70. The Cramps - Can Your Pussy Do The Dog (Big Beat)

Three weeks at number one from 16th November 1985

Of all the groups to visit the NME Indie Number One spot, The Cramps have been the slowest to peak so far (unless we count Robert Wyatt). Formed in 1976, their wait for a stint at the summit position – and indeed a debut within the UK National Top 75 – feels sluggish to say the least. If it were any other veteran punk group, you would assume it was something of a Toy Dolls situation; a freak novelty breakout hit pestering the peak slot.

The Cramps were a strange group, though; their obsession with trashy, furious old school rock and roll and B movies made them seem a heavy influence on the psychobilly scene, which by 1985 was only just shifting downwards from its 83/84 peak. Then their proclivity towards PVC stagewear and even on-stage nudity, plus the use of heavy make up and the aforementioned horror flicks, gave them an appeal to the more vampish goths. Punks also appreciated the high-paced attacks they threw into all their songs, and then there were weirdos like Mark E Smith who appreciated them purely for being fellow outsiders.

Alan McGee was also a fan, and when they inevitably signed to Creation in the mid-nineties, bouyed up by the label’s influx of Oasis cash, I was astonished by all the number of my friends who suddenly came out of the woodwork saying they’d always been fans. Once again, the sexier and camper goths, anarchists and leather jacketed rock and roll boys who rolled their own tobacco nipped down to the local record shop to buy “Naked Girl Falling Down The Stairs”. “Ha ha!” a friend of mine barked delightedly on learning of the title. “You couldn’t get a more Cramps song title than that”.

I’m in danger of making them sound like a gargantuan cult, though, one of those bands who accidentally pulled in so many freaks and art school kids that they were a constant Top 40 threat. That’s far from the truth. The Cramps played the club circuit and lived in the cracks and airless caverns of society, supported by a loyal fanbase but never making sense to quite enough people to come close to being called a phenomenon.

In 1985, “Can Your Pussy Do The Dog” proved to be the closest they’d come so far to a breakthrough, and given that, it’s surprising how much of a step backwards it sounds. It has the same wide-eyed swaggering rock vocals of The Damned in their punk prime, a similar hollow, under-produced yet heavy duty whack to last year’s psychobilly movement, and very faint echoes of The Fall at their rawest and scratchiest (in other words, the group The Fall had ceased to be). The key thing to remember when pulling these various similarities together, though, is The Cramps were on the opposite side of the ocean in New York while all these things were occurring in Britain. The psychobilly scene owed them a debt, and similarities to any other punk bands were usually either coincidental, or entirely due to transatlantic admiration of their work.

69. The Cult - Rain (Beggars Banquet)

Two weeks at number one from w/e 2nd November 1985

Back in the days when such things commonly existed, I sometimes wrote for a radical politics and music fanzine called “Splintered”. I haven’t kept any of my copies, but from memory, it was a ragbag of rants, reviews, articles and occasionally heartfelt opinion pieces from people with nowhere else to sensibly place their grievances; like most zines in that era, if somebody had a bee in their bonnet about anything from body image to the fact that Gaye Bykers on Acid had signed to a major label, the well-meaning editor often gave it the green light, typing it up then cutting, pasting and photocopying it into that fuzzy, washed out grey copy common to such organs.

One opinion piece in “Splintered” had such a lasting effect on the impressionable teenage me that I would quote it to friends endlessly. It talked about the rapid passing of time, and the way that youth wasn’t a period of life to be drifted through. Why, it argued, it’s literally the only period of your life when you’re likely to have the Energy to Experience new things and the gumption to create, so Do It Now. Pick up the pen, the guitar or the paintbrush – or even all three! - at once, or end up becoming one of those old, crabby no-marks who either did nothing, or has only just started to try, and has found out that in the winter of their lives, they are flapping, empty binbags with nothing left to say.

