“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by Wham!

"Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" is the 1984 single that turned Wham! into chart-toppers on both sides of the Atlantic, the British duo's first number one in the UK and the US alike, and it later took its place on Make It Big. George Michael wrote it, produced it and arranged it himself, with Chris Porter engineering, while the credits hand the keyboards to Tommy Eyre and the saxophone to David Baptiste.

It's pure sugar-rush dance-pop, so bright and bouncy it practically squints at you. The video did the rest: Michael and Andrew Ridgeley in oversized Katharine Hamnett T-shirts emblazoned with CHOOSE LIFE, which kicked off a fashion craze all its own. It went platinum in America, and VH1 later placed it at number 28 among the 100 greatest songs of the '80s.

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