35. The Imposter (aka Elvis Costello) - Pills And Soap (Imp)

Three weeks at number from w/e 18th June 1983

Not really much of an “imposter”, more an interloper to the indie charts. While “Pills and Soap” was presented in some quarters as a pseudonymous “mystery single”, in reality Elvis Costello did virtually nothing to dupe the public with this, not even bothering to disguise his extremely distinctive voice. By the time it emerged in the UK National Top 40, he even appeared on Top of the Pops, where John Peel and “Kid” Jenkins both sarcastically pretended not to know his true identity (Peel: “It’s not Shakey, is it?”)




There were some very dull reasons underlying this quarter-hearted deception. In 1983, Elvis Costello’s record label F-Beat were undergoing a change in their worldwide distribution arrangements, moving from Warner Brothers to RCA. The protracted legal discussions had delayed the release of his next album “Punch The Clock”, and rather than also delay the release of the first single “Pills and Soap” longer than necessary, Costello opted to release it under a pseudonym on F-Beat’s “indie” subsidiary Imp Records.

There are two possible reasons why he took this path – firstly, there’s a strong chance that he may have been impatient while bureaucratic issues were being discussed in the background, feeing that if he didn’t get something fresh out soon, momentum may be lost. There was also the small matter of the imminent General Election in the UK, which caused the subjects touched upon during this single to potentially feel more relevant, pressing and explosive.

“Pills and Soap” could, to a half-listening person, be referring to animal cruelty with the references to Noah’s ark and melting animals “down for pills and soap”. This was the explanation Costello gave to the BBC when they nervously asked him what the song was about. Closer inspection reveals this to be nonsense, though. Firstly, the chorus refers to “children and animals, two by two”, then points its finger towards the aristocracy and perhaps even the royal family: “The king is in the counting house, some folk have all the luck/ And all we get is pictures of Lord and Lady Muck/ They come from lovely people with a hardline in hypocrisy/ There are ashtrays of emotion for the fag ends of the aristocracy”. There are other sharp, bitter tasting lines on offer besides, such as “You think your country needs you but you know it never will”, which totally give the game away.

If “Shipbuilding” was a sympathetic gaze at a community (and country) in crisis, “Pills and Soap” is unfocused invective – an unfixed list of the malaise that Costello feels the UK fell under in the early eighties; decadence, distraction, blind patriotism, the establishment worshipping view of the tabloid press. The animals and children being melted down are the expendable lower classes; though of course, the fact Costello is a vegetarian isn’t a complete coincidence here.

Musically speaking, it’s absurdly simple, with a drum machine generating simple, clicking beatnik Daddio rhythms which combine with Steve Naive’s thundering, Hammer Horror piano lines. It’s an extraordinarily daring first single to lift from an album, offering the polar opposite of so much eighties pop – while that was often elaborate and multi-faceted, “Pills And Soap” is threadbare and puts the emphasis and weight of the record’s worth on its lyrics.

How you feel about it really depends upon how receptive you are to such earnest singer-songwriter minimalism, and also crucially when you first heard this. In 1983, there’s little doubt that Costello’s observations were controversial and insightful. Britain was under the early spell of Thatcherism and the behaviour of the press and the Government in power was quite radical – earlier Conservative governments obviously held aspirations to defeat Trade Unions, but few had swung the axe with as much enthusiasm and as little regard for communities as Auntie Maggie.

20. Pigbag - Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag (Y Records)

Number one for five weeks from 17 April 1982

Any keen student of the indie chart in the eighties will know that there were records which seemed to hang around forever, yo-yoing around the bottom end of the listings as if they didn’t have homes to go to. Two factors seemed to particularly trigger this phenomenon – hit singles being purchased by stragglers or new fans long after the song’s peak, and long-term dancefloor hits. Sometimes, particularly in the case of a future 1983 leviathan (which I can’t even believe I’m bothering to be secretive about) the two factors combined to an astonishingly potent degree.

After its debut in 1981, “Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag” crawled up and down the indie chart, disappearing after pressing runs dried up then reemerging, beginning the process afresh, then evaporating into thin air. Its popularity appeared [citation needed!] to be largely driven by club play and word of mouth in its earliest days. It wasn’t generally heard on daytime radio and as a small boy I don’t recall hearing it at all until 1982, although my older teenage brothers already seemed familiar with it by the time it first emerged in the grown up charts.

The track feels taken for granted nowadays, and in some circles – certainly those of particular football fans – it’s become a party favourite, a carnival cracker, something to dig out when a goal is scored, a promotion is guaranteed, or just deployed at the right time when everyone is in the correct mood. I’ve seen the effect “Papa” has on audiences, and it’s immediately recognised and understood, having a galvanising effect and crossing most cultural divides.

In one respect, this is explicable enough. The central aspect of the record is a stupendous fanfare backed with the kind of funky rhythm section that everyone finds irresistible. The horns and the clappy backbeat beckon you towards the floor even if you’re one of life’s most apologetic wallflowers. It's the part everyone can whistle when asked, the aspect that pulls everyone towards the centre of the floor. 

