Two weeks at number one from 10th July 1982
For all its good intentions, “Woman” periodically bordered on the sickly and mawkish. My mother put forward her verdict plainly and simply: “It’s a good single, but God he had a nerve to criticise Paul McCartney for being sentimental”. She allowed him a pass, though, and in common with millions of others bought the “Double Fantasy” album, absorbing it while still shaken about the man’s death, then admitting its flaws and filing it away as a souvenir from a strange emotional period; the “Candle In The Wind” of the eighties, if you will.
I have no idea if, a year-and-a-half later, Anti Nowhere League’s “Woman” was partially inspired by the identically titled Lennon single or not, but it’s certainly an interesting coincidence. If Lennon’s single is part appreciation, part apology, The League take the opposite tack and focus on the delusion of romantic love and the dark avenues it can take couples down – although when I say “couples”, I should perhaps refer only to the men in the relationship; if John Lennon’s “Woman” is about women, then Anti-Nowhere League’s “Woman” is actually about the frustrations of men, and in many ways that’s probably the cleverest thing about it (it really doesn't get more sophisticated than this, trust me).
The song begins as a ham-fisted rock ballad, filled to the brim with cliches. “You came to me in a dream, I'm sure/ You gave your love, you gave much more to me/ Woman, will you marry me?” Animal sings after a series of other deliberately soapy cliches, before the group begin to rattle and roll to the repeating, gnashed line “Til death us do part”. From that point forward, the song finds its punk feet, kicking and screaming disappointed abuse such as “Yeah, you're sitting on your arse in your dirty clothes/ You're looking a mess, you're picking your nose” and “Your tits are big but your brains are small/ Sometimes I wonder you got any brains at all”.
It’s the classic set-up for the old school working man’s club gag in song form, “Take my wife, for example… no, really, please take her” extended from a few seconds to three minutes. I wasn’t particularly familiar with “Woman” until I needed to listen to it for the purposes of this blog, and first time out, I understood very well that the fluffy, silky first minute was purely a set-up for an inevitable descent into scattershot abuse; anything else at this stage of the group’s career wouldn’t have made any sense. You can’t travel from “I Hate People” to “I Love My Wife” within the space of a few months, even if doing that would arguably have been a stranger and therefore more radical move.
Feminists would doubtless want to point out the failings in the song and its expectations of relationships, arguing that by idealising romantic partners and putting them on pedestals we set ourselves up for disappointment, and you can't punish someone for failing to live up to the image you projected on to them. By doing do, they would thereby risking falling short of Melody Maker critic Carol Clerk’s Law of The League: “Take them seriously and the joke’s on you”. The group would probably also be thrilled by the outrage.
As a result, arguably the only question worth asking is whether the gag’s execution works or not, and it has to be said, it lacks any real sleight of hand – it nudges, winks and nods so heavily at the listener during the first minute that only an idiot would be surprised by what follows, and it eventually feels more like a bunch of rugby players screeching through some unresolved frustrations in the sports club bar. A lot of the lyrics are also surprisingly conservative, even in jest; criticising the state of a woman’s personal laundry feels more like the subject of a Fabreze advert than a second-wave punk band’s third single. Getting angry about the tidiness of your partner's clothes also has more in common with Gary Numan than Jello Biafra (there's a potentially libellous rumour about Numan and a groupie I won't repeat here. Do your own research, as they say).
It’s not that there isn’t comedy mileage in men singing about their end-relationship blues. The post-Earl Brutus project The Pre New produced a two-pronged track entitled “Janet & John/ The Outcome” which may even have been inspired by this Anti Nowhere League song; it’s unlikely, but given the Brutus boys penchant for retro manliness, not impossible. Their attempt begins with a montage of men offering their holy views on the opposite sex: “I think every woman comes into this earth as a pure divine light/ Ready to give nurture and create beauty”, “Women are magical divine gifts from god/ And they can change your life and heal the world”, before suddenly plummeting into the groaned “There goes/ Her storm/ Clear the shit up/ Off my lawn” and warning of “All the emptiness the guy from Elbow never sung”.
It’s not perfect, but it’s smart – it knows where it is and its reason for being there, and even who it might be annoying and why. Both those recordings and the Anti-Nowhere League's single know that beneath the cunning drug of romance potentially lies vicious, ghastly comedowns, and that there is relief in finding gallows humour in the situation. The approaches couldn't be more different, though; one is a basic strop, the furious tantrum of the unsatisfied romantic customer, a piercing scream of “This is not what was advertised when I saw her make up and sexy clothes!”, the other is needling mid-life satire. Strops and basic tantrums were The League’s forte, of course, and it’s daft to expect them to do anything else or their audience to want an alternative to it, but nor am I obliged to find anything interesting there.
