120. Pop Will Eat Itself - Def Con One (Chapter 22)

Two weeks at number one from 30th July 1988

At some undisclosed point in 1988, Clint Mansell woke up from an appalling nightmare where his group were paid a fortune to soundtrack a McDonald’s advert. In exchange for this financial windfall, the group were mocked by the music press to oblivion, abandoned by their fans, forever associated with Ronald the corporate clown and a questionable fast food chain. RIP PWEI.

Shortly after this dream, he read a newspaper article where he learned that in the event of a nuclear attack, McDonald’s would be at the forefront of food supplies to some crisis torn areas; so the maimed and seriously injured would have no choice but to tuck in to a Big Mac Meal for sustenance. This dystopian image clearly tickled the band, and they went ahead and wrote a whopping great nuclear winter McDonald’s song – “Big Mac, fries to go, gimme Big Mac and fries to go” they chanted, despite a paycheque from Maccy D’s not being forthcoming. They could hardly stand accused of having their cake and eating it if no cake had even been offered.

If previous Pop Will Eat Itself tracks have been boorish and trashy, “Def Con One” is probably the first single where their impish and playful side comes up trumps. It also marks the dawn of the PWEI music critics and audiences alike came to respect in the late eighties and early nineties; if previous records rapped and thrashed against rudimentary samples and clodhopping beats, here’s where their technique finally seemed to gel.

“Def Con One”, in common with the likes of Coldcut and S’Express, is an unpredictable sample raid of pop’s past and present, taking in The Stooges, The Osmonds, Junior Walker and the Twilight Zone theme along with Run DMC, The Beastie Boys, Salt n Pepa and (most interestingly of all) the drums from Bomb The Bass’s “Beat Dis”, itself a very recent record largely consisting of sampled material. Was Pop really consuming itself this quickly?

It’s also probably the first record to approach the subject of nuclear armageddon – a common and normally sloppily handled topic in eighties pop – in the way The Ramones might have. If previous examples had approached it with fury and woe, “Def Con One” understands the urgency of the situation but uses it as an excuse for one final hoe-down. Militaristic marching feet are sampled on the record, but they sound almost joyous and dancefloor friendly; “If we’re going to go, let’s all go with all our favourite tunes and one last hurrah” the band seem to be saying, only for the loud explosion at the tail end of the record to put a stop to everything.

In common with most of their early work, it’s not a sophisticated single, and nor is it a subtle one, but it’s the first PWEI record to sound in tune with the times, rather than cause the group to seem like some grebo kids playing catch-up with current trends on cheap equipment. The way the source samples blend is unbelievably seamless and smooth, the juxtaposition of tack next to fashion never once feels deliberately ironic or mocking (even though I’ve no doubt a certain amount of private sniggering took place in the studio). The Osmonds “Crazy Horses” bray neatly next to Hip-Hop rhythms, Iggy slots neatly beside The Beasties, and the whole history of rock and roll, soul, disco and funk is screwed up into one final wastepaper basket ball before the three minute warning is up.

It’s incredibly close to the achievements of the successful House Music DJs and acts of 1988, in fact; while it’s still too garage punk in its sound to set the Shoom dancefloor alight, the principles and spirit of the age are carried through, as is the wit, the fun and the faintly inexplicable adoration of cult vintage television shows. “Def Con One” doesn’t share the easy groove and smoothness of “Doctorin’ The House” – it’s probably closer to “Doctorin’ The Tardis” if anything – but the attitude, the playfulness and the faultless meshing of styles is all there.

118b. Joy Division - Atmosphere (Factory)

Returned to number one for two more weeks from 16th July 1988

Here's what was going on lower down the charts across those two weeks.


Week One


6. Chumbawamba - Smash Clause 28! (Agit Prop)

Peak position: 4

Clause 28 was such a contentious Government Bill in 1988 that besides the national press, just about every music magazine – including Smash Hits – covered it. It stated that Local Authorities should “not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".

Boy George released the single “No Clause 28” in protest, which didn’t pick up much airplay and failed to reach the Top 40 (although somewhat strangely, Radio One did hold a phone-in debate about whether it should be playlisted, a move which smacked of BBC boardroom compromises). Chumbawamba also stuck their oar in with this effort, which was never really angling for airplay to begin with. It ricochets between punk thrash and more subdued, murmured elements where the most biting lyrics can be found: “You keep throwing stones though your house is made of glass/ you've helped to make Mccarthyism popular, at last” they state.

