Way Back Wednesday: The Top Music of August 19, 1983

This Week In 1983: The Top Music of August 19, 1983

The biggest drop of the week belongs to Madness and “Our House” which falls seventeen spots for it’s last week on the countdown. The biggest jump belongs to Bonnie Tyler who climbs ten spots to #30 on her way to #1. Two songs in this week’s Top 20 take a stab and addressing the growing nuclear tensions, at the time, between the USA and USSR: “It’s A Mistake” by Men At Work and “Lawyers In Love” by Jackson Brown. And while the video for his next single, “Uptown Girl” features future wife Christie Brinkley, it’s Billy Joel’s current single, “Tell Her About It” sitting at #22 this week, that was written ABOUT his future wife. Peaking out this week at #5 is our featured song of the week, “Stand Back” by Stevie Nicks.

Song Story: “Stand Back” by Stevie Nicks

What better person to talk about a song than the writer/performer herself! From the liner notes to her TimeSpace album, Stevie talks about this song:

“I got married the day I wrote this song. We were driving to Santa Barbara and a new song by Prince came on, so we pulled over somewhere and got the tape. It just gave me an incredible idea, so I spent many hours that night writing a song about some kind of a crazy argument, and it was to become one of the most important of my songs. I’ve been doing this song for years, Fleetwood Mac does it also, and I never get tired of it. “Stand Back” has always been my favorite song onstage because when it starts, it has an energy that comes from somewhere unknown. I’ve never quite understood this sound, but I have NEVER questioned it.

I become a different person, and I like that, because usually I make up my OWN characters, but the lady in Stand Back was not my idea. By the way, Prince did come into the studio the night I called him and told him about the song, and he played incredible synthesizer on it. And then he just walked out of my life, and I didn’t see him for a long time. It was extraordinary.”

In an interview after Prince’s death, Nicks said that she was “brokenhearted” that the pair never got to perform the song together while he was alive. “Had I ever in a million years thought that we would lose him so soon, I would have made sure that that would have happened,” she said. “And it didn’t. So that’s just one of those things in your life where you so say, ‘I really missed out.'”