68. The Smiths - The Boy With The Thorn In His Side (Rough Trade)

Number one for three weeks from w/e 12th October 1985

Many journalists and media pundits will tell you that Morrissey’s lyrics are supposed to strike you “at an impressionable age”. The cliched image is of the confused teenager, plain, lonely, probably bullied at school, spots on his or her chin oozing a custard-like substance, listening to The Smiths alone, hearing words from a man they believed felt the same.

NME and Melody Maker journalists tended to pull these ideas out of their hats mockingly, though it’s hard to understand why. Most people’s teenage years are confused, bewildering and ghastly, and it’s not as if most of the journalists working for those papers would have been immune from that (odds on that most of them were classroom underdogs for most of their schooldays).  I didn't hold Morrissey up as an understanding idol, though; I loathed him as a teen and looked for any group or performer, anywhere, who was holding up a bright primary coloured sign with “Way Out” printed on it. I didn’t want to wallow in my situation, I wanted promise and to be told there was escape.

Escape finally came in the form of sixth form college (not all I’d hoped it would be), university (closer to what I’d expected, but not quite) then… oh shit. Seemingly I hadn’t quite worked out the next step yet. Or perhaps I thought I had, but I’d chosen some of the toughest career options imaginable, and none were working out. Each year led me into dingier and grimmer circumstances, until by my mid-twenties I was in such a volatile situation that a number of people had to do their best to both bail me out and pull me back together.

It was at this point that “The Boy With The Thorn Is In His Side” got plucked off a Smiths “Best Of” and played by me again and again, the words “And when you want to live/ How do you start?/ Where do you go?/ Who do you need to know?” ringing in my ears a lot. My own negative disposition was also addressed by the song, as I upset friend after friend with my frustrations and misdirected anger. Did I, for a few months, think I was the character in the song in the same manner the average, unimpressive fourteen-year old thinks they’re the man with the punctured bicycle in “This Charming Man”? Probably. Was I at least ten years too old to be wading around in these waters? Certainly.

Life is seldom straightforward, but in complete truth, there were escape routes open to me I could have taken if I hadn’t been both too stubborn and too proud. I also had a distinct inability to recognise my own strengths and privileges and turn them to my advantage (if I’d actually been more honest in my phone calls home to Mum and Dad, for example, I think help would have been forthcoming). Imagine my surprise, then, when years later I found out that the main inspiration behind “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side” was Morrissey’s frustration about how he wasn’t yet a proper pop star, and The Smiths were locked outside the establishment’s drinking clubs, awards ceremonies and ballrooms. Oh the fucking irony.

By the time this single was released, The Smiths were having a shaky spell. Their last single “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” hadn’t entered the Top 40, and while the pop world of 1984 seemed to at least tolerate Morrissey’s unorthodox behaviour and camp spikiness, 1985 was as unkind to him as many of the other alternative groups we’ve covered here. It allowed him space in inky periodicals largely read by students and young twenty-somethings, but interest among the glossy magazines and prime time radio and TV shows was beginning to shut down. They’d all distilled Morrissey into a basic and unflattering black and white caricature - a pale, sexless, vegetarian streak who was hardly about to turn on the horny teenagers or suddenly write a smash adult album like “Brothers In Arms”. There was just not enough cash or glamour in the quiffmeister.

At the point of this single’s release, Smash Hits gave him a front cover, but he shared it with Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive, and the accompanying interview saw the pair of them camping it up like two ageing actors in an end-of-pier farce (they both seemed rather quick to subsequently distance themselves both from the final printed article and each other).

“It’s a big step for us, doing this piece together,” Pete Burns said. “We could have done it for The Sun”. No they couldn’t – both their careers seemed on the wane and a tabloid wouldn’t have run it unless they came out as lovers.

