113. Erasure - Ship Of Fools (Mute)

One week at number one on 9th April 1988

This is the first time Vince Clarke has been number one on the NME Indie Chart since 1983, when The Assembly reached the top spot with “Never Never”. It feels as if the cultural bulldozers have flattened the land and rebuilt on it twice over since then; in Indie terms, he was sharing chart space with anarcho-punks, Oi! urchins, Toyah and Tom Robinson when we last discussed his work in depth – in mainstream terms, that moment also coincided with Culture Club being the dominant popular force, and Slade having an unexpected comeback. Makes you think.

Of course, it’s not Clarke’s fault that the eccentricities of the NME Indie Chart placed some fairly significant Erasure records outside the number one spot (“Sometimes” only just missed out) but it isn’t an exaggeration to say that he also spent a lot of time in the long grass. After Yazoo split, he embarked on dead-end projects which (The Assembly aside) either didn’t sell or didn’t get off the ground, then launched Erasure who found themselves unexpectedly cold-shouldered by record-buyers. Even “Oh L’Amour” couldn’t get inside the national Top 75, leaving Dollar to walk off with it under their arms to turn it into a hit instead (and if Vince Clarke seemed faintly passé in 1986, then what the hell were Dollar? Truly, this feels incomparable – imagine The Springfields having a hit with a Ray Davies flop in 1964.)

By 1988, though, the pair were sprinting towards their imperial phase and just about any single they put out was assured a high chart placing. “Ship Of Fools” was the first to be taken from the explosively popular “Innocents” album, and in a strange way offers a handy symmetry, in that it sounds closer to The Assembly’s only single than perhaps anything Erasure had done so far. Both songs have a creaking, autumnal atmosphere – gentle melodies and lingering, airy notes underlining despair and tragedy. Where “Never Never” is about romantic regret, though, “Ship Of Fools” feels sociologically driven in a weirdly non-specific way.

The first time I heard it, I assumed Clarke was riffing off The Beatles “The Fool On The Hill”. The lines “The flowers and the trees are encapsulating me/ And I go spinning” are probably responsible for that, but the rest is strangely repetitive and vague, focusing constantly on the “baby of the class” who “didn’t know that one and one was two/ two and two were four”. There’s really very little to it beyond that, and you’re tricked into believing it’s lyrically richer because the arrangement does most of the work – a filmic, steadily building, occasionally almost organic sound which gets the synthetic strings out surprisingly early but still visits new places with them by the fade-out. It’s a far cry from his earliest work, coming across like a soothing lullaby to life’s misfits, a parent rocking a cradle to comfort their child’s disappointment.

As a teen, I related to it on a very obvious level. We had a late August baby in our year at school who was cursed with a mind which contained persistently naive ideas; the kind of child who, if he read a Judge Dredd comic strip that lunchtime, had managed to convince himself the story might be not only possible but actually real by three o’clock. He was also short and skinny, and while he was friendly and surprisingly good at keeping himself out of trouble, always looked faintly lost at the periphery of the playground. He joined in but was never really at the centre of anything that went on – a mid-field slogger, a bit-part character in games and social interaction.

He grew quieter as the years went on, clearly understanding that every time he opened his mouth, he exposed himself to ridicule from both kids and teachers alike. I immediately associated him with this song; he wasn’t a vindictive or bratty teen. Shouldn’t there should be some kind of prize for that? It’s not as if I always managed to pass that test myself. He was a trier who had genuine personal qualities most of my friends didn’t have, but people were too busy laughing at his feeble misunderstandings to notice.

It’s him I saw in my mind’s eye whenever this song played (and it still is). And perhaps not just him, but all those other meek, good-natured kids who did their best, failed most of their exams, and were released without praise or acknowledgement to employers who probably had them pegged as eternal mail-frankers, coat checkers or goods packers, never asking the obvious question: “What does this person want out of life? What else can they do?” At least the school bullies and delinquents occasionally got special attention in 1988. Quiet, dumb nobility did not result in any extra coaching.

