50. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - In The Ghetto (Mute)

 

One week at number on w/e 4th August 1984

In its original incarnation, the Mac Davis penned “In The Ghetto” was an enormous comeback hit for Elvis Presley – a number one in seemingly every major market around the world, re-establishing Presley’s validity and edge just as his star was in danger of waning.

Above and beyond all of that, though, it’s a genuine curiosity in songwriting terms. Over the years, Davis was strangely humble and unforthcoming about its roots and origins, referring to his childhood spent being friends with a “black boy” who lived in a rougher part of Chicago. “I couldn't figure out why they had to live where they lived, and we got to live where we lived,” Davis explained in the newspaper The Tennesean. “We didn't have a lot of money, but we didn't have broken bottles every six inches.”

It’s from this boyhood scenario that the story of “In The Ghetto” is supposed to stem, but it’s surprising that so little has been made – either by the press or the man himself – about Davis’ period spent working as a probation officer. “In The Ghetto” is sociological theory given an outlet in song-form, the cycle of urban misery described with every spin of the original record; let the needle hit the end, then lift it and return it to the run-in grooves, and you physically repeat the circle of neglect and life of crime every child in the same area goes through, and as the vinyl becomes worn and the music becomes distorted and uglier, so seeps through the steady decay. It’s a heavy load for a 1969 pop single to bear, but it manages.

Presley’s original recording is a strangely spacey and grand recording – widescreen and dramatic with its reverberating backing vocals, calmly plucked guitar lines and arrangements almost sounding as if they’re lifted from a Western soundtrack. “Paint Your Wagon” was a huge musical Western folly at this time, and there are echos of “Wanderin’ Star” about the gently shuffling wideness and melancholy of its sound. All of this is more likely to give the impression of a criminal cast out of society and forced to make his own way across a lonely prairie than it is the compressed and unforgiving environment of “the ghetto”. It’s a fine record, but it feels as if there could be other interpretations of it.

Enter Nick Cave. While Cave may currently have turned himself into the grandfather of modern alternative rock and a wise agony uncle for the broadsheet press, in 1984 he was an unpredictable ex-member of the manic and ramshackle Birthday Party, a fragile unit who sounded as if they might splinter to pieces before half their singles even finished. Neither that group nor Cave himself presented themselves as keen students of classic rock, instead coming across as nihilistic punks prone to screaming fits about all matters dark and gothic.

The fact that Cave chose a Presley cover to launch his solo career was therefore baffling at the time. A rock and roll revival was making itself felt through the psychobilly scene circa 1983/4, but “In The Ghetto” wasn’t the track to pick if you wanted to gain credibility from that crowd – it stems from the “establishment” era of Elvis, the point in his career where he was safely ensconced in his Graceland mansion and was no longer even a shadow of a rebel.

You can only conclude that Cave covered the song because he loved it, and instead of replicating it precisely or trying to scuzz it up, he instead boxes it into a minimal, slightly threatening space. At no point does it go wild, but the arrangement feels tighter, the slide guitar ominous, the drumming militaristic. Cave’s vocals, too, are not so relaxed, delivering the lines urgently, emphasising syllables unpredictably (you can hear this particularly in lines like “THEN one night in DES-peration, the young man BREAKS AWAY”). If Presley’s take on “In The Ghetto” is a cinematic sweep, Cave’s is a Play For Today version, alive and unflashy but still telling the same story. It swaps elegance for urgency.

It doesn’t usurp the original in terms of quality, but nor does it totally upend it. This isn’t Sid Vicious singing “My Way”, which I suspect some buyers and critics believed is how it would turn out – and it legitimised the song for a new generation. The tragedy is that “In The Ghetto” has never really aged, and a probation officer’s ideas about poverty, criminality and the cycle of deprivation and violence in 1969 was equally applicable in 1984 and indeed remains so today.

