Goodbye It's 1987... (or it was)

There's a pattern to 1987's indie chart I've appreciated experiencing slowly, and in depth, as I've written this blog. It starts with business as usual and lots of abrasive indie guitar bands topping the listings, then slowly morphs as sample culture and hip-hop and House music take hold - firstly in subtle ways, such as through the various Grebo crossover artists, then eventually with "Pump Up The Volume" acting as the final bucketload of water which broke the dam. The list of new number ones below doesn't quite give you a full impression of that, but the lower half of the indie chart really saw club sounds slowly beginning to ferment. 

92. 14th February 1987 (4 weeks) - The Smiths - Shoplifters Of The World Unite (Rough Trade)

93. 14th March 1987 (1 week) - Wedding Present - My Favourite Dress (Reception)

94. 21st March 1987 (3 weeks) - The Primitives - Stop Killing Me (Lazy)

95. 11th April 1987 (1 week) - Rose of Avalanche - Always There (Fire)

96. 18th April 1987 (1 week) - Wire - Ahead (Mute)

97. 25th April 1987 (4 weeks) - The Smiths - Sheila Take A Bow (Rough Trade)

98. 23rd May 1987 (3 weeks) - Gaye Bykers On Acid - Nosedive Karma (In Tape)

99. 13th June 1987 (2 weeks) - Pop Will Eat Itself - Covers EP (Chapter 22)

100. 27th June 1987 (5 weeks) - Soup Dragons - Can't Take No More (Raw TV)

101. 1st August 1987 (1 week) - All About Eve - Flowers In Our Hair (Eden)

102. 8th August 1987 (3 weeks) - New Order - True Faith (Factory)

103. 29th August 1987 (1 week) - The Smiths - Girlfriend In A Coma (Rough Trade)

104. 19th September 1987 (6 weeks) - M|A|R|R|S - Pump Up The Volume (4AD)

105. 31st October 1987 (2 weeks) - Sugarcubes - Birthday (One Little Indian)

106. 14th November 1987 (1 week) - Fields Of The Nephilim - Blue Water (Situation Two)

107. 21st November 1987 (3 weeks) - The Smiths - I Started Something I Couldn't Finish (Rough Trade)

From here on, nothing would be the same again. This is something which may sit uneasily with a lot of our more conservative readers. I'm also painfully aware that fans of some of the artists who jumped on board the groovy train remain bitter (We can all see the snarky comments under their YouTube videos mentioning "stupid dance music for sheep" and "selling out" - I bet you're all a wow at parties). 

As I'm fond of repeating ad nauseam, though, the UK indie chart wasn't just there for the lo-fi guitar-based things in life. While Morrissey may have fought tooth and nail to suggest it was an enclave for misunderstood lonely white boys, this was (like so many of his views) always patent nonsense. Anyone releasing a single through an independent distributor could sneak in, and anomalies have already made themselves known - reggae singles, funk records, psychedelic reissues, and then (at the more commercial end of the spectrum) the novelty discs de jour and unexpected commercial victories of the disco and holiday camp kind. Black Lace have entered more than once, and Renee and Renato managed to top the national chart while simultaneously sitting in the indie listings.

1987 also saw several House or House adjacent records enter, some by unlikely friends such as old school goths Danse Society. This should give you an idea of how much House and Acid House culture were beginning to slip into the creative processes of even the most unexpected songwriters and musicians; if even goths (never the biggest 24 hour party people) were starting to wave their arms around to the sound of a Roland TB-303, frankly all bets were off. Something huge was bound to happen in 1988.

Except House music was far from just being it. As Pye's messy replacement PRT slowly expired with serious cashflow issues and smaller labels saw Pinnacle as a safer, more credible option for distributing records, anything and everything started to qualify for entry to the indie charts. Australian soap stars, Radio DJs doing rekerds for charidee and club DJs aiming for exposure beyond Mixmag   - all these suddenly got in the listings, and some ended up being the biggest mainstream victors of the year. In 1988, our work will meet with the National Charts surprisingly often and to a degree we've never seen before, to the point where we'll be occasionally crossing paths with Tom Ewing's "Popular" project. The NME Indie Charts tended to give these people less of an easy ride to the top than other rival listings, but it couldn't entirely prevent the inevitable. 

