59. The Smiths - Shakespeare's Sister (Rough Trade)

One week at number one on w/e 6th April 1985

You have to be careful not to wholly trust your own memory - it can play tricks on you, twisting facts into new narratives for no discernable reason. This week, for instance, I misremembered Belle and Sebastian’s “chartbreaker” “Legal Man” as a number 9 hit, then realised through cross-checking with Wikipedia and other sources that I’d confused it with John Otway’s fanbase driven smash “Bunsen Burner”. A weird thing to do as, beyond the fact that both acts have excessively devoted fans, they otherwise have little in common.

Likewise, I had “Shakespeare’s Sister” filed in my mind as The Smiths first flop since “Hand In Glove”, which is also utterly wrong; the reference books prove it was a modest number 26 hit, and that their first disappointment came later. In this case, though, it’s easy to hear why my brain reshuffled the facts around and punished this single with an imaginary non-top 40 placing.

My associations with The Smiths have been ongoing throughout my life. Most of my friends love them. My wife was, for a long period, obsessed with them. I’ve been taken along to club nights that play nothing but Smiths singles, and been around people’s houses and listened to Smiths mixtapes over dinner. I never shared the fanaticism any of these people had, but their ideas of what made the group matter, and where their strong points lay, became the backbone of my understanding. When you’re not hopelessly devoted to a group yourself, you take your cues from the fans around you, the ones who have put in the studious graft with passion.

In all my life, I think I’ve involuntarily heard “Shakespeare’s Sister” a mere handful of times. It’s the Smiths single no-one dances to and nobody I met ever cross-analysed or had pegged as their "one". Listening back to it again for the first time in years, it’s also amazing how slight it is compared to their other singles so far. The shuffling rockabilly rhythm feels more akin to the Brilliant Corners or even The Meteors, while Morrissey wails about suicide and throwing himself down on the “rocks below”. It feels like more of a tantrum than a song, the non-chorus of “Oh let me go!” intervening at numerous points to act as a brief bit of respite rather than a hook. Beyond the mysteriously tranquil instrumental interlude, the song just scrabbles its way up some jagged scree on a steep slope, occasionally losing its grip or catching its breath, then starting up all over again.

Morrissey has made it clear that it was inspired by a concept in Virginia Woolf’s “A Room Of One’s Own”, where the writer theorised that if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister, she would have been equally mistreated by her parents and society and forced to live a dissatisfied and mentally anguished life. What we’re hearing, then, is the sound of that torment; a retro rock and roll tantrum, a scramble of malcontent, a gibbering fit which never quite settles down enough to make its lyrical ideas coherent. In fact, in places the lyrics feel rather random and almost baffling - over the years I’ve had a total failure of imagination about the final lines “I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar/ it meant you were a protest singer”, and I still can’t understand why it's relevant now; if it turns out that Morrissey half-inched them from another source and that book or article would hold the key to their relevance and meaning, I wouldn’t be at all surprised, but nothing seems to have turned up so far.

57b. Jesus & Mary Chain - Upside Down (Creation)

 

Further 3 weeks at number one from w/e 16th March 1985

It's been a while since we've seen an old number one boomeranging back up to the top again, and I'm actually relieved about that - I dislike the way that kind of repetition messes up the narrative of the blog. Still, the facts cannot be argued with, and while The Smiths "How Soon Is Now" was a track with only a feeble grip at the top and a modest toehold in the official charts, "Upside Down" remained a curiosity to casual buyers wandering into Rough Trade. The continued Mary Chain hype kept sales steady, and as soon as The Smiths showed any signs of weakness, the Reid brothers reclaimed their crown again. 

Resting warily beneath them were this lot, who didn't really offer much of a threat.

Week One

22. Balaam And The Angel - Love Me (Chapter 22)

Peak position: 9

With a crash, a smash and a despondent but insistent reverberating guitar riff, "Love Me" cemented Balaam And The Angel's early reputation as an exciting new goth rock act. Sadly, it bears no relation to the parodical Dudley Moore track of the same name, though it does holler as loudly at times - instead, it advises children to follow their instincts, ignore hate, and find their kinfolk. Fair advice from the Balaams, really, offering the kind of hopeful thinking very few goth acts managed.

27.Billy Bragg - Between The Wars (Go! Discs)

Peak position: 27

"Marketed by Chrysalis Records" is clearly written on the back of the sleeve for this one, but in their new 1985 welcoming spirit, the NME let it in the indie charts for one week anyway. 

Stunning how much "Between The Wars" sounds even more stripped bare and underproduced than almost anything else we're discussing today, though. You could be forgiven for thinking this came out on Bluurgh Records; Bragg's honking vocals and the abrasive clang of his guitar sound bare and ragged. Nor is the lyrical content a million miles off the most politicised single on Crass Records, it's just that Bragg has more folk poetry and grandeur at his heart, despite the sonic evidence to the contrary - this is a pro-union song and a prayer for the return of more open and charitable times against the cynicism of Thatcherism, rather than a war cry to kill the rich. 

If there's one thing Bragg gets which the anarcho-punks of the era didn't, it's that sometimes you have to offer your downtrodden audience a message of unity and solidarity as well as screaming for a possible bloody revolution. "Between The Wars" is perhaps a bit too despairing to offer them everything they needed in the hopelessness of 1985, but one picket line anthem is better than none. 

28. D.O.A. - Don't Turn Yer Back (On Desperate Times): The John Peel Session (Alternative Tentacles)

Peak position: 19

29. Severed Heads​ - Goodbye Tonsils (Ink)

Peak position: 29

Australian industrial duo who specialised in synth rackets, audio junk cut-ups from film and television and an ongoing fascination with the perverse and repellant. Much of their work sounds slightly too cluttered and basic to truly surprise casual listeners in 2025, but at the time, "Goodbye Tonsils" felt inventive, threatening and strange. 

30. Rabbi Joseph Gordon - Competition (Bam Caruso)

Peak position: 30

Julian Cope masquerading as a garage rock rabbi, presumably for reasons of career slump boredom and general mischief. There's an argument to be made for "Competition" injecting a sense of purpose back into his life again, though - the road away from Mercury Records and towards Island and further Top 40 success was long at this point, but the abandonment of the introspective psychedelia of "Fried" and towards hard-hitting garage Kingsmenisms possibly started here. 

This isn't to say that "Competition" is in any way essential; it's as likeable but also as throwaway as any genuine garage obscurity you're likely to hear this month. So far as Cope was concerned, though, mission accomplished.

Week Two

9. Conflict - This Is Not Enough Stand Up And F*ucking Fight (Mortarhate)

Peak position: 3

Conflict had a fine way with snappy and abusive single and album titles - this one and "Only Stupid Bastards Help EMI" pop into my head all the time.

"This Is Not Enough" is just over two minutes of agitated noise, grinding guitars and lyrics which veer towards the incomprehensible throughout the anger, but you can guess what it is they're generally on about, and you're seldom far from wrong. Like a lorryload of spare gear boxes and biscuit tins being thrown into a thresher. 

58. The Smiths - How Soon Is Now (Rough Trade)

Two weeks at number one from w/e 2nd March 1985

There’s a huge “what if?” surrounding “How Soon is Now?”. It's one of The Smiths most enduring tracks; when I was round my friend’s houses as a teen, it was there. When I was finally old enough to go to alternative nightclubs, it shot out loud and proud. When I packed up my things and went to university, it followed me, and whenever anyone mentions The Smiths in a brief piece on radio or television, it is still to this day somewhere in the background.

Very few bands are lucky enough to write songs which end up becoming slightly clumsily described as "legendary". Most amble their way through their brief careers pushing out material which is well-liked by a small section of the public, but usually left behind by radio and television a few years later, only fondly reminisced about by fans who complain you don’t hear them in public often enough nowadays.

Ironically then, nobody at Rough Trade foresaw that “How Soon Is Now?” would be so highly regarded. They worried that it didn’t sound sufficiently Smithsian and, as a result, relegated it to the B-side of the twelve inch single of their previous release “William It Was Really Nothing”. Only the growing number of fans bothering DJ’s with requests to hear it on evening Radio One shows and continued club play forced a panicked reassessment of the situation and its eventual re-release as an A-side, but by then, everyone who owned a copy of the 12” single of “William” already had it, and the new B-sides “Well I Wonder” and “Oscillate Wildly” on the reissue didn’t seem to be creating as much excitement.

