Showing posts with label The Cult. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Cult. Show all posts

Sunday, July 13, 2025

56. Toy Dolls - Nellie The Elephant (Volume)


Number one for seven weeks from w/e 15th December 1984


So then – where were you when you last heard the collective cry of “WooooooOOOOOOAARGH”? In my experience, it can be heard in the following strict set of circumstances:

1. As the enthusiastic accompaniment to somebody “downing a pint”.

2. As the tense sound made by football supporters during a critical penalty shot (usually followed either by cheers, an “ooh!” of disappointment, or even a deflated, almost sarcastic “Oh.”)

3. The noise made shortly before a group of pissed-up beef-necked overgrown schoolboys start throwing increasingly heavy objects around in a pub. It might start with beer mats and end with chairs. Usually, deep down, you know you should have left the place long before this occurred.

4. The sound shortly before the chorus of “Nellie The Elephant”.

Spot the odd one out there. We’ve encountered The Toy Dolls multiple times in our journey through the indie charts, and on every occasion it’s been noticeable just how much they inhabit their own world; it’s an absurd but not particularly sophisticated cross between the abrasive and the fey, the childlike and the rough. 

The group’s roots were firmly in the Punk Pathetique subgenre of Oi, where banal and trivial working class observations combined with a general air of frivolity and stupidity; if most of those groups focused on simple comedic situations such as trying to get served in a bar before closing time (Splodgenessabounds) or being caught kissing someone else’s woman and having to make your escape (Peter & The Test Tube Babies), the Toy Dolls were essentially doing the same only writing with thick crayons. Titles like “Cheerio and Toodle-pip”, all delivered in Olga’s high pitched music hall voice, felt as if they had emerged from ancient episodes of “Watch With Mother”. You got the impression that in Olga’s opinion, the whole of adult society hadn’t moved far beyond the kindergarten, so why should he?

Their cover version of the Mandy Miller song “Nellie The Elephant” had been released in 1982 to indie chart success, but didn’t really make much of a mark beyond the kind of dancefloors where punks gathered. The track never quite disappeared from those club playlists, though, and slowly and steadily found a fresh audience in 1984 thanks to stray bits of Radio One evening airplay getting noticed by the daytime crew (though John Peel, interestingly, consistently ignored it in favour of other Toy Dolls material). The track was reissued, and entered the lower reaches of the Top 100 in November, building up steam and then finally gatecrashing the Top 40 by early December.

Its popularity feels almost entirely due to the absurdities of the British Christmas market. Record buyers at Christmas time will happily part with money to hear anything which sounds as if it might evoke collective fun, whether that’s songs with superhumanly anthemic choruses, tracks their children could also appreciate, or novelty records which are frankly stupid but annoyingly catchy. For all its chugging punk rock stylings, “Nellie The Elephant” managed to tick all those boxes, and found itself appreciated by kids both literal and overgrown - the children at home getting excited about Christmas, and the ones in the outside world getting drunk at the works party; the Olgas and the Juniors of this world, some growing up and others falling down.

The Toy Dolls suddenly found themselves in the Christmas number four position, right behind the Three Kings of Band Aid, Wham’s “Last Christmas” and Paul McCartney’s Frog Chorus – all monstrous sellers. It was a colossal achievement for their tiny Sunderland indie label Volume, who were usually only used to worrying about getting enough copies of their singles pressed to keep them in the Indie Top 20. In this sense, “Nellie The Elephant” is an eccentric British victory for the rank outsider, the everyman partaking in daft follies in his spare time and then finding himself eyeballing an ex-Beatle for a top three chart position. And at Christmastime too! It’s a wonderful life indeed.

It has to be said that it’s not really a great piece of work in itself, though, and Peel’s reluctance to engage with it is not surprising. It’s a groundbreaker in that it feels like one of the first attempts by a punk or metal band to create a single out of unlikely source material. In the decades to come we will be treated to ironic covers of children’s songs and "cheesy" pop hits by no end of young men wearing studded leather jackets, but even taking that “innovation” into account, the single is really just a boozy racket.

