The best No 1 records: Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Two Tribes

If nuclear annihilation was just a button away wouldn't you want to make a record that contained every idea you'd ever had? That was what Two Tribes sounded like. Inspired by Mad Max, William Burroughs, the Falklands war and a big bag of weed, Holly Johnson dreamed it up in obscurity. The cash bonanza of Relax enabled producer Trevor Horn to turn it into a gleaming disco-metal warhead and po-mo visionary Paul Morley to expand it into a multimedia art statement. The song's loopy cocktail of satire, hedonism and dread was potent enough to sustain all the conceptual weight piled on to it. The British public signed up to the lunatic largesse of the whole project by keeping it at No 1 for nine weeks. Apocalypse, wow!

See every No 1 from 1984.