106. Fields Of The Nephilim - Blue Water (Situation Two)

One week at number one on 14th November 1987

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.

105. Sugarcubes - Birthday (One Little Indian)

Two weeks at number one from 31st October 1987

As a kid, I developed a strange fascination for the furthest flung bits of the globe – the sparse, underpopulated areas which contained people I’d never met, whose beliefs and customs I’d never been exposed to. Living in London, I’d been introduced to all kinds of non-British people, even if they were just being irritating tourists in the street, but some places felt deeply enigmatic. I’d nag my Mum about this, initially in seriousness, then eventually just to be an annoying, repetitive arsehole.

“Mum, can we go to Greenland on holiday?” I asked.

“No. There’s nothing there,” she sighed. “We’ve had this conversation before.”
“There can’t just be nothing there.”
“It’s as close to nothing as you can get, it’s expensive, and we’re not paying all that money to go there and sit surrounded by snow and ice. If you want to go to Greenland, you’re going to have to pay for it when you get older.”

I still haven’t been to Greenland (largely because my wife isn't up for it either). I have, however, been to Iceland a few times, a country which was similarly at the forefront of my childhood obsessions. It’s not a cheap place to visit by anyone’s standards, but it is halfway to Canada, which has on occasion made it a handy stopping off point for those long trips to see my in-laws. You can pause, mood-bathe in the sheer weirdness of eternal daylight or constant nighttime, get scalped by a couple of Arctic Terns, eat some Puffin (or actually, don’t), wander around the wild coastline, or just walk the brightly coloured streets and feel as if you’re somewhere which has still clung on to its own distinct identity; which hasn’t been Big Macced up to its eyeballs. Aside from the hot thermal springs, a Penis Museum and the rugged landscape, there are no huge tourist attractions in Iceland as such, just the comforting sense that you’re somewhere which prides itself on its differences.

When “Birthday” was released, most of the music press seemed to focus on the country of Iceland rather than the group themselves – as if the entire population, rather than a single group, had released a new record. Smash Hits just listed some facts about the country in their “Mutterings” section and The Chart Show’s info boxes barely mentioned the group at all. Strange behaviour indeed, especially as The Sugarcubes weren’t even the first Icelandic group to get exposure in the UK; Mezzoforte had a sizeable jazz funk hit with “Garden Party” some years before (which we’ve covered in passing) and their parent Steinar label even had a British arm for a time, pumping out other Icelandic records to the British public by artists such as Puzzle, You And I and Joe Ericson.

The reason the music press seem to have suddenly become Icelandphiles became apparent when I finally saw One Little Indian’s original press release for “Birthday” - the vast bulk of it was covered in Iceland facts; proof if it were needed that many music journalists are idle buggers who, when faced with an inexplicable and leftfield record, would rather just copy the contents of the press release into their word processors.

Because “Birthday” is, even by the standards of 2026, a deeply strange record. The guitars whine and weep, bells ring as if struck by stray poltergeists, ponderous percussive elements wobble down stairs, then Bjork's echoing, sky-reaching howling seeps in to create something actually really very creepy. The word "beautiful" has been occasionally used to describe the single, but it's not a well sounding record to my ears; it reaches, it surges, it staggers, it collapses like a yearning ballad being played from a vinyl record on a boat at choppy seas. In fact, chances are if you investigated the noise, you would find an empty boat bereft of a crew, and a turntable inexplicably playing this – Bjork’s screech being answered by gulls.

Comparisons were made to the Cocteau Twins at the time, but while that group could stab discords and abrupt handbrake turns into their work, they were, for the most part, following fairly predictable melodic paths. “Birthday” see-saws uncomfortably, not wanting the listener to get too settled.

The video, screened on "The Chart Show" more times than I can sensibly count, adds to the sense of unease. The background picture is Bjork dancing and singing in an empty room with a darkened window. The foreground shot zooms in and out of Bjork's face, and as it zooms in she becomes pixellated like a Crimewatch video of a witness talking about a heinous murder. It's cheap and basic, but it again gives the impression of something slightly more sinister afoot.

Bjork later referred to this as a "tasteless pop song", clarifying: "It’s a story about a love affair between a five year old girl, a secret and a man who lives next door. The song’s called Birthday because it’s his fiftieth birthday... I was always changing my mind about what the lyrics should be about. I had the atmosphere right from the start but not the facts. It finally ended up concentrating on this experience I remembered having as a little girl, among many other little girls’ experiences. It’s like huge men, about fifty or so, affect little girls very erotically but nothing happens . . . nothing is done, just this very strong feeling. I picked on this subject to show that anything can affect you erotically; material, a tree, anything.”

Which doesn't really clarify anything concretely, except to say that from the foundations up (the premise, the overall sound, the delivery) "Birthday" is consciously awkward, naive and confused, reaching for past emotions it can't get to or properly explain, and seems to want to unnerve the listener with its ideas.

104. M|A|R|R|S - Pump Up The Volume (4AD)

Six weeks at number one from 19th September 1987

It’s a summer evening in 1987 and I’m stood on the doorstep to my parent’s garden. I'm gazing towards the fir trees at the rear, taking in the sun’s last rays and idly listening to Radio One burbling away. My Mum’s kitchen radio was a cheap and nasty thing, all treble and top-end, seemingly designed to emphasise the hiss and static of poorly tuned radio frequencies over and above any bass whatsover.

Not the best bit of kit on which to hear “Pump Up The Volume” for the first time, then, which chose that moment to leak out of an evening Radio One Dance programme. Every so often I heard the half-hearted, buried, almost robotic declaration “Pump up the volume”, followed by a series of disjointed slow wooshes, interjecting samples, and the noise of what sounded like electric guitars being scraped face-down along gravel. It’s not that I didn’t like the track, it’s just it sounded like a strange, half-hearted dub. I shrugged and played with the dog for a bit, no longer really paying much attention to the single. No point in getting too invested in something which was number 47 in the Record Mirror club play chart (or wherever). These records, these weirdly credited white labels – they came, they went. There was no reason to suppose this one would be any different.

The next time I heard the track it was through some proper speakers, and then I got it – by God, I got it. It felt breathtaking. Had I been old enough to be a clubber, I might have had some sense of where “Pump Up The Volume” came from, and why it had to happen, but I was thirteen years old and many years away from such delights. As such, the depth, the bass, the vast, almost overwhelming space to the single felt strange. The way sounds panned from the extreme right to the left hand side of the stereo, as if almost to place you as an insignificant, microscopic speck among the enormousness of the tune, felt like a new universe opening up; no wonder the promo video director made outer space the central theme.

The structure of “Pump Up The Volume” also felt interesting and novel at the time. The track’s main hook is the prowling bassline and rattling drum beats which underpin it, and that is a constant presence, along with that doomy, dramatic, reverberating piano note. It therefore feels as if you’re being driven along a brightly lit motorway, riding along the spine of that groove, but every so often, for whatever reason, the driver takes a slip road off to some strange town with different noises. You can still hear the thunder of the motorway close by, or feel its vibration, but in the meantime you’re stuck in tiny, tinpot towns along its verge, hearing weird interjections from the natives, before your driver corrects his course and lands back on the motorway again.

Samples are a huge part of the record, but they’re treated as brief visitors, strange interruptions to the transmission rather than equal partners. Ofra Haza visits, as do The Criminal Element Orchestra, James Brown (of course), Coldcut and Trouble Funk. None of these samples feels essential to the record, and none of them “sold it” as such; at first you felt you could potentially cut fast and loose and create your own version of “Pump Up The Volume” with different elements. The more you listened to it, though, and the more you absorbed, the more baked in it all became, each interruption feeling essential to the whole, an important landmark in the overall journey. Listening now, I wouldn’t want to lose any of these people, anymore than I’d want to get rid of the iron bridge across the river near my house. And despite the fact they’re nudges and strange interjections, its odd how fluid and natural they seem – even James Brown feels as if he’s always been nothing but a bit-part player in the magic.

