120. Pop Will Eat Itself - Def Con One (Chapter 22)

Two weeks at number one from 30th July 1988

At some undisclosed point in 1988, Clint Mansell woke up from an appalling nightmare where his group were paid a fortune to soundtrack a McDonald’s advert. In exchange for this financial windfall, the group were mocked by the music press to oblivion, abandoned by their fans, forever associated with Ronald the corporate clown and a questionable fast food chain. RIP PWEI.

Shortly after this dream, he read a newspaper article where he learned that in the event of a nuclear attack, McDonald’s would be at the forefront of food supplies to some crisis torn areas; so the maimed and seriously injured would have no choice but to tuck in to a Big Mac Meal for sustenance. This dystopian image clearly tickled the band, and they went ahead and wrote a whopping great nuclear winter McDonald’s song – “Big Mac, fries to go, gimme Big Mac and fries to go” they chanted, despite a paycheque from Maccy D’s not being forthcoming. They could hardly stand accused of having their cake and eating it if no cake had even been offered.

If previous Pop Will Eat Itself tracks have been boorish and trashy, “Def Con One” is probably the first single where their impish and playful side comes up trumps. It also marks the dawn of the PWEI music critics and audiences alike came to respect in the late eighties and early nineties; if previous records rapped and thrashed against rudimentary samples and clodhopping beats, here’s where their technique finally seemed to gel.

“Def Con One”, in common with the likes of Coldcut and S’Express, is an unpredictable sample raid of pop’s past and present, taking in The Stooges, The Osmonds, Junior Walker and the Twilight Zone theme along with Run DMC, The Beastie Boys, Salt n Pepa and (most interestingly of all) the drums from Bomb The Bass’s “Beat Dis”, itself a very recent record largely consisting of sampled material. Was Pop really consuming itself this quickly?

It’s also probably the first record to approach the subject of nuclear armageddon – a common and normally sloppily handled topic in eighties pop – in the way The Ramones might have. If previous examples had approached it with fury and woe, “Def Con One” understands the urgency of the situation but uses it as an excuse for one final hoe-down. Militaristic marching feet are sampled on the record, but they sound almost joyous and dancefloor friendly; “If we’re going to go, let’s all go with all our favourite tunes and one last hurrah” the band seem to be saying, only for the loud explosion at the tail end of the record to put a stop to everything.

In common with most of their early work, it’s not a sophisticated single, and nor is it a subtle one, but it’s the first PWEI record to sound in tune with the times, rather than cause the group to seem like some grebo kids playing catch-up with current trends on cheap equipment. The way the source samples blend is unbelievably seamless and smooth, the juxtaposition of tack next to fashion never once feels deliberately ironic or mocking (even though I’ve no doubt a certain amount of private sniggering took place in the studio). The Osmonds “Crazy Horses” bray neatly next to Hip-Hop rhythms, Iggy slots neatly beside The Beasties, and the whole history of rock and roll, soul, disco and funk is screwed up into one final wastepaper basket ball before the three minute warning is up.

It’s incredibly close to the achievements of the successful House Music DJs and acts of 1988, in fact; while it’s still too garage punk in its sound to set the Shoom dancefloor alight, the principles and spirit of the age are carried through, as is the wit, the fun and the faintly inexplicable adoration of cult vintage television shows. “Def Con One” doesn’t share the easy groove and smoothness of “Doctorin’ The House” – it’s probably closer to “Doctorin’ The Tardis” if anything – but the attitude, the playfulness and the faultless meshing of styles is all there.

118b. Joy Division - Atmosphere (Factory)

Returned to number one for two more weeks from 16th July 1988

Here's what was going on lower down the charts across those two weeks.


Week One


6. Chumbawamba - Smash Clause 28! (Agit Prop)

Peak position: 4

Clause 28 was such a contentious Government Bill in 1988 that besides the national press, just about every music magazine – including Smash Hits – covered it. It stated that Local Authorities should “not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".

Boy George released the single “No Clause 28” in protest, which didn’t pick up much airplay and failed to reach the Top 40 (although somewhat strangely, Radio One did hold a phone-in debate about whether it should be playlisted, a move which smacked of BBC boardroom compromises). Chumbawamba also stuck their oar in with this effort, which was never really angling for airplay to begin with. It ricochets between punk thrash and more subdued, murmured elements where the most biting lyrics can be found: “You keep throwing stones though your house is made of glass/ you've helped to make Mccarthyism popular, at last” they state.

