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).

Sadly, these weird diversions seemed to consume the group until they were no longer quite sure who they were from one single to the next, until a slow puncture became apparent. The next single “Soft As Your Face” completely dialled down the mayhem to deliver a soft, mid-sixties inspired beat lullaby – not so much Dragons as Turtles – and follow-ups “Majestic Head” and “Kingdom Chairs” were also vaguely psychedelic in their nature but sounded less cohesive and more confused, as if they were no longer sure of who they wanted to be, and were visiting a land with choruses they hadn’t quite fully grasped yet. More problematically, groups such as The Stone Roses were emerging out of the woods who felt like natural citizens of this strange country; The Soup Dragons, by comparison, were spotty punker tourists with harpsichords and flowers they whacked people around the head with, rather than offered gracefully.

By the time their debut album “This Is Your Art” emerged on Sire in 1988 (and not 1987 as originally promised) critics were deeply unimpressed and irritated by the tapestry of styles on offer. The Rolling Stone criticised its “astonishingly pointless stylistic range” while The Washington Post referred to “overreaching eclecticism”. Meanwhile, closer to home, one of my schoolfriends stopped me from buying it in HMV. “DO NOT make the mistake I made,” he snapped at me, clearly still aggravated by the paper round money he’d blown on it. “It’s not what you think it is. They’ve changed!”

To some, the album seemed like a crisis of confidence, of a band who wanted to move past the brash punk of their early years and be seen as classic rock aesthetes with depth and songwriting talent. Instead, it seemed to capture a group caught in transition, recorded for posterity before they’d worked out who they truly wanted to be. The fact that there isn’t a proper studio LP chronicling their wild, adrenalised low budget years is actually a tragedy; something tells me it would have been masterful.

“Can’t Take No More”, “Hang Ten” and “Head Gone Astray” never materialised on any studio LP as a result, though a snappy US compilation did at least hoover two of those tracks up at the time. The only document British people therefore had of the group hammering out endless furious, rough yet incredibly potent tracks of this nature existed on imports and the singles themselves. The recently released compilation “Raw TV Products” sets us straight, but for decades, some of their best work was buried, lost in the racks of second hand stores and flicked past dismissively by people who knew no better.

There’s an alternative timeline, then, where this is absolutely rightfully the 100th NME indie number one – a marker of a group who foresaw the American alt-rock carnage to come, stuck to their guns and rode to eventual victory on that horse. That this situation didn’t come to pass in our lifetimes is a strange quirk of alternative music history; it tells the story of a group who either weren’t directed carefully by Seymour Stein or their management, or just couldn’t be told to stay patiently on the required path. Still, they got there in the end and stuck around for a brief while, albeit with material which sounded absolutely nothing like this.

New Entries Elsewhere In The Charts

7. Talulah Gosh – Talulah Gosh (53rd and 3rd)

Peak position: 3


Talulah Gosh in "selling out" shocker! The eponymous second single had a video, a reasonable production, a decent pop arrangement, and a needle-sharp chorus, and some of their fans felt their hearts sinking as a result. The feyness was still apparent, and the band had lost none of their identity at all - man alive, with words like "Talulah Gosh was a film star for a day/ Talulah Gosh was a top celebrity", they were clearly still in their own very pre-adolescent, bedroom dreamer lyrical mindset - but the whopping church organ climax to the tune almost seems sarcastic in the way it abandons their previous understatement so dramatically.

Increased airplay, press and even television time followed, but it wasn't really to last. Whatever their actual intentions, Talulah Gosh were ultimately a short-lived prospect.

9. Baby Lemonade - Secret Goldfish (Narodnik)

Peak position: 9


The only single from this Scottish indiepop group. Their appearance in these charts may have been fleeting, but in common with many of their herd, they left an impression which reverberates into the 21st Century for lovers of this kind of thing.

And for the uninitiated (surely nobody reading this blog?) that means a fuzzy non-production, female vocals buried in the mix, and sweet melodies. Baby Lemonade owed a clear debt to the Shop Assistants and proved there was still demand for the rawest, most primitive (with a small ‘p’) kind of indie-pop. Their appearance in the charts close to Talulah Gosh is an interesting coincidence.