That's not all there will be to it, obviously. The old guard will continue to hold their own, with "indie" as a genre rather than a distribution choice remaining largely dominant - but for once, the charts start to become a very broad buffet, a celebration of entrepreneurial spirit and club culture as well as the noise of disaffected kids with guitars. 

The new 1988 playlist of chart entries is opposite and, if you click on the link through to Spotify, runs to over 200 available tracks. Listen to it on shuffle and try not to gag on the taste of iced doughnuts next to sauerkraut, potatoes and pineapple. With a big rustling bag of acid drops for dessert, obviously.

The 1987 playlist appears on site for the last time below. Use this as an opportunity to kiss goodbye to everything you know, and get used to the idea. I can't rewrite history for you.

105b. The Sugarcubes - Birthday (One Little Indian)

Three further weeks at number one from 12th December 1987

The way "Birthday" sold in late 1987 was downright peculiar, even by cult indie standards. In a similar fashion to This Mortal Coil's "Song To The Siren" - with whom it possibly shared a few fans - it kept selling modestly week in week out, selling a thousand copies here and there. While other indie records were swift fanbase sellers in their debut week then ebbed away, "Birthday" kept on reaching new listeners who were intrigued by its sound. 

Such records always tend to bubble back up to the top of the NME Indie Charts during quiet weeks, and the Christmas 1987 period served Bjork and company well, allowing them to take the prize away from The Smiths during the entire festive season.

Here's what was going on lower down the charts.

Week One

6. Barmy Army​ - Sharp as a Needle (On-U Sound)​

Peak position: 3

More On-U Sound shenanigans, this time of the football kind - an entire track built around Liverpool FC football songs and chants, with "Abide To Me" sounding as if its being kicked right back to its hymnal roots in this context. 

While this one has been known to make drunken men cry on the dancefloor, as a non-football fan I just think it's an interesting and occasionally strangely touching idea - moments of terrace unity set to a steady, pulsing beat. Unsurprisingly, John Peel played it a lot. 

15. The Sea Urchins - Pristine Christine (Sarah)

Peak position: 7

The debut for The Sea Urchins, a band who picked up Primal Scream's fey sixties-inspired jangle and arguably upped the ante considerably. It's also the debut single for Sarah Records, a label who would suffer a number of inaccurate critical brickbats over the years but develop a fiercely devoted tribe of collectors. 

"Pristine Christine" is so straightforwardly agile and pretty that it's hard to imagine why it hadn't been written and released in 1966; whereas some of the records Sarah put out sounded messy and under-produced, this one strikes the balance just right between appropriate, luddite rawness and lovelorn melodies. A pearl.

16. The Rosehips - I Shouldn't Have to Say (Subway)

Peak position: 16

One minute and eighteen seconds of romantic tiffery on 45, which rushes past all of its ideas so quickly, and in such a thistly soup of lo-fi sound, that it feels as if you might have missed a key point or development - not unlike real-life romance in that sense, then.

17. The Groove Farm - Surfin' Into Your Heart (Subway)

Peak position: 17

Despite being lovers of sixties garage rock and releasing material which occasionally veered close to pastiche, the Groove Farm found themselves strangely loved by the indiepop kids too, perhaps due to their arrangement with the otherwise somewhat twee and snappy Subway Records. "Surfin' Into Your Heart" gives you a good idea of what they were about - quickly recorded, super-speedy pop tunes which may have sounded distorted and rough, but contained an optimism and euphoria few of their contemporaries could match. This 45 in particular sounds like a celebratory jig when so much of the indie chart was filled with either angst or contemplation. 

20. The Chesterfields - The Janice Long Session (Strange Fruit)

Peak position: 20

23. The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - Down Town (KLF Communications)

Peak position: 2

Drummond and Cauty had already got themselves into trouble with lawyers around the release of their debut album "1987 What The Fuck Is Going On", which provocatively sampled large chunks of music without seeking out copyright permission. As if to prove they had learned few lessons from their experience, "Downtown" sampled Petula Clark's classic, and the pair took the strange step of quoting from the Bible in interviews of the period, citing Proverbs 26:11: "As a dog that returneth to his vomit, so is a fool that repeateth his folly".

