105b. The Sugarcubes - Birthday (One Little Indian)

Three further weeks at number one from 12th December 1987

The way "Birthday" sold in late 1987 was downright peculiar, even by cult indie standards. In a similar fashion to This Mortal Coil's "Song To The Siren" - with whom it possibly shared a few fans - it kept selling modestly week in week out, selling a thousand copies here and there. While other indie records were swift fanbase sellers in their debut week then ebbed away, "Birthday" kept on reaching new listeners who were intrigued by its sound. 

Such records always tend to bubble back up to the top of the NME Indie Charts during quiet weeks, and the Christmas 1987 period served Bjork and company well, allowing them to take the prize away from The Smiths during the entire festive season.

Here's what was going on lower down the charts.

Week One

6. Barmy Army​ - Sharp as a Needle (On-U Sound)​

Peak position: 3

More On-U Sound shenanigans, this time of the football kind - an entire track built around Liverpool FC football songs and chants, with "Abide To Me" sounding as if its being kicked right back to its hymnal roots in this context. 

While this one has been known to make drunken men cry on the dancefloor, as a non-football fan I just think it's an interesting and occasionally strangely touching idea - moments of terrace unity set to a steady, pulsing beat. Unsurprisingly, John Peel played it a lot. 

15. The Sea Urchins - Pristine Christine (Sarah)

Peak position: 7

The debut for The Sea Urchins, a band who picked up Primal Scream's fey sixties-inspired jangle and arguably upped the ante considerably. It's also the debut single for Sarah Records, a label who would suffer a number of inaccurate critical brickbats over the years but develop a fiercely devoted tribe of collectors. 

"Pristine Christine" is so straightforwardly agile and pretty that it's hard to imagine why it hadn't been written and released in 1966; whereas some of the records Sarah put out sounded messy and under-produced, this one strikes the balance just right between appropriate, luddite rawness and lovelorn melodies. A pearl.

16. The Rosehips - I Shouldn't Have to Say (Subway)

Peak position: 16

One minute and eighteen seconds of romantic tiffery on 45, which rushes past all of its ideas so quickly, and in such a thistly soup of lo-fi sound, that it feels as if you might have missed a key point or development - not unlike real-life romance in that sense, then.

17. The Groove Farm - Surfin' Into Your Heart (Subway)

Peak position: 17

Despite being lovers of sixties garage rock and releasing material which occasionally veered close to pastiche, the Groove Farm found themselves strangely loved by the indiepop kids too, perhaps due to their arrangement with the otherwise somewhat twee and snappy Subway Records. "Surfin' Into Your Heart" gives you a good idea of what they were about - quickly recorded, super-speedy pop tunes which may have sounded distorted and rough, but contained an optimism and euphoria few of their contemporaries could match. This 45 in particular sounds like a celebratory jig when so much of the indie chart was filled with either angst or contemplation. 

20. The Chesterfields - The Janice Long Session (Strange Fruit)

Peak position: 20

23. The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - Down Town (KLF Communications)

Peak position: 2

Drummond and Cauty had already got themselves into trouble with lawyers around the release of their debut album "1987 What The Fuck Is Going On", which provocatively sampled large chunks of music without seeking out copyright permission. As if to prove they had learned few lessons from their experience, "Downtown" sampled Petula Clark's classic, and the pair took the strange step of quoting from the Bible in interviews of the period, citing Proverbs 26:11: "As a dog that returneth to his vomit, so is a fool that repeateth his folly".

The Christian element continued with their collaborators. Recorded with the London Gospel Community Choir, this is one of their more polished and well-realised early works, combining sour, cynical and heavily accented Glaswegian rapping with a joyous, happy-clappy chorus. "Glory!" sing the choir. "What glory?" answers Bill Drummond (aka King Boy D) "In a wine bar world? In a tenement block?" Conquering the charts with a Christmas tune was clearly not on his agenda at this point, as despite the overwhelming pop and fizz of the chorus here, the tune is torn in two directions. The Community Choir are pulling towards the holiness, the preciousness and the generosity of the season, whilst Drummond points out the harsher mid-winter realities, only for a sampled and stammering Petula to chip in at irregular intervals. "Neon signs are pretty" she sings, sounding pathetic and weak in this context, before another hard-edged, shouted, Special Brew-sozzled verse barges her out of the way.

Early KLF records were often clumsy and awkward, and whilst "1987 What The Fuck Is Going On" was a groundbreaking and copyright busting album, it seldom had grace on its side, being filled with often clumsily placed distorted samples. By the time "Downtown" emerged, they sounded as if they'd finally got the hang of their direction and could no longer be criticised as being a novelty act - this (along with most of the forthcoming album "Who Killed The Jams?") is pop music with a bitter underbelly, the sound of a band absorbing the sounds and culture around them and criticising and distorting it. By the end, even the choir are singing "Jesus, what can we do?"