There were a number of individuals the article could have picked on to prove its point, but for some reason it zeroed in on Ian Astbury for particular abuse, pointing out that he had started his career as an innovative, considered lyricist for a sharp and original post-punk band, then reached his late twenties and found himself capable of little more than some monosyllabic “yeahs” and “babes”. What a disgrace he now was, we were told, and what more evidence did we need of the undignified effects of the ageing process, which removed all poetry from the soul.

I wonder what the author of that piece thinks now he’s in his fifties (or possibly even his sixties). I hope he’s kinder to himself, and also gentle to every other writer who is still compulsively Just Doing It and never knew how to stop.

Should he have been kinder to Ian Astbury? When Southern Death Cult first emerged in 1982, there was definitely something primitive and spiky about the group, the hard right angles of the rhythm section meeting Astbury’s commanding howls. His lyrics couldn’t really be described as poetry, but fulfilled the dank, morbid brief the group’s austere clattering provided him; the frame needed to be filled with theatric wordplay rather than flowery verse.

As the years progressed and the group’s membership changed, The Cult simplified not just their name, but their whole approach – gradually, at first, then by the point of “She Sells Sanctuary” the metamorphosis was complete. The Cult became not “just” a rock and roll band – they didn’t look like another Motley Crue, Poison or Twisted Sister, and they certainly didn’t sound like them either – but certainly something closer to one than not. For all the flowing goth clothes and mystic hand shapes they displayed onstage, their reliance on anthemic riffs, almost meaninglessly simple lyrics and the good, solid thunder of a reliable backbeat became central. They emerged from the confused tarpit of early British goth and ended up somehow influencing Guns N’ Roses. It seems an unlikely story.

If “She Sells Sanctuary” was a glorious mix of everything great about the commercial and underground aspects of mid-eighties rock music, “Rain” is just Desert Rock – an attempt at a rousing stomper tailor-made for a video featuring the band rolling through an arid landscape in a jeep (in the event, the promo defies your expectations and just sees the group pouting and throwing shapes on a studio stage set, so obviously Beggars Banquet’s budget didn’t stretch to a shoot in the outback).

Lyrically speaking, its complete rock conservatism, riddled with cliches - “Hot sticky scenes/ you know what I mean”, begins Astbury, “I've been waiting for her for so long/ Open the sky, and let her come down”. The rest of the song just repeats the lines “Here comes the rain”, “I love the rain”, “here she comes again” and the words in the first verse over and over, making it deeply minimalistic. Clearly the lyrics do their job and allow the listener to forge an accurate impression, but they’re so effortless as to be almost childlike.

68. The Smiths - The Boy With The Thorn In His Side (Rough Trade)

Number one for three weeks from w/e 12th October 1985

Many journalists and media pundits will tell you that Morrissey’s lyrics are supposed to strike you “at an impressionable age”. The cliched image is of the confused teenager, plain, lonely, probably bullied at school, spots on his or her chin oozing a custard-like substance, listening to The Smiths alone, hearing words from a man they believed felt the same.

NME and Melody Maker journalists tended to pull these ideas out of their hats mockingly, though it’s hard to understand why. Most people’s teenage years are confused, bewildering and ghastly, and it’s not as if most of the journalists working for those papers would have been immune from that (odds on that most of them were classroom underdogs for most of their schooldays).  I didn't hold Morrissey up as an understanding idol, though; I loathed him as a teen and looked for any group or performer, anywhere, who was holding up a bright primary coloured sign with “Way Out” printed on it. I didn’t want to wallow in my situation, I wanted promise and to be told there was escape.

Escape finally came in the form of sixth form college (not all I’d hoped it would be), university (closer to what I’d expected, but not quite) then… oh shit. Seemingly I hadn’t quite worked out the next step yet. Or perhaps I thought I had, but I’d chosen some of the toughest career options imaginable, and none were working out. Each year led me into dingier and grimmer circumstances, until by my mid-twenties I was in such a volatile situation that a number of people had to do their best to both bail me out and pull me back together.

