110. Sugarcubes - Coldsweat (One Little Indian)

Three weeks at number one from 6th February 1988

Sometimes releasing a unique, spellbinding single as your debut can be disadvantageous; it can end up defining a group or an artist beyond reasonable bounds. In the case of The Sugarcubes, “Birthday” may have dominated the indie charts for months and caused Cocteau Twins fans to have spasms, but anyone who bought the twelve inch version will also have heard the extra track “Cat” on side two – a different beast, with hip-wiggling yet irregular grooves revving towards a chorus which consisted of Bjork singing “Cat cat cat” delightedly.

It indicated to anyone paying attention that there were clearly two ways The Sugarcubes could go next – the wobbling, anxious balladry of “Birthday”, which seemed to be what critics expected, or something which was more straightforward, while still not being common-or-garden pop music. “Coldsweat” was the group’s answer, a single which Bjork later vaguely referred to as a “mickey-take” of love songs.

That’s something of an understatement. Ballads typically either represent uncertainty and devastation or celebrate a couple slowly being pulled into their own divine, magnetic forcefield (albeit one which might be peppered with a few complications if the songwriter is interesting enough). “Coldsweat” is having none of this. It presents love as a war, a battle, a conquest – and if you’re smiling knowingly and reaching towards the comments box to mention Pat Benatar’s mainstream hit “Love Is A Battlefield”, it far outguns that. If Pat Benatar presents romance as the theme to an action chase in a Hollywood film, “Cold Sweat” is closer to snuff porn.

The opening lines are “Meat meat blood blood sweat sweat meat”, uttered by the group’s dependable backing growler Einar, before Bjork eventually elaborates “This is hot meat/ This is metallic blood/ This is hot meat/ This is open sweat” and later on warns (or teasingly promises?) “With your own breath/ I’ll tear your lungs” and “I will not finish/ Til I’m fully satisfied”. It makes Depeche Mode’s “Master And Servant” seem delicate; sex and romance here aren’t presented coyly, or even necessarily as (conventionally) fun. Instead, it compares that desire to an almost comical animalistic hunger, where bodies are used like the produce of butcher’s shops, and Bjork is cast not as a fantasy figure or a femme fatale, but a black widow spider devouring her partner once the copulation is over.

The arrangement underneath bares close to no relationship to “Birthday”, unless of course we consider its occasional proclivity to tilt and judder like a vehicle with a warped wheel. Nor, really, is it entirely akin to “Cat”, though its nearer to that song on the spectrum. Instead, almost funky guitar-work and throbbing basslines combine with Bjork’s vocals, which on occasion resembles an almost feline wailing and on others a full-bodied, threatening human snarl.

Her voice dominates Sugarcubes tracks so much that there’s a tendency to overlook what the band are doing, and critics frequently wrote glib lines about The B52s and Talking Heads. Both are clear influences, but is it just me who can also hear the off-kilter funk of Happy Mondays here too? That hesitant, sinister groove belongs to the ill-at-ease likes of “Tart Tart”. Here it’s less spindly and more defined, a harder-edged performance, but the instrumental breaks contain a kind of sinister indie-funk we’ve heard before, just not in this particular context. The paranoid, uneasy romance of Yoko Ono’s “Walking On Broken Ice” is another possible reference point here.

“Coldsweat” is no more commercial a single than “Birthday”, and in its own way, no less disturbing – it’s just that while the former sounded like a colourful and strangely decorated cry for help, the latter casts Bjork as the threat, the wild animal on the prowl, the hunter, not the quarry.