78. We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It - Rules and Regulations (Vindaloo)

Number one for five weeks from 3rd May 1986

“Some people do think we’re stupid, but that’s quite understandable really, isn’t it? I can’t think why people would want to come and see us” – Vicky, Record Mirror, May 1986.

“I’ve got this theory that we’re actually providing employment, because if we can’t play our instruments very well, we have to employ other people, like orchestras, to come and do it. So in fact, it’s quite politically and ideologically sound not to be able to play very well.” – Mags, Record Mirror, February 1987

Those two quotes, taken nine months apart, probably say more about Fuzzbox (and their attitude to the world and the music business) than anything I could possibly throw at my keyboard for the next few hours. It’s no wonder some music journalists found them infuriating – it was the job of the eighties rock press to peddle the idea that music has importance in either a technical or “revolutionary” way; if a record isn’t competently or artfully performed, then it should be offending someone in its attempts to rebel (usually parents, the powers-that-be or “the straights”).

We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Going To Use It (we’ll call them Fuzzbox after this point; they chose that abbreviated name for themselves eventually anyway) fitted the bill in theory. The “Rules And Regulations” EP was their debut release on Robert Lloyd’s Vindaloo Records, and lead track “XX Sex” was, beneath its chaotically fuzzy clatter, straightforwardly political. “XX sex sex gets ex-exploited” they chant, referencing page three girls and ranting “Cookery and hookery/ Exploit desolation and isolation”. If Huggy Bear had released that one in 1993, nobody would have questioned it – they sound similar enough, with only Vicky’s surprisingly clear and powerful post-punk vocals setting them apart (she's the only conventional musical talent evident on the track).

Title track “Rules and Regulations”, however, was the one with the home-made promo video which ended up picking up most of the airplay, and continued the usual punkish themes of a bleak pre-mapped journey through life, including workplace alienation, and the obviously feminist reference to a husband who “tied you down so you’re housebound”. It’s the ace on the EP, containing pounding drums without the use of metalwork, a central buzzing riff, and a chorus chant which isn’t a thousand miles away from Adam Ant, but taken as a whole, it clearly owes much more significant debts to The Slits and X Ray Spex.

When journalists saw the promotional photographs of Fuzzbox with brightly coloured, electrified hair and thickly made up faces, they must have already written their articles before interviewing the group or getting any quotes. It seemed a simple case; more punk rock, more anarchy, angry young women desperate to be heard in a society which hadn’t given them a voice…

And yet Fuzzbox usually didn’t want to be drawn. They were too busy having fun. They openly sniggered on stage and gurned in their videos. Their politics were left-leaning, perhaps not atypically for an eighties band from a major industrial city like Birmingham, but they clearly hadn’t pored over Sociology textbooks seeking to justify their views to journalists; Easterhouse they weren’t. They had a tendency to regard themselves as ridiculous as the world they inhabited, and were far enough away from the initial impact of punk rock to be able to use bright hair dye and super strength hairspray and seem cartoonish, rather than menaces to society.

And yet – there was something strangely exciting and confrontational about all this anyway. Four women who were self-confessed musical amateurs, making a noise like that and having FUN, not attempting to justify their mere existence to the rock press? The very thought seemed powerful enough to propel this EP up the official national charts so that it peaked just one space clear of the National Top 40 – and only two spaces away from Freddie Mercury’s latest single - despite being released on a tiny indie label set up by the lead singer of The Nightingales (it’s notable that when Robert Lloyd decided to finance this initial release, some friends assumed he was having a mental crisis).

71/72 - Cocteau Twins - Tiny Dynamine/ Echoes In A Shallow Bay (4AD)

Tiny Dynamine – number one for one week on w/e 7th December 1985

Echoes – number one for seven weeks from w/e 14th December 1985

Tiny Dynamine – number one again for one week from w/e 1st February 1986

Echoes – number one again for one week from w/e 8th February 1986

My Mum was idly browsing through the charts in my copy of Record Mirror in 1985 – uncharacteristic behaviour for her, but you’ll have to trust me on this one – and kept muttering the same group’s name as she went through the indie section. “Cocteau Twins” she murmured. “And there they are again. And again. And again. David, do you know this group? I’ve never heard of them but they’re all over these charts in here. They’re doing very well”.

