1984

 

1983 has been a fairly predictable year, one of continuation with both familiar indie names (New Order, Depeche Mode and Vince Clarke doing whatever he feels like doing in any given week) and familiar old hands who were IPC critical favourites joining the amateur leagues for various reasons of their own (Elvis Costello, Robert Wyatt, Tom Robinson). 

There's also been a lot of fury in the racks as well with the anti-Falklands War sentiment seeping over from 1982, and the punk movement continuing to have its say lower down the charts, although there's been a clear weakening of the grip in this respect. Beyond that, it's hard to point towards unique trends or unexpected developments which aren't in the shape of Morrissey's ambitious quiff. It's hard not to get the feeling that The Smiths weren't just damn good at what they did, the hysteria around their arrival was due to the fact that they were also introducing something fresh to a scene which was beginning to become trapped in a predictable post-punk holding pattern. 

1984 approaches, and without introducing too many spoilers, it does feel as if huge changes occur in the indie charts ahead, many of them practical rather than stylistic. 

For one thing, a sluggishness sets in which feels unfamiliar. The indie charts have always been a place where the big sellers have hogged the top ten for weeks on end while the culty new releases buzz beneath them, but given the growing number of dominant groups with long sales tails - yer New Orders, Smiths, Cocteaus and Depeches - it feels more pronounced in 1984 and contributes to a much more static chart overall. The number of new entries each week feels proportionately very low by comparison, and there are a couple of weeks where there are none whatsoever and the rest of the chart is just a shuffling of the previous week's pack. 

This isn't the only thing that's contributed to a less populated Spotify playlist than usual, though. There's also the small matter of the IPC strike which took place over the summer of 1984, knocking out production of the NME and also (logically enough) publication of the NME Chart. What might have occurred during that period is a problem we may have to confront later - but in reality, we'll never truly know what might have been number one throughout that summer period unless somebody turns up with a batch of unpublished information. The odds of that happening are close to zero. 

There were also bigger business problems in 1984 which saw Pinnacle entering a period of crisis towards the tail end of the year, poor sales for the valve electronics aspect of their business causing the receiver to be called in. While Windsong eventually rescued their distribution side, this led to a number of artists and labels temporarily shifting distribution away from the indie sector and towards major labels, also creating a sense of stasis in the indie chart for a brief period. 

Stylistically though, it's possible to sense a shift occurring. The first few Creation releases make their presence felt in 1984 (spoiler - The Legend! does not chart) and while only one makes a major impression, some of the others show McGee was very astute about where underground pop might be going next, even if the records he offered up initially were seldom more than "quite good". Indeed, elsewhere it's also possible to spot a few groups who would later be seen as none-more-1986 indie acts just starting to build a fanbase and make a bit of headway, no doubt influenced by The Smiths sudden appearance as the biggest new name on the chart. 

But that's what's up ahead. For your last chance to kiss goodbye to 1983, dig into the Spotify playlist below. The 1984 list of all available Top 30 tunes is to your right. 

Meanwhile... I've also published some handy data and indexing for the number ones over here. Now you have a map, you lucky people. 

Furthermore, as we're now 42 singles deep into this project, it feels logical (and less onerous on any sane reader) to produce an overall playlist of the actual number ones. This can also be found on the right hand side of the page. To avoid spoilers, I'll add to this gradually after we've covered each new number one. 

41b. The Smiths - This Charming Man (Rough Trade)

 

Returned to number one for six more weeks on w/e 3rd December 1983

The Assembly's "Never Never" may have been a huge chart hit, but The Smiths finished 1983 as an ever-growing and unstoppable cult, and in the world of the indie charts, the ferocity of the cult is everything. The underground kids are the ones marching towards Rough Trade en masse to buy the most important new record, after all, not the biggest pop hit. 

That "This Charming Man" managed only week at the top in November felt implausibly stingy at the time, so it's no surprise to see them back on top and managing to hold that position until well into 1984. It's a result that disrupts the natural flow and timeline of this blog somewhat - it would have been much better to see out 1983 and begin 1984 with a brand new track - but sometimes an excess of liquid causes the jug to overflow, and all we can do is mop up the mess around the table as best we can.

Here is what happened in the rest of the indie charts while The Smiths were back at number one.

Week One

12. Birthday Party - "Mutiny! EP" (Mute)

Peak position: 3

The final release following Birthday Party's split in mid-1983, the "Mutiny!" EP shows Nick Cave clearly moving towards the Bad Seeds style. While nobody would dare to suggest that the title track "Jennifer's Veil" was anything approaching pop music, the chaotic fury of their earliest releases has now totally been replaced by something much more controlled but no less sinister. Cave is the clear leader here while the rest of the group twang and strum behind. 

