96. Wire - Ahead (Mute)

One week at number one on 18th April 1987

Where do I even begin with Wire? Getting the chance to write about one of my favourite bands is both a blessing and a curse; a blessing because I want less enlightened readers to understand just why they’re so special (of course). Also a curse because groups you have spent most of your lifetime admiring become strangely hard to pin down. You know you love them, but describing why feels like resting on a therapist’s couch and being asked to remember where those feelings began. You scribbled the details down in a notebook somewhere decades ago, but now it just feels like second nature. You want me to explain?

The feelings certainly didn’t begin in the logical place for me – the place most Wire fans entered. The first track I heard was the chiming, beautiful but oblique 1988 single “Kidney Bingos” on a compilation I owned, which remains one of my favourite Wire singles (and one I’m sure we’ll get to in due course). From there, I found a cheap second-hand copy of “Outdoor Miner” (minus its picture sleeve) in Gumby Records in Southend, and played it about forty times the night I bought it, utterly obsessively. It became my favourite single of all-time and remains such. You could ask me why, but if you did, I’d just get distracted and this entire entry would be about that record. 

You’re probably expecting me to say that I then tracked back to their first three albums, but I don’t recall seeing many of them on record store racks at that point. This may or may not be the reason I bought “The Ideal Copy” first, their fourth album, their first in eight years, and their debut for Mute Records.

This is another reason why having to write about this single is a curse. “The Ideal Copy” was strange enough and strong enough to hold my attention and establish me as a fan, but clearly imperfect and vaguely chilly. It has moments of bright, faintly broken pop (“Madman’s Honey”, “The Point Of Collapse”) and the usual shattered, jagged melodies which sound in danger of breaking down but always hold their steely nerve (“Ambitious”) and in that sense, offered us what Wire always did.

Where the output differed was the precision of the approach. The group emerged having embraced electronics and feeling determined that they needed to undertake the work with a “modern” mindset. Out went Robert Gotobed’s live percussion, which was replaced by painstakingly created loops and programmed rhythm tracks, with anything that approximated cymbals or hi-hats also thrown by the wayside. Eccentric, rubbery, rapidfire yet “non-funky” (their words) basslines were laid on top, a unique approach the group referred to as “dugga”.

Gotobed has gone on record as being unimpressed by this, stating in Paul Lester’s book “Lowdown” that he felt sidelined and unable to offer much towards the creative process. While the group beavered away in Hansa studios in Berlin, he instead whiled his time going for walks around the city, occasionally popping back to grapple reluctantly with the technology. Other members were also going through challenging changes in their personal lives, ego battles commenced in the studio, and singer Colin Newman briefly walked away from it all; he was only coaxed back when he realised that it wasn’t a major label’s money he would be draining by quitting, but that of Mute boss Daniel Miller – a friend with limited resources. By moving to an independent label, Wire’s future was possibly saved.

“Ahead” was the only single taken from the album and unveils itself confidently – those slow, loud bass notes at the start act as a fanfare, and almost immediately afterwards the group jitter and judder into view, oblique as ever. “Lips growing for service/ Eyes steady for peeling” Newman begins, before enthusiastically declaring, like a market stall holder, “Bring on the special guest!/ A monkey caught stealing” (which remains one of my favourite Wire lyrics for its pure absurdity and the joyful acidity of Newman’s delivery). I’ve never fully understood what Wire were on about with this one, and you can find a variety of fans online who are absolutely, unshakeably certain what it means, but all give different accounts – so it’s either definitely about oral sex, or animal vivisection, or corruption, or being used in a relationship. In common with many Wire records, establishing the facts is almost futile, and you’re instead swept along by the melody and the intention, which in this case is urgent and irritated, yet somehow sunlit too. Blue Monday-esque monk chants drone in the background while bright synths beam dramatic hooks and Newman gibbers discontentedly “I remember/ I remember/ making the body search”.

This doesn’t make “Ahead” sound like anything close to pop music, but miraculously, it’s closer than most of the contents of the indie charts in this particular week. The group display their usual knack for taking mis-shapen lumps of ideas and convincingly presenting them as shining jewels – the urgency becomes compelling, the sentiments somehow jolly, and the synths heavenly. I don’t agree with fans who hold it up as one of their finest singles – they’ve released better work in the last fifteen years alone – but its shine and gleam definitely have a captivating effect. Only a strange, stuffy rigidity and a determination not to edge one micro-second away from the click-track prevents it from truly realising its potential.

88. Soup Dragons - Hang Ten! (Raw TV)

One week at number one on 1st November 1986

The Soup Dragons were one of those peculiar groups who seemed to go through several distinct phases in their career, to the point of feeling like multiple different acts. The period most people reading this will remember is their early nineties indie-dance/baggy phase, which saw them getting a top five national chart hit in the UK with a swaggering cover of the threadbare Rolling Stones B-side “I’m Free”.

If we’re not vaporised in some kind of nuclear war or I don’t get sick of writing this blog in the meantime – two big ifs – I’m sure we’ll get to that single in a few years time, but suffice to say it was written off by many journalists as a cynical attempt to score a hit. It also feels as if it’s disappeared from view in the years since; it dragged 1990’s kids on to the dancefloor, but didn’t necessarily convince the children of the future. Something about that Happy Mondays-aping lurch and groove just hasn’t proved durable.

Following that success, the group managed a minor scuff with the American mainstream with “Divine Thing”, which actually resulted in a number 35 Billboard hit, after which the line-up collapsed and interest was lost both at home and Stateside. Their final album “Hydrophonic”, issued in 1994, was one I had entirely forgotten existed until doing research for this blog entry.

Phase one of their career, though, is the one we’re dealing with here, and the period that gets me most excited. It begins with a broke group from Bellshill, Scotland (home of the hits) hanging around their local scene and pressing demo tapes into the hands of likely compatriots. One such early supporter was Bobby Gillespie, who offered them a gig supporting Primal Scream. Following this, the NME picked up on an early flexidisc the group pulled together, then John Peel threw his hat into the ring and offered them a session, though the band had to borrow £150 from him to make it down to London to record it. All extremely thrifty and earthy beginnings.

If the latter-day Dragons were louche with lots of slow, lazy movement around their hips, the band that emerged in the mid-eighties were taut, spring-wound and hyper, spitting out their pop songs so fast that they were usually all over just after the two minute mark. The Soup Dragons I knew and loved didn’t pout or dreamily sing “yeeeeah” liberally throughout their singles; they gnashed, crashed and raced towards their conclusion, not in a chaotic, ramshackle C86 fashion, but with a tight, orderly and tense drive. The closest point of comparison in 1986 would probably be The Wedding Present, but while Gedge’s group moped and stretched their ideas, The Soup Dragons had a quick, explosive fizz. As a result, they began to command numerous music magazine front covers, seeming young, spotty, naive and a bit ungainly in all of them, but with delicious grins pinned to their faces.

“Hang Ten!” is one of their finest singles, immediately thudding into life with irresistible hooky vocal harmonies, before filling every second of the two minutes on offer with blissful melodies married to a thrashed guitar scramble. The lyrics seem to be about a relationship falling victim to the other party discovering Christianity – “I don’t care whose up there” sneers Sean Dickson – but are far too flippant and clumsy to be deemed a serious protest. What the song appears to be most in love with isn’t any kind of moral or political point, but what it can achieve in its short life; the stomping chant of the chorus, the dorky retro vocal harmonies, the simple but instantly memorable guitar riffs and the ascending climax. All of it remains superb.

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.