If you're one of the Sunday faithful logging on here wondering where today's update is, please accept my apologies. I'm taking a couple of weeks break from this blog to rejuvenate myself and rest my weary bones.
In the meantime, here's a list of blog-related things you can do with your time:
Read the last entry on Fields of the Nephilim, which you might have missed given that it went live on Wednesday morning
Look at the index and go back through over a hundred previous blog entries to see if there's anything you've missed so far (go on, give one of the more obscure artists a whirl, they're among the least read entries but are no less fascinating than the true success stories)
Play one of our Spotify playlists of all the (available) charting Indie songs from 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987 and 1988 on shuffle
It may have been a constant feature of the NME Indie Chart from day one, but commercially speaking, goth rock was truly at its zenith in 1988. The Mission scored a number two album (“Children”) with John Paul Jones as their producer, All About Eve had a gold-certified top ten album, and The Sisters Of Mercy had emerged from the undergrowth the year before to become serious international contenders.
While the music magazines of the period talked endlessly about grebo and indiepop, in alternative rock terms nobody was coming close to outscoring the men and ladies in black (except perhaps The Primitives). The Smiths were finished, and nobody had yet emerged who seemed fit to take their crown. That meant that if you went into a provincial alternative nightclub in ‘88, you were far more likely to be greeted by “This Corrosion” and “Severina” than “Nobody’s Twisting Your Arm” – and this situation actually lasted way beyond 1988. At the Rayleigh Pink Toothbrush, for example, Friday night was unofficially "goth night" until at least 1992, and God help the DJ if he tried to change tack for any great length of time.
If The Fields of the Nephilim weren’t quite up there with the others on the scene yet, “Moonchild” finally saw them in the National Top 30, getting a brief moment in the “Top of The Pops” Chartbreakers section (a very cowardly move from the Beeb, I’d say – their emergence in the mainstream should have resulted in a studio appearance). They were never the most obviously commercial goth band, having tendencies to sprawl and meander. Carl McCoy would never snarl “Hey now, hey now now” where “radiation, contamination” could be used instead. He wasn’t a man given to glam rock cries of stadium or dancefloor unity, instead preferring to sound like some kind of harbinger of doom and gloom; The Nine O’Clock news from the year 2053 if read by a frail desert anchorman suffering from leprosy.
We’ve already explored why that made the group both so ludicrous and so special in the entry for “Blue Water”, and “Moonchild” is really more of the same, except perhaps a little less ambitious in its scope. If “Blue Water” sounded like the entire soundtrack for a film compressed into five minutes, “Moonchild” grips tightly to an admittedly solid central riff instead. They even jangle in a way which might get Johnny Marr’s ears to prick up on this one, so after each distorted run of guitars and slow creep of McCoy’s growls there’s a beautiful, glistening melody, adding some glittery sweetness against the sour.
What the hell “Moonchild” is actually about is utterly anyone’s guess, because the lyrics are as vague as Nostradamus’s proclamations - “Take your prisoners to the promised war/ You'll die for this,” McCoy promises harshly. “It's a righteous day but I'll remind you/ Don't live your life supply,” he reckons. It’s hard to understand what it is we’re actually being warned about, and as usual the group do most of the colouring in, each riff and every punch of emphasis giving his delirious worldview a semblance of meaning.
What is certainly true is that ex-Leamington Spa resident* (the town from which I’m currently typing this blog entry) Aleister Crowley did write a book called “Moonchild”, and this seems to have been the inspiration. Quelle surprise. Morrissey may not have had Crowley’s novels on his sickbed table, but the man has probably had more influence on rock music than any other author. I’ve never read the book, but according to summaries online it involves a Black Lodge and an unfortunate girl who is caught up in a magical war between two rival men; this gives us more of an inkling than McCoy’s guttural cries.
Well, this is an interesting case for chart pedants (and possibly nobody else). It might be tempting to treat “Blue Monday ‘88” as a new release, but it shared its catalogue number (FAC73) with the original single, so was treated by all chart compilers as a simple re-entry. Whether you went out and bought the original twelve-inch of this, or the new 7 inch version, or the CD Video single, or any other permeation of it, it was logged towards the same total. Some national charts even showed “Blue Monday” leaping up from the lower reaches of the Top 200 into the Sunday teatime rundown as a result.
This means it’s the fourth run at the top for the 33rd NME Indie Number One, but the circumstances this time are more interesting than before, and worth at least a bit of exploration. The original version was available as a twelve inch single only, a position the band and Factory Records refused to budge on. It made a jolly old mess of the chart display in my local Woolworths, so in the week “Blue Monday” was in the top ten somebody had scrawled “AVAILABLE ON TWELVE INCH ONLY!” in permanent marker on a piece of cardboard, right next to all the other carefully designed single sleeves. Peter Savile couldn't have wanted that – Tony Wilson might have considered it ‘found art’ and designated a special catalogue number for it, though.
Besides the memory of the horrible brown gap in the otherwise perfect row of Woolworths display teeth, there were other reasons a seven inch version might have been desirable at the time; radio stations wanted an edit of the song, for example, and pub landlords requested something that could fit into their jukeboxes (“Our customers have been asking for it”). I doubt either the band or Factory Records gave a cuss for these reasons, but over in the USA, Quincy Jones – whose Qwest label the band were signed to – had other ideas the group were unusually easy-going about.
Quincy, a man who was once rumoured to have kicked Michael Jackson around the studio floor ranting “Stop squeaking motherfucker!” in protest at his vocal tics, appeared to believe that “Blue Monday” could be remixed and edited afresh. New York mixer John Potoker, who had previously worked with Diana Ross, Ashford & Simpson, Scritti Politti and Candi Staton, was hired and ‘supervised’ by Quincy Jones, and ‘Project “No seven minute singles, motherfuckers”’* began.
The band’s reluctance to put up a fight about their classic single does seem absurd in retrospect. Had anyone tried to remix The Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever” in 1972 to make it briefer and sprightlier, placards would have been seen outside EMI’s base in Hayes, and no doubt Lennon and McCartney would have led the way. It’s hard not to get the impression that New Order still didn’t understand what they’d achieved, though – at the time, they appeared baffled by the record’s success, and by 1988 they seemed to be suggesting it had become dated. “It’s become our Birdie Song,” they scoffed.
Critical opinions of the subsequent “Blue Monday ‘88” single seem to have become harsher in the present century than I remember them being at the time. For most listeners, there is only one “Blue Monday” – the original twelve inch single which came out in 1983, and any other remix or rewrite of it is either sacrilege or at best ‘interesting’. None have really endured.
Thanks to its appearance on one of New Order’s “Best Ofs”, though, this one has probably lasted the course better than most. What’s most striking about it on first play is the sheer urgency of it all. Quincy and John brandish scissors and where they hear repetition, they cut it down to single phrases. They also dial the speed up a couple of notches, throw in incongruous samples of “radar”(?) and “Get down!” - New Order had never, ever asked anyone to “get down” before, even ironically, nor referred to Marconi tracking devices – and create a natural-sounding four minute single almost effortlessly. The most impressive aspect is the final minute or so, which twitches with digital propulsion, adding in some wonderfully simple chopping guitar lines, creating the kind of ecstatic, rushed climax the single never had before (although whether it needed one might be a question purists would ask).
