2026 Anniversary Series 068: Europe – The Final Countdown

Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: 26th May 1986 There are times when I’m writing about music, and metal, when I wonder just how I got to this point of writing about the fortieth anniversary of one of rock music’s most infamous songs and the album it came from, but this is a lesson of self discovery and of not pre-judging anything. Because despite the mega-hit nature of ‘The Final Countdown’ (number one song in 25 countries, including the UK), I had never listened to Europe at all other than that. I assumed I wasn’t going to like anything else by them, so it took many years before I gave this record a fair shake. Forty years after its release, it has now become one of my favourite 80s hair metal records. We all know it because of the infamously famous title track, a song for which we’ve all gone through the ‘love it/hate it/despise it/kinda actually like it again?’ cycle but I had never spent any time with Europe other than that before my wife asked me if they were worth going to…