57. Jesus and Mary Chain - Upside Down (Creation)

Number one for four weeks from w/e 2nd February 1985

Success in rock and pop music occurs due to happy accidents more frequently than managers, artists or labels alike would care to admit. This has always been true, from Mick Jagger bumping into Keith Richards by chance at Dartford train station, to the Sex Pistols dropping swear words on the “Today” programme. Had the former not met in adulthood, or the latter found themselves without an opportunity to offend on prime time television, it’s difficult to say what holes rock history would be left with.

Similarly, the Mary Chain’s “legendary” debut bottom-of-the-bill gig at Alan McGee’s Living Room club in London in 1984 feels somewhat like the music of chance. As is well documented in the excellent biography “My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize”, McGee had very few plans for the Jesus & Mary Chain after hearing their demo tape; just the offer of a London gig and the possible inclusion of one of their songs on a (never realised) compilation of unsigned bands. By the time the group took the stage to soundcheck, though, addled by both overconsumption of alcohol and their own inexperience (they didn’t even understand what a soundcheck was) they churned out a curdled, feedback-ridden cover of Pink Floyd’s “Vegetable Man” largely by accident. Not all of the chaos and the piercing noise was intended to be a feature of The Mary Chain’s sound, and much of the mess was purely unintentional. The group left the stage feeling as if they’d failed, to be greeted by an over-enthusiastic McGee who offered them a deal, believing it to be one of the most mind-blowing spectacles he had ever witnessed.

The gig itself was, according to the dozen or so people who actually saw it, even more shambolic, the sound of a group who couldn’t play, taking their rudimentary abilities out on cheap instruments with missing strings. This shambles was submerged beneath a yelping screech of unintentionally vigorous feedback and a broken fuzz pedal, and the set ended with all the group members punching drummer Murray Dalglish, much to the amusement and entertainment of the small audience (who included a couple of music journalists). 

Under a different promoter and another set of circumstances, it’s probable this story would have ended right there, with JAMC sent back on the next coach to East Kilbride, asked to buck their ideas up – which you sense they were incapable of doing by themselves – or go back to their factory jobs. While they played their live set, however, Alan McGee worked overtime running around the quiet bar spaces in the venue trying to convince everyone that he had witnessed combustible genius, the next big sound. When the group had finished bruising each other (literally and metaphorically) he then wandered about swearing at the non-attendees for failing to witness the historic event.

As we’ve witnessed ourselves through this blog’s journey, Creation Records were a curiosity in 1984 rather than a fashionable indie label. Their roster of acts prior to 1985 issued under-produced but melodic records, each of which has waited decades to be reappraised, but ultimately hasn’t passed the test; they’re (mostly!) decent discs, but all are playing with very predictable and well-tested elements. The Jasmine Minks had a sharp pub punk edge, but even Paul Weller didn’t want to sound slightly like The Jam in the mid-eighties. McGee’s own group Biff Bang Pow sounded like that competent local indie band you knew, who might possibly have got somewhere if only they could have found That One Great Song down the back of their sofa – and there were no signs this was going to happen soon. The mysterious Revolving Paint Dream dribbled out pleasant but cliched psychedelic pop which, if it were suddenly put under another band name on Spotify tomorrow, would probably stand accused of being an AI created project. In short, McGee currently didn’t hold an impressive hand. This was music which might brighten the world of the obsessive record buyer, but wasn't going to be front page news in the music press.

He must have known that he needed a volatile, combustible group with the sound to accompany their mayhem to push Creation Records from the margins of the indie scene to the centre. In offering The Jesus and Mary Chain a contract based on nothing more than a demo tape and a live performance consisting of little more than explosive disarray, he saw opportunities to turn himself into Malcolm McLaren with the group as his Sex Pistols. And so the mission began. He fed bogus news stories about their antics to the music press and ultimately tabloid press, booked gigs where riots broke out – though in at least one instance, the word riot should probably have quotation marks around it – and issued this single.

As is often the way with rock classics, from The Kinks “You Really Got Me” to the Beach Boys “Good Vibrations”, the gestation period of “Upside Down” wasn’t necessarily straightforward. Two versions had to be recorded before the group came out with something they felt really represented their sound. In a strange inversion of the normal rules, though, the “right” version was one which had been recorded in a cheap 4-track recording studio rather than their initial attempt, which had been recorded in a more professional facility.