Notably, it also peaked at number 72 in the national charts, a less impressive result than their previous singles. The fact it was the third single off a studio album many fans already owned didn’t help, but there was another storm brewing in the meantime. By November 1982, the alternative comedy scene, confined to the club circuit at the point “Woman” was released, began to get its first high profile airings on British television. In the process it introduced gags which, while equally loud, riotous and ham-fisted as The League at times, moved a bit beyond the usual club comedy set-ups and altered the landscape in the same way punk had.
The League’s coarse wit would ultimately be left as neither muckling nor mickling, punk enough to be a band Vyvian out of The Young Ones would have loved (or pretended to love if he thought it would piss enough other people in the room off) but having content closer to the jokes being told in the social club down the road. It feels as if there was only ever really a slight crack in time during which they could feasibly have minor success, and so it proved. This was to be their final Top 75 entry.
Elsewhere in the charts
Pigbag enter the chart at number 7 with “The Big Bean”, and in doing so suddenly swerve into new territories, the revised group line-up now cocking their ears towards the Caribbean. The steel drums and merry melodies replace the chaos of old, and the song never really departs much from its root riff. It’s far from being a bad single, but it also proves how often groups can misunderstand what made them genuinely great to begin with.
It was their second and last Top 40 entry, peaking at the basement number 40 spot. It did better in the indie chart, climbing to number two.
Sunderland Oi! group Red Alert enter at number 17 with “Take No Prisoners”. “Destroy your government” they cried, but nobody listened. It’s a surprisingly neat, sharp cut which could just as easily have been released in 1978 as 1982, but these backwards leanings might have explained how it failed to crack the indie top 10, finally resting instead at the number 15 position.
Bradford proto-goths 1919 enter a few spaces lower at number 21 with “Caged”, which never lets go of the taut menace it creates from the first 30 seconds. It would climb no further up the chart.
Numbers, numbers, so many band names with numbers in the charts this week... Just behind 1919, the under-appreciated punk legends 999 return at number 25 with “Wild Sun”. The burping basslines and sunshine melodies on this one are a major surprise and show the group weren’t clinging on as tightly to their punk roots as some of the newer breed – if anything, “Wild Sun” sounds like a sixties Merseybeat group having an attempted eighties comeback. It’s unobjectionable, but you won’t find me reaching to put this on the turntable ahead of “Emergency”.
In the second week of The League’s brief spell on the throne, Threats enter the chart at number 17 with “Go To Hell”, a song so harsh you can almost feel friction burns breaking out across your body. It would ultimately progress no further up the charts.
The Adicts show an alternative approach at number 27 with “Viva La Revolution”, which shows that the old-fashioned approach of anthemic political statements hadn’t completely gone out of style.
There again, nor apparently had the likes of Hawkwind. The splinter group Hawklords entered at number 29 with “Who’s Gonna Win The War”. The sound of a dozen imploding valve amps and mid-seventies analogue synth noises offer the listener no concessions to the new digital decade, and I actually smelt the ghostly whiff of some incense up my nostrils after listening to the first 30 seconds of this; the most pavlovian response I’ve had to anything all week.
It’s refusal to move forward arguably cost the group new fans, but by 1982 they doubtless fully understood the limited chances they had. “Who’s Gonna Win The War” is like a huge hug from your hairy older brother and a surprisingly enjoyable six minutes, but the factual answer to the question posed by the song title could only be “certainly not the hippies, mate. Not in this life or this chart, anyhow”.
For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums
Number Ones In The Official Charts
Captain Sensible: "Happy Talk" (A&M)
Irene Cara: "Fame" (RSO)
INT. BEDROOM. NIGHT:
ReplyDeleteLead singer of the Anti-Nowhere League, Flip Ferocious, is having a screaming nightmare about some tiny kittens in a field. In his subconscious he is standing on lush grass, surrounded by pleasantly smiling cartoon rainbows. He's trapped. He has to get away.
A giant woman's face rises from the grass, like a broken video game model clipping up through the ground. "Pronouns weren't invented in 2015, you bell-end," she says...
He wakes with a yelp. Shivering with fright, he looks around at his beloved collection of WWII atrocity memorabilia, illuminated by his 1000 lumens night-light, and heaves a sigh of relief. No, he wasn't about to be hit with the Care Bear Stare. Thank god, thank god.
Then he looks down at his Unit 731 brand pyjamas - oh, no. That's not sweat.