The single finally ends on someone scratch-mixing over (what I’ve always assumed is) a record of someone whistling, like audio graffiti scribbled around someone’s strolling expression of idle happiness. The record is almost jazzy by that point, riffing on so many different grooves and elements that it feels busier than ever, but never quite losing its vastness. It’s truly fucking amazing and I never tire of listening to it.

102b. New Order - True Faith/ 103b. The Smiths - Girlfriend In A Coma

 

New Order: One more week at number one on 5th September 1987

The Smiths: One more week at number one on 12th September 1987

Here the record buyers go again, ruining the natural cut and flow of my blog with their historical purchasing decisions. 

As we've seen before, rebound number ones are very common in the NME Indie Chart - sometimes because a record doesn't immediately realise its full potential and has a second or even third wave of mainstream support ("Blue Monday"), sometimes because a limited edition single only offers a short-term threat to the top spot and allows its predecessor to take back the prize, and occasionally just because two extremely competitive singles are out at the same time. And that's essentially what happened here - "True Faith" and "Girlfriend In A Coma" were two huge alternative singles in September 1987, and while in most indie charts "True Faith" held the top spot confidently, that wasn't the case in the NME.

There's nothing more to say beyond that, so let's look at the new entries lower down those charts.

Week One

5. The Soup Dragons - Soft As Your Face (Raw TV)

Peak position: 4

The Soups return with a soft chunk of sixties inspired pop; there had been signs of this proclivity before,  most notably in the Byrdsian chimes of the wonderful "Head Gone Astray", but never had they been so directly expressed. These aren't touches or hints of an influence so much as a full-blown homage.

Despite this, the single was popular with fans and only just missed matching the Official Chart peak of its predecessor "Can't Take No More" (it peaked at number 66 versus that effort's number 65 placing). Its fey, summery paisley tones are pretty, merry, and unlike a lot of other groups from this period, not remotely snide or condescending towards late sixties pop - until I started writing this blog, I'd totally forgotten how many eighties indie acts suffered from the Austin Powers Tendency. Despite this, it feels like a weaker effort when placed up against the sheer power of their previous four singles, and as time went on, the group began to lean into this side of things increasingly often, sacrificing abrasion and firepower for slower, brighter harmonies. 

Meanwhile, we should obviously be grateful to Sean Dickson for the YouTube upload, but it's a shame his copy of the video has suffered a bit of damage over the years.

Week Two

8.  Big Black - He's A Whore / The Model (Blast First)

Peak position: 2

Steve Albini's gang return with two sonic blasts, neither of which are quite as uncompromising as I remember. "He's A Whore" sounded difficult for 1987 but wouldn't have been remotely out of place in 1993, thanks to his continued cultural spell-casting through the American alternative scene. In truth, it's beginning to sound strangely tepid these days, with those solid, steady beats making it seem almost (but not quite) as ordinary as a rough Beatles Cavern bootleg. 

A lot of people bought this for the cover Kraftwerk's "The Model" on the other side, which replaces basic electronica with guitars which sound like insects stuck on flypaper. On the general spectrum of punk cover versions, it's closer to Devo than The Dickies in its stylings, but once again doesn't sound as impressive or as mighty as I remember. Or maybe I've reached the point in my life where genre-bending covers no longer seem that interesting.

9. Depeche Mode - Never Let Me Down Again (Mute)

Peak position: 3

This was taken from "Music For The Masses", the LP which turned the suburban Essex boys into a stadium band, and created so much of the trouble and confusion that lay ahead for them. "Never Let Me Down" is a beast worthy of any arena, though, an absolute juggernaut of a single which oscillates between slapping industrial rhythms and an almost symphonic sounding chorus. At this point, Anton Corbijn had also got fully on board to produce all their videos, grainy Super 8 affairs laced with dream-like imagery which worked with the music almost perfectly. Everything was gelling.

"Music For The Masses" came in a sleeve featuring a glossy photograph of a huge red megaphone, presumably broadcasting the album to an abandoned piece of twilight countryside, a string of lights from a road in the distance being the only sign of life. Internal sleeve shots showed the megaphone up mountains or by lakes and canals - in my mind, the bash and clatter of "Never Let Me Down Again" was coming out of all of them. What else would be? The track sounds like a proclamation, an announcement worthy of instant attention. It's a truly great single, the sound of all the best and most interesting elements of the eighties rolled into one ball.

At the time, it didn't really command the attention it warranted in the UK, slipping out as a cult single in common with all their other recent shots. Over time, though, it became the high point of their live set to fans, their hands waving in the air like fields of barley. It might seldom be heard on Radio Two, but it's as important to the clan as "Enjoy The Silence". 

26. Poison - Cry Tough (Music For Nations)

Peak position: 26

Meanwhile, here was the "true" sound of the stadiums and concert halls of America, operating in tandem with Depeche's ongoing threat. Poison's glam metal feels strangely cushioned and polished by our modern day standards and expectations of rock, closer to One Direction on one of their glam tips than any of the current pretenders. Nonetheless, something about that gloss and sheen obviously appealed just slightly to the Manic Street Preachers, whose first album "Generation Terrorists" occasionally has a little bit of that cushioned blow to its production.

It's also surprisingly enjoyable, its daftness and flamboyance seeming as breezy and daffy as a Dick Emery sketch these days. 

28. The Three Johns - Never And Always (Abstract)

Peak position: 7

In which the Johns link up with Adrian Sherwood to explosive effect, causing them to sound more challenging and current than any of the other new entries in the chart this week - those rattlesnake drum machine rolls and jackhammer beats suddenly give the group a modern but also deeply threatening foil to react against. It's nasty but strangely compelling, not Indie Dance in any conventional sense of the phrase, but persuasive nonetheless. Probably their most astonishing single.

For the complete charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number One In The Official Charts

Rick Astley - "Never Gonna Give You Up" (RCA)

103. The Smiths - Girlfriend In A Coma (Rough Trade)

One week at number one on 29th August 1987

Sometimes, amidst a string of often more noble efforts, one particular single becomes a catchphrase in a band’s career. It’s not necessarily their best single, or the most advanced, or even their biggest hit; it’s the one that seems, rightly or wrongly, to define their whole ethic to the Mums, Dads and "squares".

While watching “The Chart Show” in the summer of 1987, the video for “Girlfriend In A Coma” came on and my parents immediately began spluttering in disbelief. “Oh, come on. Is this a joke?” they roared; a question that probably needed to be asked, since Morrissey was, as ever, playing his role dryly. “Well, I’ve heard everything now”, my Dad muttered, and from that day forth, whenever Morrissey appeared on television, “Girlfriend In A Coma” would be brought up. To my parents, Morrissey was no longer the man with some flowers up his bum – his previous identifying factor in my house - but the bloke who had a partner in intensive care.

“Is this his new one, then?” my Dad would ask. “Is it about his girlfriend again? Is she out of hospital now? Well, at least he’s got that going for him, anyway”.

And it didn’t stop with my parents. Smash Hits listed the single as having one of 1987’s very many “rum” song titles. It also later became the name of a reasonably good novel by Smiths fan Douglas Copeland, and I’ve also seen poetry events named after it (“Girlfriend In A Comma”) and reviews of curry houses referring to it (“Girlfriend In A Korma”, even though that doesn’t really work unless the eatery involves cannibalism). On and on the track’s influence churns, despite the fact that it’s not exactly a radio favourite – and is obviously banned from every hospital radio playlist in the land – and wasn’t really regarded as much more than a quirky glitch in the Smiths catalogue at the time. It was reviewed favourably enough and sold healthily, but it hardly sat alongside “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” or “This Charming Man” as being their most respected work.

Firstly, as to the completely fair question about whether this is a joke – I would argue (as I did with my parents at the time) that it’s really more of a cheeky homage. “Girlfriend In A Coma” feels spectacularly indebted to the sixties death disc, although instead of The Shangri-Las “Leader Of The Pack”, it appears to be taking its cue from Twinkle’s much more mournful, understated motorcycle crash 45 “Terry”.

