Sophisti-pop: the essential albums of the smart, sad eighties

The album that built the template before anyone had a name for it. By 1982 Bryan Ferry had sanded every rough edge off Roxy Music's art-glam and replaced it with warm synth washes, Andy Mackay's saxophone and a vocal that sounds like it's being sung from the far end of a hotel bar. 'More Than This' is the sound of a party ending and nobody minding. Everything else on this list is downstream of it.

Sade Adu fronting a band of art-school players who'd rather be Bill Evans than Duran Duran. 'Smooth Operator' and 'Your Love Is King' turned restraint into a hit formula, all brushed drums and cool trumpet, and the album sold by the truckload without once raising its voice. Proof that the genre could top charts, not just wine lists.

Paul Weller quit The Jam, then Britain's biggest band, and walked straight into a record with instrumental jazz-piano interludes and a rap track. Café Bleu is scattered on purpose, sliding from Northern soul pastiche to bossa nova to the ache of 'You're the Best Thing.' Fans who wanted another 'Going Underground' were baffled. It has aged into one of the bravest left turns of the decade.

Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt's debut, made while they were still bookish Hull postgraduates with a Marine Girls past. Eden swaps jangle for muted trumpet, bossa rhythms and Thorn's low, unhurried voice. 'Each and Every One' is the sound of someone far too clever to beg. Long before the electronic reinvention, this is their quietest and maybe best record.

Cut in a Masonic hall in New York for the room's natural echo, with the horn arrangements of a man who'd worn out his Cole Porter records. Jackson dropped new wave spikiness for salsa, ballads and jazz-pop, and 'You Can't Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)' swings harder than anything on the radio in 1984. The cover copies a Blue Note sleeve, and he means every bit of it.

Three Glaswegians who ended up on Linn, a hi-fi manufacturer's label, because a stereo company needed something worthy of demoing its equipment. The result is sparse and patient and enormous, Paul Buchanan's cracked voice floating over synth bass and the hum of a city after midnight. 'Tinseltown in the Rain' is a lonely man's disco record. Barely anything else sounds like it.

Green Gartside began Scritti Politti as scratchy Marxist post-punk, then decided the genuinely radical move was flawless funk-pop about Jacques Derrida. 'The Word Girl' and 'Wood Beez' are candy-coated deconstruction, sung in a voice like spun sugar over drum machines programmed to the millimetre. Nothing this pristine has any right to be this strange.

Paddy McAloon writes like a novelist who got waylaid by melody, and Thomas Dolby's production hands him the space to show off. 'When Love Breaks Down' is the genre's saddest hit, while 'Bonny' and 'Goodbye Lucille #1' make the case that the deep cuts are the whole point. If sophisti-pop has a Pet Sounds, it's this.

A Liverpool synth-pop duo who talked Steely Dan's Walter Becker into producing, then got him so involved he's credited as a full band member. The album is gentle and jazzy and quietly ambitious, 'Black Man Ray' and 'King in a Catholic Style' tucking real melodic craft under an easy surface. A cult favourite that pays back anyone who digs past the singles.

Before Mick Hucknall became a soft-rock punchline he was a Manchester punk with a soul obsession and one of the best voices of his generation. 'Holding Back the Years' is a genuinely wrecking ballad about his mother walking out, and 'Money's Too Tight (to Mention)' still bites. The coffee-table years that followed buried how sharp this debut is.

A Dundee trio named after a Frank Sinatra film, led by Gary Clark, who wrote pop songs using the chords of a jazz obsessive. Their 1987 debut carries 'Mary's Prayer,' one of the great one-hit wonders, a Steely-Dan-goes-to-church single that somehow failed to make them stars. The rest of the album is nearly as good, which is the real tragedy.

Ricky Ross's songs about working Glasgow, wrapped in gospel piano and Lorraine McIntosh's harmonies. Raintown is sophisti-pop with dirt under its nails, less wine bar than bus shelter in a downpour, and 'Dignity' is a hymn for the man saving up to buy a boat and sail away from it all. Big-hearted where the genre usually plays it cool.

Corinne Drewery's voice, a horn section that seems on loan from Burt Bacharach, and 'Breakout,' a single so bright it should ship with sunglasses. Under the hit, the 1987 album is a loving pastiche of sixties orchestral pop and Blue Note swing. Easy to file as lightweight, much harder to actually write.

The Polish singer Basia Trzetrzelewska left Matt Bianco and made a solo record of Brazilian-tinged jazz-pop that's sunnier than nearly everything else here. 'Time and Tide' and 'New Day for You' are all bossa lilt and stacked harmony. Big in America, oddly ignored at home, and long overdue a proper reappraisal.

Roddy Frame started out a teenage jangle prodigy on Postcard Records, then chased a slicker, soul-struck sound to considerable critical grumbling. Love is glossy and unashamed, and 'Somewhere in My Heart' is a perfect pop single hiding real melancholy in plain sight. The purists never forgave the polish. They were wrong.

Five years after Rooftops, the same three men came back with fewer songs and even bigger feelings. Hats is seven tracks of Paul Buchanan sounding like the last person awake in a rained-on city, and 'The Downtown Lights' might be the most beautiful thing anyone in this genre committed to tape. Put it on at two in the morning and try not to phone someone you shouldn't.

Proof the genre never really died. Dan Bejar built Kaputt out of the exact ingredients everyone mocked in 1985: soft-focus saxophone, blurred late-night trumpet, lyrics muttered like he's forgotten you're in the room. It made sophisti-pop cool again for a generation raised to sneer at it, and half the smooth, sad indie records of the 2010s owe it a debt.