Number One for five more weeks from 1st October 1983
Anybody who read the preceding entry to this one could hardly be surprised to find "Blue Monday" back at number one. The indie chart is more volatile to tracks yo-yoing around the listings than most, but even the National Charts couldn't shake themselves free of Blue Monday's broad and enduring appeal. As holiday makers returned from the club nights they'd enjoyed during the long, sticky summer of 1983, demand was reinvigorated and it ricocheted into the National Top Ten for the first time.
For what else went on while it enjoyed a second stay at the top, please see below.
Week One
7. The Fall - Kicker Conspiracy (Rough Trade)
Peak position: 3
Way before New Order's football record, here was The Fall's, with less ecstacy and more hot dogs, lager and weary references to football hooliganism. "Kicker Conspiracy" occasionally sees Mark E Smith at his least cryptic and most everyday - even a Cockney Rejects fan could understand what "Remember! You are abroad/ Remember! The police are rough!" is referring to - but then he veers back into the land of The Fall and manages to make the sport sound mystical and arcane. To this day, I haven't made my mind up what "Plastic, slime, partitions, cocktail, zig-zag, tudor bar" actually means (I suspect it's a reference to the gentrification of the big game, but leave your own ideas in the comments).
Still, this is as populist and immediate as early Fall gets, and it's a corker, its strident, military march feeling somewhat appropriate for a Saturday session.
17. Depeche Mode - Love In Itself (Mute)
Peak position: 4
The least political track on "Construction Time Again" becomes the second and final single to be taken from it, and while it worked perfectly fine as the album's opener, something seems awry on 45, almost as if it's a hook or two short of becoming the pop anthem it truly wants to be.
Still, the razzing, brassy synthetic intro is powerful enough to stop the track from being merely middling, and Gahan sounds almost livid while he ruminates on love and its actual meaning in a society filled with anything but. In 1982, Martin Gore asked us what the meaning of love was and sounded child-like. Here, he sounds like it might have dawned on him and he's now embittered. A year is a long time if you're in your early twenties.
The final synth solo at the end of this track sounds as if Alan Wilder is making things up as he goes along, and that mad spree gives the single a much needed final boost, but it wasn't enough - this was their first single to fail to reach the national top twenty since their debut "Dreaming Of Me" (it had to make do with a number 21 placing).
Elsewhere in their catalogue, skinhead punk group Combat 84 ranted and raved "Fuck Off CND!" and "It's better to be dead than red!" On this one, they go into an irate diatribe about how all rapists should be hung. "We want capital punishment!" they demand.
Their politics were much debated at the time, but hardly really need to be guessed at here. Remember - the indie charts are a very broad church.
“We’ve been running round in circles all year/ doing this and that and getting nowhere...”
Both 1982 and 1983 saw music critics thunderously dismiss two major synthpop bands for their latest albums, which were seen as confused and pretentious departures from the expected path. The first, in 1982, was Depeche Mode’s second album “A Broken Frame”, which was seen as indulgent, flimsy, pretentious and incoherent – flashes of bright pop surrounded by rainy adolescent sulks, an uneven listening experience from a band clearly on the wane.
Then in 1983, OMD released “Dazzle Ships”, which in turn was seen as indulgent, flimsy, pretentious and incoherent – flashes of bright pop surrounded by pseudo avant-garde nonsense. Another uneven listening experience from a band, etc. etc. etc.
“Dazzle Ships” has since been throroughly reassessed and reissued on multiple occasions, and is now regarded not as evidence of a band out of time and ideas, but a daring and coherent piece of work (something very few people said in its day). A masterpiece, in fact. The sleeve art, featuring flashes of colour and darkness akin to the camouflage World War I navy ships adopted, mirrored the work within and created the same sense of dislocation and uncertainty; one minute bright and visible, the next slipping into a deliberately jarring Cold War statement.
“A Broken Frame” received an award and praise for its Brian Griffin directed cover art, a photograph of a peasant woman ploughing fields under a gloomy sky with a scythe, while the rear of the sleeve showed sunshine breaking through on the right hand side. Its contents, on the other hand, remain ignored. The band themselves seem to see the album as an embarrassing learning experience from a difficult period, their fans seldom talk about it online, and if it comes up for discussion in Classic Rock retrospectives, critics still find time to have a chuckle at its expense.
