28. Yazoo - The Other Side Of Love (Mute)

Number one for one week from w/e 4th December 1982

By 1982, it was becoming unusual for artists to issue singles which weren’t tracks on their current or subsequent albums. The major labels in particular had begun to work to a very simple and successful model, which saw singles as potentially loss-making promotional devices for the albums. As well as forking out for expensive videos, they were even happy to bundle expensive free gifts with singles in chart-return shops; famously, there’s the case of Rod Stewart’s single “Baby Jane” potentially reaching the top spot in ‘83 thanks to the free Adidas t-shirt that accompanied it in the “right” stores.

Indie labels couldn’t afford to play those kinds of games, and besides the financial constraints, Indie artists often had ideas of their own, asking to put out stand-alone singles which didn’t appear on any of their studio albums. There were a number of motivations for this – perhaps they were sitting on something which didn’t fit thematically with their current LP, but felt too good to be left cooling on the shelf. Maybe they wanted to experiment with a new direction, or had enough similar ideas for an EP but not a whole album. Possibly they felt that making fans pay for the same songs twice was just a rip off. Or sometimes… and this is harsh, but hear me out… perhaps it dawned on them that the track just wasn’t good enough to put on their next 33rpm platter.

“The Other Side Of Love” is an example of one of these orphaned singles. As the first piece of fresh Yazoo material to emerge since the release of their debut album “Upstairs at Erics”, it should have created much more of a buzz than it did, but the end result was a number 13 national chart placing, their only single to fail to reach the top three in the UK. When the group reformed in 2008 for some live shows, Alison Moyet was asked why it had no place in their set list. She described it as “A bit wank. It’s my least favourite track”.

In truth, “The Other Side Of Love” isn’t terrible but it’s certainly the pair’s weakest single. Built on a backbeat of cheapo electro-bongos and Binatone bleeps and trills, and fleshed out with a repetitive, “Just Can’t Get Enough” styled riff, it feels as if Clarke was reaching backwards for inspiration rather than looking forwards. Moyet does her best to insert some passion into her delivery, but for the first time it sounds mismatched – the song needs lightness of touch to succeed as a piece of bright synthpop, and instead gets a treatment that’s almost too loaded for it to bear.

At the risk of sounding like a Disc and Music Echo critic from 1965, the main thing the track has in its favour is an upbeat, catchy charm that slowly becomes more appealing after the first few listens. Speaking purely from personal experience, though, “The Other Side Of Love” is the only Yazoo single whose melody you can’t recall if it’s been a few years since your last listen. It sticks to an extent, and the central riffs are naggingly insistent, but it never burns itself into your brain, forever remaining one of those forgotten singles whose contents are doomed to be on the tip of your tongue until you press “Play” on Spotify.

26b. Robert Wyatt - Shipbuilding (Rough Trade)

 

Number One for a further week on 27th November 1982

As the shock and appeal of Crass's single "How Does It Feel To Be The Mother of a Thousand Dead" subsided, Robert Wyatt managed to push himself back up to the number one spot for a further week. Rather than discuss the Falklands War yet again, let's take a peek lower down the chart at the new entries, including one extremely significant one:

21. Blue Orchids - Agents of Change (Rough Trade)

Every Fall member who has either been dismissed from the group or wandered off to chart their own course has never quite hit the same creative highs, whether it's Marc Riley's Creepers, Brix's Extricated, or this lot. Having Martin Bramah, Una Baines and Rick Goldstraw in their ranks, Blue Orchids should have been a serious, organised force away from the alleged chaos of Smith. 

"Agents Of Change" is a fascinating track, but even by Fall standards it's barely a single. The celestial backing vocals mix and merge prettily with lo-fi post-punk riffs and rhythms, but the end impression is subdued and beguiling rather than offering an immediate impression; and as uncompromising as much of The Fall's output may have been, they excelled at grabbing you by the throat on 45.

22. Andy T - Weary Of The Flesh (Crass)

Another ranter from the live poetry circuit sneaks into the Indie Top 30. "Weary Of The Flesh" is 14 poems on a 45rpm 7" single, backed with ambient noise and sound effects. Andy T is an aggrieved man whose delivery nonetheless never rises above dour, letting the force of his words do the bulk of the work; not for him the shock theatrics of some of his peers. 

In honesty, it's hard to hear what sets him apart aside from that, but the increase of poets suddenly diving on to live music stages to give audiences pieces of their minds became increasingly prevalent in the early eighties. Had Craig Charles not jumped on stage at Club Zoo just before a Teardrop Explodes performance, it's entirely possible he wouldn't be gracing our television screens today. Andy T, however, would have to stay underground and far away from soaps, sci-fi comedies and BBC funk radio shows.