If ever a promotional step underlined a central problem, and even accidentally revealed the focus of “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”, it was that. Morrissey’s grievances in the song entirely related to his own misgivings about where he expected to be at this point in his career (a central cultural figure) and where he was potentially sliding. No matter that The Smiths were one of a handful of alternative bands in with a shot at getting chart hits in 1985, and regardless of the fact that he had already achieved more than most of his peers could dream of, it wasn’t enough. Morrissey was not a man to consider his strengths and privileges either; being something of a success wasn’t the aim. He needed the adoration huge success could bring him. His “murderous desire for love” was all about ambition.

If that makes the single sound like a self-pitying indie take on Dudley Moore’s parodical “Love Me”, Johnny Marr once again picks golden threads out of the frustrated, tightly pinched embroidery. The guitar line isn’t just wonderful, it’s almost too beautiful for such a self-serving lyric; like one of Maurice Deebank’s most stunning runs for Felt pulled apart, slightly simplified and repeated, it becomes almost the focus, softening the message and making the indulgence deeply human and relatable. If the lyrics read bare and without melody seem like a tantrum, Marr turns them into a tight hug from an old friend. It’s a piece of spin so marvellous that you’ll rarely encounter anything so transformative outside of party politics, and it’s indicative of how well the Morrissey/Marr partnership worked.

54. This Mortal Coil - Kangaroo (4AD)

Six weeks at number one from w/e 6th October 1984

I’m attending a small party in Christmas 1991, close to where the suburban sprawl of Southend necks the border of Basildon. It’s the kind of place you can easily get lost – and later that evening I do – because the estate was mass built in the late sixties and there are few distinguishing features to identify one block from the next. Premoulded houses with wooden slats and red brick exteriors face each other dryly, failing to celebrate their similarities. If they could talk, they’d wearily say “Oh, you again” to each other (They would say nothing to the humans who lived in them, of course, for that would be silly).

It’s the third or fourth such gathering I’ve been to that season. Things are changing as we become much older teenagers. The parents have all communicated to each other that we’re actually quite dull, dependable kids who aren’t in the habit of accidentally setting fire to homes, so more front doors start to open up while Mums and Dads enjoy their first taste of total freedom in years. The first thing I hear as I walk through the door on this occasion is Teenage Fanclub’s “Bandwagonesque” playing on the stereo, an album I also got as a gift that Christmas. I announce my approval of the choice of record, and murmurs of agreement fill the room, but then one kid – the slightly bitchy, oh-so-cool one with enough money to buy loads of records – corrected us all.

“Teenage Fanclub are nothing”, he sneered. “If you want to hear music like this done properly, you need to listen to Big Star, that's who they’ve spent most of their lives ripping off”.

So it went probably up and down the land in 1991, with pedestrian indie kids being corrected by the oh-so-cool ones like small children getting reprimanded by their babysitting older brothers. And if Big Star were widely seen in the eighties and nineties as one of the “great lost bands” to impress your friends with, then their final album “Third/Sister Lovers” – belatedly released in 1978, four years after it was completed – was the real work to test their mettle with. If their first two albums were (broadly speaking, though I'm fearful of another comment from a grown up oh-so-cool kid) power pop, that one was less assured and often more broken sounding; the work of a group with an increasingly fragile member (Alex Chilton) who had given up caring about petty concerns such as “commercial potential”.

“Kangaroo” is one of the more uncomfortable tracks on the album, being a slow junkyard busk about one man’s pervy squeeze against a woman at a party. There are moments where it sounds woozy in a distinctly druggy way, but it’s hard to escape the air of menace too – the sense that a scruffy, dazed Chilton rubbing his crotch on you in 1974 wouldn’t be something you’d choose to document yourself except in horror or fury. “I came against/ Didn't say excuse/ Knew what I was doing,” the song croaks. You can almost see his sloppy grin. It’s not an easy listen and only the fact the song sounds tranquillized saves it from being disturbingly unrelatable – somehow, imagining it as a dream or a half-asleep mishap makes it seem less sordid.

While recording This Mortal Coil’s debut album “It’ll End In Tears”, Ivo Watts had his heart set on including a version of “Kangaroo”, but his approach to the assembled musicians that day in the studio – Scottish experimenter and Cindytalk member Cinder Sharp, Simon Raymonde of the Cocteaus, and Martin McCarrick of Marc Almond’s Mambas – was unorthodox. None had heard the track before, and he played it only a few times to get them to understand its essence.