So allow me to step forward and make a deeply contentious claim – “A Broken Frame” is one of my favourite albums of all time. It really doesn’t deserve to be ignored. Where you hear inconsistency and incoherence, I hear a record with deliberate, stark contrasts, the sunshine breaking through the dark clouds for occasional respite before being forced undercover again. Where you hear a confused group, I hear a band who knew that pop and post-punk were not mutually exclusive; that in the end, whether The Buzzcocks, Donna Summer or The Shangri-las were singing about the tight knots romantic relationships tie us in, they were still trying to communicate the same idea (the journey from soda pops to snakebite and black is really only a mere few years - nothing in adult terms).
Perhaps more importantly, where you hear a band trying and failing to be different, I hear them succeeding. There are moments on “A Broken Frame” they wouldn’t touch upon again – the frostbitten Siberian reggae of “Satellite”, for example, is a real anomaly (but no worse for it) – but also moments which set the stage for their future direction. The squally, epic “Sun And The Rainfall” is a rarely bettered track from the early stage of their career, offering hope and reason amidst a gloomy minor key. “My Secret Garden” is hushed and delirious, constantly teasing and threatening to rise its head above the fog before diving back down again. The much-mocked “A Photograph Of You” emerges bright, simple but heartbroken on side two, only for the sound of wind to blow immediately over it to introduce the minimal, marching childhood fascist Psycho Drama of “Shouldn’t Have Done That”. If the group didn’t understand how the handle the changeable mood they were trying to evoke here, the producer Daniel Miller surely did (as an aside, I should also say that even at the time I thought "Shouldn't Have Done That" sounded uncannily close to a late sixties Beatles studio experiment in places).
The first two singles from “A Broken Frame” doubtless wrongfooted the public and critics. “See You” and “Meaning Of Love” showed some artistic development, but were essentially playing safe, trying to operate within spitting distance of Vince Clarke’s original ideas on “Speak And Spell”; two straightforward feedbag fillers, steadying the horses and ensuring nobody was hoofed up the arse all the way home to Basildon.
“Leave In Silence”, on the other hand, is the last single from the album and the one that really seems to define its spirit best. It begins with an approximation of mournful monk chanting (at this point not the cliché it has since become), an apologetic, descending bong of a chime, and synthesisers which glint despondently. This is pop picked up, slit apart, and turned into an inverse image of itself. Elements which should be celebratory and joyous are used instead to signal dismay, impatience and defeat in a minor key. Chimes collapse. Speedy synth-wizard instrumental breaks meander and tumble and reach no conclusion. Spiritual chants are used to signal defeat, not mystery or joy. Melodic conclusions are hinted at then abandoned. Glasses smash. It’s like a track from “Speak & Spell” in negative, swapping bright lights for shady resignation.
It’s also bloody wonderful and fascinatingly inventive. Prior to its release I had already decided I liked Depeche Mode, but it was the first single I found genuinely exciting. The group claim they had the option of picking a more obvious track from the album to release as the final single, but deliberately went with “Leave In Silence” to show another side to their work. Not everyone was impressed – Paul Weller was moved to comment “I’ve heard more melody coming out of Kenny Wheeler’s arsehole”, probably missing the point (as critics also did) that the band were keen to use the single as a springboard to a different career in Vince Clarke’s absence, not produce a song the milkman could whistle. When “Leave In Silence” arrives on the “Singles 81-85” compilation, whose tracks are presented in chronological order, it feels like the key transition point despite being from the second album – the moment where they truly find their own voices and stop worrying about their ex-bandmate.
In common with many other tracks on “A Broken Frame”, it has clumsy lyrical flaws, the “spreading like a cancer” line tactlessly pre-empting Turbo B out of Snap (though at least they have the sense not to rhyme it with dancer). It was also given an ultra-New Romantic arty promo video directed by Julien Temple where the band stand beside a Generation Game conveyer belt of random items which they smash with hammers. This seemed like an interesting clip by 1982 standards, but the world of music videos has evolved significantly since and it now looks like it's trying far too hard to be clever. These are minor setbacks, though, and shouldn’t distract from the fact that this is a wonderfully unusual pop record.