11. A House - Snowball Down​ (Rip)

Peak position: 11


Their final indie single (for now) before rushing to the safety and budget of WEA, “Snowball Down” is surprisingly powerful, almost having a strange kind of dancefloor potential. The sheer relentlessness of it is unusual, meaning that from verse to chorus and back again, the group puff along like a steam train powering downhill. I never did hear this one played loud in an indie club, but when it did, I absolutely guarantee you somebody got accidentally slapped in the face by someone else flaying their arms about at least once.

16. Michelle Shocked – Disorientated (EP) (Cooking Vinyl)

Peak position: 7


For the first time so far on this blog, I've come unstuck – no tracks from this EP are anywhere to be found on YouTube or Spotify. So we’re discussing this one without any accompanying audio evidence, like the good old weekly music press days.

Michelle Shocked’s debut album "The Texas Campfire Tapes" seemed to be a very unlikely underground hit in 1987, although it actually adhered to a commercial pattern hopefully familiar to most of us by now. Recorded on a Sony Walkman while Michelle Shocked performed an impromptu set around a campfire at the Kerrville Folk Festival, it's not as ragged sounding as you'd expect, but is nonetheless raw. There are background noises in the mix on numerous tracks (including occasional vehicle sounds) but it did nonetheless do a great deal to document the intimacy of the performance and Shocked's strong delivery.

For every phase in popular music history where the dominant commercial noise is almost ridiculously slickly produced and heavily airbrushed pop and rock music, it seems that a handful of "authentic" acoustic artists gain major exposure as a conscious counterstrike, usually from members of the public and critics keen to show their support for "real music". Whether it was intended to or not, "The Texas Campfire Tapes" seemed to mostly gain appreciation for the novelty of its "realness", and the fact that Michelle Shocked was very radically political in her day-to-day life also gave her an added edge, making her a valuable interviewee.

She was certainly a huge cult star for years afterwards in the USA and the UK, but a series of record company disputes ensured that after 1992, she was out on her own, producing her own material to continued, if slightly more subdued, success. She eventually became a born-again Christian and was accused of making homophobic comments live onstage ("Once Prop 8 gets instated and preachers are held at gunpoint and forced to marry homosexuals, I'm pretty sure that will be the signal for Jesus to come on back"). This in turn led to a rambling defensive debate on Piers Morgan's show, of all places. From a Sony Walkman recording for an indie label to talking about your faith and prayer meetings on the Piers Morgan show... never let it be said that life doesn't take some damn unpredictable paths.

As for the lead track "If Love Was A Train"... it's deftly performed, brittle and rustic, but truly nothing outstanding, and I'd actually rather listen to Erasure. Clearly "the devil" has all the best tunes, eh?


18. Big Black - Headache EP (Blast First)

Peak position: 2


25. Blow-Up - Good For Me (Creation)

Peak position: 25


Apparently shortly after Alan McGee signed The House of Love to Creation, he was drinking with them and said “I’ve just signed one of the best bands in the UK,” to which the group obviously beamed. “They’re called Blow-Up”, he added, causing faces to immediately fall again.

Blow-Up were big news for five minutes both in Creation’s offices and (to a lesser extent) the music press, with the label assuming they would be their next big success story. It wasn’t to be. The group had two singles out on Creation, this underperforming one and the follow-up “Pool Valley”, then decamped to Cherry Red, hitless and perhaps faintly surprised.

I was persuaded into buying a copy of this myself, and it’s confident, sultry paisley pop, far better than any of the similar bands Creation had on its roster in its earliest days – but problematically, times had moved on and competition was now considerably fiercer. Not only are Blow-Up not as good as The House of Love here (something McGee would swiftly come to his senses about) they’re also not as good as the hordes of similarly sixties influenced Manchester based acts who were currently just on the starting line.

“Good For Me” is a fine little single, but it would quickly become yesterday’s news.