Clause 28 should feel like a quaint eighties relic from less enlightened times, but thanks to the continuing political popularity of Reform UK and a hard right wing media, it feels as if needn’t necessarily be. Bad Thatcher tribute acts, like anarcho-punk, will seemingly always be with us.

7. The Sea Urchins - Solace (Sarah)

Peak position: 5

It's somewhat peculiar how all the releases on Sarah Records get lumped in with the "twee" tag when in reality, the output of the label was quite diverse. "Solace" by The Sea Urchins is proof of that – rather than being flowery or flimsy, it’s really under-produced and slightly underheated garage psychedelia. The vocals wail and harmonise like The Gibb Brothers on "Have You Heard The Word", overloaded guitar solos buzz around the room like aggravated wasps, and the whole thing sounds like a sixties demo or outtake.

I can't be alone in thinking that the budget production and distorted elements get in the way of the song breaking through in places; I've always had the impression that if "Solace" had actually been given a more sympathetic studio treatment, it could be close to early Primal Scream. But it's also the needles-into-the-red garden shed sound to this single that sets it apart. Very few other bands aping this sound at the time were quite so rough and ready, or so aggressively dreamy.

12. Another Sunny Day - I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist (Sarah)

Peak position: 12

And indeed, whenever a music journalist seeks to skewer the output of Sarah Records with their case for the prosecution, "I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist" is sometimes first on the list. And why in hell not, I suppose? This, really, is a mere minute-and-a-half of sparsely recorded guitar plucking and musing on unrequited love, the musical template for weak, fragile young souls with tea-stained Sartre books hiding in their satchels that they're never actually going to read. AmIrite?

Not really. While I can't get geared up for this single in the manner that a lot of Sarah aficionados can, its economy of style and folksy melody are significant plus points. There's an awful lot going on within not much time, in a manner that the best sixties folk rockers managed but very few cult indie figures did.

Lyrically, of course, it's as simplistic as anything ever produced by a hair metal band, if not more so - it has delicate sensitivity in buckets, but Harvey Williams (the main driving force behind ASD) despairs "I could speak to you, you could speak to me/ Oh but it will never happen, what will be will be", which feels like peak adolescent romantic idealism. He's in love with a girl who doesn't know he exists, purely because her dialogue with him has been non-existent. All she's aware of is that occasional intense gaze across the playground, which is getting more and more intense and uncomfortable by the day... pack it in, Harvey. She probably fancies a boy in the year above anyway.

As is often the way with indiepop, though, swap the gender roles around in the song to the more traditional "I'm In Love With A Boy Who Doesn't Know I Exist", and the creepiness and hopelessness somehow fades away. Which is maybe at least half the point.

13. The Springfields - Sunflower (Sarah)​

Peak position: 13

Not Dusty Springfield’s original combo reunited on Sarah Records, of course, but a Chicago group of the same name who found themselves washed up on that Bristol label.

The single’s debt to The Byrds is so obvious that it’s barely worth mentioning, but I’ll take great sounding Byrds copyists over clumsy original thinkers any day of the week, and “Sunflower” is sumptuous, sure-footed, pretty, deceptively complicated and, of course, jangly. A lot of British indie groups would love to have written it, but wouldn’t have been capable.

25. Drug Free America - Day-Glo Pussycat (Blind Eye)

Peak position: 16

Cult group who occasionally defied categorisation, seeming to indulge themselves in heavy rock, synth-pop or industrial depending on their mood that day, or even that verse or chorus.

“Day-Glo Pussycat” is an example of how agitated and twitchy they could be. Somewhere buried in this mix is a perfectly commercial track, but its suffocated beneath the shouting and chaos.

27. The Golden Dawn - My Secret World (Sarah)

Peak position: 21


Week Two


17. Mirage - Push The Beat (Debut)

Peak position: 17


24. Goldtop - Introduction (Gee Street)

Peak position: 24

Seemingly the only single release by Paul O’Kane aka Gold Top, a British hip-hop artist. “Introduction” is a rough and ready track which suggested that he potentially had more petrol in the tank than either Gee Street or others were prepared to use.