20. The Higsons: "Push Out The Boat" (Waap)

Peak position: 14

Charlie Higson and his boys were deeply unlucky not to score a genuine hit in the early eighties - if Pigbag managed to cross over with their angular dancefloor friendly post-punk, there's absolutely no reason why The Higsons frequently more commercial singles couldn't have become a bigger deal as well.

"Push Out The Boat" probably emerged far too late in the day, just as the tide was going out for this kind of affair, but it's an absolute triumph, combining taut dancefloor grooves with a sense of urgency and purpose so many of their compatriots were too cool to get close to. If it weren't for the fact that Higson eventually became best known as a comedy writer and performer, chances are he would have enjoyed a stronger reappraisal at the turn of the 21st Century, but by that point he didn't seem obscure enough or "serious" enough for the Hoxton Hipsters. 

21. Red Lorry Yellow Lorry - He's Read (Red Rhino)

Peak position: 21

27. !Action Pact! - Question of Choice (Fall Out)

Peak position: 19

Week Two

15. New Model Army - Great Expectations (Abstract)

Peak position: 15

New Model Army would rapidly go on to become a huge cult rock band, simultaneously blessed and cursed with a fanbase who were almost as fanatical as The Smiths' tribe, but often more confrontational. Stories abounded of interested punters casually turning up to their gigs and being beaten up for not looking the part. 

Unlike The Exploited, it's hard to imagine New Model Army encouraging this behaviour. While their political ideologies were often strict and puritanical, the group themselves were keen for the ideas to reach as large an audience as possible. Their second single "Great Expectations" is a sneering attack both on the way naive capitalist ideas worm their way into both the education system and parenting. "They said 'Son, it could all be yours, you just work hard and pay your dues/ Don't be content with what you've got, there's always more that you can want/ Everybody's on the make - that's what made this country great" - these are words which could just as easily have been written yesterday as in the Thatcherite sunlit uplands of 1983. 

Unlike a lot of the political rants that bind up the indie charts, NMA put across their ideas with both a degree of intelligence and relish. "Great Expectations" is a tight morality tale accompanied with a sneering thrash, and a chorus which Paul Weller (who they probably hated) wouldn't have been ashamed of. 

42. The Assembly - Never Never (Mute)

 

Number one for one week on w/e 26th November 1983

Where Vince Clarke's head was at in the early eighties is a subject that's enjoyed surprisingly little debate, but following Yazoo's dissolution he forged the concept The Assembly. The idea behind the somewhat practically named unit was that he and long-term studio engineer and producer Eric Radcliffe would hire a revolving cast of lead singers to front Clarke's songs.  

This is a fascinating plan which seems to have been borne more of Clarke’s wariness than any commercial or even creative considerations, and the only song to emerge from it is this one led by Feargal Sharkey. Sharkey was also idly kicking a tin can around in late 1983 - The Undertones were one of many punk groups to have found the commercial headwinds of the early eighties insurmountable, and their final album “The Sin Of Pride”, released in March that year, managed to climb only to number 43 in the album charts (15 spaces lower than plucky Oi hopefuls Blitz, to give some sense of how much even the punk market had moved on). The record saw the group trying to shift direction, incorporating soul, sixties garage and Motown ideas, but the end results failed to create a hit single.

By May 1983 Sharkey had announced the group’s split, and they struggled through to the end of a European Tour, waved goodbye to their remaining fans, and disappeared with surprisingly little fuss or fanfare given the levels of success they had achieved in their prime. A Best Of, “All Wrapped Up”, emerged in Autumn 1983 and performed worse than “The Sin Of Pride”, climbing only to number 67. The Undertones could seemingly win neither with a change of musical direction, nor with their Golden Greats. Nobody apart from their most loyal fans really gave a shit that “Teenage Kicks” was John Peel’s favourite single of all time, or wanted to hear “My Perfect Cousin” or “Jimmy Jimmy” again; that degree of reappraisal would take a long time to ferment.

Under the circumstances, Sharkey had everything to win and nothing to lose from sharing a studio with Vince Clarke. While the latter may have been in a similar position and was equally bandless and perhaps bereft of direction, he had recent success on his side. The charts also proved that Sharkey loaning his voice to a synthetic backdrop wasn’t going to cost him any punk credibility – that counted for nought by this point. As if to illustrate this point, while “All Wrapped Up” was struggling in the lower reaches of the album charts, “Never Never” was already in the national top ten.