The NME on Strike! (But here's The Cult, The Smiths and The Damned anyway)

9 weeks until w/e 4th August 1984

Here’s where things get tricky and a messy, charred hole emerges in our narrative. In the summer of 1984, IPC went on strike putting all of their publications either completely out of print (in the NME’s case) or operating to a greatly reduced degree. Some of IPC’s comics made it out into the shops, for example, but with reduced colour and using repeated strips from the seventies. This meant that if you were a kid in 1984 you perhaps had to deal with the unexpected surprise of Sid’s Snake out of Whizzer and Chips alarming a punk rocker, or found yourself trying to make sense of a background gag about some 1978 chart hit you couldn't remember. Everything, very suddenly, went black and white and childhoods were catapulted backwards in time.

For the older brothers and sisters of those kids, however, it just went black. There was nothing emerging from Kings Reach Tower, so if they wanted a weekly music fix, they had to read Sounds, Record Mirror or Number One magazine instead, none of which really captured the tastes or tone of their favoured Express.

More problematic than that, certainly where I'm concerned here and now in 2025, it also meant that absolutely no NME indie charts were published for that entire period either, so I’ve nothing to show you for summer 1984; however, one possible compromise emerges from this mess. 

The Independent Singles Chart compiled by MRIB continued as usual, so we can get a likely sense of what might have been number one from the data presented there. This should be taken with a pinch of salt. MRIB’s chart tended to treat pop hits by the likes of Black Lace and Renee and Renato with much more favour than the NME’s somewhat more streamlined, specialist approach. In the summer of 1984, for example, Black Lace’s “Agadoo” got to the top spot on the MRIB Indies, but due to its more modest placing in the NME’s listings, we won’t be discussing it at length on this blog (something of a shame as it would have presented an interesting challenge for me, even if I doubt anyone would have bothered to read my subsequent thoughts unless I turned them into some kind of “Ahhhh! But it is pop perfection, do you see?” styled clickbait).

As a result, here are the MRIB Number Ones for that period, presented more briefly than usual, and to be treated with kid gloves by everyone reading them; none will be added to the Spotify playlist of NME Number Ones or referred to in any of the blog’s lists. These are only possible lost number ones, some more likely than others, but not to be treated as "official" chart toppers in the NME listings. 

1. The Cult – Spirit Walker (Situation Two) – one week on w/e 2nd June

Given the way this one was galloping up the NME Indies when we left them, prodding away at a track whose sales were already descending sharply (“Pearly Dewdrops Drops”) I see no reason to doubt this one would have got to the top; but having said that, this single feeble week at the top of the MRIB charts doesn’t exactly point towards a dominant presence.

“Spiritwalker” saw the final emergence of The Cult following the dissolution of Southern Death Cult and the amendment of the subsequently named Death Cult. The group, like some kind of chemical conglomerates company who were desperately perfecting their name to make it sound less garbled to the public, obviously realised keeping things sharp and simple was best.

It’s tempting to say that “Spiritwalker” was evidence of this tightened and more commercial ambition, but in reality the progression feels very slight. The opening introduction of the track is the biggest difference, acting as a very trad rock, hollered clarion call to listeners – as a non-fan, I was genuinely surprised by how engrossed I was in the first few seconds when I played it back for the first time in years.

What happens after that is a strange mixture of more Death Cultishness combined with occasional flashes and sparks of classic rock fetishism. The rhythm section certainly still have one foot in the gothic grave – the bass guitarist rumbles and rattles out root notes like a Peter Hook inspired pro, and the drummer pounds and thuds on the skins rather than the metalwork like a medieval minstrel. Elsewhere in the group, however, a clear love of noticeable guitar hero licks is emerging from Billy Duffy, and Ian Astbury is now starting to sound fully in command.

48b. Cocteau Twins - Pearly Dewdrops Drops (4AD)

Two more weeks at number one from w/e 19th May 1984

It's been a while since we've seen a rebound number one on the blog, but here we are again, back in the arms of the Cocteaus for two further weeks. Here's what was happening lower down the charts:

Week One

9. The Cult - Spiritwalker (Situation Two)

Peak position: 3

We'll come back to this one over the weekend if it's all the same to you - it was never officially an NME Indie Chart number one, but as we're about to find out, things got very complicated over the summer.

