The 10 worst UK number ones from every year in the 1980s
The 1980s are a funny old decade, in that it simultaneously stands as a much-celebrated musical decade while also standing as a quip for all things bad.
Even in the year of our lord 2026, we’re still wallowing in a nostalgia for that era, Stranger Things resurrecting old songs back in the charts, a perennial Hollywood reboot machine plundering the collective nostalgia, and a Gen Z pining for a cultural idyll before the neoliberal consequences had truly baked in today’s cost of living.
Countering some of the finest bands and movements popular music had to offer, from hip-hop’s golden age, the US alternative underground, UK indie, and acid house by the decade’s end, there was indeed a polar spectrum of fantastically awful songs that clogged the day’s charts.
Some even graced the coveted top spot. Whether dreary novelty songs, turgid power ballads, or glossy soul dross, British pop fans in the 1980s managed to nab serious units of some of the decade’s absolute stinkers by the shedload, ensuring some of the worst pop offenders enjoy a footnote in the UK’s songbook.
In that all things brilliant and terrible decade, allow us to wade into each year of the 1980s’ number ones and pick out the worst of the lot for our 1980s Hall of Shame. Hold your nose.
The 10 worst number ones from every year in the 1980s:
St Winifred’s School Choir – ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’
Release Date: November 1980 | Producer: Peter Tattersall | Label: Music for Pleasure
1980 was a solid year for the UK number one charts, starting strong with Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ and smattered with later gems from Blondie, David Bowie, and The Jam.
The 1980s’ first year ended on a shocker, however. We’re going to try to steer clear of novelty songs, but Stockport’s St Winifred’s School Choir hands down cut the worst single of an otherwise glittering year. Boasting Rick Wakeman on keyboards, because of course, the saccharine ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’ proves so hideously cloying that rather than fostering affection for dear old granny, it makes you wanna shift the old goat to the nearest crooked retirement home.
Dishonourable mention: Kelly Marie – ‘Feels Like I’m in Love’
Bucks Fizz – ‘Making Your Mind Up’
Release Date: March 1981 | Producer: Andy Hill | Label: RCA
Eurovision has always existed in a different pop dimension, albeit commanding a campy, ironic celebration of its awfulness in recent memory. But back in 1981, the song contest captured true fucking horrors of chirpy twee and baffling wallow in kitsch grotesquerie.
Case in point is that year’s winner. Four deathly uncool squares by the name of Bucks Fizz reel off the maddeningly irritating ‘Making Your Mind Up’, a blood-pressure-raising chintz of all singing, all dancing emptiness echoing around a dismal Pontins karaoke. The only point of praise is its blessed short length, over in a merciful 2:39.
Dishonourable mention: Aneka – ‘Japanese Boy’
Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder – ‘Ebony and Ivory’
Release Date: March 1982 | Producer: George Martin | Label: Parlophone
Stevie Wonder was still able to knock a gem out of the park into the early 1980s, but poor Paul McCartney’s musical standing had long been battered by the time of 1982’s Tug of War. After the brief high of McCartney II, the former Beatle sought to make a pop commentary on race relations with the utterly insipid ‘Ebony and Ivory’.
It’s amazing Wonder even agreed to it, considering his fiercely political songbook, but neither he nor George Martin’s production can save ‘Ebony and Ivory’s schmaltzy drip. Curdled with glossy muzak keys and atrociously simplistic analogies and lyrics to the point of insulting – ”There’s good and bad in everyone”, cheers Paul – you just know such banal mush only topped the charts due to the big name pedigree doing the backbreaking heavy lifting.
Dishonourable mention: Bucks Fizz – ‘The Land of Make Believe’
Bonnie Tyler – ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’
Release Date: February 1983 | Producer: Jim Steinman | Label: CBS
The Wagnerian rock opera stylings of Jim Steinman needed Meat Loaf’s blue-collar bluster to make it work, the singer able to translate the power in the writing while tempering the Broadway silliness from dragging the power anthems to parody.
And so, Steinman was able to indulge in all his fantasy escapism on the thunderously tedious ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. Written for Welsh wailer Bonnie Tyler specifically, Steinman whips up a kind of floppy-cuffed love song for vampires from an unrealised theatre piece that should have stayed there. Now immortalised on the retro-circuit, here’s hoping Tyler’s turgid yodeller receives a stake in the heart pronto.
Dishonourable mention: UB40 – ‘Red Red Wine’
Lionel Richie – ‘Hello’
Release Date: February 1984 | Producer: Lionel Richie and James Anthony Carmichael | Label: Motown
It’s hard to separate the song from its spectacularly corny video, Lionel Richie playing the role of teacher lusting after his blind student, showing the feeling’s mutual with a sort-of passable clay bust of his likeness as the finale. But even without its melodramatic promo, ‘Hello’ is indeed a maudlin love song, the old Commodores frontman orbiting the same soft-sax snooze as Kenny G over the lauded heights of his 1970s soul output.