112. Wedding Present - Nobody's Twisting Your Arm (Reception)

 

Three weeks at number one from 19th March 1988

Sometimes – often, in fact – I find myself wondering what “pop music” is, and what the word really means. If you want to be blandly factual about it, it just means “popular”; so one week pop music could mean Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”, the next “I Should Be So Lucky” (XTC’s single “This Is Pop” seems to favour that notion). On the other hand, if you want to get scientific and separate the concept away from freak breakout Death Metal hits, there’s probably something to be said about the fluency of the melodic formation, about how strictly the song keeps to agreed time signatures or templates, rather than pulling them to pieces like the excesses of prog or jazz.

Our last entry on Bomb The Bass’s “Beat Dis” did find me asking a few questions, I must admit. While Tim Simenon is hardly Miles Davis, that single does sound like the audio equivalent of a hyperactive but purposeful man throwing paint at a canvas, using repetition to an extent, understanding symmetry, knowing what he wants to get at the end of it, but eschewing ideas like verses, choruses and middle eights for a free-form splurge over a hooky groove. Is THAT pop? Well, it earned a silver disc and was inescapable for the whole year, which is more than “O Superman” managed, and yes, I instinctively understood it as a teen – but it doesn’t adhere to “the rules”.

The indie charts are supposed to be the place where rules go out of the window and innovators can experiment in their labs before the better ones are poached by a major label. The problem here is, things are unpopular or marginal for all kinds of reasons, and that can be because they’re difficult to immediately understand, far too ahead of their time or, actually, rooted so far behind in the past that they may feel antiquated. Until 1988, when the tide began to turn, I would argue that the indie listings have often been surprisingly anachronistic in nature; the retirement home for fading sub-genres, owing obvious debts to punk, psychedelia, sixties pop, and even folk.

The Wedding Present are an interesting case in point. When they first emerged, the music press did not describe them as forward thinkers, but a glorious return to pre-eighties values – of “buzzsaw” guitars, pop-punk melodies, realistic, earthy home-spun truths of love affairs gone awry set to a melodic thrash. The only way the group were ever aligned with any projected future was by being feted as “the next Smiths”, with David Gedge cast as some kind of Agony Uncle for heartbroken youths everywhere.

This needn’t necessarily be a problem. From skiffle onwards, pop music history has been littered with traditionalists leaning on the stylings found in old songbooks. It can be a serious disadvantage when there’s an absence of commerciality, though - when they started, The Wedding Present created a fierce racket, but didn’t really seem like keen respecters of the big chorus, instead favouring the brooding, repetitive refrain.

By the time “Nobody’s Twisting Your Arm” was released, that situation was corrected. From start to finish, this single absolutely fizzes with memorable melodies as well as unforgettably barbed lyrics – the opening lines “And when I called your house/ I’m sure your sister thought that I was somebody else” feels like something from a daytime soap; almost comedic from one angle, but harshly relatable if you’ve ever experienced similar indignities. The lyrics intertwine with a tune which is fast and furious, but beneath the stroppiness lies a melody Pete Waterman wouldn’t have cocked a snook at.

That sense only gets stronger when the chorus lands, which continues the lyrical homeliness, but punches far beyond that with something which could have been from a mid-80s pop hit, if only the group had dispensed with those guitars and invested in a Roland synth and a drum machine. It’s not a million miles from a prime Motown era track in its pure rush of heartbreak and dismissal, Gedge donning a Diana Ross wig and marching off away from his tormentor like a man who knows his true worth (and it doesn’t depend on settling for being second best). Or perhaps it’s something else – maybe “Nobody’s Twisting Your Arm” is, in a sense, “I Will Survive” for indie karaoke blokes everywhere. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, has released an electropop cover of this record, but I’ve always wanted them to.

In case anyone felt it was in danger of being too blokey, however, Amelia Fletcher of Talulah Gosh features prominently on vocals throughout, adding an effective harmony and perspective to remind us that many a woman has also phoned up a boyfriend’s house only to be given unsubtle hints by their sibling.

