5. Theatre Of Hate - Nero (Burning Rome)

 

Number one for one week on 29th August 1981

Every era produces cult rock stars who are slightly too well known to be deemed underground, but not successful enough to be immediately recognisable to casual listeners. This was something I understood at a very early age, precocious nerd that I was.

This ability is perhaps best illustrated by a pointless school playground row which broke out about my cluelessness around the topics of sport, film and tv programmes.

“He knows nothing about anything!” mocked one short-arsed kid, who seemed to be the ringleader in all this. “Doesn’t watch The A-Team. Doesn’t support a football team. Reads stupid kids’ comics and not war comics. And I’ll bet he hasn’t even seen [insert name of some obscure “video nasty” here]. He wouldn’t even know where to get [name of obscure “video nasty”], but I do! I’ve watched it TWICE!”

“Oh yeah?” I countered. “Well, you know nothing about music. You probably don’t even know who Kirk Brandon is!”

People began to titter, and the short-arse retaliated.

“Berk Brandon? Why the hell should I give a shit who Berk Brandon is?!” he sneered, and everyone laughed uproariously.

I don’t know what became of that kid, by the way, but so far as I know he didn’t become a sub-editor at the NME despite seemingly already having the requisite skills at the age of eleven (It also now strikes me that with a few modest alterations, the above exchange could be an argument between Stewart Lee and Richard Herring in series one of “Fist Of Fun”.)

But still… the fact I can still remember this playground exchange points to two things – firstly, I possibly still have some stuff I need to work through with a therapist. Secondly, it signals that Brandon was neither muckling nor mickling in the eighties, even at the height of his success (which is when I had the argument). He was the kind of rock star who crept into the corners of Smash Hits as well as gaining the full-spread treatment in the NME, Melody Maker and Sounds. He was invariably portrayed as an edgy and out-there dude, but somehow lacked the recognisability and warped glamour of a Julian Cope, Ian McCulloch, Morrissey or Robert Smith character. By accident or design, those singers became mighty brands, supremely individualistic in their stylings and opinions and adopted as gurus by impressionable kids desperate for idols. Brandon, with his short crop of peroxide hair, looked as if he could have been a member of any number of post-punk bands. I’m not arguing that this matters to me, but – certainly in the eighties – this mattered if you wanted to be something more than a casual curiosity to most.

To make matters possibly more challenging, his early music career was also unsullied by involvement with major labels, despite growing interest in his work. His recording career initially began with the group The Pack on Rough Trade, before shifting onwards to Theatre Of Hate, who issued all their records on their producer’s own Burning Rome records – a label solely set up to deliver Brandon-related product. Despite taking this none-more-Buzzcocks styled DIY approach, Theatre of Hate certainly weren’t akin to the various standard issue punks and anarcho-punks littering the indie charts at this time. Rather, their sound was gloomier, with agitated vocals and slow rattling rhythms being anchored by clattering and swooping basslines. While the group have seldom been tagged with the ‘g’ (goth) word elements of their sound are certainly some steps ahead of that movement.

4. Depeche Mode - New Life (Mute)

 

Number one for seven weeks from 11th July 1981

The camera on Top Of The Pops focuses on Simon Bates. He appears to be about to go into some kind of public announcement for the benefit of families at home, standing on command. Bates as a broadcaster never seemed to know how to express excitement for music, news or ideas, instead clinging purely to a Reithian idea of mature gravitas. His Bisto brown voice, perfect for piracy warnings on VHS rental tapes, also loaned their authority to subjects as diverse as teenage lost love and the unexpected death of partners on his “Our Tunes” segment, or occasionally irritated disappointment about an irresponsible act (such as the KLF trying to “ruin it for everyone else” at the Brit Awards).

In this case, he tells us that he’s going to introduce us to a new group. The last single of theirs, “Dreaming Of Me”, didn’t do “all that it might” (he sounds slightly pained as he says this) but this time it’s going to be different. That feels like a threat more than a promise, as if he’s almost daring us not to buy the record. It’s strange he should care so much – whatever else you want to say about Bates, he rarely threw his lot behind new bands.