18. Colourbox - Punch (4AD)

Peak position: 18

More twittery grooves from 4AD's most dancefloor friendly band, who on this single sound as if they're edging closer to pop music, rapidly flashing Top of the Pops studio lights and the same carefree buoyancy of Freeez or even Break Machine. Only the extended breakdowns, lack of a nagging chorus and gasping orgasm noises prevent it from making the leap to daytime radio. 

Week Two

9. New Order - Murder (Factory Benelux)

Peak position: 9

Released over in Belgium as an exclusive on Factory's Benelux label, then charting on import over in the UK, "Murder" isn't really an act of generosity to loyal Belgian fans so much as a cast-off. It was originally recorded in Winter 1982 while the group completed their sessions for the "Power Corruption and Lies" album, and sounds (at best) like a B-side in waiting. By the time the "Substance" compilation emerged, that's how it was categorised too, relegated to the second bonus CD alongside all the other instrumental versions, dubs and flotsam. 

Sonically this has little relation to where New Order found themselves in 1984, containing tribal drum patterns, menacing bass lines, and spindly Twilight Zone-esque guitar work, interspersed with occasional samples from "2001 A Space Odyssey". For anyone pining for the atmosphere (no pun intended) of their earliest work, it might have acted as an interesting reminder of those darker days, but the average Belgian consumer must have been baffled to pieces by this one.

10. Husker Du - Eight Miles High (SST)

Peak position: 10

"Eight Miles High" created havoc with The Byrds "commerical fortunes" back in 1966, often being cited as being the point where their pop audience jumped ship to listen to material which didn't involve complex, meandering Eastern-styled guitar breaks and eerie, trippy observations on an England the band seemingly didn't understand, nor felt fully understood by (it's always been interesting to me that the group made visiting this country sound like an excursion to some mysterious and impoverished backwater tribal village - perhaps it was the drugs, perhaps it was the fact that Britain was still trying to pick itself up from the ruins of World War Two, but we can't have been as miserable and unfathomable as that, surely?)

It's a complex number to cover, which is possibly why the emerging Husker Du just dismantle it instead, howling, screaming and creating something which actually sounds uncannily like some smalltown 1966 garage act doing their thing with it. If the original is ill at ease with itself but nonetheless coherent, Husker Du's take is trippy in the most uncomfortable sense of the word, like someone who has taken acid at a crowded party in a strange town and now couldn't be further from enjoying themselves. It's a perfectly valid way of interpreting the song and captured the imagination of many listeners in 1984, beginning the process of Husker Du becoming a fringe cause for many music critics. 

13. Instigators - The Blood Is On Your Hands EP (Bluurg)

Peak position: 13

19. Exit-Stance - Esthetics (Revolver)

Peak position: 19

While Revolver was credited as the label in the NME's Chart (and indeed by the group on the sleeve) they were only the distributors of this distinctly DIY bit of goth rock - a very sketchy, presumably band-drawn sleeve houses a single with a black plasticrap label.

Sonically, Exit-Stance are underproduced here, and this is very lo-fi and top-heavy for something which clearly had ambitious to be a lot more expansive. "Do you worry about your spots?" the group ask, "Or do you - in a literal sense - put your face on each morning?" cleverly managing to make a point relevant to the anarcho-punks and the Goths simultaneously. No wonder it sold better than most other DIY singles during the same era. 

20. Break Machine - Break Dance Party (Record Shack)

Peak position: 20

In which the manufactured street crew are given an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to following up their huge hit. It jitters and whistles away in much the same manner, sounding like Roger Whittaker spinning on his back on a bit of cardboard, but also manages to sound like the work of a production crew caught with their pants down. "Oh shit, who thought that would be a smash?" you can hear them ask. "We don't seem to have any other powerful choruses to hand at the moment". 

The momentum created by their debut ensured that this climbed quickly to number 9 in the national charts before just as quickly descending again, but afterwards this particular Machine started to look a bit broken, unable to further build on their success. 