It was at this point that “The Boy With The Thorn Is In His Side” got plucked off a Smiths “Best Of” and played by me again and again, the words “And when you want to live/ How do you start?/ Where do you go?/ Who do you need to know?” ringing in my ears a lot. My own negative disposition was also addressed by the song, as I upset friend after friend with my frustrations and misdirected anger. Did I, for a few months, think I was the character in the song in the same manner the average, unimpressive fourteen-year old thinks they’re the man with the punctured bicycle in “This Charming Man”? Probably. Was I at least ten years too old to be wading around in these waters? Certainly.

Life is seldom straightforward, but in complete truth, there were escape routes open to me I could have taken if I hadn’t been both too stubborn and too proud. I also had a distinct inability to recognise my own strengths and privileges and turn them to my advantage (if I’d actually been more honest in my phone calls home to Mum and Dad, for example, I think help would have been forthcoming). Imagine my surprise, then, when years later I found out that the main inspiration behind “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side” was Morrissey’s frustration about how he wasn’t yet a proper pop star, and The Smiths were locked outside the establishment’s drinking clubs, awards ceremonies and ballrooms. Oh the fucking irony.

By the time this single was released, The Smiths were having a shaky spell. Their last single “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” hadn’t entered the Top 40, and while the pop world of 1984 seemed to at least tolerate Morrissey’s unorthodox behaviour and camp spikiness, 1985 was as unkind to him as many of the other alternative groups we’ve covered here. It allowed him space in inky periodicals largely read by students and young twenty-somethings, but interest among the glossy magazines and prime time radio and TV shows was beginning to shut down. They’d all distilled Morrissey into a basic and unflattering black and white caricature - a pale, sexless, vegetarian streak who was hardly about to turn on the horny teenagers or suddenly write a smash adult album like “Brothers In Arms”. There was just not enough cash or glamour in the quiffmeister.

At the point of this single’s release, Smash Hits gave him a front cover, but he shared it with Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive, and the accompanying interview saw the pair of them camping it up like two ageing actors in an end-of-pier farce (they both seemed rather quick to subsequently distance themselves both from the final printed article and each other).

“It’s a big step for us, doing this piece together,” Pete Burns said. “We could have done it for The Sun”. No they couldn’t – both their careers seemed on the wane and a tabloid wouldn’t have run it unless they came out as lovers.

If ever a promotional step underlined a central problem, and even accidentally revealed the focus of “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”, it was that. Morrissey’s grievances in the song entirely related to his own misgivings about where he expected to be at this point in his career (a central cultural figure) and where he was potentially sliding. No matter that The Smiths were one of a handful of alternative bands in with a shot at getting chart hits in 1985, and regardless of the fact that he had already achieved more than most of his peers could dream of, it wasn’t enough. Morrissey was not a man to consider his strengths and privileges either; being something of a success wasn’t the aim. He needed the adoration huge success could bring him. His “murderous desire for love” was all about ambition.

If that makes the single sound like a self-pitying indie take on Dudley Moore’s parodical “Love Me”, Johnny Marr once again picks golden threads out of the frustrated, tightly pinched embroidery. The guitar line isn’t just wonderful, it’s almost too beautiful for such a self-serving lyric; like one of Maurice Deebank’s most stunning runs for Felt pulled apart, slightly simplified and repeated, it becomes almost the focus, softening the message and making the indulgence deeply human and relatable. If the lyrics read bare and without melody seem like a tantrum, Marr turns them into a tight hug from an old friend. It’s a piece of spin so marvellous that you’ll rarely encounter anything so transformative outside of party politics, and it’s indicative of how well the Morrissey/Marr partnership worked.

