26. Robert Wyatt - Shipbuilding (Rough Trade)

Four weeks at number one from 16th October 1982

There’s a moment in Sue Townsend’s bestselling novel “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole” where, upon learning that the Falklands War has broken out, Adrian’s father has a meltdown and tumbles out of bed, believing Britain to potentially be under attack. When the Moles are reassured that nothing of the sort is about to happen, and realise the Falklands are located off the coast of Argentina (hidden beneath a cake crumb in their atlas) normal family order resumes.

In the current age, where war seems to be a continual rumble in the background, it’s almost difficult to relate to this fictional overreaction. In 1982 though, the Falklands conflict was a shock. While the decades following World War II hadn’t been entirely peaceful, another country hadn’t actually invaded British territory in that time. As an innocent nine year old, I too sought reassurance from my parents that Argentinian soldiers weren’t likely to be parading down our street anytime soon. I had never heard of the Falklands and assumed they were either in the Channel Islands or off the coast of Scotland; this smelt to me like big trouble.

Once the national shock subsided, political blame began to be apportioned and sides began to be taken. Doubts were raised that the military or the British government had been taking the Argentinian threat seriously, leading to them being surprised by an attack which they had been repeatedly warned was imminent (this later led to conspiracy theories that Margaret Thatcher had actually allowed the war to occur for her own electoral benefit; I’m no fan of hers, but this seems unlikely). There were questions about whether an insignificant, sparsely populated island in South America was really worth risking human life over, and the inevitable counter-argument that the vast majority of Falklanders did not want to live under the rule of Argentina’s military dictatorship, and Britain had a duty to them.

It would be naive to assume there were clear left/right wing lines on these complex issues, though the general assumption was that left-wingers were supposed to be against the conflict while those on the right felt Britain had to protect its own citizens. To this day, I haven’t formed a clear opinion of my own on the situation, though by the time I was an adult and in a learned enough position to do so, the war seemed like a distant memory, so the pressure to have a proper opinion was off.

Meanwhile, out there in insignificant, gun-free indieland, it felt as if every group had a view. The anarcho-punks were against the war, obviously. Mark E Smith felt that the war had to happen, the first   contrary political position he had taken which apparently alienated him from some of his peers (it wouldn’t be for the last time). Some of the Oi groups were less subtle than that. And Elvis Costello and Clive Langer wrote this song.

Costello was vocally anti-Thatcher, and not necessarily subtly so. “Tramp The Dirt Down”, from his 1989 album “Spike”, is a fantasy about dancing on her grave when she finally passes away. While that song was visceral, “Shipbuilding” is subtle and unique among protest songs for not giving the listener an easy steer. Instead of laying down the law or satirically mocking the government, it takes the rare step of putting the singer in the shoes of an ordinary unemployed shipbuilder in a neglected industrial town – notably, the very towns Thatcher had virtually abandoned as non-Conservative voting lost causes in the eighties.

Robert Wyatt, who recorded the vocal in a couple of hours, is an inspired choice for the message. His voice has the correct levels of earthiness and vulnerability to carry the song, and he knows exactly where the difficulties and contradictions lie. “Shipbuilding” presents the war as an opportunity and a threat; a chance for a deprived town to be given serious work for awhile by helping to build the ships which may send their sons home, alive or dead. “Is it worth it?” Wyatt asks. “A new winter coat and shoes for the wife/ and a bicycle on the boy’s birthday”. The song opens with the mundane, the everyday, despite the enormity of the problem the record is addressing.

In common with the rest of the country, disagreements in the town spill over: “Somebody said that someone got filled in/ for saying that people get killed in/ the result of the shipbuilding” Wyatt sings breathlessly. This is probably the clumsiest lyric in the whole song, but his tight, rushed delivery ensures that it’s made to work; the one direct mention of the event every parent is dreading, skirted over quickly, almost in denial.

At various moments, you sense Wyatt protesting himself, justifying allowing himself to feel upbeat, the line “It’s all we’re skilled in!” saying everything in five short words. What else do we expect or want them to do? Sit out the chance to take their families out of poverty, albeit briefly?

Unlike most political records, “Shipbuilding” understands the micro-events that underpin society. As individuals living in capitalist societies, we are all to some degree complicit in wars, slavery, and cruelty we would not otherwise condone. We may have opinions, but our jobs and lives, and our ability to put food on tables, are inextricably bound up in situations we may only be dimly aware of. Even the melody understands this, the piano line following “It’s all we’re skilled in” allowing itself to sound almost triumphant, before falling back into a minor chord again.

