32. Aztec Camera - Oblivious (Rough Trade)

Four weeks at number one from w/e 19th February 1983

Winter 1983 for me was a period of upheaval. The health of my grandfather had worsened, and a family decision was made to move out of suburban East London and deeper into Essex, to a house large enough to take everyone in. Moving to a new town meant I had to go to a new school, (struggle to) make new friends, and have a new guitar teacher, two traffic jam ridden miles from where we now lived. In my memories of those trips, it’s dark and raining and the orange streetlights created neon streaks through the grime on the windows of my Dad’s Datsun.

“Now remember,” he said on the way to the teacher’s house, “this is just a try-out. If you don’t get on with him or don’t like him, we can find you another”.

On the second or maybe third occasion, I saw he had a copy of XTC’s “English Settlement” propped up against his stereo and was quietly, shyly flabbergasted, but felt too nervous to mention it. None of my friends or family liked XTC. They were my own little obsession everyone was trying to coax me away from, for reasons of their own. My friends deemed them to be ugly old bastards. My parents felt they were “untalented New Wave rubbish, he can’t even sing”, whereas they were “punk rock” according to my brothers. My new guitar teacher had obviously found his way to them, though - and I decided that if he taught me badly (though he never did) or talked crap (which he sometimes did) he would always be forgiven as one of the enlightened ones, and I would stick with him.

A couple of weeks later he gently asked me what I was listening to at home and who my favourite bands were. I named XTC and he looked taken aback. “Well, they’re brilliant, but I wasn’t expecting that answer!” he replied. “Tell you what, if you want to listen to things which will help you think about your own work on the guitar, there’s someone else you might also be interested in...”

(I feared the worst at this point. Guitar teachers were always recommending Gordon Giltrap and Sky to me, usually with the justification “They’re in the pop charts and they’ll teach you a thing or two”. As if  a ten-year old was going to use their limited pocket money to buy a bloody Gordon Giltrap album.)

“Roddy Frame,” my teacher continued. “He’s got a band called Aztec Camera. He’s very young but he’s really good on the guitar. Great songwriter too”.

Aztec Camera were already familiar to me through occasional brief mentions in the music magazines, but I hadn’t heard any of their work. I made a mental note to turn up the radio when they next came on. I would have a long wait ahead, but “Oblivious” burst on to the airwaves on its re-release that autumn, and I taped it on to my cheap little silver radio-cassette player so I could listen to it again. 

I liked it a lot, but given my age, I had very limited financial means and even going out to buy a single from the local Woolworths required planning and forethought. For whatever reason, “Oblivious” didn’t make the cut, and nor did the album it came from, “High Land Hard Rain”. I could hear enough of what I wanted from it – tricksiness which was neither showy nor pretentious, a gorgeous hook in the chorus, haunting backing vocals, lots of ideas and movement – without loving it enough to commit any money from the piggy bank. 

Listening to “Oblivious” again, trying to approach it with fresh ears, I’m struck for the first time by the fact that my teacher’s suggestion was probably an attempt to be helpful, to try to find something similar that might be in roughly the same wheelhouse as “English Settlement”. The samba rhythm topped off with a busy acoustic guitar, zinging and zipping around, isn’t a million miles off an arrangement Partridge and Moulding might have tried for that album – unlike XTC, though, this song has sprung from the bones of a very young, optimistic man on the brink of better things, rather than a tired and weary songwriter with growing personal issues.

“Oblivious” is an unashamed bash at a pop hit on the songwriter’s own terms. It’s not simple, it’s not necessarily straightforward, and at its heart is arguably a bit too pleased with itself, but the restlessness, the hooks, the drive are so powerful and bright that they dazzle the listener enough to trojan horse the smart alec elements in. Even the acoustic guitar solo in the middle is almost too sunny, too happy with itself to sound accomplished, in the way that upbeat music often causes us to overlook any complexity. Frame finger picks one note for ages before flying off anywhere ambitious on the fretboard, almost taunting the listener not to expect any more effort.

9. The Exploited - Dead Cities (EP) (Secret)

 

Two weeks at number one from 31 Oct 1981

Intro/disclaimer – I walked into this with a crate full of simple ideas about The Exploited, who they were,  and what they stood for, but every time I attempted further research on the group a contradiction exploded behind me like a flash bomb, and I had to rewrite the entry slightly. Then it would occur again, and again, until I began to give up on any fixed ideas about the band at all. Were they misanthropic dumb-asses pretending to be anarchists, or were the neck pains I was getting from being pulled one way and then another proof that they were anarchists after all? Don’t answer that question. Just read on and hope for the best.

As a kid growing up, I became very aware of the slogan “Punk’s Not Dead” sprayed on brick walls in a wide variety of locations. At the time, I was (like most eight year olds) broadly ignorant of youth cults and subgenres and assumed that this slogan had emerged organically like a football chant, as if all the leftover punks in the eighties had hit upon the same idea at the same time. It seemed like a quick and simple way of saying “There are fewer of us, but we’re still here, and we need to let the world know in case they’ve stopped noticing the occasional flash of a spiky barnet in the local High Street”.

