The Romantics – Talking In Your Sleep

“What I Like About You” reached No. 49. This one went to No. 3.

In 1980, the Romantics released What I Like About You and it reached number 49 on the Billboard Hot 100. It has since turned up in more advertisements, films, sports arenas and television shows than almost any other record of its decade, and a great many people who can sing every word of it could not name another song by the band. The one they should name is Talking in Your Sleep, which reached number 3 in early 1984 and held that position for three weeks. It was the only Top 10 hit the Romantics ever had, and it very nearly did not exist.

Keep watching: more 80s music videos →

By the late spring of 1983, In Heat was close to finished and producer Peter Solley told the band he still could not hear a song on it capable of carrying the album. What existed instead was a bass figure Mike Skill had written during a period when he was no longer in the group, which he had been playing in jams with drummer Jimmy Marinos. Everyone recognized it as, in Marinos’s phrase, “too good a track to leave unfinished.” The melody and the lyric were built onto it inside a couple of days, and it became the last thing recorded for the record.

Miami, and a mix that would not settle

They cut it at Criteria Recording Studios in Miami across May and June 1983. Solley then spent longer mixing this one track than anything else on the album, and the reason was a genuine identity problem rather than perfectionism. Push the guitars forward and the Romantics were the Detroit garage band they had always been, which by 1983 was an unfashionable thing to be. Push the synthesizers forward and they became an American imitation of a British electronic group, which was worse. Solley’s solution was to double Skill’s bass line on a synthesizer so the two sounds occupied the same space, and to run Palmar’s vocal through a vocoder on the hook.

Nemperor released it on September 9, 1983, backed with I’m Hip. It climbed through the autumn, peaked at number 3 in early 1984, and sold past a million copies as a seven-inch single. Nemperor also put out an extended dance mix running 5:35, remixed by John “Jellybean” Benitez, who was working the same New York club circuit that had produced Madonna. One in a Million followed it to number 37, and that is the complete list of Romantics singles that reached the American Top 40.

Britain gave the song to somebody else

The single went out in Australia, New Zealand and Japan two months after the American release, and in the United Kingdom in January 1984. It did not chart in Britain at all. What happened next is the strangest thing in the song’s history: the British group Bucks Fizz recorded their own version and took it to number 15 on the UK singles chart in August 1984. A band the Romantics had almost certainly never heard of beat them in their own market with a song five Americans had written in a Miami studio.

The video did the work the record could not do abroad. It was shot in Detroit at eight in the morning, which Marinos noted were not rock and roll hours, with the band surrounded by extras in pajamas and looking convincingly like men who had been woken up, because they had been. MTV played it heavily. Then, in 2017, Stranger Things put the song into its second season, and a generation with no memory of 1984 encountered it in a school parking lot.

What makes the record hold up is the thing that took Solley so long to settle. Most bands caught between two sounds in 1983 picked one and lost the audience attached to the other. The Romantics refused to resolve it, and the tension between the garage rhythm section and the synthesizer sitting on top of it is not a compromise. It is the song. The band spent their career being remembered for a single they never got into the Top 40, and the one that actually got there is the only record they made that sounds like nobody else.