23. The Lurkers - Drag You Out (Clay)

25. Renee and Renato - Save Your Love (Hollywood)

There's a cliched belief that the independent music sector is there for the marginalised performers, the punks, the innovators, the folkies, the weirdos with ideas above their station. This misses one crucial point - some of the sector's biggest customers throughout the seventies and beyond were social club performers or cruise ship entertainers. Their management would occasionally press up a few thousand copies of them covering an oldie, keep some for selling at Butlins and the local clubs and bars, and try to get a small distributor to take on the rest. 

Rarely did this ever pay off. Local charity shops are littered with shrapnel from provincial entertainers who may have given their community a few good nights out, but never stood a hope of going national. The singing Italian waiter Renato Pagliari was a rare and strange exception. After he was spotted on "New Faces" by songwriter Johnny Edward (also the creator and voice of "Metal Mickey"), the song "Save Your Love" was handed to him and Hilary Lister (aka Renee) to record for Edward's tiny and inappropriately named Hollywood label. Instead of just shifting a few hundred copies in the Midlands, it exploded. 

To my ears, and to the lugholes of anyone who has spent most of their lives listening closely to music, this is actually inexplicable. The production and arrangement of "Save Your Love" is cheap, claustrophic and uninspired, the sound of some musicians trapped in a wardrobe desperate to get out of the closet and on to the next decent paying job. The vocal performance is also gimmicky, with Renato bellowing and showboating for all he's worth; this contrasts interestingly with Lister's more subdued approach, which sounds like muted sarcasm in response. 

Renato's one appearance on "New Faces" had occurred in 1976, and this single also seems like something which had been gathering dust from the light entertainment world of the previous decade. The video even manages to look more faded and distant than that, the staged romance feeling like a promotional video from some particularly obscure Communist bloc country. 

It's an utterly dreadful record, but unlike the work of other singing bus drivers or hoteliers who were local heroes, Renato managed to leap up the charts to become the Christmas Number One - the first time any independent distributor had ever managed to achieve this feat since the indie charts began (though it almost certainly wasn't the first independently distributed number one, as I'll explain later on). 

Champagne corks were popped at Pinnacle HQ that Christmas, and staff were asked to celebrate the achievements of the company's distribution arm, who had proven that they could take on the likes of EMI and Phonogram and win. At least a few of those staff wondered if this is what their dayjobs should be about, and if so, whether they might as well be earning better money at EMI or Phonogram instead. 

"Save Your Love" was an unquestionable achievement for the indie sector (in as much as pushing shit records to the top of the charts is ever something to be celebrated) but it was also a clear warning. Pinnacle was a business - and by this point a struggling one - not a charity. If it had opportunities to take local eccentrics and screen actors into the charts, there was no reason why it shouldn't, and it had certainly disproved the idea that it couldn't. Nothing would change very quickly at first, but later on in the eighties, the difference between their business model and Rough Trade's would begin to feel ever more acute. 

27. Crass - How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead? (Crass)

Two weeks at number one from w/e 13th November 1982

Initially I was tempted to bundle this number one and Robert Wyatt’s “Shipbuilding” together in one entry. The double-whammy effect of two back-to-back number ones on the same political topic feels like the kind of thing which could only have happened in the indie chart – short of World War III, it’s hard to imagine the official national charts ever replicating the same phenomenon.

It also tells us something about how high feelings were running in British society at that point; whether people wanted the considered, empathetic jazz-pop of “Shipbuilding” or the downright savage “How Does It Feel…” or (more likely) neither, The Falklands War was a topic it was obviously difficult to look away from.

If “Shipbuilding” is an aerial view of a conflicted town populated with people struggling to see over the barrier of their own personal struggles towards a bigger societal tragedy, “How Does It Feel” is just visceral blame. Crass may have begun to fall out with the second wave punks who dominated the scene at this point, but lyrically speaking, they were the closest to the original punk spirit of 76 – while the likes of The Exploited fell back on simplistic chants and slogans and the odd cuss word, Crass damn near scream an entire diatribe on the Falklands conflict over the course of a mere three minutes, and even find time for some sloganeering in the dying few seconds.

“So keen to play your bloody part, so impatient that your war be fought/ Iron Lady with your stone heart so eager that the lesson be taught/ That you inflicted, you determined, you created, you ordered/ It was your decision to have those young boys slaughtered” – this is a world apart from the taut, staccato, monosyllabic machine-gun attack of most eighties punk. It has so much to say that the song itself feels as if it can barely contain the anger; each line is elasticated close to a snapping point before the release comes, followed by the next swollen, unyielding attack. Then the next.