21. Quando Quango - Atom Rock (Factory)

Peak position: 21

28. Skeletal Family - Recollect (Red Rhino)

Peak position: 28

For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number One In The Official Charts

Duran Duran: "The Reflex" (EMI)

49. New Order - Thieves Like Us (Factory)

 

One week at number one on w/e 12th May 1984

“And it’s called love… and it’s so uncool/ it’s called love/ and somehow it’s become unmentionable”

It's not unfair or cruel to point out that Bernard Sumner has never been an amazing lyricist. He’s written a pearly line or two on occasion, but I’ve always suspected that it was more by luck than judgement – most New Order songs succeed in connecting with listeners despite, not because of, their lyrics.

“Thieves Like Us” is an interesting case in that fans have bothered themselves online for years zooming into the somewhat vague lines I’ve quoted above. Why, in Bernard’s eyes, has love become “unmentionable”? This is a huge statement to make for a man who has told us elsewhere in the song that “Love is the cure for every evil”. Inevitably, some have interpreted this to mean that Sumner is talking about bigotry around homosexuality specifically here, particularly if you tie it neatly to the line “It belongs to everyone but us”. I like the idea of this, but the opening lines bear no relation at all and it’s always left me feeling unsatisfied, as if it’s a concept that people would like to be true rather than central to the song.

If we’re meant to find a statement in this song at all – and that’s a big debate in itself – I have to wonder if it’s actually, subconsciously or otherwise, about music, popular culture and post-punk cynicism and where we found ourselves in 1984 as the AIDS virus began to make itself known. Love songs and balladry have long been the staple of pop and rock music of all genres and hues, but for the entire time I've been keeping this blog, there’s been a surprising lack of them. Here in the undergrowth, we’ve been digging up tracks which are furious about war and the government, irritated by corruption and occasionally tickled by lust. Pick through every number one and you might find a couple of straightforward songs about love, but they’re usually from moments where an indie label was lucky enough to have a pop group on its roster bringing in the money (Depeche Mode, Yazoo) rather than The Birthday Party, The Red Guitars or Tom Robinson penning a song for a lover.

Even in the mainstream, something odd was creeping about in the creative waters, in that even the ballads were becoming ill-at-ease with themselves. “Every Breath You Take” is an obvious example from 1983, although Sting knew exactly what he was doing, pushing the obsession angle as hard as he could. There appeared to be no such playfulness about the single which was number one in the national charts when “Thieves Like Us” entered. “Hello” by Lionel Richie is a sickly, wispy, yet deadly little record, like being smothered with a chloroform pad by John Denver. Lyrically, Lionel is left crying for his life on top of lines like “You’re all I’ve ever wanted!” and “Are you somewhere feeling lonely or is someone loving you?” (you really need to do some research before getting in this deep over a stranger, old chap). 

Elsewhere in the charts throughout its reign, there were love songs, but all seemed to deal with a fracturing of romance (“Against All Odds” and “I Want To Break Free” being two serious contenders at this point). Much has been said about the music of the early to mid eighties cowering under nuclear paranoia, but I have to wonder if the overwrought nature of a lot of our love songs at that point also points towards something rather unhealthy.

If you want to believe that “Thieves Like Us” acts as New Order’s defence of straightforward love songs and is effectively their “Silly Love Songs” – and I’m not forcing you to – it does make more sense. The track is New Order celebrating romance without being dishonest or reaching for the darkest corner of the bedroom to sit cross-legged and weep. It’s not very poetic, but Sumner does a good job of selling it, stretching his vocals surprisingly effectively when required, seemingly having decided that detachment isn’t the answer here; after all, what he’s singing about is “uncool”, so he’s free to let go.

Elsewhere, the group are a powerhouse. Arthur Baker may have co-written this, but they forsake the electronic jitters and splutters of “Confusion” for something where live instrumentation and synths sit side by side comfortably. Hooky’s basslines slide and crash, guitars distort, and the keyboards manage to sound somehow chilly yet also celestial; it's love expressed from all angles, the dramatic, the angelic, the blissful and the darkly confusing. I’m a firm believer that most pop and rock songs don’t need to be more than four minutes long, and that often groups are just hammering ideas for the sake of ensuring their hooks are fully absorbed by radio listeners; “Thieves” doesn’t waste a second of its time, though, filling every part with drama and intrigue, occasionally recoiling to shadowy and moodier areas. It ends with a bogus “record slowing down” effect which miraculously manages to sound effective rather than gimmicky.

