The Soundtrack of 1986: What A Year To Be Born

Shoulder pads. Synthesisers. A decade hitting its stride and not yet ready to apologise. By 1986, the 1980s had become fully, brazenly itself, and the music was the proof. From the euphoric pop of Madonna and Pet Shop Boys to the stadium rock of Bon Jovi and Genesis, this was the year of enormous sounds and enormous hair.

But 1986 was also a year of shadows. Chernobyl exploded in April. The Space Shuttle Challenger had fallen from the sky in January. The AIDS crisis was forcing its way into public consciousness. And across the Atlantic, Paul Simon released Graceland, an album that smuggled the music of apartheid South Africa into the Western mainstream and changed what pop could mean.

The charts in Britain reflected a nation of contradictions: brash and optimistic on the surface, anxious underneath. The Communards topped the charts with a euphoric, heartbroken cry. Jackie Wilson came back from the dead to score a number one. And somewhere between the synth-pop and the power ballads, Kate Bush was doing something no one else could quite explain.

This playlist captures all of it: the gloss and the grit, the dancefloors and the living rooms, the songs that defined a year that felt, for better and worse, like it would go on forever.

How to listen

No Spotify account? You can preview tracks here directly. To listen in full, create a free Spotify account at spotify.com. It only takes a minute.

Free Spotify account? Click the save button on the player to add this playlist to your Spotify library, then open it in the Spotify app to listen in full.

Spotify Premium? Simply press play and you can listen to the full playlist right here on this page. You can also save the playlist to your Spotify app by clicking the save button on the player.