While it shouldn’t be the focus of our attention, the video was remarkable too; not exactly another “True Faith”, but a chaotic, hyperactive, semi-animated rush through the adventures of the well-trained dog Fay Ray, who is asked to balance herself on disordered piles of rickety backroom chairs while the group also stand about one-legged on planks of wood. What did this have to do with the price of tea in China? Ask the video director, but even if you can’t extract sense from it, it is visually striking and at least communicates the new, twittering rush of the remix very well.
Bill Drummond once argued that anybody could have a number one in 1988, and it felt as if he had a point. There have been few moments in music business history where non-musicians could grab the top spot without the benefit of a major label strategy or a team of stylists behind them, but 1988 was an exception. Perhaps the punk rock dream had finally been realised.
Except that none of the freakiest of these freak number ones, often released on indie labels, sounded anything at all like punk rock. There was no fury, disillusionment or thrashed guitars on offer; instead, the past was burped up on top of House grooves, and represented on television by either a DJ miming their day at “the office”, or a bunch of faces plucked from the latest dancefloor. A casual onlooker might think that the only thing these artists had in common with punk was the volume (and strength) of hair product they used.
Which could be true, except I don’t think that Punk Rock and British House culture were as far detached as they seemed. The Clash begat Big Audio Dynamite, after all, who were one of the first groups out of the traps to use loops and crude samples. Combined with that, many of the DJs didn’t emerge out of the High Street nightclubs of Britain; they emerged from the leftfield, bringing a diverse record collection and a do-it-yourself mentality, and the attendees frequently had an awkward but entirely self-styled glamour.
At the risk of complicating things, however, Mark Moore of S'Express was possibly one of the less marginal DJs. He had already achieved acclaim at the mixed/gay night “Asylum” at Heaven in London, whose style took on board the electronic edges of post-punk and House music. That instantly gave him an edge and a sense of flamboyance many of his contemporaries lacked. If Tim Simenon made shapes with his hands next to street graffiti and M|A|R|R|S’s in-person appearances on British television were practically non-existent, S’Express presented Britain with a camp, frivolous image – one of bright make-up, lame, thick eyeliner and a dependance on the cheap, thrift-store availability of the past (whether that involved the records or the clothes). If a lot of emerging House music DJs wanted to be seen as credible artists, Moore primarily seemed to want to prove that he was having fun and could also provide fun; S’Express dressed up for Top Of The Pops, laughed and sniggered, winked at the cameras, and pouted and beckoned like pied pipers (actually, some photos of the German disco ensemble Silver Convention show considerable similarities).
The music itself mirrored their image and attitude. On “Theme From S’Express”, Moore was never going to sample James Brown or Public Enemy if an irresistible riff from Rose Royce was there waiting to be grabbed, so a sample from “Is It Love You’re After” – a huge hit and not a funk or soul deep cut – is used as the central hook. It’s placed neatly over an acid rhythm, combined with prominent doses of cult psychedelic funk track “Crystal World” by Crystal Glass (I am proud to own a copy of this myself) and a brew of other sources, credible and incredible (it’s flash-in-the-pan US pop star Stacey Q, rather than some obscure soul singer, gasping “overdrive”, for example). It’s the sound of boundaries being pushed to one side, of frivolousness and silliness having a place alongside the credible suspects.
None of this made it an expensive pop project; the mere fact that the hi-hat sound was created with a can of hairspray was entirely a method of convenience (though if you weren’t told, it’s not even as if you’d notice). Moore simply didn’t have the equipment to make a satisfactory approximation of the noise any other way. The group’s thrift store clothes were, likewise, often a result of simple budgetary choices.
The end result is actually, for all its irreverence and scattergun focus, the most pop of all the House music tracks we’ve heard so far. It’s the sound of an ecstasy tablet being washed down with a glass of Cava, of your inner child allowing yourself to raid your older sibling’s abandoned suitcase of seventies clothes, of the once-loved records you left up in the loft being mixed with the vinyl you bought last week.
Pop music is rarely inclusive – the whole point of a pop idol is to give the ordinary pleb something to worship or desire – but the most punk rock thing about S’Express isn’t just their cheapness (in the best sense of the word) but their lack of snobbery and their relatable chaos, their understanding that while current trends and fashions bring joy, that's also true of the things from our childhoods we might have cast off into the cultural beyond. As one sample tumbled into another on their record, so too did their Top Of The Pops appearances revel in the sense they were getting away with something; a group of friends thrown together by a strange set of circumstances gurning and grinning like cheshire cats.
Over the years, drivers on the A38 road from Willand to Taunton have reported the appearance of a bedraggled, curly haired gentleman with a torch. Sometimes the man has been reported to cadge a lift, throughout which he grumbled morbidly about historical road fatalities in the area. In others, he apparently disappears before the driver’s eyes, frequently after a near-collision.
All this would be odd enough by itself where it not for his appearance and garb, which made him seem, to all intents and purposes, like a modernised version of the Greek God (with Celtic origins) Telesphorus; a deity who was historically portrayed in grey hooded garments holding a lantern. It was as if time had lowered his status, or changed him or perhaps our perceptions of him; from respected God with a way-bearer's flame to common hitch-hiker holding an electric torch filled with Ever Ready batteries, begging for help. Seemingly even deities can get demoted.
I think about this version of Telesphorus a lot, more perhaps than I should; after all, he’s probably just a figment of tired and overheated human minds, brains whose wiring has snagged and is pulling on ancient memories buried deep in their DNA. But what if he’s real? That just makes me feel concerned for the poor deity. People seem to report finding him in a freezing cold or drenched state, and that’s no way for Gods to carry on.
In The Sugarcubes track “Deus”, on the other hand, Bjork tells us “Deus does not exist, but if he does…” before speculating on what God might look like, deviating away from any stereotypical descriptions. Throughout the song we learn that not only does he have a proclivity for putting people in bathtubs and “making them squeaky clean – really clean”, he also has sideburns and a quiff. “I was surprised – just as you would be,” Einar tells us, reasonably enough.
In an interview with Record Mirror in April 1988, the group explain things further – well, almost. “He lives up in a cloud. He's not a very interesting person,” Einar said. “He’s sterile,” Bjork added.
After spending some time considering whether Lofty out of Eastenders might be a God (well, he did record this) Bjork finally clarifies: “Mr Deus is just one of many gods. He's not special . . . Except for his sideburns and quiff!”
There has been much speculation from fans over the years that there’s a deeper meaning to this record, and it’s actually about the perversity, controlling authority and banality of the monotheistic Gods, and that also seems like a fair interpretation, but above all else, the song is mostly surrealistic flights of fantasy; a particular and unusual God built and created by a rock group, created because they were in a position where they could do it and people would listen. Therein lies the double-bind; Deus does exist, because he’s on this record. You can’t uncreate a myth.
You can't keep a brilliant track down it seems, and The Wedding Present returned to the number one slot for a further week once Erasure's sales weakened.
As ever, we will use this as an excuse to look at what was happening lower down the charts.
17. Danielle Dax - Cat House (Awesome)
Peak position: 2
"Baby baby you're my heart's desire/ got my engine going and my pants on fire".
Seldom did a track in 1988 burst out of your stereo with a sexual statement of intent as direct as that. This phase of Danielle Dax's career is truly fascinating, because while you can reference its gothic edge as well as the glam and faintly psychedelic elements, the simple truth is that it's old fashioned rock and roll sass on a low budget as well. The honking one-note sax riff here hints to that, but so too does - and I almost dare not say this - the almost Meatloafian tail end to the verses just before the chorus kicks in. And if you don't think that kind of camp, biker rock element exists in "Cat-House", just listen to the way Danielle sings "He's the one with my magic key/ knows my road from A to Z" and try to imagine Cher singing it in biker gear. Far fetched? I rather thought not.