48. Cocteau Twins - Pearly Dewdrops Drops (4AD)

One week at number one on w/e 5th May 1984

When I recently scanned back though old press coverage of Cocteau Twins, I realised that my perception of their critical acclaim was shot full of holes. My memory suggested they were universally gushed over by rock journalists for their innovation and their enigmatic, mysterious songs; an airbrushed and simplistic version of the truth, as it turns out, probably gleaned from the more appreciative NME and Melody Maker coverage of my later teenage years.

While they were generally acclaimed, the early-to-mid eighties landscape in music journalism was a lot more confused and inconsistent than that, featuring writers who had cut their teeth during the “punk rock wars”. Most disapproved of anything which might seem even remotely like a retrograde step back into stoned hippy “atmospheres” or spangly psychedelia. “How dare we sit around burning joss sticks and smoking dope while THATCHER is in power?” seemed to be the central crux to many of these arguments, to which the answer (always, whether the individual is Thatcher, Reagan, Blair, Trump or even Hitler) should be: well, why not, at least occasionally? Should we stop eating ice cream and tending beautiful flowerbeds in our parks and gardens while we’re at it? Are those also distractions put in place by The Man to quell the possible revolution? Is it an act of treachery to appreciate beautiful things when we can get them?

There were also others who felt that the group were miscast; a flimsy New Age noise slyly rebadged as something more revolutionary than that. Across the water, the US critic Robert Christgau was typically brashly dismissive on this front - “Harold Budd records in their studio,” he exclaimed in outrage as his opening “need I say more?” salvo, before eventually underlining the key point: “These faeries are in the aura business. So what are they doing on the alternative rock charts? Ever hear the one about being so open-minded that when you lay down to sleep your brains fall out?”

I strongly suspect, whether any journalist would admit it or otherwise, one other point of frustration about the Cocteaus is the fact that unless you want to be insultingly glib about their output and yell “Hippies!” before spitting at the floor, they’re actually a tough band to write about too. The lyrics are frequently flooded by the arrangements and feel incomprehensible, and when some coherence does seep through, it doesn’t appear to have any tangible meaning to possibly anyone except the group. This allowed listeners to weave their own narratives and ideas around their work, but doubtless snookered writers searching for something to hook a review on to.

Nor does the sound really fit the traditional language of eighties music journalism. It’s a consistently soupy, waterlogged arrangement and production which lacks the technically dazzling flash and scream of progressive rock, while also lacking the sharp whip-crack rebellion of punk or rock and roll. Anyone trying to interview the group was also often left with nothing much to go on; they weren’t big on explaining themselves.

“Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops” was actually their commercial peak on 45, reaching number 29 in the national singles charts, but didn’t offer any sops to either radio playlist programmers or the press to get there. They refused to appear on Top of the Pops and remained determinedly themselves, meaning the lyrics – of which numerous interpretations are available – are repetitive slices of twee bucolic imagery. There are several noble attempts to pull the delicate silk strands together into something meaningful online, but none (even one from an alleged insider who seems to claim that PDD is a coded poison pen letter to 4AD boss Ivo Watts-Russell) convinces me that what they’re doing here is even average lyricism, least of all complex poetry. What it means feels as if it shouldn’t matter to us, whether it’s comprehensible to the group or not.

Instead, Liz Fraser’s voice, filled with high pitched hiccups, breathlessly rushed and repetitive lines, and lingering hollering, is just another element in the mix. Intertwining with it, surprisingly jangly guitar lines emerge as well as that thundering post-punk bassline, but Fraser is the most flexible and impressive element – working overtime, jabbering, stretching her vocals and howling, the restless magician who both stops the track from seeming too hypnotic and delirious (imagine it without her singing to get what I mean) and also makes it feel somehow exotic.