It’s impossible to plan for a No. 1 hit song. Yet, every day, people try to write them. They expend all their energy, they tear out their hair, they stress and get themselves knotted into a ball. But to no avail.
Then there are those who manifest a No. 1 track seemingly easily. How do they do it? It’s quite confounding. But that’s just what we wanted to explore here below. Indeed, these are three one-hit wonders from the 1980s that were somehow No. 1 hits.
“Mickey” by Toni Basil from ‘Word Of Mouth’ (1981)
If you’ve never heard this song before, you might not want to put it on now. It’s just that catchy. We promise, this 1981 track from Toni Basil will get in your brain and stay there. It will live rent-free. It will be in your psyche all day and all night. You’ll wake up with it in your dreams. Somehow, Basil put this sticky track and compelling music video together, and it made her a star. It also made her impossible to forget. That must be why “Mickey” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
“Come On Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners from ‘Too-Rye-Ay’ (1982)
This is another impossibly catchy song from the early 1980s. Indeed, this one-hit wonder will also nestle in your mind happily and stay there forever. It’s a song about getting out. It’s a song about dusting off this one-horse town and finding something bigger, better. It’s a bold tune that likely inspired many wayward travelers. But it’s also a hit that came out of nowhere. An Irish folk song flipped into a 1980s rock offering? If you say so… But it worked!
“Maniac” by Michael Sembello from ‘Bossa Nova Hotel’ (1983)
In the 1980s, there was a dance craze. Everywhere you went, people were wearing tight clothes and heading out to some club to sweat until the wee hours of the morning. It was all the rage. Of course, it had a lot to do with the music and movies of the day, including beat-driven tunes like “Maniac” by Michael Sembello. The 1983 song appeared in the movie Flashdance that same year, and together, they had everyone cutting a rug.
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