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

One week at number one on w/e 14th November 1983

Retrospectively trying to describe the birth of a phenomenon is difficult. The further down the road you go as you pass the scene of the incident, the more it slowly retreats in the rear view mirror, the details becoming less clear, the conversation about what happened getting confused by the conflicting voices in the car.

Using that analogy with The Smiths, it sometimes feels as if the rear view mirror was also cracked and twisted, offering so many illusions that nobody is sure what’s true anymore. They were revolutionaries who changed music! They were reactionaries who dragged it backwards! Morrissey spoke to millions of lonely bookish leftists and is also a fascist! And sometimes, besides this, you find yourself leaning on the second-hand anecdotes from friends which may or may not be deeply exaggerated. I’m forced to recall an older friend telling me that he once saw a man with a broken leg dancing ecstatically at an early Smiths concert, so passionately moved by what he saw and heard that being in front of Morrissey and Marr was like a trip to Lourdes.

I heard these tales only from older friends because frankly (Mr. Shankly) I was ten years old when The Smiths broke. The first I truly knew of them was through Tom Hibbert and Sylvia Patterson’s interviews in Smash Hits. That magazine’s approach to all pop stars, whether aspiring or established, was to hold a fairground mirror up to them and distort their eccentricities until certain aspects of their personalities dominated, each interview acting more like a caricaturist’s sketch than a respectful, gushing homage. Paul McCartney became known as “Fab Macca Thumbs Aloft”. Rod Stewart’s nickname was “Uncle Disgusting”. Even when Tom Hibbert interviewed Margaret Thatcher, the one quote that shone through the final article was her icy reply of “Always be serious!” to one of his more flippant, joky comments (in this case, about whether Cliff Richard should be knighted).

Morrissey never had a nickname at Smash Hits, but the way he was portrayed in that magazine often felt more revealing than the reverence bestowed on him by the NME and Melody Maker. For one thing, his quick wit shone through in that publication far more than the others – rival music journalists seemed to want to engage with his cerebral side, ignoring the fact that his lyrics clearly revealed someone with a sharp sense of humour.

On the flipside of this, however, he also frequently came across as a deeply lonely and gloomy soul; the kind of figure who rose at Noon, watched a black and white film on the television while slowly sipping soup, and waited for the phone to ring. Not a pop star, just an alienated man with a lifestyle less appealing than the elderly widower next door; that neighbour may not have had much to envy, but he at least waved from his window cheerily every morning. The Smash Hits Morrissey would never have done that. 

I couldn’t relate to him, and he didn’t inspire me. If anything, I worried on his behalf - my Dad had a troubled friend who lived down the road, an eternal bachelor who had on occasion been sectioned due to his depressive episodes. To me, the Smash Hits Morrissey felt strangely close to the man I knew as Uncle Frank.

Also, for all their originality, there was also something very antiquated about The Smiths which felt odd to the hopeful ten-year old me. With the exception of the bold text on their sleeves, everything was deliberately black and white, frequently featuring pictures of fifties and sixties stars frozen in their monochromatic, pre-1967 world. This approach was not entirely without precedent; Paul Weller was also known to nod backwards in his choice of sleeve design and certainly sleevenotes, and obvious retro-heads like Meri Wilson and The Maisonettes might have shared this aesthetic, but generally speaking, early eighties popular culture was about keeping your eye on the horizon in front of you, not looking behind at a “better” past.

The older I became, the more I was won round. Musically they were often equally backwards-looking but less straightforward. The Smiths were proudly and obviously a “beat combo”, present to prove to the eighties that groups with guitars were absolutely not on their way out (an early review of “This Charming Man” even regurgitates this Decca audition quote) but this is where they ace it. Their sound is, like all brilliant groups, an inexplicable cocktail of everything that ever inspired them, combining to sound like nothing that went before. So much is going on here; the sharpness and brevity of sixties beat singles, the ambitious guitar work of post-punk (Marr has stated he was influenced by Maurice Deebank out of Felt – among others - but his approach is much more urgent and frantic) the taut, driving rhythms of a bass player and drummer who had obviously heard some Motown, all topped off with Morrissey’s shivering timbre, a sealion’s bray communicating one-line quips and deflated profundities, frequently with each following the other.

