“Electric Avenue” by Eddy Grant

"Electric Avenue" came off Killer on the Rampage, Eddy Grant's 1982 album, and under its bright, bouncing groove sits a song about a city boiling over. Grant, the Guyanese-British musician who wrote and produced it himself, named it after the Brixton market street in south London that was the first of its kind to get electric lighting; he had come across it while acting at the Black Theatre of Brixton.

What pushed him to write it was the 1981 Brixton riot, the eruption of anger over joblessness, poverty, racism and racist policing, which left Grant horrified and furious. The trick is that he wrapped all of it in a lilting, synth-driven shuffle you can dance to, and America did exactly that: helped along by his MTV video, it became one of the biggest hits of 1983 there.

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