21. Yazoo - Only You (Mute)

One week at number one on 22nd May 1982

In the eyes of the music critics, Vince Clarke was always going to be the winner for leaving Depeche Mode. It probably wasn’t intended as a cynical political move, but it worked in his favour – as a brand (rather than a band) they were cute, young, teeny and unashamedly pop, and arguably disposable too. Their name even translated (arguably) as "Hurried Fashion", as if to accidentally hint at a certain lack of long term plan.

By departing with some vague excuses about not enjoying the trappings of being in a group, his stance could be read as personal, disapproving of their style or direction, or artistic depending on what you wanted to believe. It was certainly an admirably bold step; few band members have quit right after their first major hit single and gone on to further success.

While hindsight proves that his move wasn’t a dumb one, it would be wrong to assume he always felt secure about his decision. Shortly after leaving and before more concrete arrangements had been made, he wondered whether he could make a living as a songwriter, and he initially offered “Only You” to the band he had just left. There’s a beautiful alternate timeline opening up here which allows us to go wild imagining what Depeche Mode would have made of this song (I’m slightly surprised somebody hasn’t tried to do this with AI technology already). I’m straining and failing to hear it; there’s something about “Only You” which doesn’t sound like it should be sung by Dave Gahan, and the arrangement is also gentle and simplistic rather than featuring the broad atmospheric sweeps the band would quickly utilise. 

The group turned Clarke down, perhaps inevitably feeling that buying second-hand songs off the band member who had just walked away would not be an act of confidence and could potentially seal their fate. Had they accepted, it would also have deprived Clarke of his first major hit as a non-member of the band; sometimes it’s for the best that paths remain unexplored.

What he did instead was quickly hook up creatively with a local woman, the ex-Screamin’ Ab Dabs member Alison Moyet. Moyet was from a very different school of thought to Clarke and his ex-Depeche friends, having a background in punk and R&B groups and a powerful, expressive voice which couldn’t have been less akin to the sulky mid-range Gahan inhabited. There was a wildness and directness to her approach which opened up all manner of fresh possibilities for Clarke as a songwriter, not least the chance to act against the critical cliché that all synth groups were in some way “cold and emotionally detached”.

In this respect, “Only You” is a slightly strange opening effort in that it doesn’t make the most of her abilities. There’s a daintiness to it that doesn’t give her much to play with – from the intro onwards, the precise, pinging, staccato synth lines remind me of an electronic version of the sounds seeping from a wind-up musical box. It’s pretty and memorable but lyrically and melodically simplistic. The intro provides a solid foundation and the track never moves very far away, stuck in its own delicate and very unspecific mourning for a failed love affair (rather like “See You”, this is romance presented as a series of sketchy outline Mills and Boon details, filled with touched hands behind closed doors and women sulkily looking out of windows).

It was a huge number two hit, which makes its later fate seem inexplicable. It’s possible I’m listening to the wrong radio stations or hanging around the wrong shopping centres, but its status seems to have slipped over the years and I can’t remember the last time I heard it. Listening to it again for the first time in forever, I’m struck by how much of a passing novelty it may have seemed in 1982; Moyet may not be given many chances to stretch herself, but her voice is a lot more naturally expressive and technically proficient than many of her straining New Romantic rivals. She manages to bring warmth to some slightly flimsy lyrics and a sense of genuine emotional investment – Phil Oakey, Dave Gahan, and even Marc Almond at this point couldn’t have sold the song as well. In tandem with her, the gentle jewellery box synth backing adds a sentimental touch which can either seem irksome or moving depending on your emotional state when you press play.

12. Toyah - Four More From Toyah (EP) (Safari)

 

One week at number one - 5th December 1981

What a funny, slippery, tricky old business punk rock was in retrospect. If initially it could be categorised as a DIY, breath-of-fresh-air, give-music-back-to-the-kids movement - forgive the inevitable cliches - it morphed very quickly and collected a lot of disparate ideas under its umbrella. We started with The Ramones, The Damned and The Pistols, who all seemed easy enough to lump together, then within a year or two the movement shape-shifted as it was claimed by various weirdos whose musical ideas were a bit more than 1-2-3-4 - so much so that arguments continue about what is and isn’t “canon”.

Toyah is a case in point. While her childhood was troubled with serious physical health problems and dyslexia, and she became a textbook teenage outsider as a result, she initially trained at drama school rather than taking the route of forming an angry punk band. Her small stature and lisp made her the victim of some superficial critical feedback from the school she paid fees to, with report notes stating that she was “not attractive” and had “a lisp”. It’s either a testament to the changing times or her determination and talent (or more likely both) that her career nonetheless took off sharply with roles in the National Theatre, as well as parts in the films “Jubilee” and “The Tempest”.