As unlikely as it sounds, these days he’s a singer-songwriter who has since released other work on Soundcloud; I had to double-check my research as it sounds utterly nothing like “Introduction”, but sometimes first impressions can obviously be misleading.





26. Robert Lloyd and the New Four Seasons - Something Nice (In Tape)

Peak position: 6

Robert Lloyd, ex-head of Vindaloo Records and lead singer of Brummie indie group The Nightingales (victims of endless lazy and slightly inaccurate "They're Birmingham's answer to The Fall!!!" music press reviews) was reasonably well known by 1988. The Nightingales were behind numerous cult indie classics, but once they split in 1986 he clearly decided that his solo career would veer in a poppier direction. The false group name Robert Lloyd & The New Four Seasons was initially created for this very purpose, and very quietly and quickly dropped to become plain old "Robert Lloyd"; I presume this happened when someone got antsy that the actual Four Seasons would take legal action. Somewhere on a cutting room floor, perhaps this was even a subplot in the "Jersey Boys" film - "I cannot believe da noive of this Nightingales guy".

"Something Nice" proved Lloyd could clearly have a pop career if he wanted and had enough of a tail wind behind him. It's a stomping, bold, brassy and incredibly catchy track lyrically focused on some kind of mid-life crisis. "I get scared that something nice will fly by", Lloyd panics. "Every time I'm ill I think I'm dying" he clarifies later on, "every time I'm sad I feel like crying/ this is the state I've got myself in". For all that, this propels along in a strident, chirpy, almost festive fashion, sounding like a hit Edwyn Collins never had. The twelve inch version is better still, revealing a restless itinerary of midlife woes which have become uncomfortably relatable.

This received a strong amount of evening airplay on Radio One, and caused A&R staff at Virgin Records to eventually get in touch. He was signed to the label and released the "Me and My Mouth" LP and the rather ace single "Funeral Stomp" which utterly and undeservedly stiffed. Virgin dropped him, and there would then be nothing much from Lloyd until The Nightingales reformed in 2006.

For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forum

Number One In The National Charts

Glenn Medeiros: "Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You" (London)

119. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Mercy Seat (Mute)

One week at number one on 9th July 1988

On one of the first warm days of Spring in 2014, I left my flat in Streatham to witness a commotion. A vortex of crows was cawing angrily overhead, and the subject of the fury seemed to be one of their own kind – he (or she) was sprawled on the road like a sack flapping in the breeze while two others gouged and grabbed at his neck. As I approached, the attackers flitted nervously away, and their victim flopped upside down, legs in the air, blood dripping from its wings, apparently dead.

As I got closer, and the noise of the other crows disappeared into the distance, he suddenly came back to life – clearly it was all a bluff. He discreetly limped and hopped away to God knows where. His wounds looked significant, and I have no idea whether he lived or died.

Corvids are rough birds, but they will very rarely turn on members of their own flocks without reason, and certainly not usually so viciously. If an attack of the nature I witnessed occurs, sanctioned by the flock as a whole, it normally means that a non-member has encroached on their territory and attempted something serious, or one of their own has been responsible for a major transgression and must be dispensed with for the good of the whole. For crow society to function effectively, the dangerous and the unruly must be destroyed. I realise that this sounds cliched, and as if I’m writing the opening paragraphs of some pulp Horror novel, but my excuse is that it was real and genuinely weird and unsettling to witness.

Human beings are more sophisticated than crows, but some societies around the world still function according to the same logic. Death row in America is one such place where people end up if society has decided that their behaviour is a dangerous and unsolvable problem. Rather than being dealt with immediately, though, the majority wait for years; making appeals, hoping against probable hope that their sentence will be downgraded. Humans are less swift or reactive than crows. Our heightened sense of fairness can accidentally result in a kind of cruelty which might be worse.

“The Mercy Seat” touches on the wait on the way to the executioner’s chair (“In a way I’m yearning to be done with all this weighing up of proof”) but is clearly about the end of the road – the nervous, racing panic ahead of the final moment. Its slow to start, with the narrator slowly growling a bit of unpromising background information, before the song really begins to get interesting as Cave mutters: “A ragged cup, a twisted mop/ The face of Jesus in my soup/ Those sinister dinner deals/ The meal trolley's wicked wheels/ A hooked bone rising from my food/ All things either good or un-good”.

