"Johnny and Mary" by Robert Palmer (1980)

On the cusp of the new digital decade, it was called "New Wave" to make radio and retail and the straights in the flyover states feel less scared by the punk rockers who had commercial potential. In New Wave, the brash energy of punk met the showy artifice of glam and disco, filtered through the newest synthesizers and drum machines, the guitar downgraded from rock's thrusting squall to funk's nervy accent, and the tent of New Wave opened for artists old and new to see how The Eighties would play.

And there was room in that tent for nearly everyone. '70s American rockers like Linda Ronstadt and Alice Cooper dipped their platinum toes in the New Wave pools, while British bedsit introverts like Soft Cell and Gary Numan (and even aged Elvis-era holdovers like Cliff Richard) discovered the strong public appetite, albeit ephemeral and fleeting, for this New Pop. But the award winner in the pivot period of 1980, a year before MTV changed the look and sound of New Wave forever, has to be "Johnny and Mary," a standout from the album Clues, by the U.K. singer Robert Palmer.

The lyric, a tale of deterioration and entropy in a stale relationship, is enough of an anomaly for "Johnny and Mary" to be notable, what with the absence of a chorus per se. But what pushes the song into the firmament is a combination of the music -- a driving synthetic pulse that nods to German motorik bands, with a warm and melancholy guitar figure periodically poking through the polished gleam of the rhythm -- and Palmer's vocal embrace of the resigned fatigue of the combatant couple. Both were unlike anything on the album, or in Palmer's career before or after, an anomaly turned singularity.

For a man with a supple and flexible vocal register -- a croon one moment, a soulful shout the next -- Palmer chooses to sing with a reporter's detachment, rarely rising past an octave in his dispatches from the trenches of the hardened heart. Instead of playing it big, a la "Young Turks" by Rod Stewart, Palmer uses those self-imposed limitations to drive home the sorrows of failed dreams inside little boxes, where two people do the dance of dissociation until the end of their twinned days. Covered by artists such as Bryan Ferry and Placebo, "Johnny and Mary" is as compelling and futuristic now as it was then, at the moment when you could imagine Johnny meeting Mary for the first time, neither knowing the promises made would be shaved away, day by day, until only the echoes remain.

The video is hokey but charming, too.