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”)
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.
There again, the album it was supposed to promote received a mixed critical reception and produced no hit singles, with many journalists pointing out that its “directionless” overload of wah-wah guitar and similarly chaotic, hyperactive interjections was hard to bear for more than half an hour. The fact Virgin allowed either the album or film out of the traps to begin with suggests that money was no object to the label in 1988, but the end results killed whatever momentum the group had while on In Tape, and they became locked in that dreaded eighties trap; a cult group trapped on a major label who were happy to give them creative control, but didn’t know how to market or deal with them, and certainly weren't willing to treat them as a priority.
Arguably they didn’t need a big budget, and for me the barbed mess of “Nosedive Karma” is the group at their best – battling it out with both technology and themselves, having fun and producing a really bloody compelling racket in the process. When Jesus Jones emerged years later with “Info Freako”, some of the younger writers in the Fleet Street press described them as thrilling and new, but it all sounded familiar to me; the hyperactivity of this single scrubbed down and retooled by handsome young men with more straightforward hooks. Everything, it seems, gets “perfected” in the end, if you just hold down fast forward for long enough.
New Entries Elsewhere In The Charts
10. The Bambi Slam - Don't It Make You Feel (Product Inc.)
Peak position: 10
The Bambis are back, this time with a rough and ready single which nonetheless sounds as if it could have been written by a successful glam rock band in 1973. Almost everything about the track is catchy and insistent, like a past pop smash being dragged through a cheap recording studio under a railway arch. Somewhere beneath the melee a violin player wails away, only adding to the sensation that the group had one eye on a very pre-punk past.
“Don’t it make you feel you’ve got nothing to lose?” asks lead singer Roy Slam, almost making you feel as if there’s a plucky bit of ambition going on beneath the skin of this near-pop song. How very unfashionable for those times.
22. Poison - Talk Dirty To Me (Music For Nations)
Peak position: 16
It’s always amusing to see how vulnerable the indie chart was to niche Metal groups, and while the eighties glam sleaze of Poison was backed by Capitol in the States, their UK arm clearly didn’t see its immediate potential in this country. Indie rock label Music For Nations therefore picked up the initial rights and their breakthrough US hit was a marginal national charter over here as a result, managing a number 67 placing.
You know what it sounds like, of course – a sleazy back alley come-on with sequins, leopardskin and lipstick from some lads rather than ladies. It’s a bit subversive in its own strange, glossy and overproduced way, and the Manic Street Preachers probably liked it. It’s not my bag, but there is something odd about a record this ludicrously camp gaining access to rock arenas across conservative America.
28. The MacManus Gang - A Town Called Big Nothing (Demon)
Peak position: 10
29. 3 Wise Men - Refresh Yourself (Rhythm King)
Peak position: 25
British Hip-Hop acts struggled horribly to make the same waves as their American counterparts in the eighties, never really generating the same amount of sales, press or media exposure. The very idea of rappers having regional British accents was actually outright mocked, and Hip-Hop artists in the UK found themselves having to confront the same prejudices that homegrown Rock and Rollers faced in the fifties.
Unlike many of the fifties artists, however, most British Hip-Hop acts were usually smart enough to realise that there was no point in adopting American accents and slang. The only way forward was to forge their own identity and talk about their own lives - and Three Wise Men certainly did that with "Urban Hell", a largely-forgotten 1986 single about the since-demolished North Peckham estate in London.
"Refresh Yourself" is an entirely different single, and perhaps less representative of their sound. Minimal sounding and lyrically simplistic, it's probably one of their most dated sounding pieces of work.
For whatever reason, for the three years they were active the group only had three singles and one LP put out on Rhythm King records, then no more.
Week Two
7. The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu - All You Need is Love (Sound of Mu)
Peak position: 4
Well, here we are, finally at the point where all the trouble started. “All You Need Is Love” was the first single to combine the talents of Bill Drummond – then best known as an ex-record label employee and band manager, despite his solo LP and previous work in Big In Japan - and ex-Brilliant member Jimmy Cauty.
