62. Depeche Mode - Shake The Disease (Mute)

One week at number one on w/e 25th May 1985

Synth-pop had been a dominant presence in the singles chart through the early eighties, with everyone from old hands (Kraftwerk) to populist pioneers (Human League, OMD) to latecomers and shape-shifting chancers spilling hits out of their keyboards.

1984 felt as if it had been, primarily thanks to Trevor Horn, the year of the Fairlight, taking the original pulsing rinky-dink tunesmithery to a grander, more explosive level. By 1985, though, strange things had begun to brew and the revenge of the “proper musician” was afoot. Most of the successful synth acts either took breaks, or went slightly mad and/or began to go off the boil, becoming exposed to reduced album sales and less prominent singles chart positions.

The number ones of the year tell a tale of huge productions and big ballads from mature artists with synths only being used subtly in the mix. Honourable exceptions here are Dead or Alive, Midge Ure and Eurythmics, but even in the latter two cases there was a sense of a slick maturity emerging; more emotive and less artful and playful (in particular, Ure’s “If I Was” contained lyrics somewhere between a couple of snippets of “Your Song” and a twee romantic Athena poster poem. It certainly meant nothing to me, anyway). 1985 felt like the year all the heartbreak songs and wedding slow dance songs were created en masse, with Jennifer Rush’s “The Power Of Love” doing the platinum honours for biggest selling single of the year.

Numerous factors (including Live Aid) have been blamed for this wave of earnestness, but whatever the true reasons, Depeche Mode were catapulting a fresh single into a strangely unsympathetic marketplace. When they launched in 1981, tracks with synths were almost guaranteed some attention, no matter how quirky, gimmicky or even experimental they were. By 1985, nobody seemed to want plucky electronic bedroom stars; they wanted old-fashioned pop stars again with serious session players behind them. A few seasoned performers seemed to relish this situation. “I don’t like Spandau Ballet or Depeche Mode”, Mick Jagger archly sneered on television at the time, seemingly mistakenly believing them to be similar acts (or people who gave a shit what he thought).

It was in this environment that Depeche Mode released arguably one of their finest singles, only to see it slowly crawl up the bottom end of the Top 40 to an undeservingly low number 18 peak. This state of affairs is one reason why its seldom heard these days; another is that it was orphaned from a proper studio album, instead being one of the two fresh tracks on their compilation “Singles 81-85”, released later that autumn. Shorn of a surrounding conceptual environment and used only as a teaser track for fans who already owned most of the band’s work, it’s always looked a little lost among their other releases.

The single feels like the first time the band have managed to celebrate and combine all their strengths. The gentle breathy intro feels as if it’s borrowed some of the pop shine of “See You”, but after a few bars of that we’re treated to harsher metallic clangs (possibly from a shopping trolley?) in the background, a pulsing, grumbling bassline, and a melancholic, minimal two note synth line. This is followed by Gahan’s opening line “I’m not going down on my knees begging you to adore me”, which sounds rather too drastically lovelorn, almost worthy of Jennifer Rush, until the context becomes clear: “I’ve tried as hard as I could/ to make you see/ how important it is for me”. This isn’t desperation on his part – it’s exhaustion. The chorus is clearer still: “You know how hard it is for me/ to shake the disease/ that takes a hold of my tongue/ in situations like these”.

Melody Maker’s Caroline Sullivan was quick to stick the knife into the single for this reason alone, describing it as the sentiments of “football hooligans as sensitive wimps” in a tart review (do football hooligans usually wear make-up and leather in the manner of Martin Gore, I wonder?) Even if the ideas expressed left her cold, though, the song blankets itself in some of the most complex arrangements of their career. The melodies constantly find new ways to twist themselves around the central hook, dropping out and re-emerging again with new force and intricacy, flowering with every repetition of the chorus rather than letting matters settle. By the point of the outro, the song feels ambitiously busy but not breathless, fading just as all the ideas unite. Even the shopping trollies sound somehow romantic when they’re up close next to that bold cello sound.

54. This Mortal Coil - Kangaroo (4AD)

Six weeks at number one from w/e 6th October 1984

I’m attending a small party in Christmas 1991, close to where the suburban sprawl of Southend necks the border of Basildon. It’s the kind of place you can easily get lost – and later that evening I do – because the estate was mass built in the late sixties and there are few distinguishing features to identify one block from the next. Premoulded houses with wooden slats and red brick exteriors face each other dryly, failing to celebrate their similarities. If they could talk, they’d wearily say “Oh, you again” to each other (They would say nothing to the humans who lived in them, of course, for that would be silly).

It’s the third or fourth such gathering I’ve been to that season. Things are changing as we become much older teenagers. The parents have all communicated to each other that we’re actually quite dull, dependable kids who aren’t in the habit of accidentally setting fire to homes, so more front doors start to open up while Mums and Dads enjoy their first taste of total freedom in years. The first thing I hear as I walk through the door on this occasion is Teenage Fanclub’s “Bandwagonesque” playing on the stereo, an album I also got as a gift that Christmas. I announce my approval of the choice of record, and murmurs of agreement fill the room, but then one kid – the slightly bitchy, oh-so-cool one with enough money to buy loads of records – corrected us all.

“Teenage Fanclub are nothing”, he sneered. “If you want to hear music like this done properly, you need to listen to Big Star, that's who they’ve spent most of their lives ripping off”.