30. Southern Death Cult - Fatman (SItuation Two)

Five weeks at number from w/e 8th January 1983.

Back in the mid-nineties I was complaining to a person “inside” the music business about a local band I loved who hadn’t been signed yet. To me their future seemed a no-brainer – they had the image, the songs and were astonishing live. Where was the roadblock? Did they just have rotten management?

The knowing insider gave me a withering look and broke it down very simply, barely pausing for thought; it seemed little reflection was required.

“Dave, you have to understand, there’s absolutely no stability in that band. You’re right, two of the members are turning out good songs, but they go through drummers and bass players like I lose socks. They stop, they start, they freeze again, sometimes for months. No major label is going to look at that situation and not see a huge problem; they want a solid, fixed group of individuals they can develop, work with and promote. They want to know that if they put the money in tomorrow, they’re going to still have a band to work with in two year’s time”.

He was right, of course (probably, although I’m sure there have been random exceptions). I know even less about the workings of the early 21st Century music biz, but part of me wonders if this rule would still apply today; presumably any label wishing to invest in such a group would whittle them down to a core duo and hire a few waged musicians to work and tour with them on the side. The idea of a “group identity” seems to have become less essential now. Back in the nineties, though, and certainly in the eighties, it mattered.

In a similar fashion, as we’ve journeyed through the NME Indie Charts of the last two years, we’ve come across a number of fragile units swelling with promise who quickly imploded, and we may have found ourselves baffled as to how they landed on labels like Rough Trade or Mute. The answer may very well lie in their own internal struggles – did Theatre Of Hate, for example, really want to press up their own records, or were there just some extremely serious problems within their own ranks which made them an undesirable business prospect?

Of all the bands we’ve brushed past or will meet in future, Southern Death Cult are the most extreme example of this phenomenon. “Moya” twinned with “Fatman” (although the NME Chart only lists “Fatman”) was the only single they put out before splitting. It was a monstrous fringe hit, popping up on numerous indie compilations from that day to this, and it soundtracked many nights out for a particular youth cult, and acted as the kind of foundation enormous careers are usually built on.

Hold that thought, though, because while Southern Death Cult disintegrated before they could release any other new material (besides some odds, sods and session tracks album their label were quick to put out), their lead singer Ian Astbury formed the similarly named Death Cult with the similarly volatile Theatre of Hate’s Billy Duffy, who eventually became The Cult of whom little more needs to be said. Astbury clearly knew which side his onions were cooked on and wasn’t going to throw the b(r)and name into rock’s great compost bin.

Despite his involvement, Southern Death Cult were a hugely different group in terms of both line-up and style, as “Fatman” clearly demonstrates. Astbury’s vocal stylings are already fully developed here, and his deliberately strained, strangulated war cries dominate “Fatman” as much as they do “She Sells Sanctuary”, cutting through the clutter beneath them to act as a guiding laser point.

What’s going on beneath is enormous and feels like every single idea the group had that month. Drums clatter, guitars borrow their stylings from both Dick Dale and Billy Duffy – he may not be working with Astbury yet, but you can feel the ground being prepared – and the tune rolls and stumbles in an organised heap towards its conclusion. There is no obvious chorus here, just a cascade of possible hooks thundering by while the drummer rattles straight and orderly patterns behind the conflicting ideas.

I’ve owned “Fatman” on a compilation for years now and never quite taken to it, but listening to it afresh again, it’s immediately striking how influential it was. You can certainly hear the template for the first iteration of The Stone Roses here from their “Garage Flower” days, but Astbury and co have a sense of measure and control the Baby Roses never quite managed. Perhaps more importantly than that, this is also unapologetic Goth Rock; Astbury has often insisted that his joking reference to Visigoths in relation to friend and associate Andi Sex Gang created the name of an entire subcult and genre.