117. The Timelords - Doctorin' The Tardis

One week at number one on 25th June 1988

One undisclosed afternoon (or was it evening?) Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty – aka the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The KLF, Disco 2000 and now The Timelords – were fiddling around in their recording studio (or was it The Village recording studios in Dagenham?) trying to come up with a House beat which combined neatly with the “Doctor Who” theme tune.

Their reasons for doing so made absolute sense at the time. The Doctor Who theme is one of the most enduring and haunting musical products of British television; a track whose peculiar oscillations, screeching electronic pronouncements and menacing hissing sounds are understood by multiple generations. It had been released several times as a single, initially by Decca then the BBC themselves, but it only charted once in 1978 – on Pinnacle Records no less! - when that distributor and label found a mob called Mankind performing it to a disco beat, saw an opportunity and took the track on. It subsequently reached number 25 in the national charts, a huge accomplishment for an indie product at the time.

Mankind’s version has become somewhat forgotten in the years since. Far from being an uptempo disco monster, it’s one of those reserved, twiddly affairs with fussy basslines and clinical guitar-work, the kind you suspect was created by people who would rather have been in a prog rock group. More unforgivably still, the theme tune itself is reduced to a weak signal, a dying star, a fragile echo of the howling original – all its threat has been defused to turn it into a comfortable, undemanding and shuffling club number.

Whether it was fresh in either Drummond or Cauty’s minds when creating “Doctorin’ The Tardis” is hard to say – though I suspect Drummond at least would have been aware of the track – but just as Mankind manipulated vougeish disco beats, the KLF were clearly trying to jump on board the current trend for huge House hits using retro-samples. House rhythms just weren’t working for them, though; the odd thing was that no matter how hard they tried to move away from it, the only thing that seemed to gel was a huge, unsubtle glam rock beat. In the end, they gave in. The stomp and thwack worked its way beneath the theme tune, and the track built its way up from there. Current trends be damned. The single made its way to number one in the national charts anyway. 

An entire book (“The Manual – How To Have A Number One The Easy Way”) was subsequently published about the pair’s experiences, in which both tried to claim that every single step in the single’s creation was careful, deliberate and almost scientific in its approach to becoming a chart-topper. It’s a fantastic read, but accepting the contradictions – even with Drummond’s coaxing – can be difficult, and it’s better treated as a shaggy dog story combined with some telling insight about the music business in 1988. The biggest contradiction of all is that the duo were masters of their destiny, a lie made bare by the presence of its glam rock rhythm; a relic of the unfashionable close past in 1988, a steal nobody would have used out of choice.

Still, what was built from there, with the scratching and additional samples of The Sweet’s “Blockbuster”, Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll” and the chant of daleks screeching “Bosh bosh bosh Loadsamoney” and “You what, you what, you what”, was an absurd record which was both of its time and out of time; current, in that it adhered to the principles of samplemania we’ve already seen with Bomb The Bass, Coldcut (whose song title “Doctorin’ The House” is partially borrowed here) and S’Express. Retro, to an incredible agree, by dint of its dated rhythms and also to an extent its core obsession. “Doctor Who” may have still be going in 1988, but it was dimly floating towards its temporary demise. The “Doctor Who” of yore was the meat many of its older viewers wished was still on the menu*.

What Drummond and Cauty ultimately created, then, was something for everyone – the thirty-something boozers in the pub nostalgic for the seventies, the sci-fi nerds, the children who still watched Doctor Who, and the teenagers aware of a current musical revolution. It’s a volatile brew and one which might have stank the room out if the formula drifted even slightly awry, but what’s most surprising is that “Doctorin’ The Tardis”, for all its cynicism, silliness and brashness, slaps so peculiarly that I’ve never been able to successfully diagnose why I actually love it.

A big part of it is surely childhood memories – of Doctor Who, of glam rock on Top of the Pops, of being able to enjoy daftness for its own sake – but that’s not the whole story. It’s something about the bizarre alchemy at play; the hooks, of both a musical and televisual nature, piled on top of one another, yet carefully and craftily. There’s sense and symmetry behind the madness here. While Bomb The Bass and Coldcut bombard their records with all kinds of samples, Bill and Jimmy stick to two eras here, never using anything that could be seen as random or out of place. The catchphrases are current, none-more-1988, while the tunes are pure early seventies pop. The past meets the present and realises that beery boorishness is an active part of both worlds – that people wanted to stomp their feet and repeat call-and-response slogans in the late eighties just as much as they did fifteen years before. A drunk in the pub in 1988 wouldn’t dream of embracing a Gary Glitter record, of course (and not for the reasons we now wouldn’t dream of doing so; too unhip). When married to the Doctor Who theme and some silly comedy catchphrases though? Why not! The guard is down, and the boots are on the dancefloor. If we're being deliberately preposterous, let's have a party. 