Clause 28 should feel like a quaint eighties relic from less enlightened times, but thanks to the continuing political popularity of Reform UK and a hard right wing media, it feels as if needn’t necessarily be. Bad Thatcher tribute acts, like anarcho-punk, will seemingly always be with us.

7. The Sea Urchins - Solace (Sarah)

Peak position: 5

It's somewhat peculiar how all the releases on Sarah Records get lumped in with the "twee" tag when in reality, the output of the label was quite diverse. "Solace" by The Sea Urchins is proof of that – rather than being flowery or flimsy, it’s really under-produced and slightly underheated garage psychedelia. The vocals wail and harmonise like The Gibb Brothers on "Have You Heard The Word", overloaded guitar solos buzz around the room like aggravated wasps, and the whole thing sounds like a sixties demo or outtake.

I can't be alone in thinking that the budget production and distorted elements get in the way of the song breaking through in places; I've always had the impression that if "Solace" had actually been given a more sympathetic studio treatment, it could be close to early Primal Scream. But it's also the needles-into-the-red garden shed sound to this single that sets it apart. Very few other bands aping this sound at the time were quite so rough and ready, or so aggressively dreamy.

12. Another Sunny Day - I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist (Sarah)

Peak position: 12

And indeed, whenever a music journalist seeks to skewer the output of Sarah Records with their case for the prosecution, "I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist" is sometimes first on the list. And why in hell not, I suppose? This, really, is a mere minute-and-a-half of sparsely recorded guitar plucking and musing on unrequited love, the musical template for weak, fragile young souls with tea-stained Sartre books hiding in their satchels that they're never actually going to read. AmIrite?

Not really. While I can't get geared up for this single in the manner that a lot of Sarah aficionados can, its economy of style and folksy melody are significant plus points. There's an awful lot going on within not much time, in a manner that the best sixties folk rockers managed but very few cult indie figures did.

Lyrically, of course, it's as simplistic as anything ever produced by a hair metal band, if not more so - it has delicate sensitivity in buckets, but Harvey Williams (the main driving force behind ASD) despairs "I could speak to you, you could speak to me/ Oh but it will never happen, what will be will be", which feels like peak adolescent romantic idealism. He's in love with a girl who doesn't know he exists, purely because her dialogue with him has been non-existent. All she's aware of is that occasional intense gaze across the playground, which is getting more and more intense and uncomfortable by the day... pack it in, Harvey. She probably fancies a boy in the year above anyway.

As is often the way with indiepop, though, swap the gender roles around in the song to the more traditional "I'm In Love With A Boy Who Doesn't Know I Exist", and the creepiness and hopelessness somehow fades away. Which is maybe at least half the point.

13. The Springfields - Sunflower (Sarah)​

Peak position: 13

Not Dusty Springfield’s original combo reunited on Sarah Records, of course, but a Chicago group of the same name who found themselves washed up on that Bristol label.

The single’s debt to The Byrds is so obvious that it’s barely worth mentioning, but I’ll take great sounding Byrds copyists over clumsy original thinkers any day of the week, and “Sunflower” is sumptuous, sure-footed, pretty, deceptively complicated and, of course, jangly. A lot of British indie groups would love to have written it, but wouldn’t have been capable.

25. Drug Free America - Day-Glo Pussycat (Blind Eye)

Peak position: 16

Cult group who occasionally defied categorisation, seeming to indulge themselves in heavy rock, synth-pop or industrial depending on their mood that day, or even that verse or chorus.

“Day-Glo Pussycat” is an example of how agitated and twitchy they could be. Somewhere buried in this mix is a perfectly commercial track, but its suffocated beneath the shouting and chaos.

27. The Golden Dawn - My Secret World (Sarah)

Peak position: 21


Week Two


17. Mirage - Push The Beat (Debut)

Peak position: 17


24. Goldtop - Introduction (Gee Street)

Peak position: 24

Seemingly the only single release by Paul O’Kane aka Gold Top, a British hip-hop artist. “Introduction” is a rough and ready track which suggested that he potentially had more petrol in the tank than either Gee Street or others were prepared to use.

As unlikely as it sounds, these days he’s a singer-songwriter who has since released other work on Soundcloud; I had to double-check my research as it sounds utterly nothing like “Introduction”, but sometimes first impressions can obviously be misleading.