The risk also paid off, to an extent. While “Leave In Silence” only reached number 18 in the charts, their lowest charting single since their debut “Dreaming Of Me”, it was successful enough to make the group realise that they could get away with testing their existing audience and potentially attract new listeners into the bargain. The Clarke-led Depeche Mode of old were now a dead concept, and the fact this change occurred so swiftly in the space of a mere year is shocking by modern standards.
As for “A Broken Frame”, there are occasional signs that at least some people are getting wise to its strengths. In 2015 the Greek synthpop duo Marsheaux released their own modernised version of the entire album, which in common with most tribute exercises contains surprising and fantastic interpretations as well as tricks which don’t quite cohere. It’s clear that the pair are handling it with love and admiration, though, seeing its bold shifts and changes in tone as strengths rather than weaknesses. It’s a small step, but hopefully further respect will follow from other quarters.
Away From The Number One Spot
New Entries In Week One
14. Fad Gadget – “Life On The Line” (Mute)
Frank Tovey entering the charts in the week Depeche Mode take the top spot is a neat piece of symmetry – the group acted as his support act for their early London shows, which brought them to the attention of Mute label boss Daniel Miller.
The band namedropped Fad Gadget often and tried to ensure he got some column inches, but despite his use of synths, Tovey was operating in a different sphere; taut, harsh and occasionally disturbing. “Ricky’s Hand”, essentially a parody of a seventies Public Information Film set to buzzing synths, is darker and more comedic than Mode ever got, as well as probably being one of the first examples a PIF being dismantled and reappropriated artistically.
“Life On The Line” is more compromising, shifting closer to pop, but still doesn’t push the mercury very far up the thermometer. While other groups were showing that synths could be used to communicate other ideas besides alienation and futurism, Fad Gadget were having absolutely bloody none of that, and while the song offers the listener some bait, Tovey’s delivery never moves an inch beyond cold and uncommitted, like the Drimble Wedge of futurism.
It eventually peaked, perhaps appropriately, at number 13.
When we bumped into Yazoo’s last single “Only You”, there was a sense the new duo were just settling into their working relationship. For whatever its strengths and commerciality, “Only You” was a track Vince Clarke had lying around before Yazoo came into being, and had initially considered hawking around to other groups. At the point of writing it, his working relationship with Alison Moyet hadn’t really been instigated, so what the public were left to buy was Moyet interpreting a track which at one point could just as easily have been handed to Depeche Mode.
“Don’t Go” is the first example of a Yazoo single where the fork in the road, the divergence between Mode and Clarke, is obvious. If Clarke’s earliest work with Depeche Mode fizzes and bops, “Don’t Go” bops and slams. The drum machine is approximating an R&B/gospel rhythm, the central synth riff – in all other respects close enough to something Clarke might have tried circa “Just Can’t Get Enough” – has more dancefloor friendly shades to it, not least the aspects where the familar high-end squeakiness is replaced by digital bubbling or low, bassy grumbles.
It’s actually less ambitious melodically than a lot of Depeche Mode’s earliest work. “New Life” was busy and surprisingly ambitious, always introducing new twists, while “Don’t Go” finds its groove by the twentieth second and sticks rigidily to it, only offering slight variations.
Unlike “New Life”, though, Clarke has a singer who can be ambitious on his behalf. While Dave Gahan is a strong vocalist, his performances from 1981 right through to the present day have tended to stick doggedly to a mournful mid-range. You could argue that it forced Depeche Mode to become more dramatic, more symphonic around him; his vocals have generally acted as the central anchor, requiring the splashes of colour to occur elsewhere in the songs. Moyet, on the other hand, veers from threatening low growls here right up to desperate shrieks. She supplies the dramatic flourishes while Clarke is free, for the first time, to let the central hooks hit a steady dancefloor friendly groove without worrying too much about frilly embellishments.
