In 1986, the UK charts made no sense and nobody cared. Prince, Madonna, and the Pet Shop Boys shared the Top 10 with a German-speaking Austrian, a dead man’s reissue, and a song performed by rubber puppets. A perfectly ordinary Tuesday afternoon might see you hearing all of them back-to-back on Radio 1, and the idea that this constituted any kind of problem simply hadn’t occurred to anybody.
If you tried to pitch that chart today, the meeting would be over before you’d opened your laptop. In 1986, it held the fort for a year. It might even have held for two, if Stock Aitken Waterman hadn’t decided, somewhere around 1987, that the entire British music industry should sound exactly the same until further notice.
This is a rundown of the best songs of 1986, UK edition, covering the bestsellers, the heavyweights, the songs you remember for reasons you can’t quite articulate, and the ones that genuinely earned their place in British pop history. If you’re after the deep dive on the year’s one-hit wonders, I’ve covered those in a separate post. This is the bigger picture.
The Bestsellers
The Communards — Don’t Leave Me This Way
The biggest single of 1986 in the UK belonged to The Communards. Don’t Leave Me This Way sat at number one for four weeks and outsold every other record of the year by a comfortable margin. Jimmy Somerville’s falsetto remains physically impossible for the vast majority of humans, a fact nobody has ever fully explained, presumably because it would involve admitting that evolution peaked with a bloke from Glasgow. The song itself is a reworking of a Thelma Houston track, but the Communards version has all but replaced the original in the public memory. Covers don’t get better than this one.
The Other Bestsellers of the Year
Behind The Communards came three songs already covered at length in my one-hit wonders post: Nick Berry’s Every Loser Wins (soap actor outsells almost every professional musician in the country, three weeks at number one, serious critics briefly considering early retirement), Boris Gardiner’s I Want to Wake Up With You (the Jamaican session musician whose smooth reggae-pop colonised every wedding reception that summer), and Spitting Image’s The Chicken Song (three weeks at number one, performed by latex puppets, written as a parody that became the exact thing it set out to mock). Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite also reappeared at the top of the Christmas chart off the back of an animated video, despite the man himself having been dead for two years. Only 1986 could deliver that kind of timeline and have the nation accept it as entirely reasonable.
The Pop Royalty
While the novelty acts and the soap stars took turns at the top, the actual pop heavyweights kept chugging along at number one like adults at a children’s birthday party, quietly making sure nobody set fire to the curtains.
Madonna — Papa Don’t Preach
Three weeks at number one, and the song where Madonna quietly announced she’d be running the rest of the decade. The music video alone caused the sort of moral panic the tabloids hadn’t enjoyed since the last time Morrissey said anything. She followed it with True Blue and Open Your Heart, which is the kind of run most artists retire on. 1986 is arguably the year Madonna stopped being a pop star and became a cultural institution, and Papa Don’t Preach is the moment you can point to.
Prince — Kiss
Prince spent 1986 being Prince, which in practice meant releasing Parade, starring in a film nobody needed (Under the Cherry Moon), and dropping Kiss as the kind of effortless funk single most musicians cannot produce with a decade’s effort and a laboratory. The falsetto, the guitar, the complete refusal to deploy a drum kit in any conventional manner. None of it should work. All of it does. It peaked at number six in the UK, which tells you something about the 1986 Top 10 rather than anything about the song.
Pet Shop Boys — West End Girls, Suburbia, Opportunities
West End Girls hit number one in January 1986 and effectively launched them as the British band of the decade. Synth-pop had existed before, but Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe turned it into social commentary you could dance to. Most bands take a career to deliver three singles as good as the ones they shipped in those twelve months. The Pet Shop Boys delivered them and then kept going, turning into one of the very few acts who could be described as both arch and sincere without appearing to try at either.
Diana Ross — Chain Reaction
Written by the Bee Gees, sung by Diana Ross, produced with a level of 1980s gloss making most modern production sound like a demo recorded in a shed. Number one for three weeks. Astonishingly good, and a single proving exactly why Motown royalty stays royalty even when their recording contracts move house. If it came on in a pub today, you’d see the over-fifties stop mid-sentence.
The Ones Everyone Remembers (Even If They Pretend Otherwise)
Some songs of 1986 exist in a peculiar category. You know every word. You’ve sung them at weddings, at karaoke, in the car when you thought nobody could see. And if anyone asked whether you liked them, you’d deny it with the conviction of a man caught in a police line-up.