If there’s a moment here where Crass feel like every other punk band of the early eighties era, it’s probably around the chorus. That’s when the drums punch, the vocals get guttural, and the group take apparent glee in the chief slogan, perhaps hoping that it will stir the tabloid press to respond. What’s interesting is how quickly the song then collapses away from that chorus and descends into mania. Unlike “Shipbuilding”, it’s not clever as such – though the lyrics do stand alone perfectly well as a form of ranting poetry, which couldn’t be said of any other track in the indie charts at this point – and nor is it tuneful, but its design and precision are hard and sharp. It sets out to wound, and while it’s doubtful Margaret Thatcher considered their views, there isn’t a single line that leans back from the attack. Every single one is a tiny bullet, a distinct and aggrieved opinion.

The distance between this and the kind of fag-end punk dross that’s littered the indie charts over the last year is obvious. The senile tail end of any subgenre generally tends to consist of groups who have enthusiastically bounded into the room only to immediately forget what they went there for – you can hear this in the worst of glam rock in 1975, the collapse of disco, and even the lad-friendly meat-and-potatoes rock of 1996 Britpop. All were filled with chancers who only remembered the basic tricks of their trade, devolving rather than evolving.

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.

24b/25b - Yazoo - Don't Go (Mute)/ Depeche Mode - Leave In Silence (Mute)

Yazoo returned to number one for one week on 2nd October 1982

Depeche Mode returned to the top for one week on 9th October 1982

In the absence of any other major competition in the independent chart at this point, Mute's two prime artists simply swapped their positions in the opening week of October, before swapping back again the week after. As tempting as it might be to froth enthusiastically about each single all over again, it probably makes more sense to take a look at what was entering the charts lower down. 

New Entries in Week One

22. Attak - Murder In The Subway (No Future)

There are two ways to capture the fear of malevolent crime on the underground - one is to create a story arc around it, as The Jam did on "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight". The other is to gruffly and savagely terrify the listener with a dense, bass heavy punk racket. 

"MURRRDER..... on the subway!" they roughly growl over an almost jolly rhythmic march, and to give Attak credit here, this is Second Wave Punk with a very slight dash of post-punk about it. The guitars may twist and snarl, but that rhythm section has obviously been listening to a few Factory Records releases in its time, probably behind the guitarist's back. No wonder everyone sounds so pissed off.  

25. Various - Back On The Streets (EP) (Secret)

Yet another Gary Bushell approved Oi release, this one offering penny-pinched punks five bands for the price of one - Venom, East End Badoes, The Strike, Skin Disease and Angela Rippon's Bum all take up space here, and if you've been following this blog for a few months now, you'll know what to expect. 

Of the above, the inventively named Angela Rippon's Bum actually bothered to shoot a video of sorts, and far from being the Splodgenessabounds indebted piece of larkery I expected, it's pretty straight-ahead Oi thrash delivered by a bunch of disaffected herberts. The group wouldn't release another record until 2000, when the presumably long awaited "Nice Arse Shame About The Face" was launched into the world. 

27. The Enemy - "Punk's Alive" (Fallout)

Another 45 protesting that punk still existed, only adding to the sense that the movement was not waving, but drowning. There's little to distinguish The Enemy from their many Oi and Second Wave Punk peers here, with only the weird breakdown halfway through the track showing any sign of inventiveness. If I'd first heard this single during the beginning of my expedition with this blog I might have been more charitable, but getting through some of these groups is really starting to feel like a slog now. However much journalists at the various IPC music magazines were being paid to cover this stuff, it wasn't nearly enough.

30. Wasted Youth - Reach Out (Bridgehouse)

East London post-punks Wasted Youth, on the other hand, took their societal frustrations in a different direction; most of their fellow travellers tended to back away from direct commentary, but "Reach Out" is a sympathetic nod to skint youths everywhere, begging "It's not that easy and it's getting harder/ Reach out and touch somebody today". 

It's minimal and frosty, but as the singer Ken Scott states knowingly as the song fades, looking over his shoulder, it's an "ordinary song about ordinary people", and it challenged people to stick by their communities rather than gnashing and wailing or filling the lyrics up with ambiguous poetry - a novel approach at that time.

Sadly, Wasted Youth would split up before the end of 1982.

Week Two

14. Special Duties - Bullshit Crass (Rondolet)

In which the conflict between Crass and other more heads-down-and-shout second wave punk bands spills over into the indie chart. "Fight Crass not punk!" the group urge their listeners. "Crass were first to say punk is dead/ now they're rightly labelled as being red/ Commune Hippies, that's what they are/ they've got no money, ha ha ha".