One week at number one on 20th August 1988
Otis Clay’s original version of “The Only Way Is Up” was always on the latter side of the fence, though wasn’t a huge success when released in 1982. If you haven’t listened to it in a while, go back and do so again – while researching this entry, I found myself unexpectedly moved by having the experience afresh. I’d forgotten just how understated it was, yet personal. If you’ve ever experienced poverty, however briefly, the idea of having somebody by your side throughout the ordeal takes on a highly romantic edge; a lot of couples don’t make it through to the other side as desperate times expose ugly personality flaws. We may all have insecurities about not being attractive enough, clever enough, charismatic enough or warm enough for our partners, but capable enough? Able to actually contribute towards food and shelter, fundamental life basics? Not being a financial drag? In the unforgiving modern world, that’s a kicker, and something the post-Reagan/Thatcher mainstream continually reinforces as a kind of societal blight.
Literal hunger can also lead to brash comments, rash behaviour and long solo walks in the freezing cold away from the claustrophobia of the bedsit. The very idea of a couple helping each other through the dark times, convinced that better things are ahead, is therefore an extremely strange idea for a dancefloor driven ballad, but an effective and touching one – and the songwriters Jackson and Henderson pull no punches (“If we should be evicted from our homes” is a brutal line in any context) while Clay sells it subtly and beautifully, without a hint of bitterness, like a warm hug in a freezing cold bed. When he sings “I know love will see us through” (a line missing from Yazz’s version) he could be singing about a relationship or about society more generally, depending on how you want to hear it. It feels like underclass gospel.
In some senses, Yazz may have seemed like the perfect person to front a cover of this record. She was sold to the public as a plucky everywoman, a club dancefloor girl with a distinctive peroxide crop who got lucky. On her first chart appearance with “Doctorin’ The House” she played an important part, providing a clarion call and foundation to Coldcut’s chaotic pilfering of old records, but it was certainly more their track than hers. A lot of people assumed she was a friend of the duo, grabbed from the club floor, when in reality she had already spent some time working as a catwalk model, and was shortly afterwards handled by Wham!’s management team. They sent her to singing lessons and she cut a demo, then was subsequently introduced to Coldcut, who happened to issue “Doctorin’ The House” right at the point where House music was becoming a commercial force (their previous records had not charted).
Her version of “The Only Way Is Up”, produced by Coldcut again, is fascinating to listen to back-to-back with Clay’s, purely because the approach is so different. Clay is smooth and warm but dogged, doing his best for his partner and guardian angel. Yazz, on the other hand, is being driven by something else – a noisy self-belief almost. Her delivery suggests she’s never lost a minute’s sleep in her life wondering if she’s wrong, or feeling as if actually, her natural level in life might be working in a call centre. The track is far too ebullient for that, punctuated with screams of victory and joy. You exit Clay’s track thinking he might land himself a perfectly average job soon, whereas throughout, Yazz sounds as if she’s already won the lottery (and in a funny way, of course, she had).
You could meaningfully compare “The Only Way Is Up” to “I Will Survive”. While Gaynor’s single is about surviving without your deadbeat cheating lover, “Up” is about the pair of you surviving through the difficulties – in Yazz’s hands, it’s a tool of absolute defiance and self-belief, determination winning over any scrap of self-doubt. Just as Gaynor knows she can get by alone, Yazz also knows that two good people united in determination to overcome their difficulties are going to have better odds than one.
Her ecstatic (pun absolutely intended) delivery is also much more in keeping with the dancefloor of the day. Coldcut’s trumpet howls, jittery bottle-bank rhythms and squelching Acid sounds demand something that can overpower them rather than falling beneath them, and just as she did on “Doctorin’ The House”, Yazz rises to the occasion. At moments, she howls in what can only be described as joyous defiance, and it sounds like an unbelievably of-the-moment record – skint kids at Shoom, being part of a movement, a moment, dosed up on E and believing that despite all the difficulties, they are finally part of something together (cue one of Mike Skinner’s diatribes). She effectively took this song away from the early eighties global recession and translated it for the later, chemical part of the decade.
It ultimately reached a much larger audience than that, though, becoming the second biggest selling single of 1988 in the UK. Something about its determination and voguishness spoke to far more people than had ever been to an underground club in London, or who had ever wanted to hear about Clay’s poverty line. It seemed to become an over-familiar pop song about self-belief, rather than anything about a united front – from direct and subtle to a universal cry of strength.
Of course, you can read the lyrics either way with equal validity. It’s not Otis Clay’s song, and he owns his interpretation of it no more or less than Yazz does. For me, though, the most commercially successful moment House had in 1988 is perhaps also one of the least interesting. Commercial House music’s usual cocktail of quirk and strange is this time mixed with a fizzy soda, and Clay’s modest, heartfelt thanks to a lover who has been crushed by life becomes an anthem. Yazz ultimately reached more people and probably touched more hearts; for me personally, though, it’s too loud, too steamrollering – a beautiful, romantic message blasted through a megaphone at a town fete. Fair enough, though – for some people, that kind of public proclamation is the absolute romantic ideal.