It’s stranger still that the band he should pick would be Depeche Mode. On the surface, they were an unpromising long-term proposition. Despite press acclaim and a rapidly growing fanbase, Mode seemed inherently flawed, hemmed in by their limitations. While other synth-pop bands like Soft Cell, The Human League and Ultravox had major label budgets and carefully controlled imagery, Depeche were cash-strapped teenagers from Basildon on an indie label. They looked like New Romantics, but they weren’t carefully coiffured like Steve Strange or threateningly feminine like Phil Oakey, appearing more like hyperactive fashion students grabbing the first clothes they could afford off the sales rails. On their debut “Top Of The Pops” performance, you get the sense that they’re all trying to suppress grins (Vince Clarke is noticeably failing at points) and there’s a twitchy, antsy energy to them. Gary Numan performing “Are Friends Electric” this isn’t.

Their sound, too, lacked the gloss or technological sophistication of “Tainted Love” or “Don’t You Want Me”. Those songs showed that synthesisers could be used to portray heartbreak and complicated emotions in an eerie, detached and timelessly relatable way – anyone who is in the early throes of a painful break-up can probably relate more to the ominous digital backing of “Tainted Love” than the organic earnestness of one of Abba’s finest ballads (which tend to be the kind of resigned thing you turn to when the dust has almost settled). At this stage in their careers, however, Depeche Mode’s A-sides bubbled, bounced, pinged and ponged for all they were worth, with drum machines punching and snapping in a staccato way in the background.

“Dreaming Of Me” even featured oscillation in its instrumental break, recalling the Theremin experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Joe Meek in previous decades. While it didn’t sound dated in 1981 to my ears, listening back to it now, recontextualising it against the moment it came out, it feels sonically a year or two behind its time, like a bunch of teens with Electronics magazine subscriptions mending and making do.

Sometimes, though, weaknesses can turn into strengths and limitations, self-imposed or otherwise, can create a sound which becomes a group’s early signature. Depeche Mode were lovable in those days precisely because they were new town dabblers. When Daniel Miller started the Mute label, he created a fictional group called The Silicon Teens to fulfil his as-yet unrealised fantasy of an adolescent pop group playing with affordable modern technology. The idea of kids using keyboards to express themselves fascinated him, but scanning the gig circuit and the demo tape pile for candidates, he found only mature(ish) twenty-somethings ready to fill that role. When Depeche Mode emerged, however, the Silicon Teens concept was retired and he threw himself wholesale into his new, real-life flesh and blood project.

The idea obviously didn’t just appeal to Miller. A bunch of kids lugging synths around on public transport to every promotional appointment was marketable and exciting to a novelty-chasing media as well - the future, after all, was about technology being accessible for us all - and the group had in Vince Clarke a great songwriter, and in Miller an astute producer. Clarke could pen memorable futuristic anthems, while Miller, almost operating in a Joe Meek role to begin with, knew how to make their bugs seem like features and their low budget sound appear punchy and current.

“New Life” is an extremely good example of this. The synths slide in angelically during the intro, only to duet with some dinstinctly Binitone ping-pong sounds. This repeats itself, building up tension, until there’s a low descending synth bass pattern and those “drums” kick in, as metronomically as ever. While they sound undeniably cheap, the reverb packed on to them gives them a pulsing, addictive kick – the first time I heard “New Life” on a Sony Walkman in 1984, it slapped against my ears far harder than many other more current sounds.

3. Dead Kennedys - Too Drunk To Fuck (Cherry Red)

 

Number One for five weeks from 6th June 1981 - 4th July 1981

It’s hard to imagine from this distance, but cussing and graphic descriptions of sexual activity on records in the early eighties – whether on hit singles or otherwise – was still deemed to be pretty damn controversial. Times have changed and we now live in an era where numerous singles featuring the f-word have scaled high in the national charts, and while it might make for a funny aside at the end of the week’s chart news, it rarely causes uproar.

