88. Soup Dragons - Hang Ten! (Raw TV)

One week at number one on 1st November 1986

The Soup Dragons were one of those peculiar groups who seemed to go through several distinct phases in their career, to the point of feeling like multiple different acts. The period most people reading this will remember is their early nineties indie-dance/baggy phase, which saw them getting a top five national chart hit in the UK with a swaggering cover of the threadbare Rolling Stones B-side “I’m Free”.

If we’re not vaporised in some kind of nuclear war or I don’t get sick of writing this blog in the meantime – two big ifs – I’m sure we’ll get to that single in a few years time, but suffice to say it was written off by many journalists as a cynical attempt to score a hit. It also feels as if it’s disappeared from view in the years since; it dragged 1990’s kids on to the dancefloor, but didn’t necessarily convince the children of the future. Something about that Happy Mondays-aping lurch and groove just hasn’t proved durable.

Following that success, the group managed a minor scuff with the American mainstream with “Divine Thing”, which actually resulted in a number 35 Billboard hit, after which the line-up collapsed and interest was lost both at home and Stateside. Their final album “Hydrophonic”, issued in 1994, was one I had entirely forgotten existed until doing research for this blog entry.

Phase one of their career, though, is the one we’re dealing with here, and the period that gets me most excited. It begins with a broke group from Bellshill, Scotland (home of the hits) hanging around their local scene and pressing demo tapes into the hands of likely compatriots. One such early supporter was Bobby Gillespie, who offered them a gig supporting Primal Scream. Following this, the NME picked up on an early flexidisc the group pulled together, then John Peel threw his hat into the ring and offered them a session, though the band had to borrow £150 from him to make it down to London to record it. All extremely thrifty and earthy beginnings.

If the latter-day Dragons were louche with lots of slow, lazy movement around their hips, the band that emerged in the mid-eighties were taut, spring-wound and hyper, spitting out their pop songs so fast that they were usually all over just after the two minute mark. The Soup Dragons I knew and loved didn’t pout or dreamily sing “yeeeeah” liberally throughout their singles; they gnashed, crashed and raced towards their conclusion, not in a chaotic, ramshackle C86 fashion, but with a tight, orderly and tense drive. The closest point of comparison in 1986 would probably be The Wedding Present, but while Gedge’s group moped and stretched their ideas, The Soup Dragons had a quick, explosive fizz. As a result, they began to command numerous music magazine front covers, seeming young, spotty, naive and a bit ungainly in all of them, but with delicious grins pinned to their faces.

“Hang Ten!” is one of their finest singles, immediately thudding into life with irresistible hooky vocal harmonies, before filling every second of the two minutes on offer with blissful melodies married to a thrashed guitar scramble. The lyrics seem to be about a relationship falling victim to the other party discovering Christianity – “I don’t care whose up there” sneers Sean Dickson – but are far too flippant and clumsy to be deemed a serious protest. What the song appears to be most in love with isn’t any kind of moral or political point, but what it can achieve in its short life; the stomping chant of the chorus, the dorky retro vocal harmonies, the simple but instantly memorable guitar riffs and the ascending climax. All of it remains superb.

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).

55. Depeche Mode - Blasphemous Rumours (Mute)

 

Four weeks at number one from w/e 17th November 1984

A point that sometimes gets missed about Depeche Mode – but seems only too obvious when you get neck-deep into the band’s catalogue – is that three of the group’s founding members (Gore, Fletcher, Clarke) were regular church-goers before they formed, and the other (Gahan) had a mother who was in the Salvation Army.

While Gore has offered strange reasons for his regular attendance at his Basildon church, putting forward the somewhat limp justification that there was “nothing else to do on Sunday” (a situation that applied to most teens, including me a mere five miles or so down the road, but I managed without) Gahan’s response to his mother’s exhortations to go to church on Sunday was less honest, and he instead chose to bunk off and go cycling instead. If you had to quickly characterise the two members with childhood anecdotes, these would be good places to start; Gore being compliant and gently shrugging his way towards group activities he couldn’t entirely see eye-to-eye with, while Gahan’s life was filled with action and rebellion.

Sunday service appeared to fascinate Gore, however, and he developed a morbid obsession with the prayers being offered for the sick parishioners there. “The person at the top of the list [of names] was guaranteed to die, but still everyone went right ahead thanking God for carrying out His will,” he later remarked. Long after Gore had bothered attending church, these memories appeared to feed their way into the group’s twelfth single, and final release of the most commercially fruitful year of their career.

If “Master and Servant” tested the waters topically and almost got banned by Radio One, “Blasphemous Rumours” was, from start to finish, the biggest act of commercial suicide committed by the group so far. A diatribe against the peculiarities and inconsistencies of the Christian faith, there are no gentle metaphors on offer here, Gore instead choosing to tell his tale in plain language as if he’s spluttering in an outraged fashion in the local pub.

“Girl of sixteen, whole life ahead of her/ Slashed her wrists, bored with life” Gahan rattles off like a telex machine listing the facts. “Didn't succeed, thank the Lord/ For small mercies”. After the first run of the damning chorus about God and his sick sense of humour, we then learn of a girl of eighteen who “found new life in Jesus Christ” and was subsequently “Hit by a car, ended up/ On a life support machine”. It’s not clear if it’s the same girl, whose boredom has been replaced two years later by a sense of virtuous purpose only for her to be killed off in a ho-ho ironic fashion, or a different one – but the effect is the same and God is, as Neil Tennant would later opine in Smash Hits, given a “thorough ticking off”.

If the central message alone was likely to get the church and Christian figures irritated, the song is strangely unsubtle, in places forsaking melody in favour of discordant lines more likely to be favoured by horror film soundtracks, combined with slowly collapsing metallic clangs and gurgling, sucking noises. It not only wants to mention a life support machine, it wants to give you an impression of what one sounds like (I remain thankfully ignorant of whether the group's attempts are accurate or not, but they do seem to strangely imitate a trip to the dental hygienist).

The overwhelming effect is close, lyrically speaking, to second wave punk rock delivered in a synthetic, ambient way. If you took these lyrics and transplanted them to a three chord rant delivered by the likes of Blitz, little would feel out of place; only the context of the mournful pop chorus changes things. “Blasphemous Rumours” is angry in its own strange way, favouring the use of 1984’s sampling technology to get its point across over the previous decade’s brutal and simple lo-fi thrash.