So "Cat-House" is ultimately camp, silly, trashy, hard-edged and sassy all at once, and was a much bigger deal at the time than you'd possibly imagine, despite the fact that a lot of elements of it seemed faintly out of step with everything else in 1988. A big part of that is down to the chaos of the chanting chorus, which sounds incredibly "alt" even if the surrounding elements of the track aren't always so, and the fact that Danielle sells the song incredibly well. That so many people expected her to become a fully fledged pop star should probably surprise nobody.
20. Coco Steel & Lovebomb - The Sound of Europe Part 1 (Instant)
Peak position: 20
With a backbeat that almost (though not quite) resembles John Hawkins "Freestyle" (later sampled by Primal Scream for "Loaded") and a less busy, more freeflowing style, "The Sound of Europe" seems like the future of Dance music as it would become - and indeed, Coco Steel & Lovebomb would probably play more of a part in that than many of the groups we've covered so far.
Still, the sampling on display here is really risky, with instrumental segments of Imagination's "Body Talk" taking front and centre at various moments. "The Sound of Europe" has somewhat evaporated from view in the years since - to the extent that I had to upload it to YouTube myself years ago - and I have to wonder if somebody noticed and it received an old-school copyright strike.
21. The Man From Delmonte - Will Nobody Save Louise (Ugly Man)
Peak position: 21
Infamously managed by Jon Ronson before he became a successful journalist and writer, The Man From Delmonte were a Manchester band with their heads firmly in the indiepop era - no electric organs, funky drummer beats or ecstacy tablets for these chaps, thank you, they were happy enough to tend their catchy sixties melodies instead. Fronted by the effervescent Mike West (son of Australian author Morris West) they oozed a carefree uncool which was as thrilling to some indie pop-pickers as it was alienating to others.
Channel 4's "The Chart Show" seemed unusually keen on them, and "Will Nobody Save Louise" achieved some mainstream exposure as a result. It didn't result in significant sales, unfortunately. Their sound landed rather late in the day when this kind of unapologetic dorky outsider merriment was starting to lose ground, and while they would retain a loyal cult audience, their pure tradness meant that they would never become a serious proposition.
26. Crime And The City Solution - On Every Train (Grain Will Bear Grain) (Mute)
Peak position: 26
Nick Cave's ex-partners in crime return with a shuffling, hypnotic and faintly sinister pean to lust, love, memories, obsession and God knows what - the code is unforgiving and possibly deeply personal. The song remains firmly on track, never shifting course, only picking up speed as it continues, then leaving the idea behind as it halts.
This is the first time Vince Clarke has been number one on the NME Indie Chart since 1983, when The Assembly reached the top spot with “Never Never”. It feels as if the cultural bulldozers have flattened the land and rebuilt on it twice over since then; in Indie terms, he was sharing chart space with anarcho-punks, Oi! urchins, Toyah and Tom Robinson when we last discussed his work in depth – in mainstream terms, that moment also coincided with Culture Club being the dominant popular force, and Slade having an unexpected comeback. Makes you think.
Of course, it’s not Clarke’s fault that the eccentricities of the NME Indie Chart placed some fairly significant Erasure records outside the number one spot (“Sometimes” only just missed out) but it isn’t an exaggeration to say that he also spent a lot of time in the long grass. After Yazoo split, he embarked on dead-end projects which (The Assembly aside) either didn’t sell or didn’t get off the ground, then launched Erasure who found themselves unexpectedly cold-shouldered by record-buyers. Even “Oh L’Amour” couldn’t get inside the national Top 75, leaving Dollar to walk off with it under their arms to turn it into a hit instead (and if Vince Clarke seemed faintly passé in 1986, then what the hell were Dollar? Truly, this feels incomparable – imagine The Springfields having a hit with a Ray Davies flop in 1964.)
By 1988, though, the pair were sprinting towards their imperial phase and just about any single they put out was assured a high chart placing. “Ship Of Fools” was the first to be taken from the explosively popular “Innocents” album, and in a strange way offers a handy symmetry, in that it sounds closer to The Assembly’s only single than perhaps anything Erasure had done so far. Both songs have a creaking, autumnal atmosphere – gentle melodies and lingering, airy notes underlining despair and tragedy. Where “Never Never” is about romantic regret, though, “Ship Of Fools” feels sociologically driven in a weirdly non-specific way.
The first time I heard it, I assumed Clarke was riffing off The Beatles “The Fool On The Hill”. The lines “The flowers and the trees are encapsulating me/ And I go spinning” are probably responsible for that, but the rest is strangely repetitive and vague, focusing constantly on the “baby of the class” who “didn’t know that one and one was two/ two and two were four”. There’s really very little to it beyond that, and you’re tricked into believing it’s lyrically richer because the arrangement does most of the work – a filmic, steadily building, occasionally almost organic sound which gets the synthetic strings out surprisingly early but still visits new places with them by the fade-out. It’s a far cry from his earliest work, coming across like a soothing lullaby to life’s misfits, a parent rocking a cradle to comfort their child’s disappointment.
As a teen, I related to it on a very obvious level. We had a late August baby in our year at school who was cursed with a mind which contained persistently naive ideas; the kind of child who, if he read a Judge Dredd comic strip that lunchtime, had managed to convince himself the story might be not only possible but actually real by three o’clock. He was also short and skinny, and while he was friendly and surprisingly good at keeping himself out of trouble, always looked faintly lost at the periphery of the playground. He joined in but was never really at the centre of anything that went on – a mid-field slogger, a bit-part character in games and social interaction.
He grew quieter as the years went on, clearly understanding that every time he opened his mouth, he exposed himself to ridicule from both kids and teachers alike. I immediately associated him with this song; he wasn’t a vindictive or bratty teen. Shouldn’t there be some kind of prize for that? It’s not as if I always managed to pass that test myself. He was a trier who had genuine personal qualities most of my friends didn’t have, but people were too busy laughing at his feeble misunderstandings to notice.
It’s him I saw in my mind’s eye whenever this song played (and it still is). And perhaps not just him, but all those other meek, good-natured kids who did their best, failed most of their exams, and were released without praise or acknowledgement to employers who probably had them pegged as eternal mail-frankers, coat checkers or goods packers, never asking the obvious question: “What does this person want out of life? What else can they do?” At least the school bullies and delinquents occasionally got special attention in 1988. Quiet, dumb nobility did not result in any extra coaching.
Sometimes – often, in fact – I find myself wondering what “pop music” is, and what the word really means. If you want to be blandly factual about it, it just means “popular”; so one week pop music could mean Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”, the next “I Should Be So Lucky” (XTC’s single “This Is Pop” seems to favour that notion). On the other hand, if you want to get scientific and separate the concept away from freak breakout Death Metal hits, there’s probably something to be said about the fluency of the melodic formation, about how strictly the song keeps to agreed time signatures or templates, rather than pulling them to pieces like the excesses of prog or jazz.
