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1985: My Year In The British Top 75 (Week 1: 5 January 1985)
New year, new city, new chart, now with Wham!, Matt Bianco, Nick Heyward, and Melle Mel
(Note: if you’re new here, first off, hi and welcome. Secondly, this is a continuation of a series about the 1984 Billboard charts that ran in 2024.)
I woke up early on January 1, 1985, in my family’s new home on 93rd Street in Lubbock, Texas. I hadn’t managed to unpack any of my boxes the night before, but I had put my bed together, set up my stereo, and stacked my LPs (which had made the journey in their usual living spaces, milk crates filched from behind a King Soopers in Longmont, Colorado, and a Furrs Supermarket in Levelland, Texas) in one corner.
I had the front bedroom, and the first thing I saw through my window was the just-planted Japanese maple in the front yard. The entire neighborhood was as new as the tree. When we’d walked through the house for the first time in September, the plaster sealing the drywall was still wet. The whole house still had that off-gassing scent of new carpets and fresh paint. We may have been the first family to move onto our entire block.
It was a nice house. Three bedrooms, two baths, covered back patio that you could access from either the living room or the back bedroom, which…