The net result was the peculiar situation of a potentially huge single peaking at number 24 in the UK chart (though it managed a fairer number 5 in Ireland) and a mere couple of weeks on top of the NME indie chart. Oops.

In Rough Trade’s defence, you can understand their concerns. The group were still establishing themselves, and the previous Smiths singles had been chiming, intricate and melodic affairs. “How Soon Is Now” consists of Johnny Marr locking himself into a shimmering but dirty hypnotic groove, offering only anguished howls from his guitar as any kind of diversion or punctuation. If The Smiths other singles are restless with possibility, with Marr’s guitar lines ricocheting all over the place and unearthing a new melody every thirty seconds, “How Soon Is Now” is locked on one killer hook and trusts it implicitly. Grooves, even of the swampy, unconventional kind, were not the kinds of things Smiths records entertained prior to this point.

On top, Morrissey delivers his anguished tale of being unloved and unlovable in some of the most unusually direct language heard on a Smiths 45 prior to this point. The opening line “I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar” is probably the most poetic. The rest descends into direct emotional bloodletting which may or may not have been inspired by the singer visiting gay clubs – my lawyer has instructed me not to speculate – but nonetheless said something a lot of teenagers, whether gay or straight, wanted to hear.

As an adolescent, there’s a tendency to believe that everyone around you is either being adored by a significant other, or could be if they so chose. It’s only in adulthood that most of us look back and realise that the two 14 year olds we knew who held hands and kissed for an entire year were freaks rather than a couple to be envied, and everyone else was either being dumped and publicly humiliated by a different person every third week, or being ignored like the other 75% of the school year. Morrissey singing “I am human and I need to be loved/ Just like everyone else does” was catnip to thousands of underdeveloped brains and souls who felt that only they were missing out on tenderness, but it also became a clear message for those who were shy and awkward adults, or just plain undesirable (and there are many cruel ways people can end up “difficult to love”, often outside their control). Heard one particular way it’s a teenage whine. To another person in another set of circumstances, it’s a banner to be held aloft at a protest march society has yet to schedule.

57. Jesus and Mary Chain - Upside Down (Creation)

Number one for four weeks from w/e 2nd February 1985

Success in rock and pop music occurs due to happy accidents more frequently than managers, artists or labels alike would care to admit. This has always been true, from Mick Jagger bumping into Keith Richards by chance at Dartford train station, to the Sex Pistols dropping swear words on the “Today” programme. Had the former not met in adulthood, or the latter found themselves without an opportunity to offend on prime time television, it’s difficult to say what holes rock history would be left with.

Similarly, the Mary Chain’s “legendary” debut bottom-of-the-bill gig at Alan McGee’s Living Room club in London in 1984 feels somewhat like the music of chance. As is well documented in the excellent biography “My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize”, McGee had very few plans for the Jesus & Mary Chain after hearing their demo tape; just the offer of a London gig and the possible inclusion of one of their songs on a (never realised) compilation of unsigned bands. By the time the group took the stage to soundcheck, though, addled by both overconsumption of alcohol and their own inexperience (they didn’t even understand what a soundcheck was) they churned out a curdled, feedback-ridden cover of Pink Floyd’s “Vegetable Man” largely by accident. Not all of the chaos and the piercing noise was intended to be a feature of The Mary Chain’s sound, and much of the mess was purely unintentional. The group left the stage feeling as if they’d failed, to be greeted by an over-enthusiastic McGee who offered them a deal, believing it to be one of the most mind-blowing spectacles he had ever witnessed.

The gig itself was, according to the dozen or so people who actually saw it, even more shambolic, the sound of a group who couldn’t play, taking their rudimentary abilities out on cheap instruments with missing strings. This shambles was submerged beneath a yelping screech of unintentionally vigorous feedback and a broken fuzz pedal, and the set ended with all the group members punching drummer Murray Dalglish, much to the amusement and entertainment of the small audience (who included a couple of music journalists). 

Under a different promoter and another set of circumstances, it’s probable this story would have ended right there, with JAMC sent back on the next coach to East Kilbride, asked to buck their ideas up – which you sense they were incapable of doing by themselves – or go back to their factory jobs. While they played their live set, however, Alan McGee worked overtime running around the quiet bar spaces in the venue trying to convince everyone that he had witnessed combustible genius, the next big sound. When the group had finished bruising each other (literally and metaphorically) he then wandered about swearing at the non-attendees for failing to witness the historic event.

As we’ve witnessed ourselves through this blog’s journey, Creation Records were a curiosity in 1984 rather than a fashionable indie label. Their roster of acts prior to 1985 issued under-produced but melodic records, each of which has waited decades to be reappraised, but ultimately hasn’t passed the test; they’re (mostly!) decent discs, but all are playing with very predictable and well-tested elements. The Jasmine Minks had a sharp pub punk edge, but even Paul Weller didn’t want to sound slightly like The Jam in the mid-eighties. McGee’s own group Biff Bang Pow sounded like that competent local indie band you knew, who might possibly have got somewhere if only they could have found That One Great Song down the back of their sofa – and there were no signs this was going to happen soon. The mysterious Revolving Paint Dream dribbled out pleasant but cliched psychedelic pop which, if it were suddenly put under another band name on Spotify tomorrow, would probably stand accused of being an AI created project. In short, McGee currently didn’t hold an impressive hand. This was music which might brighten the world of the obsessive record buyer, but wasn't going to be front page news in the music press.

He must have known that he needed a volatile, combustible group with the sound to accompany their mayhem to push Creation Records from the margins of the indie scene to the centre. In offering The Jesus and Mary Chain a contract based on nothing more than a demo tape and a live performance consisting of little more than explosive disarray, he saw opportunities to turn himself into Malcolm McLaren with the group as his Sex Pistols. And so the mission began. He fed bogus news stories about their antics to the music press and ultimately tabloid press, booked gigs where riots broke out – though in at least one instance, the word riot should probably have quotation marks around it – and issued this single.

As is often the way with rock classics, from The Kinks “You Really Got Me” to the Beach Boys “Good Vibrations”, the gestation period of “Upside Down” wasn’t necessarily straightforward. Two versions had to be recorded before the group came out with something they felt really represented their sound. In a strange inversion of the normal rules, though, the “right” version was one which had been recorded in a cheap 4-track recording studio rather than their initial attempt, which had been recorded in a more professional facility.

It sounds like it, too. “Upside Down” absolutely revels in its amateurism. Seldom has such a loud, confusing nettle soup of noise sounded both so low fidelity and also so dour. Beneath the squeals of feedback and on top of the metronomic drum patter grumbles a vaguely buoyant sixties melody. It feels like the levers were up in the recording studio on two things happening at once; a sonic art experiment akin to Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music”, plus a few moody teenagers testing out their idea of a perky tune with an absence of feeling or commitment. They sing “uh-huh-huh” like Elvis, but it sounds reluctant and sullen, like a Teddy Boy muttering it under his breath as a policeman walks past.

1985

  What have the 1984 indie charts taught us, exactly? The longer I plug away at this project, the more I wonder if calendar years are reliable markers for stories about popular (and unpopular) culture at all. Very often, a calendar year will sever the story at an inconvenient point of development rather than act as a natural close. 

That said, I do think 1984 is the first year where you can sense order and professionalism sneaking into the indie chart, where the hand-made and the DIY starts to be pushed to one side. It doesn't feel entirely coincidental that Crass caved in on themselves as an act very early in the year and the presence of punk rock is otherwise absent from the top slot, except in the form of The Toy Dolls novelty hit. Punk seems to have been increasingly shunted towards the lower end of the Top 30 to sell to an increasingly ageing audience. Taking its place at the top are the new breed of post-punk "hitmakers", stealing punk's do it yourself ambitions but sweetening them with strong studio enhanced sounds. 

In turn, some proper household names finally started to assert themselves. Cocteau Twins, The Smiths, and Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds all became dependable players alongside the Depeche Modes and New Orders of this world. The hall of fame becomes more bloated as a result, and niche acts begin to find it harder to reach the number one slot outside of slow periods (its notable that March Violets and The Senate both reached the top during the traditional summer sales slump). 

