Which band had the most top 10 hits in a single year in the 1980s?
The power of the charts has always been important, but it was in the 1980s that its chokehold seemed to have the tightest chokehold on its music fiend minions.
Scoring highly with singles has, of course, always been the name of the game with any artist, whether they’re old or new, but the decade of the ‘80s especially represented something hugely pivotal in the currency that this held. Suddenly, music was more of a numbers business than mathematics itself, but there was only one value that everyone wanted to reach.
That may have set the scene for some pretty tantalising chart battles, but it also gave way to a landscape, particularly for bands, where the competition could often get gruesome in the fight to the top. Shoving, kicking, punching: you name it, and every move was thrown in order to get their singles to one of the limited prized spots.
It was obviously tiresome and sometimes nasty work, but at the end of the day, it was the luck of the draw in terms of which select bands could rule supreme when the top ten lists got announced week after week. There were clearly some big titans at play in the UK: everyone from The Jam to Culture Club to international idols like Blondie wanted a slice of the action.
But when it boiled down to the band with the most top ten hits of the entire decade, it had to be a batch of truly homegrown talent. Adam and the Ants have always been hailed as one of the country’s greatest exports from those heady ‘80s days, but this status is only further cemented by the fact that over the course of 1981 alone, they scored six top ten tunes – more than any other band achieved in other years of the decade.
What were Adam and the Ants’ 1980s top ten songs?
The feat represented being on the up and up for Adam and the Ants, with their six singles breaking the top ten in 1981 being ‘Antmusic’, ‘Ant Rap’, ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’, ‘Prince Charming’, ‘Stand and Deliver’, and ‘Young Parisians’. Not bad for only a few years’ worth of work.
Not all of the tracks were originally released in 1981, but their high charting at that specific time was indicative of the band being at the top of their game. Adam Ant was, of course, the maestro leading the circus, but now, on his second line-up of the band in only a small number of years, you would think this long-awaited success would be the ultimate intoxicating reward.
But Ant always had his sights set on bigger dreams, no matter what it cost him to achieve them. Subsequently, a little over a year after their string of six top ten hits, in March 1982, the frontman made the decision to permanently disband his colony of Ants in pursuit of his own solo career. After all, there’s nothing like the blinding glare of the spotlight.
In this sense, Adam and the Ants take the crown not just as an ‘80s success story, but also perhaps provide a cautionary tale in what can happen when you begin to take that acclaim for granted. Being a mainstay in the top echelons of the charts is a nice title to have, but it only stays in place if the band themselves have the courage to stick together.