So it went probably up and down the land in 1991, with pedestrian indie kids being corrected by the oh-so-cool ones like small children getting reprimanded by their babysitting older brothers. And if Big Star were widely seen in the eighties and nineties as one of the “great lost bands” to impress your friends with, then their final album “Third/Sister Lovers” – belatedly released in 1978, four years after it was completed – was the real work to test their mettle with. If their first two albums were (broadly speaking, though I'm fearful of another comment from a grown up oh-so-cool kid) power pop, that one was less assured and often more broken sounding; the work of a group with an increasingly fragile member (Alex Chilton) who had given up caring about petty concerns such as “commercial potential”.

“Kangaroo” is one of the more uncomfortable tracks on the album, being a slow junkyard busk about one man’s pervy squeeze against a woman at a party. There are moments where it sounds woozy in a distinctly druggy way, but it’s hard to escape the air of menace too – the sense that a scruffy, dazed Chilton rubbing his crotch on you in 1974 wouldn’t be something you’d choose to document yourself except in horror or fury. “I came against/ Didn't say excuse/ Knew what I was doing,” the song croaks. You can almost see his sloppy grin. It’s not an easy listen and only the fact the song sounds tranquillized saves it from being disturbingly unrelatable – somehow, imagining it as a dream or a half-asleep mishap makes it seem less sordid.

While recording This Mortal Coil’s debut album “It’ll End In Tears”, Ivo Watts had his heart set on including a version of “Kangaroo”, but his approach to the assembled musicians that day in the studio – Scottish experimenter and Cindytalk member Cinder Sharp, Simon Raymonde of the Cocteaus, and Martin McCarrick of Marc Almond’s Mambas – was unorthodox. None had heard the track before, and he played it only a few times to get them to understand its essence.

41b. The Smiths - This Charming Man (Rough Trade)

 

Returned to number one for six more weeks on w/e 3rd December 1983

The Assembly's "Never Never" may have been a huge chart hit, but The Smiths finished 1983 as an ever-growing and unstoppable cult, and in the world of the indie charts, the ferocity of the cult is everything. The underground kids are the ones marching towards Rough Trade en masse to buy the most important new record, after all, not the biggest pop hit. 

That "This Charming Man" managed only week at the top in November felt implausibly stingy at the time, so it's no surprise to see them back on top and managing to hold that position until well into 1984. It's a result that disrupts the natural flow and timeline of this blog somewhat - it would have been much better to see out 1983 and begin 1984 with a brand new track - but sometimes an excess of liquid causes the jug to overflow, and all we can do is mop up the mess around the table as best we can.

Here is what happened in the rest of the indie charts while The Smiths were back at number one.

Week One

12. Birthday Party - "Mutiny! EP" (Mute)

Peak position: 3

The final release following Birthday Party's split in mid-1983, the "Mutiny!" EP shows Nick Cave clearly moving towards the Bad Seeds style. While nobody would dare to suggest that the title track "Jennifer's Veil" was anything approaching pop music, the chaotic fury of their earliest releases has now totally been replaced by something much more controlled but no less sinister. Cave is the clear leader here while the rest of the group twang and strum behind. 

20. The Higsons: "Push Out The Boat" (Waap)

Peak position: 14

Charlie Higson and his boys were deeply unlucky not to score a genuine hit in the early eighties - if Pigbag managed to cross over with their angular dancefloor friendly post-punk, there's absolutely no reason why The Higsons frequently more commercial singles couldn't have become a bigger deal as well.

"Push Out The Boat" probably emerged far too late in the day, just as the tide was going out for this kind of affair, but it's an absolute triumph, combining taut dancefloor grooves with a sense of urgency and purpose so many of their compatriots were too cool to get close to. If it weren't for the fact that Higson eventually became best known as a comedy writer and performer, chances are he would have enjoyed a stronger reappraisal at the turn of the 21st Century, but by that point he didn't seem obscure enough or "serious" enough for the Hoxton Hipsters. 

21. Red Lorry Yellow Lorry - He's Read (Red Rhino)

Peak position: 21

27. !Action Pact! - Question of Choice (Fall Out)

Peak position: 19

Week Two

15. New Model Army - Great Expectations (Abstract)

Peak position: 15

New Model Army would rapidly go on to become a huge cult rock band, simultaneously blessed and cursed with a fanbase who were almost as fanatical as The Smiths' tribe, but often more confrontational. Stories abounded of interested punters casually turning up to their gigs and being beaten up for not looking the part. 

Unlike The Exploited, it's hard to imagine New Model Army encouraging this behaviour. While their political ideologies were often strict and puritanical, the group themselves were keen for the ideas to reach as large an audience as possible. Their second single "Great Expectations" is a sneering attack both on the way naive capitalist ideas worm their way into both the education system and parenting. "They said 'Son, it could all be yours, you just work hard and pay your dues/ Don't be content with what you've got, there's always more that you can want/ Everybody's on the make - that's what made this country great" - these are words which could just as easily have been written yesterday as in the Thatcherite sunlit uplands of 1983. 

Unlike a lot of the political rants that bind up the indie charts, NMA put across their ideas with both a degree of intelligence and relish. "Great Expectations" is a tight morality tale accompanied with a sneering thrash, and a chorus which Paul Weller (who they probably hated) wouldn't have been ashamed of.