47. Sandie Shaw - Hand In Glove (Rough Trade)

 

One week at number one on w/e 28th April 1984

Arthur Crabtree: Hey. I say, is that that bird?

Billy Fisher: What bird?

Arthur Crabtree: There. Getting a lift in that lorry. That bird that wanted you to go to France with her.

Billy Fisher: Do you mean Liz?

Arthur Crabtree: Yes, where's she been this time, then?

Billy Fisher: I don't know. She goes where she feels like. She's crazy. She just enjoys herself.

Billy Liar.

There’s an idealistic, euphoric vision of the sixties I carry around with me in my head (having never lived through it myself) which clashes with the lived reality of others – my parents, for example. My Dad once told me that for him the sixties didn’t result in any real change. He still had the same job and the same lifestyle, and his only minor brush with the era’s glamour was when a friendly post-fame Peter Sarstedt mistakenly walked into the wrong South London boozer. Carnaby Street styles and fame tended not to reach Peckham. They disintegrated on impact with the South Circular Road.

Then there’s the vision I have of the famous people who littered the era, some of which is probably highly accurate (I’ve devoured enough Beatles biographies to at least have a fair idea of what went on) some driven by fantasy. Sandie Shaw, for example. She was fascinating to me because she was from Dagenham, a mere few miles from where I grew up, and my best friend’s mother was mates with her as a child, a fact she always revealed very cautiously and defensively. Of all the famous female British singers in the sixties, Sandie seemed the most local and the most relatable, but also the most flexible and shapeshifting. Who was she? Seemingly, whatever I wanted her to be.

In early promotional photographs, she looks as if she’s won the football pools and is posing for a Littlewoods advertising campaign. She’s pretty and breezy, all delighted smiles, light eyes and freckles. This fits the narrative. She was a Ford factory worker at the Dagenham plant who won second prize in a local talent contest, earning her a slot at a charity event in London where she was spotted by Adam Faith. He put in a word for her with his manager, and as such, Shaw is an early example of the “working class girl unexpectedly lands showbiz opportunity” sixties fairytale. There would be more of those (and then eventually, as the decades drifted forward, less again).

Earning numerous massive hits, including two number ones, her image moved gracefully forward with the sixties. Almost in sympathy with her aspirations (or her manager’s) to be a pan-European star, she recorded hit singles in French, German, Spanish and Italian, and slowly the image changed to that of a glamorous professional, a Saturday teatime ratings puller, a cosmopolitan singer who could be either playful, insouciant or sophisticated when the song or occasion demanded it.

Perhaps inevitably, her continental appeal led to her representing Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1967, resulting in a song she never liked (“Puppet On A String”) being voted as the public’s choice for her to perform. She won, but blamed the subsequent steady decline of her career on the kitsch, tacky image the tune and event gave her (though she was quite happy to sell anniversary souvenir whisky glasses of the victory not long ago, one of which I bought and still happily drink from). “Puppet” is an oompah heavy, knees-up piece of simple pub-friendly, tankards aloft pop dropped into an era of colour and experimentation, closer to The Scaffold than "Strawberry Fields Forever". It worked perfectly in the context of Eurovision and was extremely popular with the British public, who gave her a third number one, but in terms of fashion and the onward movement of popular culture in the late sixties, it couldn’t have seemed more dated; a bubbly bit of Parnes-era pop parachuted into the wrong end of the decade.

Whether it directly caused the decline of her career is a point I’d probably contest. The last few singles leading up to “Puppet” were comparatively weak sellers (the one prior to it, “I Don’t Need Anything”, only just charted at number 50) and I’d actually argue the Eurovision win relaunched her in the UK for a brief period as showbiz royalty, our Queen of Light Entertainment. Despite the temporary lift it gave her, though, it sat awkwardly with who she truly wanted to be, which was pushing the boundaries of pop along with many of her fellow stars.

An album was released in 1969, “Reviewing The Situation”, where she attempted to reposition herself as a progressive artist and correct the public’s view. It’s damn good, and could have been her “Surf’s Up”, but sold naff-all. From that point forward, she would score no further hit singles, living out her showbiz life through occasional appearances on light entertainment shows, performing old standards and even music hall ditties with a slight glimmer of reluctance in her eyes. She attempted to retrain as an actress – something you can easily imagine her succeeding at – but her husband Jeff Banks’ bankruptcy forced her back towards familiar territory to keep the household finances afloat.