That dominance of big names is only going to get stronger in 1985. It won't stay this way forever, and there will be cultish surprises to enjoy in the years that follow, but - without wanting to put any of you off continuing reading - it really is a year where there are fewer surprises at the top. The bands everyone loves will only assert themselves more forcefully than ever, and the oddballs and the weirdos will struggle to reach the top five. 

The one big odd development in 1985 - which I have massive issues with and casual readers are going to get very confused by - is the NME's decision to allow some small labels with major label backing into the charts until mid-December (at which point they were promptly ejected again). Beggars Banquet, Stiff and Go! Discs - owned, part-owned or distributed by Warners, Island and Chrysalis respectively - are all given space alongside tiny household run ventures. There also appears to be no consistency to this thinking, so despite these labels getting the green light, Fiction Records and ZTT don't. Was 1985 the first year the philosophical debates around what indie labels actually were began? It would make sense if so, but the paper's final conclusions feel absurd, even if they don't upend the charts as much as you may think they might. They do, however, create one ludicrous and long-lived chart-topper, but more on that when we get to it. 

The playlist featuring everything to chart (within reason) in 1984 can be found below one last time. The new 1985 playlist can be found on the right hand side of the page. Tuck in. We've got another long road ahead. 

56. Toy Dolls - Nellie The Elephant (Volume)

Number one for seven weeks from w/e 15th December 1984

So then – where were you when you last heard the collective cry of “WooooooOOOOOOAARGH”? In my experience, it can be heard in the following strict set of circumstances:

1. As the enthusiastic accompaniment to somebody “downing a pint”.

2. As the tense sound made by football supporters during a critical penalty shot (usually followed either by cheers, an “ooh!” of disappointment, or even a deflated, almost sarcastic “Oh.”)

3. The noise made shortly before a group of pissed-up beef-necked overgrown schoolboys start throwing increasingly heavy objects around in a pub. It might start with beer mats and end with chairs. Usually, deep down, you know you should have left the place long before this occurred.

4. The sound shortly before the chorus of “Nellie The Elephant”.

Spot the odd one out there. We’ve encountered The Toy Dolls multiple times in our journey through the indie charts, and on every occasion it’s been noticeable just how much they inhabit their own world; it’s an absurd but not particularly sophisticated cross between the abrasive and the fey, the childlike and the rough. 

The group’s roots were firmly in the Punk Pathetique subgenre of Oi, where banal and trivial working class observations combined with a general air of frivolity and stupidity; if most of those groups focused on simple comedic situations such as trying to get served in a bar before closing time (Splodgenessabounds) or being caught kissing someone else’s woman and having to make your escape (Peter & The Test Tube Babies), the Toy Dolls were essentially doing the same only writing with thick crayons. Titles like “Cheerio and Toodle-pip”, all delivered in Olga’s high pitched music hall voice, felt as if they had emerged from ancient episodes of “Watch With Mother”. You got the impression that in Olga’s opinion, the whole of adult society hadn’t moved far beyond the kindergarten, so why should he?

Their cover version of the Mandy Miller song “Nellie The Elephant” had been released in 1982 to indie chart success, but didn’t really make much of a mark beyond the kind of dancefloors where punks gathered. The track never quite disappeared from those club playlists, though, and slowly and steadily found a fresh audience in 1984 thanks to stray bits of Radio One evening airplay getting noticed by the daytime crew (though John Peel, interestingly, consistently ignored it in favour of other Toy Dolls material). The track was reissued, and entered the lower reaches of the Top 100 in November, building up steam and then finally gatecrashing the Top 40 by early December.

Its popularity feels almost entirely due to the absurdities of the British Christmas market. Record buyers at Christmas time will happily part with money to hear anything which sounds as if it might evoke collective fun, whether that’s songs with superhumanly anthemic choruses, tracks their children could also appreciate, or novelty records which are frankly stupid but annoyingly catchy. For all its chugging punk rock stylings, “Nellie The Elephant” managed to tick all those boxes, and found itself appreciated by kids both literal and overgrown - the children at home getting excited about Christmas, and the ones in the outside world getting drunk at the works party; the Olgas and the Juniors of this world, some growing up and others falling down.

The Toy Dolls suddenly found themselves in the Christmas number four position, right behind the Three Kings of Band Aid, Wham’s “Last Christmas” and Paul McCartney’s Frog Chorus – all monstrous sellers. It was a colossal achievement for their tiny Sunderland indie label Volume, who were usually only used to worrying about getting enough copies of their singles pressed to keep them in the Indie Top 20. In this sense, “Nellie The Elephant” is an eccentric British victory for the rank outsider, the everyman partaking in daft follies in his spare time and then finding himself eyeballing an ex-Beatle for a top three chart position. And at Christmastime too! It’s a wonderful life indeed.

It has to be said that it’s not really a great piece of work in itself, though, and Peel’s reluctance to engage with it is not surprising. It’s a groundbreaker in that it feels like one of the first attempts by a punk or metal band to create a single out of unlikely source material. In the decades to come we will be treated to ironic covers of children’s songs and "cheesy" pop hits by no end of young men wearing studded leather jackets, but even taking that “innovation” into account, the single is really just a boozy racket.

In this respect, the gap between “Nellie” and Scaffold’s 1968 Christmas number one “Lily The Pink” is actually quite narrow. Both depend on the same stomping, chugging rhythm, perfect for bashing beer tankards on tables to. Both sound perfect for the kind of overly raucous Christmas party I must admit I never got along with – the toxically mixed kind which occasionally saw somebody fired from their job in the New Year, or saw old rows between good friends being resuscitated. Sometimes the line between the jolly drunken cry of “WooooAAARGH” and much more aggressive screaming and shouting can be very fine.

55. Depeche Mode - Blasphemous Rumours (Mute)

 

Four weeks at number one from w/e 17th November 1984

A point that sometimes gets missed about Depeche Mode – but seems only too obvious when you get neck-deep into the band’s catalogue – is that three of the group’s founding members (Gore, Fletcher, Clarke) were regular church-goers before they formed, and the other (Gahan) had a mother who was in the Salvation Army.

While Gore has offered strange reasons for his regular attendance at his Basildon church, putting forward the somewhat limp justification that there was “nothing else to do on Sunday” (a situation that applied to most teens, including me a mere five miles or so down the road, but I managed without) Gahan’s response to his mother’s exhortations to go to church on Sunday was less honest, and he instead chose to bunk off and go cycling instead. If you had to quickly characterise the two members with childhood anecdotes, these would be good places to start; Gore being compliant and gently shrugging his way towards group activities he couldn’t entirely see eye-to-eye with, while Gahan’s life was filled with action and rebellion.

Sunday service appeared to fascinate Gore, however, and he developed a morbid obsession with the prayers being offered for the sick parishioners there. “The person at the top of the list [of names] was guaranteed to die, but still everyone went right ahead thanking God for carrying out His will,” he later remarked. Long after Gore had bothered attending church, these memories appeared to feed their way into the group’s twelfth single, and final release of the most commercially fruitful year of their career.

If “Master and Servant” tested the waters topically and almost got banned by Radio One, “Blasphemous Rumours” was, from start to finish, the biggest act of commercial suicide committed by the group so far. A diatribe against the peculiarities and inconsistencies of the Christian faith, there are no gentle metaphors on offer here, Gore instead choosing to tell his tale in plain language as if he’s spluttering in an outraged fashion in the local pub.

“Girl of sixteen, whole life ahead of her/ Slashed her wrists, bored with life” Gahan rattles off like a telex machine listing the facts. “Didn't succeed, thank the Lord/ For small mercies”. After the first run of the damning chorus about God and his sick sense of humour, we then learn of a girl of eighteen who “found new life in Jesus Christ” and was subsequently “Hit by a car, ended up/ On a life support machine”. It’s not clear if it’s the same girl, whose boredom has been replaced two years later by a sense of virtuous purpose only for her to be killed off in a ho-ho ironic fashion, or a different one – but the effect is the same and God is, as Neil Tennant would later opine in Smash Hits, given a “thorough ticking off”.

