Their second single "Two Tribes" referenced the ongoing cold war and featured a music video of lookalikes of American president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko violently fighting, and was number 1 for nine weeks in the summer, both songs selling over a million.
One of the members of the band, George Michael, also released a solo single this year, the ballad "Careless Whisper" co-written by his bandmate Andrew Ridgeley.
After eighteen years, Stevie Wonder achieved his first solo number 1 single with "I Just Called to Say I Love You", from the soundtrack of the film The Woman in Red, selling over a million.
He had first charted at the age of 15 with "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" in 1966, and had previously had a number 1 in 1982 with a duet with Paul McCartney, "Ebony and Ivory".
Not only did the song become the Christmas number one, it sold over three million copies and became the biggest selling single of all time, a record that held for the next thirteen years.
The classical year was kicked off by the first complete performances of Oliver Knussen's one act fantasy opera Where the Wild Things Are, based on Maurice Sendak's 1963 children's book of the same title.
The other major classical music event of the year was the first performances (in the US, then in the UK) of The Mask of Time, the longest and most ambitious of Michael Tippett's late works, written in 1982 by the then 77 year-old composer.