The eighties started to be gentler to her. Martyn Ware and Ian Marsh of Human League/ Heaven 17 produced her version of “Anyone Who Had A Heart” in 1982 which failed to chart, but brought her back into the public eye as a credible artist. A none-more-eighties electro-Buddhist single “Wish I Was” followed, and in the background, long-term fans Morrissey and Marr were desperate to earn her attention and get her to cover one of their songs.

There was reluctance on Shaw’s part initially, who seemed untrusting of the group’s slightly unusual angle on the world. This was exacerbated by the tabloid outrage caused by the song “Suffer Little Children” about the Moors Murderers, which nearly caused her to completely withdraw from any associations with them. Eventually, however, she was talked around to the idea of recording with them, and this cover of The Smiths underperforming debut single “Hand In Glove” is the end result.

The first thing that strikes you is how effortlessly Shaw has shapeshifted yet again. The Smiths lyrics weren’t typical of the eighties or any era before them, but she adapts, instantly understanding what to do with her vocals and how to both gel with the strange angles around her and also project her own personality on to them. She barks defiantly, almost in block capitals, “The good life is out there somewhere!” She copies Morrissey’s hollers and howls, but with confidence rather than despair – they seem to suggest “This is who I am” as opposed to “Oh God, so this is who I am”.

44. The Smiths – What Difference Does It Make? (Rough Trade)

9 weeks at number one from w/e 28th January 1984

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, despite their enviable string of hits, have not been given much respect in the UK. Besides belonging to the cohort of groups with bloody silly names which sound gimmicky rather than mysterious, they were fronted by ex-copper Dee; he may have been the first policeman on the scene of the car crash which killed Eddie Cochran, but other than that didn’t really ooze rock and roll. In every single one of his video performances online, he gives the impression of being the steady pop professional, delivering the songs of others with gentle, almost suppressed stage flourishes (he even cracks a whip in “Legend of Xanadu” like he’s trying to flick the residue of some treacle off his hand.)

The songwriters behind the group, Alan Blaikley and Ken Howard, were a different matter. Both were gay men who had worked with Joe Meek and penned songs which occasionally nudged and winked towards homosexual society for anyone paying enough attention. The Honeycombs 1964 flop single “Eyes” is a painful, agonised track about finding love in secret, shadowy places away from society’s gaze, combined with disordered pinging guitars and almost proto-post-punk pattering drum patterns. Meek adored it, the public begged to differ. Then, in 1968, they foisted the ominously titled “Last Night In Soho” on to DDBMT.

In typical fashion, “Last Night In Soho” isn’t explicit, but over a keening, grumbling cello, dramatic church organ flourishes and almost hysterical orchestrations, Dave Dee protests that he thought “I’d find strength to make me go straight”, “I’m just not worthy of you”, and “I’ve never told you of some things I’ve done I’m so ashamed of”. These, however, are coupled with the notion that something else happened in Soho that night which was criminal but not sexual; references are also made to a mysterious “little job” some lads in Soho have offered to Dave Dee, which he should take if he doesn’t want “aggravation” – but anyone waiting for the song’s conclusion to tell them exactly what the protagonist has done would be wasting their time. It is locked up tight as a mystery, a riddle wrapped in a lot of hand-wringing drama, though even in 1968 you have to wonder how anyone could have concluded that perhaps he held up a Post Office. The camp hysteria gives the game away by itself.

I’ve no idea if Morrissey was thinking about “Last Night In Soho” when he penned the lyrics for “What Difference Does It Make”. I somehow doubt it, but given his eclectic tastes in sixties pop, it’s possible. Whatever the facts, it falls back on the same narrative devices, teasing and riddling the listener, just less hysterically. It addresses an unknown other and begins on the line “All men have secrets and here is mine/ so let it be known” before failing to actually reveal the issue to the listener, only telling us the person the song is directed at, whom Morrissey would “leap in front of a flying bullet” for (why was he always so obsessed with sacrifice?) is now disgusted by his revelations. This is seen to be foolish - “Your prejudice won’t keep you warm tonight”, he warns. This feels, shall we say, similar, but there’s a different tone here. There is no begging for forgiveness, no shame; whatever will be will be.

Once again though, some plausible deniability creeps in and the idea is aired that Morrissey’s crime might actually be an arrestable offence by 1984’s standards – “I stole and lied and why?/ Because you asked me to!” The idea that this is just about something darkly illegal is also hinted at by the record’s sleeve, showing actor Terence Stamp cheerily holding up a chloroform patch; the still in question is from the film “The Collector”, in which Stamp’s character stalks and kidnaps an attractive female art student. There’s an alternative lyrical reading here which is altogether nastier than someone simply coming out of the closet, by the standards of any age.