The record is a chant punctuated by the most unsexy, bronchial panting in the world, yells of “Ancients of Mu”, a hasty sellotaped production and uncleared samples of Samantha Fox’s “Touch Me” and (on initial copies) The Beatles “All You Need Is Love”. Over the top, Drummond raps about the AIDS virus in a Glasgow accent under the pseudonym King Boy D. The press began getting excited in March, although the single had to be doctored before actual copies were allowed into the shops in May, by which point keen readers of music rags were desperate to get their hands on a copy.
Creation Records were offered the chance to release it first, but McGee declined, telling Bill Drummond “It’s too mad – you’ll get sued” (there’s a possibility he was also reluctant to get involved in another Baby Amphetamine styled debacle). Thus the pair went it alone, paying for the recording, pressing and distribution themselves, bypassing the established independent sector for a purely DIY approach, and embracing all the trouble ahead as their problem, and theirs alone. Crass would doubtless have approved of the activity while wondering what lay beneath it. The KLF never wrote political essays on their record sleeves, instead shrouding their motivations in mystery.
Like most of the contents of the debut album “1987”, it feels like baby-steps towards the KLF colossus, primarily hand-made and designed with provocation in mind – a timely single which now sounds antiquated given how far both the group and sample culture eventually travelled. “You aren’t going to stop working just because there’s a law against what you do,” Cauty remarked that month about their copyright thieving, continuing to throw down the gauntlet and make the group sound like renegade outlaws.
How odd that copyright and its effect and impact on artists continues to be a live topic, only it’s now one with the enormous IT companies on the “copyright is bad” side of the argument, rather than two men with a modest, self-financed creative project in mind.
10. Renegade Soundwave - Kray Twins (Rhythm King)
Peak position: 10
Renegade Soundwave were signed to Rhythm King to produce their own multi-faceted brand of electronic dance music, but eventually ended up moving to parent label Mute after a series of "artistic" disputes.
"Kray Twins" hints at just how Rhythm King might have found them totally out-of-sorts with the rest of their roster. It's a seriously rambling, aggressive, frantic piece of work, taking in harsh, punchy, in-your-face samples, burbling electronic noises, sneering cockney vocals, and the periodic emergence of thrashed guitars. Despite the fact that the techniques used to create this single must have been absurdly primitive by today's standards, it actually doesn't sound dated in the slightest - elements even sound close to the minimal rantings of Sleaford Mods, admittedly without the political nous.
Then again, nor is "Kray Twins" necessarily representative of the rest of Renegade Soundwave's work. They would produce a lot of varied material throughout their careers, from the threatening chaos of this track to the pop suss of "Probably a Robbery", and the House dancefloor hit "The Phantom". Long before the label "Indie-Dance" was thought of, Renegade Soundwave were probably one of the few true crossover artists of the mid-eighties period.
11. Erasure - Victim Of Love (Mute)
Peak position: 2
Falling back on one of Vince Clarke's subtle-as-a-sledgehammer choruses and an almost unfeasibly vibrant melody, “Victim Of Love” is strangely uplifting given the fact that its lyrics are about giving up on the idea of relationships. "I'm building a wall, every day it's getting higher" sings Bell happily. Please yourself, mate.
Meanwhile, the track jigs and judders along, accompanied by whip cracking rhythms and melodic trills and pulses, ensuring Erasure climbed to number 7 in the national charts, by now established pop treasures as opposed to marginalised indie artistes.
18. The Fizzbombs - Sign On The Line (Narodnik)
Peak position: 6
Second of three singles by Scottish indiepoppers The Fizzbombs, whose happily flimsy quickfire race towards the finish line echos earlier indie chart victors The Shop Assistants. Flowery melodies meet fey trilling vocals and a barbed approach, and it’s all over before your kettle’s boiled or your head has had a chance to forge a solid opinion.
Second of three singles by Scottish indiepoppers The Fizzbombs, whose happily flimsy quickfire race towards the finish line echos earlier indie chart victors The Shop Assistants. Flowery melodies meet fey trilling vocals and a barbed approach, and it’s all over before your kettle’s boiled or your head has had a chance to forge a solid opinion.
24. The House Of Love - Shine On (Creation)
Peak position: 19
Early output from the House Of Love who at this point were something of an uncertain, marginal proposition, not yet universally acclaimed by the music press nor really much loved outside the danker corners of the London gig circuit (Guy Chadwick could be heard to brag that they were “huge on the London squat circuit” at the time).
