89. The Smiths - Ask (Rough Trade)

Three weeks at number one from 8th November 1986

(Note – this blog entry contains some personal information from my past. If anyone feels tempted to send virtual hearts and flowers, or worry about my state of mind, please don’t. I was a kid. It all happened another lifetime ago. It weren’t for this record’s release coinciding with an unfortunate life choice, I’d probably never have felt compelled to write about any of it).

Ask, they always said. Ask. What have you got to lose? If nothing else, it will allow you to put everything behind you. Once you know for sure, you can either claim the victory or just move on. Better than stewing and giving yourself a nervous breakdown, like Frank down the road.

“Shyness is nice,” also sang Morrissey, “but shyness can stop you/ from doing all the things you’d like to”. And make no mistake, I was a shy thirteen year old when this was released. I was spotty, had thick, unruly hair, wasn’t remotely tough, wore glasses, and had a certain undisciplined intelligence but felt bored and unsatisfied at school and struggled to focus. My (bad) school reports were overly personal in their tone, and could be summarised quite neatly as “struggles with other people, struggles with his work, we don’t know what to do with him. Even open ridicule doesn’t seem to be having any positive effect”.

Amidst all this mess, most of which was just me struggling with a bleak home-life (my parents marriage was stable, but we had two very ill grandparents living with us and a heavy air of stress and hopelessness lingered) and surging hormones, there was one bright spot. I’d been friends with a girl we’ll call C since the last year of junior school, who due to weird boundary rules had been one of the handful to follow me to secondary school. Even in the last year of juniors, she was cooler than most of the children, with a blue leather jacket and a fringe she dyed like Marmalade Atkins. She was also quite pampered, openly talking about the clothes budget her parents gave her (“Don’t you have one, Dave? You should talk to your parents about that, it’s not on”) and her trips to the USA where her Dad had familial connections.

So of course, in secondary school I developed a raging crush on her and asked her out. What an idiot. If this were a work of fiction, there’s two distinct routes the above plan could take – the fairytale one, where we forged an unlikely formative alliance and amazingly ended up becoming the weird boy and girl who necked and mated for an entire year, or the one where I got rejected and ultimately mocked by the school. There’s no other possible outcome. We were friends. Friends already know they get along; you don’t need a couple of dates at the local Wimpy to work that one out. Talk to your High Street bookmaker about the odds now (“No teenage love affair, friendship shattered”: 1/4).

The fact that The Smiths “Ask” landed at this particular point in my life felt taunting, even though I now understand that while the song is lyrically simplistic, it’s also open to wider interpretations. “If there’s something you’d like to try,” sings Morrissey, which seems to be almost suggestive (how strange for him) and could even be hinting at homosexuality. “Nature is a language/ can’t you read?” he also protests, like Dudley Moore desperately hinting to an oblivious Eleanor Bron in “Bedazzled”.

Behind all this is a surprisingly unSmithsian jaunty major-chord single; a wiggling, skipping, hats-off-to-the-passing-policeman ditty which almost winks at the listener as it passes. The wheezing, chuffing harmonica beneath the melody makes the whole thing sounds like an exile from one of the last mid-sixties films made by a popular British beat combo – the central number where everyone leaps out into the street dancing. Derek Jarman directed the music video and seemed to hear that himself, creating a scratchier and more modern take, but falling back on the spinning umbrellas standby at a key moment anyway. 

The rest of the arrangement gets ambitious, the group seemingly realising that if this isn’t going to be a mere Mighty Mighty styled throwaway, they’re going to have to pile one idea on top of the other like a musical jenga tower to give it tension. Marr’s guitar explores a multitude of elaborate jangles and the rhythms almost clatter in the chorus (there’s just a micro-dose of Depeche Mode industrialism in the mix here, enough to pass unnoticed). The instrumental break, such as it is, is a slow ambient intake of deep breaths, two chords struck slowly, before the whole jig starts up again.

