92. The Smiths - Shoplifters Of The World Unite (Rough Trade)

Four weeks at number one from 14th February 1987

Oh, how we laughed when the assistant in our branch of Woolworths played this song on a busy Saturday afternoon. He was proudly ensconced behind the display copies of the Pepsi & Shirlie singles, spinning this record loudly enough that you could hear it as far back as the garden hose display. I’m sure his supervisor gave him a thorough ticking off, but if Morrissey had ever found out, he probably would have sent him a bouquet.

A man in his mid-twenties walked past me holding hands with his girlfriend tittering loudly for everyone’s benefit, “They might have thought harder before putting this one on!” The rest of the shopping trip was mundane, so it was a relief to be provided with some kind of anecdote to tell others about later – a sense that a hit single’s subversion had been appropriated in the correct way.

I didn’t expect our Saturday mission to buy lightbulbs and birdseed to be spent listening to what was the first new indie number one of 1987, and in all probability the first indie record of the year Woolworths would have stocked. Age of Chance’s dominance of the top slot for ten straight weeks seemed to have as much to do with the lack of action going on elsewhere as its cult popularity.

“Shoplifters Of The World Unite” was “one of those singles” from the off – the “Sorted For Es and Whizz” of its era, a single which was quietly looking for trouble while disguising its ambitions behind a passive-aggressive arrangement. Morrissey ducked the issue in the press a few times, perhaps wary of a radio ban, pointing out that the idea of “shoplifting” could be about creative theft as well as actual pilfering of goods. The song doesn’t make that clear anywhere, though. Instead, it talks about the protagonist's inevitable arrest (“A heartless hand on my shoulder/ A push and it's over/ Alabaster crashes down/ Six months is a long time”) and contains two lines I loved as a teenager, which are almost Martin Gore-ish in their simplicity: “But last night the plans for a future war/ Was all I saw on Channel Four” – though these days I tend to blanche a bit at the clumsiness and oddness of that quick triple rhyming scheme.

The title of the song makes it seem as if it could be another blundering, loud hippopotamus of a single akin to “Panic”, but while The Smiths have a more forceful sound here if compared to their earliest works, in reality it seems to encapsulate the sum total of the ideas in their career so far. Listen closely and you can hear the swampy rumble of “How Soon Is Now?” coming through Marr’s guitar in the verses, the glam descends of “Panic”, and the gentle melodic strum of “What Difference Does It Make”.

If I’ve made it sound like a cut-and-shut hack job by saying that, that’s not my intention – what it seems to be instead is a group realising the scope of their identity and playing all the cards to their advantage. If “Panic” and “Ask” sounded like slight departures from the usual route map, “Shoplifters” feels like a rounded and careful reiteration of the group’s strengths by comparison; one for the proud fans as well as the Woolworths shoppers, a hooky, contentious yet surprisingly delicate 45 which stood out both melodically and lyrically.

There were those, of course, who didn’t care for it, and in typical fashion fed the Morrissey shaped troll rather than rolling their eyes and walking on. Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens was incensed, referring to the track as an open ode to thievery, while Tesco threatened to sue Smash Hits for printing the song’s lyrics over the top of an image of one of their carrier bags. It’s difficult to understand what either party expected to achieve – I doubt the single inspired many people who weren’t already shoplifting to go out and give it a try, and the central message seemed to be about the hypocrisy of the fact that while bored people with light fingers serve prison time, those who engage with state sanctioned murder are lauded.

80b. The Mission - Serpent's Kiss (Chapter 22)

Two further weeks at number one from 12th July 1986

It's been awhile since we've seen a rebound number one on the NME Indie listings, but if you were settling comfortably in your seat expecting not to be interrupted again, you reckoned without the enduring popularity of "Serpent's Kiss". As soon as the already battle-weary "Almost Prayed" plummeted from the number one position, Hussey and co were ready to take back the throne again for a whole fortnight. 

As always, the only relevant question to ask at this point is "What was happening lower down the charts, then?"

Week One

13. Bogshed - Morning Sir! (Help Yourself)

Peak position: 4

Well, Bogshed pushed forward one of their best known singles for a start off. "Morning Sir!" is a delight and a curiosity in that it's one of the biggest and strangest hooks the indie chart saw in 1986, but the group lost none of their downright provocative oddness as a result. The chorus of "Morning Sir!" will stay in your brain for the rest of this week - indeed, I even thought about making it my mobile's alarm sound for a bit - but that doesn't stop the song as a whole from sounding warped, detuned, scuffed and discourteously kicked around. 

This is like modern-day skiffle if it were composed by village outcasts rather than handsome and clean-cut kids in Soho coffee bars which, in case you need telling, is a good thing. Suck on that, Terry and Gerry. 