The eighties are deemed by some to be the beginning of a much more permissive society, but the reality is that 1981 was only a few short years on from “Never Mind The Bollocks”, and the fact that album wasn’t withdrawn from sale didn’t mean that the public gave up and changed their minds about crudity overnight. Tony Harrison’s epic and distinctly non-punk poem “V” was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987 and caused outrage merely for quoting the work of vandals who had grafittied gravestones in the graveyard where his parents lay. Gratuitous swearing was harder to defend than that, particularly if delivered by young people with loud guitars who probably didn’t have any intellectual aspirations or sensible advice for young people in mind.

Punks knew only too well the power it still had and gravitated towards it. The movement may have been somewhat stale in mainstream terms by 1981, but the eruptions created by The Sex Pistols in particular had left scores of people hungry for further establishment baiting. This single was a huge juicy worm on a hook for that set, causing horror in record stores – the group responded to this by supplying concerned stockists with a sticker over the f-word, reading “Caution: You are the victim of yet another stodgy retailer afraid to warp your mind by revealing the title of this record so peel slowly and see...”

Which potentially makes this a lovely tabloid thunderstrike in a Charles and Di mug, but in retrospect, “Too Drunk To Fuck” feels like one of the least jagged uses of the f-word in pop and rock. If you don’t hear it mentioned often in relation to controversial uses of naughty words, it’s probably because it’s not exactly “Fuck The Police”. In common with a lot of punk and hardcore punk singles of the period, it takes a dire, shitty situation and amps it up for both satirical effect and disgust – “You give me head/ it makes it worse/ take out your fuckin’ retainer/ put it in your purse” growls Jello Biafra over a chugging rhythm.

Radio banned the song – do I even need to write that? - but it nuzzled the lower reaches of the National Top 40 at number 36 regardless, causing panic at the Beeb about whether the Top 30 rundown on “Top of the Pops” would eventually need to mention the unmentionable. In the meantime, Tony Blackburn dodged the issue while delivering the Sunday chart rundown by referring to it as “Too Drunk” by The Kennedys, and a nation’s easily corruptible youth were saved from indecency once again (note – some versions of this story state that Tony Blackburn said ‘the single at number 36 is by a group calling themselves The Dead Kennedys’ before promptly moving on. If anyone actually has a recording of this rundown I’d really like to hear it).

The song became a staple of mixtapes and party tapes for years afterwards. Before I knew a damn thing about The Dead Kennedys friends of mine snuck it on to C90 cassettes as a neat slice of subversion to put between other noisy offerings. The fact it’s never been embraced by oldies or alternative radio means it remains one of those rare examples of a hit single (however minor) you had to buy, or have a friend tape for you, to actually hear in the pre-internet era. I saw it quoted in the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles as a kid and was immediately intrigued, asking my Dad if he knew anything more about it while pointing towards the entry with my index finger. My Dad just spluttered with laughter and said “Probably a punk record. Shouldn’t imagine it was played anywhere”.

I had a long wait to discover what it sounded like, and when I finally heard it on a compilation tape a friend made for me, I was slightly disappointed. The long build-up had been too much and left me as disappointed as Jello Biafra’s sexual partner. So this was it? A demonic chugging riff beneath some lyrics about a limp penis? And what, I suppose, really did I expect? My Saisho music centre to splinter into fragments on impact with it?

2. UB40 - Don't Slow Down (DEP International)

 

Number One for one week on 30th May 1981

Note – This single was a double A-side with Don’t Let It Pass You By – the NME Charts (either deliberately or mistakenly) list it solely as “Don’t Slow Down”, so that’s the side I’ll focus on here.

When you’re having conversations with someone else about music, it’s always interesting to witness the assumptions that pop up; for example, until fairly recently I assumed everyone knew that UB40 were once an extremely credible band. I took it for granted that their backstory was so enormous that it hadn’t been forgotten, even beneath the crushing weight of oldies radio exposure their biggest hits get. Very often, though, people are astonished by the idea that they were ever anything more than a very commercial Breeze FM friendly act. Their childhood memories begin at “Red Red Wine” and go back no further.

