Three weeks at number one from 1st March 1986
At the time of writing this, I’m ploughing through Justin Lewis’s marvellous book “Into The Groove”, which performs the unenviable job of trying to tie together the hundreds of narratives around eighties music. How you remember the decade probably depends an awful lot on a wide variety of factors besides the big headline events – how old you were, where you lived, how much money you had, and ultimately what mattered to you most; the microscopic silk threads that weave in a dizzying number of directions.
It’s not that the eighties is the decade where audience fragmentation becomes the norm, but you can just about see the 21st Century and its cornucopia of unmixed, niche experiences on the horizon. Underground and DIY movements, started by people with perhaps more ideas than financial sense, and invisible to most but their small target audiences, began to feel more viable. For club music, urban pirate stations cropped up which were avidly followed by those in the know, creating surprise hit singles for artists nobody in the mainstream media (apart from the likes of James Hamilton) were writing about. Numerous low-budget indie labels, fanzines and club nights also popped up, all collectively pushing a roughly shared agenda and creating a scene which could see a good single by a relatively new band selling 10,000 copies with only minimal bites of mainstream exposure.
Amidst the avalanche of short-lived indie labels around the period, 53rd and 3rd is one which seldom seems to get written about, despite having an enormous cultural clout for a couple of years, almost exclusively releasing records by the kind of groups we would refer to as “indiepop” these days (and far ahead of bigger cult labels like Sarah Records).
Launched in Scotland in 1985 with Stephen McRobbie (of The Pastels), David Keegan (of The Shop Assistants) and Sandy McLean (of early indie Fast Product) running affairs, their sleeves were amateurish and none-more-indie, usually consisting of smudged designs in two colours. The contents inside matched the artwork, being simple, frequently fey, cheaply recorded and sometimes scratchy pop tunes performed by usually very young or naive bands. Their roster, if you could call it that, is essentially everyone any self-respecting indie kid of the era has heard of; Talulah Gosh, BMX Bandits, The Vaselines, The Pooh Sticks and Beat Happening all at least passed through. Their catalogue numbers usually began with AGARR, which stood for “As Good As Ramones Records”, thereby solidly etching a firm ambition on all their output, right in the middle of the run-out grooves.
For Stephen McRobbie aka Stephen Pastel, the enterprise might have been motivated by his recent experiences on Creation Records (although we’d have to ask him). His group had recently been booted off the label alongside a number of others during an Alan McGee organised clear-out, partly motivated by criticisms from his artists about what the label now represented and how he was handling their affairs. If Creation had once seemed like a convenient safehouse for oddballs and mavericks, the artists residing there had perhaps not appreciated how ambitious McGee truly was, which became only too apparent during the Jesus & Mary Chain’s first run of success. He suddenly stopped being the over-excitable man who folded single sleeves with his friends and associates until the early morning, and instead became a sunglasses-at-night wannabe McLaren figure.
53rd and 3rd backed completely away from grand statements and kept themselves firmly on the amateur side of the street. Despite this, their first release “Safety Net” quickly climbed to the top of the indie charts, and unlike The Sisterhood or Easterhouse before it, remained there for more than one token week, far above the current Depeche Mode single “Stripped” and also outpacing new contenders such as The Wedding Present and The Mighty Lemon Drops.
It was, despite their amateur aesthetic, a strong opening statement for the label. The Shop Assistants had been slowly building up an audience since 1984 with releases on various labels, and their previous single “Shopping Parade” had peaked at number 3 in the indie listings. The group – a mixed gender quintet – had also spent some of 1985 benefitting from national support slots with Jesus & Mary Chain, bringing them to much larger audiences than they would have experienced had they been stuck on pub bills with the Jasmine Minks or A Witness. On top of that, their work and live shows were cut through with a bonhomie which didn’t seem fake; without seemingly even trying, their interviews, video clips and even the records themselves made them sound like a joyful gang of people who could be your new best friends. In underground circles, where bands toured the country bumping into the same fanatical individuals in Norwich, Leeds and Bristol, that mattered. There was a sense of belonging.
If you were so minded, you could see “Safety Net” as being a very cynical move as a result. “Lucky you’ve a safety net/ lucky you’ve somewhere to go,” the song begins. The indiepop community was by this point becoming tight and solid friendships were forming – like most small music based cults, it contained people who may only have had a few slabs of vinyl and a surplus of idealism in common, but that seemed like enough to forge lasting bonds. The opening lines, then, could be addressed to the “lucky people” in the audience. “Afraid of dying and afraid of life/ But wishing we could stand around the stars again,” lead singer Alex Taylor sings again later on, addressing the simultaneous neuroses and child-like wonder of a lot of their fans.
It would be harsh to call it calculated, though. Musically, it’s poppy and sweet but undercut by the thorny scrape of cheap guitars and a bare, Mary Chain-esque backbeat. It couldn’t be trying less hard. If it’s an anthem, I’d argue it gets there by chance rather than strategic manoeuvres, purely by sharing themes common to twenty-somethings in an increasingly harsh economic environment.