111. Bomb The Bass - Beat Dis (Rhythm King)

Three weeks at number one from 27th February 1988

“This? Is this what people are listening to now? A record with a bleeping digital watch as the chorus? Jesus Christ… the whole thing’s like being trapped in an amusement arcade. It’s awful, I give up, you’ve all gone bloody mad.” - my mother hearing “Beat Dis” for the first time, 1988.

I was absolutely fascinated by that reaction when this record first came out. To me, “Beat Dis” was exciting but hardly felt radical at the time – since “Pump Up The Volume” topped the charts in 1987, the floodgates opened for House records featuring bold and hyperactive samples to not only get released, but actually sell in huge quantities. There was an urgency and propulsion to this record which seemed thrilling at the time, but didn’t actually feel odd or alienating; rather, it seemed like a continuation of a busy, current trend.

If you were of an older generation who hadn’t been paying close attention to the charts, though, and had your dial permanently glued to Radio Two, I now realise that this entering the national charts at number five must have felt inexplicable; even with punk rock and the artier edges of glam, hit singles prior to this still had a logic and a flow which didn’t depart hugely from the golden rules of pop – namely, that choruses must at least try to be memorable and verses must flow obviously and make logical sense. The arrival of synth-pop at the tail end of the seventies did push these boundaries a little further (for instance, “O Superman” really upsets the apple cart) but in general, proper hit singles, and even cult hit singles, adhered to some fairly basic structural rules.

One reason I found the late eighties House uprising so fascinating as a teen is that it had no time for Denmark Street or Tin Pan Alley melodies (unless it was sampling them in five second bites). The groove was everything. What you did on top of that groove was up to you. It could be not much at all, and that’s the option many DJs and artists took, favouring stark minimalism with a gentle seasoning of samples and airy synth washes. Others, however, didn’t know when to stop and loaded the sample gun with everything they’d heard that week and pressed “fire” over the beat, blasting in with a series of tenuously related soundbites and hooks.

“Beat Dis” is firmly in the latter camp. It interrupts constantly with source material as wide as Thunderbirds, Bob Prescott’s absurd “Cartoons In Stereo” album, stereo sound test records, Jayne Mansfield giggling, Disney stories, as well as the obvious candidates – Public Enemy, Kurtis Blow, Afrikaa Bambaataa, Indeep’s “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life”. In common with “Pump Up The Volume”, each sampled snatch eventually etches itself so much into your brain that it feels like a strange hook in itself; I can’t hear Bob Prescott saying “You play Russian Roulette this way” in my mind without hearing a twittering, chattering rhythm beneath it.

Nonetheless, on first listen it’s pretty overwhelming, a riot of speech, scratching, jittery melodies and impatient, forceful dustbin lid rhythms smacking you in the face. My mother was right. It is – kind of – like playing an arcade game on Southend seafront in 1988 and trying to hear the music and noise of the machine you’re focusing on against the attention seeking clarion calls of the others. As a teen, I found that idea thrilling, though.

What’s also fascinating about “Beat Dis” is that for all its freshness, the choice of samples was unbelievably antiquated. I suspect part of this was due to ease of use; it’s much more straightforward to drop in a speech sample from an old sound effects record than it is to isolate vocals from another piece of music, and these discs could very easily be found in stores like Music and Video Exchange for very little money. It was also partly due to the fetishisation of sixties and seventies ideas in clubland at this point too, which might (arguably!) have bled over from the psychedelic Alice In Wonderland events people like Richard Norris were involved with before moving to Shoom.

“Beat Dis” therefore becomes this sweet and sour cocktail of the old and the new, the furiously modern and the old; a black and white land of perfect on-mic pronunciation being thieved, pulled out of context and buried beneath noise. To older generations, it may even have sounded like sacrilege – the fondly remembered past being combined with a present sound they barely understood. I personally loved its pure energy at the time but don’t tend to gravitate towards it as much now; it has the formula of “Pump Up The Volume” but none of the space, grace and patience. In short, I have to be in the right mood.

