82. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Singer (Mute)

Number one for one week on 26th July 1986

If anybody working for Columbia Records in 1968 thought Johnny Cash’s new track “The Folk Singer” had potential, they did little to invest in it. The big '68 hype where Cash was concerned was the release of his unprecedented “At Folsom Prison” live LP, where the man can be heard brewing up a storm while performing to a gaggle of assembled felons. The label were initially worried about the idea, fearing that it might cause Cash to lose some of his Christian audience, only for the album to become one of those near-perfect combinations of both quality and newsworthy novelty – something that almost marketed itself.

“Folsom Prison Blues” was released from the album as a single, and an ordinary studio recording of “The Folk Singer”, co-written with Charles E Daniels, was chosen to sit on the flip. It might then have rested there largely unnoticed, but Burl Ives was quick to spot its mournful charms, recording it for his album “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in the same year, staying broadly faithful to the concept. It’s a wordy yet – on the surface – fairly simple tale of a forgotten singer who finds himself suddenly ignored by a public who once wanted to crowd and pester him with their admiration. The singer’s inability to adapt to his new empty environment is broached early on (“I pass a million houses but there is no place where I belong/ All I knew to give you was song after song after song”) with typical Cash-esque hints at his outsider status. Whoever the 'singer' is, you're left pretty convinced that there's nothing else he can usefully do with his life. 

It’s not clear whether Cash was worried about his own future when he recorded it, but it’s not unfair to speculate that he might at least have been looking over his shoulder at those whose careers had been less successful, acknowledging that in the music business, longevity is often a fluke, not a given. Speculation online is rife about who he might have been thinking about, but the candidates are numerous; the tale of talented musicians, appreciated briefly when their talent peaked and happened to align with the public’s tastes, then rapidly forgotten, was not new even in 1968.

Above that, though, there are hints towards the growing invisibility of the older person in society, the slick young buck with his fresh ideas being reduced to a husk. As he wanders through streets he may have once been chauffeured through wearing his old fashioned clothes, he suddenly finds no eyes being drawn in his direction in either condemnation or admiration. His rebellion has become meaningless, and his only hope is that the children of the future reappraise his efforts – a problem that most creative people are left to desperately confront. 

The original arrangement is simple and nigh-on perfect, greeting the singer’s fate with subtle arrangements and gorgeous downwards guitar twangs, which might be why Burl Ives wasn’t tempted to tamper with it much. Glen Campbell, on the other hand, took the flipside and exposed it to peculiar degrees of sunshine in 1970 – his version is a sweet yet daring finger-picked, bitter-sweet melody, “the singer” still singing his heart out rather than moping and dragging his heels.

Nick Cave’s version in 1986 was somewhat unexpected, but takes the cautious Ives approach of “don’t fuck with a classic” rather than the more radical Campbell move. So similar is it, in fact, that the only major difference is that Cave throws in the f word towards the end, something even Cash would never have considered in ‘68. It makes “the singer” seem threatening, a Grim Reaper character pointing his finger at the comfortable and the ignorant, rather than a completely defeated outsider. Cave makes you think the singer will be back, if not due to reappraisal, then perhaps on the headline news for some act of public indecency. It shifts the tone of the work slightly, but not enough to make it feel like an overhaul.

“The Singer” was released at a time when Cave appeared to be repositioning himself as a performer. His earlier work with The Birthday Party was demented, raucous and deliberately niche – punk rock at its loudest and most unrelenting. Two minutes spent listening to a Birthday Party track could feel strangely exhausting, and in his public’s mind Cave was a ferocious performer and unpredictable loose cannon. Once that group ceased to be, the Bad Seeds were formed and his moves became more measured (though often no less ghoulish).

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.

67. Depeche Mode - It's Called A Heart (Mute)

One week at number one on w/e 6th October 1985

From about 1983 until the end of the decade, it felt as if every Christmas came accompanied with a Big Present; the desirable item that someone in my family (not always my parents) decided to treat me to that year. One year I hit the jackpot and got a home computer, a treasured Commodore 64 which kept me company until the space bar literally fell off it. Other years I was given brilliant gifts whose value I didn’t always appreciate at first sight – as with 1985, when I unwrapped an unpromisingly small parcel and a dolby equipped Sony Walkman fell out.

