76. Half Man Half Biscuit - The Trumpton Riots (Probe Plus)

Two weeks at number one from 22nd March 1986

If you love neatly splicing things into sub-genres, and you feel very strongly that groups and artists have clear "neighbourhoods" which cannot be disputed, here’s where things get awkward. Way back at the end of 1984, The Toy Dolls climbed to number one in the indie charts with “Nellie The Elephant”. Not only was that the last major punk hit in the National Charts, I was also going to argue that it was the last big gasp of the Punk Pathetique sub-genre of Oi! Except…

There are critics and punk fans out there who will argue that Half Man Half Biscuit are part of that Gary Bushell adjacent patch. I can’t find any evidence to suggest that the group referred to themselves as such, but even if they didn’t, these views exist. The counter-claims against them are obviously numerous; the differences between The Toy Dolls, The Test Tube Babies, Splodgenessabounds and Half Man Half Biscuit couldn’t be more obvious. The Splodges looked quite striking in their own way, but indulged in facile dingbattery. The Dolls were/are hyper, whacky, squeaky and cartoonish, overgrown excitable children kicking each other’s tricycles whose handlebars were smeared in melted chocolate. 

HMHB, on the other hand, were – and are – another prospect altogether. Dour, scruffy, despondent, moping and despairing they may have been, but they often churned out comedic lyrical phrases which seemed anything but lazy and effortless. Their debut album “Back In The DHSS” was a shambling cornucopia of observations about children’s television, ageing comic actors (Bob Todd) and “Give Us A Clue” approved national treasures (Nerys Hughes, Una Stubbs, Lionel Blair), spliffs and snooker referees (Len Gangley). Punk Pathetique? I'd argue their styles and methods bore more resemblance to their fellow city-dwellers and beat poets The Liverpool Scene (give "Baby" a virtual spin to get the idea). 

The album was recorded as the test-run of a new eight-track facility in Liverpool where Nigel Blackwell worked as a caretaker following seven years of unemployment. “The caretaker’s band”, as they were somewhat disparagingly known by his colleagues, were allowed to give the desk its first dummy run and the album was recorded for the mate’s rate of £40. They handed the resulting tape around to record companies more in hope than expectation; Factory Records politely and predictably passed on it, but local record store Probe picked it up for their backroom label.

“Back In The DHSS” has a slightly rushed, demo-level sound as a result of its thrifty beginnings, but that only works in its favour. The underproduced sounds collide perfectly with lyrics which provide endless hints to Blackwell’s lifestyle (and possibly the band’s) – his world is one of front room televisions being switched on in the daytime at the height of summer, the heavy curtains fully drawn to stop the sun’s rude interruptions. Spliff and tobacco smoke hang in the air, while he sits on a pouffe passively absorbing the day’s televisual offerings, occasionally getting frustrated but feeling too powerless and groggy to even change the station. Trumpton comes on. He laughs his first stoned giggle of the day, imagining the central characters to be dabbling with drugs. We've all been there. 

As a result, the album felt as if it accidentally found three target markets – students, the unemployed, and stoners. All were able to recognise themselves in these beaten-up novelty folk-punk ditties, able to not only laugh along but rub their eyes in despair. Here’s where the punk pathetique comparisons fall apart; The Toy Dolls and Splodgenessabounds were celebrations of stupidity and passive consumption. HMHB seemed, consciously or otherwise, to be wanting to walk away from it but found they were snookered at every turn, empty-pocketed prisoners to the worst of eighties light entertainment culture.

They were also strangely obsessed with the gentle stop-motion children’s programme “Trumpton”, which besides forming part of the album in “Time Flies By (When You’re The Driver Of A Train)” (“speeding out of Trumpton with a cargo of cocaine”) now became the backdrop to their debut single “The Trumpton Riots”. In many respects, it’s more of the same, except perhaps even more lo-fi. 

59. The Smiths - Shakespeare's Sister (Rough Trade)

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

You have to be careful not to wholly trust your own memory - it can play tricks on you, twisting facts into new narratives for no discernable reason. This week, for instance, I misremembered Belle and Sebastian’s “chartbreaker” “Legal Man” as a number 9 hit, then realised through cross-checking with Wikipedia and other sources that I’d confused it with John Otway’s fanbase driven smash “Bunsen Burner”. A weird thing to do as, beyond the fact that both acts have excessively devoted fans, they otherwise have little in common.

Likewise, I had “Shakespeare’s Sister” filed in my mind as The Smiths first flop since “Hand In Glove”, which is also utterly wrong; the reference books prove it was a modest number 26 hit, and that their first disappointment came later. In this case, though, it’s easy to hear why my brain reshuffled the facts around and punished this single with an imaginary non-top 40 placing.

My associations with The Smiths have been ongoing throughout my life. Most of my friends love them. My wife was, for a long period, obsessed with them. I’ve been taken along to club nights that play nothing but Smiths singles, and been around people’s houses and listened to Smiths mixtapes over dinner. I never shared the fanaticism any of these people had, but their ideas of what made the group matter, and where their strong points lay, became the backbone of my understanding. When you’re not hopelessly devoted to a group yourself, you take your cues from the fans around you, the ones who have put in the studious graft with passion.

In all my life, I think I’ve involuntarily heard “Shakespeare’s Sister” a mere handful of times. It’s the Smiths single no-one dances to and nobody I met ever cross-analysed or had pegged as their "one". Listening back to it again for the first time in years, it’s also amazing how slight it is compared to their other singles so far. The shuffling rockabilly rhythm feels more akin to the Brilliant Corners or even The Meteors, while Morrissey wails about suicide and throwing himself down on the “rocks below”. It feels like more of a tantrum than a song, the non-chorus of “Oh let me go!” intervening at numerous points to act as a brief bit of respite rather than a hook. Beyond the mysteriously tranquil instrumental interlude, the song just scrabbles its way up some jagged scree on a steep slope, occasionally losing its grip or catching its breath, then starting up all over again.

Morrissey has made it clear that it was inspired by a concept in Virginia Woolf’s “A Room Of One’s Own”, where the writer theorised that if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister, she would have been equally mistreated by her parents and society and forced to live a dissatisfied and mentally anguished life. What we’re hearing, then, is the sound of that torment; a retro rock and roll tantrum, a scramble of malcontent, a gibbering fit which never quite settles down enough to make its lyrical ideas coherent. In fact, in places the lyrics feel rather random and almost baffling - over the years I’ve had a total failure of imagination about the final lines “I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar/ it meant you were a protest singer”, and I still can’t understand why it's relevant now; if it turns out that Morrissey half-inched them from another source and that book or article would hold the key to their relevance and meaning, I wouldn’t be at all surprised, but nothing seems to have turned up so far.