Twinkle was supposed to have been a superstar in the sixties, a prodigious teenage singer-songwriter whose pop songs seeped with vulnerability and introversion. Instead, the music business pulled her in then spat her out with distaste after her attempts to follow up her big hit faltered. Her second single “Golden Lights” was a mournful study of the downside of being a famous person’s other half, and was actually written while she was dating Dec Cluskey of The Bachelors. The public only cared enough to take it to number 21, and it would be her second and final hit.

The Smiths covered it in 1986 and placed it as the extra track on the 12” single of “Ask”, so they had already doffed a cap to her work. “Girlfriend In A Coma” appears to be looking more in the direction of “Terry”, noting its strangely hushed and understated delivery of a deeply controversial subject matter (it was effectively banned by the BBC for its morbidity). If the subject matter of the leathered-up motorcycle tragedy of “Terry” is vaguely rock and roll – even though its shuffling rhythms and delicately plucked instruments barely qualify – “Girlfriend” erases every last final drop of teenage rebellion from its likely influence and is lyrically stark and almost weirdly understated.

Marr’s simple, unambitious but pretty acoustic guitar lines combine with Morrissey’s softly sung pleas of “I know, I know it’s serious”, “No I don’t want to see her” and, contradicting himself in his mental muddle, “Would you please let me see her”, to create what can only be described as a sombre lullaby of panic. The string section adds some drama to the mix, but it’s ultimately an exhausted collection of thoughts, positive and negative, guilty and concerned (“There are times when I could have strangled her/ but you know, I would hate anything to happen to her”).

There’s an alternative reading to the above, of course. Just as you might listen to Cliff Richard’s “Carrie” and suspect the man at Carrie’s old address had murdered her, I’ve often had a slight feeling of unease that Morrissey is hinting that he is in some way responsible for the coma. His lines about murdering or strangling her followed with “you know, I would hate anything to happen to her” feel almost as if he’s protesting too much, playing a role; yes, of course we regularly bickered, your honour, but it wasn’t me in the greenhouse with the quiff and the cricket bat.

The only thing that scuppers the above is the track’s genuine sense of kitchen sink distress, the repetition and disorder. Where Twinkle sang “Don’t do it, don’t do it!” Morrissey also repeats himself and circles slowly around the truth, arriving thereas the reality of his situation cements itself (“Let me whisper my last goodbyes”).

Of course, I have no doubt that the single probably isn’t intended as an entirely serious artistic statement – it’s The Smiths attempting sixties baroque pop but amping the tragedy and the melodrama to the max, taking the ideas as far as they’ll go before the balloon bursts and the idea becomes too ridiculous to contemplate. It walks a very fine line between homage and parody, and in its own way is as attention seeking as “Panic” or “Shoplifters Of The World Unite” – only the idea seems to have had much more durability and continued shock value than either of those, the thought of quiet ballads to comatose lovers being too ludicrous for some to handle.

102. New Order - True Faith (Factory)

Three weeks at number one from 8th August 1987

In the eighties, New Order never really seemed like the kind of group to embrace the idea of a "Greatest Hits" album. Snapping all their 45rpm moments into one neat, consumer-friendly brochure for casual shoppers seemed a strange idea for a group (and record label) who were against the idea of even advertising their new releases. Nonetheless, 1987 saw the arrival of "Substance", one of the best "Best Ofs" the entire decade had to offer; beautifully packaged (especially the cassette) and near-perfect in its contents. 

It also resulted in New Order being given a tight, pressing deadline by their label boss Tony Wilson – to record two new tracks in London with producer Stephen Hague, one of which would be used on the compilation. Studio time was booked for ten days with Hague, a producer the band hadn’t worked with before, but whose reputation had begun to spike due to his recent work with the Pet Shop Boys. Perhaps somewhat foolishly, the band entered the studio with just a handful of ideas.

While Tony Wilson made several nervous phone calls to check things were progressing well, the band toyed and tinkered away and began to forge the basis of two songs which would become “True Faith” and “1963”. Problematically though, Bernard Sumner hadn’t written lyrics for either, and Hague began to grow impatient, stating that he found it extremely hard to understand what direction the song should be taking without a clear lyrical map to follow. Sumner ummed and ahhed, then welched on his promise to come up with something to an agreed deadline, until he was “accidentally” locked inside the West London flat the band were renting and left without food for an entire day (history does not record who was responsible for this, or indeed whether it was deliberate).

Left without anything to do apart from stew in his own hunger and misfortune, Sumner turned out possibly the finest set of lyrics of his career for one of the tracks (and some of the most baffling ones ever for the B-side). “True Faith” is overwhelmingly about drug addiction, though the band ultimately backtracked on the original draft for one of the verses, the much more explicit “When I was a very small boy/ very small boys talked to me/ now that we’ve grown up together/ they’re all taking drugs with me”. Doing so, and changing the final line to “They’re afraid of what they see”, has probably given the song an ambiguity and mystique it may otherwise not have had, besides ensuring larger amounts of radio airplay.

The end result is a track which sounds both euphoric and troubled, fresh and exotic and yet disintegrating. It skips and bounces, and has a chorus which could almost be heard as celebratory, but never once sounds truly triumphant, and always feels giddy and unstable. The chimes fall and despond, those bizarre panpipe sounds, which seem as if they would ordinarily belong on a New Age gift shop CD, hum in the background like the soundtrack to a yogic daze, and Sumner delivers lines which are appropriately contradictory – the reserved joy of “A certain sense of liberty” sits alongside the despair of “I don’t care if I’m here tomorrow”, while the line “I used to think that the day would never come” could sit in either camp. Are you delighted that you’re finally here, bathed in sunlight, watching yourself from the outside, or horrified? Or both?

Sumner utterly nails it with the simple line “the childhood I lost replaced by fear” too; making the way addicts self-medicate their way out of their own prisons a central focal point of the song. The song is not glorifying the use of heroin, or indeed any other drug, but instead trying to understand why it became such a huge issue in the mid-eighties. In doing so, it’s more empathetic than any number of grainy, gritty Government adverts where a narrator whispered, in a voice somewhere between Gary Lineker and David Attenborough, that if you took it, you’d start to look “tired… and spotty” (we all looked a bit tired and spotty in those days, whether we were on or off The Horse). Musically and lyrically, it’s a hazy, faded, pastel shaded sketch of a situation which is portrayed as a frustrated, fragile and finite kind of luke-warm happiness, one where the sharp hooks of reality are capable of penetrating the bliss. Even if New Order hadn’t changed the original lyrics, it’s hard to hear how anybody would have thought the song was written in an approving way.

101. All About Eve - Flowers In Our Hair (Eden)

One week at number one on 1st August 1987

It sometimes feels as if people were mourning the death of the hippy dream within five minutes of the whole thing starting. I’m exaggerating for effect, obviously, but the nostalgia and regret seem to start fairly sharply. Thunderclap Newman’s 1969 number one “Something In The Air” drips with desperation – the line “We have got to get it together” sounding more panicked than optimistic, urging somebody somewhere not to just do something, but attempt it in an organised, unified way. 

More bizarrely still, the obscure track “Imagine”*, recorded by Elton John, Rodger Hodgson (of eventual Supertramp fame) and friends in the same year seems to be fondly looking back at an era which had only just passed. “You'll find that the flowers won't wait/ they will disintegrate” warns Hodgson; and by 1969 they had, broadly speaking. Both songs feel as if they’re taking place at a wake, or at least on the last bank holiday of August when a faint chill can be felt on the breeze.

The seventies weren’t without occasional dabbles back into the land of corduroy toadstools – Hawkwind’s entire damn career and Rainbow Cottage’s freak 1976 hit “Seagull” are indicative of that – but the children did indeed grow up, and the British kids who took their place post-1976 were often angry, marginalised and aggrieved rather than peace loving. There’s a frequently unspoken and unreferenced commonality between the underground hippies and the seventies punks, but the Year Zero effects of punk rock rendered the frilliest and softest edges of psychedelic pop redundant; there would be no more pollen on 45 for awhile (excepting The Damned's occasional dabbles).