As Drummond and Cauty state in “The Manual”, the construction of “Doctorin’ The Tardis” may be unorthodox by the standards of previous years, with barely a live instrument in sight, but it does at least stick to The Rules – a clear chorus, verses (of a kind) a neat fade-out, a quick under-three minute performance, a neat order that is undoubtedly more Pop than House.

BREAK

If you're one of the Sunday faithful logging on here wondering where today's update is, please accept my apologies. I'm taking a couple of weeks break from this blog to rejuvenate myself and rest my weary bones.

In the meantime, here's a list of blog-related things you can do with your time:

• Read the last entry on Fields of the Nephilim, which you might have missed given that it went live on Wednesday morning
• Look at the index and go back through over a hundred previous blog entries to see if there's anything you've missed so far (go on, give one of the more obscure artists a whirl, they're among the least read entries but are no less fascinating than the true success stories)
• Play one of our Spotify playlists of all the (available) charting Indie songs from 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987 and 1988 on shuffle
• If you're feeling less ambitious, listen to all the NME Indie Number Ones from 1981-85
• Read one of the recommended blogs on the right hand side

By the time you've finished, I'll probably be back. 

116. Fields Of The Nephilim - Moonchild (Situation Two)

Two weeks at number one from 11th June 1988

It may have been a constant feature of the NME Indie Chart from day one, but commercially speaking, goth rock was truly at its zenith in 1988. The Mission scored a number two album (“Children”) with John Paul Jones as their producer, All About Eve had a gold-certified top ten album, and The Sisters Of Mercy had emerged from the undergrowth the year before to become serious international contenders. 

While the music magazines of the period talked endlessly about grebo and indiepop, in alternative rock terms nobody was coming close to outscoring the men and ladies in black (except perhaps The Primitives). The Smiths were finished, and nobody had yet emerged who seemed fit to take their crown. That meant that if you went into a provincial alternative nightclub in ‘88, you were far more likely to be greeted by “This Corrosion” and “Severina” than “Nobody’s Twisting Your Arm” – and this situation actually lasted way beyond 1988. At the Rayleigh Pink Toothbrush, for example, Friday night was unofficially "goth night" until at least 1992, and God help the DJ if he tried to change tack for any great length of time. 

If The Fields of the Nephilim weren’t quite up there with the others on the scene yet, “Moonchild” finally saw them in the National Top 30, getting a brief moment in the “Top of The Pops” Chartbreakers section (a very cowardly move from the Beeb, I’d say – their emergence in the mainstream should have resulted in a studio appearance). They were never the most obviously commercial goth band, having tendencies to sprawl and meander. Carl McCoy would never snarl “Hey now, hey now now” where “radiation, contamination” could be used instead. He wasn’t a man given to glam rock cries of stadium or dancefloor unity, instead preferring to sound like some kind of harbinger of doom and gloom; The Nine O’Clock news from the year 2053 if read by a frail desert anchorman suffering from leprosy.

We’ve already explored why that made the group both so ludicrous and so special in the entry for “Blue Water”, and “Moonchild” is really more of the same, except perhaps a little less ambitious in its scope. If “Blue Water” sounded like the entire soundtrack for a film compressed into five minutes, “Moonchild” grips tightly to an admittedly solid central riff instead. They even jangle in a way which might get Johnny Marr’s ears to prick up on this one, so after each distorted run of guitars and slow creep of McCoy’s growls there’s a beautiful, glistening melody, adding some glittery sweetness against the sour.

What the hell “Moonchild” is actually about is utterly anyone’s guess, because the lyrics are as vague as Nostradamus’s proclamations - “Take your prisoners to the promised war/ You'll die for this,” McCoy promises harshly. “It's a righteous day but I'll remind you/ Don't live your life supply,” he reckons. It’s hard to understand what it is we’re actually being warned about, and as usual the group do most of the colouring in, each riff and every punch of emphasis giving his delirious worldview a semblance of meaning.

