93. The Wedding Present - My Favourite Dress (Reception)

One week at number one on 14th March 1987

“My favourite song has to be My Favourite Dress. David has managed to perfectly distil the tortuous agonising feelings of jealousy into three minutes of angst. The guitar hook is pretty great too.” – Sir Keir Starmer.

Well, there you go; not my words, but the words of the Prime Minister (presumably still the case, by the time this goes live). If you ever wondered what it might be like to live in a country governed by an indie nerd, rest assured you are already living that dream, although he isn't the only Labour Party "name" who is interested in The Wedding Present – years ago, the one-time Labour deputy leader hopeful Stella Creasy tweeted me about the band, and we’re not even members of the same party. There’s dedication to Gedge beyond the call of duty.

An oblivious person reading this in another country might assume that this means the group were massive, but that would be a mistake; while the music press briefly touted them as the next Smiths, the peak of the band’s achievements occurred in 1992 when they managed to crash the national charts with twelve different limited edition singles released throughout the year. All went Top 40 and one even managed to nose its way into the top ten, but prior and subsequent chart performances indicated that this was purely due to the rabidity of their fanbase – the Starmers and Creaseys of this world taking a break from their local Labour Party meeting to rush out and buy them on the Monday of release, scared of missing their ship.

For a few years, The Wedding Present felt like the biggest cult band in Britain, mightier even than The Fall, but relatively unheard outside their fanbase. When they appeared on Top of the Pops, which happened frequently, people would write letters of complaint to the mainstream pop press about the din. No new fans were gained; the existing fans simply hardened their lines of defence about the group’s earthy but unique sound.

In 1985 and 1986, however, they were still releasing records on their own label and merely attracting evening radio airplay, thousands of miles from the bright television studio lights. Their performance in the indie chart tells its own story of a group slowly building up steam, from the tentative number 17 shot of “Go Out And Get ‘Em Boy” to the confident number 3 peak of “You Should Always Keep In Touch With Your Friends”. Each release seemed to sweep them closer towards a breakthrough moment, and “My Favourite Dress” is the one that delivered not just a number one in the indie charts, but a refreshed perception of what the group were capable of. By the time the year was up, they would have five entries in John Peel’s Festive Fifty, four of those in the top ten – votes being split in ways Starmer would doubtless cringe at.

For something that’s still lauded as being their finest moment, “My Favourite Dress” is an oddly understated sulk initially. The two chords it opens with are left to clang by themselves for the introduction before the group reluctantly grumble in behind, and Gedge joins to sing in a part angry, part tearful manner about a romantic betrayal. Despite his reputation as an earthy, jocular Leeds everyman, the lyrics are actually pearls, borderline Smokey Robinson in their attempts at understanding: “Sometimes these words just don't have to be said/ I know how you both feel/ The heart can rule the head/ Jealousy is an essential part of love/ The hurting here below/ And the emptiness above”. There’s something almost Northern Soul about those opening lines, were it not for the very C86 scraping and thudding beneath – the wheels of this song belong to a tram, not an aeroplane; it’s sticking to its own simple, dependable rhythm, not soaring off anywhere soon.

We finally move on from the two chord holding pattern when the chorus arrives, which begins to add choppiness and spikiness to the mix, but is still surprisingly slight, and over in an instant with Gedge sighing “never mind”. Then his reasonableness declines and his grievances become more pronounced in the second verse, during which it sounds as if he’s almost choking when singing about his ex-lover’s new sleeping arrangements. Following a second round of the chorus, things really start to go into overdrive and the ranting begins, and this is what makes “My Favourite Dress” several leagues above the average indiepop ditty about romantic disappointment – it starts off controlled and sane, and slowly peels away its rationality, the fury of betrayal taking an increasingly heavy role.

The final verse isn’t so much a lyric as Gedge delivering a shopping list of disappointments to his ex, bullet pointing the key occurrences in one of the worst days of his life so far – “a long walk home”, “the pouring rain”, “uneaten meals”, then, explosively, “a stranger’s hand on my favourite dress”. The key problem, the painful image. The moment the song finds both its title and its purpose. If you’re not listening closely, it almost sounds absurd.