26. Robert Lloyd and the New Four Seasons - Something Nice (In Tape)

Peak position: 6

Robert Lloyd, ex-head of Vindaloo Records and lead singer of Brummie indie group The Nightingales (victims of endless lazy and slightly inaccurate "They're Birmingham's answer to The Fall!!!" music press reviews) was reasonably well known by 1988. The Nightingales were behind numerous cult indie classics, but once they split in 1986 he clearly decided that his solo career would veer in a poppier direction. The false group name Robert Lloyd & The New Four Seasons was initially created for this very purpose, and very quietly and quickly dropped to become plain old "Robert Lloyd"; I presume this happened when someone got antsy that the actual Four Seasons would take legal action. Somewhere on a cutting room floor, perhaps this was even a subplot in the "Jersey Boys" film - "I cannot believe da noive of this Nightingales guy".

"Something Nice" proved Lloyd could clearly have a pop career if he wanted and had enough of a tail wind behind him. It's a stomping, bold, brassy and incredibly catchy track lyrically focused on some kind of mid-life crisis. "I get scared that something nice will fly by", Lloyd panics. "Every time I'm ill I think I'm dying" he clarifies later on, "every time I'm sad I feel like crying/ this is the state I've got myself in". For all that, this propels along in a strident, chirpy, almost festive fashion, sounding like a hit Edwyn Collins never had. The twelve inch version is better still, revealing a restless itinerary of midlife woes which have become uncomfortably relatable.

This received a strong amount of evening airplay on Radio One, and caused A&R staff at Virgin Records to eventually get in touch. He was signed to the label and released the "Me and My Mouth" LP and the rather ace single "Funeral Stomp" which utterly and undeservedly stiffed. Virgin dropped him, and there would then be nothing much from Lloyd until The Nightingales reformed in 2006.

For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forum

Number One In The National Charts

Glenn Medeiros: "Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You" (London)

119. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Mercy Seat (Mute)

One week at number one on 9th July 1988

On one of the first warm days of Spring in 2014, I left my flat in Streatham to witness a commotion. A vortex of crows was cawing angrily overhead, and the subject of the fury seemed to be one of their own kind – he (or she) was sprawled on the road like a sack flapping in the breeze while two others gouged and grabbed at his neck. As I approached, the attackers flitted nervously away, and their victim flopped upside down, legs in the air, blood dripping from its wings, apparently dead.

As I got closer, and the noise of the other crows disappeared into the distance, he suddenly came back to life – clearly it was all a bluff. He discreetly limped and hopped away to God knows where. His wounds looked significant, and I have no idea whether he lived or died.

Corvids are rough birds, but they will very rarely turn on members of their own flocks without reason, and certainly not usually so viciously. If an attack of the nature I witnessed occurs, sanctioned by the flock as a whole, it normally means that a non-member has encroached on their territory and attempted something serious, or one of their own has been responsible for a major transgression and must be dispensed with for the good of the whole. For crow society to function effectively, the dangerous and the unruly must be destroyed. I realise that this sounds cliched, and as if I’m writing the opening paragraphs of some pulp Horror novel, but my excuse is that it was real and genuinely weird and unsettling to witness.

Human beings are more sophisticated than crows, but some societies around the world still function according to the same logic. Death row in America is one such place where people end up if society has decided that their behaviour is a dangerous and unsolvable problem. Rather than being dealt with immediately, though, the majority wait for years; making appeals, hoping against probable hope that their sentence will be downgraded. Humans are less swift or reactive than crows. Our heightened sense of fairness can accidentally result in a kind of cruelty which might be worse.

“The Mercy Seat” touches on the wait on the way to the executioner’s chair (“In a way I’m yearning to be done with all this weighing up of proof”) but is clearly about the end of the road – the nervous, racing panic ahead of the final moment. Its slow to start, with the narrator slowly growling a bit of unpromising background information, before the song really begins to get interesting as Cave mutters: “A ragged cup, a twisted mop/ The face of Jesus in my soup/ Those sinister dinner deals/ The meal trolley's wicked wheels/ A hooked bone rising from my food/ All things either good or un-good”.

Sometimes, the best rock and pop music uses its brief run-time, its narrow canvas, to communicate a sense of tension around one specific moment. In more traditional songs, its often romantic – can we kiss, should we kiss, now we’ve done it, what does it mean? – in alternative rock, however, we can be taken beyond those everyday human emotions and placed in extraordinary situations we are unlikely to personally experience. Cave here communicates the intensity, the warped realness of the everyday while someone waits to be killed; everything carries significance, and morphs almost cartoonishly into a threat, a hint or a judgement.

Or - even a joke. As the protagonist goes towards the electric chair, he compares his fate with that of Jesus, but can’t resist jumping on the irony of the fact that God came back to Earth as a carpenter, and was finally killed on a wooden cross. Everything, it seems, has a twisted pattern, not just the bones in his food.