In this respect, the gap between “Nellie” and Scaffold’s 1968 Christmas number one “Lily The Pink” is actually quite narrow. Both depend on the same stomping, chugging rhythm, perfect for bashing beer tankards on tables to. Both sound perfect for the kind of overly raucous Christmas party I must admit I never got along with – the toxically mixed kind which occasionally saw somebody fired from their job in the New Year, or saw old rows between good friends being resuscitated. Sometimes the line between the jolly drunken cry of “WooooAAARGH” and much more aggressive screaming and shouting can be very fine.

Sunday, June 8, 2025

51. March Violets - Walk Into The Sun


Three weeks at number one from w/e 11th August 1984


Back in my teens, I was a member of a twee indie trio who augmented their contemplative janglings about strange teenage girls and rainy days with a cheap Casio drum machine. We knew no drummers, saw no obvious way of getting acquainted with any, and in any case, we didn’t have and couldn’t afford a suitable rehearsal space to put a full drumkit in.

The band’s principle songwriter was strangely defensive of the crappy machine, though, constantly trying to make out it was a unique selling point rather than a hinderance, and had worked out ways of making it sound more interesting; piling on the reverb and ladening it with odd effects. I stood playing bass alongside the shuffling, precise, echoing thump and hiss of this digital steam engine and felt increasingly that this wasn’t what being in a rhythm section should be about. The other two members had each other to trade off and lean on – I had a machine I hated which just winked at me with one red LED eye. I obviously whined about this far too much, as one day they just stopped telling me when rehearsals were taking place.

Further back still than that, in the early eighties in the Leeds area, all kinds of goth-adjacent groups were choosing not to put little cards in the windows of music shops asking for drummers (or if they did, nobody replied). Sisters Of Mercy, Rose Of Avalanche and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry all decided this was a distinctly unnecessary and hassle-filled pre-eighties extravagance, and March Violets followed suit. The cavernous thwack of the drum machine therefore became synonymous with a particular brand of northern Goth rock, the lamp black musings of those groups always being anchored in place forcibly by that precise, immovable and sometimes unshifting rhythm pattern.

I’ve made my personal experiences plain from the outset here not as an excuse to waffle on about my embarrassing teenage years in groups – I barely give a shit about them now, so I fail to see why you should - but as a clear conflict of interest. I always hated the bloody machines in a rock context and now when I hear one on a professional rock recording, I often can’t get past it. The problem with drum machines wedded to anything predominantly guitar based is you’re usually going to have to work very hard to make a limitation sound like a positive feature.

The March Violets started, according to member Tom Ashton, as a “reaction to all the synthy pap that was filling the Top 40. We wanted to dance but we were also still punk rockers at heart. And we couldn’t be bothered to audition drummers, so we did what we did!”

Besides the fact that I obviously inwardly sighed when I read the slagging of “synthy pap”, there’s nothing wrong with this ambition it’s just – well – how do you dance to this single? To be fair to the group, they are ambitious with the beatbox. It shifts and changes and approximates a live drummer fairly decently throughout, but you can still tell. There’s a measuredness to it, a pulse without frills or fills or spontaneity. The guitars chunter and clang alongside it, and the added feature of the shifting but fussy beat just makes “Walk Into The Sun” sound leaden, too heavy to cavort around the dancefloor to, but also too far away from Proper Rock to mosh or throw yourself around.

Let’s not completely lose focus, though. More than many of their compatriots, The Violets have a distinctive sound of their own here, pulling politely away from theatrical doominess and towards something that almost allows some daylight in. You can hear it in singer Rosie Garland’s careful and almost gleeful annunciations during the chorus, or in the almost celebratory burst of sax towards the end. “The sun machine is coming down/ and we’re going to have a party” they declare, ripping off Bowie but at least making their intentions pretty clear. “Walk Into The Sun” makes it sound as if the kids in black were having a whale of a time after all.