Relationships are often portrayed in songs and films in a very simplistic way, the memories people cling on to frequently being trite in their obviousness. “I liked the way he held me when we danced”. “I adored the way she kissed”. The reality for me (and seemingly Gedge, and Keir Starmer, and probably you too) is that you don’t actually know what memory you’ll hang on to until they’re over. It might be guessed at, but it’s frequently unknowable. It could be that moment you greeted them home at the arrivals section of an airport and realised you truly loved them, the song they loved that you always hated, or something even more inconsequential than that – a haircut, sunkissed skin from a recent holiday, a perfume smell or an item of clothing. I’ve had my day ruined by women with the same hairstyle as an ex of mine, so I know only too well that seemingly trivial visual prompts have a peculiar and extremely potent magical power.

92. The Smiths - Shoplifters Of The World Unite (Rough Trade)

Four weeks at number one from 14th February 1987

Oh, how we laughed when the assistant in our branch of Woolworths played this song on a busy Saturday afternoon. He was proudly ensconced behind the display copies of the Pepsi & Shirlie singles, spinning this record loudly enough that you could hear it as far back as the garden hose display. I’m sure his supervisor gave him a thorough ticking off, but if Morrissey had ever found out, he probably would have sent him a bouquet.

A man in his mid-twenties walked past me holding hands with his girlfriend tittering loudly for everyone’s benefit, “They might have thought harder before putting this one on!” The rest of the shopping trip was mundane, so it was a relief to be provided with some kind of anecdote to tell others about later – a sense that a hit single’s subversion had been appropriated in the correct way.

I didn’t expect our Saturday mission to buy lightbulbs and birdseed to be spent listening to what was the first new indie number one of 1987, and in all probability the first indie record of the year Woolworths would have stocked. Age of Chance’s dominance of the top slot for ten straight weeks seemed to have as much to do with the lack of action going on elsewhere as its cult popularity.

“Shoplifters Of The World Unite” was “one of those singles” from the off – the “Sorted For Es and Whizz” of its era, a single which was quietly looking for trouble while disguising its ambitions behind a passive-aggressive arrangement. Morrissey ducked the issue in the press a few times, perhaps wary of a radio ban, pointing out that the idea of “shoplifting” could be about creative theft as well as actual pilfering of goods. The song doesn’t make that clear anywhere, though. Instead, it talks about the protagonist's inevitable arrest (“A heartless hand on my shoulder/ A push and it's over/ Alabaster crashes down/ Six months is a long time”) and contains two lines I loved as a teenager, which are almost Martin Gore-ish in their simplicity: “But last night the plans for a future war/ Was all I saw on Channel Four” – though these days I tend to blanche a bit at the clumsiness and oddness of that quick triple rhyming scheme.

The title of the song makes it seem as if it could be another blundering, loud hippopotamus of a single akin to “Panic”, but while The Smiths have a more forceful sound here if compared to their earliest works, in reality it seems to encapsulate the sum total of the ideas in their career so far. Listen closely and you can hear the swampy rumble of “How Soon Is Now?” coming through Marr’s guitar in the verses, the glam descends of “Panic”, and the gentle melodic strum of “What Difference Does It Make”.

If I’ve made it sound like a cut-and-shut hack job by saying that, that’s not my intention – what it seems to be instead is a group realising the scope of their identity and playing all the cards to their advantage. If “Panic” and “Ask” sounded like slight departures from the usual route map, “Shoplifters” feels like a rounded and careful reiteration of the group’s strengths by comparison; one for the proud fans as well as the Woolworths shoppers, a hooky, contentious yet surprisingly delicate 45 which stood out both melodically and lyrically.

There were those, of course, who didn’t care for it, and in typical fashion fed the Morrissey shaped troll rather than rolling their eyes and walking on. Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens was incensed, referring to the track as an open ode to thievery, while Tesco threatened to sue Smash Hits for printing the song’s lyrics over the top of an image of one of their carrier bags. It’s difficult to understand what either party expected to achieve – I doubt the single inspired many people who weren’t already shoplifting to go out and give it a try, and the central message seemed to be about the hypocrisy of the fact that while bored people with light fingers serve prison time, those who engage with state sanctioned murder are lauded.

