'Now, personally I wouldn't mind going to an Eighties disco, all Smiths records and Coal Not Dole badges, Go-Betweens B-sides and Red Wedge banners ...

That was my Eighties, maybe yours, too, but it's not the official version of the decade, is it? The official version is - yawn - spandex leggings and Duran Duran, puffball skirts and mullets, shoulder pads, Dynasty, yuppies and Tories, Tories, Tories!"

Tracey Thorn, New Statesman, 2014

"81, 82, 83, 84."

Simple Minds, New Gold Dream, 1982.

In 1983 I had a grey overcoat, the original 7" of The Smiths' What Difference Does It Make? (the one with Terence Stamp on the cover) and a guilty secret. The guilty secret was that I didn't really hate Duran Duran.

I didn't like them, obviously. By 1983 they were already the enemy. They'd released Rio. They were poncing around in the Caribbean in Anthony Price suits and on board pricey yachts. So even if they weren't Tories, they were certainly Tory-minded.

In my head I was a pop roundhead. My tastes were northern and indie. Even so, Duran's cavalier gaudiness appealed on some deep level. Maybe as a reminder of how much I'd loved the glitter of ABC and what the NME called the new pop a year or two before. Or maybe just because we are always attracted to our opposites.

And so, if you asked me, I would have had to admit Simon Le Bon singing "Don't say you're easy on me/You're about as easy as a nuclear war" sounded more profound than anything Dylan had ever written.

Back then, pop music - like so much else in those I Hate Thatcher days - was divided into two tribes. I saw myself on the same side as Tracey (see above) and Morrissey and Bernard Sumner and Roddy Frame. I loved Go-Betweens B-sides (their A-sides weren't bad either). But in my bedroom I'd still dance to Wham.

Time softens and blurs the edge of things. The past is reduced to caricature. All those northern indie miserabilists have been hived off into a 6 Music classic rock continuum, removed from their moment in history, leaving the glittery southern pop types to be boxed into an Absolute 80s spandex and deely-bopper moment that speaks for - yet distorts - the time. And so what's been lost along the way is how those two tribes once rubbed up against each other, the rewarding frictions that resulted and the guilty complicit thrill when the division was bridged

One of the pleasures, then, of Lori Majewski and Glaswegian expat Jonathan Bernstein's Mad World is that it reminds us that back in the 1980s both sides occupied the same territory - the charts. And so in this book Duran Duran sit beside New Order, The Normal live next door to Kajagoogoo. The result, then, is more Top Of The Pops than Old Grey Whistle Test. Or rather - given that it's American in origin - Casey Kasem's American Top 40.

The idea is simple. Talk to the bands behind 35 of the biggest hits of the early 1980s and get the stories behind the songs. Cue a litany of bad haircuts, eyeliner and egos. Huge egos. "We wanted cellos - I'd listened to Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring," Psychedelic Furs frontman Richard Butler says of the band's 1982 hit Love My Way. Perhaps, if he was still alive, Stravinsky would return the compliment. And when he's not having a go at Bono ("a gibbering leprechaunish t**t") Bunnyman Ian McCulloch is extolling the virtues of his own song, The Killing Moon: "It's way beyond a song. It's about everything. It's not about football or f***ing celery, but it's about most other things."

What emerges is that whichever tribe you belonged to you could still fall victim to the same destructive tendencies. If you think the bad blood between Peter Hook and the rest of New Order has coagulated over the years, have a look at the chapter on Kajagoogoo's Too Shy to see the ill feeling between Limahl and the rest of the band (helped along by Mad World's authors clearly passing on what's been said: "Wow! He's gonna develop an ulcer if he's not careful," Nick Beggs says on hearing of one of Limahl's blame-everyone-else-but-me stories).

Maybe implicit here is a notion that pop in the early 1980s was more multivalent than it is now. "Looking back to the 1980s there was so much more room for diversity," Alison Moyet argues at one point. "A freak was more celebrated than it is now."

But the woodwork can only squeak so many times. And by the decade's halfway point, the post-punk purists and pop gadflies were reaching an ending. And so Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas - the last song in the book - and the Live Aid add-on were a full stop. In the wings, hip hop and samplers were waiting to take over. I'd lost my grey overcoat by then.