110. Sugarcubes - Coldsweat (One Little Indian)

Three weeks at number one from 6th February 1988

Sometimes releasing a unique, spellbinding single as your debut can be disadvantageous; it can end up defining a group or an artist beyond reasonable bounds. In the case of The Sugarcubes, “Birthday” may have dominated the indie charts for months and caused Cocteau Twins fans to have spasms, but anyone who bought the twelve inch version will also have heard the extra track “Cat” on side two – a different beast, with hip-wiggling yet irregular grooves revving towards a chorus which consisted of Bjork singing “Cat cat cat” delightedly.

It indicated to anyone paying attention that there were clearly two ways The Sugarcubes could go next – the wobbling, anxious balladry of “Birthday”, which seemed to be what critics expected, or something which was more straightforward, while still not being common-or-garden pop music. “Coldsweat” was the group’s answer, a single which Bjork later vaguely referred to as a “mickey-take” of love songs.

That’s something of an understatement. Ballads typically either represent uncertainty and devastation or celebrate a couple slowly being pulled into their own divine, magnetic forcefield (albeit one which might be peppered with a few complications if the songwriter is interesting enough). “Coldsweat” is having none of this. It presents love as a war, a battle, a conquest – and if you’re smiling knowingly and reaching towards the comments box to mention Pat Benatar’s mainstream hit “Love Is A Battlefield”, it far outguns that. If Pat Benatar presents romance as the theme to an action chase in a Hollywood film, “Cold Sweat” is closer to snuff porn.

The opening lines are “Meat meat blood blood sweat sweat meat”, uttered by the group’s dependable backing growler Einar, before Bjork eventually elaborates “This is hot meat/ This is metallic blood/ This is hot meat/ This is open sweat” and later on warns (or teasingly promises?) “With your own breath/ I’ll tear your lungs” and “I will not finish/ Til I’m fully satisfied”. It makes Depeche Mode’s “Master And Servant” seem delicate; sex and romance here aren’t presented coyly, or even necessarily as (conventionally) fun. Instead, it compares that desire to an almost comical animalistic hunger, where bodies are used like the produce of butcher’s shops, and Bjork is cast not as a fantasy figure or a femme fatale, but a black widow spider devouring her partner once the copulation is over.

The arrangement underneath bares close to no relationship to “Birthday”, unless of course we consider its occasional proclivity to tilt and judder like a vehicle with a warped wheel. Nor, really, is it entirely akin to “Cat”, though its nearer to that song on the spectrum. Instead, almost funky guitar-work and throbbing basslines combine with Bjork’s vocals, which on occasion resembles an almost feline wailing and on others a full-bodied, threatening human snarl.

Her voice dominates Sugarcubes tracks so much that there’s a tendency to overlook what the band are doing, and critics frequently wrote glib lines about The B52s and Talking Heads. Both are clear influences, but is it just me who can also hear the off-kilter funk of Happy Mondays here too? That hesitant, sinister groove belongs to the ill-at-ease likes of “Tart Tart”. Here it’s less spindly and more defined, a harder-edged performance, but the instrumental breaks contain a kind of sinister indie-funk we’ve heard before, just not in this particular context. The paranoid, uneasy romance of Yoko Ono’s “Walking On Broken Ice” is another possible reference point here.

“Coldsweat” is no more commercial a single than “Birthday”, and in its own way, no less disturbing – it’s just that while the former sounded like a colourful and strangely decorated cry for help, the latter casts Bjork as the threat, the wild animal on the prowl, the hunter, not the quarry. 

109. Beatmasters featuring The Cookie Crew - Rok Da House (Rhythm King)

 

One week at number one on 30th January 1988

Casual dismissers of eighties music usually refer to the over-produced “sameyness” of the era. I’ve always been a little bit gobsmacked by that assertion – yes, the MOR and AOR aspects of the decade’s middle period occasionally suffered from a weird, suffocating and dispassionate smoothness, and there was a tendency to either overlook or airbrush guitar sounds in the mainstream, but that was never “it”. Innovation was everywhere. 