This is probably the finest early KLF single, and whilst you can't quite hear the future they'd have as mega-selling Stadium House releasing millionaires, it's a step closer towards that. It's certainly a pivotal indie release, and it deserves to be heard a lot more often.

24. Frank Sidebottom - Timperley Sunset (In Tape)

Peak position: 16

Sidebottom's typically ludicrous cover of The Kinks "Waterloo Sunset" sees him describing his suburb of Manchester with an affection which almost sounds genuine rather than joking; if Davies always sounded a bit sinister as he delicately trilled "I don't need no friends", Frank is only too keen to paint a keen, childlike picture of his community. 

It also feels as if marginally more budget and effort has gone into this than his earliest EMI releases, not that it really resulted in many sales outside his core fanbase. 

25. Society - Love It (Big Life)

Peak position: 14

Way before Bobby Gillespie chanced a hit with an Andrew Weatherall remix, the indie chart was treated to the spectacle of goths Danse Society collaborating with Coldcut on this record. It's not a complete success, with far too many spiky guitar riffs and distorted vocals in the mix, but is nonetheless one of the earliest examples of a crossover record - probably far too soon for either their fanbase or the House kids to fully throw their support behind it, though it seems to have picked up some more recent acclaim from the retro kids.  

Weeks Two and Three (only one chart published)

3. The Smiths - Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me (Rough Trade)

Peak position: 2

The final offering from The Smiths, "Last Night" slipped out around Christmas with barely any promotion or music video, feeling strangely like an afterthought rather than a swansong. As such, it suffered and was one of their least successful singles in years, reaching number 30 in the national charts and failing to top the indie charts, the first occurrence of this since "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" reached number three in 1985. 

Of course, if you're going to pick a song to roll the end credits to The Smiths career to, this isn't actually a bad choice; its lonely, looping melody resembles "How Soon Is Now?" without repeating the idea, Morrissey and Marr instead treating us to a music box lullaby of unresolved business, a ballad of ongoing loneliness. As The Smiths sounded when they entered, so they seemed as they left; isolated, slightly strange and unquestionably backwards looking. Instrumentally speaking, this record sounds like the end theme to a heart-wrenching black and white movie, where perhaps a priest or a soldier who is sent to the front is doomed to never experience romance, to always march to this funeral rhythm for eternity. 

As for Morrissey, he left the indie sector for EMI and, contrary to popular view, did occasionally produce the odd groover on the way; no Acid House for him, though, as he usually ended up having more in common with Shakin' Stevens when he wanted to cut some rug, rather than S'Express. He continued to find comfort in looking backwards.

20. Electro Hippies - The Peel Sessions (Strange Fruit)

Peak position: 16

29. Alien Sex Fiend - Stuff The Turkey (Plague)

Peak position: 20

A gothic Xmas single? Why not, I suppose, and certainly why not from Alien Sex Fiend, who were always rare examples of party-movers rather than the party-poopers of the Goth sect. Impersonations of Bernard Matthews mix with screaming, off-the-peg festive observations and occasional stabbing discords. The group operated within their own particular mutant zone, selling their records to the same five thousand fans, never really taking this business very seriously and somewhat getting away with it. 

For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number One In The Official Charts

T'Pau - "China In Your Hand" (Siren)

Pet Shop Boys - "Always On My Mind" (Parlophone)

107. The Smiths - I Started Something I Couldn't Finish (Rough Trade)

Three weeks at number one from 21st November 1987

If there’s one thing very few Smiths singles had, it was a touch of sleaze. They were often contemplative, yes. Weary, occasionally. Sardonic, sure. Spiky and provocative, maybe. Even at their most heavy-handed and sledgehammer-happy, though, The Smiths rarely sounded like greasy backroom razzle-dazzle.

“I Started Something” could be the exception, though – it was the first single to be released after the group’s dissolution was announced to the press, and is a strange outlier rather than a typical finale, pricking up my ears as a teenage boy for its peculiarly brassy arrangement. The way the record swings and rocks is reminiscent of the soundtrack to a strip-tease – have a go at imaging somewhere flinging their underwear into the air from the tips of their fingers to this if you want (though I’m not forcing you to). There’s a strange come-hither arrangement going on here, the sort of thing Suede revelled in many years later but felt atypical of The Smiths output.

On top of the glam swing, Morrissey doesn’t partake in innuendo, but instead delivers some regretful, hesitant and intriguing lyrics, appearing to confront the idea of getting in too deep with an unsuitable partner. Gone are the slogans and the forthrightness, and his lines are caked in doubt – “I forced you to a zone/ and you were clearly never meant to go” he states, “I started something and now I’m not too sure”.