38. Depeche Mode - Everything Counts (Mute)

4 weeks at number one from w/e 13th August 1983

“With someone like Crass, all you can get drawn in by is the lyrics and that’s it… the music is so hard that a lot of people won’t go near it. But with ‘Everything Counts’ they’ll give it a chance and then they’ll hear the lyric” – Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode talking to X Moore, NME 17th September 1983.

The crisis continues. Crass may have vacated the number one spot, heaving the doors open and drunkenly chanting as they left, but the broader British malaise continued; the problem of what being left-wing meant in a society where Thatcherism and the harder edges of capitalism were portrayed as the only answer. You would have expected Crass to have something to say on the matter but Depeche Mode? Politics didn’t really seem to be their thing.

There had been hints of it on “A Broken Frame”, of course, but only in an obvious, non-committal way. Their sinister anti-Hitler Youth deep cut “Shouldn’t Have Done That” didn’t say anything new beyond “Fascism is a bad idea”; something even a Daily Telegraph reader could have got on board with (back in those days at least. Who knows now?) At the time, too, the sleeve offered little, the image of a peasant woman with a scythe being only the barest of hints.

In 1983, their third album “Construction Time Again” emerged with the cover art showing a man swinging a large hammer over his head while standing high on a mountainside, backed by an antiseptic mouthwash sky. It looked like something from a political propaganda poster, an idealised, romanticised view of the European working man. A few critics and fans were quick to spot something else – what if the scythe on the sleeve for “A Broken Frame” could also be interpreted as a sickle? What were they trying to tell us?

While Depeche Mode didn’t design their own sleeves, “Construction Time Again” wasn’t shy about the band’s left-leaning political ideas. It was an album I bought as a teenager and instantly fell in love with, because it expressed its ideas so starkly and simply, echoing my own emerging thoughts without clouding the messaging with doubts or ifs and buts. These days, some of it feels naive and the album has toppled in my estimations as a result – at its most preachy, there’s a thin line between the broad socialism they present on tracks like “Pipeline” (“Taking from the greedy, giving to the needy”) and “Shame” (“Do you ever get that feeling when the guilt begins to hurt/ seeing all the children wallowing in dirt”) and Michael Jackson at his most pious.

The key difference here, the artistically (rather than lyrically) revolutionary aspect, is that Depeche, influenced by the industrial music scene sprouting around them, introduced a digitally sampled crashing and clattering to the simple sentiments, not new in itself, but certainly a fresh idea in a pop context – its release date even beats ZTT’s debut record, The Art of Noise’s “Into Battle EP”, by some margin.

The record’s uneasy, irate mood was influenced by Martin Gore’s world opening up beyond the confines of South East Essex. Having travelled to Thailand and witnessed crippling poverty, then returning home again to comfort, he became struck by the concept of a world shrinking thanks to the availability of technology and air travel, but failing to ‘eradicate its problems’ despite the glaring obviousness of the disparity between wealth and poverty. The excuses of ignorance and television’s distancing effect could not longer be leant on if the problem was right there, literally in front of most of us, and also very literally begging and appealing to our better nature.

“Everything Counts” is so central to the album’s theme that it appears twice – once in full, at the end of Side One, then again as a brief, muted reprise at the end of Side Two, nudging us in the ribs gently. Its initial appearance is far from subtle. It begins with a grinding, panning, metallic effect, like the work of a panel beater echoing around a mountain valley, then adds large, cinematic, sombre notes and a wailing, unearthly Shawm noise created by a synthesiser. Within barely twenty seconds, the track has managed to enter into conflict with itself; modernity versus ancient art, progress against tradition.