69. The Cult - Rain (Beggars Banquet)

Two weeks at number one from w/e 2nd November 1985

Back in the days when such things commonly existed, I sometimes wrote for a radical politics and music fanzine called “Splintered”. I haven’t kept any of my copies, but from memory, it was a ragbag of rants, reviews, articles and occasionally heartfelt opinion pieces from people with nowhere else to sensibly place their grievances; like most zines in that era, if somebody had a bee in their bonnet about anything from body image to the fact that Gaye Bykers on Acid had signed to a major label, the well-meaning editor often gave it the green light, typing it up then cutting, pasting and photocopying it into that fuzzy, washed out grey copy common to such organs.

One opinion piece in “Splintered” had such a lasting effect on the impressionable teenage me that I would quote it to friends endlessly. It talked about the rapid passing of time, and the way that youth wasn’t a period of life to be drifted through. Why, it argued, it’s literally the only period of your life when you’re likely to have the Energy to Experience new things and the gumption to create, so Do It Now. Pick up the pen, the guitar or the paintbrush – or even all three! - at once, or end up becoming one of those old, crabby no-marks who either did nothing, or has only just started to try, and has found out that in the winter of their lives, they are flapping, empty binbags with nothing left to say.

There were a number of individuals the article could have picked on to prove its point, but for some reason it zeroed in on Ian Astbury for particular abuse, pointing out that he had started his career as an innovative, considered lyricist for a sharp and original post-punk band, then reached his late twenties and found himself capable of little more than some monosyllabic “yeahs” and “babes”. What a disgrace he now was, we were told, and what more evidence did we need of the undignified effects of the ageing process, which removed all poetry from the soul.

I wonder what the author of that piece thinks now he’s in his fifties (or possibly even his sixties). I hope he’s kinder to himself, and also gentle to every other writer who is still compulsively Just Doing It and never knew how to stop.

Should he have been kinder to Ian Astbury? When Southern Death Cult first emerged in 1982, there was definitely something primitive and spiky about the group, the hard right angles of the rhythm section meeting Astbury’s commanding howls. His lyrics couldn’t really be described as poetry, but fulfilled the dank, morbid brief the group’s austere clattering provided him; the frame needed to be filled with theatric wordplay rather than flowery verse.

As the years progressed and the group’s membership changed, The Cult simplified not just their name, but their whole approach – gradually, at first, then by the point of “She Sells Sanctuary” the metamorphosis was complete. The Cult became not “just” a rock and roll band – they didn’t look like another Motley Crue, Poison or Twisted Sister, and they certainly didn’t sound like them either – but certainly something closer to one than not. For all the flowing goth clothes and mystic hand shapes they displayed onstage, their reliance on anthemic riffs, almost meaninglessly simple lyrics and the good, solid thunder of a reliable backbeat became central. They emerged from the confused tarpit of early British goth and ended up somehow influencing Guns N’ Roses. It seems an unlikely story.

If “She Sells Sanctuary” was a glorious mix of everything great about the commercial and underground aspects of mid-eighties rock music, “Rain” is just Desert Rock – an attempt at a rousing stomper tailor-made for a video featuring the band rolling through an arid landscape in a jeep (in the event, the promo defies your expectations and just sees the group pouting and throwing shapes on a studio stage set, so obviously Beggars Banquet’s budget didn’t stretch to a shoot in the outback).

Lyrically speaking, its complete rock conservatism, riddled with cliches - “Hot sticky scenes/ you know what I mean”, begins Astbury, “I've been waiting for her for so long/ Open the sky, and let her come down”. The rest of the song just repeats the lines “Here comes the rain”, “I love the rain”, “here she comes again” and the words in the first verse over and over, making it deeply minimalistic. Clearly the lyrics do their job and allow the listener to forge an accurate impression, but they’re so effortless as to be almost childlike.

35. The Imposter (aka Elvis Costello) - Pills And Soap (Imp)

Three weeks at number from w/e 18th June 1983

Not really much of an “imposter”, more an interloper to the indie charts. While “Pills and Soap” was presented in some quarters as a pseudonymous “mystery single”, in reality Elvis Costello did virtually nothing to dupe the public with this, not even bothering to disguise his extremely distinctive voice. By the time it emerged in the UK National Top 40, he even appeared on Top of the Pops, where John Peel and “Kid” Jenkins both sarcastically pretended not to know his true identity (Peel: “It’s not Shakey, is it?”)




There were some very dull reasons underlying this quarter-hearted deception. In 1983, Elvis Costello’s record label F-Beat were undergoing a change in their worldwide distribution arrangements, moving from Warner Brothers to RCA. The protracted legal discussions had delayed the release of his next album “Punch The Clock”, and rather than also delay the release of the first single “Pills and Soap” longer than necessary, Costello opted to release it under a pseudonym on F-Beat’s “indie” subsidiary Imp Records.

There are two possible reasons why he took this path – firstly, there’s a strong chance that he may have been impatient while bureaucratic issues were being discussed in the background, feeing that if he didn’t get something fresh out soon, momentum may be lost. There was also the small matter of the imminent General Election in the UK, which caused the subjects touched upon during this single to potentially feel more relevant, pressing and explosive.

“Pills and Soap” could, to a half-listening person, be referring to animal cruelty with the references to Noah’s ark and melting animals “down for pills and soap”. This was the explanation Costello gave to the BBC when they nervously asked him what the song was about. Closer inspection reveals this to be nonsense, though. Firstly, the chorus refers to “children and animals, two by two”, then points its finger towards the aristocracy and perhaps even the royal family: “The king is in the counting house, some folk have all the luck/ And all we get is pictures of Lord and Lady Muck/ They come from lovely people with a hardline in hypocrisy/ There are ashtrays of emotion for the fag ends of the aristocracy”. There are other sharp, bitter tasting lines on offer besides, such as “You think your country needs you but you know it never will”, which totally give the game away.

If “Shipbuilding” was a sympathetic gaze at a community (and country) in crisis, “Pills and Soap” is unfocused invective – an unfixed list of the malaise that Costello feels the UK fell under in the early eighties; decadence, distraction, blind patriotism, the establishment worshipping view of the tabloid press. The animals and children being melted down are the expendable lower classes; though of course, the fact Costello is a vegetarian isn’t a complete coincidence here.

Musically speaking, it’s absurdly simple, with a drum machine generating simple, clicking beatnik Daddio rhythms which combine with Steve Naive’s thundering, Hammer Horror piano lines. It’s an extraordinarily daring first single to lift from an album, offering the polar opposite of so much eighties pop – while that was often elaborate and multi-faceted, “Pills And Soap” is threadbare and puts the emphasis and weight of the record’s worth on its lyrics.

How you feel about it really depends upon how receptive you are to such earnest singer-songwriter minimalism, and also crucially when you first heard this. In 1983, there’s little doubt that Costello’s observations were controversial and insightful. Britain was under the early spell of Thatcherism and the behaviour of the press and the Government in power was quite radical – earlier Conservative governments obviously held aspirations to defeat Trade Unions, but few had swung the axe with as much enthusiasm and as little regard for communities as Auntie Maggie.

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.