30. Scala Featuring Bill Nelson & Daryl Runswick – Secret Ceremony (Theme From Brond)(Cocteau)

Peak position: 30


Week Two


13. The Foetus All-Nude Revue - Bedrock (Some Bizarre)

Peak position: 2


Probably the most absurdly entertaining of all the Foetus singles, “Bedrock” takes Rat Pack rhythms and basslines and growls obscenities over the top, Thirlwell taking his turn as a drunken, slurring, half-singing criminal nobody dare remove from the stage with a hook.

It’s a surprising track to have made such a huge impact in the indie charts, but Foetus were one of the dominant industrial groups of the era, and found it easy to gather momentum.

14. Schoolly D - Dedication To All B-Boys (Flame)

Peak position: 14


15. Fields Of The Nephilim – Burning The Fields EP (Situation Two)

Peak position: 2


This EP was originally issued in 1985 on Tower, but failed to sell – it was subsequently reissued by Situation Two in 1987 due to increased interest in the group, and was sucked up in large quantities.

The intricate, almost proggy nature of some of this EP sounds shocking given where they ended up, but perhaps there was a fine line between their dusty theatricality and some of the mystical excesses of that genre after all. The title track “Trees Come Down” takes about four minutes to stop being frilly and elaborate and begin to get going, by which time we’re getting The Nephilim as we know them. It remains a popular live track to this day, but for a few minutes it seems to be coming from another angle in another world entirely.

21. Folk Devils - The Best Protection (Situation Two)

Peak position: 21


More frantic, paranoid and agitated output from The Devils which hides its head under the covers and barks and screams “isolation is the best protection”. The sound of one man’s panic attack beneath sweat-stained sheets, but surprisingly more enjoyable than that.





26. The Razorcuts - I Heard You The First Time (Flying Nun UK)

Peak position: 14


Week Three


24. James Ray And The Performance - Texas (Red Rhino)

Peak position: 8


Second release from James Ray who previously handled lead vocals for Andrew Eldritch’s Sisterhood project. “Texas” has such a pulsating drive at its heart that it almost sounds like a hit single; only the low budget production and typical gothic dedication to minimalism and repetition prevent it from truly fulfilling its potential.





25. The Dave Howard Singers - Yon Yonson (Hallelujah)

Peak position: 10


Aka the one The Chart Show played three times and everyone has since struggled to erase from their memories – once heard, never forgotten. “Yon Yonson” is a recursive MidWestern American folk song which is referred to in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse Five”. It consists only of one verse which repeats to infinity (or for as long as the performer feels willing to sing it) and has found its way into popular culture on numerous occasions.

In this case, Canadian Dave Howard – at this point the only actual member of the so-called Dave Howard Singers – rapped the verse over the top of some beatbox rhythms and the effects pedal treated screech of his ancient Acetone keyboard, a minimal but oddly effective idea which even saw him getting a gig at the Canadian Embassy in London. 

It sounds like it should be an entirely unpalatable mess, but in actual fact there’s something about “Yon Yonson” in this form which is appealing, the track slowly building momentum and getting twitchier and groovier as it progresses. The dependence on repetition could test the easily irritated, but I still quite like digging this one out for a listen once every few years – though that’s plenty enough, thank you.

In 1987, this single was probably the closest thing we got to a "WTF" viral moment. It may not have sold in sufficient quantities to break the Top 100, much less the Top 40, but its repetitive nature meant that the very few bits of television and radio play it got went a very long way. My parents were painfully familiar with it as a result, and kids chanted it in my school playground; it was, for the start of that summer, close to 2026's favoured Canucks Angine de Poitrine in terms of an unlikely and strange idea reaching a wider audience. As for whether Angine de Poitrine's pedal-enhanced template will do better in the long term than Dave Howard's, let's wait and see. 

26. Alien Sex Fiend - The Impossible Mission (Plagiarism)

Peak position: 12


28. The Bachelor Pad - The Albums of Jack (Warholasound)

Peak position: 22


Truly fascinating neo-psychedelia from Scottish heads The Bachelor Pad, who sound unbelievably like the raw, real deal here; if you picked up a crusty old demo acetate from the Music and Video Exchange and it sounded like this, you would genuinely believe it was the work of an unsigned 1967 group, probably recorded at Oak Studios in Morden.

