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

Five weeks at number one from 27th June 1987

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two weeks at number one from 13th June 1987

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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