Attitudes softened again in the eighties with a bunch of “Paisley Underground” types emerging in 1982, but few were bold enough to try to earnestly shove Flower Power front and centre of anything they did. References were made, but mainly in a very knowing, nudging fashion. This meant that by the time All About Eve’s “Flowers In Our Hair” emerged in 1987, music critics inevitably balked at the ludicrous balls on it; here was a single, after all, which seemed to be weeping a lament for the loss of a potentially transformative era, right down to the promo video which saw the heavy-handed imagery of a coffin daubed with the words “Hippy – RIP” being set ablaze. These people, concluded the journalists, were either very brave or very stupid. 

Or possibly neither. Despite their goth following, All About Eve were one of the few acts of this era to have a genuinely romantic and unironic view of the recent pre-punk past. Psychedelia didn’t play a prominent role in their musical thinking, but the early to mid seventies did. Miles Hunt of The Wonder Stuff scoffed that the group were like Fleetwood Mac**, but his barbs aside, they also clearly had Fairport Convention in their record collections too (or at the very least lead singer Julianne Regan certainly did). The group could rock out, but there was a floaty, measured, almost gentile aspect to everything they did – the airy softness and wondrous expression of Regan’s voice dictating the backdrop and ensuring the group were never going to be anchored to thundering basslines and reverb-heavy rhythms. You just can’t mix those kinds of flavours together.

Moreover, Regan wasn’t shy about passionately embracing topics of conversation the mainstream press almost certainly regarded as passé – she happily spilled forth about paganism and spells at a point in time where even Julian Cope could get a bit cautious around the subject. It was never exactly clear whether she simply didn’t give a shit whether she was being fashionable or was too carried away with her own trip to notice. Her interviews at this time were fascinatingly but almost innocently out of time, enthusiastic must-reads for anyone who didn’t want to wade through even more rock decadence and punk inspired nihilism.

Perhaps it would have been more surprising if such a group hadn’t released a single about the death of the hippy dream, then. Despite this, “Flowers In Our Hair” is, it has to be said, somewhat heavy handed, but with sentiments utterly in keeping with the kind of last gasps we heard in 1969. “We earn the flowers in our hair my friend/ So take my hand/ ‘One day’ is always too far away” Regan sings, with a bit of a regretful trill towards the instrumental break. The track also concludes with perhaps the key point a lot of journalists missed, unable to see the cynicism for the paisley patterns: “We only dare to say 'please love me'/ At the seventh glass of wine”. Aha. So it’s as much about buttoned-up English repression and how that ties in with disappointment and sourness and unrealised emotional aspirations. It also explains an earlier line “Do you ever think we’ll make it/ something more than a uniform?” 

Regan’s voice and easy, floaty charisma enabled her to get away with these ideas in a way very few other vocalists at the time could have pulled off. She’s too confident and powerful in her delivery to be child-like (which would have rendered this record an horrendous, twee mess – imagine it sung in a lisping, prim voice to get what I mean) but has enough natural charm and gentleness to also make the ideas seem almost palatable, even slap-bang in the middle of a Thatcherite decade where you were supposed to be either greedy or angry (or possibly both). She appeared to have inherited the independent spirit and waywardness of punk in terms of attitude, but the record collection of a mid seventies university graduate.

100. Soup Dragons - Can't Take No More (Raw TV)

Five weeks at number one from 27th June 1987

When I started writing this blog, I did idly wonder what the hundredth number one might be, and promised myself that I wouldn’t draft a full list in advance and project ahead. That would spoil the beezer surprise for me, after all – supposing it’s a really appropriate, “era defining” classic? Or, even better than that, something the indie-kids would get agitated about; an Erasure single, perhaps, or one of the many Rhythm King releases that dominated the late eighties? What would that co(s)mic event tell us?

In reality, and at the risk of sounding like Hannah Fry, sequential numbers don’t care much about your preferred narratives. Just as nothing exciting happened when your car’s mileometer hit 5,000, and you just passed a boarded up carpet store rather than the Angel of the North or the house of the first person you ever loved, centenaries occur just because eventually they have to. The law of sequences demands it, and whether they coincide with something memorable depends entirely on the way the coin lands that day (go and look up the 100th Official UK Number One and you’ll see what I mean. I’ve been told the answer to that one before, many times, but I still have to keep reminding myself).

Back in 1987 though, The Soup Dragons taking the crown at this point would have felt somewhat appropriate, even though I can’t remember anyone noting it. While the start of their career saw them regarded as another one of those cheap and cheeky C86 acts, all fizz and charm, and the tail end saw them cast as bandwagon-hopping chancers, there was a brief sunlit period where they were critically lauded as the next big cult thing. Front page magazine shoots were gained, a highly reputable manager swept in to guide them, and a serious buzz emerged.

“Can’t Take No More” landed at the apex of all the fuss, and became their first single to enter the national Top 75. At this point, the group were still playing true to their roots, and the promotion around it was misleadingly low-key – The Chart Show played the accompanying video a few times, making a big deal of the fact that it was shot by the group for £80, tactfully ignoring the backing they had at this point.

The song itself is actually the third slam-dunk in a row for the band, following both “Hang Ten” and “Head Gone Astray” into some kind of scratchy indie heaven. The three singles are markedly different from each other yet still, amazingly, identifiable as Soups product. “Hang Ten” stays true to their C86 roots and serves up two minutes of exhilarating rattle and roll, while “Head Gone Astray” is somehow punky yet beautiful jangle pop, and then “Can’t Take No More” is a stranger beast still – shouty, stammering, always evolving then collapsing again, and downright furious about the inconsistencies and wrongdoings of a significant other. “Your attitude always ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes/ like the weather!” rants Sean Dickson angrily, while staccato drumbeats and distorted guitars follow him behind.

It could choose to all be over in two minutes like “Hang Ten”, but instead it twists and evolves, featuring shimmering guitar breakdowns and taunting, childlike “na na na” vocalisations, before finishing on an ear-splitting electric organ break. It’s almost as if the group had two possible objectives, either a track akin to The Who’s “I Can See For Miles”, or a Slade styled rave-up, and decided to go for both at once, but keep the production and the presentation raw and cheap.

It’s easy to attempt something like this and come back with something perfectly listenable but ultimately insubstantial – thousands of low-key indie bands have done just that – but they channel so much adrenalin and frustration into one three minute single they manage to make the listener feel both peppy and disorientated at the same time. Elements of this, particularly the sharper and more discordant aspects, sound as if they would have slotted very neatly alongside some of the groups emerging out of the USA in a year or two’s time; Black Francis, for one, seems as if he might have appreciated it. Far from staying true to this indie era’s dominant idea that singles should be cheap, raw and simple, the Soups bounce and ricochet off the walls in ways which aren’t immediately predictable (the disorientating psychedelic dizziness of the latter half of each verse is interesting and proof they were already operating in a different territory to either The Wedding Presents or Bodines of this world).

99. Pop Will Eat Itself - Covers (EP) (Chapter 22)

Two weeks at number one from 13th June 1987

Pop Will Eat Itself are one of the few groups I can vividly remember entering and exiting my life. The first memory involves me joyfully taking my meagre paper round money to HMV, rushing to the “P” section in the racks and finding a copy of their album “Box Frenzy”. “This is the stuff!” I thought while looking at the cheaply designed sleeve (complete with unflattering photos of the group swigging from tins of lager).

I took it to the till, watched it being rung up, and took the hour’s bus journey home from Southend precinct to listen to it. The number 1 route towards the smaller South East Essex towns was always an indirect, circling, dawdling trip which nonetheless built up anticipation – sleeve notes would be devoured, labels inspected, and sometimes abuse would be yelled by other kids from my school sitting behind me, asking why I hadn’t bought a Public Enemy record instead (fair comment in retrospect, and one PWEI would probably get on board with). When I got home and my Dad asked to see what I bought (“I hope you’re broadening your tastes a bit”) his face fell.