“Wow, that’s nice!” I said, before quickly moving on.
“But it’s a Sony Walkman!” my brother said. “Aren’t you excited?” (luckily the present buyer was not in the room at this point).
“Yeah, like I said, it’s nice!”
“It’s more than nice, that’s a fantastic Walkman!” he continued to protest, almost offended by my mild enthusiasm. “I’d love one like that!”

My casual enthusiasm was due to the fact that I already had a radio/cassette player upstairs and couldn’t understand the difference. I soon came round. Also among my presents were two albums I’d wanted for months – Art Of Noise’s “Who’s Afraid Of…?” and Depeche Mode’s “Singles 81-85”. I pushed the button down on my new Walkman and pressed play, straight into “Dreaming Of Me”… and BANG. The pulse and throb of the drum machine hammered around my head in pristine, shiny audio. Every deep bass note and synthetic twitter, breath and pulse felt as if it was plugging right into my heartbeat, blocking out the rest of the world and creating a slick, digital soundtrack for my daydreams.

Both the tapes and the Walkman barely left my side for weeks afterwards, and I familiarised myself with Depeche Mode’s singles like a scholarly monk, sometimes eating breakfast and lunch in the kitchen while they played, deaf to the humdrum family world (this period of my life was excellent heavy advance research for this blog, you could say). “Singles 81-85” is structured chronologically, which with a lesser group could be a mistake and might involve frontloading their flops and fumbles first, causing the listener to lose interest after the fifteenth minute. As Depeche emerged surprisingly well-formed and carefully produced for an indie group, what you got instead was a band slowly morphing before your ears as they go through adolescence (literally and metaphorically) and decide who they really are.

When Vince Clarke leaves after “Just Can’t Get Enough”, there’s no jarring change, but a noticeable shift in priorities as the digital bops and squeaks get slowly replaced by more lingering ambient textures. Then industrial sampling emerges by the point of “Everything Counts”, then suddenly they become a harsher, noisier group in 1984 – in common with many others at the time – before landing on “Shake The Disease” and finding a way of making all their influences cohere with beautifully and admirably intricate production and songwriting.

That wasn’t all, though. “Shake The Disease” was only the first out of two non-studio album tracks on the compilation. The second one, and the final track overall, was this single, which slowly drifted into my ears doing a spitting, hissing and huffing synthetic impersonation of a groovy stream train; how very disco of them. Then the bass burps emerged, the rhythms twitched, the song sprang into life, Dave Gahan sang “There’s something beating here inside my body and it’s called a heart!” and I found myself thinking… oh. Is that it? Is this the finale, the curtain closer on the first act of your great career?

When put up against the last two years of the group’s work, which under these circumstances you’re given no choice but to consider, “It’s Called A Heart” is a perplexing backwards shift. It’s lyrically coy and unbelievably simple; there’s no questioning of God or pondering the complexities of human relationships here, it’s all about putting your trust in someone romantically, just like so many other pop songs before it. “Hearts can never be owned/ hearts only come on loan” sings Gahan, like a speak-your-Clintons-Valentines-Card machine. The group jitter and bug in the background, sprightly and peppy, and they do a good job of approximating the adrenalin rush of fresh romance, but there’s nothing truly impressive going on here. We’ve all been led to believe that pop music is never “just” pop music, but there will always be middling moments where it ends up being little more than a happy jingle to make the day go by faster. While a top-of-the-range Sony Walkman isn’t merely “nice”, sometimes that’s all the singles you play on it are – competently delivered slices of mild catchiness.

If “It’s Called A Heart” feels like a surprisingly retrograde step, some hints were present in the interviews the group did to promote it at the time. Andy Fletcher and Martin Gore talked about the process in “One Two Testing” magazine in October 1985, and a sense of under-investment and uncertainty shines through. Each band member and producer Daniel Miller got a vote on what should be the next single from a demo tape Martin Gore provided them with.