Chris de Burgh — The Lady in Red
Number one for three weeks. Has been played at every British wedding reception since 1986 with the grim inevitability of a buffet ending in disappointment. Chris de Burgh is a genuine Irish multi-instrumentalist with several proper albums to his name, but he will go to his grave as the bloke who wrote the song your uncle slow-danced to with someone he shouldn’t have. There’s a doctoral thesis to be written on the gap between what this song actually sounds like and how much the country pretends to hate it.
Europe — The Final Countdown
Number one in November 1986, and the single reason every football ground in the country can stop what it’s doing and simultaneously hum the same keyboard riff. I excluded it from the one-hit wonders post because Europe had other chart entries and technically don’t qualify. I’m including it here because any survey of 1986 music ignoring this song would be a work of fiction, and I already write those in my spare time. The opening synth line has become one of the most recognisable four seconds of music ever committed to tape, which is impressive for a song ostensibly about leaving the planet.
Berlin — Take My Breath Away
Four weeks at number one, written for Top Gun, and therefore mandatory listening if you wanted to participate in any social interaction with anyone who’d seen the film in 1986. It’s a stunning piece of production, all atmosphere and restraint, and it has aged remarkably well considering it shares DNA with the most sincerely ridiculous film of the decade.
The Ones That Actually Held Up
Every year produces songs that peak, charm, and vanish. 1986 also produced a handful of singles that have refused to age, outlasting most of the records alongside them in the Top 40 by a margin of decades.
Simply Red — Holding Back the Years
Number two in the UK, number one in the US, and one of the genuinely great British soul singles of the decade. Mick Hucknall has a voice critics mock and audiences adore, which is the position every singer secretly wants to be in. The song itself remains flawless: a quiet, controlled meditation on family, loss, and getting out alive, sung by a man who sounds like he means every syllable.
Peter Gabriel — Sledgehammer
Number four in the UK, number one in the US, and the song that essentially invented the music video as a genre most of us still recognise. The stop-motion video alone occupied half of Channel 4’s schedule for eighteen months. The song itself holds up too. Gabriel had left Genesis years earlier, and by 1986 he’d comprehensively outgrown them artistically, commercially, and in terms of how much money his videos cost to make.
George Michael — A Different Corner
Self-written, self-produced, self-performed. Number one for three weeks in April 1986, and the song in which George Michael quietly informed the world he’d be serious about this for the rest of his career. Wham! still had The Edge of Heaven to release, but A Different Corner functioned as the first draft of the grown-up solo artist he’d become by 1987. It stands alongside anything he recorded in his later career, which is saying something.
Queen — A Kind of Magic
Number three in the UK. Queen in 1986 also scored Who Wants to Live Forever, Friends Will Be Friends, and the album of the same name, all in service of Highlander, a film with approximately the plot coherence of a dog chasing a tennis ball through a warehouse. The songs outlasted the film by several decades and continue to do so. That’s how good Queen were in their prime, and 1986 is arguably the last year they operated at full strength.
Paul Simon — Graceland (the album, not a UK chart single) deserves a paragraph of its own. Technically not a single, but impossible to leave out of any serious account of 1986. Graceland reshaped the idea of what a pop record could sound like, pulled South African musicians into the global pop conversation, and sold in quantities embarrassing most of the younger, cooler acts releasing material that year. If you’ve never sat down and listened to it properly, now is the time.
The Weird Corners of 1986
Beyond the chart-toppers, 1986 also hosted some of the most interesting crossover moments of the decade. These aren’t all number ones, but they matter to the year’s story.
Run-DMC featuring Aerosmith — Walk This Way
Number eight in the UK, and the moment hip-hop announced it would be eating rock’s lunch from now on. The collaboration terrified every suburban parent and delighted every teenager who’d ever wanted to like Aerosmith but hadn’t worked out how. It changed the direction of an entire genre in four minutes and in the process rescued Aerosmith from a decade of diminishing returns.
Cameo — Word Up
Number three in the UK. Funk at its most confident, with a bassline any producer would give their right ear to have written, and a lead vocal delivered by a man wearing a red codpiece. The eighties in a single three-minute package.
Mel & Kim — Showing Out reached number three and signalled the imminent arrival of Stock Aitken Waterman as the dominant force in British pop. SAW would go on to produce approximately one song per artist for the next four years, each one distinguishable only by the name on the label. But that came later. In 1986, Showing Out still felt fresh. A-ha had already scored with Take On Me in 1985, but 1986 delivered the album’s title track alongside Train of Thought, confirming the band had more than one video-based gimmick. They went on to become one of the biggest-selling European pop acts of the decade.