The second memory is me almost exactly ten years later, looking at a box of records in my parent’s spare room, trying to rationalise my collection and lighten my life load before moving into yet another short-lived and chaotic houseshare (things would get worse before they got better). My hand fell on “Box Frenzy” and placed it into the “discard” pile with barely a second’s thought. “I’ll never play that again,” I thought to myself, and sure enough, I don’t think I’ve even so much as streamed it online since.

So what was it about the group which elicited excitement in a fourteen year old paperboy’s heart but only prompted thoughtless dismissal in the head of a broke, chaotic, twenty-four year old almost-man? Those are two very different reactions, occurring at distinct periods, and it strikes me that it’s not just about the naïveté of my youth. We’re not quite hearing it on this EP, but Pop Will Eat Itself jumped on to hip-hop and sampling culture just at the right moment, signposting their allegiances and habits with upfront glee (they even supported Public Enemy live, though it should be noted that they were bottled off). The group described themselves as “Robin Hoods”, taking from other people’s work to enhance their own. They enjoyed comparing their pilfering to serious law-breaking on their records - “Crime circles, waves, and passes by/ Uh, sorry no speech, we really must fly!” they declare on the album’s not entirely serious ‘statement of purpose’ finale “Hit The Hi-Tech Groove”.

There was one other group in the indie charts doing precisely the same thing at this point, namely The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, soon to become the KLF. The difference in media technique here is startling, however. The Poppies swigged beer, belched and sang football songs as they marched through life, coming across like unruly schoolboys stealing Trebor sweets from the newsagents. Drummond and Cauty, on the other hand, were evasive and continually one step ahead of the journalists they spoke to. They never directly claimed to be sonic outlaws, jokingly or otherwise; they let the press draw that conclusion by themselves. Master criminals never openly brag about their daring heists – they let others report on them and speculate instead.

What’s interesting in retrospect is how underdeveloped the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu were at this point. Two tracks aside, “1987 What The Fuck Is Going On” is an unholy mess, reams of sticky-back plastic disintegrating against the weight of crudely edited samples which sound as if they’ve been cut with a dinner table knife. It’s like one of Chris Hill’s novelty cut-up records in places, failing to resist the temptation to floodlight how appropriately placed some of the copyright theft is, each sample lined up as a nudge-nudge wink-wink gag.

“Box Frenzy”, on the other hand, mixes genuinely quite witty couplets with piss-taking samples from recent hit singles (nothing too cool or knowing here) rapping that perhaps veers too close to shouting for comfort, and some porn film loops and casual misogyny (and even though most of that sexism stems from a cover version, nobody forced the group to record it at gunpoint). For all that chaos, however, there’s a strangely neat order to most of it, a sense of an album that was actually vaguely produced at FON, not just pulled together in a wild fury.

The central problem was that Pop Will Eat Itself had no mystery. They were loud. They were crude. They had creativity and wit, but it was unvarnished. The band journalists most frequently compared them to was the pre-Paul’s Boutique Beastie Boys. High praise in 1987, less so by the following year.

Prior to that album, the group released lo fidelity indie records with a trashy, punky vibe, getting on the C86 compilation almost by virtue of their DIY cheapness rather than anything else. At the point the “Covers EP” came out, PWEI were almost but not quite out of the chrysalis, moments away from the madness of “Box Frenzy” but still, to all intents and purposes, a guitar-based act with occasional raps on the side.

The first track on offer on this EP, a cover of Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s recent hit “Love Missile F1-11”, is smart because it takes the digital twitter and stutter of the Moroder produced original and reminds us that basic, churning rock and roll was the blueprint beneath all that futurism after all. PWEI’s version is explosive and thrilling, turning the heat up on the best bits of an idea which was always trying too hard to second-guess where music was going next. “Who cares about your weird Clockwork Orange inspired pretensions, let’s rock” seems to be their thinking, and perhaps somebody could try that method with Campag Velocet next.

98. Gaye Bykers On Acid - Nosedive Karma EP (In Tape)

Three weeks at number one from 23rd May 1987

“If this was video, we could forward all the crap”.

When people talk about the indie charts in the eighties, they often think in terms of the press headlines, the dominant idea of alternative music; groups with guitars, to borrow a phrase from a long retired Decca A&R man.

While they were often wrapped in a bright mesh of electric guitar based sounds, the listings also weren’t immune from the effects of ever-cheaper technology or club culture, and the period this single spends at number one is striking for a few reasons; firstly, it’s when the KLF first appear in their initial Justified Ancients of Mu Mu guise (more on them down below) and also when a relevant future number one

(Spoiler

Pop Will Eat Itself’s cover of “Love Missile F1-11”)

enters the top ten. And right on top for three straight weeks was this sprawling heap of digital barbed wire, discordant guitars and distorted samples. It felt as if something was happening. Something ugly, but something nonetheless.

The reasons sampling started to work its way into low-budget music had as much to do with affordability as fashion, and the effects of the lowest priced technology were smeared all over the crevices of the indie scene in 1987. The memory limits of most cheap samplers involved short stabs of speech or music, delivered in a highly distorted manner, rather than extended, luxurious loops. The bands that chose to play with these new toys therefore often became equally manic and unfocused, creating a frenetic racket rather than any kind of groove.

You can hear this throughout “Nosedive Karma”. The band take a garage guitar riff, trigger messy, fast samples from ancient Hollywood films, then throw in muddy solos and agitated rants about – well – you be the judge. “Avarice and greed/ Nostalgia through your veins/ It ain't crack that I need/ To make things feel the same!” rants Mary Byker, presumably railing against the black-and-white Levis world that permeated 1987 (The KLF would similarly sneer at this on the debut album “1987 What The Fuck Is Going On”). These lyrical ideas shift and frequently drift into nonsense, though, colliding with an old school chorus of “ba ba ba bas” and another onslaught of samples and noise.

What the track does is work with the glitchiness of the technology rather than against it, evolving gracelessly and throwing different riffs and ideas around as if they’re detritus. On “Nosedive Karma”, it somehow feels as if no riff, no solo, and no lyrical idea is any more important than whatever fleeting digital scrap decorates it; the band leap towards every distraction gleefully, piling everything on top of the mess. If it sounded like a bunch of herberts pissing about with tech back then, there’s something slightly relevant about it in 2026 too; it also feels like being sat indoors on a Spring Day with all the windows in the house closed, but every window on your laptop open and blaring. Maybe they were on to something.

Gaye Bykers on Acid were a strange group. While saddled with the Grebo tag and sharing it with groups such as Crazyhead and Pop Will Eat Itself, they lacked any straightforwardness at all, and (some would argue) seriousness. Occasionally supporting themselves at gigs under monikers such as Lesbian Dopeheads on Mopeds (dressed as women) and fake dissident East German thrash punk band Rektum, there was a whole fictional universe surrounding the group which probably only made complete sense once you were on the inside. They also didn’t lean on the bog-standard Velvet Underground and Byrds influences, instead having members who loved Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.

That love of the angular, satirical and experimental cuts through a lot of their work and attitude. They may have presented themselves as motorcycle boot wearing scruffs with fridges filled with lager, but the noise they created was sometimes challenging as well as thrilling. “Nosedive Karma” is, for me, their finest single; a down-in-one chug of every twitchy, agitated idea 1987 had to offer, with the unexpected sweetness of the sixties surf chorus in the middle.

Its success and their subsequent press made them seem attractive to Virgin Records, who gave them a surprisingly free reign for 1988’s “Drill Your Own Hole” album (initial copies of which came with the central hole covered over by an unperforated label). The group blew their promotional budget on a satirical sci-fi B-movie of the same name, which is available on YouTube and is actually better than you’d expect, like some kind of Max Headroom-ised take on Hard Day’s Night, piercing the cliches and habits of idle rock hacks, the music business, punters and even themselves. Throughout, they are warned that they are spoiling their own chances of success by “not taking things seriously”. Perhaps they effectively diagnosed their own problem.

