"Come on Eileen" by Dexy's Midnight Runners (1982)

There are a few songs released in 1982 that take me away to an unknown place whenever I hear them. It must be something about a child's development: I guess at age seven, a child learns to love music in a certain way that leaves an indelible stamp upon him.

Alternately it could just be that there were some kick-ass good songs released that year.

Kevin Rowland doesn't matter very much to the world. A bit self-important, really, he thought more of himself than the public-at-large did, with the result that he spent about three years at the top of his game and generations a laughing-stock.

This is, however, the top of his game. It's rare, really, that someone's best song is also their most commercially successful (in fact, in the USA, this song is pretty closely associated with the state of being a 'one-hit wonder'). Rowland's dream of integrating soul with Irish music might have been revolutionary if Van Morrison hadn't already been spending decades at it by this point, but here he gets the balance pretty good. Being 1982, somehow this song manages to sound synthesised despite being performed entirely on acoustic instruments, yet it pulls the listener along from start to finish through an amazing ride of increases and decreases in tension as well as tempo. A wonderful vocal melody shares the spotlight with those fiddles and accordion and whatever else, with a result that must have struck a 7-year-old Canadian as in many ways other-worldly while still seeming so perfectly right.

I didn't have the first clue what they lyrics were when I was seven - I just heard it as another part of the music that would occasionally call out the title before lapsing back into mere sound. Had I never read them online, I might not have known that they reference Johnnie Ray and seem to be largely about getting a girl out of her 'pretty red dress'. And frankly at 7, neither of those things would have meant much to me. It is interesting, though, that like so many touchstones from my youth that make me nostalgic to hear now, it is a nostalgia piece itself - going back to 1950s radio with 'our mothers' crying in it. Ultimately, the music is all 'retro' too. Yet that doesn't stop it from being a truly awesome piece of work - with much less 'soul' than most other Dexy's Midnight Runners songs, but somehow with all the more soul as a result.

And ultimate proof that it really doesn't matter who or what you are, how good or how pompous a musician you are: it's still possible to find that elusive thing and pin it down for three minutes or so, thus entering you a place in eternity's record books.

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"Temptation" by New Order (1982)

At this point in this project, I’m planning on not duplicating artists. Sooner or later I’ll have to get over that – I mean, when it comes to sacred cows like Bob Dylan or the Beatles, you can’t just throw in one song as representative of them and be done with it. Certainly each of them have quite a few songs worthy of being considered among the ‘best ever’.

I mention those two ‘golden-age’ performers, but I haven’t gotten around to either of them yet. As strange as it may seem, at this point the artist I’ve had the hardest time narrowing down to a single song has been New Order.

Their modish design ethic on a chic boutique indie back in the 80s may have obscured the point, but New Order were shockingly consistent. Listening to their singles collection “Substance” reveals not a single song that couldn’t by rights appear here on this list. Their approach was so assured that they were pretty much guaranteed of quality each time out.

They’re an interesting band, New Order. The path they took from generic punk on “Warsaw” (recorded with Ian Curtis as Joy Division) to guitarless rave on “Fine Time” in less than ten years might not seem all that plausible except that each step of that journey was a completely logical product of the previous step. Their trajectory would have been chess-like methodical if it weren’t so plainly the result of blind flying. What made New Order’s halting journey to the dancefloor believable was the fact that, even when surrounded by Balearic beats and building up an ecstatic trance, they still seemed like outsiders, gazing at their shoes and vaguely embarrassed by it all. As a wallflower in need of deliberate coaxing myself, I could see in New Order kindred spirits on the dance floor.

Through it all, the main constant in Joy Division and New Order has always been Peter Hook. It is his bass playing that makes a New Order song, and whatever else it sounds like, if he is on bass, it’s genuine. “Temptation” has great lead bass lines, but what it also has is both melodic guitars and punchy drums. In other words, it’s an intermediate step in their journey, and being the single coming immediately before the iconic “Blue Monday” is the last time that they were truly stumbling in the dark, holding onto Joy Division’s residual audience without truly finding a new one of their own. They were soon to be heroes, but weren’t yet.

Which is remarkable, because Bernard Sumner’s amazing lead vocals (who says this man can’t sing?) on wonderfully enigmatic lyrics (who says this man can’t write?) pull you in, but the amazing, glorious never-ending mess of a groove that the band concocts behind him is truly what makes it worthwhile. At 7:00, it’s quite short by New Order single standards, but it’s not merely a generic dance-remix extension. It’s seven minutes long because it has seven minutes’ worth of things to say – disjointed things that might not have coalesced, but somehow do. Chorus? Verse? Bridge? Doesn’t matter. I recently read a comparison between New Order’s song structures and Pink Floyd’s. After initially scoffing, I thought about it, and there is some truth to it. Both of them write epics. But Pink Floyd’s epics don’t inspire careless abandon on the dancefloor. And are that much there worse for it.

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