114. The Sugarcubes - Deus (One Little Indian)

Three weeks at number one from 23rd April 1988

Over the years, drivers on the A38 road from Willand to Taunton have reported the appearance of a bedraggled, curly haired gentleman with a torch. Sometimes the man has been reported to cadge a lift, throughout which he grumbled morbidly about historical road fatalities in the area. In others, he apparently disappears before the driver’s eyes, frequently after a near-collision.

All this would be odd enough by itself where it not for his appearance and garb, which made him seem, to all intents and purposes, like a modernised version of the Greek God (with Celtic origins) Telesphorus; a deity who was historically portrayed in grey hooded garments holding a lantern. It was as if time had lowered his status, or changed him or perhaps our perceptions of him; from respected God with a way-bearer's flame to common hitch-hiker holding an electric torch filled with Ever Ready batteries, begging for help. Seemingly even deities can get demoted.

I think about this version of Telesphorus a lot, more perhaps than I should; after all, he’s probably just a figment of tired and overheated human minds, brains whose wiring has snagged and is pulling on ancient memories buried deep in their DNA. But what if he’s real? That just makes me feel concerned for the poor deity. People seem to report finding him in a freezing cold or drenched state, and that’s no way for Gods to carry on.

In The Sugarcubes track “Deus”, on the other hand, Bjork tells us “Deus does not exist, but if he does…” before speculating on what God might look like, deviating away from any stereotypical descriptions. Throughout the song we learn that not only does he have a proclivity for putting people in bathtubs and “making them squeaky clean – really clean”, he also has sideburns and a quiff. “I was surprised – just as you would be,” Einar tells us, reasonably enough.

In an interview with Record Mirror in April 1988, the group explain things further – well, almost. “He lives up in a cloud. He's not a very interesting person,” Einar said. “He’s sterile,” Bjork added.

After spending some time considering whether Lofty out of Eastenders might be a God (well, he did record this) Bjork finally clarifies: “Mr Deus is just one of many gods. He's not special . . . Except for his sideburns and quiff!”

There has been much speculation from fans over the years that there’s a deeper meaning to this record, and it’s actually about the perversity, controlling authority and banality of the monotheistic Gods, and that also seems like a fair interpretation, but above all else, the song is mostly surrealistic flights of fantasy; a particular and unusual God built and created by a rock group, created because they were in a position where they could do it and people would listen. Therein lies the double-bind; Deus does exist, because he’s on this record. You can’t uncreate a myth.

104. M|A|R|R|S - Pump Up The Volume (4AD)

Six weeks at number one from 19th September 1987

It’s a summer evening in 1987 and I’m stood on the doorstep to my parent’s garden. I'm gazing towards the fir trees at the rear, taking in the sun’s last rays and idly listening to Radio One burbling away. My Mum’s kitchen radio was a cheap and nasty thing, all treble and top-end, seemingly designed to emphasise the hiss and static of poorly tuned radio frequencies over and above any bass whatsover.

Not the best bit of kit on which to hear “Pump Up The Volume” for the first time, then, which chose that moment to leak out of an evening Radio One Dance programme. Every so often I heard the half-hearted, buried, almost robotic declaration “Pump up the volume”, followed by a series of disjointed slow wooshes, interjecting samples, and the noise of what sounded like electric guitars being scraped face-down along gravel. It’s not that I didn’t like the track, it’s just it sounded like a strange, half-hearted dub. I shrugged and played with the dog for a bit, no longer really paying much attention to the single. No point in getting too invested in something which was number 47 in the Record Mirror club play chart (or wherever). These records, these weirdly credited white labels – they came, they went. There was no reason to suppose this one would be any different.

The next time I heard the track it was through some proper speakers, and then I got it – by God, I got it. It felt breathtaking. Had I been old enough to be a clubber, I might have had some sense of where “Pump Up The Volume” came from, and why it had to happen, but I was thirteen years old and many years away from such delights. As such, the depth, the bass, the vast, almost overwhelming space to the single felt strange. The way sounds panned from the extreme right to the left hand side of the stereo, as if almost to place you as an insignificant, microscopic speck among the enormousness of the tune, felt like a new universe opening up; no wonder the promo video director made outer space the central theme.

The structure of “Pump Up The Volume” also felt interesting and novel at the time. The track’s main hook is the prowling bassline and rattling drum beats which underpin it, and that is a constant presence, along with that doomy, dramatic, reverberating piano note. It therefore feels as if you’re being driven along a brightly lit motorway, riding along the spine of that groove, but every so often, for whatever reason, the driver takes a slip road off to some strange town with different noises. You can still hear the thunder of the motorway close by, or feel its vibration, but in the meantime you’re stuck in tiny, tinpot towns along its verge, hearing weird interjections from the natives, before your driver corrects his course and lands back on the motorway again.