The Christian element continued with their collaborators. Recorded with the London Gospel Community Choir, this is one of their more polished and well-realised early works, combining sour, cynical and heavily accented Glaswegian rapping with a joyous, happy-clappy chorus. "Glory!" sing the choir. "What glory?" answers Bill Drummond (aka King Boy D) "In a wine bar world? In a tenement block?" Conquering the charts with a Christmas tune was clearly not on his agenda at this point, as despite the overwhelming pop and fizz of the chorus here, the tune is torn in two directions. The Community Choir are pulling towards the holiness, the preciousness and the generosity of the season, whilst Drummond points out the harsher mid-winter realities, only for a sampled and stammering Petula to chip in at irregular intervals. "Neon signs are pretty" she sings, sounding pathetic and weak in this context, before another hard-edged, shouted, Special Brew-sozzled verse barges her out of the way.

Early KLF records were often clumsy and awkward, and whilst "1987 What The Fuck Is Going On" was a groundbreaking and copyright busting album, it seldom had grace on its side, being filled with often clumsily placed distorted samples. By the time "Downtown" emerged, they sounded as if they'd finally got the hang of their direction and could no longer be criticised as being a novelty act - this (along with most of the forthcoming album "Who Killed The Jams?") is pop music with a bitter underbelly, the sound of a band absorbing the sounds and culture around them and criticising and distorting it. By the end, even the choir are singing "Jesus, what can we do?"

This is probably the finest early KLF single, and whilst you can't quite hear the future they'd have as mega-selling Stadium House releasing millionaires, it's a step closer towards that. It's certainly a pivotal indie release, and it deserves to be heard a lot more often.

24. Frank Sidebottom - Timperley Sunset (In Tape)

Peak position: 16

Sidebottom's typically ludicrous cover of The Kinks "Waterloo Sunset" sees him describing his suburb of Manchester with an affection which almost sounds genuine rather than joking; if Davies always sounded a bit sinister as he delicately trilled "I don't need no friends", Frank is only too keen to paint a keen, childlike picture of his community. 

It also feels as if marginally more budget and effort has gone into this than his earliest EMI releases, not that it really resulted in many sales outside his core fanbase. 

25. Society - Love It (Big Life)

Peak position: 14

Way before Bobby Gillespie chanced a hit with an Andrew Weatherall remix, the indie chart was treated to the spectacle of goths Danse Society collaborating with Coldcut on this record. It's not a complete success, with far too many spiky guitar riffs and distorted vocals in the mix, but is nonetheless one of the earliest examples of a crossover record - probably far too soon for either their fanbase or the House kids to fully throw their support behind it, though it seems to have picked up some more recent acclaim from the retro kids.  

Weeks Two and Three (only one chart published)

3. The Smiths - Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me (Rough Trade)

Peak position: 2

The final offering from The Smiths, "Last Night" slipped out around Christmas with barely any promotion or music video, feeling strangely like an afterthought rather than a swansong. As such, it suffered and was one of their least successful singles in years, reaching number 30 in the national charts and failing to top the indie charts, the first occurrence of this since "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" reached number three in 1985. 

Of course, if you're going to pick a song to roll the end credits to The Smiths career to, this isn't actually a bad choice; its lonely, looping melody resembles "How Soon Is Now?" without repeating the idea, Morrissey and Marr instead treating us to a music box lullaby of unresolved business, a ballad of ongoing loneliness. As The Smiths sounded when they entered, so they seemed as they left; isolated, slightly strange and unquestionably backwards looking. Instrumentally speaking, this record sounds like the end theme to a heart-wrenching black and white movie, where perhaps a priest or a soldier who is sent to the front is doomed to never experience romance, to always march to this funeral rhythm for eternity. 

As for Morrissey, he left the indie sector for EMI and, contrary to popular view, did occasionally produce the odd groover on the way; no Acid House for him, though, as he usually ended up having more in common with Shakin' Stevens when he wanted to cut some rug, rather than S'Express. He continued to find comfort in looking backwards.

20. Electro Hippies - The Peel Sessions (Strange Fruit)

Peak position: 16

29. Alien Sex Fiend - Stuff The Turkey (Plague)

Peak position: 20

A gothic Xmas single? Why not, I suppose, and certainly why not from Alien Sex Fiend, who were always rare examples of party-movers rather than the party-poopers of the Goth sect. Impersonations of Bernard Matthews mix with screaming, off-the-peg festive observations and occasional stabbing discords. The group operated within their own particular mutant zone, selling their records to the same five thousand fans, never really taking this business very seriously and somewhat getting away with it. 