Our last entry on Bomb The Bass’s “Beat Dis” did find me asking a few questions, I must admit. While Tim Simenon is hardly Miles Davis, that single does sound like the audio equivalent of a hyperactive but purposeful man throwing paint at a canvas, using repetition to an extent, understanding symmetry, knowing what he wants to get at the end of it, but eschewing ideas like verses, choruses and middle eights for a free-form splurge over a hooky groove. Is THAT pop? Well, it earned a silver disc and was inescapable for the whole year, which is more than “O Superman” managed, and yes, I instinctively understood it as a teen – but it doesn’t adhere to “the rules”.
The indie charts are supposed to be the place where rules go out of the window and innovators can experiment in their labs before the better ones are poached by a major label. The problem here is, things are unpopular or marginal for all kinds of reasons, and that can be because they’re difficult to immediately understand, far too ahead of their time or, actually, rooted so far behind in the past that they may feel antiquated. Until 1988, when the tide began to turn, I would argue that the indie listings have often been surprisingly anachronistic in nature; the retirement home for fading sub-genres, owing obvious debts to punk, psychedelia, sixties pop, and even folk.
The Wedding Present are an interesting case in point. When they first emerged, the music press did not describe them as forward thinkers, but a glorious return to pre-eighties values – of “buzzsaw” guitars, pop-punk melodies, realistic, earthy home-spun truths of love affairs gone awry set to a melodic thrash. The only way the group were ever aligned with any projected future was by being feted as “the next Smiths”, with David Gedge cast as some kind of Agony Uncle for heartbroken youths everywhere.
This needn’t necessarily be a problem. From skiffle onwards, pop music history has been littered with traditionalists leaning on the stylings found in old songbooks. It can be a serious disadvantage when there’s an absence of commerciality, though - when they started, The Wedding Present created a fierce racket, but didn’t really seem like keen respecters of the big chorus, instead favouring the brooding, repetitive refrain.
By the time “Nobody’s Twisting Your Arm” was released, that situation was corrected. From start to finish, this single absolutely fizzes with memorable melodies as well as unforgettably barbed lyrics – the opening lines “And when I called your house/ I’m sure your sister thought that I was somebody else” feels like something from a daytime soap; almost comedic from one angle, but harshly relatable if you’ve ever experienced similar indignities. The lyrics intertwine with a tune which is fast and furious, but beneath the stroppiness lies a melody Pete Waterman wouldn’t have cocked a snook at.
That sense only gets stronger when the chorus lands, which continues the lyrical homeliness, but punches far beyond that with something which could have been from a mid-80s pop hit, if only the group had dispensed with those guitars and invested in a Roland synth and a drum machine. It’s not a million miles from a prime Motown era track in its pure rush of heartbreak and dismissal, Gedge donning a Diana Ross wig and marching off away from his tormentor like a man who knows his true worth (and it doesn’t depend on settling for being second best). Or perhaps it’s something else – maybe “Nobody’s Twisting Your Arm” is, in a sense, “I Will Survive” for indie karaoke blokes everywhere. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, has released an electropop cover of this record, but I’ve always wanted them to.
In case anyone felt it was in danger of being too blokey, however, Amelia Fletcher of Talulah Gosh features prominently on vocals throughout, adding an effective harmony and perspective to remind us that many a woman has also phoned up a boyfriend’s house only to be given unsubtle hints by their sibling.
“This? Is this what people are listening to now? A record with a bleeping digital watch as the chorus? Jesus Christ… the whole thing’s like being trapped in an amusement arcade. It’s awful, I give up, you’ve all gone bloody mad.” - my mother hearing “Beat Dis” for the first time, 1988.
I was absolutely fascinated by that reaction when this record first came out. To me, “Beat Dis” was exciting but hardly felt radical at the time – since “Pump Up The Volume” topped the charts in 1987, the floodgates opened for House records featuring bold and hyperactive samples to not only get released, but actually sell in huge quantities. There was an urgency and propulsion to this record which seemed thrilling at the time, but didn’t actually feel odd or alienating; rather, it seemed like a continuation of a busy, current trend.
If you were of an older generation who hadn’t been paying close attention to the charts, though, and had your dial permanently glued to Radio Two, I now realise that this entering the national charts at number five must have felt inexplicable; even with punk rock and the artier edges of glam, hit singles prior to this still had a logic and a flow which didn’t depart hugely from the golden rules of pop – namely, that choruses must at least try to be memorable and verses must flow obviously and make logical sense. The arrival of synth-pop at the tail end of the seventies did push these boundaries a little further (for instance, “O Superman” really upsets the apple cart) but in general, proper hit singles, and even cult hit singles, adhered to some fairly basic structural rules.
One reason I found the late eighties House uprising so fascinating as a teen is that it had no time for Denmark Street or Tin Pan Alley melodies (unless it was sampling them in five second bites). The groove was everything. What you did on top of that groove was up to you. It could be not much at all, and that’s the option many DJs and artists took, favouring stark minimalism with a gentle seasoning of samples and airy synth washes. Others, however, didn’t know when to stop and loaded the sample gun with everything they’d heard that week and pressed “fire” over the beat, blasting in with a series of tenuously related soundbites and hooks.
“Beat Dis” is firmly in the latter camp. It interrupts constantly with source material as wide as Thunderbirds, Bob Prescott’s absurd “Cartoons In Stereo” album, stereo sound test records, Jayne Mansfield giggling, Disney stories, as well as the obvious candidates – Public Enemy, Kurtis Blow, Afrikaa Bambaataa, Indeep’s “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life”. In common with “Pump Up The Volume”, each sampled snatch eventually etches itself so much into your brain that it feels like a strange hook in itself; I can’t hear Bob Prescott saying “You play Russian Roulette this way” in my mind without hearing a twittering, chattering rhythm beneath it.
Nonetheless, on first listen it’s pretty overwhelming, a riot of speech, scratching, jittery melodies and impatient, forceful dustbin lid rhythms smacking you in the face. My mother was right. It is – kind of – like playing an arcade game on Southend seafront in 1988 and trying to hear the music and noise of the machine you’re focusing on against the attention seeking clarion calls of the others. As a teen, I found that idea thrilling, though.
What’s also fascinating about “Beat Dis” is that for all its freshness, the choice of samples was unbelievably antiquated. I suspect part of this was due to ease of use; it’s much more straightforward to drop in a speech sample from an old sound effects record than it is to isolate vocals from another piece of music, and these discs could very easily be found in stores like Music and Video Exchange for very little money. It was also partly due to the fetishisation of sixties and seventies ideas in clubland at this point too, which might (arguably!) have bled over from the psychedelic Alice In Wonderland events people like Richard Norris were involved with before moving to Shoom.
“Beat Dis” therefore becomes this sweet and sour cocktail of the old and the new, the furiously modern and the old; a black and white land of perfect on-mic pronunciation being thieved, pulled out of context and buried beneath noise. To older generations, it may even have sounded like sacrilege – the fondly remembered past being combined with a present sound they barely understood. I personally loved its pure energy at the time but don’t tend to gravitate towards it as much now; it has the formula of “Pump Up The Volume” but none of the space, grace and patience. In short, I have to be in the right mood.
Sometimes releasing a unique, spellbinding single as your debut can be disadvantageous; it can end up defining a group or an artist beyond reasonable bounds. In the case of The Sugarcubes, “Birthday” may have dominated the indie charts for months and caused Cocteau Twins fans to have spasms, but anyone who bought the twelve inch version will also have heard the extra track “Cat” on side two – a different beast, with hip-wiggling yet irregular grooves revving towards a chorus which consisted of Bjork singing “Cat cat cat” delightedly.