Farewell 1986

If the years 1981-85 have been comparatively predictable affairs, where familiar Indie royalty regularly bagged the number one spot with occasionally mediocre singles, 1986 was when the snowshaker really flurried. Groups on tiny new labels making scratchy sounding singles could, by a combination of press recommendation, fanzine raves and word of mouth, climb to the top with enthusiasm; the underground was beginning to poke its claws into the rubber membrane of pop again. 

The list of nineteen new number ones below tells a headline story not just of C86 or indiepop suddenly finding its way to the forefront, but also The Smiths continued dominance and goth's continuing allure.

1. w/e 15th February 1986 (1 week) - Easterhouse - Whistling In The Dark (Rough Trade)

2. w/e 22nd February 1986 (1 week) - The Sisterhood - Giving Ground (Merciful Release) 

3. w/e 1st March 1986 (3 weeks) - Shop Assistants - Safety Net (53rd & 3rd)

4. w/e 22nd March 1986 (2 weeks) - Half Man Half Biscuit - The Trumpton Riots (Probe Plus)

5. w/e 5th April 1986 (4 weeks) - New Order - Shellshock (Factory)

6. w/e 3rd May 1986 (5 weeks) - We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It - Rules and Regulations EP (Vindaloo)

7. w/e 7th June 1986 (1 week) - The Smiths - Bigmouth Strikes Again (Rough Trade)

8. w/e 14th June 1986 (3 weeks) - The Mission - Serpent's Kiss (Chapter 22)

9. w/e 5th July 1986 (1 week) - Weather Prophets - Almost Prayed (Creation)

10. w/e 26th July 1986 (1 week) - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Singer (Mute)

11. w/e 2nd August 1986 (1 week) - The Mission - Garden of Delight/ Like a Hurricane (Chapter 22)

12. w/e 9th August 1986 (1 week) - The Smiths - Panic (Rough Trade)

13. w/e 20th September 1986 (1 week) - Depeche Mode - A Question Of Time (Mute)

14. w/e 27th September 1986 (4 weeks) - New Order - State Of The Nation (Factory)

15. w/e 26th October 1986 (1 week) - Half Man Half Biscuit - Dickie Davies Eyes (Probe Plus)

16. w/e 1st November 1986 (1 week) - Soup Dragons - Hang Ten! (Raw TV)

17. w/e 8th November 1986 (3 weeks) - The Smiths - Ask (Rough Trade) 

18. w/e 29th November 1986 (1 week) - New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle (Factory)

19. w/e 6th December 1986 (10 weeks) - Age of Chance - Kiss (FON)

1987 is where things start to get confusing and certainties begin to crumble, and the only solid scaffolding you can reliably cling on to is the continued and dogged presence of the goth scene. The best and most robust of the indiepop acts continue to make their presence felt, but the more delicate and less organised ones either inadvisably sign to major labels, or fall away. If 1986 was a free for all, 1987 is the year where any acts with slightly scrappy or flaky ideas start to become dismissed by both the music press and the public (while maintaining their core cult audiences). 

Sample culture begins to make itself felt not just through the grebo bands, who have had a fine line in 3 second distorted vocal interjections so far, but through club culture as expected. The KLF emerge in their first guise to create huge music press headlines but comparatively few sales, and a smattering of club classics begin to nudge around the fringes of the chart, with the exception of one from some surprisingly old and familiar hands which goes stratospheric (and has the video to match its interstellar ambitions). Let's not spoil the surprise for anyone under the age of 45 who may be reading.

A complete playlist of all 1986's chart entries - or at least all that were available on Spotify - can be found below, with 1987's menu on the right hand side of this page. 

91. Age Of Chance - Kiss (FON)

Ten weeks at number one from 6th December 1986

“1) Be L-Louder, 2) Be more beautiful, 3) Be unreasonable.” - Age of Chance, January 1986.