To be fair, he’s taken the incessant mockery in good humour ever since, obliging spoofy covers with Jimmy Fallon and allowing his hit to live on as a 1980s punchline, but one spin of ‘Hello’ reminds just how soap opera-fantastically trite his defining solo bore really is.
Dishonourable mention: Paul McCartney – ‘Pipes of Peace’
USA for Africa – ‘We Are the World’
Release Date: March 1985 | Producer: Quincy Jones | Label: Columbia
Well, Richie’s been awarded the dubious honour of featuring two wincers in our list, joining forces with Michael Jackson for a various artists charity sermon so sappy it makes ‘Hello’ seem like Einstürzende Neubauten. Seeking to offer an American answer to Band Aid, USA for Africa corrals some of the States’ biggest names, from Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner and Bob Dylan, to similarly raise funds for the era’s Ethiopian famine.
It’s easy to laugh at all this now, cringing at the Western saviour complexes and ineffective political action, but there’s just no excuse for how piddlingly shabby ‘We Are the World’ is. Artists United Against Apartheid showed musical activism could still drop a decent song, and even Band Aid at least came up with a number imbued with a fervent festive spirit. Knowing Jackson and Richie were at the songwriting helm makes ‘We Are the World’s Disney mush all the more unforgivable.
Dishonourable mention: Foreigner – ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’
Chris de Burgh – ‘The Lady in Red’
Release Date: June 1986 | Producer: Paul Hardiman | Label: A&M
We know, we know, Chris de Burgh’s insipid serenade to his wife is too easy, almost a byword for any artist’s ‘bad song’. But ‘The Lady in Red’ is truly unremittingly awful, a soggy traipse of thin drum machines and soulless key washes so lacking in a pulse you’re at risk of slipping into a coma.
Incredibly, such dross spent a remarkable three weeks at the UK top spot, so the wedding slowdance horror had its fans. We do have ‘The Lady in Red’ to thank, however, for the most surreally hilarious moment in British television, when science technician Ian Moor sang de Burgh’s drippy dreck on ITV’s Stars in Their Eyes, only to be joined by the man himself to his star-struck surprise for a stiff and awkward rendition of his weepy gipper.
Dishonourable mention: Billy Ocean – ‘When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going’
T’Pau – ‘China in Your Hand’<br>
Release Date: October 1987 | Producer: Ron Rogers and Tim Burgess (single edit), Roy Thomas Baker (12″/album version) | Label: Siren
Little did they know what awaited around the corner. ‘Grunge killed hair metal and power ballads overnight’ narratives are not without their clichés, but the broader alternative movement bubbling away underground indeed swept aside any relevancy the likes of T’Pau briefly enjoyed across the arse end of the 1980s.
While serving singer Carol Decker well on the nostalgia package shows that are willing to book her, ‘China in Your Hand’ stands as a stodgy document of everything awful about much of the pop-rock world T’Pau represented, big hair, ostentatious production, and zero taste. Now finding a second infamy as a reactionary old witch on X and eager GB News guest, you can feel a little less guilty cringing at T’Pau’s poor man’s ‘Total Eclipse’.
Dishonourable mention: Starship – ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’
Wet Wet Wet – ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’
Release Date: May 1988 | Producer: Wet Wet Wet | Label: New Musical Express
They were in good company. Organised by NME no less as a charity effort for Childline, the Sgt Pepper Knew My Father compilation pulled in Sonic Youth, The Fall, and Frank Sidebottom, all offering suitably alternative takes on The Beatles’ songbook.
For its double A-side single, Billy Bragg handled ‘She’s Leaving Home’, and Scotland’s grinning soul quartet Wet Wet Wet tackled ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’. It was brave, considering Joe Cocker had already cut a defining cover, but Marti Pellow and the lads excise the original’s salt of the earth charm for a plodding, crushingly twee chore, given an extra dose of sinister by their frontman’s perma-grimace.
Dishonourable mention: Cliff Richard – ‘Mistletoe and Wine’
Band Aid II – ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’
Release Date: December 1989 | Producer: Stock Aitken Waterman | Label: PWL
As we’ve already touched on, the antiquated charity single has aged badly in a time when performative politics and liberal sanctimony have never been more scrutinised. But it’s easy to see how many of the UK’s biggest rock and pop names were swept up in Bob Geldof’s well-meaning mission, Band Aid, and its subsequent Live Aid concert, standing as a cultural touchstone of the decade.
So, with the Ethiopian famine still raging on five years later, Geldof gave the Stock Aitken Waterman pap factory a call to churn out a rerecord. Out went Midge Ure’s stirring production and the original’s undeniably A-list ensemble, in came hideously cheap sequencer sausage meat NRG with Christmas bells and the glittering cast of guest singers, such as Wet Wet Wet, Sonia, Big Fun, and, err, Cliff Richard. While Kylie Minogue gives her all, she was nowhere the cool pop queen that awaited, rendering the whole shoddy affair a grim end to the 1980s and a time capsule of everything coldly corporate from the PWL shit house.
Dishonourable mention: Sonia – ‘You’ll Never Stop Me Loving You’
