122. Yazz & The Plastic Population - The Only Way Is Up (Big Life)

One week at number one on 20th August 1988

Originally, I was tempted to tie this together with the last entry (“Superfly Guy”) for the simple reason that it underlines the point I was making about the different approaches to music for the dancefloor. You can either stick doggedly to a groove where the lyrics are a pure afterthought, mere chanted exhortations, or offer a much more coherent, emotional story, guided more by pop song structures (“I Will Survive”).

Otis Clay’s original version of “The Only Way Is Up” was always on the latter side of the fence, though wasn’t a huge success when released in 1982. If you haven’t listened to it in a while, go back and do so again – while researching this entry, I found myself unexpectedly moved by having the experience afresh. I’d forgotten just how understated it was, yet personal. If you’ve ever experienced poverty, however briefly, the idea of having somebody by your side throughout the ordeal takes on a highly romantic edge; a lot of couples don’t make it through to the other side as desperate times expose ugly personality flaws. We may all have insecurities about not being attractive enough, clever enough, charismatic enough or warm enough for our partners, but capable enough? Able to actually contribute towards food and shelter, fundamental life basics? Not being a financial drag? In the unforgiving modern world, that’s a kicker, and something the post-Reagan/Thatcher mainstream continually reinforces as a kind of societal blight.  

Literal hunger can also lead to brash comments, rash behaviour and long solo walks in the freezing cold away from the claustrophobia of the bedsit. The very idea of a couple helping each other through the dark times, convinced that better things are ahead, is therefore an extremely strange idea for a dancefloor driven ballad, but an effective and touching one – and the songwriters Jackson and Henderson pull no punches (“If we should be evicted from our homes” is a brutal line in any context) while Clay sells it subtly and beautifully, without a hint of bitterness, like a warm hug in a freezing cold bed. When he sings “I know love will see us through” (a line missing from Yazz’s version) he could be singing about a relationship or about society more generally, depending on how you want to hear it. It feels like underclass gospel.

In some senses, Yazz may have seemed like the perfect person to front a cover of this record. She was sold to the public as a plucky everywoman, a club dancefloor girl with a distinctive peroxide crop who got lucky. On her first chart appearance with “Doctorin’ The House” she played an important part, providing a clarion call and foundation to Coldcut’s chaotic pilfering of old records, but it was certainly more their track than hers. A lot of people assumed she was a friend of the duo, grabbed from the club floor, when in reality she had already spent some time working as a catwalk model, and was shortly afterwards handled by Wham!’s management team. They sent her to singing lessons and she cut a demo, then was subsequently introduced to Coldcut, who happened to issue “Doctorin’ The House” right at the point where House music was becoming a commercial force (their previous records had not charted).

Her version of “The Only Way Is Up”, produced by Coldcut again, is fascinating to listen to back-to-back with Clay’s, purely because the approach is so different. Clay is smooth and warm but dogged, doing his best for his partner and guardian angel. Yazz, on the other hand, is being driven by something else – a noisy self-belief almost. Her delivery suggests she’s never lost a minute’s sleep in her life wondering if she’s wrong, or feeling as if actually, her natural level in life might be working in a call centre. The track is far too ebullient for that, punctuated with screams of victory and joy. You exit Clay’s track thinking he might land himself a perfectly average job soon, whereas throughout, Yazz sounds as if she’s already won the lottery (and in a funny way, of course, she had).

You could meaningfully compare “The Only Way Is Up” to “I Will Survive”. While Gaynor’s single is about surviving without your deadbeat cheating lover, “Up” is about the pair of you surviving through the difficulties – in Yazz’s hands, it’s a tool of absolute defiance and self-belief, determination winning over any scrap of self-doubt. Just as Gaynor knows she can get by alone, Yazz also knows that two good people united in determination to overcome their difficulties are going to have better odds than one.

Her ecstatic (pun absolutely intended) delivery is also much more in keeping with the dancefloor of the day. Coldcut’s trumpet howls, jittery bottle-bank rhythms and squelching Acid sounds demand something that can overpower them rather than falling beneath them, and just as she did on “Doctorin’ The House”, Yazz rises to the occasion. At moments, she howls in what can only be described as joyous defiance, and it sounds like an unbelievably of-the-moment record – skint kids at Shoom, being part of a movement, a moment, dosed up on E and believing that despite all the difficulties, they are finally part of something together (cue one of Mike Skinner’s diatribes). She effectively took this song away from the early eighties global recession and translated it for the later, chemical part of the decade.

121. S'Express - Superfly Guy (Rhythm King)

One week at number one on 13th August 1988

I’m pondering this track while walking the dog and grabbing a drink at the local cafe – something I often do when drafting new blog entries – when, serendipity abound, I realise that the young women on the counter are listening to a seventies disco compilation. Sadly, this isn’t the kind of compilation that reflects a wide spread of the dancefloor hits of the era, but a kind of sanitised, Heart FM “disco super smashes” effort. So while I’m hanging around, I get to hear Boney M’s “Rasputin” and Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”, and marvel at the fact that these were Proper Songs with lyrical stories and momentum. For as much as they were disco, they were also Pop.

Gloria Gaynor gasping and singing “Oh!” before the final chorus of “I Will Survive” means the same thing to everyone. Out there away from the Classic Pop Smash which happened to have a groove, however, lay a bunch of songs which probably meant something different to each of the hundreds of thousands of people who bought them. The creators of Silver Convention’s “Get Up And Boogie”, for example, were deeply proud of the fact that there were only six words used in the entire song (“Get”, “Up”, “And”, “Boogie”, “That’s” and “Right”) all glued on to some chirpy strings and a funky rhythm. “Get Up And Boogie” is only an exhortation to dance, lyrically speaking, but its simplicity means that it takes on a thousand different shapes for all its listeners – it could be about that person they kissed on the dancefloor one night in 1976 then never saw again, that first holiday abroad, that cocktail party they had that barely anyone can remember accurately… it’s celebratory but the memories it carries are up to them. Sometimes imprisoning yourself with only six words gives your listeners a lot of freedom.

Mark Moore of S’Express was a man of few words too. “Superfly Guy” is less manic and less inclined to throw mud at the wall than “Theme From…”, and instead sticks to a clockwork kind of groove, all ticks and gibbers, while liberally dropping the odd sample here and there. The main hook of “Superfly Guy, let me take you higher” is dominant and frequently repeated, but between that are breakdowns, soulful cries, and little bursts of records from the previous decade, teasingly dropped for those in the know (Roy Ayers is the credible chap in the case, BT Express the “tack” – S’Express stuck to the principle of placing the cool next to the plastic for most of their career).

The other key difference is that while “Theme” felt pulsing and heavy at times, sucking your feet downwards on the dancefloor, “Superfly Guy” is pure levity – not only do the vocals soar, but the entire arrangement seems to give you permission to enjoy yourself, to float off towards the club lights and do the breast-stroke in mid-air. It’s only possible connection to heaviness is the way it toys with gangster imagery ever so slightly (particularly in the equally care-free video) but it doesn’t do so with any degree of seriousness. It’s (quite literally) stick-on moustache dicking around, wearing the fancy dress like a kid in a cowboy costume.

Whether you think it’s a better single than its predecessor depends on what you want. For me, it is, because it knows its got a killer groove to offer and realises that budging from it to play into the hands of eighties samplemania will break the thrill; it engages with its key strengths. While doing so, it piles on other embellishments such as string stings and howled soulful proclamations, all adding up to an amazing single about absolutely nothing in particular, a slice of pretty minimalism to which you can attach any mood or memory you want.

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?