Thematically, the song this reminds me of most is Pulp’s “Underwear”, but whereas that’s explicit and very directly addresses a dumbstruck victim who could walk away if s/he wanted to, “Something” is all chewed fingers and floor-pacing, hair nervously but precisely parted. Given how frequently relationships bend this way, with one party realising they’re never truly going to love the other, it’s surprising it’s such an unaddressed area in songs. How often do humans actually, properly fall in love? A handful of times in our lives, maximum? How often is that mutually felt, and how much mess and ill-feeling can any imbalance create, despite our best intentions? And when you’re with the unsuitable partner in a bedroom, pondering this over, and they say “the three words” you least want to hear at that moment, how do you deal with it?

There isn’t a script you can follow, and advice on this area is thin on the ground. Letting a lovestruck person down gently is an artform some Femme Fatales and Lotharios may get good at over time, but most men and women seem to stumble and stutter around, pouring drinks with unsteady hands or going to hide in the bathroom. Sometimes that’s enough for less deluded human beings to get the message, but people in love tend not to be firing on logical cylinders; hope outweighs hard experience. Unwanted lovers tend to ask “Are you ill? Shall I get you something?” rather than “Are you hiding from me? Shall we talk?” while knocking on the toilet door.

The conflict between the lyrics and the melody creates the brilliant tension in this single, and while I seldom see it praised much, it’s one of my favourite Smiths records. Morrissey isn’t a smart-arse here – he’s racked with guilt instead (but is any of this his fault really?) He’s Charlie Brown muttering “typical me” while rolling his eyes, as the band circle and swing and encourage him to kiss Peppermint Patty. If recent Smiths singles we've covered have seemed a bit too pleased with themselves, featuring Morrissey revelling in his certainties, this has a vulnerability which is both nerve-jangling and relatable.

104. M|A|R|R|S - Pump Up The Volume (4AD)

Six weeks at number one from 19th September 1987

It’s a summer evening in 1987 and I’m stood on the doorstep to my parent’s garden. I'm gazing towards the fir trees at the rear, taking in the sun’s last rays and idly listening to Radio One burbling away. My Mum’s kitchen radio was a cheap and nasty thing, all treble and top-end, seemingly designed to emphasise the hiss and static of poorly tuned radio frequencies over and above any bass whatsover.

Not the best bit of kit on which to hear “Pump Up The Volume” for the first time, then, which chose that moment to leak out of an evening Radio One Dance programme. Every so often I heard the half-hearted, buried, almost robotic declaration “Pump up the volume”, followed by a series of disjointed slow wooshes, interjecting samples, and the noise of what sounded like electric guitars being scraped face-down along gravel. It’s not that I didn’t like the track, it’s just it sounded like a strange, half-hearted dub. I shrugged and played with the dog for a bit, no longer really paying much attention to the single. No point in getting too invested in something which was number 47 in the Record Mirror club play chart (or wherever). These records, these weirdly credited white labels – they came, they went. There was no reason to suppose this one would be any different.

The next time I heard the track it was through some proper speakers, and then I got it – by God, I got it. It felt breathtaking. Had I been old enough to be a clubber, I might have had some sense of where “Pump Up The Volume” came from, and why it had to happen, but I was thirteen years old and many years away from such delights. As such, the depth, the bass, the vast, almost overwhelming space to the single felt strange. The way sounds panned from the extreme right to the left hand side of the stereo, as if almost to place you as an insignificant, microscopic speck among the enormousness of the tune, felt like a new universe opening up; no wonder the promo video director made outer space the central theme.

The structure of “Pump Up The Volume” also felt interesting and novel at the time. The track’s main hook is the prowling bassline and rattling drum beats which underpin it, and that is a constant presence, along with that doomy, dramatic, reverberating piano note. It therefore feels as if you’re being driven along a brightly lit motorway, riding along the spine of that groove, but every so often, for whatever reason, the driver takes a slip road off to some strange town with different noises. You can still hear the thunder of the motorway close by, or feel its vibration, but in the meantime you’re stuck in tiny, tinpot towns along its verge, hearing weird interjections from the natives, before your driver corrects his course and lands back on the motorway again.

Samples are a huge part of the record, but they’re treated as brief visitors, strange interruptions to the transmission rather than equal partners. Ofra Haza visits, as do The Criminal Element Orchestra, James Brown (of course), Coldcut and Trouble Funk. None of these samples feels essential to the record, and none of them “sold it” as such; at first you felt you could potentially cut fast and loose and create your own version of “Pump Up The Volume” with different elements. The more you listened to it, though, and the more you absorbed, the more baked in it all became, each interruption feeling essential to the whole, an important landmark in the overall journey. Listening now, I wouldn’t want to lose any of these people, anymore than I’d want to get rid of the iron bridge across the river near my house. And despite the fact they’re nudges and strange interjections, its odd how fluid and natural they seem – even James Brown feels as if he’s always been nothing but a bit-part player in the magic.

