83b The Mission - Garden Of Delight/ 84b The Smiths - Panic

Garden of Delight returns to number one for one week on 16th August 1986

Panic returns to number one for two weeks on 23rd August 1986

Garden of Delight rebounds to number one again for one week on 6th September 1986

Panic returns again for a further week on 13th September 1986

Have you absorbed all those chart facts above? Good. Rebound number ones were never unusual in the NME Indie Chart, but the dogfight between Morrissey and Hussey (speaking in sales terms, rather than literally) which occurred throughout the dying summer months of 1986 led to a confusing ping-ponging at the top rather than letting in any fresh blood.

It’s probably not worth saying much more about this beyond the fact that it might seem surprising that at this point, The Mission were such a big deal that they could compete easily with one of The Smiths biggest and most well known singles. They were managing to capture the imagination of a broader cross-section of the public than Hussey’s old band The Sisters of Mercy, and certainly other long-standing goth acts besides. 

Other than gesturing towards that fact, let’s take a peek lower down the charts.


Week One


21. Mighty Mighty - Is There Anyone Out There (Girlie)

Peak position: 11

“The summer brings out the best in girls and the worst in me” hollers singer Hugh McGuinness early on in this 45, before singing about suntanned legs being among his favourite things. The song is essentially a twee ditty about the typical loneliness of your average anorak wearing dork in 1986 rather than a perv-out, and its trilling, twanging melodies underline the innocence of the whole thing. Honest.

22. The Toy Dolls - Geordie's Gone To Jail (Volume)

Peak position: 15

This is an unexpected about-turn. The Toy Dolls' vocalist Olga generally bubbled and squeaked his way through their songs, but on this single the whole group let rip not only with something approaching a snarl from Olga, but also a roaring anthemic second wave punk chorus. 

It’s not clear who the Geordie is the group are referring to, except that he's going to jail even though he didn’t kill anyone – he’s also never taken any drugs “only penicilin when he’s got a headache”. The old novelty lightness of touch remains throughout this single, but I did find myself filling up with doubt and started hunting around to find out if there was actually a serious back-story here; it’s about as sincere sounding as The Toy Dolls get, even if that sincerity is only just on the right side of Tenpole Tudor. 

24. Poly Styrene - Gods & Goddesses EP (Awesome)

Peak position: 24

Poly Styrene of X Ray Spex emerging on the Awesome label (which was largely reserved for Danielle Dax products) might seem surprising but the whole thing not only does sound a bit like Dax, but also gels with Poly’s style unbelievably well. Lead track “Trick Of The Witch” is a giddy brew of heavy rock riffs, psychedelia, bubbling electronic pulses and Poly’s wide-eyed vocals. While her post X Ray Spex records are undeniably patchy, it’s hard not to have admiration for her ability to move forwards away from the constraints of punk rock; while some of the people from that scene continued to thrash away in 1986, Styrene dared to push forwards.

27. Demented Are Go - Holy Hack Jack (ID)


Peak position: 23


Week Two


17. Pop Will Eat Itself - The Poppies Say GRRrrr! (Desperate)

Peak position: 14

The Poppies second release is an oddly subdued recording, with lots of sweet, spritely melodies and only slightly distorted guitars in the mix. At this point, they were clearly trying to stay close to the C86 pack and hadn’t forged a clear identity of their own, and to that end it’s not a particularly impressive listen, whizzing unmemorably through your stereo speakers like the last demo your work colleague’s little teenage brother sent you. You can only nod encouragingly at the progress – they did become a much more brittle and modern group in very short order.

21. Yeah Jazz - This Is Not Love (Upright)

Peak position: 20

Kitchen sink indie drama from this market town (Uttoxeter) mob from Staffordshire, singing of unwanted teenage pregnancies and forced relationships in a manner which could have been either cloying or overly heavy-handed, but manages to strike the balance beautifully. Yeah Jazz use diverse instrumentation to colour the drama and tumultuous emotions in the lyrics, sounding impressively like early precursors to Belle and Sebastian in the process. The first genuinely surprising track I’ve heard for an age while researching this blog.

75. Shop Assistants - Safety Net (53rd and 3rd)

Three weeks at number one from 1st March 1986

At the time of writing this, I’m ploughing through Justin Lewis’s marvellous book “Into The Groove”, which performs the unenviable job of trying to tie together the hundreds of narratives around eighties music. How you remember the decade probably depends an awful lot on a wide variety of factors besides the big headline events – how old you were, where you lived, how much money you had, and ultimately what mattered to you most; the microscopic silk threads that weave in a dizzying number of directions. 