67. Depeche Mode - It's Called A Heart (Mute)

One week at number one on w/e 6th October 1985

From about 1983 until the end of the decade, it felt as if every Christmas came accompanied with a Big Present; the desirable item that someone in my family (not always my parents) decided to treat me to that year. One year I hit the jackpot and got a home computer, a treasured Commodore 64 which kept me company until the space bar literally fell off it. Other years I was given brilliant gifts whose value I didn’t always appreciate at first sight – as with 1985, when I unwrapped an unpromisingly small parcel and a dolby equipped Sony Walkman fell out.

“Wow, that’s nice!” I said, before quickly moving on.
“But it’s a Sony Walkman!” my brother said. “Aren’t you excited?” (luckily the present buyer was not in the room at this point).
“Yeah, like I said, it’s nice!”
“It’s more than nice, that’s a fantastic Walkman!” he continued to protest, almost offended by my mild enthusiasm. “I’d love one like that!”

My casual enthusiasm was due to the fact that I already had a radio/cassette player upstairs and couldn’t understand the difference. I soon came round. Also among my presents were two albums I’d wanted for months – Art Of Noise’s “Who’s Afraid Of…?” and Depeche Mode’s “Singles 81-85”. I pushed the button down on my new Walkman and pressed play, straight into “Dreaming Of Me”… and BANG. The pulse and throb of the drum machine hammered around my head in pristine, shiny audio. Every deep bass note and synthetic twitter, breath and pulse felt as if it was plugging right into my heartbeat, blocking out the rest of the world and creating a slick, digital soundtrack for my daydreams.

Both the tapes and the Walkman barely left my side for weeks afterwards, and I familiarised myself with Depeche Mode’s singles like a scholarly monk, sometimes eating breakfast and lunch in the kitchen while they played, deaf to the humdrum family world (this period of my life was excellent heavy advance research for this blog, you could say). “Singles 81-85” is structured chronologically, which with a lesser group could be a mistake and might involve frontloading their flops and fumbles first, causing the listener to lose interest after the fifteenth minute. As Depeche emerged surprisingly well-formed and carefully produced for an indie group, what you got instead was a band slowly morphing before your ears as they go through adolescence (literally and metaphorically) and decide who they really are.

When Vince Clarke leaves after “Just Can’t Get Enough”, there’s no jarring change, but a noticeable shift in priorities as the digital bops and squeaks get slowly replaced by more lingering ambient textures. Then industrial sampling emerges by the point of “Everything Counts”, then suddenly they become a harsher, noisier group in 1984 – in common with many others at the time – before landing on “Shake The Disease” and finding a way of making all their influences cohere with beautifully and admirably intricate production and songwriting.

That wasn’t all, though. “Shake The Disease” was only the first out of two non-studio album tracks on the compilation. The second one, and the final track overall, was this single, which slowly drifted into my ears doing a spitting, hissing and huffing synthetic impersonation of a groovy stream train; how very disco of them. Then the bass burps emerged, the rhythms twitched, the song sprang into life, Dave Gahan sang “There’s something beating here inside my body and it’s called a heart!” and I found myself thinking… oh. Is that it? Is this the finale, the curtain closer on the first act of your great career?

When put up against the last two years of the group’s work, which under these circumstances you’re given no choice but to consider, “It’s Called A Heart” is a perplexing backwards shift. It’s lyrically coy and unbelievably simple; there’s no questioning of God or pondering the complexities of human relationships here, it’s all about putting your trust in someone romantically, just like so many other pop songs before it. “Hearts can never be owned/ hearts only come on loan” sings Gahan, like a speak-your-Clintons-Valentines-Card machine. The group jitter and bug in the background, sprightly and peppy, and they do a good job of approximating the adrenalin rush of fresh romance, but there’s nothing truly impressive going on here. We’ve all been led to believe that pop music is never “just” pop music, but there will always be middling moments where it ends up being little more than a happy jingle to make the day go by faster. While a top-of-the-range Sony Walkman isn’t merely “nice”, sometimes that’s all the singles you play on it are – competently delivered slices of mild catchiness.