The single finally ends on someone scratch-mixing over (what I’ve always assumed is) a record of someone whistling, like audio graffiti scribbled around someone’s strolling expression of idle happiness. The record is almost jazzy by that point, riffing on so many different grooves and elements that it feels busier than ever, but never quite losing its vastness. It’s truly fucking amazing and I never tire of listening to it.

98. Gaye Bykers On Acid - Nosedive Karma EP (In Tape)

Three weeks at number one from 23rd May 1987

“If this was video, we could forward all the crap”.

When people talk about the indie charts in the eighties, they often think in terms of the press headlines, the dominant idea of alternative music; groups with guitars, to borrow a phrase from a long retired Decca A&R man.

While they were often wrapped in a bright mesh of electric guitar based sounds, the listings also weren’t immune from the effects of ever-cheaper technology or club culture, and the period this single spends at number one is striking for a few reasons; firstly, it’s when the KLF first appear in their initial Justified Ancients of Mu Mu guise (more on them down below) and also when a relevant future number one

(Spoiler

Pop Will Eat Itself’s cover of “Love Missile F1-11”)

enters the top ten. And right on top for three straight weeks was this sprawling heap of digital barbed wire, discordant guitars and distorted samples. It felt as if something was happening. Something ugly, but something nonetheless.

The reasons sampling started to work its way into low-budget music had as much to do with affordability as fashion, and the effects of the lowest priced technology were smeared all over the crevices of the indie scene in 1987. The memory limits of most cheap samplers involved short stabs of speech or music, delivered in a highly distorted manner, rather than extended, luxurious loops. The bands that chose to play with these new toys therefore often became equally manic and unfocused, creating a frenetic racket rather than any kind of groove.

You can hear this throughout “Nosedive Karma”. The band take a garage guitar riff, trigger messy, fast samples from ancient Hollywood films, then throw in muddy solos and agitated rants about – well – you be the judge. “Avarice and greed/ Nostalgia through your veins/ It ain't crack that I need/ To make things feel the same!” rants Mary Byker, presumably railing against the black-and-white Levis world that permeated 1987 (The KLF would similarly sneer at this on the debut album “1987 What The Fuck Is Going On”). These lyrical ideas shift and frequently drift into nonsense, though, colliding with an old school chorus of “ba ba ba bas” and another onslaught of samples and noise.

What the track does is work with the glitchiness of the technology rather than against it, evolving gracelessly and throwing different riffs and ideas around as if they’re detritus. On “Nosedive Karma”, it somehow feels as if no riff, no solo, and no lyrical idea is any more important than whatever fleeting digital scrap decorates it; the band leap towards every distraction gleefully, piling everything on top of the mess. If it sounded like a bunch of herberts pissing about with tech back then, there’s something slightly relevant about it in 2026 too; it also feels like being sat indoors on a Spring Day with all the windows in the house closed, but every window on your laptop open and blaring. Maybe they were on to something.

Gaye Bykers on Acid were a strange group. While saddled with the Grebo tag and sharing it with groups such as Crazyhead and Pop Will Eat Itself, they lacked any straightforwardness at all, and (some would argue) seriousness. Occasionally supporting themselves at gigs under monikers such as Lesbian Dopeheads on Mopeds (dressed as women) and fake dissident East German thrash punk band Rektum, there was a whole fictional universe surrounding the group which probably only made complete sense once you were on the inside. They also didn’t lean on the bog-standard Velvet Underground and Byrds influences, instead having members who loved Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.

That love of the angular, satirical and experimental cuts through a lot of their work and attitude. They may have presented themselves as motorcycle boot wearing scruffs with fridges filled with lager, but the noise they created was sometimes challenging as well as thrilling. “Nosedive Karma” is, for me, their finest single; a down-in-one chug of every twitchy, agitated idea 1987 had to offer, with the unexpected sweetness of the sixties surf chorus in the middle.

Its success and their subsequent press made them seem attractive to Virgin Records, who gave them a surprisingly free reign for 1988’s “Drill Your Own Hole” album (initial copies of which came with the central hole covered over by an unperforated label). The group blew their promotional budget on a satirical sci-fi B-movie of the same name, which is available on YouTube and is actually better than you’d expect, like some kind of Max Headroom-ised take on Hard Day’s Night, piercing the cliches and habits of idle rock hacks, the music business, punters and even themselves. Throughout, they are warned that they are spoiling their own chances of success by “not taking things seriously”. Perhaps they effectively diagnosed their own problem.