For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number One In The Official Charts

T'Pau - "China In Your Hand" (Siren)

Pet Shop Boys - "Always On My Mind" (Parlophone)

107. The Smiths - I Started Something I Couldn't Finish (Rough Trade)

Three weeks at number one from 21st November 1987

If there’s one thing very few Smiths singles had, it was a touch of sleaze. They were often contemplative, yes. Weary, occasionally. Sardonic, sure. Spiky and provocative, maybe. Even at their most heavy-handed and sledgehammer-happy, though, The Smiths rarely sounded like greasy backroom razzle-dazzle.

“I Started Something” could be the exception, though – it was the first single to be released after the group’s dissolution was announced to the press, and is a strange outlier rather than a typical finale, pricking up my ears as a teenage boy for its peculiarly brassy arrangement. The way the record swings and rocks is reminiscent of the soundtrack to a strip-tease – have a go at imaging somewhere flinging their underwear into the air from the tips of their fingers to this if you want (though I’m not forcing you to). There’s a strange come-hither arrangement going on here, the sort of thing Suede revelled in many years later but felt atypical of The Smiths output.

On top of the glam swing, Morrissey doesn’t partake in innuendo, but instead delivers some regretful, hesitant and intriguing lyrics, appearing to confront the idea of getting in too deep with an unsuitable partner. Gone are the slogans and the forthrightness, and his lines are caked in doubt – “I forced you to a zone/ and you were clearly never meant to go” he states, “I started something and now I’m not too sure”.

Thematically, the song this reminds me of most is Pulp’s “Underwear”, but whereas that’s explicit and very directly addresses a dumbstruck victim who could walk away if s/he wanted to, “Something” is all chewed fingers and floor-pacing, hair nervously but precisely parted. Given how frequently relationships bend this way, with one party realising they’re never truly going to love the other, it’s surprising it’s such an unaddressed area in songs. How often do humans actually, properly fall in love? A handful of times in our lives, maximum? How often is that mutually felt, and how much mess and ill-feeling can any imbalance create, despite our best intentions? And when you’re with the unsuitable partner in a bedroom, pondering this over, and they say “the three words” you least want to hear at that moment, how do you deal with it?

There isn’t a script you can follow, and advice on this area is thin on the ground. Letting a lovestruck person down gently is an artform some Femme Fatales and Lotharios may get good at over time, but most men and women seem to stumble and stutter around, pouring drinks with unsteady hands or going to hide in the bathroom. Sometimes that’s enough for less deluded human beings to get the message, but people in love tend not to be firing on logical cylinders; hope outweighs hard experience. Unwanted lovers tend to ask “Are you ill? Shall I get you something?” rather than “Are you hiding from me? Shall we talk?” while knocking on the toilet door.

The conflict between the lyrics and the melody creates the brilliant tension in this single, and while I seldom see it praised much, it’s one of my favourite Smiths records. Morrissey isn’t a smart-arse here – he’s racked with guilt instead (but is any of this his fault really?) He’s Charlie Brown muttering “typical me” while rolling his eyes, as the band circle and swing and encourage him to kiss Peppermint Patty. If recent Smiths singles we've covered have seemed a bit too pleased with themselves, featuring Morrissey revelling in his certainties, this has a vulnerability which is both nerve-jangling and relatable.

106. Fields Of The Nephilim - Blue Water (Situation Two)

One week at number one on 14th November 1987

On a scorching summer day in the mid nineties, I was sat in the park with an ex-goth, swigging from a cheap bottle of wine, testily asking him about the old days. I was merely curious and didn’t intend this to be a form of psychological torture, but I watched his cheeks get steadily pinker in tone as he stammered his way through the ‘old lifestyle’. I began to feel unnecessarily like a BBC documentary filmmaker interviewing a departed member of a cult.