Similarly to “Panic”, though, it feels lyrically like a series of catchphrases in search of a T-shirt or bedroom poster to be printed on. “If it’s not love then it’s the bomb that will bring us together” feels like another mid-eighties Paul Morleyism, and only “Spending warm summer days indoors/ Writing frightening verse/ To a buck-tooth girl in Luxembourg” captures the old Morrissey richness of both witty and wordy – rather than solely dynamic - wordplay. One of the big, noticeable changes in the group’s style from 1986 onwards isn’t just the fact that their sound gets tougher and more brittle (largely thanks to Gannon) but how Morrissey’s lyrics, in turn, forsake beguiling imagery for immediacy.

64. The Cult - She Sells Sanctuary (Beggars Banquet)

Five weeks at number one from w/e 29th June 1985

There’s an elephant in the room we really need to address before talking about this single; namely the small problem of Beggars Banquet not really being an indie label, and its products having no real place in the indie charts. While Beggars were certainly an indie when they began in the late seventies, they rapidly inked a marketing and distribution deal with Warner Brothers who, whatever the size of Beggars own offices or staff-force, made them no more or less independent than Sire, Atlantic or Elektra.

The official MRIB indie charts recognised this state of affairs and barred them from entry. The NME, Melody Maker and Record Mirror indie charts all seemed to be in a state of confusion over it, though, letting Beggars in at some point in the mid-eighties before booting them out again a year or two later. So far as I can tell, this wasn’t a hot topic among the readers of those magazines, who probably didn’t care about these trifles; such discussions were fit only for industry types in the pages of Music Week. It must have been galling if you were in with a shot of getting an indie number one during The Cult's reign at the top, though – so commiserations to Doctor and the Medics who suffered that blow during this single’s initial stay there.

In other respects too, “She Sells Sanctuary” feels like something more than a modest little independent release. Every time we’ve met The Cult on our travels through these charts, there have been subtle shifts and progressions, sometimes interrupted by a fanbase-pleasing 45 before they increased their levels of stomp and bluesy strum a little further. “Sanctuary” is the sound of borders not just being fully breached, but the group sprinting across them screaming about their arrival. Held in place by one of the better rock riffs of the eighties - a mutant cross between Big Country’s bagpiping guitar and a classic Keith Richards refrain - Astbury sounds as if he’s screaming for sanctuary while running from one rock genre to the other.

While I doubt the group were being overly cynical in the construction of this one, it is fascinating just how many styles and tropes it wraps into one neat bundle. The incoherent post-punk vocalisations are intact – of all The Cult’s singles, it’s interesting that their biggest hit so far should be the most incomprehensible – but while there’s a Kirk Brandon-esque wail in the mix, there are also moments where Astbury’s voice finds the clench teethed scream of basic metal.

Elsewhere, Duffy’s hoedown hook is consistently interrupted at the tail end by the brief strums of a folky acoustic guitar, so regular, simple and predictable that almost feels like a sample. I’m a sucker for this bit, actually; I love the way it keeps interrupting the busy nature of the rest of the song with its polite, understated tick of approval, as if its visiting from another song entirely. Then there’s that instrumental break, mellow and toying with psychedelia, shoving the central riff underwater and filling it with the whine and buzz of sitar strings.

The end result is that “She Sells Sanctuary” sounded like everything that was going on in alternative rock in 1985 happening at once. At the time, I couldn’t help but be very conscious of its existence; it felt as if it spent most of the summer school holidays slowly crawling around the Top 40, never quite reaching the top ten but refusing to leave. At certain hours on Radio One, its riff needled away on the airwaves, sounding so familiar that it begged doubts as to whether somebody had written it many years before [post-script: It does admittedly sound somewhat like the intro to "Cats In The Cradle"]

Years later, when I became old enough to be let into alternative rock clubs, it still hadn’t gone away. It remained the barnstormer the DJ would utilise at the key moment everyone had consumed enough Snakebite and Black, only to watch the dancefloor seethe with the disordered movements of a hundred grebos, crusties and goths (and some of the metallers too). Some tracks spoke only to small segments of the audience and created vacuums in the corners of the dancefloor, but “She Sells Sanctuary” – like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Firestarter” after it – seemingly spoke to everyone.