It indicated to anyone paying attention that there were clearly two ways The Sugarcubes could go next – the wobbling, anxious balladry of “Birthday”, which seemed to be what critics expected, or something which was more straightforward, while still not being common-or-garden pop music. “Coldsweat” was the group’s answer, a single which Bjork later vaguely referred to as a “mickey-take” of love songs.
That’s something of an understatement. Ballads typically either represent uncertainty and devastation or celebrate a couple slowly being pulled into their own divine, magnetic forcefield (albeit one which might be peppered with a few complications if the songwriter is interesting enough). “Coldsweat” is having none of this. It presents love as a war, a battle, a conquest – and if you’re smiling knowingly and reaching towards the comments box to mention Pat Benatar’s mainstream hit “Love Is A Battlefield”, it far outguns that. If Pat Benatar presents romance as the theme to an action chase in a Hollywood film, “Cold Sweat” is closer to snuff porn.
The opening lines are “Meat meat blood blood sweat sweat meat”, uttered by the group’s dependable backing growler Einar, before Bjork eventually elaborates “This is hot meat/ This is metallic blood/ This is hot meat/ This is open sweat” and later on warns (or teasingly promises?) “With your own breath/ I’ll tear your lungs” and “I will not finish/ Til I’m fully satisfied”. It makes Depeche Mode’s “Master And Servant” seem delicate; sex and romance here aren’t presented coyly, or even necessarily as (conventionally) fun. Instead, it compares that desire to an almost comical animalistic hunger, where bodies are used like the produce of butcher’s shops, and Bjork is cast not as a fantasy figure or a femme fatale, but a black widow spider devouring her partner once the copulation is over.
The arrangement underneath bares close to no relationship to “Birthday”, unless of course we consider its occasional proclivity to tilt and judder like a vehicle with a warped wheel. Nor, really, is it entirely akin to “Cat”, though its nearer to that song on the spectrum. Instead, almost funky guitar-work and throbbing basslines combine with Bjork’s vocals, which on occasion resembles an almost feline wailing and on others a full-bodied, threatening human snarl.
Her voice dominates Sugarcubes tracks so much that there’s a tendency to overlook what the band are doing, and critics frequently wrote glib lines about The B52s and Talking Heads. Both are clear influences, but is it just me who can also hear the off-kilter funk of Happy Mondays here too? That hesitant, sinister groove belongs to the ill-at-ease likes of “Tart Tart”. Here it’s less spindly and more defined, a harder-edged performance, but the instrumental breaks contain a kind of sinister indie-funk we’ve heard before, just not in this particular context. The paranoid, uneasy romance of Yoko Ono’s “Walking On Broken Ice” is another possible reference point here.
“Coldsweat” is no more commercial a single than “Birthday”, and in its own way, no less disturbing – it’s just that while the former sounded like a colourful and strangely decorated cry for help, the latter casts Bjork as the threat, the wild animal on the prowl, the hunter, not the quarry.
Casual dismissers of eighties music usually refer to the over-produced “sameyness” of the era. I’ve always been a little bit gobsmacked by that assertion – yes, the MOR and AOR aspects of the decade’s middle period occasionally suffered from a weird, suffocating and dispassionate smoothness, and there was a tendency to either overlook or airbrush guitar sounds in the mainstream, but that was never “it”. Innovation was everywhere.
“Rok Da House”, for example, is something which was didn't completely take off on its first release for its crossing of two genre streams. In 1987, House Music and Hip-Hop were two different beasts, seldom seen in the same habitats – in some cities they may have attracted similar audiences, but people usually did not rap over a House beat, anymore than they would a Hi-NRG rhythm. House was party music, Hip-Hop was its own, usually more intense area.
“Rok Da House” is widely considered to be the first example of a disc which mixed the two and got away with it. Cookie Crew were a long-standing Hip-Hop duo from South London who grew in prominence after they won a 1985 rap championship at the Wag Club. Two John Peel sessions followed and these are well worth a listen, because despite being quite raw and innocent, they also show how well-developed the pair already were. Despite his support and enthusiasm, though, record label interest appeared non-existent until Rhythm King stepped forward in 1987.
Beatmasters, on the other hand, were the total opposite of “late night radio”, with two out of the three members having day jobs composing jingles and soundtracks for television adverts. Despite their roles churning out ditties to sell bathroom products to, they were also regular London club-goers who were excited by the scene’s ongoing developments, and keen to get on board. Rhythm King records gave them the job of working with Cookie Crew, and despite the obvious illogic of giving a credible but marginal UK Hip-Hop duo the task of recording with a trio whose interests were geared around House music, “Rok Da House” was born that year.
Interest was marginal at first, with the single bobbing up into the lower reaches of the Indie Top 10 but not quite crossing over. Following its initial release, the decision was taken to give it a fresh remix and relaunch it again into the cold winter snap of 1988, where it shot into the National Top 10 without much hesitation, following the success of other House records during the same period. It had finally found its moment.
While M|A|R|R|S sometimes felt like an uneven collaboration with one artist doing most of the heavy lifting on its most played side, “Rok Da House” is an obvious partnership of equals. If you removed The Beatmasters contributions from this and allowed the Crew to do their usual rhythmic verbal assault over their cutting and mixing technique, the end result would probably have been another cult track for the duo following “Females”. Equally, without the fierce, loud rapping over the backing track here, The Beatmasters work would have been just another club-friendly House instrumental which might have lucked out with a low Top 40 position.
Combined, the two are dynamite. Cookie Crew sell the track awesomely, never ashamed or afraid to acknowledge the track’s instrumental peaks by using those moments to bark and shout the fiercest; listening to this again, it’s astonishing how raw and instinctive but utterly perfectly timed some of their moves seem, shooting off in a quickfire fashion, frequently raising the volume halfway through sentences to emphasise the track’s drive and momentum. There was still a misapprehension in the late eighties among “real musicians” that rap was a dead-end fad (or as Ozzy Osbourne put it “Just talking over a record? It’s a doddle, innit!”) and while there were many short-lived novelty chancers both in the USA and UK, Cookie Crew make it really obvious how they won a competition two years prior to this. Their fluidity makes it sound too easy (try copying them and you’ll realise it’s not). It’s not just the speed of their flow that’s impressive, it’s the charisma and the instinctive use of emphasis, as well as their unapologetic brattiness. It’s the sound of the two loudest women in the room expressing a rush of ecstasy, but doing so with consummate technique.
The Beatmasters, meanwhile, have provided them with a House track that’s a little bit more restless and scattergun in its focus than most of the crossover records we’ve heard so far. It starts off ordinarily enough with that piano motif, but they then riddle the song with endless extra keyboard runs, what sounds like a prowling bassline sped up five times over, and (one of my favourite bits, and probably yours too) that chaotic, giddy psychedelic keyboard break which emerges just when you suspect they might have run out of ideas (eventually, it does more or less finish the song). If you were being cynical, you could argue that they were professional musicians putting their experience at writing catchy ad jingles over a genre which was booming in commercial and dancefloor popularity - there are a couple of slightly buried elements in the mix which do sound a tiny bit like “brassy synthetic library music” - but then again, why not?
Throughout the Autumn of 1987 and the winter of 1988, "Birthday" was the single which just wouldn't lay down and die - modest sales of the record dripped in week after week, which meant very little in "big chart terms" but remained enough to be a threat to the Indie Number One spot.
