80. The Mission - Serpent's Kiss (Chapter 22)

Three weeks at number one from 14th June 1986

During my final year of sixth form college, I developed a slight crush on a goth girl in the year below (Cliche alert - I realise this isn’t remotely uncommon. Almost every male friend my age has suffered a similar predicament, and almost every female goth has had to toss away unwanted Valentines). Shamefully, I can’t remember her name for certain – which indicates that she obviously didn’t work her way into my affections to an unhealthy degree – but I can still remember how studiedly and absolutely she embodied ‘the look’, even getting angry when she ‘caught some sun’ and freckled her nose at an outdoor gig, ruining her pale skin plan. I also loved the confident way she played up to her dorkiness rather than trying to hide it under self-conscious posturing. She seemed friendly, quietly funny and unbelievably cool in a way almost everyone else I knew wasn’t.

I thought I’d kept my admiration for her on the downlow, but obviously not, because one night outside the local nightclub one of my friends drunkenly blurted out “Oi Dave, it’s that goth girl you fancy!” while she was within earshot. Clearly my poker face needed work. After she split with her unbelievably lanky, long-faced and permanently weary looking boyfriend, who it seemed had been her other half since birth, she awkwardly initiated further conversations with me and gave the impression she might be interested.

Reader, as I’m sure you’ve already gathered, it didn’t happen. I can’t remember the reasons, but her finding another suitor who was just more gothic than me was almost certainly the prime factor. I had something of a quiet aversion to the key things that made her world revolve, feigning interest whenever we spoke but probably never being able to successfully conceal my doubt. Some time before this, a friend or acquaintance gave me a C90 compilation tape of current goth sounds and I listened, trying to get to grips with it. By the thirtieth minute, I was bored shitless and realised I was never going to commit to a lifestyle that had so much dreary sludge as its soundtrack. 

Thanks to this blog, I’ve been thinking back to that sliding doors moment a lot lately, and wondering if maybe my friend did me – and goth in general – a disservice. He focused on the long, soporific aspects which leaned towards the seriously morbid and epic. While ploughing through the indie charts for this blog, I’ve been forced to remember that musically speaking, goth was actually a much broader genre than that, to the point of near-meaninglessness. Besides the punk originators (The Damned, Siouxsie And The Banshees) and their Batcave heirs, there were also groups who performed camp electronic nonsense (Alien Sex Fiend), arena-eyeing rock God goths (The Cult, Gene Loves Jezebel, *coughs* The Stone Roses) and also a bunch of groups I now think of as paisley bloused goths, adding loose-fitting hippydom to their sound (The Cure, The Bolshoi, All About Eve). These little sub-genres don’t necessarily always make sense or fit, and the groups I’ve mentioned tended to jump between them periodically, but they’ve helped me to make sense of a movement which stylistically sprawls in a number of directions.

This was perhaps demonstrated by Wayne Hussey and Andrew Eldritch's falling out while both were members of the Sisters of Mercy (which we’ve already covered in quite dramatic detail). One of the issues seemed to be that Eldritch had written new songs for the Sisters Of Mercy which were far too minimal for the rest of his group’s tastes, whereas Hussey’s were seen as too unusual. It’s not really clear how much of that eccentricity found its way into his subsequent group The Mission, but on the strength of their debut single “Serpent’s Kiss”, it would seem not much.

It starts predictably enough, filling your ears with dank guitar lines, wilted flowers and lyrics like “Ash on the carpet and dust on the mirror/ Chasing shadows and the dreaming comes clearer”, proving that Hussey had the poetry of his audience down pat. Where it suddenly shifts gear and shows its true colours – which aren’t entirely black – is in that zippy, celebratory chorus. “Screaming howl and the children play/ Serpents kiss for the words you pray” may be words which sound as if they need a reverberated steady backbeat and a gravelly vocal, but The Mission launch into them as if these child-bothering snakes are actually a good thing. It’s closer to Jim Morrison celebrating the dark arts with a forceful chorus than Bauhaus, shimmying and shaking its tight-trousered butt around the imagery rather than screaming about it.

Hussey, like Robert Smith, also gave the impression that taking the piss and even misleading the public was one of his motivations in life as well as trying to write great songs. When asked if he had “a type” when seeking out ladies, he responded with glee that his slogan could be “Wayne Hussey – he’s not fussy”. You can’t imagine Andrew Eldritch giving his game away so easily. The cheap and cheerful promo clip for “Serpent’s Kiss” is a thing of strange colour and joy too, filled with lipstick kisses from Uncle Wayne, while the group twirl multi-coloured umbrellas, and leap, lark and generally tit around in the country. Visually it has more in common with a Dukes of Stratosphear video than the rainy, rockist visuals which accompanied The Sisters “This Corrosion”.

70. The Cramps - Can Your Pussy Do The Dog (Big Beat)

Three weeks at number one from 16th November 1985

Of all the groups to visit the NME Indie Number One spot, The Cramps have been the slowest to peak so far (unless we count Robert Wyatt). Formed in 1976, their wait for a stint at the summit position – and indeed a debut within the UK National Top 75 – feels sluggish to say the least. If it were any other veteran punk group, you would assume it was something of a Toy Dolls situation; a freak novelty breakout hit pestering the peak slot.