Why 1986 Hit Different
Every decade convinces itself that its pop culture mattered more than whatever came next. Most of the time, that’s nostalgia doing the talking. But there’s a specific argument to be made for 1986 as the last year the UK charts genuinely surprised people.
Consider what had to happen for this chart to exist. A Jamaican session musician had to stumble into a number one. An Austrian had to rap in German about Mozart and find himself number one a few months later. A soap actor had to outsell most professional musicians in the country. Rubber puppets had to hold the top spot for three weeks. And all of it had to happen in the same twelve months, in a country of sixty-odd million people, without anyone filing a complaint.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when the industry hasn’t yet figured out how to predict what the public will buy. By the late eighties, Stock Aitken Waterman had worked out the formula and set about industrialising it. By the early nineties, the majors had followed suit. The charts stopped producing weird left-field number ones and started producing whatever the data said they should.
1986 sat on the last good side of that line. It’s the last year where a bloke from Glasgow, a puppet of Margaret Thatcher, and Prince Rogers Nelson could all hit number one in the same calendar year without anyone batting an eyelid. Everything afterwards has tried harder. Very little of it has felt quite as effortlessly strange.
The ’86 Fix
When I decided to write a time-travel novel set in 1986, I spent the best part of a year living inside the soundtrack. Writing a book set in a specific year means immersing yourself in the period until the details stop feeling like research and start feeling like memory. For The ’86 Fix, that meant listening to every song on this list, and plenty more besides, often at inappropriate volumes while the neighbours pretended not to notice.
The book follows Craig, a middle-aged man handed the chance to return to 1986 and unpick the worst decisions of his younger self. Everything about the year is in there: the music, the tea-time TV, the clothes, the cars, the Argos catalogue, the pubs, the slang, the kind of weather that could ruin a summer and define a childhood in the same afternoon. It’s a love letter to a specific year in British life, and the soundtrack runs all the way through it.
If this post has made you nostalgic for a year when the Top 40 could still produce a surprise, The ’86 Fix might be exactly what you’re after. It’s a novel for anyone who grew up in the decade, loaded with cultural references that’ll hit you in the chest on every other page.
One Last Thing
I still remember the first time I heard Don’t Leave Me This Way coming out of a kitchen radio. Too young to understand what Jimmy Somerville had to say, I knew the song mattered in some important way I couldn’t articulate. Forty years on, I can still feel the summer that record belonged to.
That’s what the best songs of 1986 actually did. They attached themselves to specific afternoons, specific kitchens, specific people. They turned up without warning and stayed longer than they had any right to. And every so often, one of them comes back on the radio, and for about three minutes, you are twelve years old again and everything is possible.
Which, when you think about it, is the only thing a song has ever really been asked to do — remind you of who you used to be when you first heard it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the best-selling single of 1986 in the UK?
The best-selling single of 1986 in the UK belonged to The Communards. Don’t Leave Me This Way spent four weeks at number one and outsold every other record released that year. Nick Berry’s Every Loser Wins came second, with Boris Gardiner’s I Want to Wake Up With You third.
What songs were popular in the UK in 1986?
1986 produced an unusually rich Top 40. The year’s biggest hits included Don’t Leave Me This Way by The Communards, Every Loser Wins by Nick Berry, I Want to Wake Up With You by Boris Gardiner, The Final Countdown by Europe, Take My Breath Away by Berlin, Chain Reaction by Diana Ross, The Lady in Red by Chris de Burgh, A Different Corner by George Michael, Papa Don’t Preach by Madonna, and West End Girls by the Pet Shop Boys. The year also produced an unusually high number of one-hit wonders, including Falco, Owen Paul, and the Grange Hill Cast.
Who had a number one hit in the UK in 1986?
Twenty-one different singles reached number one in the UK during 1986. Among the year’s chart-toppers: The Communards, Madonna, Diana Ross, Nick Berry, Boris Gardiner, Spitting Image, Falco, Europe, Berlin, Jackie Wilson, George Michael, the Pet Shop Boys, and Cliff Richard with The Young Ones on a novelty remake of Living Doll.
What were the top songs of 1986?
Judged by sales and chart position, the top songs of 1986 in the UK included Don’t Leave Me This Way (The Communards), Every Loser Wins (Nick Berry), I Want to Wake Up With You (Boris Gardiner), The Chicken Song (Spitting Image), Reet Petite (Jackie Wilson), Papa Don’t Preach (Madonna), The Lady in Red (Chris de Burgh), A Different Corner (George Michael), and West End Girls (Pet Shop Boys). Paul Simon’s Graceland dominated the album charts and remains the defining long-player of the year.