IT WAS A YEAR IN WHICH POP MUSIC MADE THE MOST OF THE DARK AS THE LIGHTS DIMMED IN MOVIE THEATRES. WITH MADONNA, SIMPLE MINDS AND DURAN DURAN AMONGST THEM, THESE ACTS WOULD TRANSFORM 1985 INTO A GOLDEN YEAR FOR THE SYNERGY OF POP SONGS AND CINEMA…

KEVIN HARLEY

Roger Moore’s final film as 007 gave us one of the very best James Bond themes, thanks to Duran Duran

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Judd Nelson punches the air as unmistakeable power chords ring out. Michael J Fox skateboards to fame on a love-struck high.

Graduates hit a famous bar to a soft-rock hit. Bond gets saucy in a submersible over jabbing New-Wave-y synths. And Linda Fiorentino and Matthew Modine dance slowly to an explosively charismatic bar singer’s ballad…

“How about that dance?” he asks. “Yeah, sure,” she shrugs. Audiences in 1985 were, however, less nonchalant in affirming the combined pleasures of pop music and movies. The two were intimate bedfellows throughout the 1980s, of course, but there are grounds to argue that 1985 was a peak year for this mutually beneficial hybridisation of forms.

POWER PLAY

Billboard’s Hot 100 for the year tells the story. Alongside hits from 1984 movies (Beverly Hills Cop, notably), songs from Vision Quest, Back To The Future, A View To A Kill, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, The Breakfast Club, St Elmo’s Fire and more feature highly, punching their weight. MTV helped boost their successes as standalone singles, but they were – in variable ways – also deeply integral to the films’ identities and action.

Case one shared a name with another 1985 hit. The biggest-selling UK single of the year was a ballad, The Power Of Love, by New York singer Jennifer Rush.

The year’s biggest movie at the box office put the song title to more propulsive use, though the song’s writer and singer required a push to start his engine.

Huey Lewis And The News began making big news in 1983, when their album Sports – beloved of American Psycho’s cheesy psychopath Patrick Bateman – spawned hits in I Want A New Drug, The Heart Of Rock & Roll and If This Is It. Even so, Lewis was not confident about writing for a movie, until the film’s creative troupe of Steven Spielberg, Neil Canton (producers), Robert Zemeckis (director) and Bob Gale (writer) flexed their powers of persuasion. The idea was that Marty McFly, the skateboarding, axe-rocking hero of Back To The Future, would have been a News fan. Lewis retreated again, telling the movie’s creators that he didn’t fancy writing a song called ‘Back To The Future’, to which they supposedly replied: ‘Well, just write one of your own.’