With it, the pair also managed to take early eighties synth pop to slightly different places from their peers. If you were being charitable, you could argue that it was fresh and new, and that it signalled that Clarke knew synths were about more than just aloofness and futurism, but in truth they weren’t the first to realise this. Giorgio Moroder picked up the new technology and discovered that it could represent sex, desire, vulnerability and danceability in the previous decade. All Clarke and Moyet were really doing was picking up the baton and understanding that they didn’t need permission to take electronics into these areas. Their approach here, a kind of gospel tinged New Romanticism, did however slowly nose away at the boundaries of what was possible, impressing critics without frightening either the school disco dancefloor or Clarke’s earliest fans.
“Don’t Go” is one of those rare examples of two stylistically very different individuals realising the qualities they have in tandem, and working them through with maximum effectiveness. It peaked at number 3 in the national charts.
The thirteenth number one of 1981, and indeed of the NME Indie Charts in general, is The Damned’s “Friday the 13th EP” – a neat coincidence, or perhaps a case of demonic interference?
It’s certainly a rare victory for punk’s old guard whether Satan’s stinking finger nudged them to the top or not. The indie charts of 81 were generally dominated by Gary Bushell approved second wave acts, with the old school 70s bands with new homes on small labels clinging on in the foothills; if punk wasn’t exactly dead, it certainly seemed as if some of its original proponents were living in less assured circumstances.
Of all those groups, The Damned couldn’t be more “first wave” if they tried – they were the first UK band to issue a punk rock single in the form of “New Rose” and the first to push an album out. Unlike many of the more serious-minded acts who quickly usurped them, The Damned were cartoonish rogues, a hammer horror Ramones offering scuffed-up hyper garage rock. None of their songs offered clear manifestos or pushed ideologies, even for effect, unless of course “Can a man be a mystery man/ can a doll be a baby doll” is code for something I don’t fully understand. I suppose you could even argue that “Problem Child” off the second LP “Music For Pleasure” is a punk throwback to Cilla Black’s “Liverpool Lullaby”, but let’s forget I even thought of that idea.
The second album was a huge problem child in its own right, though. The Damned’s love of sixties psychedelia led them to approach Syd Barrett to produce the record, which inevitably came to nought. Pink Floyd’s drummer Nick Mason took on the job instead as a consolation prize, and produced a negatively reviewed and poorly selling record in “Music For Pleasure”. So underwhelmed were critics and fans alike by the disc that it contributed to the group’s split afterwards.
Perhaps understanding that they had handled a typical case of second album syndrome too hastily, the group reformed without the original guitarist Brian James for the “Machine Gun Etiquette” album in 1979, which charted (unlike its predecessor) then pushed out “The Black Album” in 1980 which saw them broadening their palette and gradually moving away from their original punk sound. While goth wasn’t yet popularly understood as a musical genre in 1980, Dave Vanian’s vocals became deeper and eerier while the clanging of bells could occasionally be heard beneath the group’s toughened up (and incredibly well performed) R&B sounds – on some moments like the superb opening track “Wait For the Blackout”, it’s possible to visualise the group as The Pretty Things or The Downliners Sect with Lord Sutch on guest vocals after having had some valuable singing lessons.
Of all the punk groups, The Damned were generally the most open about their previous influences and also closer to the musos punk meant to replace. Captain Sensible once expressed outrage that The Pistols stole the Damned’s thunder, commenting that he bought a copy of “Anarchy In The UK”, desperate to hear what “our rivals” had produced, and feeling aghast when he heard “Old Man Steptoe singing”. They may have been fast, raucous, chaotic and even extremely daft, but they were probably always closer to their pub rock cousins than most of the emerging set; good musicians with sixties influences creating an exhilarating noise. They were therefore assured a longevity that a lot of the earliest 100 Club and Roxy hopefuls were never going to achieve.
Despite being somewhat unexpectedly produced by New Musik's Tony Mansfield, the “Friday the 13th EP” is really a sharp dose of more of the same, with lead track “Disco Man” pulling up water from the same well; those vocal harmonies, sharp guitar riffs and thumping backbeats don’t lie. “Limit Club” even combines gothic atmospheres with sixties psychedelia, proving that punk didn’t necessarily eliminate the hippies – it absorbed ideas from them too (the crossover between the hippy underground press and the fanzines also proved that the breaks weren’t as clean as everybody suggested).