The week it happened to reclaim the top spot in January is also a very quiet one, so sorry, but it won't take us long to peer beneath at the new entries in the lower reaches of the charts.
24. 2 Bad 2 Mention - Do It (In Touch)
Peak position: 24
Another House record in the indie charts, although not one which received a great deal of commercial attention. "Do It" on first appearance feels as if it has a steady, minimal groove going on, but then it stammers, splutters and jerks rhythmically while super-random samples vomit all over the vinyl. While it on occasion has a creeping rhythmic propulsion and casual scratching similar to "Pump Up The Volume", it's ultimately more hyper than that - and I struggle to believe that Michael Jackson sample got cleared, but I'm not his lawyer, so what do I know?
28. The Boy Hairdressers - Golden Shower (53rd & 3rd)
Peak position: 28
Three future members of Teenage Fanclub (Blake, McDonald, McGinley) gather together with Joe McAladin for this solitary release under the Boy Hairdressers name.
While the title promises smut and innuendo, "Golden Shower" really does sound like a Baby Fanclub record with a strangely festive melody, angelic vocals, and under-produced, naive jangles. While it would be tempting to file this under C86 if you were only halfway paying attention, there's already a clear Big Star and Byrds influence running through this which goes above and beyond its underproduced nature; while many of their labelmates were scuffing and scratching away, "Golden Shower" is trying to commit to classic songwriting standards, and managing far better than most.
While we were discussing the entry for “True Faith” on Bluesky, a number of followers jumped in to offer early praise for this follow-up single. This caught me off guard. I have a rule to myself that I won’t discuss future blog entries on social media; for one thing, I don’t want to pre-empt the contents, and for another I’m conscious of ripping other people off; after all, if somebody comes up with a particularly insightful, red-hot take, it’s going to be really hard to ignore it and stick to my own path – and in the end, it might seem as if I should have asked them to write about the record instead.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the vocal support this single seemed to be get. In my mind, it’s always been one of the weakest New Order 45s – a strange cut from the tail end of one phase of their career, a stand-alone single which half-heartedly drifted mid-way into the 1987 Christmas charts and was then largely forgotten. I was so concerned I might have got it wrong that I took the unusual step of putting it on a playlist and listening to it again for a couple of weeks, living with it and trying to find a fresh way in. A fortnight later, I am still none the wiser.
It’s not that “Touched By The Hand Of God” doesn’t have some appeal to me. There’s a brightness, a burbling, grumbling charm right from the off, which ensures it’s truly not a bad single. The rhythm tracks rumble and the orchestral hits act as the fireworks every time Bernard Sumner sings “touched”, suggesting that he’s possibly not singing about a woman here, but potentially a drug. The synth lines slowly and airily drift skyward, creating a strange kind of electronic gospel feel (this stuff would become increasingly common across the board as 1988 progressed).
The problem is that once it sets out its stall, it barely progresses. The rhythm track is embedded from the first ten seconds, the central riffs are unyielding, and despite trying to convey the sensation of elation, it starts to give the impression of being stuck in a rut. A couple of Bluesky users also pointed out its similarities to mainstream synthpop, most specifically Ultravox – while New Order may have drifted close to these domains in the past, this is the first time it feels as if they’ve truly rooted themselves there.
It also put the group in the strange position of putting out another non-studio album single straight after “True Faith”. “Touched” sits as part of the soundtrack to Beth B’s black comedy film “Salvation!”, a film about a televangelist which was almost universally critically panned and appears to have fallen into a strange cultural oubliette since – I’ve never seen it myself, and if it’s mentioned at all these days it seems to be in reference to this one single and some New Order obscurities the soundtrack spawned (the album also contains their tracks “Salvation Theme”, “Sputnik”, “Let’s Go” and “Skullcrusher”).
Given their heavy involvement, a hit album should have been guaranteed despite the general disinterest in the film, but it sold poorly and left behind a series of New Order tracks which even fans seem strangely incurious about; though only “Hand Of God” itself offers anything more than instrumental decoration or ambience, so this is easily explained.
There's a pattern to 1987's indie chart I've appreciated experiencing slowly, and in depth, as I've written this blog. It starts with business as usual and lots of abrasive indie guitar bands topping the listings, then slowly morphs as sample culture and hip-hop and House music take hold - firstly in subtle ways, such as through the various Grebo crossover artists, then eventually with "Pump Up The Volume" acting as the final bucketload of water which broke the dam. The list of new number ones below doesn't quite give you a full impression of that, but the lower half of the indie chart really saw club sounds slowly beginning to ferment.
From here on, nothing would be the same again. This is something which may sit uneasily with a lot of our more conservative readers. I'm also painfully aware that fans of some of the artists who jumped on board the groovy train remain bitter (We can all see the snarky comments under their YouTube videos mentioning "stupid dance music for sheep" and "selling out" - I bet you're all a wow at parties).
As I'm fond of repeating ad nauseam, though, the UK indie chart wasn't just there for the lo-fi guitar-based things in life. While Morrissey may have fought tooth and nail to suggest it was an enclave for misunderstood lonely white boys, this was (like so many of his views) always patent nonsense. Anyone releasing a single through an independent distributor could sneak in, and anomalies have already made themselves known - reggae singles, funk records, psychedelic reissues, and then (at the more commercial end of the spectrum) the novelty discs de jour and unexpected commercial victories of the disco and holiday camp kind. Black Lace have entered more than once, and Renee and Renato managed to top the national chart while simultaneously sitting in the indie listings.
1987 also saw several House or House adjacent records enter, some by unlikely friends such as old school goths Danse Society. This should give you an idea of how much House and Acid House culture were beginning to slip into the creative processes of even the most unexpected songwriters and musicians; if even goths (never the biggest 24 hour party people) were starting to wave their arms around to the sound of a Roland TB-303, frankly all bets were off. Something huge was bound to happen in 1988.
Except House music was far from just being it. As Pye's messy replacement PRT slowly expired with serious cashflow issues and smaller labels saw Pinnacle as a safer, more credible option for distributing records, anything and everything started to qualify for entry to the indie charts. Australian soap stars, Radio DJs doing rekerds for charidee and club DJs aiming for exposure beyond Mixmag - all these suddenly got in the listings, and some ended up being the biggest mainstream victors of the year. In 1988, our work will meet with the National Charts surprisingly often and to a degree we've never seen before, to the point where we'll be occasionally crossing paths with Tom Ewing's "Popular" project. The NME Indie Charts tended to give these people less of an easy ride to the top than other rival listings, but it couldn't entirely prevent the inevitable.
That's not all there will be to it, obviously. The old guard will continue to hold their own, with "indie" as a genre rather than a distribution choice remaining largely dominant - but for once, the charts start to become a very broad buffet, a celebration of entrepreneurial spirit and club culture as well as the noise of disaffected kids with guitars.
The new 1988 playlist of chart entries is opposite and, if you click on the link through to Spotify, runs to over 200 available tracks. Listen to it on shuffle and try not to gag on the taste of iced doughnuts next to sauerkraut, potatoes and pineapple. With a big rustling bag of acid drops for dessert, obviously.
The 1987 playlist appears on site for the last time below. Use this as an opportunity to kiss goodbye to everything you know, and get used to the idea. I can't rewrite history for you.
