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.

54. This Mortal Coil - Kangaroo (4AD)

Six weeks at number one from w/e 6th October 1984

I’m attending a small party in Christmas 1991, close to where the suburban sprawl of Southend necks the border of Basildon. It’s the kind of place you can easily get lost – and later that evening I do – because the estate was mass built in the late sixties and there are few distinguishing features to identify one block from the next. Premoulded houses with wooden slats and red brick exteriors face each other dryly, failing to celebrate their similarities. If they could talk, they’d wearily say “Oh, you again” to each other (They would say nothing to the humans who lived in them, of course, for that would be silly).

It’s the third or fourth such gathering I’ve been to that season. Things are changing as we become much older teenagers. The parents have all communicated to each other that we’re actually quite dull, dependable kids who aren’t in the habit of accidentally setting fire to homes, so more front doors start to open up while Mums and Dads enjoy their first taste of total freedom in years. The first thing I hear as I walk through the door on this occasion is Teenage Fanclub’s “Bandwagonesque” playing on the stereo, an album I also got as a gift that Christmas. I announce my approval of the choice of record, and murmurs of agreement fill the room, but then one kid – the slightly bitchy, oh-so-cool one with enough money to buy loads of records – corrected us all.

“Teenage Fanclub are nothing”, he sneered. “If you want to hear music like this done properly, you need to listen to Big Star, that's who they’ve spent most of their lives ripping off”.

So it went probably up and down the land in 1991, with pedestrian indie kids being corrected by the oh-so-cool ones like small children getting reprimanded by their babysitting older brothers. And if Big Star were widely seen in the eighties and nineties as one of the “great lost bands” to impress your friends with, then their final album “Third/Sister Lovers” – belatedly released in 1978, four years after it was completed – was the real work to test their mettle with. If their first two albums were (broadly speaking, though I'm fearful of another comment from a grown up oh-so-cool kid) power pop, that one was less assured and often more broken sounding; the work of a group with an increasingly fragile member (Alex Chilton) who had given up caring about petty concerns such as “commercial potential”.

“Kangaroo” is one of the more uncomfortable tracks on the album, being a slow junkyard busk about one man’s pervy squeeze against a woman at a party. There are moments where it sounds woozy in a distinctly druggy way, but it’s hard to escape the air of menace too – the sense that a scruffy, dazed Chilton rubbing his crotch on you in 1974 wouldn’t be something you’d choose to document yourself except in horror or fury. “I came against/ Didn't say excuse/ Knew what I was doing,” the song croaks. You can almost see his sloppy grin. It’s not an easy listen and only the fact the song sounds tranquillized saves it from being disturbingly unrelatable – somehow, imagining it as a dream or a half-asleep mishap makes it seem less sordid.

While recording This Mortal Coil’s debut album “It’ll End In Tears”, Ivo Watts had his heart set on including a version of “Kangaroo”, but his approach to the assembled musicians that day in the studio – Scottish experimenter and Cindytalk member Cinder Sharp, Simon Raymonde of the Cocteaus, and Martin McCarrick of Marc Almond’s Mambas – was unorthodox. None had heard the track before, and he played it only a few times to get them to understand its essence.