'80s B-Side Songs That Outshined Their Lead Singles

In the 1980s, we often approved of the singles that record companies chose from albums we cherished. Who doesn't love New Order's transcendent "Bizarre Love Triangle," a single from the band's 1986 "Brotherhood" LP? However, we often preferred those singles' B-sides. Music consumption changed in the 1980s, and that arguably aided some B-sides. No longer were neglected songs solely reliant on being flipped by commercial radio DJs to be heard, partly driven by the emergence of college radio, which drew listeners to underground hits.

For example, the magisterial and tragic 1980 single "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is probably Joy Division's finest moment, but many prefer "These Days," its harder-hitting synth-driven flip side. And Madonna's irresistible and propulsive "Into The Groove" was never released as a commercial A-side in the U.S., relegated instead to the B-side of the disputably less-immediate and engaging "Angel." 

Leaving aside the above heavy-hitters, we've chosen those B-sides we think cut through 1980s culture's signal-to-noise ratio; songs not slated to be hits that reached listeners nonetheless, drawing on the club scene, MTV, nascent college radio, and even old-school commercial radio, to shape the soundtrack of a decade.

When Echo & The Bunnymen's brooding debut album "Crocodiles" dropped in the U.K. in July 1980, the ratcheting, rampaging "Do It Clean" was left off the disc, reportedly because a record company executive mistakenly thought the song contained obscenities. Once the tune was determined "clean," it was subsequently included on the U.S. release, which garnered rave reviews: Rolling Stone singled out "Do It Clean" as one of the band's "Yardbirds-[meets]-Elevators ravers jacked up in the New Wave manner." The driving second track on the U.S. LP, "Do It Clean" is the B-side of the lethargic "The Puppet," the band's third U.K single. 

While "The Puppet" canters in an amiable ramble, "Do It Clean" bolts out of the gate with Ian McCulloch's jittery rhythm guitar, Les Pattinson's rampaging yet melodic bass, Pete de Freitas' skittering drums, and Will Sergeant's jagged downstroke guitar that unleashes power chords like artillery bursts. Over the runaway locomotive backing track, McCulloch wails like a possessed shaman calling an arcane cult to prayer.

Some claim McCulloch is extolling the temporary bliss of drug misuse with the lyrics "I've got a handful of this/ What do I do with it/ I've got a barrel of this/ What do I do with it," but the tune arguably depicts McCulloch grappling with the possibilities stretching ahead — life with all its unknown thrills and dangers. An extended consciousness-expanding workout in concert, "Do It Clean" blows its A-side out of the firmament.

In 1980, Grace Jones was ready to leave New York and the disco music that propelled her dancefloor hits like "I Need a Man" behind. That year, backed by a crack band including Jamaican rhythm kings Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, Jones dropped a cover of The Pretenders' "Private Life" as a single. It's good, but not as essential as its B-side, a radical reworking of Joy Division's menacing "She's Lost Control."

"I had decided that I was going to sing in my way, not try and become a conventional pop singer," Jones wrote in her book "I'll Never Write my Memoirs" (via the BBC). By 1980, reggae and ska music had profoundly impacted punk and post-punk, with The Clash punking up reggae tunes like Eddy Grant's "Police on My Back." When Jones recorded her "Warm Leatherette" LP, she flipped that script, applying a rhythmic reggae approach to post-punk.

While the original embraces despair, Jones' eerie version of "She's Lost Control" is upbeat and sensual but no less dangerous. Changing the lyrics from third person to first, Jones announces she is ready to take on anyone with bold androgynous swagger. 

When ska combo the English Beat (also known as just the Beat) released its second single "Hands Off ... She's Mine/ Twist And Crawl" in 1980, it was a double A-side in its native England but a traditional A/B split elsewhere. Similar to punk bands, but with more charm and humor, the charismatic working-class crew filled dancefloors with a message of racial and gender equality. The lilting A-side is arguably anti-misogynist, with lyrics depicting a protagonist mired in possessiveness. Far better fleshed out, musically and thematically, is the sinuous and frenetic B-side, "Twist And Crawl." 

Riding a rubbery pumping bassline, skirling ska saxophone, and Dave Wakeling's husky tenor, "Twist and Crawl" is darker and more ambiguous. Similar to the band's subsequent single, "Mirror In The Bathroom," "Twist And Crawl" seems to document a descent into paranoia. With nothing seeming real to the song's protagonist, his personality dissolves into delusional wish fulfilment: "I can have a new face/ I can have a new body/ I can have a new boy/ I can have a new girl."

Noting that a friend of English Beat bassist David Steele co-wrote the lyrics, Wakeling told Songfacts that the song documented "social discomfort to the point of pitiful pain of always feeling you're in the wrong place at the wrong time and saying the wrong thing to the wrong person."

In 1986, when XTC entered Todd Rundgren's Utopia Sound Studios in Woodstock, New York, to record its eighth studio album "Skylarking," the eclectic British pop-rock band had abandoned its spiky new-wave origins for a more pastoral, psychedelic approach. Rundgren could be a difficult producer; the "Skylarking" sessions rendered that an understatement, and disagreements extended to "Dear God." The song's writer, Andy Partridge, didn't want to release it, considering his lyrics inadequate. Rundgren disagreed, but "Dear God" was released anyway as the UK-only B-side of XTC's bucolic "Grass."

With a devastating opening/closing vocal by 8-year-old Jasmine Veillette, the sweeping, cantering, and harrowing "Dear God" asks how we can reconcile the existence of evil with a loving God. Partridge once said of the song, per Neville Farmer's "XTC: Song Stories: The Exclusive Authorized Story Behind The Music,"  "It is such a big subject ... how can you cover it in three-and-a-half minutes?" Nonetheless, when U.S. college radio DJs started playing the imported flip side, XTC's American record company repressed the album with "Dear God" reinstated, and the song firmly put the band back on the map in the U.S.

When the Pixies released "Here Comes Your Man" in 1989, there was no such genre as grunge, but after this single unleashed its pioneering onslaught of loud/quiet chaos, rock would never be the same. The Boston alternative rock band presaged the sound that would shape the 1990s, with a raw blend of punk, indie, and metal, but it can't be heard on the jaunty, jangly A-side. For that, we need to turn to one of the three other included tracks: "Into The White."

While "Here Comes Your Man" looks back to folk rock, the B-side "Into The White" is forward-looking and far more influential. The live version of the song, featuring Black Francis' and Joey Santiago's bleeding guitars and Kim Deal's pulsing bassline and dreamy, repetitive vocals, points to the spacier spectrum of grunge, such as Swervedriver and Spacemen 3.  

Weaving a surrealistic incantation involving quasars and meteorites, the song's lyrics anticipate Nirvana's collage-style imagery, as heard in "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Heart-Shaped Box." Whether it's talking about passing through the veil of mortality, or venturing beyond Earth's gravity to beyond the Kuiper Belt, "Into The White" is a harbinger of grunge music, including Deal's subsequent proto Riot Grrrl band The Breeders, and another Pixies tune, "Planet of Sound."