What is certainly true is that ex-Leamington Spa resident* (the town from which I’m currently typing this blog entry) Aleister Crowley did write a book called “Moonchild”, and this seems to have been the inspiration. Quelle surprise. Morrissey may not have had Crowley’s novels on his sickbed table, but the man has probably had more influence on rock music than any other author. I’ve never read the book, but according to summaries online it involves a Black Lodge and an unfortunate girl who is caught up in a magical war between two rival men; this gives us more of an inkling than McCoy’s guttural cries.

33d. New Order - Blue Monday (88) (Factory)

Three more weeks at number one from 21st May 1988

Well, this is an interesting case for chart pedants (and possibly nobody else). It might be tempting to treat “Blue Monday ‘88” as a new release, but it shared its catalogue number (FAC73) with the original single, so was treated by all chart compilers as a simple re-entry. Whether you went out and bought the original twelve-inch of this, or the new 7 inch version, or the CD Video single, or any other permeation of it, it was logged towards the same total. Some national charts even showed “Blue Monday” leaping up from the lower reaches of the Top 200 into the Sunday teatime rundown as a result.

This means it’s the fourth run at the top for the 33rd NME Indie Number One, but the circumstances this time are more interesting than before, and worth at least a bit of exploration. The original version was available as a twelve inch single only, a position the band and Factory Records refused to budge on. It made a jolly old mess of the chart display in my local Woolworths, so in the week “Blue Monday” was in the top ten somebody had scrawled “AVAILABLE ON TWELVE INCH ONLY!” in permanent marker on a piece of cardboard, right next to all the other carefully designed single sleeves. Peter Savile couldn't have wanted that – Tony Wilson might have considered it ‘found art’ and designated a special catalogue number for it, though.

Besides the memory of the horrible brown gap in the otherwise perfect row of Woolworths display teeth, there were other reasons a seven inch version might have been desirable at the time; radio stations wanted an edit of the song, for example, and pub landlords requested something that could fit into their jukeboxes (“Our customers have been asking for it”). I doubt either the band or Factory Records gave a cuss for these reasons, but over in the USA, Quincy Jones – whose Qwest label the band were signed to – had other ideas the group were unusually easy-going about.

Quincy, a man who was once rumoured to have kicked Michael Jackson around the studio floor ranting “Stop squeaking motherfucker!” in protest at his vocal tics, appeared to believe that “Blue Monday” could be remixed and edited afresh. New York mixer John Potoker, who had previously worked with Diana Ross, Ashford & Simpson, Scritti Politti and Candi Staton, was hired and ‘supervised’ by Quincy Jones, and ‘Project “No seven minute singles, motherfuckers”’* began.

The band’s reluctance to put up a fight about their classic single does seem absurd in retrospect. Had anyone tried to remix The Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever” in 1972 to make it briefer and sprightlier, placards would have been seen outside EMI’s base in Hayes, and no doubt Lennon and McCartney would have led the way. It’s hard not to get the impression that New Order still didn’t understand what they’d achieved, though – at the time, they appeared baffled by the record’s success, and by 1988 they seemed to be suggesting it had become dated. “It’s become our Birdie Song,” they scoffed.

Critical opinions of the subsequent “Blue Monday ‘88” single seem to have become harsher in the present century than I remember them being at the time. For most listeners, there is only one “Blue Monday” – the original twelve inch single which came out in 1983, and any other remix or rewrite of it is either sacrilege or at best ‘interesting’. None have really endured.

Thanks to its appearance on one of New Order’s “Best Ofs”, though, this one has probably lasted the course better than most. What’s most striking about it on first play is the sheer urgency of it all. Quincy and John brandish scissors and where they hear repetition, they cut it down to single phrases. They also dial the speed up a couple of notches, throw in incongruous samples of “radar”(?) and “Get down!” - New Order had never, ever asked anyone to “get down” before, even ironically, nor referred to Marconi tracking devices – and create a natural-sounding four minute single almost effortlessly. The most impressive aspect is the final minute or so, which twitches with digital propulsion, adding in some wonderfully simple chopping guitar lines, creating the kind of ecstatic, rushed climax the single never had before (although whether it needed one might be a question purists would ask).

