71/72 - Cocteau Twins - Tiny Dynamine/ Echoes In A Shallow Bay (4AD)

Tiny Dynamine – number one for one week on w/e 7th December 1985

Echoes – number one for seven weeks from w/e 14th December 1985

Tiny Dynamine – number one again for one week from w/e 1st February 1986

Echoes – number one again for one week from w/e 8th February 1986

My Mum was idly browsing through the charts in my copy of Record Mirror in 1985 – uncharacteristic behaviour for her, but you’ll have to trust me on this one – and kept muttering the same group’s name as she went through the indie section. “Cocteau Twins” she murmured. “And there they are again. And again. And again. David, do you know this group? I’ve never heard of them but they’re all over these charts in here. They’re doing very well”.

Sometimes flippant comments made by people who aren’t invested in a band or genre reveal truths, and indeed, the Cocteaus were an utterly unshiftable force in alternative music in 1985. Unlike the Morrisseys, McCullochs and (Robert) Smiths of that world, though, their presence was often only felt through mentions in the music press, plays on evening radio, and their largely unintentional farming of the indie listings. Their records frequently slowly drifted around both the singles and album charts, gumming up the works and leaving long, murky pastel trails.

The absolute peak of this phenomenon occurred at the end of 1985, when 4AD saw fit to release two of their EPs in quick succession. Both “Tiny Dynamine” and “Echoes In A Shallow Bay” were recorded in short order as the group tested the facilities of their new recording studio, producing results they felt were good enough for public consumption in the process. The two records were not particularly stylistically distinct and could easily have been mashed together to create a mini-LP without losing any coherence, and history doesn’t record why the EP approach was taken instead.

Even if you didn’t already know that the songs featured here began life in a laboratory-like, testing environment, it becomes clear that something fresh is afoot almost immediately. Whereas previous Cocteaus singles had a sense of openness and vastness, particularly their previous release “Aikea-Guinea”, with both these records you feel – or at least I feel (never assume!) - as if a glass dome is being pulled over the group. The production begins to take on a radiated indoor warmth as thick basslines meet airy but artificial sounding washes. It’s hardly Dire Straits, but there’s a precision and slickness to the sound which causes you to imagine wandering around an empty shopping mall where only brief glimpses of natural light are seen through occasional tiny windows on the edges. The rest is strip lights, potted plants and tasteful muted colours.

You can hear this particularly strongly on tracks like “Pale Clouded White” on “Echoes”, where the ambient whine of treated guitars constantly linger in the background like the gentle echo of unoiled machinery, or on “Great Spangled Fritillary” where the background instruments approximate creaks, clicks, groans and distant foghorn blasts rather than providing any traditional anchor. In a sense, this is industrial music, but it sounds nothing like Foetus. Instead, it cuddles up to the machinery, accepting it as a tool which can be something other than a weapon.

It’s not as if “Tiny Dynamine” offers anything vastly different. The epitome of the phenomenon can possibly be found on there first, the instrumental “Ribbed and Veined” offering artificial cricket clicks alongside hazy muzak hums, occasional touches of wow and flutter, and a steady, unchallenging backbeat. If anything, this track almost sounds close to the modern idea of Vaporwave, where relaxing, smooth melodies meet cavernous echoes and badly recalled memories of the wonders of the eighties indoor shopping centre; it’s just that while those songs generally veer towards the bright and even groovy, “Ribbed and Veined” is closer to the music you hear in a jammed elevator just as the place is due to close for the evening; a gentle, unobtrusive thing wobbling its way towards the unintentionally nightmarish. Nor is the Cocteau’s music ever as straightforward as some dork pushing a few Garageband effects buttons over a loop of an instrumental break from some dinner party soul album.

70. The Cramps - Can Your Pussy Do The Dog (Big Beat)

Three weeks at number one from 16th November 1985

Of all the groups to visit the NME Indie Number One spot, The Cramps have been the slowest to peak so far (unless we count Robert Wyatt). Formed in 1976, their wait for a stint at the summit position – and indeed a debut within the UK National Top 75 – feels sluggish to say the least. If it were any other veteran punk group, you would assume it was something of a Toy Dolls situation; a freak novelty breakout hit pestering the peak slot.

The Cramps were a strange group, though; their obsession with trashy, furious old school rock and roll and B movies made them seem a heavy influence on the psychobilly scene, which by 1985 was only just shifting downwards from its 83/84 peak. Then their proclivity towards PVC stagewear and even on-stage nudity, plus the use of heavy make up and the aforementioned horror flicks, gave them an appeal to the more vampish goths. Punks also appreciated the high-paced attacks they threw into all their songs, and then there were weirdos like Mark E Smith who appreciated them purely for being fellow outsiders.

Alan McGee was also a fan, and when they inevitably signed to Creation in the mid-nineties, bouyed up by the label’s influx of Oasis cash, I was astonished by all the number of my friends who suddenly came out of the woodwork saying they’d always been fans. Once again, the sexier and camper goths, anarchists and leather jacketed rock and roll boys who rolled their own tobacco nipped down to the local record shop to buy “Naked Girl Falling Down The Stairs”. “Ha ha!” a friend of mine barked delightedly on learning of the title. “You couldn’t get a more Cramps song title than that”.

I’m in danger of making them sound like a gargantuan cult, though, one of those bands who accidentally pulled in so many freaks and art school kids that they were a constant Top 40 threat. That’s far from the truth. The Cramps played the club circuit and lived in the cracks and airless caverns of society, supported by a loyal fanbase but never making sense to quite enough people to come close to being called a phenomenon.

In 1985, “Can Your Pussy Do The Dog” proved to be the closest they’d come so far to a breakthrough, and given that, it’s surprising how much of a step backwards it sounds. It has the same wide-eyed swaggering rock vocals of The Damned in their punk prime, a similar hollow, under-produced yet heavy duty whack to last year’s psychobilly movement, and very faint echoes of The Fall at their rawest and scratchiest (in other words, the group The Fall had ceased to be). The key thing to remember when pulling these various similarities together, though, is The Cramps were on the opposite side of the ocean in New York while all these things were occurring in Britain. The psychobilly scene owed them a debt, and similarities to any other punk bands were usually either coincidental, or entirely due to transatlantic admiration of their work.

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.