The best No 1 records: The Specials – Ghost Town

Forget for a moment the synchronous outbreak of inner-city rioting which made Ghost Town seem like a news report as much as a record. It was a remarkable pop cultural moment but it wasn't what made the song a classic. Hear it instead as the sound of a disintegrating band who stayed together just long enough to record it. The centre cannot hold and the different voices pass each other in the night without quite connecting. The mood is both pre- and post-apocalyptic: the lyrics say the crisis is coming while the eerie, hollowed-out music says that it's already happened and the band are just wandering the wreckage. During the fraught recording Jerry Dammers called it "the greatest record that's ever been made in the history of anything". It's certainly up there.

See every No 1 hit from 1981.