The music came later with a band being formed in her own name, leading to questions about her authenticity. She had been an on-screen punk rocker in “Jubilee” and to some it seemed as if she had tucked the role under her arm and walked off with it, bringing her acting academy dressing up games into music. While these days around 40% of the charts seem to consist of ex-performing arts school graduates, punks were deeply suspicious of trained media figures moving in on their patch. Having a previous media or recording career didn’t prevent some punks from being credible (Poly Styrene had an interesting background, for example) but it helped if it was very uncommon public knowledge. There was nowhere to hide for an actress with an existing public profile. The proof was there on celluloid for all to see.

Despite this, or perhaps possibly because of her existing profile, the indie label Safari Records were quick to sign her. They began marketing her in some obvious ways, such as using the then-novel picture disc format as a frame for her striking image, plus some stranger ones, such as making her unusually titled debut mini-LP “Sheep Farming In Barnet” a budget seven inch record which played at 33rpm.

Further records trickled out in 1979 and 1980, each creeping closer to the mainstream than the last, before the “Four From Toyah EP” in February 1981 vaulted to number four in the national charts, helped no end by the lead track “It’s A Mystery”. It’s a track she had no hand in writing, but still regularly introduces at concerts as one “which has been very good to me”. Unexpected demand for the EP was such that Safari had to use melted down and recycled vinyl to keep up demand, which led to some copies sounding very rough indeed on people’s turntables; on occasion sudden success comes at a cost to the fans as well as the artist.

From “It’s A Mystery” onwards, Toyah was a huge presence in the media. Colourful and glamorous in an unorthodox way, she could sit on the front page of Smash Hits as easily as the middle of Sounds. Her backstory was a genuine and interesting one of a teenage misfit; such characters seemed two-a-penny in the late seventies and early eighties, but surprisingly few of them could also be trusted to appear on Swap Shop or be interviewed on early evening news magazine shows without causing a ruckus. Toyah, on the other hand, appeared smiling and genial, telling school-going teenagers that of course their Mums would be concerned if they chose to dye their hair exotic colours. She was a Pro at being herself without offending many people in Middle England, doing little apart from cause Mums and Dads to talk about “the state of that” while their children beamed on excitedly.

8. New Order - Everything's Gone Green (Factory)

 

Number one for three weeks from 10^th October 1981

Note – this was technically a double A-side with “Procession”, but the NME chart only listed “Everything’s Gone Green”, so that’s what we’ll be focussing on.

So, there was this thing called punk rock, and that was very important… and also this band from Manchester who emerged from punk rock, but were financed by a newsreader, and overcame tragedy when… and you probably know this already… but... oh fuck it.

It’s unprofessional of me not to begin this entry with the backstory of New Order. The problem is it would feel either cliche-ridden or strange to bother. Who is reading this right now who doesn’t know their story, or about Ian Curtis’s suicide, or the legend of Factory records? Even the most poorly programmed AI bot in the world could spew that stuff back at you to perfection.

If I had something new to add to the thousands of pieces of work out there (not least a whole motion picture) I could try, but by this point my angle remains as typical and as factual as any Wikipedia entry. So you’ll hopefully forgive me for not starting right at the beginning, for not mentioning Warsaw, The Sex Pistols, Tony Wilson doing regional news on the television, or any of that hoopla. There are ways out of this jammy fix, admittedly; if I wanted this entry to be both original and clickbait friendly I could claim that it was all over-puffed and silly and everyone involved should be regarded as a footnote in any story about British independent music, especially while Toyah Willcox had records out at the same time and was higher up in the actual proper grown-up charts, but I’m not here to play those games.

Except… what can get overlooked in the aftermath of Joy Division is how confused New Order initially seemed. Their debut single “Ceremony” was a recording of an unreleased Joy Division song issued after Curtis’s death, and sounds exactly as you would expect – a continuation of the story rather than any kind of new project. If other groups had been faced with a similar situation, it could also have acted as a full stop, a short tribute before everyone agreed that nothing would ever be the same again and all went their separate ways. That would have provided a way out which would have denied New Order years of trauma at live shows as punters cried out for Joy Division songs which were too painful for the band to perform.

It was not to be, though. “Everything’s Gone Green” – named after a flippant, stoned remark in a recording studio – followed and sounds like the first true New Order single, the one where they’ve found a voice which isn’t purely an imitation of Ian Curtis’s, and yet it’s a strange, uncomfortable hybrid, at moments sounding like a rough 1977 Giorgio Moroder demo of a remix of an unfinished Joy Division song.