Samples are a huge part of the record, but they’re treated as brief visitors, strange interruptions to the transmission rather than equal partners. Ofra Haza visits, as do The Criminal Element Orchestra, James Brown (of course), Coldcut and Trouble Funk. None of these samples feels essential to the record, and none of them “sold it” as such; at first you felt you could potentially cut fast and loose and create your own version of “Pump Up The Volume” with different elements. The more you listened to it, though, and the more you absorbed, the more baked in it all became, each interruption feeling essential to the whole, an important landmark in the overall journey. Listening now, I wouldn’t want to lose any of these people, anymore than I’d want to get rid of the iron bridge across the river near my house. And despite the fact they’re nudges and strange interjections, its odd how fluid and natural they seem – even James Brown feels as if he’s always been nothing but a bit-part player in the magic.

The single finally ends on someone scratch-mixing over (what I’ve always assumed is) a record of someone whistling, like audio graffiti scribbled around someone’s strolling expression of idle happiness. The record is almost jazzy by that point, riffing on so many different grooves and elements that it feels busier than ever, but never quite losing its vastness. It’s truly fucking amazing and I never tire of listening to it.

102. New Order - True Faith (Factory)

Three weeks at number one from 8th August 1987

In the eighties, New Order never really seemed like the kind of group to embrace the idea of a "Greatest Hits" album. Snapping all their 45rpm moments into one neat, consumer-friendly brochure for casual shoppers seemed a strange idea for a group (and record label) who were against the idea of even advertising their new releases. Nonetheless, 1987 saw the arrival of "Substance", one of the best "Best Ofs" the entire decade had to offer; beautifully packaged (especially the cassette) and near-perfect in its contents. 

It also resulted in New Order being given a tight, pressing deadline by their label boss Tony Wilson – to record two new tracks in London with producer Stephen Hague, one of which would be used on the compilation. Studio time was booked for ten days with Hague, a producer the band hadn’t worked with before, but whose reputation had begun to spike due to his recent work with the Pet Shop Boys. Perhaps somewhat foolishly, the band entered the studio with just a handful of ideas.

While Tony Wilson made several nervous phone calls to check things were progressing well, the band toyed and tinkered away and began to forge the basis of two songs which would become “True Faith” and “1963”. Problematically though, Bernard Sumner hadn’t written lyrics for either, and Hague began to grow impatient, stating that he found it extremely hard to understand what direction the song should be taking without a clear lyrical map to follow. Sumner ummed and ahhed, then welched on his promise to come up with something to an agreed deadline, until he was “accidentally” locked inside the West London flat the band were renting and left without food for an entire day (history does not record who was responsible for this, or indeed whether it was deliberate).

Left without anything to do apart from stew in his own hunger and misfortune, Sumner turned out possibly the finest set of lyrics of his career for one of the tracks (and some of the most baffling ones ever for the B-side). “True Faith” is overwhelmingly about drug addiction, though the band ultimately backtracked on the original draft for one of the verses, the much more explicit “When I was a very small boy/ very small boys talked to me/ now that we’ve grown up together/ they’re all taking drugs with me”. Doing so, and changing the final line to “They’re afraid of what they see”, has probably given the song an ambiguity and mystique it may otherwise not have had, besides ensuring larger amounts of radio airplay.

The end result is a track which sounds both euphoric and troubled, fresh and exotic and yet disintegrating. It skips and bounces, and has a chorus which could almost be heard as celebratory, but never once sounds truly triumphant, and always feels giddy and unstable. The chimes fall and despond, those bizarre panpipe sounds, which seem as if they would ordinarily belong on a New Age gift shop CD, hum in the background like the soundtrack to a yogic daze, and Sumner delivers lines which are appropriately contradictory – the reserved joy of “A certain sense of liberty” sits alongside the despair of “I don’t care if I’m here tomorrow”, while the line “I used to think that the day would never come” could sit in either camp. Are you delighted that you’re finally here, bathed in sunlight, watching yourself from the outside, or horrified? Or both?

Sumner utterly nails it with the simple line “the childhood I lost replaced by fear” too; making the way addicts self-medicate their way out of their own prisons a central focal point of the song. The song is not glorifying the use of heroin, or indeed any other drug, but instead trying to understand why it became such a huge issue in the mid-eighties. In doing so, it’s more empathetic than any number of grainy, gritty Government adverts where a narrator whispered, in a voice somewhere between Gary Lineker and David Attenborough, that if you took it, you’d start to look “tired… and spotty” (we all looked a bit tired and spotty in those days, whether we were on or off The Horse). Musically and lyrically, it’s a hazy, faded, pastel shaded sketch of a situation which is portrayed as a frustrated, fragile and finite kind of luke-warm happiness, one where the sharp hooks of reality are capable of penetrating the bliss. Even if New Order hadn’t changed the original lyrics, it’s hard to hear how anybody would have thought the song was written in an approving way.