New Entries Elsewhere In The Charts
Peak position: 6
The Weather Prophets may have returned to the Creation Records offices sighing with relief, poisoned by how marginalised and poorly handled they’d been at a major label, but reality set in quickly. Without an advance or a decent promotional budget, and having a reputation as has-beens rather than next big things, they found themselves only capable of charting singles well below the national Top 100 line.
“Always The Light” lyrically seems like a more poetic version of “The Only Way Is Up” - “There's always a chance/ yes there's always a way/ Sowing seeds in the cracks of a second/ the spill of an empty day” sings Peter Astor. “However dark it gets, there's always the light”.
It’s actually a very good single, but you can’t blame the public for buying Yazz and not another bit of indie-jangle about grey and hopeless days (though the use of saxophone suggests they were shooting beyond such cliches). Despite their apparent efforts to cheer themselves up, it turned out to be their final single, something which surprised absolutely nobody at the time, except perhaps the band themselves.
14. Death By Milkfloat – The Absolute Non-End EP (Ediesta)
Peak position: 14
Commonly cited by jokers as a prime example of “John Peel favoured bands with ridiculous names”, Death By Milkfloat seemed like hopeless cases when their vinyl first landed in 1988 – their skittish, top-heavy riffs and rhythms felt like the kind of Gang of Four and Beefheart indebted C86 ideas of two years ago, and certainly not the sound of now. Hell, their patron saint Ron Johnson’s label had even gone under before 1988 was up.
Nonetheless, they actually managed to do somewhat better than their predecessors and were still recording into the early nineties. Peel’s support and their dogged determination to find the sharpest angles in the shattered greenhouse gained them a loyal cult fanbase who were more than capable of pushing their singles into the Indie Top 20.
Peak position: 14
Commonly cited by jokers as a prime example of “John Peel favoured bands with ridiculous names”, Death By Milkfloat seemed like hopeless cases when their vinyl first landed in 1988 – their skittish, top-heavy riffs and rhythms felt like the kind of Gang of Four and Beefheart indebted C86 ideas of two years ago, and certainly not the sound of now. Hell, their patron saint Ron Johnson’s label had even gone under before 1988 was up.
Nonetheless, they actually managed to do somewhat better than their predecessors and were still recording into the early nineties. Peel’s support and their dogged determination to find the sharpest angles in the shattered greenhouse gained them a loyal cult fanbase who were more than capable of pushing their singles into the Indie Top 20.
17. I Start Counting - Ra! Ra! Rawhide (Mute)
Peak position: 17
Daniel Miller signed synth-pop duo I Start Counting to Mute Records on the basis of a demo tape, and began releasing singles by the pair in 1984. The press and public probably expected another Depeche Mode, but in truth, their spirit was smaller, dreamier and more introverted – on early singles like “Letters To A Friend”, with its refrain of “Saturday we watch the sunrise/ Sunday you spent/ Writing letters to a friend”, they sounded like a Sarah Records act given access to an expensive bank of synthesisers.
Such thoughtful electronica really didn’t sell, however, and “Ra! Ra! Rawhide” is their first track to enter the NME Indie Chart. Even more unexpectedly, it’s a mash-up of Boney M’s “Rasputin” and Frankie Laine’s “Rawhide”, all delivered to a cheap electronic pulse and deadpan vocals. It’s an extremely odd bit of low budget high camp which sounds at least four years out of date for 1988, but nonetheless became their breakthrough indie moment. I’m struggling to get through a single listen without imagining Roland Rivron smoking a cigarette while playing the bongos, and would advise potential listeners of theirs to start elsewhere; this is a prime example of a novelty breakthrough moment not being representative of a group’s other work.
26. The Screaming Trees - Tangiers (Native)
Peak position: 15
Once again, I would like to remind readers that this lot have no connections to the grunge act of the same name, and were instead a synth-heavy band leaning towards industrial music.
"Tangiers" was their very last single for Native Records before they opted to rename themselves Count Zero. It straddles the genres of Industrial, Dance and Synth-pop in quite a daring way and sounded huge enough to cross over, but once "The Chart Show" had screened the video, that seemed to be the end of its mainstream exposure. A shame, because it sounds like a possible future being explored - one where the new Ibiza-influenced rhythms of New Order, the aggression of Front 242 and the nagging melodic hooks of Depeche Mode all combined to huge effect.
For five minutes, this sounded like a wonderful and very 1988 pop moment, albeit one which only found limited appreciation.
For the complete charts, please go to the UKMix Forums
Number One In The Official Charts
Yazz & The Plastic Population: "The Only Way Is Up" (Big Life)
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