111. Bomb The Bass - Beat Dis (Rhythm King)

Three weeks at number one from 27th February 1988

“This? Is this what people are listening to now? A record with a bleeping digital watch as the chorus? Jesus Christ… the whole thing’s like being trapped in an amusement arcade. It’s awful, I give up, you’ve all gone bloody mad.” - my mother hearing “Beat Dis” for the first time, 1988.

I was absolutely fascinated by that reaction when this record first came out. To me, “Beat Dis” was exciting but hardly felt radical at the time – since “Pump Up The Volume” topped the charts in 1987, the floodgates opened for House records featuring bold and hyperactive samples to not only get released, but actually sell in huge quantities. There was an urgency and propulsion to this record which seemed thrilling at the time, but didn’t actually feel odd or alienating; rather, it seemed like a continuation of a busy, current trend.

If you were of an older generation who hadn’t been paying close attention to the charts, though, and had your dial permanently glued to Radio Two, I now realise that this entering the national charts at number five must have felt inexplicable; even with punk rock and the artier edges of glam, hit singles prior to this still had a logic and a flow which didn’t depart hugely from the golden rules of pop – namely, that choruses must at least try to be memorable and verses must flow obviously and make logical sense. The arrival of synth-pop at the tail end of the seventies did push these boundaries a little further (for instance, “O Superman” really upsets the apple cart) but in general, proper hit singles, and even cult hit singles, adhered to some fairly basic structural rules.

One reason I found the late eighties House uprising so fascinating as a teen is that it had no time for Denmark Street or Tin Pan Alley melodies (unless it was sampling them in five second bites). The groove was everything. What you did on top of that groove was up to you. It could be not much at all, and that’s the option many DJs and artists took, favouring stark minimalism with a gentle seasoning of samples and airy synth washes. Others, however, didn’t know when to stop and loaded the sample gun with everything they’d heard that week and pressed “fire” over the beat, blasting in with a series of tenuously related soundbites and hooks.

“Beat Dis” is firmly in the latter camp. It interrupts constantly with source material as wide as Thunderbirds, Bob Prescott’s absurd “Cartoons In Stereo” album, stereo sound test records, Jayne Mansfield giggling, Disney stories, as well as the obvious candidates – Public Enemy, Kurtis Blow, Afrikaa Bambaataa, Indeep’s “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life”. In common with “Pump Up The Volume”, each sampled snatch eventually etches itself so much into your brain that it feels like a strange hook in itself; I can’t hear Bob Prescott saying “You play Russian Roulette this way” in my mind without hearing a twittering, chattering rhythm beneath it.

Nonetheless, on first listen it’s pretty overwhelming, a riot of speech, scratching, jittery melodies and impatient, forceful dustbin lid rhythms smacking you in the face. My mother was right. It is – kind of – like playing an arcade game on Southend seafront in 1988 and trying to hear the music and noise of the machine you’re focusing on against the attention seeking clarion calls of the others. As a teen, I found that idea thrilling, though.

What’s also fascinating about “Beat Dis” is that for all its freshness, the choice of samples was unbelievably antiquated. I suspect part of this was due to ease of use; it’s much more straightforward to drop in a speech sample from an old sound effects record than it is to isolate vocals from another piece of music, and these discs could very easily be found in stores like Music and Video Exchange for very little money. It was also partly due to the fetishisation of sixties and seventies ideas in clubland at this point too, which might (arguably!) have bled over from the psychedelic Alice In Wonderland events people like Richard Norris were involved with before moving to Shoom.

“Beat Dis” therefore becomes this sweet and sour cocktail of the old and the new, the furiously modern and the old; a black and white land of perfect on-mic pronunciation being thieved, pulled out of context and buried beneath noise. To older generations, it may even have sounded like sacrilege – the fondly remembered past being combined with a present sound they barely understood. I personally loved its pure energy at the time but don’t tend to gravitate towards it as much now; it has the formula of “Pump Up The Volume” but none of the space, grace and patience. In short, I have to be in the right mood.

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.