52. The Senate/ Theatre of Hate - Original Sin/ Westworld (Burning Rome)

One week at number one on w/e 1st September 1984

On the previous entry, we focused on The March Violets, a goth-leaning post-punk band who used a drum machine to closely ape the patterns of a live drummer, resulting in a precise, leaden sound. It’s an interesting twist of fate that the following number one should be from someone from much the same background taking a totally different approach.

The Senate were a duo formed by Kirk Brandon (ex-Theatre of Hate) and Rusty Egan (ex-Rich Kids and Visage) ostensibly – so far as I can gather – to record this one single before both parties moved on to other things. For Brandon in particular, it probably acted as a safe space away from his recently collapsed Theatre to dabble creatively in a less volatile short-term environment.

"Original Sin" was Theatre of Hate's debut single in 1980, but this version veers away from the brief and desperate three minute approach of that version and embraces the Theatre of Hate's later love of dramatic sprawls. With wails and howls, the single begins and lingers for two-and-a-half minutes on his voice and Egan’s keyboards. It’s a barren and moody and initially almost overly desolate start.

Past that point, the track suddenly crashes into 1984 with orchestral stabs, ambitious evolving and rumbling drum machine patterns, and keyboard lines which aren’t a million miles from the kind of work Trevor Horn was delivering elsewhere. It lacks the production gloss or sure-footedness, or the sense that it’s the product of three months worth of studio work, but maintains a rough and ready ambition alongside a very nagging percussive drive. This is the first goth-adjacent single I’ve heard since starting this blog which actually sounds danceable, and is using its drama and sense of momentum to engage feet as well as some slightly macabre minds – dammit, it obviously is possible.

In common with a lot of Brandon’s work, I also don’t think it’s perfect. The lingering on moody atmospherics for the first few minutes feels overstretched, and there’s a slight sense in places that this is a cut and shut assembly of Egan and Brandon’s separate ideas; the way the track evolves and resolves itself doesn’t feel as clean as it might be. Nonetheless, there’s a sense once again that Brandon wasn’t ever going to settle on the “growl a few mysterious and dramatic lyrics over some second hand Joy Division riffs” stand-by so commonly heard elsewhere in these charts. “Original Sin” may not be a knockout single, but it’s a very surprising and enjoyable one, and its slow climb to the top of the NME Indie Chart is understandable.

Of course, it was technically a double A side with a re-release of Theatre of Hate’s “Westworld”, which we’ve already covered. It’s not clear why that was tucked away as part of the package, except perhaps to remind more casual fans of who was behind the record – I suspect a record billed as The Senate alone might have struggled to get as far as this one did.

33c. New Order - Blue Monday (Factory)

Returned to number one on 12th November 1983 for one week

Groundhog Day hits us again as "Blue Monday" jumps up from number three to reclaim the top spot from This Mortail Coil. Let's look at what's happening further down the... oh.

The fact is, this event also occurred on a very dull and uninteresting week where there are only three new entries, of which one is a future number one, and another is just an old record we've already covered with its B-side flipped to the plug position. Let's not make a big song and dance about this, let's just get this covered and move on to the main entry tomorrow, I think....

New Entries (such as they are)

24. Alien Sex Fiend - Lips Can't Go (Anagram)

Peak position: 9

There are very few groups on the goth circuit whose career has ridden the greatest crests of the movement and also the most loveless troughs, but Alien Sex Fiend have persisted against all the odds, throwing an album into the shops every decade since the eighties (with the exception of the 2020s, though I suspect it's only a matter of time).

This is remarkable as unlike some of their more well-known peers, they never really had a watershed moment. Their only album to get inside the mainstream charts was "Maximum Security" in 1985, which spent one week at number 100; beyond that, they've never graced the Guinness Book of Hit Singles or Albums with their presence. 

"Lips Can't Go" probably gives you an idea about why. The first time I played this a couple of weeks ago, I got so pissed off with its unshifting, minimal electro-racket that I gave up halfway through. Just now, however, I found myself almost enjoying its clattering, pulsing, horror-comic dirginess, and who knows, a third play might actually spark something. You can also hear the approach of groups like Nitzer Ebb and even Front 242 in its basic sound, proving that they were probably just as much on the side of the emerging industrial music as the sounds of the kids in that Batcave.

28. The Escalators - The Munsters Theme (Big Beat)

Peak position: 28

This was originally released as the flipside to their single "Monday", but Big Beat obviously noticed that it was starting to pick up more attention and subsequently ran off some new picture sleeves with "The Munsters" being promoted as the A-side instead... and here we are. In any ordinary week I'd stick the boot up this one and refuse to dignify it with more than a link to the relevant video - it's a re-release in all but name - but we're not exactly spoiled for choice right now.