The Cramps were a strange group, though; their obsession with trashy, furious old school rock and roll and B movies made them seem a heavy influence on the psychobilly scene, which by 1985 was only just shifting downwards from its 83/84 peak. Then their proclivity towards PVC stagewear and even on-stage nudity, plus the use of heavy make up and the aforementioned horror flicks, gave them an appeal to the more vampish goths. Punks also appreciated the high-paced attacks they threw into all their songs, and then there were weirdos like Mark E Smith who appreciated them purely for being fellow outsiders.

Alan McGee was also a fan, and when they inevitably signed to Creation in the mid-nineties, bouyed up by the label’s influx of Oasis cash, I was astonished by all the number of my friends who suddenly came out of the woodwork saying they’d always been fans. Once again, the sexier and camper goths, anarchists and leather jacketed rock and roll boys who rolled their own tobacco nipped down to the local record shop to buy “Naked Girl Falling Down The Stairs”. “Ha ha!” a friend of mine barked delightedly on learning of the title. “You couldn’t get a more Cramps song title than that”.

I’m in danger of making them sound like a gargantuan cult, though, one of those bands who accidentally pulled in so many freaks and art school kids that they were a constant Top 40 threat. That’s far from the truth. The Cramps played the club circuit and lived in the cracks and airless caverns of society, supported by a loyal fanbase but never making sense to quite enough people to come close to being called a phenomenon.

In 1985, “Can Your Pussy Do The Dog” proved to be the closest they’d come so far to a breakthrough, and given that, it’s surprising how much of a step backwards it sounds. It has the same wide-eyed swaggering rock vocals of The Damned in their punk prime, a similar hollow, under-produced yet heavy duty whack to last year’s psychobilly movement, and very faint echoes of The Fall at their rawest and scratchiest (in other words, the group The Fall had ceased to be). The key thing to remember when pulling these various similarities together, though, is The Cramps were on the opposite side of the ocean in New York while all these things were occurring in Britain. The psychobilly scene owed them a debt, and similarities to any other punk bands were usually either coincidental, or entirely due to transatlantic admiration of their work.

44. The Smiths – What Difference Does It Make? (Rough Trade)

9 weeks at number one from w/e 28th January 1984

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, despite their enviable string of hits, have not been given much respect in the UK. Besides belonging to the cohort of groups with bloody silly names which sound gimmicky rather than mysterious, they were fronted by ex-copper Dee; he may have been the first policeman on the scene of the car crash which killed Eddie Cochran, but other than that didn’t really ooze rock and roll. In every single one of his video performances online, he gives the impression of being the steady pop professional, delivering the songs of others with gentle, almost suppressed stage flourishes (he even cracks a whip in “Legend of Xanadu” like he’s trying to flick the residue of some treacle off his hand.)

The songwriters behind the group, Alan Blaikley and Ken Howard, were a different matter. Both were gay men who had worked with Joe Meek and penned songs which occasionally nudged and winked towards homosexual society for anyone paying enough attention. The Honeycombs 1964 flop single “Eyes” is a painful, agonised track about finding love in secret, shadowy places away from society’s gaze, combined with disordered pinging guitars and almost proto-post-punk pattering drum patterns. Meek adored it, the public begged to differ. Then, in 1968, they foisted the ominously titled “Last Night In Soho” on to DDBMT.

In typical fashion, “Last Night In Soho” isn’t explicit, but over a keening, grumbling cello, dramatic church organ flourishes and almost hysterical orchestrations, Dave Dee protests that he thought “I’d find strength to make me go straight”, “I’m just not worthy of you”, and “I’ve never told you of some things I’ve done I’m so ashamed of”. These, however, are coupled with the notion that something else happened in Soho that night which was criminal but not sexual; references are also made to a mysterious “little job” some lads in Soho have offered to Dave Dee, which he should take if he doesn’t want “aggravation” – but anyone waiting for the song’s conclusion to tell them exactly what the protagonist has done would be wasting their time. It is locked up tight as a mystery, a riddle wrapped in a lot of hand-wringing drama, though even in 1968 you have to wonder how anyone could have concluded that perhaps he held up a Post Office. The camp hysteria gives the game away by itself.

I’ve no idea if Morrissey was thinking about “Last Night In Soho” when he penned the lyrics for “What Difference Does It Make”. I somehow doubt it, but given his eclectic tastes in sixties pop, it’s possible. Whatever the facts, it falls back on the same narrative devices, teasing and riddling the listener, just less hysterically. It addresses an unknown other and begins on the line “All men have secrets and here is mine/ so let it be known” before failing to actually reveal the issue to the listener, only telling us the person the song is directed at, whom Morrissey would “leap in front of a flying bullet” for (why was he always so obsessed with sacrifice?) is now disgusted by his revelations. This is seen to be foolish - “Your prejudice won’t keep you warm tonight”, he warns. This feels, shall we say, similar, but there’s a different tone here. There is no begging for forgiveness, no shame; whatever will be will be.

Once again though, some plausible deniability creeps in and the idea is aired that Morrissey’s crime might actually be an arrestable offence by 1984’s standards – “I stole and lied and why?/ Because you asked me to!” The idea that this is just about something darkly illegal is also hinted at by the record’s sleeve, showing actor Terence Stamp cheerily holding up a chloroform patch; the still in question is from the film “The Collector”, in which Stamp’s character stalks and kidnaps an attractive female art student. There’s an alternative lyrical reading here which is altogether nastier than someone simply coming out of the closet, by the standards of any age.