“19” by Paul Hardcastle

"19" was the single that launched Paul Hardcastle's self-titled fourth album in 1985, and it sounds like the evening news fed through a sampler and left to jitter. An anti-war record about America in Vietnam and what the war did to the soldiers sent there, it's built around narration by Peter Thomas, snatches of interviews and news reports lifted from Vietnam Requiem, the ABC documentary on the post-traumatic stress veterans carried home. The speech gets chopped into a synthetic stutter, the title number included, alongside crowd noise and a bugle call; Bill Couturié and Jonas McCord share the lyric credit with Hardcastle.

It was an early showcase for sampled speech, and it went global: five weeks at number one in the UK, the biggest seller of 1985 in 13 countries, helped along by versions voiced by local news anchors in French, Spanish, German and Japanese, and an Ivor Novello Award for best-selling single.

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