His presence also doesn't really upend everything as much as you’d expect. Despite his quivering but tough “big boys don’t cry” vocal stylings, “Never Never” remains a quintessential early eighties era Clarke track. Had this been handed to Moyet as a farewell single instead, there’s no doubt it would have had the same impact; akin to “Only You”, it’s another delicate, spring-wound synth ballad, which despite the high-tech setting – there’s a Fairlight CMI in the mix here - sounds almost rustic. The arrangement knocks and creaks like a windmill in Old Amsterdam (perhaps inspiring the promo video, shot in a windmill in Essex), while the keyboards ring out depressive, autumnal chimes. There are moments where it even sounds like an instrumental excerpt from the soundtrack of a children’s stop-motion animation.

Clarke and Radcliffe are the despondent organ grinders while Sharkey bemoans his loveless fate – “Love’s just a door that’s locked and there’s no key” – and finally, it seems, finds an appropriate setting for his voice outside The Undertones. Their later singles may have been more soulful than usual, but were still attacked vigorously with their primary colour loaded paintbrush, leaving him in his usual role as the exuberant and forceful punk era frontman. “Never Never” allows softer pastel hues in, and proves he had a flexibility few might have suspected in The Undertones earliest years.

Following the success of this single, and against the reckoning of many music critics of the period, Sharkey eventually regained his footing and achieved enormous success by the mid-eighties, his version of Maria McKee’s “A Good Heart” going on to become one of the more enduring number ones of the decade. “Never Never” had presented his ruggedness in a pop context and succeeded, and arguably gave major labels the confidence to view his career afresh.

41. The Smiths - This Charming Man (Rough Trade)

One week at number one on w/e 14th November 1983

Retrospectively trying to describe the birth of a phenomenon is difficult. The further down the road you go as you pass the scene of the incident, the more it slowly retreats in the rear view mirror, the details becoming less clear, the conversation about what happened getting confused by the conflicting voices in the car.

Using that analogy with The Smiths, it sometimes feels as if the rear view mirror was also cracked and twisted, offering so many illusions that nobody is sure what’s true anymore. They were revolutionaries who changed music! They were reactionaries who dragged it backwards! Morrissey spoke to millions of lonely bookish leftists and is also a fascist! And sometimes, besides this, you find yourself leaning on the second-hand anecdotes from friends which may or may not be deeply exaggerated. I’m forced to recall an older friend telling me that he once saw a man with a broken leg dancing ecstatically at an early Smiths concert, so passionately moved by what he saw and heard that being in front of Morrissey and Marr was like a trip to Lourdes.

I heard these tales only from older friends because frankly (Mr. Shankly) I was ten years old when The Smiths broke. The first I truly knew of them was through Tom Hibbert and Sylvia Patterson’s interviews in Smash Hits. That magazine’s approach to all pop stars, whether aspiring or established, was to hold a fairground mirror up to them and distort their eccentricities until certain aspects of their personalities dominated, each interview acting more like a caricaturist’s sketch than a respectful, gushing homage. Paul McCartney became known as “Fab Macca Thumbs Aloft”. Rod Stewart’s nickname was “Uncle Disgusting”. Even when Tom Hibbert interviewed Margaret Thatcher, the one quote that shone through the final article was her icy reply of “Always be serious!” to one of his more flippant, joky comments (in this case, about whether Cliff Richard should be knighted).

Morrissey never had a nickname at Smash Hits, but the way he was portrayed in that magazine often felt more revealing than the reverence bestowed on him by the NME and Melody Maker. For one thing, his quick wit shone through in that publication far more than the others – rival music journalists seemed to want to engage with his cerebral side, ignoring the fact that his lyrics clearly revealed someone with a sharp sense of humour.

On the flipside of this, however, he also frequently came across as a deeply lonely and gloomy soul; the kind of figure who rose at Noon, watched a black and white film on the television while slowly sipping soup, and waited for the phone to ring. Not a pop star, just an alienated man with a lifestyle less appealing than the elderly widower next door; that neighbour may not have had much to envy, but he at least waved from his window cheerily every morning. The Smash Hits Morrissey would never have done that. 

I couldn’t relate to him, and he didn’t inspire me. If anything, I worried on his behalf - my Dad had a troubled friend who lived down the road, an eternal bachelor who had on occasion been sectioned due to his depressive episodes. To me, the Smash Hits Morrissey felt strangely close to the man I knew as Uncle Frank.