If “It’s Called A Heart” feels like a surprisingly retrograde step, some hints were present in the interviews the group did to promote it at the time. Andy Fletcher and Martin Gore talked about the process in “One Two Testing” magazine in October 1985, and a sense of under-investment and uncertainty shines through. Each band member and producer Daniel Miller got a vote on what should be the next single from a demo tape Martin Gore provided them with.

66. The Woodentops - Well Well Well (Rough Trade)

Three weeks at number one from w/e 14th September 1985

In the Microdisney documentary “The Clock Comes Down The Stairs” – and indeed in some of the press interviews that surrounded its premiere – the group regularly mused on why they weren’t successful. The incendiary behaviour of their frontman Cathal Coughlan is frequently overlooked as an explanation in favour of other factors, such as the fact that The Smiths were dominating Rough Trade’s attention in the eighties.

I’m sure that this is largely true. Rough Trade were a small independent label often operating on creaky financial footing, and had to put the most money down on their leanest, speediest horse rather than gambling their lot on unknown quantities. The Smiths were certainly their prize filly, but what’s interesting is absolutely nobody in the documentary mentions The Woodentops, who were also rapidly catching up on the outside lane and were also stealing Rough Trade's attention.

The group, it seems, have largely been forgotten even by people who were actually in their vicinity at the time, but were distinct press favourites and earmarked as probable contenders even in the trade press. Rolo McGinty had previously unsuccessfully auditioned as the bass player for the Teardrop Explodes, and like that group, had a faint air of both the New Wave pop star and the magic mushroom guzzling hippy about him. His pixie-ish bopping made him a great English frontman in the Barrett/ Bolan tradition, while the group’s cocktail of influences made them a unique prospect.

McGinty’s rounded middle class English vowels met with frequently folky lead acoustic guitars, which mixed and matched with hyper post-punk tribal drums and squealing keyboards. The angular woodiness to their sound can’t have been unprecedented, but it felt simultaneously accessible and yet odd; the only real prior comparison I can think of is Unit 4+2 at the frantic and faintly psychedelic tail end of their career (give their final 45 “I Will” a spin to hear what I mean, but don’t ignore the better flipside). Even they never truly pushed the boat out this far, though.

McGinty made the approach sound very simple in a 1986 interview with “One Two Testing”, explaining “[There are] lots of different kinds of shapes but there's always this acoustic guitar and lots of backing vocals so it always has that kind of folkiness… The music of the drums, the bass, electric guitar and the keyboards is almost like a dream behind the acoustic guitar so the vocal and guitar are like Bob Dylan leaning against a tree, singing a song and the band is like a dream of the backing that's going on inside Bob Dylan's head when he's singing.

"He's not hearing this acoustic guitar, he's hearing this orchestra or something and he's singing with that. The acoustic guitar is just keeping his rhythm for him.”

They clearly weren’t approaching things from an orthodox direction, but the results could be astounding, and “Well Well Well” is marvellous. If you haven’t heard it in a long time, refreshing your memory is a valuable exercise – for one thing, it’s more intense than you remember, sounding polite and joyful but also faintly threatening. Rolo often sounds taunting while singing “Baby I know you like my way so wrap my soul and take it away” in the chorus, and the band pound, clatter and rattle like an old diesel train in danger of getting derailed behind him. It’s a steep downhill journey towards the buffers, or perhaps, in reality, towards a likely lady’s lap.

Usually when groups pick up acoustic guitars to enchant someone of the opposite sex, it’s done so with embarrassing displays of earnestness and passion rather than mischief, which is another way the group subvert expectations here. The fact that while doing so, they have a killer skiffling hook in the mix (Terry and Gerry would have undertaken unspeakable and possibly criminal dares to own this chorus) and know exactly when to stop is a sign that none of this is random, despite Rolo’s jazzy vagueness about their methods. It just feels eccentrically plotted, but unlike the off-kilter experiments of a lot of indie acts, it’s a scheme that Pops rather than jars.