66. The Woodentops - Well Well Well (Rough Trade)

Three weeks at number one from w/e 14th September 1985

In the Microdisney documentary “The Clock Comes Down The Stairs” – and indeed in some of the press interviews that surrounded its premiere – the group regularly mused on why they weren’t successful. The incendiary behaviour of their frontman Cathal Coughlan is frequently overlooked as an explanation in favour of other factors, such as the fact that The Smiths were dominating Rough Trade’s attention in the eighties.

I’m sure that this is largely true. Rough Trade were a small independent label often operating on creaky financial footing, and had to put the most money down on their leanest, speediest horse rather than gambling their lot on unknown quantities. The Smiths were certainly their prize filly, but what’s interesting is absolutely nobody in the documentary mentions The Woodentops, who were also rapidly catching up on the outside lane and were also stealing Rough Trade's attention.

The group, it seems, have largely been forgotten even by people who were actually in their vicinity at the time, but were distinct press favourites and earmarked as probable contenders even in the trade press. Rolo McGinty had previously unsuccessfully auditioned as the bass player for the Teardrop Explodes, and like that group, had a faint air of both the New Wave pop star and the magic mushroom guzzling hippy about him. His pixie-ish bopping made him a great English frontman in the Barrett/ Bolan tradition, while the group’s cocktail of influences made them a unique prospect.

McGinty’s rounded middle class English vowels met with frequently folky lead acoustic guitars, which mixed and matched with hyper post-punk tribal drums and squealing keyboards. The angular woodiness to their sound can’t have been unprecedented, but it felt simultaneously accessible and yet odd; the only real prior comparison I can think of is Unit 4+2 at the frantic and faintly psychedelic tail end of their career (give their final 45 “I Will” a spin to hear what I mean, but don’t ignore the better flipside). Even they never truly pushed the boat out this far, though.

McGinty made the approach sound very simple in a 1986 interview with “One Two Testing”, explaining “[There are] lots of different kinds of shapes but there's always this acoustic guitar and lots of backing vocals so it always has that kind of folkiness… The music of the drums, the bass, electric guitar and the keyboards is almost like a dream behind the acoustic guitar so the vocal and guitar are like Bob Dylan leaning against a tree, singing a song and the band is like a dream of the backing that's going on inside Bob Dylan's head when he's singing.

"He's not hearing this acoustic guitar, he's hearing this orchestra or something and he's singing with that. The acoustic guitar is just keeping his rhythm for him.”

They clearly weren’t approaching things from an orthodox direction, but the results could be astounding, and “Well Well Well” is marvellous. If you haven’t heard it in a long time, refreshing your memory is a valuable exercise – for one thing, it’s more intense than you remember, sounding polite and joyful but also faintly threatening. Rolo often sounds taunting while singing “Baby I know you like my way so wrap my soul and take it away” in the chorus, and the band pound, clatter and rattle like an old diesel train in danger of getting derailed behind him. It’s a steep downhill journey towards the buffers, or perhaps, in reality, towards a likely lady’s lap.

Usually when groups pick up acoustic guitars to enchant someone of the opposite sex, it’s done so with embarrassing displays of earnestness and passion rather than mischief, which is another way the group subvert expectations here. The fact that while doing so, they have a killer skiffling hook in the mix (Terry and Gerry would have undertaken unspeakable and possibly criminal dares to own this chorus) and know exactly when to stop is a sign that none of this is random, despite Rolo’s jazzy vagueness about their methods. It just feels eccentrically plotted, but unlike the off-kilter experiments of a lot of indie acts, it’s a scheme that Pops rather than jars.

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.