In my old days of writing the “Left and to the Back” blog and rooting around in sixties debris, I was lucky to find something as strong as this more than once every five or six months; the band, unlike many of the pretenders around them, absolutely get it.

Week Four


11. The Meteors - Go Buddy Go (Cherry Red)

Peak position: 11

The psychobilly train continued to call at all stations where the kids still had quiffs, danced sweatily at the same speed and listened to the same songs. If the passenger numbers seemed down, it didn’t put the hardcore off.

The Meteors here deliver a track which was released by The Stranglers the decade before, and while it’s a damn good version, you can probably guess what it sounds like before you even press “Play”. Whether you need it in your life or not depends entirely on when you’re ready to wave your hands in defeat, rub your stomach and say “Plenty enough pyschobilly for me, thanks”.

13. Loop - Spinning (Head)

Peak position: 13


20. Beastie Boys - Cookie Puss (Rat Cage)

Peak position: 6

As The Beastie Boys popularity grew, their earliest indie recordings were re-released in the UK to casual interest. “Cookie Puss” was their first hip-hop release from 1983, and may be rough around the edges, but proved that their invention and humour was present from the off – in fact, this track is quirkier and considerably less predictable than their earliest Def Jam output, which brought their brattishness to the fore and junked the hyperactive sense of adventure. That would return in time, however.

In the meantime, “Cookie Puss” proved the Beasties were way, way ahead of any British grebo outfits, to the point of rendering any comparisons faintly laughable.

21. Man 2 Man - I Need A Man (Bolts)

Peak position: 7


23. The Beatmasters ft Cookie Crew - Rok Da House (Rhythm King)

Peak position: 8


The first release for a track which was somewhat slept on during the summer of 1987, but eventually picked up steam in the winter of 1988 and became unstoppable. Let’s save it for another day.


24. Skin - Girl: Come Out (Product Inc.)

Peak position: 20


25. The Beloved – Forever Dancing (Flim Flam)

Peak position: 19


Arguably, The Beloved were unbelievably ahead of the curve here. By accident or design, many of the elements of "Forever Dancing" sound like the beginnings of Indie Dance, and when this was later compiled on to the first "Best of Indie Top 20" compilation LP sandwiched between The Soup Dragons "Mother Universe" and a New Order club remix, it sounded at home despite having been recorded years before either of them. Everything about the sound of "Forever Dancing" screams major-label-indie-dance-signings-of-1988... which, quite naturally, The Beloved quickly became, signing to WEA immediately after this single.

In reality, Jon Marsh probably wasn't a seer so much as a person who drank from the same electronic dance pool as New Order. "Forever Dancing", for all its foresightedness (accidental or otherwise) really isn't The Beloved at their finest, either - some of their later singles were rich with atmosphere or had tons of pop smarts, whereas this is a moody groove which sulks and struts along without really making any firm impression. Their sound is identifiably in place, though, and it would hold them in very good stead in a couple of years time... just not in 1987. 

Week Five


14. Sally Timms & Marc Almond - This house is a house of trouble (T.I.M.)

Peak position: 14


A possibly unlikely pairing between Mekons member Sally Timms and Face of 1981 Marc Almond. Lest we forget, he also duetted with Gene Pitney later in 1989, and most of us would probably kill to have both things on our CVs.

“This House” is actually hugely enjoyable, with both artists bringing out the best in each other – Timms brings the dourness, Almond the theatrical, and the Drifting Cowgirls backing band bring the swing. Wind forward several years and The Tindersticks could probably have picked this one up, but obviously they didn’t, so that outcome can only exist in our own minds.

22. Zoot and the Roots - This Heart (Native)

Peak position: 17


29. The Dentists - Writhing On The Shagpile (Sharp)

Peak position: 29


For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number One In The National Charts

The Firm - "Star Trekkin'" (Bark)

Pet Shop Boys - "It's A Sin" (Parlophone)

Madonna - "Who's That Girl" (Sire)