95. Rose of Avalanche - Always There (Fire)

One week at number one on 11th April 1987

By the late eighties, the goth movement – if it could sensibly be called a "movement" – had become one of the most unbudging aspects of alternative music. I’ve now spent over two years writing this blog, covering six years worth of music; goth was there from the off with Bauhaus and The Birthday Party, and their surviving (metaphorical) kin and offspring only seemed to get stronger and reach ever-larger audiences following their demise. Goth didn’t fade from view like anarcho-punk or the quirkier jolts of New Wave, it sat enigmatically in the corner of the nightclub recruiting more and more people to its cause.

As the decade progressed, a pattern emerged which is typical of most sub-genres and movements; there were groups deemed goth royalty whom nobody was allowed to blaspheme against, whose inevitable second-week chart peak appearances on Top of the Pops were deemed victories for the sect. Beneath those honoured few, however, lay scores of bands who might, if they were lucky and a fair wind was behind them on a Spring afternoon, score a high placing indie chart entry. Despite this, they would never be radio playlisted or let close to any television programme which wasn’t The Tube or the Oxford Roadshow, and as such would remain fringe concerns. Your Dad might have sung along to The Cure’s “The Lovecats” when it came on the radio, but he wasn’t getting anywhere near Red Lorry Yellow Lorry’s “Open Up” (though nor would you have wanted him to - I mean, imagine that).

Sometimes, if the indie charts were soft and not much else was happening, they might even score a number one. We saw this with the March Violets in the typically sleepy August of 1984, and Rose of Avalanche repeat the trick again close to the Easter period of 1987. They were always one of the more straightforward goth bands; loyal to their leaden, reverb-heavy and spartan drumbeats, sombre melodies and slowly scaling ideas which sometimes stretched beyond the five minute mark (their single prior to this one, “Velveteen”, was an epic tribute to Nico which is probably their most enduring song in both length and subsequent reputation).

In common with many goth bands, they disputed ever being part of the movement, and in this case I’ll sympathise. They often seemed like university students who had tried too hard to impress the kids who dressed like Velvet Underground members in their first year, and found themselves shunned and dealing with their next closest compatriots instead. Never quite hip enough, always wondering what might have happened if they’d just played it a bit cooler during Fresher’s Week.

They were, to all intents and purposes, a band who could just as easily have been on Creation and hanging out with Pete Astor and Bobby Gillespie. They loved psychedelic rock and The Doors, they wore leather jackets and sunglasses at night, and they weren’t against wearing paisley clothing. As you’d therefore expect, their music occasionally lifted its head out of the mourning bow to shuffle, boogie and stride; they were never averse to a simple garage rock chorus or an airy, stoned rock-out.

Which is essentially where we come in with “Always There”, which sadly isn't a cover of Marti Webb's version of the "Howard's Way" theme, but a pretty jangle and stride through verses and choruses you wouldn’t be surprised to find on a sixties obscurities compilation. If the chorus of “I know death won’t find us” is very goth indeed, its surrounding melodies, harmonies and production would have been equally at home on a House Of Love single. Their only drawback is their straightforwardness – where Terry Bickers would have found space to scrape and wail around unpredictably, The Rose of Avalanche are steadfastly loyal to the central rhythm and riff, seeming afraid to wander too far off the track in case they lose grip of the plot.

In that sense, then, they were very goth; the band themselves acknowledged this paradox, calling themselves “too rock for goths, too goth for rockers”. Many of the minor goth acts clutched on to their basic ideas and drum machine patterns tightly, offering a shady safeness from guitar hero licks or skittering dancefloor rhythms; there’s a reason that many goths held Joy Division close to their bosoms but could be faintly sniffy about New Order, and it had everything to do with the way the latter used their drum machine to lift feet off the floor rather than keep them anchored with a dead weight.

87. Half Man Half Biscuit - Dickie Davies Eyes (Probe Plus)

One week at number one on 26th October 1986

“Mention The Lord Of The Rings just once more/ and I’ll more than likely kill you” - there aren’t many better opening lines to songs than that. Even Neil Tennant had to highlight just how well Nigel Blackwell had nailed a common frustration with eighties life; the Tolkien obsession overhanging from the seventies into the squat and bedsit walls of the eighties student and doley generation.

This single once came up for discussion when I was in the pub with friends, and we all realised that when we first heard the song, each of us related the opening line to somebody we knew (although admittedly three of us were all thinking of the same individual). Every damn one of us knew someone who, however unrelated the conversation, would find some unlikely way of relating the situation back to Tolkien’s works. These days the opening line would probably have to be about Terry Pratchett or Doctor Who, but in the eighties and the early part of the following decade, Middle Earth still held a surprisingly firm grip.

Perhaps partly for those reasons, “Dickie Davies Eyes” is Half Man Half Biscuit’s strangest and bleakest early work; whereas their other material prior to this point had been a knowing, jokey three chord thrash through daytime television and the suburban shopping parade, DDE begins with opening instrumental lines that can’t decide if the song wants to be maudlin or jaunty. That marching drum beat seems to be designed to push bottoms off sofas towards a waltz with a partner, but the organ seems to be playing an anonymous fugue for somebody’s funeral. It doesn’t feel like much of a joke, and it continues in the same vein despite Nigel Blackwell’s lyrical interventions.

Besides Tolkien, it references football commentator Brian Moore, whose “head looks uncannily like London Planitarium” – a line which would eventually become the title of a football fanzine – the erotic Cadbury’s Flake adverts doing the rounds on television, and science fiction writer Michael Moorcock. Unlike their other tracks, it feels unfixed, drifting, the sharp observational eye replaced by an indecisive pre-REM sleep brain, picking up the frustrated or underwhelming memories of the day. Blackwell sings not with a rant or a cry, but a mumble, to himself rather than anyone else.

For a long time, I regarded this as one of the least satisfactory HMHB songs as a result. Blackwell’s lyrics are usually razor sharp – as a lyricist, his output is usually far funnier than most comedy poets, whose wit is often blunted by an apologetic tweeness and bounciness (performance poets are often slightly embarrassed about their craft and are desperate to try and make friends with the audience as quickly as possible). “Dickie Davies Eyes” is, by comparison, adrift on a coffee table raft in the middle of what passes for a frustrating friend’s living room, desperately grabbing at the detritus in the hope that something might provide a helpful anchor.

At some point in the last ten years, though, I’ve decided I actually like that. For one thing, the instrumentation on this is interesting and sometimes gets stuck in my head by itself – a queasy folky jaunt which sounds as if it might ordinarily be accompanying a tale of the sole survivor of an ancient shipwreck. Half Man Half Biscuit have been compared to folk music a few times in more recent decades, and you can hear the beginnings of that on this single. Punk rock it isn’t, except for the aspects which despair of hippy culture.

The promotional video also feels as if it ties in neatly with the surrounding C86 movement (whether that was Blackwell’s intention or not). The poet, musician and artist Edward Barton once said that the streets of the eighties seemed to be filled with discarded children’s toys from Boomer children who had grown up, their infant years left abandoned at the kerbside. Barton saw poetry and meaning in this and collected and appropriated them in various ways, as did less obviously “artistic” people like Stephen Pastel who could be found playing with battered Action Man toys at people’s parties. The video features endless examples of such childish behaviour, presented blankly and almost through a fog of boredom. If The Pastels seemed thrilled to be back out in the back garden playing with Stretch Armstrong again, Blackwell and his cohorts seemed to be pointing towards this discarded kinder-trash as the only thing that was freely available to him on a bored Tuesday (though the ride in the mechanised child’s toy in the shopping centre must have cost at least ten pence).