It’s not that the eighties is the decade where audience fragmentation becomes the norm, but you can just about see the 21st Century and its cornucopia of unmixed, niche experiences on the horizon. Underground and DIY movements, started by people with perhaps more ideas than financial sense, and invisible to most but their small target audiences, began to feel more viable. For club music, urban pirate stations cropped up which were avidly followed by those in the know, creating surprise hit singles for artists nobody in the mainstream media (apart from the likes of James Hamilton) were writing about. Numerous low-budget indie labels, fanzines and club nights also popped up, all collectively pushing a roughly shared agenda and creating a scene which could see a good single by a relatively new band selling 10,000 copies with only minimal bites of mainstream exposure.

Amidst the avalanche of short-lived indie labels around the period, 53rd and 3rd is one which seldom seems to get written about, despite having an enormous cultural clout for a couple of years, almost exclusively releasing records by the kind of groups we would refer to as “indiepop” these days (and far ahead of bigger cult labels like Sarah Records).

Launched in Scotland in 1985 with Stephen McRobbie (of The Pastels), David Keegan (of The Shop Assistants) and Sandy McLean (of early indie Fast Product) running affairs, their sleeves were amateurish and none-more-indie, usually consisting of smudged designs in two colours. The contents inside matched the artwork, being simple, frequently fey, cheaply recorded and sometimes scratchy pop tunes performed by usually very young or naive bands. Their roster, if you could call it that, is essentially everyone any self-respecting indie kid of the era has heard of; Talulah Gosh, BMX Bandits, The Vaselines, The Pooh Sticks and Beat Happening all at least passed through. Their catalogue numbers usually began with AGARR, which stood for “As Good As Ramones Records”, thereby solidly etching a firm ambition on all their output, right in the middle of the run-out grooves.

For Stephen McRobbie aka Stephen Pastel, the enterprise might have been motivated by his recent experiences on Creation Records (although we’d have to ask him). His group had recently been booted off the label alongside a number of others during an Alan McGee organised clear-out, partly motivated by criticisms from his artists about what the label now represented and how he was handling their affairs. If Creation had once seemed like a convenient safehouse for oddballs and mavericks, the artists residing there had perhaps not appreciated how ambitious McGee truly was, which became only too apparent during the Jesus & Mary Chain’s first run of success. He suddenly stopped being the over-excitable man who folded single sleeves with his friends and associates until the early morning, and instead became a sunglasses-at-night wannabe McLaren figure.

53rd and 3rd backed completely away from grand statements and kept themselves firmly on the amateur side of the street. Despite this, their first release “Safety Net” quickly climbed to the top of the indie charts, and unlike The Sisterhood or Easterhouse before it, remained there for more than one token week, far above the current Depeche Mode single “Stripped” and also outpacing new contenders such as The Wedding Present and The Mighty Lemon Drops. 

It was, despite their amateur aesthetic, a strong opening statement for the label. The Shop Assistants had been slowly building up an audience since 1984 with releases on various labels, and their previous single “Shopping Parade” had peaked at number 3 in the indie listings. The group – a mixed gender quintet – had also spent some of 1985 benefitting from national support slots with Jesus & Mary Chain, bringing them to much larger audiences than they would have experienced had they been stuck on pub bills with the Jasmine Minks or A Witness. On top of that, their work and live shows were cut through with a bonhomie which didn’t seem fake; without seemingly even trying, their interviews, video clips and even the records themselves made them sound like a joyful gang of people who could be your new best friends. In underground circles, where bands toured the country bumping into the same fanatical individuals in Norwich, Leeds and Bristol, that mattered. There was a sense of belonging. 

If you were so minded, you could see “Safety Net” as being a very cynical move as a result. “Lucky you’ve a safety net/ lucky you’ve somewhere to go,” the song begins. The indiepop community was by this point becoming tight and solid friendships were forming – like most small music based cults, it contained people who may only have had a few slabs of vinyl and a surplus of idealism in common, but that seemed like enough to forge lasting bonds. The opening lines, then, could be addressed to the “lucky people” in the audience. “Afraid of dying and afraid of life/ But wishing we could stand around the stars again,” lead singer Alex Taylor sings again later on, addressing the simultaneous neuroses and child-like wonder of a lot of their fans.

It would be harsh to call it calculated, though. Musically, it’s poppy and sweet but undercut by the thorny scrape of cheap guitars and a bare, Mary Chain-esque backbeat. It couldn’t be trying less hard. If it’s an anthem, I’d argue it gets there by chance rather than strategic manoeuvres, purely by sharing themes common to twenty-somethings in an increasingly harsh economic environment.