41. The Smiths - This Charming Man (Rough Trade)

One week at number one on w/e 14th November 1983

Retrospectively trying to describe the birth of a phenomenon is difficult. The further down the road you go as you pass the scene of the incident, the more it slowly retreats in the rear view mirror, the details becoming less clear, the conversation about what happened getting confused by the conflicting voices in the car.

Using that analogy with The Smiths, it sometimes feels as if the rear view mirror was also cracked and twisted, offering so many illusions that nobody is sure what’s true anymore. They were revolutionaries who changed music! They were reactionaries who dragged it backwards! Morrissey spoke to millions of lonely bookish leftists and is also a fascist! And sometimes, besides this, you find yourself leaning on the second-hand anecdotes from friends which may or may not be deeply exaggerated. I’m forced to recall an older friend telling me that he once saw a man with a broken leg dancing ecstatically at an early Smiths concert, so passionately moved by what he saw and heard that being in front of Morrissey and Marr was like a trip to Lourdes.

I heard these tales only from older friends because frankly (Mr. Shankly) I was ten years old when The Smiths broke. The first I truly knew of them was through Tom Hibbert and Sylvia Patterson’s interviews in Smash Hits. That magazine’s approach to all pop stars, whether aspiring or established, was to hold a fairground mirror up to them and distort their eccentricities until certain aspects of their personalities dominated, each interview acting more like a caricaturist’s sketch than a respectful, gushing homage. Paul McCartney became known as “Fab Macca Thumbs Aloft”. Rod Stewart’s nickname was “Uncle Disgusting”. Even when Tom Hibbert interviewed Margaret Thatcher, the one quote that shone through the final article was her icy reply of “Always be serious!” to one of his more flippant, joky comments (in this case, about whether Cliff Richard should be knighted).

Morrissey never had a nickname at Smash Hits, but the way he was portrayed in that magazine often felt more revealing than the reverence bestowed on him by the NME and Melody Maker. For one thing, his quick wit shone through in that publication far more than the others – rival music journalists seemed to want to engage with his cerebral side, ignoring the fact that his lyrics clearly revealed someone with a sharp sense of humour.

On the flipside of this, however, he also frequently came across as a deeply lonely and gloomy soul; the kind of figure who rose at Noon, watched a black and white film on the television while slowly sipping soup, and waited for the phone to ring. Not a pop star, just an alienated man with a lifestyle less appealing than the elderly widower next door; that neighbour may not have had much to envy, but he at least waved from his window cheerily every morning. The Smash Hits Morrissey would never have done that. 

I couldn’t relate to him, and he didn’t inspire me. If anything, I worried on his behalf - my Dad had a troubled friend who lived down the road, an eternal bachelor who had on occasion been sectioned due to his depressive episodes. To me, the Smash Hits Morrissey felt strangely close to the man I knew as Uncle Frank.

Also, for all their originality, there was also something very antiquated about The Smiths which felt odd to the hopeful ten-year old me. With the exception of the bold text on their sleeves, everything was deliberately black and white, frequently featuring pictures of fifties and sixties stars frozen in their monochromatic, pre-1967 world. This approach was not entirely without precedent; Paul Weller was also known to nod backwards in his choice of sleeve design and certainly sleevenotes, and obvious retro-heads like Meri Wilson and The Maisonettes might have shared this aesthetic, but generally speaking, early eighties popular culture was about keeping your eye on the horizon in front of you, not looking behind at a “better” past.

The older I became, the more I was won round. Musically they were often equally backwards-looking but less straightforward. The Smiths were proudly and obviously a “beat combo”, present to prove to the eighties that groups with guitars were absolutely not on their way out (an early review of “This Charming Man” even regurgitates this Decca audition quote) but this is where they ace it. Their sound is, like all brilliant groups, an inexplicable cocktail of everything that ever inspired them, combining to sound like nothing that went before. So much is going on here; the sharpness and brevity of sixties beat singles, the ambitious guitar work of post-punk (Marr has stated he was influenced by Maurice Deebank out of Felt – among others - but his approach is much more urgent and frantic) the taut, driving rhythms of a bass player and drummer who had obviously heard some Motown, all topped off with Morrissey’s shivering timbre, a sealion’s bray communicating one-line quips and deflated profundities, frequently with each following the other.

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.