53. The Smiths - William, It Was Really Nothing (Rough Trade)

Number one for four weeks from w/e 8th September 1984

Maybe it’s because I’m a Wire fan, but I’ve always admired compactness and brevity in pop*. The structure of the traditional pop or rock song usually involves heavy repetition, and however much indie groups claim to be outside the concerns of commerciality, they usually obey one of pop’s key principles – if you don’t hammer the fuck out of your song’s strongest hook, not only will it be less likely to get airplay, but any airplay it does receive won’t be noticed as much by the listeners.

By 1984, producers and bands were filling singles to their maximum run times, stuffing the turkey baster with the chorus and then ramming the grooves right up to the record label with its repetition. Even outside of some (mostly pointless and hastily cobbled together) extended twelve inch versions, songs often sprawled beyond their natural run-times and outstayed their welcomes.

“William, It Was Really Nothing” is probably my favourite Smiths song because it steps so far outside this usual structure while also fizzing to the brim with ideas. It comes across as a pile-up of grievances, a betrayed rant in song form, starting with an almost jaunty melody from Marr, before Morrissey whines “The rain falls hard on a humdrum town/ This town has dragged you down”, repeats himself, then adds “and everybody’s got to live their lives”. You’re immediately invited to envisage him strolling agitatedly through some red-brick suburban overspill with no discerning features.

It then makes a huge lyrical leap, using the town not as a reason to sympathise with the predicament of the person the song is aimed at, but to accuse them of building their own prison. William, whose life is “nothing”, is accused of staying with a fat girl – the only bit of the song I feel uncomfortable with, surely the main problem with her isn’t her obesity? - whose only aspiration in life seems to be marriage.

The song feels split in two halves. The first section sets the scene, and Marr and the rest of the Smiths are sprightly and busy throughout, setting you up for the idea that this is going to be an antsy tune about suburban ennui. Following the lines “God knows I’ve got to live mine”, though, things shift, the guitar begins to twang on a despairing line, then we get to the chorus and Marr’s fingers seem to blur through a furiously picked but very pretty and Byrdsian jangle. The chorus repeats once before the whole lot bends and folds like a house of cards, leaving only some ambient inconclusive guitar chords ringing.

It feels as if a tornado has appeared, thrashed around the edges of town, then left a few stray pieces of metal to rattle and sing out as it collapses. The effect is spectacular and surprisingly pretty – rarely do you hear a piece of music where betrayal and fury sounds so fussy and intricate, like a carefully designed doily with “fuck you” written in the centre – a song about courtship and romance where Marr’s guitar lines chime slightly like wedding bells in places, but do so with agitation not celebration.

Morrissey mentioned that “William It Was Really Nothing” was his attempt at writing an anti-marriage record for men, noting that women were always being told to leave their partners on singles, but men had little advice of their own to go on. There’s a slight tone of misogyny to the fact that he picked a “fat girl” as the central focus for “William” – I’m surprised female Smiths fans stood for this – but the song dares to observe that some women become unhealthily obsessed with marriage and begin to use it as a bargaining chip in relationships in a way men more often won’t.

27. Crass - How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead? (Crass)

Two weeks at number one from w/e 13th November 1982

Initially I was tempted to bundle this number one and Robert Wyatt’s “Shipbuilding” together in one entry. The double-whammy effect of two back-to-back number ones on the same political topic feels like the kind of thing which could only have happened in the indie chart – short of World War III, it’s hard to imagine the official national charts ever replicating the same phenomenon.

It also tells us something about how high feelings were running in British society at that point; whether people wanted the considered, empathetic jazz-pop of “Shipbuilding” or the downright savage “How Does It Feel…” or (more likely) neither, The Falklands War was a topic it was obviously difficult to look away from.

If “Shipbuilding” is an aerial view of a conflicted town populated with people struggling to see over the barrier of their own personal struggles towards a bigger societal tragedy, “How Does It Feel” is just visceral blame. Crass may have begun to fall out with the second wave punks who dominated the scene at this point, but lyrically speaking, they were the closest to the original punk spirit of 76 – while the likes of The Exploited fell back on simplistic chants and slogans and the odd cuss word, Crass damn near scream an entire diatribe on the Falklands conflict over the course of a mere three minutes, and even find time for some sloganeering in the dying few seconds.