20. Age Of Chance – The Twilight World Of Sonic Disco (Riot Bible)

Peak position: 20

The Age of Chance were rapidly getting closer to becoming one of the more "important" C86 acts, but at this stage, "Motor City" off the "Twilight World" EP shows no signs of them budging from their own tinny and uncompromising groove - it's stark, harsh and devilish, and as Steven E repeatedly urges "If you can get through my wall of sound" beneath the metallic beatings, it's hard not to hear it as a direct challenge to you, the listener. 

28. The Mekons - Hello Cruel World (Sin)

Peak position: 20

29. Hawkwind - Silver Machine (Samurai)

Peak position: 29

Week Two

14. The Creepers - Baby's On Fire (In Tape)

Peak position: 6

 

Marc Riley and his cohorts covering Brian Eno must have raised a few eyebrows in the old Fall camp at the time, with Mark E Smith doubtless opining that he was right to sack him. Nonetheless, in much the same way that his original group used cover versions as templates to scrawl their own impenetrable avant doodles over, The Creepers rip "Baby's On Fire" to pieces, making it somehow feel even more menacing as a caterwaul of sound builds up steadily with each instrumental break.

69. The Cult - Rain (Beggars Banquet)

Two weeks at number one from w/e 2nd November 1985

Back in the days when such things commonly existed, I sometimes wrote for a radical politics and music fanzine called “Splintered”. I haven’t kept any of my copies, but from memory, it was a ragbag of rants, reviews, articles and occasionally heartfelt opinion pieces from people with nowhere else to sensibly place their grievances; like most zines in that era, if somebody had a bee in their bonnet about anything from body image to the fact that Gaye Bykers on Acid had signed to a major label, the well-meaning editor often gave it the green light, typing it up then cutting, pasting and photocopying it into that fuzzy, washed out grey copy common to such organs.

One opinion piece in “Splintered” had such a lasting effect on the impressionable teenage me that I would quote it to friends endlessly. It talked about the rapid passing of time, and the way that youth wasn’t a period of life to be drifted through. Why, it argued, it’s literally the only period of your life when you’re likely to have the Energy to Experience new things and the gumption to create, so Do It Now. Pick up the pen, the guitar or the paintbrush – or even all three! - at once, or end up becoming one of those old, crabby no-marks who either did nothing, or has only just started to try, and has found out that in the winter of their lives, they are flapping, empty binbags with nothing left to say.

There were a number of individuals the article could have picked on to prove its point, but for some reason it zeroed in on Ian Astbury for particular abuse, pointing out that he had started his career as an innovative, considered lyricist for a sharp and original post-punk band, then reached his late twenties and found himself capable of little more than some monosyllabic “yeahs” and “babes”. What a disgrace he now was, we were told, and what more evidence did we need of the undignified effects of the ageing process, which removed all poetry from the soul.

I wonder what the author of that piece thinks now he’s in his fifties (or possibly even his sixties). I hope he’s kinder to himself, and also gentle to every other writer who is still compulsively Just Doing It and never knew how to stop.

Should he have been kinder to Ian Astbury? When Southern Death Cult first emerged in 1982, there was definitely something primitive and spiky about the group, the hard right angles of the rhythm section meeting Astbury’s commanding howls. His lyrics couldn’t really be described as poetry, but fulfilled the dank, morbid brief the group’s austere clattering provided him; the frame needed to be filled with theatric wordplay rather than flowery verse.

As the years progressed and the group’s membership changed, The Cult simplified not just their name, but their whole approach – gradually, at first, then by the point of “She Sells Sanctuary” the metamorphosis was complete. The Cult became not “just” a rock and roll band – they didn’t look like another Motley Crue, Poison or Twisted Sister, and they certainly didn’t sound like them either – but certainly something closer to one than not. For all the flowing goth clothes and mystic hand shapes they displayed onstage, their reliance on anthemic riffs, almost meaninglessly simple lyrics and the good, solid thunder of a reliable backbeat became central. They emerged from the confused tarpit of early British goth and ended up somehow influencing Guns N’ Roses. It seems an unlikely story.

If “She Sells Sanctuary” was a glorious mix of everything great about the commercial and underground aspects of mid-eighties rock music, “Rain” is just Desert Rock – an attempt at a rousing stomper tailor-made for a video featuring the band rolling through an arid landscape in a jeep (in the event, the promo defies your expectations and just sees the group pouting and throwing shapes on a studio stage set, so obviously Beggars Banquet’s budget didn’t stretch to a shoot in the outback).

Lyrically speaking, its complete rock conservatism, riddled with cliches - “Hot sticky scenes/ you know what I mean”, begins Astbury, “I've been waiting for her for so long/ Open the sky, and let her come down”. The rest of the song just repeats the lines “Here comes the rain”, “I love the rain”, “here she comes again” and the words in the first verse over and over, making it deeply minimalistic. Clearly the lyrics do their job and allow the listener to forge an accurate impression, but they’re so effortless as to be almost childlike.