“Party Out Of Bounds” by B

"Party Out of Bounds" comes off Wild Planet, the B-52's' second album, from 1980, with the writing credited to Kate Pierson, Fred Schneider, Keith Strickland, Cindy Wilson and Ricky Wilson. The joke is right there in the premise: a how-to for throwing a house party without it tipping over into disaster, played with deadpan party-crasher glee.

It was never a proper single, yet as an album cut it climbed to five on Billboard's dance club chart in 1980 and has stayed a fixture of new wave club nights ever since. An instrumental dub mix turned up on the flip of the "Private Idaho" 45, and the next year Daniel Coulombe and Steven Stanley reworked it for the Party Mix! EP, piling on echo and extra keyboard effects. Stanley went on to produce Whammy! in 1983.

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