Three further weeks at number one from 12th December 1987
The way "Birthday" sold in late 1987 was downright peculiar, even by cult indie standards. In a similar fashion to This Mortal Coil's "Song To The Siren" - with whom it possibly shared a few fans - it kept selling modestly week in week out, selling a thousand copies here and there. While other indie records were swift fanbase sellers in their debut week then ebbed away, "Birthday" kept on reaching new listeners who were intrigued by its sound.
Such records always tend to bubble back up to the top of the NME Indie Charts during quiet weeks, and the Christmas 1987 period served Bjork and company well, allowing them to take the prize away from The Smiths during the entire festive season.
Here's what was going on lower down the charts.
Week One
6. Barmy Army - Sharp as a Needle (On-U Sound)
Peak position: 3
More On-U Sound shenanigans, this time of the football kind - an entire track built around Liverpool FC football songs and chants, with "Abide To Me" sounding as if its being kicked right back to its hymnal roots in this context.
While this one has been known to make drunken men cry on the dancefloor, as a non-football fan I just think it's an interesting and occasionally strangely touching idea - moments of terrace unity set to a steady, pulsing beat. Unsurprisingly, John Peel played it a lot.
15. The Sea Urchins - Pristine Christine (Sarah)
Peak position: 7
The debut for The Sea Urchins, a band who picked up Primal Scream's fey sixties-inspired jangle and arguably upped the ante considerably. It's also the debut single for Sarah Records, a label who would suffer a number of inaccurate critical brickbats over the years but develop a fiercely devoted tribe of collectors.
"Pristine Christine" is so straightforwardly agile and pretty that it's hard to imagine why it hadn't been written and released in 1966; whereas some of the records Sarah put out sounded messy and under-produced, this one strikes the balance just right between appropriate, luddite rawness and lovelorn melodies. A pearl.
16. The Rosehips - I Shouldn't Have to Say (Subway)
Peak position: 16
One minute and eighteen seconds of romantic tiffery on 45, which rushes past all of its ideas so quickly, and in such a thistly soup of lo-fi sound, that it feels as if you might have missed a key point or development - not unlike real-life romance in that sense, then.
17. The Groove Farm - Surfin' Into Your Heart (Subway)
Peak position: 17
Despite being lovers of sixties garage rock and releasing material which occasionally veered close to pastiche, the Groove Farm found themselves strangely loved by the indiepop kids too, perhaps due to their arrangement with the otherwise somewhat twee and snappy Subway Records. "Surfin' Into Your Heart" gives you a good idea of what they were about - quickly recorded, super-speedy pop tunes which may have sounded distorted and rough, but contained an optimism and euphoria few of their contemporaries could match. This 45 in particular sounds like a celebratory jig when so much of the indie chart was filled with either angst or contemplation.
23. The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - Down Town (KLF Communications)
Peak position: 2
Drummond and Cauty had already got themselves into trouble with lawyers around the release of their debut album "1987 What The Fuck Is Going On", which provocatively sampled large chunks of music without seeking out copyright permission. As if to prove they had learned few lessons from their experience, "Downtown" sampled Petula Clark's classic, and the pair took the strange step of quoting from the Bible in interviews of the period, citing Proverbs 26:11: "As a dog that returneth to his vomit, so is a fool that repeateth his folly".
The Christian element continued with their collaborators. Recorded with the London Gospel Community Choir, this is one of their more polished and well-realised early works, combining sour, cynical and heavily accented Glaswegian rapping with a joyous, happy-clappy chorus. "Glory!" sing the choir. "What glory?" answers Bill Drummond (aka King Boy D) "In a wine bar world? In a tenement block?" Conquering the charts with a Christmas tune was clearly not on his agenda at this point, as despite the overwhelming pop and fizz of the chorus here, the tune is torn in two directions. The Community Choir are pulling towards the holiness, the preciousness and the generosity of the season, whilst Drummond points out the harsher mid-winter realities, only for a sampled and stammering Petula to chip in at irregular intervals. "Neon signs are pretty" she sings, sounding pathetic and weak in this context, before another hard-edged, shouted, Special Brew-sozzled verse barges her out of the way.
Early KLF records were often clumsy and awkward, and whilst "1987 What The Fuck Is Going On" was a groundbreaking and copyright busting album, it seldom had grace on its side, being filled with often clumsily placed distorted samples. By the time "Downtown" emerged, they sounded as if they'd finally got the hang of their direction and could no longer be criticised as being a novelty act - this (along with most of the forthcoming album "Who Killed The Jams?") is pop music with a bitter underbelly, the sound of a band absorbing the sounds and culture around them and criticising and distorting it. By the end, even the choir are singing "Jesus, what can we do?"
This is probably the finest early KLF single, and whilst you can't quite hear the future they'd have as mega-selling Stadium House releasing millionaires, it's a step closer towards that. It's certainly a pivotal indie release, and it deserves to be heard a lot more often.
24. Frank Sidebottom - Timperley Sunset (In Tape)
Peak position: 16
Sidebottom's typically ludicrous cover of The Kinks "Waterloo Sunset" sees him describing his suburb of Manchester with an affection which almost sounds genuine rather than joking; if Davies always sounded a bit sinister as he delicately trilled "I don't need no friends", Frank is only too keen to paint a keen, childlike picture of his community.
It also feels as if marginally more budget and effort has gone into this than his earliest EMI releases, not that it really resulted in many sales outside his core fanbase.
25. Society - Love It (Big Life)
Peak position: 14
Way before Bobby Gillespie chanced a hit with an Andrew Weatherall remix, the indie chart was treated to the spectacle of goths Danse Society collaborating with Coldcut on this record. It's not a complete success, with far too many spiky guitar riffs and distorted vocals in the mix, but is nonetheless one of the earliest examples of a crossover record - probably far too soon for either their fanbase or the House kids to fully throw their support behind it, though it seems to have picked up some more recent acclaim from the retro kids.
Weeks Two and Three (only one chart published)
3. The Smiths - Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me (Rough Trade)
Peak position: 2
The final offering from The Smiths, "Last Night" slipped out around Christmas with barely any promotion or music video, feeling strangely like an afterthought rather than a swansong. As such, it suffered and was one of their least successful singles in years, reaching number 30 in the national charts and failing to top the indie charts, the first occurrence of this since "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" reached number three in 1985.
Of course, if you're going to pick a song to roll the end credits to The Smiths career to, this isn't actually a bad choice; its lonely, looping melody resembles "How Soon Is Now?" without repeating the idea, Morrissey and Marr instead treating us to a music box lullaby of unresolved business, a ballad of ongoing loneliness. As The Smiths sounded when they entered, so they seemed as they left; isolated, slightly strange and unquestionably backwards looking. Instrumentally speaking, this record sounds like the end theme to a heart-wrenching black and white movie, where perhaps a priest or a soldier who is sent to the front is doomed to never experience romance, to always march to this funeral rhythm for eternity.
As for Morrissey, he left the indie sector for EMI and, contrary to popular view, did occasionally produce the odd groover on the way; no Acid House for him, though, as he usually ended up having more in common with Shakin' Stevens when he wanted to cut some rug, rather than S'Express. He continued to find comfort in looking backwards.
A gothic Xmas single? Why not, I suppose, and certainly why not from Alien Sex Fiend, who were always rare examples of party-movers rather than the party-poopers of the Goth sect. Impersonations of Bernard Matthews mix with screaming, off-the-peg festive observations and occasional stabbing discords. The group operated within their own particular mutant zone, selling their records to the same five thousand fans, never really taking this business very seriously and somewhat getting away with it.