I didn’t really know anything about The Exploited and was therefore ignorant of their enormous cult LP “Punk’s Not Dead” which reached the mainstream Top 20 in 1981, selling tens of thousands of copies. Then one day, while watching Top of the Pops on the cheapo portable black and white television in the bedroom (the TV in the front room must have been reserved for whatever drama serial my parents were insisting on viewing in those pre-VCR days) the group appeared for two short minutes to deliver “Dead Cities”, a surprise Top 40 hit in 1981.

This didn’t feel like long enough for my eight-year old brain to process what was happening. I was very aware of punk rock, and even liked some of it – you couldn’t survive your infancy in the late seventies and remain ignorant – but this felt rougher, harsher, more threatening somehow. A rush of noise hit the television’s speakers accompanied by a hard, heavy looking group whose lead singer had a bright mohican, then there was a hyperactive flash of studio lights, a shot of a few game members of the TOTP audience pogoing, then it all seemed to be over as soon as it started. I never saw or heard from the group on the television or radio again. It felt as if a very strange mistake had occurred, an unauthorised interruption, a 1981 styled precursor to the Max Headroom incident.

I wasn’t impressed so much as stunned and dumbfounded, though other older people apparently complained to the BBC. I quickly forgot the name of the band, and there were moments in the pre-Internet years that followed where I wondered if it might be a false memory and I was actually recalling a performance on The Tube or another Channel 4 programme.

If the BBC complaints might have seemed petty to anyone not in the know (and I’m sure a great deal of them were from irritated Mums and Dads in St Albans who were equally ignorant of the band) the fact remains that The Exploited were not entirely unproblematic. They began pressing their own records back in their home city of Edinburgh in 1980, and immediately set out their stall with the debut EP “Army Life”, which came with the message “To all the Edinburgh punks and skins – keep on mod-bashing!” on the rear of the sleeve. Later, when performing a gig around the corner from a Jam concert, their lead singer Wattie suggested on-mic that their audience should kick a few mod’s heads in outside the venue. A number of them did as he wished, leading to street battles between Jam fans (many of whom probably weren’t mods anyway) and The Exploited’s following.

What’s fascinating about this incident is it reveals how polarised the punk scene had become. Deeply fundamentalist attitudes were beginning to slip in as interest declined. The Jam and their fans began in the seventies by reasonably comfortably co-existing with the rest of the movement, then eventually became pariahs, too successful, too clean-cut, not enough of a threat to society, in need of something to worry about.

6. Birthday Party - Release The Bats (4AD)

 

Number one for three weeks from 5th September 1981

While many interviews have revealed his uniquely dry sense of humour, Nick Cave isn’t particularly renowned for his way with a catchphrase or punchline. In the mid-nineties, you could shove Jarvis Cocker – a man who isn’t averse to a bit of spite and darkness himself - on a panel show and be assured of a few cheeky giggles, but it’s safe to say that nobody called Nick Cave’s manager about putting him on Pop Quiz.

So it's strange to listen to “Release The Bats” afresh for the first time in decades, years after it last pummelled my ears during Friday nights at the Rayleigh Pink Toothbrush (goths welcome), and notice both how camply brilliant it is and how indebted to simple sloganeering. For a track which is largely regarded as spearheading the gothic movement, it owes a far bigger debt to Joe Meek and Screaming Lord Sutch than Joy Division or Bauhaus, taking the ketchup and cleavage gore of a thousand cheap Hammer spin-offs as its source text.

“Bite! Bite!” demands Cave at the start, before asking loudly but almost incoherently “Tell me that it doesn’t hurt/ a hundred fluttering in your skirt?” an image which is immediately ludicrous rather than disgusting.

The track, like many Birthday Party singles, starts as it means to continue, like an unchallenged steamroller slowly crumpling up the edge of the street where the parked cars live. There’s no discernable chorus, just a continued barrage of stabbed guitar lines, catchphrases (which as the song progresses descend into excited gibberish such as “sex horror sex bat sex sex horror sex vampire”) and Cave ripping himself into a state of either ecstasy or fury. He seems conflicted about the bats, wanting to destroy them (or “explode” them) as much as he wants to celebrate them, like a wildlife preservation officer who happens to have some living in his attic.

The drumming is also worthy of mention here; in common with a lot of the indie chart entries I’ve been listening to for this period of 1981, the near complete aversion to a cymbal or a hi-hat is both notable and strangely typical. Martin Hannett famously got the ball rolling on this percussive style with Joy Division, but it also became adopted by acts whose debt to Joy Division was less immediately obvious – Felt, for example, were also adding bottom-heavy percussion to their otherwise airy indie-pop compositions at this point. In The Birthday Party’s case, it anchors the sound down with those jazzy basslines, making “Release The Bats” bit-part punk racket with a strange unwieldy swing on top.