Sunday, May 25, 2025

The NME on Strike! (But here's The Cult, The Smiths and The Damned anyway)

























9 weeks until w/e 4th August 1984

Here’s where things get tricky and a messy, charred hole emerges in our narrative. In the summer of 1984, IPC went on strike putting all of their publications either completely out of print (in the NME’s case) or operating to a greatly reduced degree. Some of IPC’s comics made it out into the shops, for example, but with reduced colour and using repeated strips from the seventies. This meant that if you were a kid in 1984 you perhaps had to deal with the unexpected surprise of Sid’s Snake out of Whizzer and Chips alarming a punk rocker, or found yourself trying to make sense of a background gag about some 1978 chart hit you couldn't remember. Everything, very suddenly, went black and white and childhoods were catapulted backwards in time.

For the older brothers and sisters of those kids, however, it just went black. There was nothing emerging from Kings Reach Tower, so if they wanted a weekly music fix, they had to read Sounds, Record Mirror or Number One magazine instead, none of which really captured the tastes or tone of their favoured Express.

More problematic than that, certainly where I'm concerned here and now in 2025, it also meant that absolutely no NME indie charts were published for that entire period either, so I’ve nothing to show you for summer 1984; however, one possible compromise emerges from this mess. 

The Independent Singles Chart compiled by MRIB continued as usual, so we can get a likely sense of what might have been number one from the data presented there. This should be taken with a pinch of salt. MRIB’s chart tended to treat pop hits by the likes of Black Lace and Renee and Renato with much more favour than the NME’s somewhat more streamlined, specialist approach. In the summer of 1984, for example, Black Lace’s “Agadoo” got to the top spot on the MRIB Indies, but due to its more modest placing in the NME’s listings, we won’t be discussing it at length on this blog (something of a shame as it would have presented an interesting challenge for me, even if I doubt anyone would have bothered to read my subsequent thoughts unless I turned them into some kind of “Ahhhh! But it is pop perfection, do you see?” styled clickbait).

As a result, here are the MRIB Number Ones for that period, presented more briefly than usual, and to be treated with kid gloves by everyone reading them; none will be added to the Spotify playlist of NME Number Ones or referred to in any of the blog’s lists. These are only possible lost number ones, some more likely than others, but not to be treated as "official" chart toppers in the NME listings. 

1. The Cult – Spirit Walker (Situation Two) one week on w/e 2nd June




Given the way this one was galloping up the NME Indies when we left them, prodding away at a track whose sales were already descending sharply (“Pearly Dewdrops Drops”) I see no reason to doubt this one would have got to the top; but having said that, this single feeble week at the top of the MRIB charts doesn’t exactly point towards a dominant presence.

“Spiritwalker” saw the final emergence of The Cult following the dissolution of Southern Death Cult and the amendment of the subsequently named Death Cult. The group, like some kind of chemical conglomerates company who were desperately perfecting their name to make it sound less garbled to the public, obviously realised keeping things sharp and simple was best.

It’s tempting to say that “Spiritwalker” was evidence of this tightened and more commercial ambition, but in reality the progression feels very slight. The opening introduction of the track is the biggest difference, acting as a very trad rock, hollered clarion call to listeners – as a non-fan, I was genuinely surprised by how engrossed I was in the first few seconds when I played it back for the first time in years.

What happens after that is a strange mixture of more Death Cultishness combined with occasional flashes and sparks of classic rock fetishism. The rhythm section certainly still have one foot in the gothic grave – the bass guitarist rumbles and rattles out root notes like a Peter Hook inspired pro, and the drummer pounds and thuds on the skins rather than the metalwork like a medieval minstrel. Elsewhere in the group, however, a clear love of noticeable guitar hero licks is emerging from Billy Duffy, and Ian Astbury is now starting to sound fully in command.

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

48b. Cocteau Twins - Pearly Dewdrops Drops (4AD)


Two more weeks at number one from w/e 19th May 1984

It's been a while since we've seen a rebound number one on the blog, but here we are again, back in the arms of the Cocteaus for two further weeks. Here's what was happening lower down the charts:

Week One

9. The Cult - Spiritwalker (Situation Two)

Peak position: 3

We'll come back to this one over the weekend if it's all the same to you - it was never officially an NME Indie Chart number one, but as we're about to find out, things got very complicated over the summer.