Sometimes, the best rock and pop music uses its brief run-time, its narrow canvas, to communicate a sense of tension around one specific moment. In more traditional songs, its often romantic – can we kiss, should we kiss, now we’ve done it, what does it mean? – in alternative rock, however, we can be taken beyond those everyday human emotions and placed in extraordinary situations we are unlikely to personally experience. Cave here communicates the intensity, the warped realness of the everyday while someone waits to be killed; everything carries significance, and morphs almost cartoonishly into a threat, a hint or a judgement.

Or - even a joke. As the protagonist goes towards the electric chair, he compares his fate with that of Jesus, but can’t resist jumping on the irony of the fact that God came back to Earth as a carpenter, and was finally killed on a wooden cross. Everything, it seems, has a twisted pattern, not just the bones in his food.

“The Mercy Seat” pokes at bitter ironies and contradictions obsessively, in particular the idea that the Bible is filled with both New Testament forgiveness and Old Testament rage, and picks up speed like a rattling train. It’s one of the only songs I can think of which uses the ancient pop device of repeating the chorus to fade to artistic (rather than commercial) effect – whereas other tracks are marking time and hammering their hookiest ideas for radio play, it has a clear purpose here; to communicate the prisoner’s racing brain and panicked response to his situation. The more he sings “I’m not afraid to die”, the less you believe him; the Bad Seeds are contradicting the idea, piling more thunder behind the words.

Eventually he even contradicts himself. On the twelfth repeat of the chorus, the line “Anyway I told the truth/ and I’m not afraid to die” changes to “I’m not afraid to lie”. On the final repeat he sings “I’m afraid I told a lie”. Is the prisoner finally facing up to his own denial and giving up the pretence, or facing up to God? And is it an irony in itself that it takes staring in the face of death to admit that you were lying all along?

118. Joy Division - Atmosphere (Factory)

One week at number one on 2nd July 1988

It’s another strange backwards step for the blog. “Atmosphere” was originally released in the UK in 1980 and topped the MRIB Indie Charts in October of that year. That occurred, however, around six months before the NME introduced their nationally compiled indie listings*, so for our purposes, it’s the 118th new number one.

Its re-release was greeted with a certain amount of criticism, being regarded in some quarters as exploitative, using Ian Curtis’s death and some deeply morbid visual imagery as a way of increasing sales of Joy Division’s “Substance” compilation. New Order were interviewed on Snub TV on BBC2, where the subject was somewhat testily broached.

In the interview, you can see Bernard Sumner bristling slightly, while Peter Hook responds calmly, stating that “we felt that the Joy Division ‘Substance’ was more valid than the New Order ‘Substance’, which Rob and Tony thought was more valid than the Joy Division ‘Substance’, so we decided to do both... [and] we took a single off [both]. It was quite straightforward – one wasn’t exploited more than the other...”

Bernard Sumner, meanwhile, thought that “the [Anton Corbijn directed] video was a reflection of the press’s view of Joy Division…. This man has become a legend through his music.”

The video for the reissue remains a deeply strange offering. Corbijn takes the black and white Super 8 approach of his recent promos for Depeche Mode, but instead shoots still, slow footage of shuffling mourners in both black and white shrouds (with pluses and minuses on them) who are seen moving in unison, holding up giant posters of Ian Curtis, and even occasionally losing their footing; viewed one way, it’s a fascinating piece of art. Viewed another, it’s mawkish, almost mocking – treating Ian Curtis as the leader of some remote religious cult (and this is before we even get on to the similarity of the shrouds to KKK costumes). It sometimes feels as if it was developed to force the viewer to question their relationship with Joy Division’s music, and if that’s the case, it’s one of the most non-promotional “promo” videos ever – but how typical of Factory Records.

The record itself, of course, is one of the group’s finest, whatever window dressing or context its given; a slowly unfolding and strangely wide open, airy track which often feels as if its gliding above Curtis’s solemn vocals, contradicting them and encouraging grace under pressure. “People like you find it easy” Curtis almost snaps at one point, while the long, luxurious notes hold beneath him, almost in total contradiction. The drums patter and thunder ominously, but the rest of the group are off, soaring high above the lot with a drawn-out conclusion which feels like being given a hug by a higher force. Curtis is invisible for the final minute of the song while the band play on.