It does have to be said that it suffers from a problem common to many early Creation releases, that being the unflatteringly harsh production. A song like “Shine On” deserves space for the arrangement to stretch and chime – as the release on Fontana in 1990 eventually did – but here it suffered from a hushed, smothered, reverb heavy production and deeply buried drums. It may sound authentically cheap like an early Sarah Records release, but that approach ultimately destroys the full impact the song is capable of, and undersells the band by some margin. There are those, however, who will disagree and prefer the lo-fi approach on offer here.
28. The Cradle - It's Too High (Rough Trade)
Peak position: 28
29. Various – 6 Track Miners Benefit EP (Wake up)
Peak position: 21
Billy Bragg and other like-minded cohorts gather together to raise money for the striking miners, led by The Redskins covering “Levi Stubbs Tears”. A ragbag of stuff and yet very little nonsense, it’s odd how EPs such as this one, with their hastily designed sleeves covered in polemic, feel like relics of another era – these days, you would simply raise your funds through Bandcamp and have done with it, cutting out the printing and distribution costs. In 1987, however, you simply included EPs like this one with fanzines and really went broad and large, giving the audience more than just a download and a quickly forgotten glow of righteousness.
30. Lime Spiders - Weirdo Libido (Zinger)
Peak position: 30
Week Three
Billy Bragg and other like-minded cohorts gather together to raise money for the striking miners, led by The Redskins covering “Levi Stubbs Tears”. A ragbag of stuff and yet very little nonsense, it’s odd how EPs such as this one, with their hastily designed sleeves covered in polemic, feel like relics of another era – these days, you would simply raise your funds through Bandcamp and have done with it, cutting out the printing and distribution costs. In 1987, however, you simply included EPs like this one with fanzines and really went broad and large, giving the audience more than just a download and a quickly forgotten glow of righteousness.
30. Lime Spiders - Weirdo Libido (Zinger)
Peak position: 30
Week Three
18. Scab Aid - Let It Be (Scab)
Peak position: 12
Chumbawamba reacting to the charity record “Let It Be”, which was released as a response to the Zeebrugge ferry disaster but heavily signposted as a project of the right-wing tabloid newspaper The Sun. Families may well have been compensated as a result, but the newspaper got to look like angels while continuing to run unflattering stories about striking miners or anyone else who fell short of their idea of the norm, such as racial minorities or homosexuals. A quick glimpse at a copy of the paper from this period shows that, tough as it may be to believe, it has mellowed to a small extent in its old age (or at least chosen to disguise its prejudices with more tightly coded language).
At this point, Chumbawamba seemed to be picking up the departed Crass’s mantle. They tended to be less experimental or perverse – it’s hard to imagine them releasing a record of Casiotone Christmas carols, for example – but no less provocative.
Peak position: 12
Chumbawamba reacting to the charity record “Let It Be”, which was released as a response to the Zeebrugge ferry disaster but heavily signposted as a project of the right-wing tabloid newspaper The Sun. Families may well have been compensated as a result, but the newspaper got to look like angels while continuing to run unflattering stories about striking miners or anyone else who fell short of their idea of the norm, such as racial minorities or homosexuals. A quick glimpse at a copy of the paper from this period shows that, tough as it may be to believe, it has mellowed to a small extent in its old age (or at least chosen to disguise its prejudices with more tightly coded language).
At this point, Chumbawamba seemed to be picking up the departed Crass’s mantle. They tended to be less experimental or perverse – it’s hard to imagine them releasing a record of Casiotone Christmas carols, for example – but no less provocative.
24. Leather Nun - I Can Smell Your Thoughts (Wire)
Peak position: 18
Moody, chorus-free grind through the minds of the Swedish group, which received some exposure on The Chart Show in the UK. Its strolling tempo and soaring guitars give it a certain mysterious gothic allure; it is possible to stay rooted to the spot and still seem interesting, it seems.
For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums
Number Ones In The Official Charts
Starship - "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (Grunt)
Whitney Houston - "I Wanna Dance With Somebody Who Loves Me" (Arista)
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