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)

40. This Mortal Coil - Song To The Siren (4AD)

 

One week at number one on w/e 5th November 1983

For a song as tasteful, respected and covered by all and sundry, “Song To The Siren” had an unbelievably ignoble and shaky start. Tim Buckley made several failed attempts to record the track before finally committing it to vinyl, meaning its debut release was a tossed off version by Pat Boone (complete with Pat doing an impromptu pirate impersonation at the start). Less objectionable, but no less unlikely than that, the first broadcast version by Buckley saw him singing it (beautifully) on an episode of “The Monkees”.




Buckley’s version on “Starsailor”, however, complete with the heat haze of reverb-heavy guitar and his sonorous voice, finally saw the track becoming the kind of cult classic eventually taped on to endless cream coloured TDK cassettes and swapped between friends in the know.

Its visibility was starting to wane by the early eighties, at which point 4AD entered the fray. This Mortal Coil were a label project rather than a proper band, an excuse for 4AD’s owner Ivo Watts-Russell to build his own troupe using a talent pool of all the different voices on the label. A world apart from Pat Boone’s version, “Song To The Siren” is, in the hands of Watts-Russell, Liz Fraser and Robin Guthrie, suddenly something arctic, unhurried, debagged of Buckley’s weighty, elaborate vocal bulk. It breathes slowly, embraces absolute silence where emptiness has the greatest impact, and is unafraid of the cold and dark – Fraser’s performance is exquisite, broken but confident, always leaving the impression that she could push harder and go further, without her being tempted to actually do that. Just when you then think you’re close to reaching her, the song stops abruptly, messing with the fabric of time as it does so; you think you’ve been listening for a mere minute-and-a-half, but it’s clearly been playing for over twice as long.

The phrase “effortless sounding” is bandied around a lot by critics to describe all manner of tracks, from catchy two minute punk-pop wonders to improv jazz, and is usually pulled out when they can’t quite do their job and define what it is about the damn thing that works. The fact that I’ve apologised for reaching for that phrase doesn’t make the use of it any more excusable; but explaining why I find this version to be more effective than any of the many that have followed it since (from people as varied as George Michael, Bryan Ferry, Robert Plant, The The, Sinead O’Connor, Garbage and even Half Man Half Biscuit) almost feels like an act of science, like trying to dissect the emotional impact of one voice and its accompanying half-asleep guitar with a stopwatch and notebook.

The best conclusion I’ve ever managed to draw is that in this instance, “Song To The Siren” succeeds because of what it doesn’t do. In the same manner that a performer in a jazz or folk club taking the stage to do an impromptu open-mic performance can sometimes be the best live performance you’ve heard all year, it realises that laying the track bare, giving it an unfussy space and letting Liz Fraser gently embody its essence is the best bet – she knows exactly where to take it, precisely when less is more (which is interesting, given that some of her performances can be as showy and dazzling in their own eccentric way as Buckley’s) and her instinct aligns with the listener’s emotions. In her hands, this song sounds as ancient as the Greek myths Buckley was embracing, as if you first heard it forty lifetimes ago. The subtle, cold 4AD production just adds to the impression of a song trapped and frozen between two worlds, the ancient and the modern; no wonder David Lynch became so obsessed with it.

While it only entered into the lower reaches of the national Top 75 – which you may rightly deem to be unjust, but it was hardly likely to ever be played on Steve Wright In The Afternoon – “Song To The Siren” hovered around the NME Indie Charts for 54 weeks, keeping “Blue Monday” endless company.

33b. New Order - Blue Monday (Factory)

Number One for five more weeks from 1st October 1983

Anybody who read the preceding entry to this one could hardly be surprised to find "Blue Monday" back at number one. The indie chart is more volatile to tracks yo-yoing around the listings than most, but even the National Charts couldn't shake themselves free of Blue Monday's broad and enduring appeal. As holiday makers returned from the club nights they'd enjoyed during the long, sticky summer of 1983, demand was reinvigorated and it ricocheted into the National Top Ten for the first time.

For what else went on while it enjoyed a second stay at the top, please see below.

Week One

7. The Fall - Kicker Conspiracy (Rough Trade)

Peak position: 3

Way before New Order's football record, here was The Fall's, with less ecstacy and more hot dogs, lager and weary references to football hooliganism. "Kicker Conspiracy" occasionally sees Mark E Smith at his least cryptic and most everyday - even a Cockney Rejects fan could understand what "Remember! You are abroad/ Remember! The police are rough!" is referring to - but then he veers back into the land of The Fall and manages to make the sport sound mystical and arcane. To this day, I haven't made my mind up what "Plastic, slime, partitions, cocktail, zig-zag, tudor bar" actually means (I suspect it's a reference to the gentrification of the big game, but leave your own ideas in the comments).

Still, this is as populist and immediate as early Fall gets, and it's a corker, its strident, military march feeling somewhat appropriate for a Saturday session. 

17. Depeche Mode - Love In Itself (Mute)

Peak position: 4

The least political track on "Construction Time Again" becomes the second and final single to be taken from it, and while it worked perfectly fine as the album's opener, something seems awry on 45, almost as if it's a hook or two short of becoming the pop anthem it truly wants to be. 

Still, the razzing, brassy synthetic intro is powerful enough to stop the track from being merely middling, and Gahan sounds almost livid while he ruminates on love and its actual meaning in a society filled with anything but. In 1982, Martin Gore asked us what the meaning of love was and sounded child-like. Here, he sounds like it might have dawned on him and he's now embittered. A year is a long time if you're in your early twenties.

The final synth solo at the end of this track sounds as if Alan Wilder is making things up as he goes along, and that mad spree gives the single a much needed final boost, but it wasn't enough - this was their first single to fail to reach the national top twenty since their debut "Dreaming Of Me" (it had to make do with a number 21 placing). 

20. Play Dead - Shine (Beggars Banquet)

Peak position: 10

23. Under Two Flags - Lest We Forget (Situation Two)

Peak position: 23

28. Combat 84 - Rapist (Victory)

Peak position: 23

Elsewhere in their catalogue, skinhead punk group Combat 84 ranted and raved "Fuck Off CND!" and "It's better to be dead than red!" On this one, they go into an irate diatribe about how all rapists should be hung. "We want capital punishment!" they demand.

Their politics were much debated at the time, but hardly really need to be guessed at here. Remember - the indie charts are a very broad church.