“Rok Da House”, for example, is something which was didn't completely take off on its first release for its crossing of two genre streams. In 1987, House Music and Hip-Hop were two different beasts, seldom seen in the same habitats – in some cities they may have attracted similar audiences, but people usually did not rap over a House beat, anymore than they would a Hi-NRG rhythm. House was party music, Hip-Hop was its own, usually more intense area.

“Rok Da House” is widely considered to be the first example of a disc which mixed the two and got away with it. Cookie Crew were a long-standing Hip-Hop duo from South London who grew in prominence after they won a 1985 rap championship at the Wag Club. Two John Peel sessions followed and these are well worth a listen, because despite being quite raw and innocent, they also show how well-developed the pair already were. Despite his support and enthusiasm, though, record label interest appeared non-existent until Rhythm King stepped forward in 1987. 

Beatmasters, on the other hand, were the total opposite of “late night radio”, with two out of the three members having day jobs composing jingles and soundtracks for television adverts. Despite their roles churning out ditties to sell bathroom products to, they were also regular London club-goers who were excited by the scene’s ongoing developments, and keen to get on board. Rhythm King records gave them the job of working with Cookie Crew, and despite the obvious illogic of giving a credible but marginal UK Hip-Hop duo the task of recording with a trio whose interests were geared around House music, “Rok Da House” was born that year.

Interest was marginal at first, with the single bobbing up into the lower reaches of the Indie Top 10 but not quite crossing over. Following its initial release, the decision was taken to give it a fresh remix and relaunch it again into the cold winter snap of 1988, where it shot into the National Top 10 without much hesitation, following the success of other House records during the same period. It had finally found its moment.

While M|A|R|R|S sometimes felt like an uneven collaboration with one artist doing most of the heavy lifting on its most played side, “Rok Da House” is an obvious partnership of equals. If you removed The Beatmasters contributions from this and allowed the Crew to do their usual rhythmic verbal assault over their cutting and mixing technique, the end result would probably have been another cult track for the duo following “Females”. Equally, without the fierce, loud rapping over the backing track here, The Beatmasters work would have been just another club-friendly House instrumental which might have lucked out with a low Top 40 position.

Combined, the two are dynamite. Cookie Crew sell the track awesomely, never ashamed or afraid to acknowledge the track’s instrumental peaks by using those moments to bark and shout the fiercest; listening to this again, it’s astonishing how raw and instinctive but utterly perfectly timed some of their moves seem, shooting off in a quickfire fashion, frequently raising the volume halfway through sentences to emphasise the track’s drive and momentum. There was still a misapprehension in the late eighties among “real musicians” that rap was a dead-end fad (or as Ozzy Osbourne put it “Just talking over a record? It’s a doddle, innit!”) and while there were many short-lived novelty chancers both in the USA and UK, Cookie Crew make it really obvious how they won a competition two years prior to this. Their fluidity makes it sound too easy (try copying them and you’ll realise it’s not). It’s not just the speed of their flow that’s impressive, it’s the charisma and the instinctive use of emphasis, as well as their unapologetic brattiness. It’s the sound of the two loudest women in the room expressing a rush of ecstasy, but doing so with consummate technique. 

The Beatmasters, meanwhile, have provided them with a House track that’s a little bit more restless and scattergun in its focus than most of the crossover records we’ve heard so far. It starts off ordinarily enough with that piano motif, but they then riddle the song with endless extra keyboard runs, what sounds like a prowling bassline sped up five times over, and (one of my favourite bits, and probably yours too) that chaotic, giddy psychedelic keyboard break which emerges just when you suspect they might have run out of ideas (eventually, it does more or less finish the song). If you were being cynical, you could argue that they were professional musicians putting their experience at writing catchy ad jingles over a genre which was booming in commercial and dancefloor popularity - there are a couple of slightly buried elements in the mix which do sound a tiny bit like “brassy synthetic library music” - but then again, why not?