What was the most successful song of 1981?

It’s hard to imagine the 1980s in a time before the new wave populated it, when tinny synths were not yet in sight and MTV had not yet hit the airwaves to change the course of music consumption forever. But as the genre eventually surfed to shore, it’s fair to say that the canon of pop and rock sonics never looked back from those heights, invigorating a sound that was alternative but altogether stormed the charts – and it all began in 1981.

In retrospect, it was a year of extremes – there were perhaps more one-hit wonders than ever before, but also the likes of The Police and Queen at their prime, and Phil Collins changing the fabric of the scene forever with the launch of his solo career. But despite the stratospheric successes of all these figures and their respective discographies during that year, it was a different new wave classic that stole the acclaim of being the best-selling single of 1981.

That was ‘Don’t You Want Me’ by The Human League, a song that not only came a cropper in respect of the year it was released, but came to typify the entire era as a whole for all its synth superiority. Uncharacteristically being released later in their campaign for their album Dare as a fourth single, ‘Don’t You Want Me’ was, perhaps a little ironically, at first an unwanted song, but soon became The Human League’s most defining hit.

Indeed, being credited as the song that sparked the second British invasion and thus started the tsunami of the new wave, ‘Don’t You Want Me’ became a global entity far beyond solely the allure of the UK charts. Selling over 1.5 million copies in the country alone and thus becoming one of its most successful tunes in history was one thing, but it was the legacy of that waitress working in a cocktail bar that captured the sonic hearts of the world.

How did ‘Don’t You Want Me’ change music in 1981?

In many ways, it was quite funny that ‘Don’t You Want Me’ went on to sustain such an enduring legacy, given that The Human League’s frontman Philip Oakey was never much of a fan of it, to put it mildly. Having written the lyrics inspired by a story in a teen girl’s magazine, he hated the eventual product so much that he relegated it to the final track on the second side of Dare – the sonic graveyard, if you will, that he’d have really rather forgotten.

But this evidently transpired to be an ill-fated call, as when eventually but albeit reticently persuaded to release the song as a further single for the album, it became a mammoth that no one could have anticipated. Taking the crown of the top spot at the end of 1981 in the UK, Ireland, United States, and Canada – among a litany of other countries – proved that although Oakey may have liked to call the shots, he had to eat his words pretty quickly.

And thus, the 1980s marched on with a new synth peppiness in its stride, whipping up a whole firestorm of new wave hits in the years to come but never losing sight of the fact it was ‘Don’t You Want Me’ that lit the spark. That may have been a state of affairs begrudged within the inner dynamics of The Human League, but equally, you can imagine the ever-rolling royalties may have softened the blow a little.

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