61. James - Hymn From A Village (Factory)

One week at number one on w/e 18th May 1985

James were a somewhat pious bunch of buggers to begin with. While preparing myself for this blog entry, I made the mistake of listening to “Hymn From A Village” immediately before bedtime, trying to get my head around Tim Booth in particular. My REM brain – no pun intended – immediately went to work on the scenario, and I was presented with an image of Paul McGann playing Booth playing Jesus Christ preaching to a large crowd in Jeruasalem. The throng were restless and somewhat ambivalent about his messages.

Then I woke up, and immediately felt that this was a disappointing result from my brain. If it was trying to help me, it could at least deliver something more than idle critical hackwork. I mean, the old “rock star as God” cliché, spare me (I was then punished with a proper nightmare about something else, but never mind about that). But then again… was it a case of "Fair comment" in this instance?

While James went on to become proper rock stars playing enormous venues, you could easily argue that they had an unusually daring mission statement here for a group of minor renown. There’s an unspoken rule in most artforms that you don’t reflect on the art itself in your work; therefore, artists should not paint works which offer commentaries on other art, and poets should not write poems about poetry. Entering into such a feedback loop suggests self-indulgence, boring your audience with your tales of what you got up to at “the office” that day and who delighted and aggravated you.

Rock music has always operated to slightly different standards, however, and there are plenty of songs out there appraising heroes, offering dedication to whole genres, or just singing about the transporting nature of music itself. Then there are the bitchy sideswipes – “There There My Dear” by Dexys Midnight Runners is probably one of the most successful examples – which want to throw darts at photos of the lazy, underachieving villains in the business.

“Hymn From The Village” is definitely on the latter side of the fence, kicking and screaming at rock lyricists who have no interest in engaging with anything beyond mundane cliches. There’s not even any build-up. Booth begins cuttingly and unequivocally: “This song's made up, made second rate/ Cosmetic music, powderpuff/ Pop tunes, false rhymes, all lightweight bluffs/ Secondhand ideas, no soul, no hate…” If that weren’t enough, he really starts waving his sword around later, as eloquent as a warrior in an ancient play: “This language used is all worn out/ A walking corpse it won't play dead/ Disease dragged on from bed to bed/ Paid for your twist, paid for shout”.

The song itself is all campfire bone and steel rattles, where deep, rubbery basslines mix with exotic jangles. It builds steadily, getting more frantic and agitated as it goes along, in love with its own noise but also rattled by the hatred of everyone else’s. There’s not a second of this single where I think they don’t mean it – the passion is there, the intent clear to everyone – but in the 1985 world, there were surely bigger things to worry about than the lyrical complacency of pop artists? A world of Morrissey, Elvis Costello, Mark E Smith, Billy Bragg, Cathal Coughlan, and umpteen anarcho-punk bands wasn’t exactly a scene left bone-dry of lyrical passion, or even literate and thoughtful musicians. Is it possible that Tim Booth wasn’t actually telling us about what we didn’t currently have, but grandstanding about who he believed he was? If so, he wouldn’t be the last Manc Son of God to climb up the summit to do so.

It’s a deeply odd single whose climax of “Heard you calling through the drumbeat/ Can you hear the question, feel the reply?” could just as easily belong to an ecstatic piece of early 90s House music, were it not so frenzied, angry and manic. It’s asking for something much bigger from musicians – a relationship, a sense of belonging, a campfire to place a population around who would no longer feel so apart and alone; intelligent observations and answers, not vague outlines.

While this single caused a massive stir and resulted in a contract with Seymour Stein’s Sire Records, the path ahead for the band was very unsteady and would have destroyed less determined artists. Neither of their albums on Sire (1986’s “Stutter” and 1988’s “Strip-Mine”) sold well, and they ended up temporarily in indieland again in ‘88, back to dealing with small budgets and distracted label bosses who had more interest in the fresh new daisies popping up on their lawn than James’s slightly wilting allure.

It was while in this state that they wrote “Sit Down”, a song once again acting as a campfire to the alone, the dispossessed, the ignored, and this time the village grew into a town of chanting faces. There will be more on that much further down the line. For now, “Hymn From The Village” is the sound of a defiant, stubborn and headstrong band setting out their stall, telling people what they stood for and who they would become if only they were given a chance. To me it sounds jagged and furious, but there are many fans of the group who feel it’s one the most beautiful things they’ve heard; proof that red and purple flashes of anger and determination can seem stunning in their own way. 

New Entries Elsewhere In The Chart

17. The Lords Of The New Church - Like a Virgin (Illegal)

Peak position: 17


The wave of jokey, snarky covers of top pop songs hadn’t quite hit indieland yet, but this is one of the earliest examples. It takes the sleek sleaze of Madonna’s original – quite a contentious hit at the time – and just slaps some greasier sleaze on top of it, like engine oil on top of suntan lotion. 

I must admit I can’t tell if the good Lords despise the track and want to send it up (in which case, they’re not being anything close to savage enough) or love it and want to celebrate it (in which case, the cheap keyboards and screeched drunken karaoke vocals seem to defeat their aims). The end result is akin to being stuck in your local bar at 11pm and watching the staff of Halfords making a misguided choice on the karaoke machine.

Underground bands would eventually learn to consign these kinds of joky experiments to B-sides and the extra tracks on twelve inch singles where they belonged. 

26. Exit-Stance - While Backs Are Turned... EP (Fight Back)


Peak position: 26


Even if the 1985 Indie Chart was slowly squeezing out punk content, that didn’t mean to say that some tracks weren’t attracting enough buyers to make their presence felt. The “While Backs Are Turned” EP was Exit Stance’s final offering as the group grew weary and disillusioned about criticism from fellow punks and violence from skinheads.

The entirety of side one focuses on animal cruelty, with titles like “They Kill Dogs” making it pretty damn clear that the group were disgusted by animal experimentation in particular. It’s all blunt and furious, and even if the band felt battle weary by this point, it doesn’t show in the recordings.





27. Captain Sensible & The Missus - WOT ! No Meat ? (Animus)

Peak position: 27

Of course, they had Captain Sensible on their side. He had spent time at Crass’s co-operative and re-emerged an avowed vegetarian, loaning his voice to the cause where possible.

“Wot! No Meat?” was the final of three singles on the specialist label Animus which put out records specifically about animal abuse – the others were Country Joe MacDonald’s “Blood On The Ice” and Steve Davis’s “Get Em Out” (not that Steve Davis, either!)

Unlike Exit Stance, the Cap donates a mournful synthpop melody plus some samples from the deeply strange British meat industry adverts from 1983, which tried to persuade the UK public that giving up meat was a very silly life choice by imitating the directorial style of Madness videos. I don’t have any stats to suggest how many vegetarians switched back to flesh as a result of the campaign, but I suspect it would have taken more than a whacky caricature of a British bobby mentioning roast lamb to turn back the tide.

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Number One In The Official Charts

Paul Hardcastle: "19" (Chrysalis)