If the central message alone was likely to get the church and Christian figures irritated, the song is strangely unsubtle, in places forsaking melody in favour of discordant lines more likely to be favoured by horror film soundtracks, combined with slowly collapsing metallic clangs and gurgling, sucking noises. It not only wants to mention a life support machine, it wants to give you an impression of what one sounds like (I remain thankfully ignorant of whether the group's attempts are accurate or not, but they do seem to strangely imitate a trip to the dental hygienist).

The overwhelming effect is close, lyrically speaking, to second wave punk rock delivered in a synthetic, ambient way. If you took these lyrics and transplanted them to a three chord rant delivered by the likes of Blitz, little would feel out of place; only the context of the mournful pop chorus changes things. “Blasphemous Rumours” is angry in its own strange way, favouring the use of 1984’s sampling technology to get its point across over the previous decade’s brutal and simple lo-fi thrash.

54. This Mortal Coil - Kangaroo (4AD)

Six weeks at number one from w/e 6th October 1984

I’m attending a small party in Christmas 1991, close to where the suburban sprawl of Southend necks the border of Basildon. It’s the kind of place you can easily get lost – and later that evening I do – because the estate was mass built in the late sixties and there are few distinguishing features to identify one block from the next. Premoulded houses with wooden slats and red brick exteriors face each other dryly, failing to celebrate their similarities. If they could talk, they’d wearily say “Oh, you again” to each other (They would say nothing to the humans who lived in them, of course, for that would be silly).

It’s the third or fourth such gathering I’ve been to that season. Things are changing as we become much older teenagers. The parents have all communicated to each other that we’re actually quite dull, dependable kids who aren’t in the habit of accidentally setting fire to homes, so more front doors start to open up while Mums and Dads enjoy their first taste of total freedom in years. The first thing I hear as I walk through the door on this occasion is Teenage Fanclub’s “Bandwagonesque” playing on the stereo, an album I also got as a gift that Christmas. I announce my approval of the choice of record, and murmurs of agreement fill the room, but then one kid – the slightly bitchy, oh-so-cool one with enough money to buy loads of records – corrected us all.

“Teenage Fanclub are nothing”, he sneered. “If you want to hear music like this done properly, you need to listen to Big Star, that's who they’ve spent most of their lives ripping off”.

So it went probably up and down the land in 1991, with pedestrian indie kids being corrected by the oh-so-cool ones like small children getting reprimanded by their babysitting older brothers. And if Big Star were widely seen in the eighties and nineties as one of the “great lost bands” to impress your friends with, then their final album “Third/Sister Lovers” – belatedly released in 1978, four years after it was completed – was the real work to test their mettle with. If their first two albums were (broadly speaking, though I'm fearful of another comment from a grown up oh-so-cool kid) power pop, that one was less assured and often more broken sounding; the work of a group with an increasingly fragile member (Alex Chilton) who had given up caring about petty concerns such as “commercial potential”.

“Kangaroo” is one of the more uncomfortable tracks on the album, being a slow junkyard busk about one man’s pervy squeeze against a woman at a party. There are moments where it sounds woozy in a distinctly druggy way, but it’s hard to escape the air of menace too – the sense that a scruffy, dazed Chilton rubbing his crotch on you in 1974 wouldn’t be something you’d choose to document yourself except in horror or fury. “I came against/ Didn't say excuse/ Knew what I was doing,” the song croaks. You can almost see his sloppy grin. It’s not an easy listen and only the fact the song sounds tranquillized saves it from being disturbingly unrelatable – somehow, imagining it as a dream or a half-asleep mishap makes it seem less sordid.

While recording This Mortal Coil’s debut album “It’ll End In Tears”, Ivo Watts had his heart set on including a version of “Kangaroo”, but his approach to the assembled musicians that day in the studio – Scottish experimenter and Cindytalk member Cinder Sharp, Simon Raymonde of the Cocteaus, and Martin McCarrick of Marc Almond’s Mambas – was unorthodox. None had heard the track before, and he played it only a few times to get them to understand its essence.

53. The Smiths - William, It Was Really Nothing (Rough Trade)

Number one for four weeks from w/e 8th September 1984

Maybe it’s because I’m a Wire fan, but I’ve always admired compactness and brevity in pop*. The structure of the traditional pop or rock song usually involves heavy repetition, and however much indie groups claim to be outside the concerns of commerciality, they usually obey one of pop’s key principles – if you don’t hammer the fuck out of your song’s strongest hook, not only will it be less likely to get airplay, but any airplay it does receive won’t be noticed as much by the listeners.

By 1984, producers and bands were filling singles to their maximum run times, stuffing the turkey baster with the chorus and then ramming the grooves right up to the record label with its repetition. Even outside of some (mostly pointless and hastily cobbled together) extended twelve inch versions, songs often sprawled beyond their natural run-times and outstayed their welcomes.

“William, It Was Really Nothing” is probably my favourite Smiths song because it steps so far outside this usual structure while also fizzing to the brim with ideas. It comes across as a pile-up of grievances, a betrayed rant in song form, starting with an almost jaunty melody from Marr, before Morrissey whines “The rain falls hard on a humdrum town/ This town has dragged you down”, repeats himself, then adds “and everybody’s got to live their lives”. You’re immediately invited to envisage him strolling agitatedly through some red-brick suburban overspill with no discerning features.

It then makes a huge lyrical leap, using the town not as a reason to sympathise with the predicament of the person the song is aimed at, but to accuse them of building their own prison. William, whose life is “nothing”, is accused of staying with a fat girl – the only bit of the song I feel uncomfortable with, surely the main problem with her isn’t her obesity? - whose only aspiration in life seems to be marriage.

The song feels split in two halves. The first section sets the scene, and Marr and the rest of the Smiths are sprightly and busy throughout, setting you up for the idea that this is going to be an antsy tune about suburban ennui. Following the lines “God knows I’ve got to live mine”, though, things shift, the guitar begins to twang on a despairing line, then we get to the chorus and Marr’s fingers seem to blur through a furiously picked but very pretty and Byrdsian jangle. The chorus repeats once before the whole lot bends and folds like a house of cards, leaving only some ambient inconclusive guitar chords ringing.

It feels as if a tornado has appeared, thrashed around the edges of town, then left a few stray pieces of metal to rattle and sing out as it collapses. The effect is spectacular and surprisingly pretty – rarely do you hear a piece of music where betrayal and fury sounds so fussy and intricate, like a carefully designed doily with “fuck you” written in the centre – a song about courtship and romance where Marr’s guitar lines chime slightly like wedding bells in places, but do so with agitation not celebration.

Morrissey mentioned that “William It Was Really Nothing” was his attempt at writing an anti-marriage record for men, noting that women were always being told to leave their partners on singles, but men had little advice of their own to go on. There’s a slight tone of misogyny to the fact that he picked a “fat girl” as the central focus for “William” – I’m surprised female Smiths fans stood for this – but the song dares to observe that some women become unhealthily obsessed with marriage and begin to use it as a bargaining chip in relationships in a way men more often won’t.

52. The Senate/ Theatre of Hate - Original Sin/ Westworld (Burning Rome)

One week at number one on w/e 1st September 1984

On the previous entry, we focused on The March Violets, a goth-leaning post-punk band who used a drum machine to closely ape the patterns of a live drummer, resulting in a precise, leaden sound. It’s an interesting twist of fate that the following number one should be from someone from much the same background taking a totally different approach.

The Senate were a duo formed by Kirk Brandon (ex-Theatre of Hate) and Rusty Egan (ex-Rich Kids and Visage) ostensibly – so far as I can gather – to record this one single before both parties moved on to other things. For Brandon in particular, it probably acted as a safe space away from his recently collapsed Theatre to dabble creatively in a less volatile short-term environment.

"Original Sin" was Theatre of Hate's debut single in 1980, but this version veers away from the brief and desperate three minute approach of that version and embraces the Theatre of Hate's later love of dramatic sprawls. With wails and howls, the single begins and lingers for two-and-a-half minutes on his voice and Egan’s keyboards. It’s a barren and moody and initially almost overly desolate start.

