Three weeks at number one from 6th February 1988
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.
Also unlike “Birthday”, it was given a slightly more than no-budget video, which allowed the viewer to properly witness a group who seemed unexpectedly pedestrian looking at this point – what shocked me most when it appeared on “The Chart Show” was that Bjork didn’t seem particularly other-worldly; even while cast as an exotic princess sprawling around on a bed of precious jewellery, she resembled a teenager in a school play rather than an eccentric, outré figure. That would change steadily over time. At present, the group’s identity – and hers – felt incomplete, as if this ragbag of poets, surrealists and musicians had been caught by surprise, and had yet to have a meeting to talk about anything other than the music itself (their record sleeves are surprisingly bland and utilitarian at this point too).
If all this makes it sound as if I don’t enjoy “Coldsweat”, that would be unfortunate. It’s one of the Sugarcubes singles I play most often, finding the thump and grind of it, and even Bjork’s furious demands, extremely hooky despite its unconventionality. Putting down into words why it’s likeable is a harder task, though. It doesn’t seek to charm, it doesn’t really have a memorable chorus (though it has a strange way of getting to you in the end) and it forgoes regular grooves for threatening skanks and thuds. The main similarity it shares with their previous single is the way it beguiles despite itself.
It was another minor Top 75 entry for the group, and they found themselves thrown to the international music business, who (as Bjork complained) had to deal with the group “as human beings” and not as some exotic aliens creating strange music. Clearly we were all learning.
New Entries Elsewhere In The Charts
6. Sonic Youth - Master=Dik EP (Blast First)
Peak position: 3
Drum machine driven raps, rants and snarls share space with minimal basslines, snowstorms of guitars, and a sense that the whole damn thing is going to collapse inwardly on itself any second (it never does). It may have been inspired by Hip-Hop, but it sounds closer to industrial, although at moments it also seems to predict The Fall’s “Touch Sensitive” (though I doubt the ghost of ME Smith would like me suggesting they ripped someone else off, least of all Sonic Youth).
In the end, though, it’s just a huge, glorious mess which just about manages to stay listenable despite itself.
13. Kylie Minogue - I Should Be So Lucky (PWL)
Peak position: 5
Unlike Kylie Minogue, obviously, who here represents the most carefully presented normality.
Kylie’s appearances in this chart caused dismay to many people at the time, who were beginning to see the term “indie” as a genre rather than shorthand for a distribution method. The fact remains, however, that Stock Aitken and Waterman formed the PWL label for the purposes of releasing anything they either didn’t want to license through a major label, or simply couldn’t get placed on one. Pinnacle picked up the distribution, and the indie listings cowered under the subsequent onslaught of jittering uptempo discofied pop; everything the three had learned through the Hi-NRG scene which had previously sent records into these charts, in fact. There is nothing new under the sun.
Kylie was seen as a slightly iffy proposition in the UK. While she was one of the popular stars of the (by this point massive) Australian soap “Neighbours” and had already had a hit single with “Locomotion” in her home country, by 1988 the British public had emerged from the other side of an onslaught of 45s from the Eastenders cast – even Lofty got a disc out in the form of a pulsating cover of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (it wasn’t a hit). Records by soap singers were therefore deemed deeply naff, the kind of thing small children and dotty old Aunties got excited about, and even they were starting to ignore them.
Had Kylie’s first single in the UK been “The Locomotion” rather than “I Should Be So Lucky”, it’s possible she would have been ignored. The fact that “I Should Be So Lucky” was a SAW original, and also surprisingly sharp and hooky, saw it slowly rise to number one in the British charts from an unpromising number 90 entry point in the dead of January. It also topped a number of indie charts in the music press, but not the NME one who seemed to report lower sales of it through their chosen sample group.
As for the song itself, I’m always surprised by how cheap it sounds when I revisit it – it’s not blessed with the sweeping rush of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” or the chattering menace of Dead or Alive’s “Spin Me Round”. Instead it sounds strangely enclosed and claustrophobic, with those brassy electronic blasts and chiming bells in the background seeming as if they belong to a kid’s BBC TV theme.
Perhaps that helped. Children certainly bought it in their droves, as did huge numbers of adults, and its cheap and cheerful qualities are, let’s face it, Indie. Not the kind of Indie that most readers of this blog will own, admittedly, but perfectly at home alongside any of the other examples of low-budget pop we’ve encountered so far – the Taffies and Man 2 Mans of this world opened the gates so the cast of Neighbours could follow.
