23. Anti-Nowhere League - Woman (WXYZ)

Two weeks at number one from 10th July 1982

In January 1981, during the long period of mourning that followed John Lennon’s assassination, Geffen scored another number one single from his “Double Fantasy” album. Beginning with the murmured lines “For the other half of the sky”, “Woman” wasn’t just a pean to Yoko Ono – although he clearly had her in mind – but women in general; the sacrifices they make, the nonsense they potentially tolerate.

For all its good intentions, “Woman” periodically bordered on the sickly and mawkish. My mother put forward her verdict plainly and simply: “It’s a good single, but God he had a nerve to criticise Paul McCartney for being sentimental”. She allowed him a pass, though, and in common with millions of others bought the “Double Fantasy” album, absorbing it while still shaken about the man’s death, then admitting its flaws and filing it away as a souvenir from a strange emotional period; the “Candle In The Wind” of the eighties, if you will.

I have no idea if, a year-and-a-half later, Anti Nowhere League’s “Woman” was partially inspired by the identically titled Lennon single or not, but it’s certainly an interesting coincidence. If Lennon’s single is part appreciation, part apology, The League take the opposite tack and focus on the delusion of romantic love and the dark avenues it can take couples down – although when I say “couples”, I should perhaps refer only to the men in the relationship; if John Lennon’s “Woman” is about women, then Anti-Nowhere League’s “Woman” is actually about the frustrations of men, and in many ways that’s probably the cleverest thing about it (it really doesn't get more sophisticated than this, trust me).

The song begins as a ham-fisted rock ballad, filled to the brim with cliches. “You came to me in a dream, I'm sure/ You gave your love, you gave much more to me/ Woman, will you marry me?” Animal sings after a series of other deliberately soapy cliches, before the group begin to rattle and roll to the repeating, gnashed line “Til death us do part”. From that point forward, the song finds its punk feet, kicking and screaming disappointed abuse such as “Yeah, you're sitting on your arse in your dirty clothes/ You're looking a mess, you're picking your nose” and “Your tits are big but your brains are small/ Sometimes I wonder you got any brains at all”.

It’s the classic set-up for the old school working man’s club gag in song form, “Take my wife, for example… no, really, please take her” extended from a few seconds to three minutes. I wasn’t particularly familiar with “Woman” until I needed to listen to it for the purposes of this blog, and first time out, I understood very well that the fluffy, silky first minute was purely a set-up for an inevitable descent into scattershot abuse; anything else at this stage of the group’s career wouldn’t have made any sense. You can’t travel from “I Hate People” to “I Love My Wife” within the space of a few months, even if doing that would arguably have been a stranger and therefore more radical move.

Feminists would doubtless want to point out the failings in the song and its expectations of relationships, arguing that by idealising romantic partners and putting them on pedestals we set ourselves up for disappointment, and you can't punish someone for failing to live up to the image you projected on to them. By doing do, they would thereby risking falling short of Melody Maker critic Carol Clerk’s Law of The League: “Take them seriously and the joke’s on you”. The group would probably also be thrilled by the outrage.

As a result, arguably the only question worth asking is whether the gag’s execution works or not, and it has to be said, it lacks any real sleight of hand – it nudges, winks and nods so heavily at the listener during the first minute that only an idiot would be surprised by what follows, and it eventually feels more like a bunch of rugby players screeching through some unresolved frustrations in the sports club bar. A lot of the lyrics are also surprisingly conservative, even in jest; criticising the state of a woman’s personal laundry feels more like the subject of a Fabreze advert than a second-wave punk band’s third single. Getting angry about the tidiness of your partner's clothes also has more in common with Gary Numan than Jello Biafra (there's a potentially libellous rumour about Numan and a groupie I won't repeat here. Do your own research, as they say). 

4. Depeche Mode - New Life (Mute)

 

Number one for seven weeks from 11th July 1981

The camera on Top Of The Pops focuses on Simon Bates. He appears to be about to go into some kind of public announcement for the benefit of families at home, standing on command. Bates as a broadcaster never seemed to know how to express excitement for music, news or ideas, instead clinging purely to a Reithian idea of mature gravitas. His Bisto brown voice, perfect for piracy warnings on VHS rental tapes, also loaned their authority to subjects as diverse as teenage lost love and the unexpected death of partners on his “Our Tunes” segment, or occasionally irritated disappointment about an irresponsible act (such as the KLF trying to “ruin it for everyone else” at the Brit Awards).

