33b. New Order - Blue Monday (Factory)

Number One for five more weeks from 1st October 1983

Anybody who read the preceding entry to this one could hardly be surprised to find "Blue Monday" back at number one. The indie chart is more volatile to tracks yo-yoing around the listings than most, but even the National Charts couldn't shake themselves free of Blue Monday's broad and enduring appeal. As holiday makers returned from the club nights they'd enjoyed during the long, sticky summer of 1983, demand was reinvigorated and it ricocheted into the National Top Ten for the first time.

For what else went on while it enjoyed a second stay at the top, please see below.

Week One

7. The Fall - Kicker Conspiracy (Rough Trade)

Peak position: 3

Way before New Order's football record, here was The Fall's, with less ecstacy and more hot dogs, lager and weary references to football hooliganism. "Kicker Conspiracy" occasionally sees Mark E Smith at his least cryptic and most everyday - even a Cockney Rejects fan could understand what "Remember! You are abroad/ Remember! The police are rough!" is referring to - but then he veers back into the land of The Fall and manages to make the sport sound mystical and arcane. To this day, I haven't made my mind up what "Plastic, slime, partitions, cocktail, zig-zag, tudor bar" actually means (I suspect it's a reference to the gentrification of the big game, but leave your own ideas in the comments).

Still, this is as populist and immediate as early Fall gets, and it's a corker, its strident, military march feeling somewhat appropriate for a Saturday session. 

17. Depeche Mode - Love In Itself (Mute)

Peak position: 4

The least political track on "Construction Time Again" becomes the second and final single to be taken from it, and while it worked perfectly fine as the album's opener, something seems awry on 45, almost as if it's a hook or two short of becoming the pop anthem it truly wants to be. 

Still, the razzing, brassy synthetic intro is powerful enough to stop the track from being merely middling, and Gahan sounds almost livid while he ruminates on love and its actual meaning in a society filled with anything but. In 1982, Martin Gore asked us what the meaning of love was and sounded child-like. Here, he sounds like it might have dawned on him and he's now embittered. A year is a long time if you're in your early twenties.

The final synth solo at the end of this track sounds as if Alan Wilder is making things up as he goes along, and that mad spree gives the single a much needed final boost, but it wasn't enough - this was their first single to fail to reach the national top twenty since their debut "Dreaming Of Me" (it had to make do with a number 21 placing). 

20. Play Dead - Shine (Beggars Banquet)

Peak position: 10

23. Under Two Flags - Lest We Forget (Situation Two)

Peak position: 23

28. Combat 84 - Rapist (Victory)

Peak position: 23

Elsewhere in their catalogue, skinhead punk group Combat 84 ranted and raved "Fuck Off CND!" and "It's better to be dead than red!" On this one, they go into an irate diatribe about how all rapists should be hung. "We want capital punishment!" they demand.

Their politics were much debated at the time, but hardly really need to be guessed at here. Remember - the indie charts are a very broad church. 

13. The Damned - Friday the 13th (EP) (NEMS)

 

One week at number one on 12th December 1981

The thirteenth number one of 1981, and indeed of the NME Indie Charts in general, is The Damned’s “Friday the 13th EP” – a neat coincidence, or perhaps a case of demonic interference?

It’s certainly a rare victory for punk’s old guard whether Satan’s stinking finger nudged them to the top or not. The indie charts of 81 were generally dominated by Gary Bushell approved second wave acts, with the old school 70s bands with new homes on small labels clinging on in the foothills; if punk wasn’t exactly dead, it certainly seemed as if some of its original proponents were living in less assured circumstances.

Of all those groups, The Damned couldn’t be more “first wave” if they tried – they were the first UK band to issue a punk rock single in the form of “New Rose” and the first to push an album out. Unlike many of the more serious-minded acts who quickly usurped them, The Damned were cartoonish rogues, a hammer horror Ramones offering scuffed-up hyper garage rock. None of their songs offered clear manifestos or pushed ideologies, even for effect, unless of course “Can a man be a mystery man/ can a doll be a baby doll” is code for something I don’t fully understand. I suppose you could even argue that “Problem Child” off the second LP “Music For Pleasure” is a punk throwback to Cilla Black’s “Liverpool Lullaby”, but let’s forget I even thought of that idea.

The second album was a huge problem child in its own right, though. The Damned’s love of sixties psychedelia led them to approach Syd Barrett to produce the record, which inevitably came to nought. Pink Floyd’s drummer Nick Mason took on the job instead as a consolation prize, and produced a negatively reviewed and poorly selling record in “Music For Pleasure”. So underwhelmed were critics and fans alike by the disc that it contributed to the group’s split afterwards.

Perhaps understanding that they had handled a typical case of second album syndrome too hastily, the group reformed without the original guitarist Brian James for the “Machine Gun Etiquette” album in 1979, which charted (unlike its predecessor) then pushed out “The Black Album” in 1980 which saw them broadening their palette and gradually moving away from their original punk sound. While goth wasn’t yet popularly understood as a musical genre in 1980, Dave Vanian’s vocals became deeper and eerier while the clanging of bells could occasionally be heard beneath the group’s toughened up (and incredibly well performed) R&B sounds – on some moments like the superb opening track “Wait For the Blackout”, it’s possible to visualise the group as The Pretty Things or The Downliners Sect with Lord Sutch on guest vocals after having had some valuable singing lessons.

Of all the punk groups, The Damned were generally the most open about their previous influences and also closer to the musos punk meant to replace. Captain Sensible once expressed outrage that The Pistols stole the Damned’s thunder, commenting that he bought a copy of “Anarchy In The UK”, desperate to hear what “our rivals” had produced, and feeling aghast when he heard “Old Man Steptoe singing”. They may have been fast, raucous, chaotic and even extremely daft, but they were probably always closer to their pub rock cousins than most of the emerging set; good musicians with sixties influences creating an exhilarating noise. They were therefore assured a longevity that a lot of the earliest 100 Club and Roxy hopefuls were never going to achieve.

Despite being somewhat unexpectedly produced by New Musik's Tony Mansfield, the “Friday the 13th EP” is really a sharp dose of more of the same, with lead track “Disco Man” pulling up water from the same well; those vocal harmonies, sharp guitar riffs and thumping backbeats don’t lie. “Limit Club” even combines gothic atmospheres with sixties psychedelia, proving that punk didn’t necessarily eliminate the hippies – it absorbed ideas from them too (the crossover between the hippy underground press and the fanzines also proved that the breaks weren’t as clean as everybody suggested).