“So keen to play your bloody part, so impatient that your war be fought/ Iron Lady with your stone heart so eager that the lesson be taught/ That you inflicted, you determined, you created, you ordered/ It was your decision to have those young boys slaughtered” – this is a world apart from the taut, staccato, monosyllabic machine-gun attack of most eighties punk. It has so much to say that the song itself feels as if it can barely contain the anger; each line is elasticated close to a snapping point before the release comes, followed by the next swollen, unyielding attack. Then the next.

If there’s a moment here where Crass feel like every other punk band of the early eighties era, it’s probably around the chorus. That’s when the drums punch, the vocals get guttural, and the group take apparent glee in the chief slogan, perhaps hoping that it will stir the tabloid press to respond. What’s interesting is how quickly the song then collapses away from that chorus and descends into mania. Unlike “Shipbuilding”, it’s not clever as such – though the lyrics do stand alone perfectly well as a form of ranting poetry, which couldn’t be said of any other track in the indie charts at this point – and nor is it tuneful, but its design and precision are hard and sharp. It sets out to wound, and while it’s doubtful Margaret Thatcher considered their views, there isn’t a single line that leans back from the attack. Every single one is a tiny bullet, a distinct and aggrieved opinion.

The distance between this and the kind of fag-end punk dross that’s littered the indie charts over the last year is obvious. The senile tail end of any subgenre generally tends to consist of groups who have enthusiastically bounded into the room only to immediately forget what they went there for – you can hear this in the worst of glam rock in 1975, the collapse of disco, and even the lad-friendly meat-and-potatoes rock of 1996 Britpop. All were filled with chancers who only remembered the basic tricks of their trade, devolving rather than evolving.

16. Theatre Of Hate - Do You Believe In The West World? (Burning Rome)

 

Number one for one week on 30 January 1982

The idea that the cold war exercised a clammy grip on the imagination of eighties pop is a dominant cliche. There’s plenty of evidence to back it up, obviously. Duran Duran clumsily used the frequently mocked “you’re about as easy as a nuclear war” line, and Ultravox penned one of the eeriest pop ballads ever, “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes”, and directed a child-melting video to go with it. Bigger and louder than either of those were Frankie Goes To Hollywood who spent nine weeks at number one with a record partially consisting of the actor Patrick Allen issuing post-nuclear bomb public information on top of agitated, urgent rhythms.

All those tracks emerged in 1983 or 1984, either around or not long after the point Ronald Reagan called the USSR an “evil empire” and the cold war entered its deepest freeze. Prior to that, while the threat was apparent, its shadow was perhaps more apparent in the atmosphere of some of the odder, more unsettled records to attract public excitement and attention; in that respect, it feels appropriate that “O Superman” was a huge seller in 1981 in a way I doubt it would have been five years earlier or later. Was it actually directly about nuclear war, though? Possibly not.

Records which actually directly referenced nuclear war, even in the indie chart, were relatively thin on the ground prior to that point, with tracks like UB40’s “The Earth Dies Screaming” being the exceptions that proved the rule. In general, most of the punk underground were more interested in issuing rattlingly irritated singles about the futility of war in general. The Exploited were particularly exercised by such matters, with lead singer Wattie’s previous career as a soldier serving in Northern Ireland feeding into his obsession with the futility of armed conflict.

“Do You Believe in the West World” was a bit of an exception, and emerged packaged in a provocative sleeve, signposting the actual meaning of the lyrics for anyone who wasn’t listening closely enough. Kirk Brandon uses a Western film backdrop as the canvas to scrawl his message on, offering us not very subtle hints such as “That was before the circus with the bear arrived/ oh the bear it roared as the gun was fired/ then the cowboy turned the gun on himself as he sang/ ‘no-one’s alive’”.

“Westworld” is actually a cunning and surprisingly rewarding single which seems to crush a wide range of influences into one song, from the obvious (actual Western films) to the more current. The track opens with a post-punk thunder of bottom-heavy tribal drumming, before allowing an almost funky rhythm guitar to slip in, as if to remind us that in the event of armageddon, Orange Juice and Edwyn Collins would be evaporated as well as Brandon’s more anguished music. 

As the track progresses and inevitably lets in some Morricone inspired twang, it also eventually permits a raging sax solo as well, making this sound like a condensed representation of rock and roll in the nuclear age. Whereas Theatre of Hate’s previous indie number one “Nero” was a static atmosphere piece with feet of clay, “Westworld” unfolds gracefully, managing more in its five minutes than most post-punk groups of the period bothered with.