67. Depeche Mode - It's Called A Heart (Mute)

One week at number one on w/e 6th October 1985

From about 1983 until the end of the decade, it felt as if every Christmas came accompanied with a Big Present; the desirable item that someone in my family (not always my parents) decided to treat me to that year. One year I hit the jackpot and got a home computer, a treasured Commodore 64 which kept me company until the space bar literally fell off it. Other years I was given brilliant gifts whose value I didn’t always appreciate at first sight – as with 1985, when I unwrapped an unpromisingly small parcel and a dolby equipped Sony Walkman fell out.

“Wow, that’s nice!” I said, before quickly moving on.
“But it’s a Sony Walkman!” my brother said. “Aren’t you excited?” (luckily the present buyer was not in the room at this point).
“Yeah, like I said, it’s nice!”
“It’s more than nice, that’s a fantastic Walkman!” he continued to protest, almost offended by my mild enthusiasm. “I’d love one like that!”

My casual enthusiasm was due to the fact that I already had a radio/cassette player upstairs and couldn’t understand the difference. I soon came round. Also among my presents were two albums I’d wanted for months – Art Of Noise’s “Who’s Afraid Of…?” and Depeche Mode’s “Singles 81-85”. I pushed the button down on my new Walkman and pressed play, straight into “Dreaming Of Me”… and BANG. The pulse and throb of the drum machine hammered around my head in pristine, shiny audio. Every deep bass note and synthetic twitter, breath and pulse felt as if it was plugging right into my heartbeat, blocking out the rest of the world and creating a slick, digital soundtrack for my daydreams.

Both the tapes and the Walkman barely left my side for weeks afterwards, and I familiarised myself with Depeche Mode’s singles like a scholarly monk, sometimes eating breakfast and lunch in the kitchen while they played, deaf to the humdrum family world (this period of my life was excellent heavy advance research for this blog, you could say). “Singles 81-85” is structured chronologically, which with a lesser group could be a mistake and might involve frontloading their flops and fumbles first, causing the listener to lose interest after the fifteenth minute. As Depeche emerged surprisingly well-formed and carefully produced for an indie group, what you got instead was a band slowly morphing before your ears as they go through adolescence (literally and metaphorically) and decide who they really are.

When Vince Clarke leaves after “Just Can’t Get Enough”, there’s no jarring change, but a noticeable shift in priorities as the digital bops and squeaks get slowly replaced by more lingering ambient textures. Then industrial sampling emerges by the point of “Everything Counts”, then suddenly they become a harsher, noisier group in 1984 – in common with many others at the time – before landing on “Shake The Disease” and finding a way of making all their influences cohere with beautifully and admirably intricate production and songwriting.

That wasn’t all, though. “Shake The Disease” was only the first out of two non-studio album tracks on the compilation. The second one, and the final track overall, was this single, which slowly drifted into my ears doing a spitting, hissing and huffing synthetic impersonation of a groovy stream train; how very disco of them. Then the bass burps emerged, the rhythms twitched, the song sprang into life, Dave Gahan sang “There’s something beating here inside my body and it’s called a heart!” and I found myself thinking… oh. Is that it? Is this the finale, the curtain closer on the first act of your great career?

When put up against the last two years of the group’s work, which under these circumstances you’re given no choice but to consider, “It’s Called A Heart” is a perplexing backwards shift. It’s lyrically coy and unbelievably simple; there’s no questioning of God or pondering the complexities of human relationships here, it’s all about putting your trust in someone romantically, just like so many other pop songs before it. “Hearts can never be owned/ hearts only come on loan” sings Gahan, like a speak-your-Clintons-Valentines-Card machine. The group jitter and bug in the background, sprightly and peppy, and they do a good job of approximating the adrenalin rush of fresh romance, but there’s nothing truly impressive going on here. We’ve all been led to believe that pop music is never “just” pop music, but there will always be middling moments where it ends up being little more than a happy jingle to make the day go by faster. While a top-of-the-range Sony Walkman isn’t merely “nice”, sometimes that’s all the singles you play on it are – competently delivered slices of mild catchiness.

If “It’s Called A Heart” feels like a surprisingly retrograde step, some hints were present in the interviews the group did to promote it at the time. Andy Fletcher and Martin Gore talked about the process in “One Two Testing” magazine in October 1985, and a sense of under-investment and uncertainty shines through. Each band member and producer Daniel Miller got a vote on what should be the next single from a demo tape Martin Gore provided them with.