89. The Smiths - Ask (Rough Trade)

Three weeks at number one from 8th November 1986

(Note – this blog entry contains some personal information from my past. If anyone feels tempted to send virtual hearts and flowers, or worry about my state of mind, please don’t. I was a kid. It all happened another lifetime ago. It weren’t for this record’s release coinciding with an unfortunate life choice, I’d probably never have felt compelled to write about any of it).

Ask, they always said. Ask. What have you got to lose? If nothing else, it will allow you to put everything behind you. Once you know for sure, you can either claim the victory or just move on. Better than stewing and giving yourself a nervous breakdown, like Frank down the road.

“Shyness is nice,” also sang Morrissey, “but shyness can stop you/ from doing all the things you’d like to”. And make no mistake, I was a shy thirteen year old when this was released. I was spotty, had thick, unruly hair, wasn’t remotely tough, wore glasses, and had a certain undisciplined intelligence but felt bored and unsatisfied at school and struggled to focus. My (bad) school reports were overly personal in their tone, and could be summarised quite neatly as “struggles with other people, struggles with his work, we don’t know what to do with him. Even open ridicule doesn’t seem to be having any positive effect”.

Amidst all this mess, most of which was just me struggling with a bleak home-life (my parents marriage was stable, but we had two very ill grandparents living with us and a heavy air of stress and hopelessness lingered) and surging hormones, there was one bright spot. I’d been friends with a girl we’ll call C since the last year of junior school, who due to weird boundary rules had been one of the handful to follow me to secondary school. Even in the last year of juniors, she was cooler than most of the children, with a blue leather jacket and a fringe she dyed like Marmalade Atkins. She was also quite pampered, openly talking about the clothes budget her parents gave her (“Don’t you have one, Dave? You should talk to your parents about that, it’s not on”) and her trips to the USA where her Dad had familial connections.

So of course, in secondary school I developed a raging crush on her and asked her out. What an idiot. If this were a work of fiction, there’s two distinct routes the above plan could take – the fairytale one, where we forged an unlikely formative alliance and amazingly ended up becoming the weird boy and girl who necked and mated for an entire year, or the one where I got rejected and ultimately mocked by the school. There’s no other possible outcome. We were friends. Friends already know they get along; you don’t need a couple of dates at the local Wimpy to work that one out. Talk to your High Street bookmaker about the odds now (“No teenage love affair, friendship shattered”: 1/4).

The fact that The Smiths “Ask” landed at this particular point in my life felt taunting, even though I now understand that while the song is lyrically simplistic, it’s also open to wider interpretations. “If there’s something you’d like to try,” sings Morrissey, which seems to be almost suggestive (how strange for him) and could even be hinting at homosexuality. “Nature is a language/ can’t you read?” he also protests, like Dudley Moore desperately hinting to an oblivious Eleanor Bron in “Bedazzled”.

Behind all this is a surprisingly unSmithsian jaunty major-chord single; a wiggling, skipping, hats-off-to-the-passing-policeman ditty which almost winks at the listener as it passes. The wheezing, chuffing harmonica beneath the melody makes the whole thing sounds like an exile from one of the last mid-sixties films made by a popular British beat combo – the central number where everyone leaps out into the street dancing. Derek Jarman directed the music video and seemed to hear that himself, creating a scratchier and more modern take, but falling back on the spinning umbrellas standby at a key moment anyway. 

The rest of the arrangement gets ambitious, the group seemingly realising that if this isn’t going to be a mere Mighty Mighty styled throwaway, they’re going to have to pile one idea on top of the other like a musical jenga tower to give it tension. Marr’s guitar explores a multitude of elaborate jangles and the rhythms almost clatter in the chorus (there’s just a micro-dose of Depeche Mode industrialism in the mix here, enough to pass unnoticed). The instrumental break, such as it is, is a slow ambient intake of deep breaths, two chords struck slowly, before the whole jig starts up again.

