“Obsession” by Animotion

Animotion's "Obsession" is synth-pop with its pulse racing, and it came from an unlikely pair of writers: Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight, who wrote it together in 1983. Des Barres was climbing out of a heroin addiction at the time and wanted to write about obsession for a wide audience, so he steered the song away from the needle and toward romantic fixation. It was his producer, Mike Chapman, who put him in a room with Knight, another writer on Chapman's publishing roster.

One image in it, the lover as a butterfly to be caught and kept, came from The Collector, the 1965 film about a man who abducts a beautiful woman. Animotion's version, released on Mercury, turns that creepy undertow into a cold, glittering dance-floor chill: sequencers ticking, the beat relentless, desire played as a trap.

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