Also, for all their originality, there was also something very antiquated about The Smiths which felt odd to the hopeful ten-year old me. With the exception of the bold text on their sleeves, everything was deliberately black and white, frequently featuring pictures of fifties and sixties stars frozen in their monochromatic, pre-1967 world. This approach was not entirely without precedent; Paul Weller was also known to nod backwards in his choice of sleeve design and certainly sleevenotes, and obvious retro-heads like Meri Wilson and The Maisonettes might have shared this aesthetic, but generally speaking, early eighties popular culture was about keeping your eye on the horizon in front of you, not looking behind at a “better” past.

The older I became, the more I was won round. Musically they were often equally backwards-looking but less straightforward. The Smiths were proudly and obviously a “beat combo”, present to prove to the eighties that groups with guitars were absolutely not on their way out (an early review of “This Charming Man” even regurgitates this Decca audition quote) but this is where they ace it. Their sound is, like all brilliant groups, an inexplicable cocktail of everything that ever inspired them, combining to sound like nothing that went before. So much is going on here; the sharpness and brevity of sixties beat singles, the ambitious guitar work of post-punk (Marr has stated he was influenced by Maurice Deebank out of Felt – among others - but his approach is much more urgent and frantic) the taut, driving rhythms of a bass player and drummer who had obviously heard some Motown, all topped off with Morrissey’s shivering timbre, a sealion’s bray communicating one-line quips and deflated profundities, frequently with each following the other.

33c. New Order - Blue Monday (Factory)

Returned to number one on 12th November 1983 for one week

Groundhog Day hits us again as "Blue Monday" jumps up from number three to reclaim the top spot from This Mortail Coil. Let's look at what's happening further down the... oh.

The fact is, this event also occurred on a very dull and uninteresting week where there are only three new entries, of which one is a future number one, and another is just an old record we've already covered with its B-side flipped to the plug position. Let's not make a big song and dance about this, let's just get this covered and move on to the main entry tomorrow, I think....

New Entries (such as they are)

24. Alien Sex Fiend - Lips Can't Go (Anagram)

Peak position: 9

There are very few groups on the goth circuit whose career has ridden the greatest crests of the movement and also the most loveless troughs, but Alien Sex Fiend have persisted against all the odds, throwing an album into the shops every decade since the eighties (with the exception of the 2020s, though I suspect it's only a matter of time).

This is remarkable as unlike some of their more well-known peers, they never really had a watershed moment. Their only album to get inside the mainstream charts was "Maximum Security" in 1985, which spent one week at number 100; beyond that, they've never graced the Guinness Book of Hit Singles or Albums with their presence. 

"Lips Can't Go" probably gives you an idea about why. The first time I played this a couple of weeks ago, I got so pissed off with its unshifting, minimal electro-racket that I gave up halfway through. Just now, however, I found myself almost enjoying its clattering, pulsing, horror-comic dirginess, and who knows, a third play might actually spark something. You can also hear the approach of groups like Nitzer Ebb and even Front 242 in its basic sound, proving that they were probably just as much on the side of the emerging industrial music as the sounds of the kids in that Batcave.

28. The Escalators - The Munsters Theme (Big Beat)

Peak position: 28

This was originally released as the flipside to their single "Monday", but Big Beat obviously noticed that it was starting to pick up more attention and subsequently ran off some new picture sleeves with "The Munsters" being promoted as the A-side instead... and here we are. In any ordinary week I'd stick the boot up this one and refuse to dignify it with more than a link to the relevant video - it's a re-release in all but name - but we're not exactly spoiled for choice right now.

Questions should probably be asked about why exactly a twang-tastic sixties instro take on The Munsters theme should have been getting attention nobody intended it to receive, and there are probably a couple of key things going on here; firstly, there's the minor factor that Channel 4 had started screening old episodes of The Munsters on British TV in the late afternoons, causing it to pick up new appreciation from schoolkids, students and the unemployed. Then, of course, there was the fact that goths were growing in number and desperate to pick up anything which had any associations with the ghoulish, freakish and bizarre. While The Escalators weren't courting that audience at all, it's safe to assume that a fair few of them bought this record. 

It's actually a very effective cover which sharpens up the original theme in the way those cynical approximations of popular television tunes did on Decca, Columbia and Pye in the early sixties. The group's guitars sound sharp as pins and have the clean, preppy tones of an instrumental rock era which is now largely ignored by most music listeners. Even in 1983 it was a little bit too niche in its revivalisms for its own good, which probably explains its inability to climb higher up the indie chart. 

For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number One In The Official Charts

Billy Joel: "Uptown Girl" (CBS)