“That Was Then But This Is Now” by ABC

"That Was Then But This Is Now" fired the opening shot for Beauty Stab, ABC's second album, going out on Mercury late in 1983 with Martin Fry singing and Stephen Singleton and Mark White sharing the writing and arranging with him. The band produced it themselves with Gary Langan, and it tears along at a clip without letting go of their taste for the grand, tailored gesture. Smash Hits made it single of the fortnight, and in America it crept onto the Hot 100 at number 89, their third visit.

Not everyone was charmed. One line of polite small talk about dessert drew a public scolding from Aztec Camera's Roddy Frame, who heard in it everything wrong with the decade's pop, and it has dogged worst-lyric polls ever since, topping a BBC 6 Music survey in 2007. The video parks the band behind a giant Risk-style world map, cut with flags and a helicopter that lifts off and explodes.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.