Sometimes flippant comments made by people who aren’t invested in a band or genre reveal truths, and indeed, the Cocteaus were an utterly unshiftable force in alternative music in 1985. Unlike the Morrisseys, McCullochs and (Robert) Smiths of that world, though, their presence was often only felt through mentions in the music press, plays on evening radio, and their largely unintentional farming of the indie listings. Their records frequently slowly drifted around both the singles and album charts, gumming up the works and leaving long, murky pastel trails.

The absolute peak of this phenomenon occurred at the end of 1985, when 4AD saw fit to release two of their EPs in quick succession. Both “Tiny Dynamine” and “Echoes In A Shallow Bay” were recorded in short order as the group tested the facilities of their new recording studio, producing results they felt were good enough for public consumption in the process. The two records were not particularly stylistically distinct and could easily have been mashed together to create a mini-LP without losing any coherence, and history doesn’t record why the EP approach was taken instead.

Even if you didn’t already know that the songs featured here began life in a laboratory-like, testing environment, it becomes clear that something fresh is afoot almost immediately. Whereas previous Cocteaus singles had a sense of openness and vastness, particularly their previous release “Aikea-Guinea”, with both these records you feel – or at least I feel (never assume!) - as if a glass dome is being pulled over the group. The production begins to take on a radiated indoor warmth as thick basslines meet airy but artificial sounding washes. It’s hardly Dire Straits, but there’s a precision and slickness to the sound which causes you to imagine wandering around an empty shopping mall where only brief glimpses of natural light are seen through occasional tiny windows on the edges. The rest is strip lights, potted plants and tasteful muted colours.

You can hear this particularly strongly on tracks like “Pale Clouded White” on “Echoes”, where the ambient whine of treated guitars constantly linger in the background like the gentle echo of unoiled machinery, or on “Great Spangled Fritillary” where the background instruments approximate creaks, clicks, groans and distant foghorn blasts rather than providing any traditional anchor. In a sense, this is industrial music, but it sounds nothing like Foetus. Instead, it cuddles up to the machinery, accepting it as a tool which can be something other than a weapon.

It’s not as if “Tiny Dynamine” offers anything vastly different. The epitome of the phenomenon can possibly be found on there first, the instrumental “Ribbed and Veined” offering artificial cricket clicks alongside hazy muzak hums, occasional touches of wow and flutter, and a steady, unchallenging backbeat. If anything, this track almost sounds close to the modern idea of Vaporwave, where relaxing, smooth melodies meet cavernous echoes and badly recalled memories of the wonders of the eighties indoor shopping centre; it’s just that while those songs generally veer towards the bright and even groovy, “Ribbed and Veined” is closer to the music you hear in a jammed elevator just as the place is due to close for the evening; a gentle, unobtrusive thing wobbling its way towards the unintentionally nightmarish. Nor is the Cocteau’s music ever as straightforward as some dork pushing a few Garageband effects buttons over a loop of an instrumental break from some dinner party soul album.

68. The Smiths - The Boy With The Thorn In His Side (Rough Trade)

Number one for three weeks from w/e 12th October 1985

Many journalists and media pundits will tell you that Morrissey’s lyrics are supposed to strike you “at an impressionable age”. The cliched image is of the confused teenager, plain, lonely, probably bullied at school, spots on his or her chin oozing a custard-like substance, listening to The Smiths alone, hearing words from a man they believed felt the same.

NME and Melody Maker journalists tended to pull these ideas out of their hats mockingly, though it’s hard to understand why. Most people’s teenage years are confused, bewildering and ghastly, and it’s not as if most of the journalists working for those papers would have been immune from that (odds on that most of them were classroom underdogs for most of their schooldays).  I didn't hold Morrissey up as an understanding idol, though; I loathed him as a teen and looked for any group or performer, anywhere, who was holding up a bright primary coloured sign with “Way Out” printed on it. I didn’t want to wallow in my situation, I wanted promise and to be told there was escape.