It sounds like it, too. “Upside Down” absolutely revels in its amateurism. Seldom has such a loud, confusing nettle soup of noise sounded both so low fidelity and also so dour. Beneath the squeals of feedback and on top of the metronomic drum patter grumbles a vaguely buoyant sixties melody. It feels like the levers were up in the recording studio on two things happening at once; a sonic art experiment akin to Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music”, plus a few moody teenagers testing out their idea of a perky tune with an absence of feeling or commitment. They sing “uh-huh-huh” like Elvis, but it sounds reluctant and sullen, like a Teddy Boy muttering it under his breath as a policeman walks past.

33. New Order - Blue Monday (Factory)

 

9 weeks at number one from w/e 26th March 1983

Is there a danger that I may be adding nothing here? If you head over to your favourite search engine now and try to find videos, blog posts and think pieces about “Blue Monday”, you’ll be spoiled for choice. Aside from a few smart Alecs on Internet forums playing devil’s advocate, you will find a set of almost unified voices gushing very genuinely about the song; its sound, the sleeve design, and the way it transformed Factory Records and therefore (arguably) Manchester.

What you tend to hear less about is how it was received when it was released in March 1983. Some journalists loved it unreservedly, as expected – New Order were, after all, press darlings even at this point – but there wasn’t the unified response you might expect. Right at the bottom of the Smash Hits singles review pages, almost as an afterthought, you can read David Hepworth’s uncharitable verdict:

“It had to happen. New Order have dumped moody, repetitive guitars in favour of moody, repetitive synths and a drum kit with a pronounced stutter. After the first twenty minutes or so, it starts to cause a tense, nervous headache”.

His Single Of The Fortnight was Bobby “O” with “She Has A Way”, which doubtless caused nods of approval from Neil Tennant on a nearby Carnaby Street office desk. Bobby “O” has certainly been influential on his career, but the verdict that “She Has A Way” is not only better than “Blue Monday”, but better by notable lengths and margins is surprising. It's playing on a field that's closer to New Order than you might expect, but is like a slap on the back from a mate on a crowded dancefloor in comparison to their record - bouncy, jovial and uncomplicated. 

Over at the NME, Julie Burchill was so frustrated by Factory’s reluctance to label the A and B sides properly that she reviewed the version on the flipside “The Beach” instead, fleetingly and half-heartedly, before moving on.

Record Mirror went one better and ignored “Blue Monday” in their review pages altogether.

Even New Order themselves have since seemed perplexed by the single’s dominance of dancefloors and the public imagination. Their original aim was to produce something they could leave a machine to play as an encore while they remained offstage, and Bernard Sumner once stated “It’s not really a song, it’s more of a machine that sounds good on club systems”. He then added, without further elaboration, “There was a lot of trickery going on that you don't realise. It's not just the bass, there's quite a lot of subsonic”, sounding slightly like Bill Drummond by way of Derren Brown as he did so. Maybe he was just genuinely dumbfounded by the single’s success and reached for the only explanation that made sense, that some kind of irregular sonic hypnotism was at play in making the track a success,

Whatever certain segments of the press or the group themselves thought, it was a given that the New Order single that followed “Temptation” was probably going to be a minor hit. The goodwill and the fanbase left hanging over from their Joy Division days would see to that, and “Blue Monday” confidently (but not breathtakingly) pushed its way into the national charts at number 37 on the week ending 19th March.

The expected run for singles by cult bands at this point was for the single to nudge another few places up the charts, perhaps resulting in a triumphant Top of the Pops appearance by the group, only for the single to fail to cross over to the general public and disappear. What “Blue Monday” did instead was far odder, hanging around the Top 100 for 38 straight weeks, often nudging up a few places or falling a few notches as if it had no bigger plans other than to hang around. By June it had fallen out of the Top 40, only to return again with a fresh wave of goodwill in September, eventually climbing to the top ten for the first time.

Early in its run on 31st March 1983, the group appeared on “Top Of The Pops” and put in a live appearance so nervous, chaotic and devoid of charisma that I found myself red-faced, desperately defending the record to my family - “But it usually sounds brilliant!” I yelled (to which my Dad’s admittedly sensible response was “Well, if you want to appear live on television you’d better make sure you can actually manage it first”).

The dominant myth is that the single dipped down the charts the following week as a result of disgusted would-be purchasers voting with their feet. This is actually not true – it climbed the chart defiantly. Had New Order decided to show up and put on a glove puppet show live on air, it wouldn't have killed the record’s momentum, if “momentum” is an adequate word to describe its mid-table stamina. Neither music critics, radio DJs refusing to play all seven-and-a-half minutes of it, its unavailability on seven inch single or Factory Records themselves could kill “Blue Monday” off – it knew it needed to reach everyone, and if it managed it slowly and stealthily rather than in a typical eighties rush, then so be it.