Questions should probably be asked about why exactly a twang-tastic sixties instro take on The Munsters theme should have been getting attention nobody intended it to receive, and there are probably a couple of key things going on here; firstly, there's the minor factor that Channel 4 had started screening old episodes of The Munsters on British TV in the late afternoons, causing it to pick up new appreciation from schoolkids, students and the unemployed. Then, of course, there was the fact that goths were growing in number and desperate to pick up anything which had any associations with the ghoulish, freakish and bizarre. While The Escalators weren't courting that audience at all, it's safe to assume that a fair few of them bought this record. 

It's actually a very effective cover which sharpens up the original theme in the way those cynical approximations of popular television tunes did on Decca, Columbia and Pye in the early sixties. The group's guitars sound sharp as pins and have the clean, preppy tones of an instrumental rock era which is now largely ignored by most music listeners. Even in 1983 it was a little bit too niche in its revivalisms for its own good, which probably explains its inability to climb higher up the indie chart. 

For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number One In The Official Charts

Billy Joel: "Uptown Girl" (CBS)

38. Depeche Mode - Everything Counts (Mute)

4 weeks at number one from w/e 13th August 1983

“With someone like Crass, all you can get drawn in by is the lyrics and that’s it… the music is so hard that a lot of people won’t go near it. But with ‘Everything Counts’ they’ll give it a chance and then they’ll hear the lyric” – Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode talking to X Moore, NME 17th September 1983.

The crisis continues. Crass may have vacated the number one spot, heaving the doors open and drunkenly chanting as they left, but the broader British malaise continued; the problem of what being left-wing meant in a society where Thatcherism and the harder edges of capitalism were portrayed as the only answer. You would have expected Crass to have something to say on the matter but Depeche Mode? Politics didn’t really seem to be their thing.

There had been hints of it on “A Broken Frame”, of course, but only in an obvious, non-committal way. Their sinister anti-Hitler Youth deep cut “Shouldn’t Have Done That” didn’t say anything new beyond “Fascism is a bad idea”; something even a Daily Telegraph reader could have got on board with (back in those days at least. Who knows now?) At the time, too, the sleeve offered little, the image of a peasant woman with a scythe being only the barest of hints.

In 1983, their third album “Construction Time Again” emerged with the cover art showing a man swinging a large hammer over his head while standing high on a mountainside, backed by an antiseptic mouthwash sky. It looked like something from a political propaganda poster, an idealised, romanticised view of the European working man. A few critics and fans were quick to spot something else – what if the scythe on the sleeve for “A Broken Frame” could also be interpreted as a sickle? What were they trying to tell us?

While Depeche Mode didn’t design their own sleeves, “Construction Time Again” wasn’t shy about the band’s left-leaning political ideas. It was an album I bought as a teenager and instantly fell in love with, because it expressed its ideas so starkly and simply, echoing my own emerging thoughts without clouding the messaging with doubts or ifs and buts. These days, some of it feels naive and the album has toppled in my estimations as a result – at its most preachy, there’s a thin line between the broad socialism they present on tracks like “Pipeline” (“Taking from the greedy, giving to the needy”) and “Shame” (“Do you ever get that feeling when the guilt begins to hurt/ seeing all the children wallowing in dirt”) and Michael Jackson at his most pious.

The key difference here, the artistically (rather than lyrically) revolutionary aspect, is that Depeche, influenced by the industrial music scene sprouting around them, introduced a digitally sampled crashing and clattering to the simple sentiments, not new in itself, but certainly a fresh idea in a pop context – its release date even beats ZTT’s debut record, The Art of Noise’s “Into Battle EP”, by some margin.

The record’s uneasy, irate mood was influenced by Martin Gore’s world opening up beyond the confines of South East Essex. Having travelled to Thailand and witnessed crippling poverty, then returning home again to comfort, he became struck by the concept of a world shrinking thanks to the availability of technology and air travel, but failing to ‘eradicate its problems’ despite the glaring obviousness of the disparity between wealth and poverty. The excuses of ignorance and television’s distancing effect could not longer be leant on if the problem was right there, literally in front of most of us, and also very literally begging and appealing to our better nature.

“Everything Counts” is so central to the album’s theme that it appears twice – once in full, at the end of Side One, then again as a brief, muted reprise at the end of Side Two, nudging us in the ribs gently. Its initial appearance is far from subtle. It begins with a grinding, panning, metallic effect, like the work of a panel beater echoing around a mountain valley, then adds large, cinematic, sombre notes and a wailing, unearthly Shawm noise created by a synthesiser. Within barely twenty seconds, the track has managed to enter into conflict with itself; modernity versus ancient art, progress against tradition.