Similarly to “Panic”, though, it feels lyrically like a series of catchphrases in search of a T-shirt or bedroom poster to be printed on. “If it’s not love then it’s the bomb that will bring us together” feels like another mid-eighties Paul Morleyism, and only “Spending warm summer days indoors/ Writing frightening verse/ To a buck-tooth girl in Luxembourg” captures the old Morrissey richness of both witty and wordy – rather than solely dynamic - wordplay. One of the big, noticeable changes in the group’s style from 1986 onwards isn’t just the fact that their sound gets tougher and more brittle (largely thanks to Gannon) but how Morrissey’s lyrics, in turn, forsake beguiling imagery for immediacy.

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).

76. Half Man Half Biscuit - The Trumpton Riots (Probe Plus)

Two weeks at number one from 22nd March 1986

If you love neatly splicing things into sub-genres, and you feel very strongly that groups and artists have clear "neighbourhoods" which cannot be disputed, here’s where things get awkward. Way back at the end of 1984, The Toy Dolls climbed to number one in the indie charts with “Nellie The Elephant”. Not only was that the last major punk hit in the National Charts, I was also going to argue that it was the last big gasp of the Punk Pathetique sub-genre of Oi! Except…

There are critics and punk fans out there who will argue that Half Man Half Biscuit are part of that Gary Bushell adjacent patch. I can’t find any evidence to suggest that the group referred to themselves as such, but even if they didn’t, these views exist. The counter-claims against them are obviously numerous; the differences between The Toy Dolls, The Test Tube Babies, Splodgenessabounds and Half Man Half Biscuit couldn’t be more obvious. The Splodges looked quite striking in their own way, but indulged in facile dingbattery. The Dolls were/are hyper, whacky, squeaky and cartoonish, overgrown excitable children kicking each other’s tricycles whose handlebars were smeared in melted chocolate. 

HMHB, on the other hand, were – and are – another prospect altogether. Dour, scruffy, despondent, moping and despairing they may have been, but they often churned out comedic lyrical phrases which seemed anything but lazy and effortless. Their debut album “Back In The DHSS” was a shambling cornucopia of observations about children’s television, ageing comic actors (Bob Todd) and “Give Us A Clue” approved national treasures (Nerys Hughes, Una Stubbs, Lionel Blair), spliffs and snooker referees (Len Gangley). Punk Pathetique? I'd argue their styles and methods bore more resemblance to their fellow city-dwellers and beat poets The Liverpool Scene (give "Baby" a virtual spin to get the idea). 

The album was recorded as the test-run of a new eight-track facility in Liverpool where Nigel Blackwell worked as a caretaker following seven years of unemployment. “The caretaker’s band”, as they were somewhat disparagingly known by his colleagues, were allowed to give the desk its first dummy run and the album was recorded for the mate’s rate of £40. They handed the resulting tape around to record companies more in hope than expectation; Factory Records politely and predictably passed on it, but local record store Probe picked it up for their backroom label.

“Back In The DHSS” has a slightly rushed, demo-level sound as a result of its thrifty beginnings, but that only works in its favour. The underproduced sounds collide perfectly with lyrics which provide endless hints to Blackwell’s lifestyle (and possibly the band’s) – his world is one of front room televisions being switched on in the daytime at the height of summer, the heavy curtains fully drawn to stop the sun’s rude interruptions. Spliff and tobacco smoke hang in the air, while he sits on a pouffe passively absorbing the day’s televisual offerings, occasionally getting frustrated but feeling too powerless and groggy to even change the station. Trumpton comes on. He laughs his first stoned giggle of the day, imagining the central characters to be dabbling with drugs. We've all been there. 

As a result, the album felt as if it accidentally found three target markets – students, the unemployed, and stoners. All were able to recognise themselves in these beaten-up novelty folk-punk ditties, able to not only laugh along but rub their eyes in despair. Here’s where the punk pathetique comparisons fall apart; The Toy Dolls and Splodgenessabounds were celebrations of stupidity and passive consumption. HMHB seemed, consciously or otherwise, to be wanting to walk away from it but found they were snookered at every turn, empty-pocketed prisoners to the worst of eighties light entertainment culture.

They were also strangely obsessed with the gentle stop-motion children’s programme “Trumpton”, which besides forming part of the album in “Time Flies By (When You’re The Driver Of A Train)” (“speeding out of Trumpton with a cargo of cocaine”) now became the backdrop to their debut single “The Trumpton Riots”. In many respects, it’s more of the same, except perhaps even more lo-fi.