If there’s one thing very few Smiths singles had, it was a touch of sleaze. They were often contemplative, yes. Weary, occasionally. Sardonic, sure. Spiky and provocative, maybe. Even at their most heavy-handed and sledgehammer-happy, though, The Smiths rarely sounded like greasy backroom razzle-dazzle.
“I Started Something” could be the exception, though – it was the first single to be released after the group’s dissolution was announced to the press, and is a strange outlier rather than a typical finale, pricking up my ears as a teenage boy for its peculiarly brassy arrangement. The way the record swings and rocks is reminiscent of the soundtrack to a strip-tease – have a go at imaging somewhere flinging their underwear into the air from the tips of their fingers to this if you want (though I’m not forcing you to). There’s a strange come-hither arrangement going on here, the sort of thing Suede revelled in many years later but felt atypical of The Smiths output.
On top of the glam swing, Morrissey doesn’t partake in innuendo, but instead delivers some regretful, hesitant and intriguing lyrics, appearing to confront the idea of getting in too deep with an unsuitable partner. Gone are the slogans and the forthrightness, and his lines are caked in doubt – “I forced you to a zone/ and you were clearly never meant to go” he states, “I started something and now I’m not too sure”.
Thematically, the song this reminds me of most is Pulp’s “Underwear”, but whereas that’s explicit and very directly addresses a dumbstruck victim who could walk away if s/he wanted to, “Something” is all chewed fingers and floor-pacing, hair nervously but precisely parted. Given how frequently relationships bend this way, with one party realising they’re never truly going to love the other, it’s surprising it’s such an unaddressed area in songs. How often do humans actually, properly fall in love? A handful of times in our lives, maximum? How often is that mutually felt, and how much mess and ill-feeling can any imbalance create, despite our best intentions? And when you’re with the unsuitable partner in a bedroom, pondering this over, and they say “the three words” you least want to hear at that moment, how do you deal with it?
There isn’t a script you can follow, and advice on this area is thin on the ground. Letting a lovestruck person down gently is an artform some Femme Fatales and Lotharios may get good at over time, but most men and women seem to stumble and stutter around, pouring drinks with unsteady hands or going to hide in the bathroom. Sometimes that’s enough for less deluded human beings to get the message, but people in love tend not to be firing on logical cylinders; hope outweighs hard experience. Unwanted lovers tend to ask “Are you ill? Shall I get you something?” rather than “Are you hiding from me? Shall we talk?” while knocking on the toilet door.
The conflict between the lyrics and the melody creates the brilliant tension in this single, and while I seldom see it praised much, it’s one of my favourite Smiths records. Morrissey isn’t a smart-arse here – he’s racked with guilt instead (but is any of this his fault really?) He’s Charlie Brown muttering “typical me” while rolling his eyes, as the band circle and swing and encourage him to kiss Peppermint Patty. If recent Smiths singles we've covered have seemed a bit too pleased with themselves, featuring Morrissey revelling in his certainties, this has a vulnerability which is both nerve-jangling and relatable.
On a scorching summer day in the mid nineties, I was sat in the park with an ex-goth, swigging from a cheap bottle of wine, testily asking him about the old days. I was merely curious and didn’t intend this to be a form of psychological torture, but I watched his cheeks get steadily pinker in tone as he stammered his way through the ‘old lifestyle’. I began to feel unnecessarily like a BBC documentary filmmaker interviewing a departed member of a cult.
While we were talking about the music, I mentioned that of all the groups, I liked Fields of the Nephilim best. His face lit up, not with approval, but with sadistic glee. “Oh,” I could tell he was thinking, “you’re going to sit here listening to me embarrassing myself with my teenage vampire stories, then you’re going to openly declare that you enjoy the work of men from Stevenage in apocalyptic cowboy fancy dress? You’re getting both barrels now, laddie!”
And his rant began. Fields of the Nephilim weren’t a goth band, they were a joke. A tired, second-rate Sisters of Mercy tribute act in children’s fancy dress. A band for provincial goths, stunted goths who had never left their hometowns to visit a city, goths who had read far too much terrible pulp horror fiction, goths who were barely goths in fact – just weirdos with spaghetti western fixations. “Nobody,” he jabbed at me, “Nobody who was an Actual Goth ever liked Fields of the Nephilim!”
“Yeah well, they were my favourite goth band, so that figures,” I said, then changed the subject to something else, very very quickly.
I’ve thought about that weird moment a lot since, and have gone on to meet other goths with similar views (although others who also disagree; I saw a goth in a Nephilim T-shirt only last week). I can understand the vitriol. The Nephilim were, at root, somewhat silly. Andrew Eldritch and Robert Smith were arch and knowing, regularly falling back on plausible deniability, whereas The Nephilim built an entire backstory, a self-constructed myth which was too rich to ever be a joke. Their name referred to the angel-human hybrids of the same name in the Hebrew Bible, and they shot music videos which felt like five-minute apocalyptic horror b-movies – impressive looking (their director Richard Stanley later went on to make numerous feature films) but lower budget than a Garth Marenghi cast-off, featuring the band over-acting, as musicians will inevitably do.
They covered themselves in Mother’s Pride flour to achieve that dusty desert cowboy look, and were occasionally hauled to one side by customs officers keen to check it wasn’t cocaine. Oh, and they had a drummer called Nod. Apocalyptic desert cowboy groups should never have drummers with the name Nod. It’s always going to become a punchline, far more than the most ridiculous stage name ever would.
At the time – and even now – I thought that these discrepancies and incidents were far more Heavy Metal than Goth, and the Nephilim’s sound and lyrical content sometimes veered closer to Iron Maiden than The Mission or The Sisters; but that said, the dramatic Morricone inspired twangs that occasionally whined through their songs were coming from neither place; seldom have rock groups sounded so epic, so thrillingly, openly sixties Saturday afternoon picture-house.
If fate had taken a different course and he hadn’t shot his landlady and himself, Joe Meek would have locked Fields Of The Nephilim in his house in the eighties and demanded to produce them. Not only did they share similarities with two of his previous acts (The cowboy-dressed Outlaws and the undead Screaming Lord Sutch) thereby saving on costume costs, they also tapped into stories of psychic planes, and growled stories about radioactive contamination and unforgiving, howling deserts. There’s a fancy dress, boxed-in Englishness at play here – high-budget ideas, epic in scope, forged on low-budget trickery (the video for “Blue Water” cost a mere £1,500. Coincidentally, a freak hurricane interrupted proceedings, perhaps brought on by singer Carl McCoy pointing upwards and growling about the sky falling in, or maybe not).
The group also sometimes produced music which was truly great, and “Blue Water” is up there. The full twelve-inch version utterly sprawls, as drums clatter and cymbals expressively splash, and those guitar lines restlessly reach and descend and whine; even without a video, there’s a whole cinematic experience going on in your mind’s eye. Carl McCoy’s growling lyrics are almost secondary; the real appeal lies in the instrumentation behind, the sound of a group of frustrated soundtrack writers painting every corner with a new flash of detail. Brilliantly, the group’s visual direction also married perfectly with their sound – if you showed an uninitiated individual a photo of them, they would probably correctly guess their general direction, even though I don’t think there are many other rock-goth-Morricone groups out there.