26. Robert Wyatt - Shipbuilding (Rough Trade)

Four weeks at number one from 16th October 1982

There’s a moment in Sue Townsend’s bestselling novel “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole” where, upon learning that the Falklands War has broken out, Adrian’s father has a meltdown and tumbles out of bed, believing Britain to potentially be under attack. When the Moles are reassured that nothing of the sort is about to happen, and realise the Falklands are located off the coast of Argentina (hidden beneath a cake crumb in their atlas) normal family order resumes.

In the current age, where war seems to be a continual rumble in the background, it’s almost difficult to relate to this fictional overreaction. In 1982 though, the Falklands conflict was a shock. While the decades following World War II hadn’t been entirely peaceful, another country hadn’t actually invaded British territory in that time. As an innocent nine year old, I too sought reassurance from my parents that Argentinian soldiers weren’t likely to be parading down our street anytime soon. I had never heard of the Falklands and assumed they were either in the Channel Islands or off the coast of Scotland; this smelt to me like big trouble.

Once the national shock subsided, political blame began to be apportioned and sides began to be taken. Doubts were raised that the military or the British government had been taking the Argentinian threat seriously, leading to them being surprised by an attack which they had been repeatedly warned was imminent (this later led to conspiracy theories that Margaret Thatcher had actually allowed the war to occur for her own electoral benefit; I’m no fan of hers, but this seems unlikely). There were questions about whether an insignificant, sparsely populated island in South America was really worth risking human life over, and the inevitable counter-argument that the vast majority of Falklanders did not want to live under the rule of Argentina’s military dictatorship, and Britain had a duty to them.

It would be naive to assume there were clear left/right wing lines on these complex issues, though the general assumption was that left-wingers were supposed to be against the conflict while those on the right felt Britain had to protect its own citizens. To this day, I haven’t formed a clear opinion of my own on the situation, though by the time I was an adult and in a learned enough position to do so, the war seemed like a distant memory, so the pressure to have a proper opinion was off.

Meanwhile, out there in insignificant, gun-free indieland, it felt as if every group had a view. The anarcho-punks were against the war, obviously. Mark E Smith felt that the war had to happen, the first   contrary political position he had taken which apparently alienated him from some of his peers (it wouldn’t be for the last time). Some of the Oi groups were less subtle than that. And Elvis Costello and Clive Langer wrote this song.

Costello was vocally anti-Thatcher, and not necessarily subtly so. “Tramp The Dirt Down”, from his 1989 album “Spike”, is a fantasy about dancing on her grave when she finally passes away. While that song was visceral, “Shipbuilding” is subtle and unique among protest songs for not giving the listener an easy steer. Instead of laying down the law or satirically mocking the government, it takes the rare step of putting the singer in the shoes of an ordinary unemployed shipbuilder in a neglected industrial town – notably, the very towns Thatcher had virtually abandoned as non-Conservative voting lost causes in the eighties.

Robert Wyatt, who recorded the vocal in a couple of hours, is an inspired choice for the message. His voice has the correct levels of earthiness and vulnerability to carry the song, and he knows exactly where the difficulties and contradictions lie. “Shipbuilding” presents the war as an opportunity and a threat; a chance for a deprived town to be given serious work for awhile by helping to build the ships which may send their sons home, alive or dead. “Is it worth it?” Wyatt asks. “A new winter coat and shoes for the wife/ and a bicycle on the boy’s birthday”. The song opens with the mundane, the everyday, despite the enormity of the problem the record is addressing.

In common with the rest of the country, disagreements in the town spill over: “Somebody said that someone got filled in/ for saying that people get killed in/ the result of the shipbuilding” Wyatt sings breathlessly. This is probably the clumsiest lyric in the whole song, but his tight, rushed delivery ensures that it’s made to work; the one direct mention of the event every parent is dreading, skirted over quickly, almost in denial.

At various moments, you sense Wyatt protesting himself, justifying allowing himself to feel upbeat, the line “It’s all we’re skilled in!” saying everything in five short words. What else do we expect or want them to do? Sit out the chance to take their families out of poverty, albeit briefly?

Unlike most political records, “Shipbuilding” understands the micro-events that underpin society. As individuals living in capitalist societies, we are all to some degree complicit in wars, slavery, and cruelty we would not otherwise condone. We may have opinions, but our jobs and lives, and our ability to put food on tables, are inextricably bound up in situations we may only be dimly aware of. Even the melody understands this, the piano line following “It’s all we’re skilled in” allowing itself to sound almost triumphant, before falling back into a minor chord again.