In this case, he tells us that he’s going to introduce us to a new group. The last single of theirs, “Dreaming Of Me”, didn’t do “all that it might” (he sounds slightly pained as he says this) but this time it’s going to be different. That feels like a threat more than a promise, as if he’s almost daring us not to buy the record. It’s strange he should care so much – whatever else you want to say about Bates, he rarely threw his lot behind new bands.

It’s stranger still that the band he should pick would be Depeche Mode. On the surface, they were an unpromising long-term proposition. Despite press acclaim and a rapidly growing fanbase, Mode seemed inherently flawed, hemmed in by their limitations. While other synth-pop bands like Soft Cell, The Human League and Ultravox had major label budgets and carefully controlled imagery, Depeche were cash-strapped teenagers from Basildon on an indie label. They looked like New Romantics, but they weren’t carefully coiffured like Steve Strange or threateningly feminine like Phil Oakey, appearing more like hyperactive fashion students grabbing the first clothes they could afford off the sales rails. On their debut “Top Of The Pops” performance, you get the sense that they’re all trying to suppress grins (Vince Clarke is noticeably failing at points) and there’s a twitchy, antsy energy to them. Gary Numan performing “Are Friends Electric” this isn’t.

Their sound, too, lacked the gloss or technological sophistication of “Tainted Love” or “Don’t You Want Me”. Those songs showed that synthesisers could be used to portray heartbreak and complicated emotions in an eerie, detached and timelessly relatable way – anyone who is in the early throes of a painful break-up can probably relate more to the ominous digital backing of “Tainted Love” than the organic earnestness of one of Abba’s finest ballads (which tend to be the kind of resigned thing you turn to when the dust has almost settled). At this stage in their careers, however, Depeche Mode’s A-sides bubbled, bounced, pinged and ponged for all they were worth, with drum machines punching and snapping in a staccato way in the background.

“Dreaming Of Me” even featured oscillation in its instrumental break, recalling the Theremin experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Joe Meek in previous decades. While it didn’t sound dated in 1981 to my ears, listening back to it now, recontextualising it against the moment it came out, it feels sonically a year or two behind its time, like a bunch of teens with Electronics magazine subscriptions mending and making do.

Sometimes, though, weaknesses can turn into strengths and limitations, self-imposed or otherwise, can create a sound which becomes a group’s early signature. Depeche Mode were lovable in those days precisely because they were new town dabblers. When Daniel Miller started the Mute label, he created a fictional group called The Silicon Teens to fulfil his as-yet unrealised fantasy of an adolescent pop group playing with affordable modern technology. The idea of kids using keyboards to express themselves fascinated him, but scanning the gig circuit and the demo tape pile for candidates, he found only mature(ish) twenty-somethings ready to fill that role. When Depeche Mode emerged, however, the Silicon Teens concept was retired and he threw himself wholesale into his new, real-life flesh and blood project.

The idea obviously didn’t just appeal to Miller. A bunch of kids lugging synths around on public transport to every promotional appointment was marketable and exciting to a novelty-chasing media as well - the future, after all, was about technology being accessible for us all - and the group had in Vince Clarke a great songwriter, and in Miller an astute producer. Clarke could pen memorable futuristic anthems, while Miller, almost operating in a Joe Meek role to begin with, knew how to make their bugs seem like features and their low budget sound appear punchy and current.

“New Life” is an extremely good example of this. The synths slide in angelically during the intro, only to duet with some dinstinctly Binitone ping-pong sounds. This repeats itself, building up tension, until there’s a low descending synth bass pattern and those “drums” kick in, as metronomically as ever. While they sound undeniably cheap, the reverb packed on to them gives them a pulsing, addictive kick – the first time I heard “New Life” on a Sony Walkman in 1984, it slapped against my ears far harder than many other more current sounds.