“Gimme Hope Jo'anna” by Eddy Grant

Eddy Grant aimed "Gimme Hope Jo'anna" squarely at apartheid South Africa in 1988, and he dressed the protest up as a song sung to a woman: "Jo'anna" is Johannesburg, the city standing in for the government that ran the whole rotten system. He wrote it after a trip to Africa, packed it with nods to South African life, and let it close on a note of real hope that the regime's days were numbered.

The South African government banned it, and it got played there anyway. Grant wrote and produced it himself for File Under Rock, recording in Saint Philip with Glen Johansen engineering, and set the anger to a bright, bouncing reggae lilt that makes the message go down like a party. At home it gave him his first British top 10 in five years, climbing to No. 7.

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