18. Jesse Garon and the Desperadoes - The Adam Faith Experience (Speed)
Peak position: 11
27. The Clouds - Tranquil (Subway)
Peak position: 12
28. Candido - Jingo (Hardcore)
Peak position: 16
This reissue of the 1979 dancefloor filler “Jingo” doubtless occurred due to New York scenester (and friend of Madonna, as he loved to remind us) Jellybean taking his version into the charts around this point.
The track had a long history even before 1979, though. While veteran Cuban percussionist Candido had a hit with it then, it had originally been written by Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, then subsequently covered by artists as diverse as James Last and Serge Gainsbourg, as well as being a known floor-filler at discotheques, bars, social clubs and holiday camps across the world.
Candido’s version is actually a wee bit more compelling and organic than Jellybean’s, which suffers from the kind of rigidity typical of people who are too cool to actually have a good time. A song like “Jingo” needs beer, cocktails, red eyes, late nights and a sense of fun, not wailing guitars and a smooth, serious production. No wonder people started picking up this version again.
Week Two
23. A.C. Marias - Time was (Mute)
Peak position: 21
Aka video director and artist Angela Conway and Bruce Gilbert out of Wire working as a duo. A.C. Marias had already issued two records prior to this one, “Drop” in 1981, and “Just Talk” in 1986, and were only intended as an occasional distraction for both parties rather than a serious project.
“Time Was” is more uncommercial than Wire themselves at this point – while they used technology to craft odd pop songs, this is an uneven and rhythmically jarring journey, Conway’s delirious voice combining with unexpected squeals, disjointed drums and loose guitar rattles.
23. A.C. Marias - Time was (Mute)
Peak position: 21
Aka video director and artist Angela Conway and Bruce Gilbert out of Wire working as a duo. A.C. Marias had already issued two records prior to this one, “Drop” in 1981, and “Just Talk” in 1986, and were only intended as an occasional distraction for both parties rather than a serious project.
“Time Was” is more uncommercial than Wire themselves at this point – while they used technology to craft odd pop songs, this is an uneven and rhythmically jarring journey, Conway’s delirious voice combining with unexpected squeals, disjointed drums and loose guitar rattles.
25. The Orchids - I've got a habit EP (Sarah)
Peak position: 12
The second release on Sarah Records which truly set the label up as one to watch among the indiepop set. While many of those kids had moved on by this point, there were still enough people out there who felt that Creation Records had lost their way, and what society needed more gentle, lo-fi jangles to soothe them at night.
The Orchids are from Glasgow and “I’ve Got A Habit” is an enduring classic of its kind which even features the unlikely romantic line “Drinking Irn Bru and I’m thinking of you”.
30. Babakoto - Just To Get By (Union Jack)
Peak position: 30
Babakoto, on the other hand, were from Essex and featured future Ting Tings member Jules De Martino.
All that was way ahead in the future for him, though, and back in the 20th Century he bopped along with this lot. “Just To Get By” was their only single to gain any significant airplay or attention, and while it slithered indecisively around the lower reaches of the National Top 100 as if it were the upbeat, straight-laced cousin to The Sugarcubes’ “Birthday”, it never properly broke through despite a major label reissue.
It’s a highly commercial sounding record, but at the time its old-school Tin Pan Alley melodies colliding with disco beats probably seemed a bit quaint. They tried to make up for that with their follow-up “Magic Potion” on MCA, which stayed close to a slick eighties pop sound, but wasn’t a hit either. As a result, no album was forthcoming, and the group disappeared.
Week Three
8. Coldcut (feat Yazz & The Plastic Population) - Doctorin' the House (Ahead of Our Time)
Peak position: 2
In which Coldcut combine with singer and model Yazz for a track which didn’t exactly sound like a pop hit at the time, but occurred at a moment where all the usual rules went out of the window.
It meant that their usual methods of grabbing samples from antiquated or unlikely sources as Howdy Doody, Thunderbirds, reggae classics, Kool & The Gang and Afrika Bambaataa saw them flying into the top ten. Yazz acting as the striking, charismatic singer up front did them no harm either, giving them a visual identity they otherwise lacked – and she would soon become a serious force in her own right.
Peak position: 2
In which Coldcut combine with singer and model Yazz for a track which didn’t exactly sound like a pop hit at the time, but occurred at a moment where all the usual rules went out of the window.
It meant that their usual methods of grabbing samples from antiquated or unlikely sources as Howdy Doody, Thunderbirds, reggae classics, Kool & The Gang and Afrika Bambaataa saw them flying into the top ten. Yazz acting as the striking, charismatic singer up front did them no harm either, giving them a visual identity they otherwise lacked – and she would soon become a serious force in her own right.
For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums
Number Ones In The National Charts
Tiffany: "I Think We're Alone Now" (MCA)
Kylie Minogue: "I Should Feel So Lucky" (PWL)
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