wearing, beer-swilling, donut-scarfing comedy duo from the Great White North, Bob & Doug McKenzie, enlist a fellow Canuck, Rush vocalist Geddy Lee, in “Take Off,” a coo-loo-coo-coo-coo-coo-coo-cool welcome to their show, eh? Singer-songwriter Karla Bonoff, best known for composing hits like “Someone To Lay Down Beside Me” for Linda Ronstadt, takes herself one step into the solo spotlight with a song she didn’t write, the slinky-sweet smooth groove “Personally.” And Stacey Lynn Swain, known professionally as Stacey Q, launches into a synth-slathered hi-NRG dance frenzy on the way to becoming a Hollywood Squares panelist with her pop-tart disco hit, “Two of Hearts.”

Decades change, music evolves, and as long as there are hits, there will always be artists who make them . . . only one time. Not all of these performers wound up in destitute obscurity, or worse, effecting a tragically premature exit from life’s stage; most merely found a way to ply their trade under the Billboard charts radar, grateful for a moment in the spotlight that most artists don’t even experience once. When the era of leg warmers, Izod shirts, and Rubik’s Cube finally came to a close and the mousse dissolved, these were some of the songs that stuck . . . even if their makers didn’t. From Mohawk-coiffed new-wavers like Bow Wow Wow to second-wave singer-songwriters like Karla Bonoff, from power-popsters like Marshall Crenshaw to hip-hop heroes like Kurtis Blow, we’ve got all the single-smash marvels from the era that video, as predicted, really did kill the radio star.