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.