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.

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.