18. Colourbox - Punch (4AD)

Peak position: 18

More twittery grooves from 4AD's most dancefloor friendly band, who on this single sound as if they're edging closer to pop music, rapidly flashing Top of the Pops studio lights and the same carefree buoyancy of Freeez or even Break Machine. Only the extended breakdowns, lack of a nagging chorus and gasping orgasm noises prevent it from making the leap to daytime radio. 

Week Two

9. New Order - Murder (Factory Benelux)

Peak position: 9

Released over in Belgium as an exclusive on Factory's Benelux label, then charting on import over in the UK, "Murder" isn't really an act of generosity to loyal Belgian fans so much as a cast-off. It was originally recorded in Winter 1982 while the group completed their sessions for the "Power Corruption and Lies" album, and sounds (at best) like a B-side in waiting. By the time the "Substance" compilation emerged, that's how it was categorised too, relegated to the second bonus CD alongside all the other instrumental versions, dubs and flotsam. 

Sonically this has little relation to where New Order found themselves in 1984, containing tribal drum patterns, menacing bass lines, and spindly Twilight Zone-esque guitar work, interspersed with occasional samples from "2001 A Space Odyssey". For anyone pining for the atmosphere (no pun intended) of their earliest work, it might have acted as an interesting reminder of those darker days, but the average Belgian consumer must have been baffled to pieces by this one.

10. Husker Du - Eight Miles High (SST)

Peak position: 10

"Eight Miles High" created havoc with The Byrds "commerical fortunes" back in 1966, often being cited as being the point where their pop audience jumped ship to listen to material which didn't involve complex, meandering Eastern-styled guitar breaks and eerie, trippy observations on an England the band seemingly didn't understand, nor felt fully understood by (it's always been interesting to me that the group made visiting this country sound like an excursion to some mysterious and impoverished backwater tribal village - perhaps it was the drugs, perhaps it was the fact that Britain was still trying to pick itself up from the ruins of World War Two, but we can't have been as miserable and unfathomable as that, surely?)

It's a complex number to cover, which is possibly why the emerging Husker Du just dismantle it instead, howling, screaming and creating something which actually sounds uncannily like some smalltown 1966 garage act doing their thing with it. If the original is ill at ease with itself but nonetheless coherent, Husker Du's take is trippy in the most uncomfortable sense of the word, like someone who has taken acid at a crowded party in a strange town and now couldn't be further from enjoying themselves. It's a perfectly valid way of interpreting the song and captured the imagination of many listeners in 1984, beginning the process of Husker Du becoming a fringe cause for many music critics. 


13. Instigators - The Blood Is On Your Hands EP (Bluurg)

Peak position: 13

19. Exit-Stance - Esthetics (Revolver)

Peak position: 19

While Revolver was credited as the label in the NME's Chart (and indeed by the group on the sleeve) they were only the distributors of this distinctly DIY bit of goth rock - a very sketchy, presumably band-drawn sleeve houses a single with a black plasticrap label.

Sonically, Exit-Stance are underproduced here, and this is very lo-fi and top-heavy for something which clearly had ambitious to be a lot more expansive. "Do you worry about your spots?" the group ask, "Or do you - in a literal sense - put your face on each morning?" cleverly managing to make a point relevant to the anarcho-punks and the Goths simultaneously. No wonder it sold better than most other DIY singles during the same era. 



20. Break Machine - Break Dance Party (Record Shack)

Peak position: 20

In which the manufactured street crew are given an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to following up their huge hit. It jitters and whistles away in much the same manner, sounding like Roger Whittaker spinning on his back on a bit of cardboard, but also manages to sound like the work of a production crew caught with their pants down. "Oh shit, who thought that would be a smash?" you can hear them ask. "We don't seem to have any other powerful choruses to hand at the moment". 

The momentum created by their debut ensured that this climbed quickly to number 9 in the national charts before just as quickly descending again, but afterwards this particular Machine started to look a bit broken, unable to further build on their success. 



Peak position: 21


Peak position: 28

For the full charts, please go to the UKMix Forums

Number One In The Official Charts


Duran Duran: "The Reflex" (EMI)