It’s easy to come up with predictable narratives and conclusions here, and trust me, I’m trying to resist this. The problem listeners my age and younger are always going to face when talking about Joy Division is that we can’t remember a time when Ian Curtis was actually alive. The first I knew of the group was when I caught “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on the evening airwaves as a boy, then heard the DJ announce he was dead; my enjoyment of the song (which I taped) was somewhat undermined by the immediate bad news. I’d had three minutes of appreciating them as a new and fascinating force, before they were quickly snatched and filed away as a piece of history, a victim of events (of course I didn’t literally think this as a six year old boy. I was probably just baffled by the whole thing – though it would happen on a much grander and more confusing scale with John Lennon at the end of the year).

Unlike “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, “Atmosphere” was released prior to Ian Curtis’s suicide, meaning that there are thousands of listeners out there who heard it shorn of that context, who probably knew very little about Curtis’s health and marital struggles. They will have heard this song in an entirely different way to me, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t untangle the record from the tragedy that closely followed it; every time I try to decouple things, my brain immediately cuts a corner and jumps back to the dominant mythology again. It’s a huge trench that’s cut across an older pathway, too deeply engrained to bypass.

117. The Timelords - Doctorin' The Tardis

One week at number one on 25th June 1988

One undisclosed afternoon (or was it evening?) Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty – aka the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The KLF, Disco 2000 and now The Timelords – were fiddling around in their recording studio (or was it The Village recording studios in Dagenham?) trying to come up with a House beat which combined neatly with the “Doctor Who” theme tune.

Their reasons for doing so made absolute sense at the time. The Doctor Who theme is one of the most enduring and haunting musical products of British television; a track whose peculiar oscillations, screeching electronic pronouncements and menacing hissing sounds are understood by multiple generations. It had been released several times as a single, initially by Decca then the BBC themselves, but it only charted once in 1978 – on Pinnacle Records no less! - when that distributor and label found a mob called Mankind performing it to a disco beat, saw an opportunity and took the track on. It subsequently reached number 25 in the national charts, a huge accomplishment for an indie product at the time.

Mankind’s version has become somewhat forgotten in the years since. Far from being an uptempo disco monster, it’s one of those reserved, twiddly affairs with fussy basslines and clinical guitar-work, the kind you suspect was created by people who would rather have been in a prog rock group. More unforgivably still, the theme tune itself is reduced to a weak signal, a dying star, a fragile echo of the howling original – all its threat has been defused to turn it into a comfortable, undemanding and shuffling club number.

Whether it was fresh in either Drummond or Cauty’s minds when creating “Doctorin’ The Tardis” is hard to say – though I suspect Drummond at least would have been aware of the track – but just as Mankind manipulated vougeish disco beats, the KLF were clearly trying to jump on board the current trend for huge House hits using retro-samples. House rhythms just weren’t working for them, though; the odd thing was that no matter how hard they tried to move away from it, the only thing that seemed to gel was a huge, unsubtle glam rock beat. In the end, they gave in. The stomp and thwack worked its way beneath the theme tune, and the track built its way up from there. Current trends be damned. The single made its way to number one in the national charts anyway. 

An entire book (“The Manual – How To Have A Number One The Easy Way”) was subsequently published about the pair’s experiences, in which both tried to claim that every single step in the single’s creation was careful, deliberate and almost scientific in its approach to becoming a chart-topper. It’s a fantastic read, but accepting the contradictions – even with Drummond’s coaxing – can be difficult, and it’s better treated as a shaggy dog story combined with some telling insight about the music business in 1988. The biggest contradiction of all is that the duo were masters of their destiny, a lie made bare by the presence of its glam rock rhythm; a relic of the unfashionable close past in 1988, a steal nobody would have used out of choice.

