1985’s 15 Hottest Rock Tours

1985 was a glorious time to be a fan of live rock and roll music.

Thanks partially to the attention foisted upon them by MTV and the music video revolution, artists such as Motley Crue, Dire Straits and Iron Maiden reached dizzying new levels of popularity. Realizing that visuals were an increasingly important part of their shows, many of them pumped up their outfits, pyrotechnics and props, turning their concerts into can’t-miss spectacles.

Here’s a breakdown of the 15 hottest tours of 1985, including video whenever possible:

Motley Crue

A couple of weeks after releasing their glammed-up Theatre of Pain album, Motley Crue began a massive 128-date tour on July 7, 1985 with the first of five shows in Tokyo. Loudness and Y&T were among the opening acts on this tour, which concluded on March 3 in Paris. Tommy Lee’s solo spotlight was a nightly highlight, as the drummer performed on a kit bolted to a large platform that flipped up vertically 90 degrees, so the entire crowd could see him from a birds-eye view. (You can see it in the video below beginning at the 53 minute mark.) The tour’s show-closing cover of Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock” ended up on their next album, 1987’s Girls, Girls, Girls.

Phil Collins

Phil Collins spent most of the ’80s toggling between Genesis and his solo career, enjoying multi-platinum album sales and sold-out arenas in both forms. 1985 was a particularly high peak, with his No Jacket Required album eventually selling over 25 million copies worldwide. He celebrated with a five-month long, 85-date tour that featured a four-piece horn section. The May 29, 1985 Dallas show was filmed for an HBO special and home video release No Ticket Required, and while traveling Collins cleverly filmed himself in front of various famous landmarks all over the world for the “Take Me Home” video.

Tina Turner

After making one of the most stunning (and welcome) comebacks in rock history with 1984’s Private Dancer, Tina Turner spent nearly all of 1985 celebrating with fans on her 185-show world tour. An estimated 2.5 million people attended the shows, generating $40 million in box office. Two shows from Birmingham, England were filmed and released as the home video Tina Live: Private Dancer Tour, with special guest appearances from David Bowie and Bryan Adams.

Read More: The Top 20 Hard Rock and Metal Albums of 1985

Dire Straits

When Brothers in Arms – and more specifically, “Money for Nothing” – made Dire Straits unlikely MTV darlings in the spring of 1985 the band wisely capitalized with a 248 (!!) date tour that stretched from April 25 of that year to April 26, 1986. The tour’s last show was broadcast live, but has yet to be released on home video. Burned out and concerned that popularity had taken precedent over the quality music, frontman Mark Knopfler disbanded the group in 1988. He brought them together for one more album and tour, then shut the band down seemingly for good in 1995 in order to focus on a more scaled-down solo career.

Rush

After a five-date “warm up” tour earlier in the year, Rush launched their proper Power Windows tour On Dec. 4 in Portland, Maine. Like the album it was supporting, the tour found the band delving more deeply into synths, bass pedals and samplers. It also featured dazzling visual elements including lasers, holograms and backing projection screens. Live performances of two songs from this tour – “Mystic Rhythms” and “Witch Hunt” – were included on the 1989 live album A Show of Hands.

AC/DC

Although 1985’s Fly on the Wall was a slight letdown in terms of AC/DC albums, it featured a handful of excellent new songs worthy of a spot on the set lists of the band’s corresponding world tour, which ran from Sept. 4, 1985 to Feb. 16, 1986. The title track, “Shake Your Foundations” and “Sink the Pink” were all great additions, and it’s too bad they reportedly only gave “Playing With Girls” a shot on one night.

Kiss

Having successfully completed a commercial comeback with 1984’s “Heaven’s on Fire,” Kiss struck quickly with 1985’s Asylum and another hit single in “Tears are Falling.” They pumped up their stage show with blindingly bright neon clothing and a 20′ tall Kiss sign – the biggest they ever used – capable of changing colors for the first time. The 95-date tour began on Nov. 29, 1985 in Little Rock, with the band frequently covering the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in a set list otherwise dominated by their ’80s catalog. This is one of the few Kiss tours that wasn’t professionally filmed, making video bootlegs from this era highly sought after by fans.

Ratt / Bon Jovi

Ratt brought a very special guest along for much of their 1985 Invasion of Your Privacy tour. Bon Jovi, still building a name for themselves with the 7800 Fahrenheit album, served as the opening act on much of the tour. The following year the group’s Slippery When Wet album permanently entrenched them as headliners.

Sting

Turning away from the Police at the height of their popularity, Sting told a bold left turn with the jazz-influenced The Dream of the Blue Turtles album. He then doubled down on the corresponding tour, which found him trading his longtime rock trio for a seven-piece band featuring jazz heavyweights such as Brandford Marsalis. His preparations for the tour, which kicked off with three nights at New York City’s famed Ritz in February 1985, was captured on the Bring on the Night documentary, as well as a corresponding live album.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers‘ ambitious 1985 album Southern Accents had a difficult birth, with Petty famously breaking his hand while punching a studio wall in frustration at one point in its creation. But he recovered and was able to breath fresh new life into the songs on the road, dedicating roughly half the set list to the new record on the June 6, 1985 opening night in St. Louis. A two-night stand in Los Angeles was recorded and filmed for the Pack Up the Plantation: Live! album and home video.

Don Henley

With two hit albums – 1982’s I Can’t Stand Still and 1984’s Building the Perfect Beast – under his belt, former (and future) Eagles star Don Henley launched his first solo tour on June 18, 1985 in St. Louis. The 58-tour found him adjusting to life at the front of the stage, switching largely from drums to guitar while offering a mix of solo hits and Eagles classics. (There doesn’t seem to be any live video from this era.)

Bryan Adams

Released late in 1984, Reckless made the already popular Bryan Adams a bona fide superstar, and he capitalized with a massive 155-date world tour that took up most of 1985. An expanded 2014 edition of Reckless included a fifteen-song live album recorded at the April 20th London concert.

Bruce Springsteen

Spending half of 1984 touring wasn’t enough to satisfy the demand for Bruce Springsteen tickets after the success of Born in the U.S.A., so he also devoted about two-thirds of 1985 to playing packed arenas and stadiums in support of the album. “Our anthems were built to fill and communicate in places of this size,” Springsteen later wrote in his memoir, “so from Timbuktu to New Jersey, crowds dropped one by one to the powerhouse show we’d started developing overseas.” Just shy of half of Springsteen’s massive career-spanning Live 1975-85 box set was comprised of performances from this tour.

Iron Maiden

The stage show Iron Maiden put together for their 1984-1985 World Slavery tour is widely considered to be their best. It featured an Egyptian setting based on their hit Powerslave album and a gigantic mummified Eddie that soared over the stage. (They recreated key elements from it on 2008’s Somewhere Back in Time tour.) The year-long, 189-date tour left the band exhausted, but also yielded a flat-out classic live album and home video, Live After Death.

ZZ Top

The mega-multi-platinum success of 1983’s Eliminator gave ZZ Top some extra money to sink into stage production, and they went for it on the tour in support of 1985’s Afterburner. The set transformed from the dashboard of the classic car on the Eliminator cover to the control panel for the futuristic space shuttle pictured on the cover of Afterburner. Oddly enough – the stage was originally designed for Loverboy. The fact that this tour, along with the group’s even wilder Worldwide Texas Tour – which featured a stage shaped like their home state and LIVE CATTLE roaming free – were not professionally filmed earns ZZ Top a high spot on our “how did you not think to film this?” hall of shame.