“Election Day” by Arcadia

"Election Day" was the first single from Arcadia, the Duran Duran offshoot, and Parlophone put it out in October 1985. Written by Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor, it's a slinky, shadowy thing, all glossy menace and high drama, and Grace Jones drifts through it with vocals and spoken passages.

It made the top 10 in both America and Britain, landing at 6 on the US chart and 7 in the UK, and Italy went mad for it, keeping it at number one for seven straight weeks from November 1985 into January 1986 after a run of high-profile TV spots. There's a lost verse, too: when Smash Hits printed the complete lyric, it included lines later cut from the released recording, and those lines also turn up on the back cover of the "Cryptic cut no voice" release.

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