5 Hit Songs From The '80s That Almost Didn't Get Made

Regardless of how much popularity, clout, and artistic integrity that a band or solo artist may have built up over the years, it's a messed up truth about the 1980s music industry that creating hit records was a collaborative process. By and large, musicians of the era recorded, and their labels released, the songs that they wanted to put to vinyl and cassette. But those had to be approved by the executives paying for the whole operation. Not only did they have veto power, but they could also strongly suggest, or downright insist, that their biggest artists record exactly the tunes they wanted them to record. Plenty of other vested and interested parties had a say in what music the musicians made, too. That led to not only creative tension but downright hostility.

It's a fairly uncomfortable result, then, for both artists and fans, that many classic hits, even some rock songs from the '80s we'll be blasting on repeat 'til the end of time, were only ever recorded and released despite the stated and aggressive reluctance of the musicians. Here are five '80s songs with the wildest backstories — in that if it were up to those who made them, they never would've existed at all.

Champions of 1970s progressive rock, the dreamy, futuristic sounds of Yes won over lots of fans, but few hit singles in the United States. It reached No. 1 for the first and only time in 1984, well after its most creatively fruitful period. By then, so many original members had left that the remainders brought in Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes of New Wave band the Buggles to record an album before disbanding. Two members formed Cinema with guitarist Trevor Rabin, absorbed two other ex-Yes musicians, changed the name back to Yes, and recruited Horn to produce the "90215" album.

After recording most of "90125," Horn realized that it lacked a single. The only real question mark: "Owner of a Lonely Heart." Horn heard a demo of the song, written by Rabin, who initially denied its use because it was intended for someone else, not for Yes. Besides, it needed work. 

"The song, as it originally was, was so awful," Horn said at a Red Bull Music Academy lecture, "that I was convinced that if we didn't put loads of whiz-bangs and gags all over the verse, no one would ever listen to it." Still, he suggested "Owner of a Lonely Heart for the single. "They didn't want to do it. I had to beg them," he claimed. In answer to Horn's plea that his career as a producer would be over if Yes didn't record this song, the musicians laid down their tracks over the course of a few days. In January 1984, "Owner of a Lonely Heart" topped the Hot 100.

Glasgow alternative rock band Simple Minds had already scored a string of hits in the U.K. in the early 1980s but struggled to make any inroads into the bigger, more lucrative U.S. market. Then it got its big break: the chance to record a showcase soundtrack song for a new movie by writer-director John Hughes. The only problem for Simple Minds: The band couldn't write their own piece — a song would be provided. Even after the musicians begrudgingly attended a special screening of an early cut of the movie — the future high school classic "The Breakfast Club" — Simple Minds still wasn't interested. "We couldn't give a toss about teenage American school kids," frontman Jim Kerr told The Guardian.

It would take some outside persuasion for Simple Minds to commit to "(Don't You) Forget About Me." Kerr's then-wife, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, "kept badgering me. 'I like the song,' she said. 'What's the problem?'" Kerr recalled. Then songwriter Keith Forsey personally phoned Kerr to tell him that he loved Simple Minds. They became friendly, but it was light pity which finally forced Kerr's hand. "Eventually, I started to feel sorry for him. 'Maybe we should go into a studio for an afternoon.'" The cut from the soundtrack of "The Breakfast Club" went all the way to No. 1 in the U.S. in 1985, the first of five American Top 40 hits for Simple Minds.

"The Joshua Tree" elevated U2 in the U.S. from quirky alternative rock band to stadium-filling juggernaut. The 1987 album is where the band perfected its epic sound, replete with ringing guitars, as heard on the hit single "Where the Streets Have No Name," built around a complex multi-track riff recorded at home by The Edge. "I thought I had just come up with the most amazing guitar part and song of my life," he recalled in "U2 by U2." His U2 bandmates disagreed. "It was a bit of a tongue-twister for the rhythm section, with strange bar lengths that got everybody in a bad mood," co-producer Daniel Lanois told Mojo (via Rolling Stone). The rest of U2 was also annoyed that The Edge had only written the intro and end part of the song, and it spent many sessions trying to figure out the middle.

That all took co-producer Brian Eno to a breaking point. "Probably half the time that the whole album took was spent on that song — trying to fix up this version," Eno said in a "Classic Albums" documentary (via Rolling Stone). And so, he endeavored to try to delete all the recorded work on the song, which would've forced U2 to either start over or come up with a new song. He thought the better of it, and did no such thing, although other members of the U2 camp recall actually stopping Eno from hitting the erase button.

Terry Britten and Graham Lyle penned a lyrically maudlin but musically upbeat tune called "What's Love Got to Do With It" and sent it along for consideration to early '80s stars like Cliff Richard and Donna Summer. Nobody wanted to record it, and it floated down to Tina Turner. At the time, Turner was emerging from years of obscurity. After splitting from Ike Turner, her abusive husband and musical partner in the Ike and Tina Turner Review, Turner toiled as a solo act to little notice until she resurfaced with a new deal with Capitol Records in 1983.

Like Richard and Summer, Turner didn't want that much-shopped tune. "Did you know that when I first read the lyrics for 'What's Love Got to Do With It,' I rejected the song?" Turner noted on Instagram in 2021. The reason: She wanted to make rock, not adult-oriented pop music. In the documentary "Tina" (via Time), she called the song "terrible." However, Turner's manager Roger Davies saw the promise in the song and called in Britten to adapt it to better suit the singer's voice. She consented to recording, and "What's Love Got to Do With It" fueled Turner's remarkable comeback. It went to No. 1 on the pop chart and won Turner the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance.

A memorable and exceptionally randy song, an emergent anthem for LGBT people, and co-written by longtime David Letterman bandleader Paul Shaffer, "It's Raining Men" is a post-disco dance-floor-filling classic. In 1983, the song topped Billboard's dance club chart and just barely missed the Hot 100's Top 40.

Gospel and disco veterans Martha Wash and Izora Armstead, previously known as Two Tons o' Fun, adopted the thematically appropriate name the Weather Girls to record "It's Raining Men" for Columbia. But the singers didn't really see the magic or the point of the song and didn't want it in their repertoire. "We thought it was a crazy song — in fact, too crazy to record," Wash told HuffPost in 2015. "I kept saying, it's raining men? Really? Are you kidding me?" 

Wash didn't think audiences would understand the song, which uses meteorological metaphors to describe being surrounded by attention and affection. "I just did not think people would buy it. That's why I kept saying no." The song's other writer, Paul Jabara, persisted in getting the Weather Girls to accept it — it had already been turned down by Diana Ross, Barbra Streisand, Cher, and Donna Summer. "He kept pleading with us. That was the song he wanted us to put our vocals to, so we did," Wash explained.