11. Anti-Pasti - 6 Guns

 

One week at number one on 28th November 1981

There seemed to be a spirit of camaraderie among second wave British punk bands in the early eighties. While the most known of those groups are undoubtedly The Exploited and the Anti Nowhere League, there were a whole brace of other groups welcome inside that parameter fence as the groups all sat on the same bill at numerous punk all-dayers.

With one honourable exception aside, Anti-Pasti didn't get inside the official Top 75, but they were frequently close to dining at the captain's (sensible?) table on the Great Ship Bushell. Their debut LP “The Last Call” got to number 31 on the album charts, and many of their singles also flew high in the independent listings.

Some were ultra lo-fi and bruised sounding, scratching their way around common concerns at the time like audio brillo pads trying to scrape away the shine of capitalism (right kids?). “No Government”, for example, is a pretty straightforward anti-monarchy and anti-Thatcher single which also reminds its listeners that the Queen doesn’t fight in the army, so why should they? The whole thing sounds like one man yelling over the buzzing of a Remington electric shaver which has become embedded in a wasps nest.




“6 Guns” is surprisingly commercial and almost first wave by comparison, consisting of the kind of anthemic punk chorus neither Sham 69 or UK Subs would turn their noses up at. There are no surprises or red herrings stylistically here, with the group not being even vaguely tempted to acknowledge post-punk or the more rockist leanings some of their heroes were beginning to lean towards; it really is brittle, immediate and tight punk rock, and as such it’s difficult to find anything new to say about it.

1. Discharge - Why? (Clay Records)

 

Number One from 18th May 1981 for two weeks

Back in the early nineties a label called Connoisseur Collection issued a series of thoughtfully compiled records called “The Indie Scene”. Each documented a year in the life of British independent labels, and while it was occasionally guilty of inauthenticity (even the most liberal definition of “indie” shouldn’t include The Stranglers releases on United Artists) the booklets were enthusiastically written and informative, and some of the CDs contained material which had been unavailable in a digital format before.

Despite this, missing from these compilations was any kind of (even passing) reference to the early eighties punk scene. Whether this was due to rights issues or master tape problems is a question, but cynical old me suspects that it was probably because those bands didn’t fit the narrative, despite their overwhelming popularity in underground terms. I can imagine the conversations in the office – “Post punk? Definitely, that’s going in. Industrial? Of course. Synth pop? Well, we can hardly leave Mute out of the story. Hardcore Punk? Forget it. Nobody is going to buy these compilations to listen to one minute and thirty seconds of a man grunting and raging against the failings of a supposedly liberal Western society while a group thrash away behind him”.

Whether my assumptions are correct or not, I generally feel the rush of enthusiasm for these releases has been wiped out of indie history. It fits the story in one respect, in that all these groups were operating outside the mainstream, had a distinct sound, passion and purpose, and were sometimes played by John Peel, but they certainly don’t neatly fit the preferred mainstream BBC 6 Music narrative, the backwards looking one with its tidy cuts and edits to the messy edges of the story.

In addition, punks in general had a significantly reduced visibility by the early eighties. They were still apparent, but seemed to have become more of a small town phenomenon; similar to the way in which you don’t see motorcycle gangs in urban areas anymore but one miraculously emerges as soon as you take a day trip to Cheddar, punks now seemed to have become a phenomenon of the bored suburbs and strange between-city outposts rather than the troubled estates.

At the time, I noticed the graffiti “Punk’s Not Dead” popping up in odd places (we’ll come back to this slogan again in good time) which even as an eight year old I understood wasn’t a good sign. People don’t tend to walk around protesting something’s not dead if it’s obviously in rude health. When our neighbour told us that her Dad was still alive, it was only because this seemed like a miraculous fact given his health woes, not because he had taken up tap dancing.

Punk, though, had both infected other genres and itself splintered into many different factions and forms. The Oi scene, championed and promoted by future tabloid superhack Gary Bushell, seemed to imagine an alternate universe where Sham 69 were the artistic champions of the movement and not The Clash or The Pistols. Then other “punk pathetique” groups like Splodgenessabounds and Peter and the Test Tube Babies occupied the gleefully childish fringes of the movement, as if they had decided that refusing to act like a grown up and celebrating, rather than railing against, the daft trivialities of daily life was one of the most anarchic and free-spirited things a human being could still do (I might be inclined to agree with them).

Then there was hardcore punk, though how long it took before anybody actually referred to it as such in the UK is open to question. Bushell didn’t seem to talk as enthusiastically about those bands, though he certainly gave them space. They were harder, heavier, nastier and, for all their relative musical amateurism, more Metal than the first wave of British punk bands.

Stoke-on-Trent’s Discharge were pioneers of the British movement, and the “Why?” EP shows us how they did it. It’s akin to Wire’s earliest work in that each song is a short, mean stab which doesn’t take up more time than it has to – the EP consists of ten tracks but is over in less than twenty minutes. Completely unlike any of Wire’s work, however, this is persistently, relentlessly harsh, a distorted and furious cacophony which barely stops for breath. Cal Morris’ vocals practically invent the doomy guttural chant of modern metal, while the group surge, clatter and charge behind him.