A few weeks back, Zooey Deschanel posted an Instagram photo of herself, face thick with heavy but sophisticated make-up, wearing chic but casual clothes, thoughtfully cradling a copy of the NME C86 compilation in her hands. It was such a weird mismatch of style and media content that it almost felt like an in-joke, or a trolling attempt, or a plug for this blog (it wasn’t, sorry) – a sleek Vogue cover colliding with a spotty eighties teenage underworld. I freely admit I wanted a print of it for my wall.

It led to all kinds of speculation online about what the hell she knew about C86, but she should be given some credit here. She’s a huge fan of Belle and Sebastian and Camera Obscura, is utterly no stranger to indiepop herself – a few of the She and Him tracks unquestionably drink from that stream, even if they don’t quite get their hair wet – and if she hasn’t encountered Stump and A Witness before now, I’d say that’s more surprising than not. She beat a lot of Nuggets and Rubble heads to the sixties baroque pop group Forever Amber, after all.

It reopened the question of what C86 really was about (if anything) though. Indiepop, as we would now call it, was only one aspect of the compilation. The opening twelve minutes or so lull you into a false sense of security, making you think the whole cassette is going to be filled with naive, untutored British kids searching for sharp melodies. Then, once that’s done, Stump lurch into view with “Buffalo”, then A Witness with “Sharpened Sticks”, and what we’re confronted with is anyone’s guess. It was a compilation which was (and is) perfectly possible to own and only love in part. Some people were broad minded enough to accept the more angular aspects, but a lot weren’t.

There’s a tendency to assume that the harsher edges of C86 were fringe contributions from groups who sold few records, but that would also be a mistake. Stump shifted around 60,000 copies of their debut album, and that year, Leeds band Age of Chance – whose track “From Now On, This Will Be Your God” isn’t exactly the most challenging track, but is also far from the most commercial – briefly became cultishly huge. Unlike a lot of their compilation mates who would blush and apologise about anything that smacked of marketing, the group had a firm and keen style and graphic image; garish, bright and loud, which perfectly matched the metallic flashes of noise in their songs. This made them an editor’s dream, assuring them coverage in magazines most bands of their ilk would never have gained – pages were devoted to their beliefs, their manifestos, and their backgrounds (“We're confronting the area that we live in. The unease, unrest, dissatisfaction, things like that. The element of where we come from is prevalent in our music.”)

Their earliest singles were perhaps a touch too abrasive and combative to find broader public appeal, but their decision to cover Prince’s “Kiss” almost pushed them overground. Taking their cues from their dancefloor memories of the record, rather than actually buying a copy of it and carefully studying its arrangements, they cut, thrash and grind to the song’s hip-hop inspired beats, giving it a strangely accessible ugliness. If Prince’s original version is lipstick and cocktails with just a peppery hint of urbanity, Age of Chance take that urbanity and make it the sole feature – a pair of heavily made up lips graffitied on to a rain-stained concrete wall, or a drunken dancefloor smooch becoming an accidental headbutt.

Guitars grind monotonously, the vocals chant in protest, the song demands rather than seduces. It’s another example of a cover version which is an inversion of the original track, like staring at the negatives of a glamorous night out and trying to make sense of bright hair and white lips.

It’s hard to say how calculated it was. Age of Chance were an incredibly knowing band, also covering the disco classic “Disco Inferno” but bringing its reference to riots to the forefront, and it may just have been that they also heard an aggression in Prince’s work which hadn’t fully expressed itself. Whether accidental or otherwise, though, it was a canny move. Prince was the mainstream artist all groups and performers, whatever their background, could admire without risk. He was as admired in the pages of the tabloids as he was the broadsheets, fawned over in the IPC weeklies as well as Smash Hits and Making Music. A virtuoso musician with perplexing artistic messages and undeniable songwriting talent, he was the complicated pop star it was OK to like in the mid-eighties (a strangely divisive and hostile time).