While we were talking about the music, I mentioned that of all the groups, I liked Fields of the Nephilim best. His face lit up, not with approval, but with sadistic glee. “Oh,” I could tell he was thinking, “you’re going to sit here listening to me embarrassing myself with my teenage vampire stories, then you’re going to openly declare that you enjoy the work of men from Stevenage in apocalyptic cowboy fancy dress? You’re getting both barrels now, laddie!”

And his rant began. Fields of the Nephilim weren’t a goth band, they were a joke. A tired, second-rate Sisters of Mercy tribute act in children’s fancy dress. A band for provincial goths, stunted goths who had never left their hometowns to visit a city, goths who had read far too much terrible pulp horror fiction, goths who were barely goths in fact – just weirdos with spaghetti western fixations. “Nobody,” he jabbed at me, “Nobody who was an Actual Goth ever liked Fields of the Nephilim!”

“Yeah well, they were my favourite goth band, so that figures,” I said, then changed the subject to something else, very very quickly.

I’ve thought about that weird moment a lot since, and have gone on to meet other goths with similar views (although others who also disagree; I saw a goth in a Nephilim T-shirt only last week). I can understand the vitriol. The Nephilim were, at root, somewhat silly. Andrew Eldritch and Robert Smith were arch and knowing, regularly falling back on plausible deniability, whereas The Nephilim built an entire backstory, a self-constructed myth which was too rich to ever be a joke. Their name referred to the angel-human hybrids of the same name in the Hebrew Bible, and they shot music videos which felt like five-minute apocalyptic horror b-movies – impressive looking (their director Richard Stanley later went on to make numerous feature films) but lower budget than a Garth Marenghi cast-off, featuring the band over-acting, as musicians will inevitably do.

They covered themselves in Mother’s Pride flour to achieve that dusty desert cowboy look, and were occasionally hauled to one side by customs officers keen to check it wasn’t cocaine. Oh, and they had a drummer called Nod. Apocalyptic desert cowboy groups should never have drummers with the name Nod. It’s always going to become a punchline, far more than the most ridiculous stage name ever would.

At the time – and even now – I thought that these discrepancies and incidents were far more Heavy Metal than Goth, and the Nephilim’s sound and lyrical content sometimes veered closer to Iron Maiden than The Mission or The Sisters; but that said, the dramatic Morricone inspired twangs that occasionally whined through their songs were coming from neither place; seldom have rock groups sounded so epic, so thrillingly, openly sixties Saturday afternoon picture-house.

If fate had taken a different course and he hadn’t shot his landlady and himself, Joe Meek would have locked Fields Of The Nephilim in his house in the eighties and demanded to produce them. Not only did they share similarities with two of his previous acts (The cowboy-dressed Outlaws and the undead Screaming Lord Sutch) thereby saving on costume costs, they also tapped into stories of psychic planes, and growled stories about radioactive contamination and unforgiving, howling deserts. There’s a fancy dress, boxed-in Englishness at play here – high-budget ideas, epic in scope, forged on low-budget trickery (the video for “Blue Water” cost a mere £1,500. Coincidentally, a freak hurricane interrupted proceedings, perhaps brought on by singer Carl McCoy pointing upwards and growling about the sky falling in, or maybe not).

The group also sometimes produced music which was truly great, and “Blue Water” is up there. The full twelve-inch version utterly sprawls, as drums clatter and cymbals expressively splash, and those guitar lines restlessly reach and descend and whine; even without a video, there’s a whole cinematic experience going on in your mind’s eye. Carl McCoy’s growling lyrics are almost secondary; the real appeal lies in the instrumentation behind, the sound of a group of frustrated soundtrack writers painting every corner with a new flash of detail. Brilliantly, the group’s visual direction also married perfectly with their sound – if you showed an uninitiated individual a photo of them, they would probably correctly guess their general direction, even though I don’t think there are many other rock-goth-Morricone groups out there.

105. Sugarcubes - Birthday (One Little Indian)

Two weeks at number one from 31st October 1987

As a kid, I developed a strange fascination for the furthest flung bits of the globe – the sparse, underpopulated areas which contained people I’d never met, whose beliefs and customs I’d never been exposed to. Living in London, I’d been introduced to all kinds of non-British people, even if they were just being irritating tourists in the street, but some places felt deeply enigmatic. I’d nag my Mum about this, initially in seriousness, then eventually just to be an annoying, repetitive arsehole.