In the jokey IPC comics I was bought as a child, the future of all factories and technology was usually portrayed in slightly overblown and monstrous ways, often featuring giant metallic robotic crab shaped machines who tinned food, built cars or even operated on people. The people in these comic strips would generally be cowed by the shiny beast, quivering in corners, stammering or insisting that it was out of control and everyone concerned should step away from it. In “Everything’s Gone Green”, New Order are those visitors to an evil genius’s factory, backed into a corner, surrendering nervously to the electronics but not surfing their waves entirely successfully. The pulsing nature of this single seems like an unnatural fit at certain moments; they sound swamped in places, and in others just a fraction of a beat behind the mechanical precision. The ending is the most revealing aspect; the machines get the last word via some polite digital burbling, not the group.

1. Discharge - Why? (Clay Records)

 

Number One from 18th May 1981 for two weeks

Back in the early nineties a label called Connoisseur Collection issued a series of thoughtfully compiled records called “The Indie Scene”. Each documented a year in the life of British independent labels, and while it was occasionally guilty of inauthenticity (even the most liberal definition of “indie” shouldn’t include The Stranglers releases on United Artists) the booklets were enthusiastically written and informative, and some of the CDs contained material which had been unavailable in a digital format before.

Despite this, missing from these compilations was any kind of (even passing) reference to the early eighties punk scene. Whether this was due to rights issues or master tape problems is a question, but cynical old me suspects that it was probably because those bands didn’t fit the narrative, despite their overwhelming popularity in underground terms. I can imagine the conversations in the office – “Post punk? Definitely, that’s going in. Industrial? Of course. Synth pop? Well, we can hardly leave Mute out of the story. Hardcore Punk? Forget it. Nobody is going to buy these compilations to listen to one minute and thirty seconds of a man grunting and raging against the failings of a supposedly liberal Western society while a group thrash away behind him”.

Whether my assumptions are correct or not, I generally feel the rush of enthusiasm for these releases has been wiped out of indie history. It fits the story in one respect, in that all these groups were operating outside the mainstream, had a distinct sound, passion and purpose, and were sometimes played by John Peel, but they certainly don’t neatly fit the preferred mainstream BBC 6 Music narrative, the backwards looking one with its tidy cuts and edits to the messy edges of the story.

In addition, punks in general had a significantly reduced visibility by the early eighties. They were still apparent, but seemed to have become more of a small town phenomenon; similar to the way in which you don’t see motorcycle gangs in urban areas anymore but one miraculously emerges as soon as you take a day trip to Cheddar, punks now seemed to have become a phenomenon of the bored suburbs and strange between-city outposts rather than the troubled estates.

At the time, I noticed the graffiti “Punk’s Not Dead” popping up in odd places (we’ll come back to this slogan again in good time) which even as an eight year old I understood wasn’t a good sign. People don’t tend to walk around protesting something’s not dead if it’s obviously in rude health. When our neighbour told us that her Dad was still alive, it was only because this seemed like a miraculous fact given his health woes, not because he had taken up tap dancing.

Punk, though, had both infected other genres and itself splintered into many different factions and forms. The Oi scene, championed and promoted by future tabloid superhack Gary Bushell, seemed to imagine an alternate universe where Sham 69 were the artistic champions of the movement and not The Clash or The Pistols. Then other “punk pathetique” groups like Splodgenessabounds and Peter and the Test Tube Babies occupied the gleefully childish fringes of the movement, as if they had decided that refusing to act like a grown up and celebrating, rather than railing against, the daft trivialities of daily life was one of the most anarchic and free-spirited things a human being could still do (I might be inclined to agree with them).

Then there was hardcore punk, though how long it took before anybody actually referred to it as such in the UK is open to question. Bushell didn’t seem to talk as enthusiastically about those bands, though he certainly gave them space. They were harder, heavier, nastier and, for all their relative musical amateurism, more Metal than the first wave of British punk bands.

Stoke-on-Trent’s Discharge were pioneers of the British movement, and the “Why?” EP shows us how they did it. It’s akin to Wire’s earliest work in that each song is a short, mean stab which doesn’t take up more time than it has to – the EP consists of ten tracks but is over in less than twenty minutes. Completely unlike any of Wire’s work, however, this is persistently, relentlessly harsh, a distorted and furious cacophony which barely stops for breath. Cal Morris’ vocals practically invent the doomy guttural chant of modern metal, while the group surge, clatter and charge behind him.