Escape finally came in the form of sixth form college (not all I’d hoped it would be), university (closer to what I’d expected, but not quite) then… oh shit. Seemingly I hadn’t quite worked out the next step yet. Or perhaps I thought I had, but I’d chosen some of the toughest career options imaginable, and none were working out. Each year led me into dingier and grimmer circumstances, until by my mid-twenties I was in such a volatile situation that a number of people had to do their best to both bail me out and pull me back together.

It was at this point that “The Boy With The Thorn Is In His Side” got plucked off a Smiths “Best Of” and played by me again and again, the words “And when you want to live/ How do you start?/ Where do you go?/ Who do you need to know?” ringing in my ears a lot. My own negative disposition was also addressed by the song, as I upset friend after friend with my frustrations and misdirected anger. Did I, for a few months, think I was the character in the song in the same manner the average, unimpressive fourteen-year old thinks they’re the man with the punctured bicycle in “This Charming Man”? Probably. Was I at least ten years too old to be wading around in these waters? Certainly.

Life is seldom straightforward, but in complete truth, there were escape routes open to me I could have taken if I hadn’t been both too stubborn and too proud. I also had a distinct inability to recognise my own strengths and privileges and turn them to my advantage (if I’d actually been more honest in my phone calls home to Mum and Dad, for example, I think help would have been forthcoming). Imagine my surprise, then, when years later I found out that the main inspiration behind “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side” was Morrissey’s frustration about how he wasn’t yet a proper pop star, and The Smiths were locked outside the establishment’s drinking clubs, awards ceremonies and ballrooms. Oh the fucking irony.

By the time this single was released, The Smiths were having a shaky spell. Their last single “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” hadn’t entered the Top 40, and while the pop world of 1984 seemed to at least tolerate Morrissey’s unorthodox behaviour and camp spikiness, 1985 was as unkind to him as many of the other alternative groups we’ve covered here. It allowed him space in inky periodicals largely read by students and young twenty-somethings, but interest among the glossy magazines and prime time radio and TV shows was beginning to shut down. They’d all distilled Morrissey into a basic and unflattering black and white caricature - a pale, sexless, vegetarian streak who was hardly about to turn on the horny teenagers or suddenly write a smash adult album like “Brothers In Arms”. There was just not enough cash or glamour in the quiffmeister.

At the point of this single’s release, Smash Hits gave him a front cover, but he shared it with Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive, and the accompanying interview saw the pair of them camping it up like two ageing actors in an end-of-pier farce (they both seemed rather quick to subsequently distance themselves both from the final printed article and each other).

“It’s a big step for us, doing this piece together,” Pete Burns said. “We could have done it for The Sun”. No they couldn’t – both their careers seemed on the wane and a tabloid wouldn’t have run it unless they came out as lovers.

If ever a promotional step underlined a central problem, and even accidentally revealed the focus of “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”, it was that. Morrissey’s grievances in the song entirely related to his own misgivings about where he expected to be at this point in his career (a central cultural figure) and where he was potentially sliding. No matter that The Smiths were one of a handful of alternative bands in with a shot at getting chart hits in 1985, and regardless of the fact that he had already achieved more than most of his peers could dream of, it wasn’t enough. Morrissey was not a man to consider his strengths and privileges either; being something of a success wasn’t the aim. He needed the adoration huge success could bring him. His “murderous desire for love” was all about ambition.

If that makes the single sound like a self-pitying indie take on Dudley Moore’s parodical “Love Me”, Johnny Marr once again picks golden threads out of the frustrated, tightly pinched embroidery. The guitar line isn’t just wonderful, it’s almost too beautiful for such a self-serving lyric; like one of Maurice Deebank’s most stunning runs for Felt pulled apart, slightly simplified and repeated, it becomes almost the focus, softening the message and making the indulgence deeply human and relatable. If the lyrics read bare and without melody seem like a tantrum, Marr turns them into a tight hug from an old friend. It’s a piece of spin so marvellous that you’ll rarely encounter anything so transformative outside of party politics, and it’s indicative of how well the Morrissey/Marr partnership worked.