97. The Smiths - Sheila Take A Bow (Rough Trade)

Four weeks at number one from 25th April 1987

Prior to the release of “Sheila Take A Bow”, it might have felt as if The Smiths were treading the backwards path, understanding their initial appeal and returning to their original ideas. Craig Gannon was out of the group, and previous single “Shoplifters of the World Unite” was (instrumentally speaking) chock-full of Smiths tropes, all bowed together into a fresh new song. And for “Sheila”, Sandie Shaw was invited back into the studio to do vocals. So far, so very 1984 (in calendar terms rather than Orwellian terms, obviously).

However, everything seemed cursed from the off. At the aborted sessions for the single in December 1986, Morrissey declared himself ill and only Shaw turned up. She was dismissive of the song, calling it “horrid”, and was slightly reluctant to play second fiddle as a backing vocalist. She spoke to Morrissey on the phone and demanded that he sing down the telephone line what he wanted her to do, and he obliged, but the session was deemed unworkable and ultimately scrapped.

Stephen Street later picked up the pieces and produced the version which was released, which might be one of the oddest singles The Smiths put out. The tumbling, thumping intro with its honking brass, almost sounding like a factory klaxon, makes it seem as if we’re in for another “Panic”, only for it to suddenly and inexplicably start to do musical high kicks, like an aborted show-tune (it’s rather like Madonna’s “Hanky Panky” or Geri Halliwell’s “Look At Me” in that respect). Just when you think it might deviate from this path and explore different avenues, it sticks fairly rigidly to the concept and even leans into it towards the end – “You’re a girl and I’m a boy/ la la la la la la la la la!” sings Morrissey at the end, beaming towards the imaginary West End theatre audience before him (I suspect this bit might have been written with Shaw’s contributions in mind).

It wasn’t the first time The Smiths had created something which sounded as if it might work in a musical. “Ask” had its moments too, but it was never such a constant, unending feature of the track. Nor had Morrissey ever written lyrics which felt so much like a parody of a sixties Tin Pan Alley tune – with the exception of “boot the grime of this world in the crotch, dear”, the song is filled with fairly cliched imagery which feels almost tossed-off. The thunder and swing of the group’s backing helps it to achieve a small amount of heft, but there’s an incessant and deeply unSmithsian sugariness to the rest of the contents – an overwhelming taste of honey which gloops down your gullet and dominates your tastebuds in an unwelcome way for the rest of the afternoon.

Behind the scenes, the first obvious signs that all was not well in The Smiths were beginning to make themselves known to those outside their camp. Brixton Academy had been booked for the filming of a promotional video, but Morrissey refused to show up for the filming, resulting in a significant waste of money and a promo-free song. Given that he failed to turn up for the first recording session as well, a certain pattern was clearly establishing itself which continues to this day – Morrissey the diva hiding under the duvet whenever obligation knocks. Johnny Marr would not tolerate this for long.

You could also argue that “Sheila” stylistically fits in with his solo material better than The Smiths catalogue, given that its daffy, showy sensibilities feel akin to his moments of levity there – neither “You’re The One For Me, Fatty” or “Certain People I Know” fit neatly alongside “Everyday Is Like Sunday” or “November Spawned A Monster”, but they’re in his discography nonetheless, those attempts to impress the ghost of sixties pop impresario Larry Parnes with bits of easy-to-swallow rock and roll. “Sheila” has that same breezy flexibility and is as family friendly as a tub of Peak Freans biscuits, but something feels very wrong here; the song is catchy, jolly, and has a spirited glam charge, but the melody feels more like an adland jingle for a carpet warehouse than a proper pop song.

96. Wire - Ahead (Mute)

One week at number one on 18th April 1987

Where do I even begin with Wire? Getting the chance to write about one of my favourite bands is both a blessing and a curse; a blessing because I want less enlightened readers to understand just why they’re so special (of course). Also a curse because groups you have spent most of your lifetime admiring become strangely hard to pin down. You know you love them, but describing why feels like resting on a therapist’s couch and being asked to remember where those feelings began. You scribbled the details down in a notebook somewhere decades ago, but now it just feels like second nature. You want me to explain?

The feelings certainly didn’t begin in the logical place for me – the place most Wire fans entered. The first track I heard was the chiming, beautiful but oblique 1988 single “Kidney Bingos” on a compilation I owned, which remains one of my favourite Wire singles (and one I’m sure we’ll get to in due course). From there, I found a cheap second-hand copy of “Outdoor Miner” (minus its picture sleeve) in Gumby Records in Southend, and played it about forty times the night I bought it, utterly obsessively. It became my favourite single of all-time and remains such. You could ask me why, but if you did, I’d just get distracted and this entire entry would be about that record. 

You’re probably expecting me to say that I then tracked back to their first three albums, but I don’t recall seeing many of them on record store racks at that point. This may or may not be the reason I bought “The Ideal Copy” first, their fourth album, their first in eight years, and their debut for Mute Records.

This is another reason why having to write about this single is a curse. “The Ideal Copy” was strange enough and strong enough to hold my attention and establish me as a fan, but clearly imperfect and vaguely chilly. It has moments of bright, faintly broken pop (“Madman’s Honey”, “The Point Of Collapse”) and the usual shattered, jagged melodies which sound in danger of breaking down but always hold their steely nerve (“Ambitious”) and in that sense, offered us what Wire always did.

Where the output differed was the precision of the approach. The group emerged having embraced electronics and feeling determined that they needed to undertake the work with a “modern” mindset. Out went Robert Gotobed’s live percussion, which was replaced by painstakingly created loops and programmed rhythm tracks, with anything that approximated cymbals or hi-hats also thrown by the wayside. Eccentric, rubbery, rapidfire yet “non-funky” (their words) basslines were laid on top, a unique approach the group referred to as “dugga”.

Gotobed has gone on record as being unimpressed by this, stating in Paul Lester’s book “Lowdown” that he felt sidelined and unable to offer much towards the creative process. While the group beavered away in Hansa studios in Berlin, he instead whiled his time going for walks around the city, occasionally popping back to grapple reluctantly with the technology. Other members were also going through challenging changes in their personal lives, ego battles commenced in the studio, and singer Colin Newman briefly walked away from it all; he was only coaxed back when he realised that it wasn’t a major label’s money he would be draining by quitting, but that of Mute boss Daniel Miller – a friend with limited resources. By moving to an independent label, Wire’s future was possibly saved.

“Ahead” was the only single taken from the album and unveils itself confidently – those slow, loud bass notes at the start act as a fanfare, and almost immediately afterwards the group jitter and judder into view, oblique as ever. “Lips growing for service/ Eyes steady for peeling” Newman begins, before enthusiastically declaring, like a market stall holder, “Bring on the special guest!/ A monkey caught stealing” (which remains one of my favourite Wire lyrics for its pure absurdity and the joyful acidity of Newman’s delivery). I’ve never fully understood what Wire were on about with this one, and you can find a variety of fans online who are absolutely, unshakeably certain what it means, but all give different accounts – so it’s either definitely about oral sex, or animal vivisection, or corruption, or being used in a relationship. In common with many Wire records, establishing the facts is almost futile, and you’re instead swept along by the melody and the intention, which in this case is urgent and irritated, yet somehow sunlit too. Blue Monday-esque monk chants drone in the background while bright synths beam dramatic hooks and Newman gibbers discontentedly “I remember/ I remember/ making the body search”.

This doesn’t make “Ahead” sound like anything close to pop music, but miraculously, it’s closer than most of the contents of the indie charts in this particular week. The group display their usual knack for taking mis-shapen lumps of ideas and convincingly presenting them as shining jewels – the urgency becomes compelling, the sentiments somehow jolly, and the synths heavenly. I don’t agree with fans who hold it up as one of their finest singles – they’ve released better work in the last fifteen years alone – but its shine and gleam definitely have a captivating effect. Only a strange, stuffy rigidity and a determination not to edge one micro-second away from the click-track prevents it from truly realising its potential.

95. Rose of Avalanche - Always There (Fire)

One week at number one on 11th April 1987

By the late eighties, the goth movement – if it could sensibly be called a "movement" – had become one of the most unbudging aspects of alternative music. I’ve now spent over two years writing this blog, covering six years worth of music; goth was there from the off with Bauhaus and The Birthday Party, and their surviving (metaphorical) kin and offspring only seemed to get stronger and reach ever-larger audiences following their demise. Goth didn’t fade from view like anarcho-punk or the quirkier jolts of New Wave, it sat enigmatically in the corner of the nightclub recruiting more and more people to its cause.

