“You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” by Dead or Alive

"You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" was the lead single from Dead or Alive's second album, Youthquake (1985), and it's a dance-floor centrifuge: a pounding, relentless beat, a riff that whirls round and round like the needle the title name-checks, and a vocal that struts and sneers with pure theatrical swagger. All four members, Pete Burns, Steve Coy, Tim Lever and Mike Percy, share the songwriting, and Pete Waterman produced it, making it the record that handed the Stock Aitken Waterman team their very first UK number one.

It didn't get there in a hurry. The single took 17 weeks to grind its way to the top of the UK chart, finally arriving in March 1985, and it went on to top the charts in Ireland and Canada and reach 3 in Australia. In America it peaked at 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 that August, still the band's best showing there. Vaughan Arnell and Anthea Benton directed the video.

The lists have been kind to it since. Q slotted it at 981 among its 1001 best songs ever in 2003, Blender ranked it 289th on its "Greatest Songs Since You Were Born" in 2005, and in a 2015 ITV poll the British public voted it the nation's 17th-favourite number one of the 1980s.

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