In that sense, you could cover “Kiss” and only risk the wrath of a few of the man’s most eager fans. Music journalists would applaud your impeccable taste, major labels would note your pop ambitions, and you had nothing to lose. And Age of Chance certainly didn’t lose, at least not in the short-term. Partly bolstered by the slow movement of the indie charts around December and January, but mostly enabled by constant waves of impressive sales, “Kiss” managed a chart-topping run only rivalled by the likes of “Blue Monday”. John Peel listeners also showed their appreciation by voting it number two in the man’s Festive Fifty; an impressive result for a song released late in 1986, which started to gain traction after the ballots opened.

90. New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle (Factory)

One week at number one - 29th November 1986

“Bizarre Love Triangle” is an unusual phrase for New Order to use. In the eighties in particular, the tabloid press used it quite freely, being obsessed with the idea of “love rats” in their “secret love nests” who were having adulterous affairs with a priest/ biscuit factory magnate/ headmaster. Hopefully also, these affairs would involve a significant age gap and/or some form of sexual deviancy.

A big reason these stories are so enduring is partly judgement – people seem to love being shown the failings of their fellow humans so they can feel better about themselves. Another, I think, is that extra-marital affairs, and especially “bizarre” ones, are not something we encounter as often as the tabloid press lead us to believe; in my own social circle, I can only think of a couple of examples over the last few decades. Even if their marriages are failing, people tend to not want the added stress and burden of the double-bluffing, fake diary appointments and secrecy affairs seem to involve. They’re usually too busy dealing with their kids and demanding spouse, and scrolling through their phone contacts wondering whether they should start speaking to a solicitor now or give marriage counselling yet another crack. I’ve encountered more frail marriages where a spouse has been wrongfully suspected of having an affair than those where one has actually been taking place.

This is true for those of us who have average jobs and ordinary lives. For successful musicians or actors, however, temptation is a constant risk. If you’re continually away from home, living in a bubble and constantly being flattered in an over-familiar way by people who not only find you attractive but have idealised notions about you – that’s a problem. Bernard Sumner probably knew that. Ian Curtis definitely did, as is well documented. And while most of us will never be idolised in that strange way, there’s still a chance that at some point in our lives, we might briefly be thrown into dangerously prolonged proximity to someone who finds us as alluring as we find them.

“Bizarre Love Triangle” is lyrically slight, but seems to exist in that dim reverie, that fluttering queasiness which comes from a magnetic pull that is never allowed to resolve itself. You can hear it in the arrangement, which is excited and buoyant but never quite lets go, the unreleased tension of the idea of adultery never letting it rip out of its shell. The chorus is elated, but it doesn’t feel like proper joy – those twinkling keyboards and soaring strings are pure fantasy, total idealism. In a proper love song, such effects would seem tacky, almost Disneyesque in their overreach, but because Sumner is singing about a possible affair, we accept the fairy lights and the pink backdrop. It’s a dreamworld. “I’m waiting for the final moment/ you say the words that I can’t say” he sings, but you get the impression that what he wants is never going to happen. Stasis is going to be the only result.

Elsewhere in the song he circles round the idea, gibbers a bit about the elation (“I feel fine, I feel good/ I feel like I never should”) then about the regret (“Why can’t we be ourselves/ like we were yesterday?”). He also has a moment of rare, direct honesty and borderline profundity when he sings “I do admit to myself/ that if I hurt someone else/ then I’ll never see/ just what we’re meant to be”. There’s the rub. Love triangles rarely result in anything positive. They’re bound up in chaos, guilt, and at least one person (and very often two) feeling betrayed and cheated. They’re not a great springboard for a successful new relationship – they involve messiness and an external judgement few would willingly entertain.

Nonetheless, New Order create a cocktail of confusion, guilt and airy fantasy which is intoxicating to the listener – just like the tabloid press stories, these experiences are always more enticing when they’re being communicated to us, one step removed. The strings hold a continual tension, the rhythms propel, seemingly egging Sumner on, the synth hits bark out their warnings, and it sounds like a massive hit single. The group were always prone to ruining their chances with over-long tracks, flat vocals or coldness in the past, but everything holds in place so well on this that you would clearly have it pegged as a serious commercial contender.