On ‘Born This Way’, Lady Gaga brought together Eurotrash excess and shoddy attempts at speaking German (see: ‘Scheiße’) with straight-up rock ambition direct from the playbook of one of her favourite artists, Bruce Springsteen. Something of a legend in the medium, Clemons also lent his woodwind talents to… Lady Gaga, ‘The Edge of Glory’ (2011) Clarence Clemons steps into answer with an enormous sax solo giddy on joy and excitement. “I want to know if love is real / Oh, can you show me?” Springsteen sings. Bruce Springsteen, ‘ Born to Run’ (1975)Ī colossal slab of wide-eyed rock’n’roll, Bruce Springsteen’s commercial breakthrough ‘Born To Run’ is an operatic epic to chasing “a runaway American Dream” – each vivid scene more saturated than the last.

Oddly, ‘Baker Street’ shares another link with the similarly sax-heavy ‘Careless Whisper’ – guitarist Hugh Burns plays on both. Soon the song was in constant rotation on radio, and led to what has been dubbed the ‘Baker Street’ phenomenon – mandatory sax solos everywhere in ‘80s pop. When Raphael Ravenscroft turned up to record a few bits on baritone sax, he suggested playing it on the spare tenor sax in the boot of his car, and the hit was born. Without its wailing saxophone, ‘Baker Street’ might’ve been just another bang average soft-rock number – the original demo features the iconic hook played on guitar. And for sheer feel-good factor, it doesn’t get much better than the high drama Celtic-flavoured sax that powers Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Run Away With Me’ – a melody so ridiculously memorable that it became a Vine meme in which it was played by everyone from Dolly Parton to Ross Geller. In a tradition that possibly dates back to Bucharest-based Europop pioneer Alexandra Stan and her 2011 horn-playing tribute ‘Mr Saxobeat’, pop has made increasing use of the saxophone over the last decade. Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘Run Away With Me’ (2015) It’s one of the best known solos from Charles DeChant, Hall & Oates’ leading sax player since 1979. The woman they’re singing about, Oates told Classic Rock, is actually New York – a bustling city of “greed, avarice, and spoiled riches” – and the sax solo has a kind of neon-lit sleaze, like a wet pavement glowing outside a Meatpacking district dive bar. Originally ‘Maneater’ started life as a reggae track, before Daryl Hall suggested shifting the groove into Motown territory.

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