As the decade progressed, a pattern emerged which is typical of most sub-genres and movements; there were groups deemed goth royalty whom nobody was allowed to blaspheme against, whose inevitable second-week chart peak appearances on Top of the Pops were deemed victories for the sect. Beneath those honoured few, however, lay scores of bands who might, if they were lucky and a fair wind was behind them on a Spring afternoon, score a high placing indie chart entry. Despite this, they would never be radio playlisted or let close to any television programme which wasn’t The Tube or the Oxford Roadshow, and as such would remain fringe concerns. Your Dad might have sung along to The Cure’s “The Lovecats” when it came on the radio, but he wasn’t getting anywhere near Red Lorry Yellow Lorry’s “Open Up” (though nor would you have wanted him to - I mean, imagine that).

Sometimes, if the indie charts were soft and not much else was happening, they might even score a number one. We saw this with the March Violets in the typically sleepy August of 1984, and Rose of Avalanche repeat the trick again close to the Easter period of 1987. They were always one of the more straightforward goth bands; loyal to their leaden, reverb-heavy and spartan drumbeats, sombre melodies and slowly scaling ideas which sometimes stretched beyond the five minute mark (their single prior to this one, “Velveteen”, was an epic tribute to Nico which is probably their most enduring song in both length and subsequent reputation).

In common with many goth bands, they disputed ever being part of the movement, and in this case I’ll sympathise. They often seemed like university students who had tried too hard to impress the kids who dressed like Velvet Underground members in their first year, and found themselves shunned and dealing with their next closest compatriots instead. Never quite hip enough, always wondering what might have happened if they’d just played it a bit cooler during Fresher’s Week.

They were, to all intents and purposes, a band who could just as easily have been on Creation and hanging out with Pete Astor and Bobby Gillespie. They loved psychedelic rock and The Doors, they wore leather jackets and sunglasses at night, and they weren’t against wearing paisley clothing. As you’d therefore expect, their music occasionally lifted its head out of the mourning bow to shuffle, boogie and stride; they were never averse to a simple garage rock chorus or an airy, stoned rock-out.

Which is essentially where we come in with “Always There”, which sadly isn't a cover of Marti Webb's version of the "Howard's Way" theme, but a pretty jangle and stride through verses and choruses you wouldn’t be surprised to find on a sixties obscurities compilation. If the chorus of “I know death won’t find us” is very goth indeed, its surrounding melodies, harmonies and production would have been equally at home on a House Of Love single. Their only drawback is their straightforwardness – where Terry Bickers would have found space to scrape and wail around unpredictably, The Rose of Avalanche are steadfastly loyal to the central rhythm and riff, seeming afraid to wander too far off the track in case they lose grip of the plot.

In that sense, then, they were very goth; the band themselves acknowledged this paradox, calling themselves “too rock for goths, too goth for rockers”. Many of the minor goth acts clutched on to their basic ideas and drum machine patterns tightly, offering a shady safeness from guitar hero licks or skittering dancefloor rhythms; there’s a reason that many goths held Joy Division close to their bosoms but could be faintly sniffy about New Order, and it had everything to do with the way the latter used their drum machine to lift feet off the floor rather than keep them anchored with a dead weight.

94. The Primitives - Stop Killing Me (Lazy)

Three weeks at number one from 21st March 1987

BAMALAMALAMALAMA…. Rarely do singles begin with such an abrasive attack of guitars, right from the very first second, before putting their bristles down again. Most groups, even alternative ones, are aware of the need to consider the delicate sensibilities of radio listeners and save their noisiest moments for later on in the single. Coventry’s The Primitives couldn’t have given a damn in this instance, though, putting their loudest attack right at the start of the single, then never quite hitting that peak again.

That said, The Primitives were an odd bunch to start with, creating slightly misshapen alternative pop whose influences were obvious (and tantalisingly fashionable) but were stretched into an unforced coolness of their own. Early songs liberally utilised the feedback screeching beloved of the Jesus & Mary Chain, the simple pop attack of The Ramones, Motown choruses, and the scratchiness of the Shop Assistants and The Flatmates, topped off with their own unique weapon in lead singer Tracey Tracey. While other female vocalists in the indie chart communicated with anger, conviction, sweetness or heartbreak, sometimes all in the same song, Tracey usually rolled her eyes with impatience. You can hear the disdain in almost every Primitives song at this point (bar “Thru The Flowers”) – perfectly enunciated, softly sung. Previous single “Really Stupid” is a prime example, taking its very title from the tired, understated insult that peppers the song.

It’s close to punk rock, but punks tended to sneer forcefully rather than seem utterly, offhandedly above whoever they were addressing. Tracey’s vocal style is actually quite chilling as a result; she feels like every woman who wearily sighed at your weak jokes, or gave you steely glances across a club dancefloor to pre-warn you that your chances with her were nil. Whether her style has the same effect on women (making them feel as if she is unapproachable and cooler-than-thou) is something I’ve never asked, but from a male perspective there’s something inherently but relatably threatening about it. She gave the impression of being somebody who Took No Shit without needing to heavily articulate the fact.

“Stop Killing Me” combines her vocals with guitars which skid off in various directions at different moments, beginning with that immediate machine gun fire, then settling on a distorted Ramones riff, then chiming beautifully in the chorus, then get steadily more gnarly until feedback starts to bleed around the edges. It is a very sharp, short and simple pop song at heart – Tracey even “ba ba ba bas” in the chorus, like a back-up singer with a soda pop in one hand – but what it lacks in complexity, it makes up for in its many flavours of menace. Insouciance and noise meet melody and friction, and it manages in two minutes what some singles fail to achieve in five; something that’s thrilling and hooky but also a little bit alienating and challenging at the same time. “Just keep away from me/ ‘cos you’re killing me” sings Tracey, and you believe that not only might she mean it, but she may be directing it at you.

By this point, the music press were beginning to get seriously excited by the group, which seemed to represent everything about British alternative rock they loved rolled together into one package. Tracey’s charisma and the rest of the band’s obvious love of pop hooks made them seem like one of the few groups in the late eighties indie charts who stood a strong chance in the outside world, and the media cuttings piled up quickly.

In time, they would be referred to as being part of the “Blonde” movement, a particularly unimaginative and press contrived scene which rather reductively grouped vaguely alt-leaning bands together who had blonde female singers. As a result, The Primitives found themselves lumped in with Transvision Vamp, The Darling Buds and The Parachute Men, despite only really having anything in common with one of those acts.

Such idleness and borderline misogyny from the music press was fleeting and quickly forgotten, and the group ended up floating far above it when they finally signed to RCA and managed a major Top Five hit with “Crash”. Its parent album “Lovely” sits in my record collection, and sands down the rougher edges of their sound slightly, but places the abrasion alongside flowery pop-psych, bright sunshine melodies and occasional bursts of almost Cocteaus-styled haziness (“Ocean Blue” feels almost as if its pushing at the shoegaze door three years too early). A cynic might argue that the group were having their cake and eating it – trying to be all things to all the different kinds of inky music press reading people – but they never quite lose their sense of self throughout, and the final results make for a surprisingly even listen. Even “Stop Killing Me” finds a natural home right next to the tranquil buoyancy of “Out Of Reach”.

The album only just failed to follow “Crash” into the national top five, but sold incredibly well for an alternative record, bagging the group a gold disc and a lot of music press and major label goodwill. By the following year, though, their follow-up album “Pure” only just managed a place inside the Top 40, and a crisis meeting was allegedly held at RCA asking if Tracey’s new deep red hair colour was to blame. Seldom in rock history has hair been regarded as such a central factor in a group’s successes and failings.

93. The Wedding Present - My Favourite Dress (Reception)

One week at number one on 14th March 1987

“My favourite song has to be My Favourite Dress. David has managed to perfectly distil the tortuous agonising feelings of jealousy into three minutes of angst. The guitar hook is pretty great too.” – Sir Keir Starmer.