Past that point, the track suddenly crashes into 1984 with orchestral stabs, ambitious evolving and rumbling drum machine patterns, and keyboard lines which aren’t a million miles from the kind of work Trevor Horn was delivering elsewhere. It lacks the production gloss or sure-footedness, or the sense that it’s the product of three months worth of studio work, but maintains a rough and ready ambition alongside a very nagging percussive drive. This is the first goth-adjacent single I’ve heard since starting this blog which actually sounds danceable, and is using its drama and sense of momentum to engage feet as well as some slightly macabre minds – dammit, it obviously is possible.

In common with a lot of Brandon’s work, I also don’t think it’s perfect. The lingering on moody atmospherics for the first few minutes feels overstretched, and there’s a slight sense in places that this is a cut and shut assembly of Egan and Brandon’s separate ideas; the way the track evolves and resolves itself doesn’t feel as clean as it might be. Nonetheless, there’s a sense once again that Brandon wasn’t ever going to settle on the “growl a few mysterious and dramatic lyrics over some second hand Joy Division riffs” stand-by so commonly heard elsewhere in these charts. “Original Sin” may not be a knockout single, but it’s a very surprising and enjoyable one, and its slow climb to the top of the NME Indie Chart is understandable.

Of course, it was technically a double A side with a re-release of Theatre of Hate’s “Westworld”, which we’ve already covered. It’s not clear why that was tucked away as part of the package, except perhaps to remind more casual fans of who was behind the record – I suspect a record billed as The Senate alone might have struggled to get as far as this one did.

51. March Violets - Walk Into The Sun

Three weeks at number one from w/e 11th August 1984

Back in my teens, I was a member of a twee indie trio who augmented their contemplative janglings about strange teenage girls and rainy days with a cheap Casio drum machine. We knew no drummers, saw no obvious way of getting acquainted with any, and in any case, we didn’t have and couldn’t afford a suitable rehearsal space to put a full drumkit in.

The band’s principle songwriter was strangely defensive of the crappy machine, though, constantly trying to make out it was a unique selling point rather than a hinderance, and had worked out ways of making it sound more interesting; piling on the reverb and ladening it with odd effects. I stood playing bass alongside the shuffling, precise, echoing thump and hiss of this digital steam engine and felt increasingly that this wasn’t what being in a rhythm section should be about. The other two members had each other to trade off and lean on – I had a machine I hated which just winked at me with one red LED eye. I obviously whined about this far too much, as one day they just stopped telling me when rehearsals were taking place.

Further back still than that, in the early eighties in the Leeds area, all kinds of goth-adjacent groups were choosing not to put little cards in the windows of music shops asking for drummers (or if they did, nobody replied). Sisters Of Mercy, Rose Of Avalanche and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry all decided this was a distinctly unnecessary and hassle-filled pre-eighties extravagance, and March Violets followed suit. The cavernous thwack of the drum machine therefore became synonymous with a particular brand of northern Goth rock, the lamp black musings of those groups always being anchored in place forcibly by that precise, immovable and sometimes unshifting rhythm pattern.

I’ve made my personal experiences plain from the outset here not as an excuse to waffle on about my embarrassing teenage years in groups – I barely give a shit about them now, so I fail to see why you should - but as a clear conflict of interest. I always hated the bloody machines in a rock context and now when I hear one on a professional rock recording, I often can’t get past it. The problem with drum machines wedded to anything predominantly guitar based is you’re usually going to have to work very hard to make a limitation sound like a positive feature.

The March Violets started, according to member Tom Ashton, as a “reaction to all the synthy pap that was filling the Top 40. We wanted to dance but we were also still punk rockers at heart. And we couldn’t be bothered to audition drummers, so we did what we did!”

Besides the fact that I obviously inwardly sighed when I read the slagging of “synthy pap”, there’s nothing wrong with this ambition it’s just – well – how do you dance to this single? To be fair to the group, they are ambitious with the beatbox. It shifts and changes and approximates a live drummer fairly decently throughout, but you can still tell. There’s a measuredness to it, a pulse without frills or fills or spontaneity. The guitars chunter and clang alongside it, and the added feature of the shifting but fussy beat just makes “Walk Into The Sun” sound leaden, too heavy to cavort around the dancefloor to, but also too far away from Proper Rock to mosh or throw yourself around.

Let’s not completely lose focus, though. More than many of their compatriots, The Violets have a distinctive sound of their own here, pulling politely away from theatrical doominess and towards something that almost allows some daylight in. You can hear it in singer Rosie Garland’s careful and almost gleeful annunciations during the chorus, or in the almost celebratory burst of sax towards the end. “The sun machine is coming down/ and we’re going to have a party” they declare, ripping off Bowie but at least making their intentions pretty clear. “Walk Into The Sun” makes it sound as if the kids in black were having a whale of a time after all.

50. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - In The Ghetto (Mute)

 

One week at number on w/e 4th August 1984

In its original incarnation, the Mac Davis penned “In The Ghetto” was an enormous comeback hit for Elvis Presley – a number one in seemingly every major market around the world, re-establishing Presley’s validity and edge just as his star was in danger of waning.

Above and beyond all of that, though, it’s a genuine curiosity in songwriting terms. Over the years, Davis was strangely humble and unforthcoming about its roots and origins, referring to his childhood spent being friends with a “black boy” who lived in a rougher part of Chicago. “I couldn't figure out why they had to live where they lived, and we got to live where we lived,” Davis explained in the newspaper The Tennesean. “We didn't have a lot of money, but we didn't have broken bottles every six inches.”

It’s from this boyhood scenario that the story of “In The Ghetto” is supposed to stem, but it’s surprising that so little has been made – either by the press or the man himself – about Davis’ period spent working as a probation officer. “In The Ghetto” is sociological theory given an outlet in song-form, the cycle of urban misery described with every spin of the original record; let the needle hit the end, then lift it and return it to the run-in grooves, and you physically repeat the circle of neglect and life of crime every child in the same area goes through, and as the vinyl becomes worn and the music becomes distorted and uglier, so seeps through the steady decay. It’s a heavy load for a 1969 pop single to bear, but it manages.

Presley’s original recording is a strangely spacey and grand recording – widescreen and dramatic with its reverberating backing vocals, calmly plucked guitar lines and arrangements almost sounding as if they’re lifted from a Western soundtrack. “Paint Your Wagon” was a huge musical Western folly at this time, and there are echos of “Wanderin’ Star” about the gently shuffling wideness and melancholy of its sound. All of this is more likely to give the impression of a criminal cast out of society and forced to make his own way across a lonely prairie than it is the compressed and unforgiving environment of “the ghetto”. It’s a fine record, but it feels as if there could be other interpretations of it.

Enter Nick Cave. While Cave may currently have turned himself into the grandfather of modern alternative rock and a wise agony uncle for the broadsheet press, in 1984 he was an unpredictable ex-member of the manic and ramshackle Birthday Party, a fragile unit who sounded as if they might splinter to pieces before half their singles even finished. Neither that group nor Cave himself presented themselves as keen students of classic rock, instead coming across as nihilistic punks prone to screaming fits about all matters dark and gothic.

The fact that Cave chose a Presley cover to launch his solo career was therefore baffling at the time. A rock and roll revival was making itself felt through the psychobilly scene circa 1983/4, but “In The Ghetto” wasn’t the track to pick if you wanted to gain credibility from that crowd – it stems from the “establishment” era of Elvis, the point in his career where he was safely ensconced in his Graceland mansion and was no longer even a shadow of a rebel.

You can only conclude that Cave covered the song because he loved it, and instead of replicating it precisely or trying to scuzz it up, he instead boxes it into a minimal, slightly threatening space. At no point does it go wild, but the arrangement feels tighter, the slide guitar ominous, the drumming militaristic. Cave’s vocals, too, are not so relaxed, delivering the lines urgently, emphasising syllables unpredictably (you can hear this particularly in lines like “THEN one night in DES-peration, the young man BREAKS AWAY”). If Presley’s take on “In The Ghetto” is a cinematic sweep, Cave’s is a Play For Today version, alive and unflashy but still telling the same story. It swaps elegance for urgency.