Still, what was built from there, with the scratching and additional samples of The Sweet’s “Blockbuster”, Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll” and the chant of daleks screeching “Bosh bosh bosh Loadsamoney” and “You what, you what, you what”, was an absurd record which was both of its time and out of time; current, in that it adhered to the principles of samplemania we’ve already seen with Bomb The Bass, Coldcut (whose song title “Doctorin’ The House” is partially borrowed here) and S’Express. Retro, to an incredible agree, by dint of its dated rhythms and also to an extent its core obsession. “Doctor Who” may have still be going in 1988, but it was dimly floating towards its temporary demise. The “Doctor Who” of yore was the meat many of its older viewers wished was still on the menu*.

What Drummond and Cauty ultimately created, then, was something for everyone – the thirty-something boozers in the pub nostalgic for the seventies, the sci-fi nerds, the children who still watched Doctor Who, and the teenagers aware of a current musical revolution. It’s a volatile brew and one which might have stank the room out if the formula drifted even slightly awry, but what’s most surprising is that “Doctorin’ The Tardis”, for all its cynicism, silliness and brashness, slaps so peculiarly that I’ve never been able to successfully diagnose why I actually love it.

A big part of it is surely childhood memories – of Doctor Who, of glam rock on Top of the Pops, of being able to enjoy daftness for its own sake – but that’s not the whole story. It’s something about the bizarre alchemy at play; the hooks, of both a musical and televisual nature, piled on top of one another, yet carefully and craftily. There’s sense and symmetry behind the madness here. While Bomb The Bass and Coldcut bombard their records with all kinds of samples, Bill and Jimmy stick to two eras here, never using anything that could be seen as random or out of place. The catchphrases are current, none-more-1988, while the tunes are pure early seventies pop. The past meets the present and realises that beery boorishness is an active part of both worlds – that people wanted to stomp their feet and repeat call-and-response slogans in the late eighties just as much as they did fifteen years before. A drunk in the pub in 1988 wouldn’t dream of embracing a Gary Glitter record, of course (and not for the reasons we now wouldn’t dream of doing so; too unhip). When married to the Doctor Who theme and some silly comedy catchphrases though? Why not! The guard is down, and the boots are on the dancefloor. If we're being deliberately preposterous, let's have a party. 

As Drummond and Cauty state in “The Manual”, the construction of “Doctorin’ The Tardis” may be unorthodox by the standards of previous years, with barely a live instrument in sight, but it does at least stick to The Rules – a clear chorus, verses (of a kind) a neat fade-out, a quick under-three minute performance, a neat order that is undoubtedly more Pop than House.

BREAK

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
• If you're feeling less ambitious, listen to all the NME Indie Number Ones from 1981-85
• Read one of the recommended blogs on the right hand side

By the time you've finished, I'll probably be back. 

116. Fields Of The Nephilim - Moonchild (Situation Two)

Two weeks at number one from 11th June 1988

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.

33d. New Order - Blue Monday (88) (Factory)

Three more weeks at number one from 21st May 1988

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.

115. S'Express - Theme From S'Express (Rhythm King)

One week at number one on 14th May 1988

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.

114. The Sugarcubes - Deus (One Little Indian)

Three weeks at number one from 23rd April 1988

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.

112b. Wedding Present - Nobody's Twisting Your Arm (Reception)

 

One more week at number one on 16th April 1988

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.

22. The Fizzbombs – The Surfin' Winter EP (Calculus)

Peak position: 16

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.

28. Close Lobsters - the Janice Long Session (Night Trax)

Peak position: 28

For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number One In The National Charts

Pet Shop Boys: "Heart" (Parlophone)

113. Erasure - Ship Of Fools (Mute)

One week at number one on 9th April 1988

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.

112. Wedding Present - Nobody's Twisting Your Arm (Reception)

 

Three weeks at number one from 19th March 1988

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.

111. Bomb The Bass - Beat Dis (Rhythm King)

Three weeks at number one from 27th February 1988

“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.

110. Sugarcubes - Coldsweat (One Little Indian)

Three weeks at number one from 6th February 1988

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. 

109. Beatmasters featuring The Cookie Crew - Rok Da House (Rhythm King)

 

One week at number one on 30th January 1988

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? 

105c. The Sugarcubes - Birthday (One Little Indian)

One more week at number one on 23rd January 1988

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. 

For the complete charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number One In The Official Charts

Belinda Carlisle - Heaven Is A Place On Earth (Virgin)

108. New Order - Touched By The Hand Of God (Factory)

Three weeks at number one from 2nd January 1988

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.