That’s a strange mistake to make. UB40, as most people reading this almost certainly realise, had deeply humble, lo-fi underground beginnings. Starting off as a Birmingham live act, they signed to the independent label Graduate in 1980 and proceeded to issue a string of successful top ten hits which felt like reggae viewed through a grease-smeared post-punk lens. Titles like “The Earth Dies Screaming”, referencing a possible nuclear apocalypse, felt more targeted towards IPC journalists and John Peel than the national top ten, but somehow pushed their way through anyway.

This period is also significant in that it produced allegedly the first ever single on an indie label to go top ten – “King”. I’ve seen this fact bandied around often, but nonetheless I doubt it’s entirely true, or at the very least it depends on what your definition of ‘indie’ is. President Records were distributed by Lugton in the sixties (a company far away from the business of major labels) and got The Equals to number one, and Joe Meek’s Triumph Records earlier in that decade also scored a top ten hit in the form of Michael Cox’s “Angela Jones”. What I think people mean is that UB40 were the first to score a major hit single while an independent chart of some form also existed, which is a clear difference.

No matter; to begin with, UB40 were certainly operating on minuscule budgets. Their debut LP “Signing Off” was recorded in a bedsit in Birmingham, and contained a reproduction of an unemployment form on the cover. It was deemed a brave, brilliant and authentic record at the time, and found support among dopeheads, students, reggae fans, soulies and casual listeners alike. I heard the LP frequently in the bedroom I shared with my brothers growing up, and when I was old enough to eventually buy a copy for myself, I did. “Signing Off” is nothing like UB40 at their commercial peak – it’s far too skeletal and dour for that – but despite that, its sound and dominant themes were entirely right for the period. Like The Specials’ “Ghost Town”, its sulk sums up the mood of the early eighties. While it may have been more compressed, boxed in and less widescreen than that record, the disc and its packaging are equally tied to an era which promised little for those in the old industrial heartlands.

Following the success of that album, the group left Graduate Records – who survived without them for awhile but never found another act who caught the public imagination to the same extent - and formed their own label DEP International, with a view to issuing their own material and that of other reggae artists they admired. The first handful of DEP records were distributed by Spartan and, in common with their previous work, entered the indie charts as a result.

1. Discharge - Why? (Clay Records)

 

Number One from 18th May 1981 for two weeks

Back in the early nineties a label called Connoisseur Collection issued a series of thoughtfully compiled records called “The Indie Scene”. Each documented a year in the life of British independent labels, and while it was occasionally guilty of inauthenticity (even the most liberal definition of “indie” shouldn’t include The Stranglers releases on United Artists) the booklets were enthusiastically written and informative, and some of the CDs contained material which had been unavailable in a digital format before.

Despite this, missing from these compilations was any kind of (even passing) reference to the early eighties punk scene. Whether this was due to rights issues or master tape problems is a question, but cynical old me suspects that it was probably because those bands didn’t fit the narrative, despite their overwhelming popularity in underground terms. I can imagine the conversations in the office – “Post punk? Definitely, that’s going in. Industrial? Of course. Synth pop? Well, we can hardly leave Mute out of the story. Hardcore Punk? Forget it. Nobody is going to buy these compilations to listen to one minute and thirty seconds of a man grunting and raging against the failings of a supposedly liberal Western society while a group thrash away behind him”.

Whether my assumptions are correct or not, I generally feel the rush of enthusiasm for these releases has been wiped out of indie history. It fits the story in one respect, in that all these groups were operating outside the mainstream, had a distinct sound, passion and purpose, and were sometimes played by John Peel, but they certainly don’t neatly fit the preferred mainstream BBC 6 Music narrative, the backwards looking one with its tidy cuts and edits to the messy edges of the story.

In addition, punks in general had a significantly reduced visibility by the early eighties. They were still apparent, but seemed to have become more of a small town phenomenon; similar to the way in which you don’t see motorcycle gangs in urban areas anymore but one miraculously emerges as soon as you take a day trip to Cheddar, punks now seemed to have become a phenomenon of the bored suburbs and strange between-city outposts rather than the troubled estates.