It doesn’t usurp the original in terms of quality, but nor does it totally upend it. This isn’t Sid Vicious singing “My Way”, which I suspect some buyers and critics believed is how it would turn out – and it legitimised the song for a new generation. The tragedy is that “In The Ghetto” has never really aged, and a probation officer’s ideas about poverty, criminality and the cycle of deprivation and violence in 1969 was equally applicable in 1984 and indeed remains so today.

The NME on Strike! (But here's The Cult, The Smiths and The Damned anyway)

9 weeks until w/e 4th August 1984

Here’s where things get tricky and a messy, charred hole emerges in our narrative. In the summer of 1984, IPC went on strike putting all of their publications either completely out of print (in the NME’s case) or operating to a greatly reduced degree. Some of IPC’s comics made it out into the shops, for example, but with reduced colour and using repeated strips from the seventies. This meant that if you were a kid in 1984 you perhaps had to deal with the unexpected surprise of Sid’s Snake out of Whizzer and Chips alarming a punk rocker, or found yourself trying to make sense of a background gag about some 1978 chart hit you couldn't remember. Everything, very suddenly, went black and white and childhoods were catapulted backwards in time.

For the older brothers and sisters of those kids, however, it just went black. There was nothing emerging from Kings Reach Tower, so if they wanted a weekly music fix, they had to read Sounds, Record Mirror or Number One magazine instead, none of which really captured the tastes or tone of their favoured Express.

More problematic than that, certainly where I'm concerned here and now in 2025, it also meant that absolutely no NME indie charts were published for that entire period either, so I’ve nothing to show you for summer 1984; however, one possible compromise emerges from this mess. 

The Independent Singles Chart compiled by MRIB continued as usual, so we can get a likely sense of what might have been number one from the data presented there. This should be taken with a pinch of salt. MRIB’s chart tended to treat pop hits by the likes of Black Lace and Renee and Renato with much more favour than the NME’s somewhat more streamlined, specialist approach. In the summer of 1984, for example, Black Lace’s “Agadoo” got to the top spot on the MRIB Indies, but due to its more modest placing in the NME’s listings, we won’t be discussing it at length on this blog (something of a shame as it would have presented an interesting challenge for me, even if I doubt anyone would have bothered to read my subsequent thoughts unless I turned them into some kind of “Ahhhh! But it is pop perfection, do you see?” styled clickbait).

As a result, here are the MRIB Number Ones for that period, presented more briefly than usual, and to be treated with kid gloves by everyone reading them; none will be added to the Spotify playlist of NME Number Ones or referred to in any of the blog’s lists. These are only possible lost number ones, some more likely than others, but not to be treated as "official" chart toppers in the NME listings. 

1. The Cult – Spirit Walker (Situation Two) – one week on w/e 2nd June

Given the way this one was galloping up the NME Indies when we left them, prodding away at a track whose sales were already descending sharply (“Pearly Dewdrops Drops”) I see no reason to doubt this one would have got to the top; but having said that, this single feeble week at the top of the MRIB charts doesn’t exactly point towards a dominant presence.

“Spiritwalker” saw the final emergence of The Cult following the dissolution of Southern Death Cult and the amendment of the subsequently named Death Cult. The group, like some kind of chemical conglomerates company who were desperately perfecting their name to make it sound less garbled to the public, obviously realised keeping things sharp and simple was best.

It’s tempting to say that “Spiritwalker” was evidence of this tightened and more commercial ambition, but in reality the progression feels very slight. The opening introduction of the track is the biggest difference, acting as a very trad rock, hollered clarion call to listeners – as a non-fan, I was genuinely surprised by how engrossed I was in the first few seconds when I played it back for the first time in years.

What happens after that is a strange mixture of more Death Cultishness combined with occasional flashes and sparks of classic rock fetishism. The rhythm section certainly still have one foot in the gothic grave – the bass guitarist rumbles and rattles out root notes like a Peter Hook inspired pro, and the drummer pounds and thuds on the skins rather than the metalwork like a medieval minstrel. Elsewhere in the group, however, a clear love of noticeable guitar hero licks is emerging from Billy Duffy, and Ian Astbury is now starting to sound fully in command.

48b. Cocteau Twins - Pearly Dewdrops Drops (4AD)

Two more weeks at number one from w/e 19th May 1984

It's been a while since we've seen a rebound number one on the blog, but here we are again, back in the arms of the Cocteaus for two further weeks. Here's what was happening lower down the charts:

Week One

9. The Cult - Spiritwalker (Situation Two)

Peak position: 3

We'll come back to this one over the weekend if it's all the same to you - it was never officially an NME Indie Chart number one, but as we're about to find out, things got very complicated over the summer.

18. Colourbox - Punch (4AD)

Peak position: 18

More twittery grooves from 4AD's most dancefloor friendly band, who on this single sound as if they're edging closer to pop music, rapidly flashing Top of the Pops studio lights and the same carefree buoyancy of Freeez or even Break Machine. Only the extended breakdowns, lack of a nagging chorus and gasping orgasm noises prevent it from making the leap to daytime radio. 

Week Two

9. New Order - Murder (Factory Benelux)

Peak position: 9

Released over in Belgium as an exclusive on Factory's Benelux label, then charting on import over in the UK, "Murder" isn't really an act of generosity to loyal Belgian fans so much as a cast-off. It was originally recorded in Winter 1982 while the group completed their sessions for the "Power Corruption and Lies" album, and sounds (at best) like a B-side in waiting. By the time the "Substance" compilation emerged, that's how it was categorised too, relegated to the second bonus CD alongside all the other instrumental versions, dubs and flotsam. 

Sonically this has little relation to where New Order found themselves in 1984, containing tribal drum patterns, menacing bass lines, and spindly Twilight Zone-esque guitar work, interspersed with occasional samples from "2001 A Space Odyssey". For anyone pining for the atmosphere (no pun intended) of their earliest work, it might have acted as an interesting reminder of those darker days, but the average Belgian consumer must have been baffled to pieces by this one.

10. Husker Du - Eight Miles High (SST)

Peak position: 10

"Eight Miles High" created havoc with The Byrds "commerical fortunes" back in 1966, often being cited as being the point where their pop audience jumped ship to listen to material which didn't involve complex, meandering Eastern-styled guitar breaks and eerie, trippy observations on an England the band seemingly didn't understand, nor felt fully understood by (it's always been interesting to me that the group made visiting this country sound like an excursion to some mysterious and impoverished backwater tribal village - perhaps it was the drugs, perhaps it was the fact that Britain was still trying to pick itself up from the ruins of World War Two, but we can't have been as miserable and unfathomable as that, surely?)

It's a complex number to cover, which is possibly why the emerging Husker Du just dismantle it instead, howling, screaming and creating something which actually sounds uncannily like some smalltown 1966 garage act doing their thing with it. If the original is ill at ease with itself but nonetheless coherent, Husker Du's take is trippy in the most uncomfortable sense of the word, like someone who has taken acid at a crowded party in a strange town and now couldn't be further from enjoying themselves. It's a perfectly valid way of interpreting the song and captured the imagination of many listeners in 1984, beginning the process of Husker Du becoming a fringe cause for many music critics. 

13. Instigators - The Blood Is On Your Hands EP (Bluurg)

Peak position: 13

19. Exit-Stance - Esthetics (Revolver)

Peak position: 19

While Revolver was credited as the label in the NME's Chart (and indeed by the group on the sleeve) they were only the distributors of this distinctly DIY bit of goth rock - a very sketchy, presumably band-drawn sleeve houses a single with a black plasticrap label.

Sonically, Exit-Stance are underproduced here, and this is very lo-fi and top-heavy for something which clearly had ambitious to be a lot more expansive. "Do you worry about your spots?" the group ask, "Or do you - in a literal sense - put your face on each morning?" cleverly managing to make a point relevant to the anarcho-punks and the Goths simultaneously. No wonder it sold better than most other DIY singles during the same era. 

20. Break Machine - Break Dance Party (Record Shack)

Peak position: 20

In which the manufactured street crew are given an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to following up their huge hit. It jitters and whistles away in much the same manner, sounding like Roger Whittaker spinning on his back on a bit of cardboard, but also manages to sound like the work of a production crew caught with their pants down. "Oh shit, who thought that would be a smash?" you can hear them ask. "We don't seem to have any other powerful choruses to hand at the moment". 