“Mum, can we go to Greenland on holiday?” I asked.

“No. There’s nothing there,” she sighed. “We’ve had this conversation before.”
“There can’t just be nothing there.”
“It’s as close to nothing as you can get, it’s expensive, and we’re not paying all that money to go there and sit surrounded by snow and ice. If you want to go to Greenland, you’re going to have to pay for it when you get older.”

I still haven’t been to Greenland (largely because my wife isn't up for it either). I have, however, been to Iceland a few times, a country which was similarly at the forefront of my childhood obsessions. It’s not a cheap place to visit by anyone’s standards, but it is halfway to Canada, which has on occasion made it a handy stopping off point for those long trips to see my in-laws. You can pause, mood-bathe in the sheer weirdness of eternal daylight or constant nighttime, get scalped by a couple of Arctic Terns, eat some Puffin (or actually, don’t), wander around the wild coastline, or just walk the brightly coloured streets and feel as if you’re somewhere which has still clung on to its own distinct identity; which hasn’t been Big Macced up to its eyeballs. Aside from the hot thermal springs, a Penis Museum and the rugged landscape, there are no huge tourist attractions in Iceland as such, just the comforting sense that you’re somewhere which prides itself on its differences.

When “Birthday” was released, most of the music press seemed to focus on the country of Iceland rather than the group themselves – as if the entire population, rather than a single group, had released a new record. Smash Hits just listed some facts about the country in their “Mutterings” section and The Chart Show’s info boxes barely mentioned the group at all. Strange behaviour indeed, especially as The Sugarcubes weren’t even the first Icelandic group to get exposure in the UK; Mezzoforte had a sizeable jazz funk hit with “Garden Party” some years before (which we’ve covered in passing) and their parent Steinar label even had a British arm for a time, pumping out other Icelandic records to the British public by artists such as Puzzle, You And I and Joe Ericson.

The reason the music press seem to have suddenly become Icelandphiles became apparent when I finally saw One Little Indian’s original press release for “Birthday” - the vast bulk of it was covered in Iceland facts; proof if it were needed that many music journalists are idle buggers who, when faced with an inexplicable and leftfield record, would rather just copy the contents of the press release into their word processors.

Because “Birthday” is, even by the standards of 2026, a deeply strange record. The guitars whine and weep, bells ring as if struck by stray poltergeists, ponderous percussive elements wobble down stairs, then Bjork's echoing, sky-reaching howling seeps in to create something actually really very creepy. The word "beautiful" has been occasionally used to describe the single, but it's not a well sounding record to my ears; it reaches, it surges, it staggers, it collapses like a yearning ballad being played from a vinyl record on a boat at choppy seas. In fact, chances are if you investigated the noise, you would find an empty boat bereft of a crew, and a turntable inexplicably playing this – Bjork’s screech being answered by gulls.

Comparisons were made to the Cocteau Twins at the time, but while that group could stab discords and abrupt handbrake turns into their work, they were, for the most part, following fairly predictable melodic paths. “Birthday” see-saws uncomfortably, not wanting the listener to get too settled.

The video, screened on "The Chart Show" more times than I can sensibly count, adds to the sense of unease. The background picture is Bjork dancing and singing in an empty room with a darkened window. The foreground shot zooms in and out of Bjork's face, and as it zooms in she becomes pixellated like a Crimewatch video of a witness talking about a heinous murder. It's cheap and basic, but it again gives the impression of something slightly more sinister afoot.

Bjork later referred to this as a "tasteless pop song", clarifying: "It’s a story about a love affair between a five year old girl, a secret and a man who lives next door. The song’s called Birthday because it’s his fiftieth birthday... I was always changing my mind about what the lyrics should be about. I had the atmosphere right from the start but not the facts. It finally ended up concentrating on this experience I remembered having as a little girl, among many other little girls’ experiences. It’s like huge men, about fifty or so, affect little girls very erotically but nothing happens . . . nothing is done, just this very strong feeling. I picked on this subject to show that anything can affect you erotically; material, a tree, anything.”

Which doesn't really clarify anything concretely, except to say that from the foundations up (the premise, the overall sound, the delivery) "Birthday" is consciously awkward, naive and confused, reaching for past emotions it can't get to or properly explain, and seems to want to unnerve the listener with its ideas.