At the time, I noticed the graffiti “Punk’s Not Dead” popping up in odd places (we’ll come back to this slogan again in good time) which even as an eight year old I understood wasn’t a good sign. People don’t tend to walk around protesting something’s not dead if it’s obviously in rude health. When our neighbour told us that her Dad was still alive, it was only because this seemed like a miraculous fact given his health woes, not because he had taken up tap dancing.

Punk, though, had both infected other genres and itself splintered into many different factions and forms. The Oi scene, championed and promoted by future tabloid superhack Gary Bushell, seemed to imagine an alternate universe where Sham 69 were the artistic champions of the movement and not The Clash or The Pistols. Then other “punk pathetique” groups like Splodgenessabounds and Peter and the Test Tube Babies occupied the gleefully childish fringes of the movement, as if they had decided that refusing to act like a grown up and celebrating, rather than railing against, the daft trivialities of daily life was one of the most anarchic and free-spirited things a human being could still do (I might be inclined to agree with them).

Then there was hardcore punk, though how long it took before anybody actually referred to it as such in the UK is open to question. Bushell didn’t seem to talk as enthusiastically about those bands, though he certainly gave them space. They were harder, heavier, nastier and, for all their relative musical amateurism, more Metal than the first wave of British punk bands.

Stoke-on-Trent’s Discharge were pioneers of the British movement, and the “Why?” EP shows us how they did it. It’s akin to Wire’s earliest work in that each song is a short, mean stab which doesn’t take up more time than it has to – the EP consists of ten tracks but is over in less than twenty minutes. Completely unlike any of Wire’s work, however, this is persistently, relentlessly harsh, a distorted and furious cacophony which barely stops for breath. Cal Morris’ vocals practically invent the doomy guttural chant of modern metal, while the group surge, clatter and charge behind him.

The Concept

 

C81 and up and on

What you’re reading, if you hadn’t already guessed for yourself, is a blog focusing on all the singles which topped the NME Independent Singles Chart from 1981 (when their chart launched) onwards.

And why?

If you’re of a cynical persuasion, your first thought is probably "Why? Isn’t the indie chart a very antiquated concept? In the 21st Century, haven’t we accepted that all music has the ability to be groundbreaking and innovative, without being issued on small labels? And who cares about labels anymore anyway?"

Well, yes. I’m going to potentially cause some of you to click away by raising the obvious point that a lot of my favourite music of all time was actually issued by major labels. Also, it's my view that while indie snobbery (where singles issued in xeroxed sleeves by tiny labels were wowed over in favour of chartbound sounds) was definitely rife in the eighties and occasionally felt like a necessary reaction, it’s not something I feel much affinity for now. The idea that "the underground is where the best music can be found" is unbelievably restrictive and untrue, especially as most genres tend not to stay underground forever.

But then again... a lot of my favourite singles of all-time were put out on indie labels and they were the place where the initial spells were cast. I'm fascinated by the stirrings of ideas, the initial flawed fumblings of genres and even the groups who were supposed to be the future but failed to effectively represent any era, including the one they were spawned in. History doesn't always have to be written about the winners. 

Also, much of the material in the lower reaches of the charts has since become long-forgotten despite its presence on evening radio and the press at the time, making it ripe for reexamination in a way that other groups aren’t – for every Smiths or New Order hit there were a hundred groups who shoved out a couple of well-reviewed singles before finding they couldn’t forge any further ahead. None of these bands have ever had the luxury of a Sony or Universal reissue, and have instead slid into a weird cultural oubliette.

Even the groups behind indie number ones are not necessarily remembered by most in the 21st Century. Many were genre-based or fanbase-driven flashes in the pan, a chance for an underground group to quickly peer up beneath the crack in the manhole into the mainstream, only for their heads to be stomped on by uncaring pedestrians rushing out to buy a Stars on 45 medley instead.