While it shouldn’t be the focus of our attention, the video was remarkable too; not exactly another “True Faith”, but a chaotic, hyperactive, semi-animated rush through the adventures of the well-trained dog Fay Ray, who is asked to balance herself on disordered piles of rickety backroom chairs while the group also stand about one-legged on planks of wood. What did this have to do with the price of tea in China? Ask the video director, but even if you can’t extract sense from it, it is visually striking and at least communicates the new, twittering rush of the remix very well.

115. S'Express - Theme From S'Express (Rhythm King)

One week at number one on 14th May 1988

Bill Drummond once argued that anybody could have a number one in 1988, and it felt as if he had a point. There have been few moments in music business history where non-musicians could grab the top spot without the benefit of a major label strategy or a team of stylists behind them, but 1988 was an exception. Perhaps the punk rock dream had finally been realised. 

Except that none of the freakiest of these freak number ones, often released on indie labels, sounded anything at all like punk rock. There was no fury, disillusionment or thrashed guitars on offer; instead, the past was burped up on top of House grooves, and represented on television by either a DJ miming their day at “the office”, or a bunch of faces plucked from the latest dancefloor. A casual onlooker might think that the only thing these artists had in common with punk was the volume (and strength) of hair product they used.

Which could be true, except I don’t think that Punk Rock and British House culture were as far detached as they seemed. The Clash begat Big Audio Dynamite, after all, who were one of the first groups out of the traps to use loops and crude samples. Combined with that, many of the DJs didn’t emerge out of the High Street nightclubs of Britain; they emerged from the leftfield, bringing a diverse record collection and a do-it-yourself mentality, and the attendees frequently had an awkward but entirely self-styled glamour.

At the risk of complicating things, however, Mark Moore of S'Express was possibly one of the less marginal DJs. He had already achieved acclaim at the mixed/gay night “Asylum” at Heaven in London, whose style took on board the electronic edges of post-punk and House music. That instantly gave him an edge and a sense of flamboyance many of his contemporaries lacked. If Tim Simenon made shapes with his hands next to street graffiti and M|A|R|R|S’s in-person appearances on British television were practically non-existent, S’Express presented Britain with a camp, frivolous image – one of bright make-up, lame, thick eyeliner and a dependance on the cheap, thrift-store availability of the past (whether that involved the records or the clothes). If a lot of emerging House music DJs wanted to be seen as credible artists, Moore primarily seemed to want to prove that he was having fun and could also provide fun; S’Express dressed up for Top Of The Pops, laughed and sniggered, winked at the cameras, and pouted and beckoned like pied pipers (actually, some photos of the German disco ensemble Silver Convention show considerable similarities).

The music itself mirrored their image and attitude. On “Theme From S’Express”, Moore was never going to sample James Brown or Public Enemy if an irresistible riff from Rose Royce was there waiting to be grabbed, so a sample from “Is It Love You’re After” – a huge hit and not a funk or soul deep cut – is used as the central hook. It’s placed neatly over an acid rhythm, combined with prominent doses of cult psychedelic funk track “Crystal World” by Crystal Glass (I am proud to own a copy of this myself) and a brew of other sources, credible and incredible (it’s flash-in-the-pan US pop star Stacey Q, rather than some obscure soul singer, gasping “overdrive”, for example). It’s the sound of boundaries being pushed to one side, of frivolousness and silliness having a place alongside the credible suspects.

None of this made it an expensive pop project; the mere fact that the hi-hat sound was created with a can of hairspray was entirely a method of convenience (though if you weren’t told, it’s not even as if you’d notice). Moore simply didn’t have the equipment to make a satisfactory approximation of the noise any other way. The group’s thrift store clothes were, likewise, often a result of simple budgetary choices.

The end result is actually, for all its irreverence and scattergun focus, the most pop of all the House music tracks we’ve heard so far. It’s the sound of an ecstasy tablet being washed down with a glass of Cava, of your inner child allowing yourself to raid your older sibling’s abandoned suitcase of seventies clothes, of the once-loved records you left up in the loft being mixed with the vinyl you bought last week.

Pop music is rarely inclusive – the whole point of a pop idol is to give the ordinary pleb something to worship or desire – but the most punk rock thing about S’Express isn’t just their cheapness (in the best sense of the word) but their lack of snobbery and their relatable chaos, their understanding that while current trends and fashions bring joy, that's also true of the things from our childhoods we might have cast off into the cultural beyond. As one sample tumbled into another on their record, so too did their Top Of The Pops appearances revel in the sense they were getting away with something; a group of friends thrown together by a strange set of circumstances gurning and grinning like cheshire cats.