The momentum created by their debut ensured that this climbed quickly to number 9 in the national charts before just as quickly descending again, but afterwards this particular Machine started to look a bit broken, unable to further build on their success. 

21. Quando Quango - Atom Rock (Factory)

Peak position: 21

28. Skeletal Family - Recollect (Red Rhino)

Peak position: 28

For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number One In The Official Charts

Duran Duran: "The Reflex" (EMI)

49. New Order - Thieves Like Us (Factory)

 

One week at number one on w/e 12th May 1984

“And it’s called love… and it’s so uncool/ it’s called love/ and somehow it’s become unmentionable”

It's not unfair or cruel to point out that Bernard Sumner has never been an amazing lyricist. He’s written a pearly line or two on occasion, but I’ve always suspected that it was more by luck than judgement – most New Order songs succeed in connecting with listeners despite, not because of, their lyrics.

“Thieves Like Us” is an interesting case in that fans have bothered themselves online for years zooming into the somewhat vague lines I’ve quoted above. Why, in Bernard’s eyes, has love become “unmentionable”? This is a huge statement to make for a man who has told us elsewhere in the song that “Love is the cure for every evil”. Inevitably, some have interpreted this to mean that Sumner is talking about bigotry around homosexuality specifically here, particularly if you tie it neatly to the line “It belongs to everyone but us”. I like the idea of this, but the opening lines bear no relation at all and it’s always left me feeling unsatisfied, as if it’s a concept that people would like to be true rather than central to the song.

If we’re meant to find a statement in this song at all – and that’s a big debate in itself – I have to wonder if it’s actually, subconsciously or otherwise, about music, popular culture and post-punk cynicism and where we found ourselves in 1984 as the AIDS virus began to make itself known. Love songs and balladry have long been the staple of pop and rock music of all genres and hues, but for the entire time I've been keeping this blog, there’s been a surprising lack of them. Here in the undergrowth, we’ve been digging up tracks which are furious about war and the government, irritated by corruption and occasionally tickled by lust. Pick through every number one and you might find a couple of straightforward songs about love, but they’re usually from moments where an indie label was lucky enough to have a pop group on its roster bringing in the money (Depeche Mode, Yazoo) rather than The Birthday Party, The Red Guitars or Tom Robinson penning a song for a lover.

Even in the mainstream, something odd was creeping about in the creative waters, in that even the ballads were becoming ill-at-ease with themselves. “Every Breath You Take” is an obvious example from 1983, although Sting knew exactly what he was doing, pushing the obsession angle as hard as he could. There appeared to be no such playfulness about the single which was number one in the national charts when “Thieves Like Us” entered. “Hello” by Lionel Richie is a sickly, wispy, yet deadly little record, like being smothered with a chloroform pad by John Denver. Lyrically, Lionel is left crying for his life on top of lines like “You’re all I’ve ever wanted!” and “Are you somewhere feeling lonely or is someone loving you?” (you really need to do some research before getting in this deep over a stranger, old chap). 

Elsewhere in the charts throughout its reign, there were love songs, but all seemed to deal with a fracturing of romance (“Against All Odds” and “I Want To Break Free” being two serious contenders at this point). Much has been said about the music of the early to mid eighties cowering under nuclear paranoia, but I have to wonder if the overwrought nature of a lot of our love songs at that point also points towards something rather unhealthy.

If you want to believe that “Thieves Like Us” acts as New Order’s defence of straightforward love songs and is effectively their “Silly Love Songs” – and I’m not forcing you to – it does make more sense. The track is New Order celebrating romance without being dishonest or reaching for the darkest corner of the bedroom to sit cross-legged and weep. It’s not very poetic, but Sumner does a good job of selling it, stretching his vocals surprisingly effectively when required, seemingly having decided that detachment isn’t the answer here; after all, what he’s singing about is “uncool”, so he’s free to let go.

Elsewhere, the group are a powerhouse. Arthur Baker may have co-written this, but they forsake the electronic jitters and splutters of “Confusion” for something where live instrumentation and synths sit side by side comfortably. Hooky’s basslines slide and crash, guitars distort, and the keyboards manage to sound somehow chilly yet also celestial; it's love expressed from all angles, the dramatic, the angelic, the blissful and the darkly confusing. I’m a firm believer that most pop and rock songs don’t need to be more than four minutes long, and that often groups are just hammering ideas for the sake of ensuring their hooks are fully absorbed by radio listeners; “Thieves” doesn’t waste a second of its time, though, filling every part with drama and intrigue, occasionally recoiling to shadowy and moodier areas. It ends with a bogus “record slowing down” effect which miraculously manages to sound effective rather than gimmicky.

48. Cocteau Twins - Pearly Dewdrops Drops (4AD)

One week at number one on w/e 5th May 1984

When I recently scanned back though old press coverage of Cocteau Twins, I realised that my perception of their critical acclaim was shot full of holes. My memory suggested they were universally gushed over by rock journalists for their innovation and their enigmatic, mysterious songs; an airbrushed and simplistic version of the truth, as it turns out, probably gleaned from the more appreciative NME and Melody Maker coverage of my later teenage years.

While they were generally acclaimed, the early-to-mid eighties landscape in music journalism was a lot more confused and inconsistent than that, featuring writers who had cut their teeth during the “punk rock wars”. Most disapproved of anything which might seem even remotely like a retrograde step back into stoned hippy “atmospheres” or spangly psychedelia. “How dare we sit around burning joss sticks and smoking dope while THATCHER is in power?” seemed to be the central crux to many of these arguments, to which the answer (always, whether the individual is Thatcher, Reagan, Blair, Trump or even Hitler) should be: well, why not, at least occasionally? Should we stop eating ice cream and tending beautiful flowerbeds in our parks and gardens while we’re at it? Are those also distractions put in place by The Man to quell the possible revolution? Is it an act of treachery to appreciate beautiful things when we can get them?

There were also others who felt that the group were miscast; a flimsy New Age noise slyly rebadged as something more revolutionary than that. Across the water, the US critic Robert Christgau was typically brashly dismissive on this front - “Harold Budd records in their studio,” he exclaimed in outrage as his opening “need I say more?” salvo, before eventually underlining the key point: “These faeries are in the aura business. So what are they doing on the alternative rock charts? Ever hear the one about being so open-minded that when you lay down to sleep your brains fall out?”

I strongly suspect, whether any journalist would admit it or otherwise, one other point of frustration about the Cocteaus is the fact that unless you want to be insultingly glib about their output and yell “Hippies!” before spitting at the floor, they’re actually a tough band to write about too. The lyrics are frequently flooded by the arrangements and feel incomprehensible, and when some coherence does seep through, it doesn’t appear to have any tangible meaning to possibly anyone except the group. This allowed listeners to weave their own narratives and ideas around their work, but doubtless snookered writers searching for something to hook a review on to.

Nor does the sound really fit the traditional language of eighties music journalism. It’s a consistently soupy, waterlogged arrangement and production which lacks the technically dazzling flash and scream of progressive rock, while also lacking the sharp whip-crack rebellion of punk or rock and roll. Anyone trying to interview the group was also often left with nothing much to go on; they weren’t big on explaining themselves.

“Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops” was actually their commercial peak on 45, reaching number 29 in the national singles charts, but didn’t offer any sops to either radio playlist programmers or the press to get there. They refused to appear on Top of the Pops and remained determinedly themselves, meaning the lyrics – of which numerous interpretations are available – are repetitive slices of twee bucolic imagery. There are several noble attempts to pull the delicate silk strands together into something meaningful online, but none (even one from an alleged insider who seems to claim that PDD is a coded poison pen letter to 4AD boss Ivo Watts-Russell) convinces me that what they’re doing here is even average lyricism, least of all complex poetry. What it means feels as if it shouldn’t matter to us, whether it’s comprehensible to the group or not.

Instead, Liz Fraser’s voice, filled with high pitched hiccups, breathlessly rushed and repetitive lines, and lingering hollering, is just another element in the mix. Intertwining with it, surprisingly jangly guitar lines emerge as well as that thundering post-punk bassline, but Fraser is the most flexible and impressive element – working overtime, jabbering, stretching her vocals and howling, the restless magician who both stops the track from seeming too hypnotic and delirious (imagine it without her singing to get what I mean) and also makes it feel somehow exotic.