Well, there you go; not my words, but the words of the Prime Minister (presumably still the case, by the time this goes live). If you ever wondered what it might be like to live in a country governed by an indie nerd, rest assured you are already living that dream, although he isn't the only Labour Party "name" who is interested in The Wedding Present – years ago, the one-time Labour deputy leader hopeful Stella Creasy tweeted me about the band, and we’re not even members of the same party. There’s dedication to Gedge beyond the call of duty.

An oblivious person reading this in another country might assume that this means the group were massive, but that would be a mistake; while the music press briefly touted them as the next Smiths, the peak of the band’s achievements occurred in 1992 when they managed to crash the national charts with twelve different limited edition singles released throughout the year. All went Top 40 and one even managed to nose its way into the top ten, but prior and subsequent chart performances indicated that this was purely due to the rabidity of their fanbase – the Starmers and Creaseys of this world taking a break from their local Labour Party meeting to rush out and buy them on the Monday of release, scared of missing their ship.

For a few years, The Wedding Present felt like the biggest cult band in Britain, mightier even than The Fall, but relatively unheard outside their fanbase. When they appeared on Top of the Pops, which happened frequently, people would write letters of complaint to the mainstream pop press about the din. No new fans were gained; the existing fans simply hardened their lines of defence about the group’s earthy but unique sound.

In 1985 and 1986, however, they were still releasing records on their own label and merely attracting evening radio airplay, thousands of miles from the bright television studio lights. Their performance in the indie chart tells its own story of a group slowly building up steam, from the tentative number 17 shot of “Go Out And Get ‘Em Boy” to the confident number 3 peak of “You Should Always Keep In Touch With Your Friends”. Each release seemed to sweep them closer towards a breakthrough moment, and “My Favourite Dress” is the one that delivered not just a number one in the indie charts, but a refreshed perception of what the group were capable of. By the time the year was up, they would have five entries in John Peel’s Festive Fifty, four of those in the top ten – votes being split in ways Starmer would doubtless cringe at.

For something that’s still lauded as being their finest moment, “My Favourite Dress” is an oddly understated sulk initially. The two chords it opens with are left to clang by themselves for the introduction before the group reluctantly grumble in behind, and Gedge joins to sing in a part angry, part tearful manner about a romantic betrayal. Despite his reputation as an earthy, jocular Leeds everyman, the lyrics are actually pearls, borderline Smokey Robinson in their attempts at understanding: “Sometimes these words just don't have to be said/ I know how you both feel/ The heart can rule the head/ Jealousy is an essential part of love/ The hurting here below/ And the emptiness above”. There’s something almost Northern Soul about those opening lines, were it not for the very C86 scraping and thudding beneath – the wheels of this song belong to a tram, not an aeroplane; it’s sticking to its own simple, dependable rhythm, not soaring off anywhere soon.

We finally move on from the two chord holding pattern when the chorus arrives, which begins to add choppiness and spikiness to the mix, but is still surprisingly slight, and over in an instant with Gedge sighing “never mind”. Then his reasonableness declines and his grievances become more pronounced in the second verse, during which it sounds as if he’s almost choking when singing about his ex-lover’s new sleeping arrangements. Following a second round of the chorus, things really start to go into overdrive and the ranting begins, and this is what makes “My Favourite Dress” several leagues above the average indiepop ditty about romantic disappointment – it starts off controlled and sane, and slowly peels away its rationality, the fury of betrayal taking an increasingly heavy role.

The final verse isn’t so much a lyric as Gedge delivering a shopping list of disappointments to his ex, bullet pointing the key occurrences in one of the worst days of his life so far – “a long walk home”, “the pouring rain”, “uneaten meals”, then, explosively, “a stranger’s hand on my favourite dress”. The key problem, the painful image. The moment the song finds both its title and its purpose. If you’re not listening closely, it almost sounds absurd.

Relationships are often portrayed in songs and films in a very simplistic way, the memories people cling on to frequently being trite in their obviousness. “I liked the way he held me when we danced”. “I adored the way she kissed”. The reality for me (and seemingly Gedge, and Keir Starmer, and probably you too) is that you don’t actually know what memory you’ll hang on to until they’re over. It might be guessed at, but it’s frequently unknowable. It could be that moment you greeted them home at the arrivals section of an airport and realised you truly loved them, the song they loved that you always hated, or something even more inconsequential than that – a haircut, sunkissed skin from a recent holiday, a perfume smell or an item of clothing. I’ve had my day ruined by women with the same hairstyle as an ex of mine, so I know only too well that seemingly trivial visual prompts have a peculiar and extremely potent magical power.

92. The Smiths - Shoplifters Of The World Unite (Rough Trade)

Four weeks at number one from 14th February 1987

Oh, how we laughed when the assistant in our branch of Woolworths played this song on a busy Saturday afternoon. He was proudly ensconced behind the display copies of the Pepsi & Shirlie singles, spinning this record loudly enough that you could hear it as far back as the garden hose display. I’m sure his supervisor gave him a thorough ticking off, but if Morrissey had ever found out, he probably would have sent him a bouquet.

A man in his mid-twenties walked past me holding hands with his girlfriend tittering loudly for everyone’s benefit, “They might have thought harder before putting this one on!” The rest of the shopping trip was mundane, so it was a relief to be provided with some kind of anecdote to tell others about later – a sense that a hit single’s subversion had been appropriated in the correct way.

I didn’t expect our Saturday mission to buy lightbulbs and birdseed to be spent listening to what was the first new indie number one of 1987, and in all probability the first indie record of the year Woolworths would have stocked. Age of Chance’s dominance of the top slot for ten straight weeks seemed to have as much to do with the lack of action going on elsewhere as its cult popularity.

“Shoplifters Of The World Unite” was “one of those singles” from the off – the “Sorted For Es and Whizz” of its era, a single which was quietly looking for trouble while disguising its ambitions behind a passive-aggressive arrangement. Morrissey ducked the issue in the press a few times, perhaps wary of a radio ban, pointing out that the idea of “shoplifting” could be about creative theft as well as actual pilfering of goods. The song doesn’t make that clear anywhere, though. Instead, it talks about the protagonist's inevitable arrest (“A heartless hand on my shoulder/ A push and it's over/ Alabaster crashes down/ Six months is a long time”) and contains two lines I loved as a teenager, which are almost Martin Gore-ish in their simplicity: “But last night the plans for a future war/ Was all I saw on Channel Four” – though these days I tend to blanche a bit at the clumsiness and oddness of that quick triple rhyming scheme.

The title of the song makes it seem as if it could be another blundering, loud hippopotamus of a single akin to “Panic”, but while The Smiths have a more forceful sound here if compared to their earliest works, in reality it seems to encapsulate the sum total of the ideas in their career so far. Listen closely and you can hear the swampy rumble of “How Soon Is Now?” coming through Marr’s guitar in the verses, the glam descends of “Panic”, and the gentle melodic strum of “What Difference Does It Make”.

If I’ve made it sound like a cut-and-shut hack job by saying that, that’s not my intention – what it seems to be instead is a group realising the scope of their identity and playing all the cards to their advantage. If “Panic” and “Ask” sounded like slight departures from the usual route map, “Shoplifters” feels like a rounded and careful reiteration of the group’s strengths by comparison; one for the proud fans as well as the Woolworths shoppers, a hooky, contentious yet surprisingly delicate 45 which stood out both melodically and lyrically.

There were those, of course, who didn’t care for it, and in typical fashion fed the Morrissey shaped troll rather than rolling their eyes and walking on. Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens was incensed, referring to the track as an open ode to thievery, while Tesco threatened to sue Smash Hits for printing the song’s lyrics over the top of an image of one of their carrier bags. It’s difficult to understand what either party expected to achieve – I doubt the single inspired many people who weren’t already shoplifting to go out and give it a try, and the central message seemed to be about the hypocrisy of the fact that while bored people with light fingers serve prison time, those who engage with state sanctioned murder are lauded.