The best-selling British album of the 1980s

While the 1970s were the decade of the blockbuster album, a period where the music industry nearly topped Hollywood as entertainment’s most lucrative business, the next decade still produced some Billboard giants that to this day stand as music’s biggest-selling acts. The record’s still held by Michael Jackson’s Thriller at an astonishing 70 million reported sales, followed by AC/DC’s Back in Black duckwalking to second place with a more than respectable 50m.

Following rock’s holy veneration of the album, punk and new wave brought the single back with the same essentiality as rock ‘n’ roll did the 45″. Yet this never cancelled out the album’s prized place in the pop landscape, with Guns N’ Roses, Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, and Journey all riding high above 20 million sales.

Aided by a new and revolutionary promo arm with MTV’s launch in 1981, the coveted video now served as a new and vital marketing push for any band’s latest LP. The era’s biggest sellers were all releases by artists who were very much ‘seen’ in the charts as opposed to the likes of Pink Floyd, boasting the 1970s’ biggest-selling British album behind the faceless concepts of The Dark Side of the Moon.

A major force behind the new wave that flooded the 1980s’ charts at the decade’s start was the influx of UK acts eager to conquer America just as their heroes had 20 years earlier. The second British invasion littered MTV’s new dawn with a host of Brits from Duran Duran to Iron Maiden finding eager fanbases stateside, with the likes of The Police and The Clash reaching stadium levels of fame despite their ostensible punk backgrounds.

One band loosely connected to the invasion would commercially eclipse all other bands from their home country for a moment to become the face of MTV and the zenith of 1980s pop.

So, what was the best-selling British album of the 1980s?

Spending 14 non-consecutive weeks at number one on the UK Albums Chart and nine on the Billboard 200, Dire Straits‘ glossy soft rock monster Brothers in Arms towered over anything from Britain in 1985 through to the entire decade. Shifting from their rootsy pub rock foundations in favour of widescreen digital rock, their fifth LP is probably what your mind plays when recalling the pomp and excesses of the decade’s neon pop culture clichés.

Sales just never stopped. It was the first CD to sell over one million copies, and the first to be certified ten times platinum in the UK, plus it is the eighth-best-selling album in UK chart history. It’s an astonishing feat for a record that was critically derided, with the dreadful ‘Walk of Life’ routinely listed as one of the 1980s’ worst singles.

Brothers in Arms‘ stratospheric success was helped in no small part by its pioneering CGI video for the second single, ‘Money for Nothing’, which played every five minutes on MTV. The channel was also the first to air its European launch in 1987. While band purists may clutch 1978’s eponymous debut close to their hearts, Dire Straits will always be defined by Brothers in Arms.

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