Who was the best-selling band of the 1980s?
An age of shoulder pads, rising nuclear tensions, and enough hairspray to cause a climate crisis, the 1980s is routinely cast in a perpetually rose-tinted light in the modern age, as the youth embrace high-waited jeans and John Hughes films, but the decade wasn’t all sunshine and Betamax; in fact, one of the only consistent sources of joy was the musical realm.
When New Year’s Day, 1980, rolled around, the music industry was still very much hungover from the previous decade. After all, the 1970s saw the birth of disco, glam, and, of course, the revolutionary abrasion of the punk years, and those influences weren’t going to disappear with the passing of a new calendar year. Particularly in the UK, the sounds of synthpop, post-punk, and the new romantics all began to emerge onto the mainstream during the early 1980s, retaining that punk attitude of self-determination.
Eventually, that unwavering DIY spirit birthed the golden age of indie rock, with groups like The Smiths, The Cure, and, over on the other side of the Atlantic, REM, all breaking into the mainstream consciousness with a distinctly grassroots sound. Indeed, a few of the old faces from the punk scene were still knocking about, with The Damned descending even further into a kind of Halloween-esque novelty act, The Clash reaching their experimental peak, and CBGB’s sound giving way to an explosion of hardcore punk.
Meanwhile, the early roots of hip-hop were beginning to show up in the back alleys and bedrooms of cities like New York and Philadelphia, although they were still a few decades away from having such a colossal command on the mainstream. If we’re talking commercial success, then the 1980s was inarguably the era of brightly-coloured, big-budget pop mastery.
Madonna, for instance, was among the biggest-selling artists of the decade; her command over the global singles charts rivalled only by the ‘King of Pop’ himself, Michael Jackson, who had successfully translated his Motown childhood into a pop music empire the likes of which had never been seen. Perhaps reflecting the decades’ neo-liberalist politics, the best-selling list of the 1980s is composed largely of solo artists, with Phil Collins, Prince, and Bruce Springsteen also raking in colossal sales figures over the course of that ten-year period.
That is not to say that the great music-buying public had fallen out of love with bands; if anything, they were spoiled for choice. Dire Straits, for example, earned themselves the biggest-selling record of the decade in the UK, with the 1985 classic Brothers In Arms, striking a blow for ensemble artists against the domination of solo performers. In the end, though, that number-one record still didn’t do enough to commit the Knopfler brothers to the biggest-selling bands of the era.
Some of the most successful groups of the decade will come as no surprise. Queen, for instance, ride high on the charts, having successfully revitalised their somewhat waning career of the late 1970s with triumphant records like The Works and A Kind of Magic towards the mid-point of the decade, having been spurred on by their iconic Live Aid performance in 1985.
Nevertheless, the call-and-response of Freddie Mercury and his yellow jacket was no match for the utter domination of one group hailing from Dublin, thanks largely to the inescapable success of records like The Joshua Tree, which earned U2 the accolade of being the biggest-selling group of the 1980s. Shifting roughly 116million records in the space of ten years, the numbers become all the more impressive when you remember that their debut album, Boy, only came out in 1980.
