Pop was sponsored either by Coke (Whitney, Duran Duran) or Pepsi (Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Bowie) and the Tories won another election. But it didn’t matter, because The Beastie Boys were coming. Which was the scariest thing since the Vikings if you believed certain politicians. There were riots, and Ad Rock was arrested. VW owners the nation over cursed their name.
Gone: The Tube. Pop and TV have never been easy bedfellows, but this was a near as it got to getting it right. So obviously it had to go. Best bit? Rick Mayall puking up whilst trying to introduce the show.
Album of the year: Big Black – ‘Songs About Fucking’
Single of the year: The Sugarcubes – ‘Birthday’
Band/artist of the year: The Beastie Boys
1987 belonged to: hip hop
Event: The Beasties UK tour. The tabloids promised us a riot and the Beasties duly delivered. 
Even better was Public Enemy‘s ‘Yo! Bum Rush The Show’, taking hip hop onto another plane, while Prince delivered his sprawling masterpiece, ‘Sign ‘O’ The Times’. And it just got better. The UK charts suffered from an overdose of white boy funk, typified by Curiosity Killed The Cat and Johnny Hates Jazz, the Americans were coming. REM went mainstream with ‘Document’, Husker Du invented grunge, Big Black and Butthole Surfers were making rock evil again and The Pixies were about to reinvent guitar music as we knew it. Even the normally placid Swiss (Young Gods) and Icelanders (Sugarcubes) did their bit. M/A/R/R/S scored the first indie number 1 in the proper charts.
So we could gloss over the emergence of Whitney Houston and ignore ‘Ferry Aid’, the very nadir of charity bunfests. What we could never forgive was T’Pau.