Written and first recorded by Robert Hazard (1979).
Hit version by Cyndi Lauper (US #2/UK #2/CAN #1/AUS #1/NZ #1/IRE #1/JPN #1 1983).
From the wiki: “The song was written by Robert Hazard, who first recorded it in 1979, writing it from a male point of view. Hazard was the son of an opera singer. He was profiled in a 1981 Rolling Stone magazine article by Kurt Loder. In the piece, Loder describes Hazard’s musical history as a musician ‘… who started out as a Dylan-era folkie, then spent eight years singing country & western. ‘I just love country music,’ he explains — which of course explains nothing, least of all the two years he subsequently spent with a reggae band … or his current electro-pop approach, which owes little to any of the above.’ Hazard also composed the 1980s New Wave and MTV hits ‘Escalator of Life’ and ‘Change Reaction’ which he performed with his band, Robert Hazard and the Heroes, popular in the Philadelphia club scene during the 1980s.