“The Mercy Seat” pokes at bitter ironies and contradictions obsessively, in particular the idea that the Bible is filled with both New Testament forgiveness and Old Testament rage, and picks up speed like a rattling train. It’s one of the only songs I can think of which uses the ancient pop device of repeating the chorus to fade to artistic (rather than commercial) effect – whereas other tracks are marking time and hammering their hookiest ideas for radio play, it has a clear purpose here; to communicate the prisoner’s racing brain and panicked response to his situation. The more he sings “I’m not afraid to die”, the less you believe him; the Bad Seeds are contradicting the idea, piling more thunder behind the words.

Eventually he even contradicts himself. On the twelfth repeat of the chorus, the line “Anyway I told the truth/ and I’m not afraid to die” changes to “I’m not afraid to lie”. On the final repeat he sings “I’m afraid I told a lie”. Is the prisoner finally facing up to his own denial and giving up the pretence, or facing up to God? And is it an irony in itself that it takes staring in the face of death to admit that you were lying all along?

118. Joy Division - Atmosphere (Factory)

One week at number one on 2nd July 1988

It’s another strange backwards step for the blog. “Atmosphere” was originally released in the UK in 1980 and topped the MRIB Indie Charts in October of that year. That occurred, however, around six months before the NME introduced their nationally compiled indie listings*, so for our purposes, it’s the 118th new number one.

Its re-release was greeted with a certain amount of criticism, being regarded in some quarters as exploitative, using Ian Curtis’s death and some deeply morbid visual imagery as a way of increasing sales of Joy Division’s “Substance” compilation. New Order were interviewed on Snub TV on BBC2, where the subject was somewhat testily broached.

In the interview, you can see Bernard Sumner bristling slightly, while Peter Hook responds calmly, stating that “we felt that the Joy Division ‘Substance’ was more valid than the New Order ‘Substance’, which Rob and Tony thought was more valid than the Joy Division ‘Substance’, so we decided to do both... [and] we took a single off [both]. It was quite straightforward – one wasn’t exploited more than the other...”

Bernard Sumner, meanwhile, thought that “the [Anton Corbijn directed] video was a reflection of the press’s view of Joy Division…. This man has become a legend through his music.”

The video for the reissue remains a deeply strange offering. Corbijn takes the black and white Super 8 approach of his recent promos for Depeche Mode, but instead shoots still, slow footage of shuffling mourners in both black and white shrouds (with pluses and minuses on them) who are seen moving in unison, holding up giant posters of Ian Curtis, and even occasionally losing their footing; viewed one way, it’s a fascinating piece of art. Viewed another, it’s mawkish, almost mocking – treating Ian Curtis as the leader of some remote religious cult (and this is before we even get on to the similarity of the shrouds to KKK costumes). It sometimes feels as if it was developed to force the viewer to question their relationship with Joy Division’s music, and if that’s the case, it’s one of the most non-promotional “promo” videos ever – but how typical of Factory Records.

The record itself, of course, is one of the group’s finest, whatever window dressing or context its given; a slowly unfolding and strangely wide open, airy track which often feels as if its gliding above Curtis’s solemn vocals, contradicting them and encouraging grace under pressure. “People like you find it easy” Curtis almost snaps at one point, while the long, luxurious notes hold beneath him, almost in total contradiction. The drums patter and thunder ominously, but the rest of the group are off, soaring high above the lot with a drawn-out conclusion which feels like being given a hug by a higher force. Curtis is invisible for the final minute of the song while the band play on.

It’s easy to come up with predictable narratives and conclusions here, and trust me, I’m trying to resist this. The problem listeners my age and younger are always going to face when talking about Joy Division is that we can’t remember a time when Ian Curtis was actually alive. The first I knew of the group was when I caught “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on the evening airwaves as a boy, then heard the DJ announce he was dead; my enjoyment of the song (which I taped) was somewhat undermined by the immediate bad news. I’d had three minutes of appreciating them as a new and fascinating force, before they were quickly snatched and filed away as a piece of history, a victim of events (of course I didn’t literally think this as a six year old boy. I was probably just baffled by the whole thing – though it would happen on a much grander and more confusing scale with John Lennon at the end of the year).

Unlike “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, “Atmosphere” was released prior to Ian Curtis’s suicide, meaning that there are thousands of listeners out there who heard it shorn of that context, who probably knew very little about Curtis’s health and marital struggles. They will have heard this song in an entirely different way to me, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t untangle the record from the tragedy that closely followed it; every time I try to decouple things, my brain immediately cuts a corner and jumps back to the dominant mythology again. It’s a huge trench that’s cut across an older pathway, too deeply engrained to bypass.

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.