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.

91. Age Of Chance - Kiss (FON)

Ten weeks at number one from 6th December 1986

“1) Be L-Louder, 2) Be more beautiful, 3) Be unreasonable.” - Age of Chance, January 1986.

A few weeks back, Zooey Deschanel posted an Instagram photo of herself, face thick with heavy but sophisticated make-up, wearing chic but casual clothes, thoughtfully cradling a copy of the NME C86 compilation in her hands. It was such a weird mismatch of style and media content that it almost felt like an in-joke, or a trolling attempt, or a plug for this blog (it wasn’t, sorry) – a sleek Vogue cover colliding with a spotty eighties teenage underworld. I freely admit I wanted a print of it for my wall.

It led to all kinds of speculation online about what the hell she knew about C86, but she should be given some credit here. She’s a huge fan of Belle and Sebastian and Camera Obscura, is utterly no stranger to indiepop herself – a few of the She and Him tracks unquestionably drink from that stream, even if they don’t quite get their hair wet – and if she hasn’t encountered Stump and A Witness before now, I’d say that’s more surprising than not. She beat a lot of Nuggets and Rubble heads to the sixties baroque pop group Forever Amber, after all.

It reopened the question of what C86 really was about (if anything) though. Indiepop, as we would now call it, was only one aspect of the compilation. The opening twelve minutes or so lull you into a false sense of security, making you think the whole cassette is going to be filled with naive, untutored British kids searching for sharp melodies. Then, once that’s done, Stump lurch into view with “Buffalo”, then A Witness with “Sharpened Sticks”, and what we’re confronted with is anyone’s guess. It was a compilation which was (and is) perfectly possible to own and only love in part. Some people were broad minded enough to accept the more angular aspects, but a lot weren’t.

There’s a tendency to assume that the harsher edges of C86 were fringe contributions from groups who sold few records, but that would also be a mistake. Stump shifted around 60,000 copies of their debut album, and that year, Leeds band Age of Chance – whose track “From Now On, This Will Be Your God” isn’t exactly the most challenging track, but is also far from the most commercial – briefly became cultishly huge. Unlike a lot of their compilation mates who would blush and apologise about anything that smacked of marketing, the group had a firm and keen style and graphic image; garish, bright and loud, which perfectly matched the metallic flashes of noise in their songs. This made them an editor’s dream, assuring them coverage in magazines most bands of their ilk would never have gained – pages were devoted to their beliefs, their manifestos, and their backgrounds (“We're confronting the area that we live in. The unease, unrest, dissatisfaction, things like that. The element of where we come from is prevalent in our music.”)

Their earliest singles were perhaps a touch too abrasive and combative to find broader public appeal, but their decision to cover Prince’s “Kiss” almost pushed them overground. Taking their cues from their dancefloor memories of the record, rather than actually buying a copy of it and carefully studying its arrangements, they cut, thrash and grind to the song’s hip-hop inspired beats, giving it a strangely accessible ugliness. If Prince’s original version is lipstick and cocktails with just a peppery hint of urbanity, Age of Chance take that urbanity and make it the sole feature – a pair of heavily made up lips graffitied on to a rain-stained concrete wall, or a drunken dancefloor smooch becoming an accidental headbutt.

Guitars grind monotonously, the vocals chant in protest, the song demands rather than seduces. It’s another example of a cover version which is an inversion of the original track, like staring at the negatives of a glamorous night out and trying to make sense of bright hair and white lips.

It’s hard to say how calculated it was. Age of Chance were an incredibly knowing band, also covering the disco classic “Disco Inferno” but bringing its reference to riots to the forefront, and it may just have been that they also heard an aggression in Prince’s work which hadn’t fully expressed itself. Whether accidental or otherwise, though, it was a canny move. Prince was the mainstream artist all groups and performers, whatever their background, could admire without risk. He was as admired in the pages of the tabloids as he was the broadsheets, fawned over in the IPC weeklies as well as Smash Hits and Making Music. A virtuoso musician with perplexing artistic messages and undeniable songwriting talent, he was the complicated pop star it was OK to like in the mid-eighties (a strangely divisive and hostile time).

In that sense, you could cover “Kiss” and only risk the wrath of a few of the man’s most eager fans. Music journalists would applaud your impeccable taste, major labels would note your pop ambitions, and you had nothing to lose. And Age of Chance certainly didn’t lose, at least not in the short-term. Partly bolstered by the slow movement of the indie charts around December and January, but mostly enabled by constant waves of impressive sales, “Kiss” managed a chart-topping run only rivalled by the likes of “Blue Monday”. John Peel listeners also showed their appreciation by voting it number two in the man’s Festive Fifty; an impressive result for a song released late in 1986, which started to gain traction after the ballots opened.