47. Sandie Shaw - Hand In Glove (Rough Trade)

 

One week at number one on w/e 28th April 1984

Arthur Crabtree: Hey. I say, is that that bird?

Billy Fisher: What bird?

Arthur Crabtree: There. Getting a lift in that lorry. That bird that wanted you to go to France with her.

Billy Fisher: Do you mean Liz?

Arthur Crabtree: Yes, where's she been this time, then?

Billy Fisher: I don't know. She goes where she feels like. She's crazy. She just enjoys herself.

Billy Liar.

There’s an idealistic, euphoric vision of the sixties I carry around with me in my head (having never lived through it myself) which clashes with the lived reality of others – my parents, for example. My Dad once told me that for him the sixties didn’t result in any real change. He still had the same job and the same lifestyle, and his only minor brush with the era’s glamour was when a friendly post-fame Peter Sarstedt mistakenly walked into the wrong South London boozer. Carnaby Street styles and fame tended not to reach Peckham. They disintegrated on impact with the South Circular Road.

Then there’s the vision I have of the famous people who littered the era, some of which is probably highly accurate (I’ve devoured enough Beatles biographies to at least have a fair idea of what went on) some driven by fantasy. Sandie Shaw, for example. She was fascinating to me because she was from Dagenham, a mere few miles from where I grew up, and my best friend’s mother was mates with her as a child, a fact she always revealed very cautiously and defensively. Of all the famous female British singers in the sixties, Sandie seemed the most local and the most relatable, but also the most flexible and shapeshifting. Who was she? Seemingly, whatever I wanted her to be.

In early promotional photographs, she looks as if she’s won the football pools and is posing for a Littlewoods advertising campaign. She’s pretty and breezy, all delighted smiles, light eyes and freckles. This fits the narrative. She was a Ford factory worker at the Dagenham plant who won second prize in a local talent contest, earning her a slot at a charity event in London where she was spotted by Adam Faith. He put in a word for her with his manager, and as such, Shaw is an early example of the “working class girl unexpectedly lands showbiz opportunity” sixties fairytale. There would be more of those (and then eventually, as the decades drifted forward, less again).

Earning numerous massive hits, including two number ones, her image moved gracefully forward with the sixties. Almost in sympathy with her aspirations (or her manager’s) to be a pan-European star, she recorded hit singles in French, German, Spanish and Italian, and slowly the image changed to that of a glamorous professional, a Saturday teatime ratings puller, a cosmopolitan singer who could be either playful, insouciant or sophisticated when the song or occasion demanded it.

Perhaps inevitably, her continental appeal led to her representing Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1967, resulting in a song she never liked (“Puppet On A String”) being voted as the public’s choice for her to perform. She won, but blamed the subsequent steady decline of her career on the kitsch, tacky image the tune and event gave her (though she was quite happy to sell anniversary souvenir whisky glasses of the victory not long ago, one of which I bought and still happily drink from). “Puppet” is an oompah heavy, knees-up piece of simple pub-friendly, tankards aloft pop dropped into an era of colour and experimentation, closer to The Scaffold than "Strawberry Fields Forever". It worked perfectly in the context of Eurovision and was extremely popular with the British public, who gave her a third number one, but in terms of fashion and the onward movement of popular culture in the late sixties, it couldn’t have seemed more dated; a bubbly bit of Parnes-era pop parachuted into the wrong end of the decade.

Whether it directly caused the decline of her career is a point I’d probably contest. The last few singles leading up to “Puppet” were comparatively weak sellers (the one prior to it, “I Don’t Need Anything”, only just charted at number 50) and I’d actually argue the Eurovision win relaunched her in the UK for a brief period as showbiz royalty, our Queen of Light Entertainment. Despite the temporary lift it gave her, though, it sat awkwardly with who she truly wanted to be, which was pushing the boundaries of pop along with many of her fellow stars.

An album was released in 1969, “Reviewing The Situation”, where she attempted to reposition herself as a progressive artist and correct the public’s view. It’s damn good, and could have been her “Surf’s Up”, but sold naff-all. From that point forward, she would score no further hit singles, living out her showbiz life through occasional appearances on light entertainment shows, performing old standards and even music hall ditties with a slight glimmer of reluctance in her eyes. She attempted to retrain as an actress – something you can easily imagine her succeeding at – but her husband Jeff Banks’ bankruptcy forced her back towards familiar territory to keep the household finances afloat.

The eighties started to be gentler to her. Martyn Ware and Ian Marsh of Human League/ Heaven 17 produced her version of “Anyone Who Had A Heart” in 1982 which failed to chart, but brought her back into the public eye as a credible artist. A none-more-eighties electro-Buddhist single “Wish I Was” followed, and in the background, long-term fans Morrissey and Marr were desperate to earn her attention and get her to cover one of their songs.

There was reluctance on Shaw’s part initially, who seemed untrusting of the group’s slightly unusual angle on the world. This was exacerbated by the tabloid outrage caused by the song “Suffer Little Children” about the Moors Murderers, which nearly caused her to completely withdraw from any associations with them. Eventually, however, she was talked around to the idea of recording with them, and this cover of The Smiths underperforming debut single “Hand In Glove” is the end result.

The first thing that strikes you is how effortlessly Shaw has shapeshifted yet again. The Smiths lyrics weren’t typical of the eighties or any era before them, but she adapts, instantly understanding what to do with her vocals and how to both gel with the strange angles around her and also project her own personality on to them. She barks defiantly, almost in block capitals, “The good life is out there somewhere!” She copies Morrissey’s hollers and howls, but with confidence rather than despair – they seem to suggest “This is who I am” as opposed to “Oh God, so this is who I am”.

46. Depeche Mode - People Are People (Mute)

 

Two weeks at number one from w/e 14th April 1984

Depeche Mode’s first single of 1984 begins with what sounds like an explosion in a crockery cupboard, followed by five swings into a digital punchbag, before looping back again. It feels loud, up-to-the-minute - those samples as brutal as anything Art of Noise were doing that year – then thuds its last, entering into a glistening electronic harp effect, before Gahan sings the big reveal:

“People are People so why should it be/ you and I should get along so aw-fully?”

Oh. You immediately get the impression Martin Gore thought he had created a grand slogan here, one which could proudly open the song, but it’s an unfortunate example of him falling back into his naive teenage ways (despite no longer being a teen). On “See You” he pronounced that “I think that you’ll find people are basically the same”, and “People Are People” returns to this point. Are we not, he seems to ask, fundamentally driven by the same desires, the same emotions, the same need to commune in pleasancy?

As the song unfolds it at least expands on this point a bit more gracefully. If “We’re different colours/ and we’re different creeds/ and different people have different needs” sounds a little bit too close to David Brent for comfort, the sneer of “I’m relying on your common decency/ So far it hasn’t surfaced/ but I’m sure it exists/ it just take a while to travel/ from your head to your fists” is at least a smart putdown, albeit one which probably would cut no ice with the person shouting aggressively in a pub car park.

The song’s strengths lie away from its well-meaning but wide-eyed lyrics. “People Are People” sees Depeche progressing from the gentile industrialisms of “Construction Time Again”, where at certain moments it felt as if they were tinkling on metallic surfaces gracefully, into something harder, more aggressive. The compressed thwacks and crashes are both akin to the harder edges of the emerging industrial scene and strangely dancefloor friendly, and the arrangement packs everything it can into it; vocal breakdowns, Art of Noise styled bass vocal samples, despairing symphonic synth lines and crashing orchestral stabs.

It is, in short, as subtle as a brick in the face but complicated all the same, which is one reason the lyrics can sometimes be ignored or dismissed. If you’re going to place them within the context of an arrangement which is essentially one melodic exclamation mark after another, you can just about get away with viewing society through a panicked, simplistic and over-dramatic lens. Taken by itself, it’s an enjoyable cacophony, an overloaded piece of pop whose only real attempts at subtlety are Martin Gore singing “I can’t understand what makes a man hate another man” like a wounded child in a playground. Even that, it has to be said, isn’t exactly understated.