39. New Order - Confusion (Factory)

Three weeks at number one from w/e 10th September 1983

In 1991, a peculiar, almost unprecedented chart quirk occurred. Bryan Adams’ single “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” held firm at number one for so long that his label A&M were faced with a tricky decision – should they hold back his follow-up single “Can’t Stop This Thing We Started” until it ran out of steam (which it showed no imminent signs of doing) or just put it out anyway and risk it being overshadowed?

Ultimately, A&M took the latter route, leading to the absurd spectacle of “Can’t Stop” rising, peaking and falling out of the charts before its elder brother had fallen from the top spot. Radio stations gave it some begrudging plays and DJs asked daft questions like “I wonder if he can do it again with this one?” but everyone knew the answer to that question already. In 1991 at least, Bryan Adams was going to be The Bloke With The Robin Hood Song to Mr and Mrs Woolworths.

Obviously I’m troubling you with seemingly unrelated Bryan Adams trivia because New Order were faced with a similar flattering but awkward problem in 1983. “Blue Monday” was proving to have such longevity with both British post-punk kids and common-or-garden clubbers that any follow-up single was going to find itself competing with its predecessor both critically and commercially. On the official charts “Confusion” did lead the way for a few weeks, peaking at a very respectable number 12 (the same peak position as Adams’ “Can’t Stop This Thing We Started”, serendipity fans) before being usurped by their earlier release rising back up above it. It was almost as if “Confusion” served the purpose of reminding the public that New Order had another better single in the shops at the same time.

Despite being one of New Order’s biggest eighties hits, “Confusion” doesn’t seem to have quite recovered from being overshadowed. I can’t remember the last time I heard the original mix on the radio and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it played in a club (although this is certainly an "age thing" – the US club charts point towards lots of turntable spins over there at least). It was slightly grudgingly well-reviewed at the time, with lots of luke-warm praise littered with reservations; Tom Hibbert's half-hearted verdict of "vaguely toe-tapping" in Smash Hits not being entirely atypical. It didn’t appear to be what people expected.

I have to wonder if the shadow cast by “Blue Monday” was the only problem here. Immersing myself in this single again, the first thing I’m struck by is a hesitancy and uncertainty we haven’t heard from New Order since “Everything’s Gone Green”. Bernard Sumner feels fractionally out of time with the rhythm track and strangely ill at ease with the limits of his vocals for the first couple of minutes at least. Arthur Baker was one of the most credible American producers of the era, a painfully cool operator despite his unremarkable hairy appearance, and the group sound almost cowed, desperate to impress and slot neatly alongside his plans.

Eventually everything coheres, but the boisterous, Americanised chanting of “Why can’t you see – What – You – Mean – TO – ME!” feels tacked on, like a badge of New York street credibility piercing the skin of an underfed, pale Manc kid. More than on any post-Blue Monday record of New Order’s career, the group sound like they know what they want to be rather than aware of the strengths of who they truly are, but an unexpectedly monstrous hit will often create these schisms.

38. Depeche Mode - Everything Counts (Mute)

4 weeks at number one from w/e 13th August 1983

“With someone like Crass, all you can get drawn in by is the lyrics and that’s it… the music is so hard that a lot of people won’t go near it. But with ‘Everything Counts’ they’ll give it a chance and then they’ll hear the lyric” – Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode talking to X Moore, NME 17th September 1983.

The crisis continues. Crass may have vacated the number one spot, heaving the doors open and drunkenly chanting as they left, but the broader British malaise continued; the problem of what being left-wing meant in a society where Thatcherism and the harder edges of capitalism were portrayed as the only answer. You would have expected Crass to have something to say on the matter but Depeche Mode? Politics didn’t really seem to be their thing.

There had been hints of it on “A Broken Frame”, of course, but only in an obvious, non-committal way. Their sinister anti-Hitler Youth deep cut “Shouldn’t Have Done That” didn’t say anything new beyond “Fascism is a bad idea”; something even a Daily Telegraph reader could have got on board with (back in those days at least. Who knows now?) At the time, too, the sleeve offered little, the image of a peasant woman with a scythe being only the barest of hints.

In 1983, their third album “Construction Time Again” emerged with the cover art showing a man swinging a large hammer over his head while standing high on a mountainside, backed by an antiseptic mouthwash sky. It looked like something from a political propaganda poster, an idealised, romanticised view of the European working man. A few critics and fans were quick to spot something else – what if the scythe on the sleeve for “A Broken Frame” could also be interpreted as a sickle? What were they trying to tell us?

While Depeche Mode didn’t design their own sleeves, “Construction Time Again” wasn’t shy about the band’s left-leaning political ideas. It was an album I bought as a teenager and instantly fell in love with, because it expressed its ideas so starkly and simply, echoing my own emerging thoughts without clouding the messaging with doubts or ifs and buts. These days, some of it feels naive and the album has toppled in my estimations as a result – at its most preachy, there’s a thin line between the broad socialism they present on tracks like “Pipeline” (“Taking from the greedy, giving to the needy”) and “Shame” (“Do you ever get that feeling when the guilt begins to hurt/ seeing all the children wallowing in dirt”) and Michael Jackson at his most pious.

The key difference here, the artistically (rather than lyrically) revolutionary aspect, is that Depeche, influenced by the industrial music scene sprouting around them, introduced a digitally sampled crashing and clattering to the simple sentiments, not new in itself, but certainly a fresh idea in a pop context – its release date even beats ZTT’s debut record, The Art of Noise’s “Into Battle EP”, by some margin.

The record’s uneasy, irate mood was influenced by Martin Gore’s world opening up beyond the confines of South East Essex. Having travelled to Thailand and witnessed crippling poverty, then returning home again to comfort, he became struck by the concept of a world shrinking thanks to the availability of technology and air travel, but failing to ‘eradicate its problems’ despite the glaring obviousness of the disparity between wealth and poverty. The excuses of ignorance and television’s distancing effect could not longer be leant on if the problem was right there, literally in front of most of us, and also very literally begging and appealing to our better nature.

“Everything Counts” is so central to the album’s theme that it appears twice – once in full, at the end of Side One, then again as a brief, muted reprise at the end of Side Two, nudging us in the ribs gently. Its initial appearance is far from subtle. It begins with a grinding, panning, metallic effect, like the work of a panel beater echoing around a mountain valley, then adds large, cinematic, sombre notes and a wailing, unearthly Shawm noise created by a synthesiser. Within barely twenty seconds, the track has managed to enter into conflict with itself; modernity versus ancient art, progress against tradition.

37. Crass - Who Dunnit? (Crass)

Two weeks at number one from w/e 30th July 1983

Sometimes political records treat the music itself as a bit of an afterthought. For every Joe Strummer or Billy Bragg creating records which stand the test of time as good rock music as well as political protest, there have been many attempts where the medium has been used (or abused) purely to carry some slogans beyond a cause or campaign.

Besides that, often people just want to dream use the charts as a medium for their message. As recently as 2020, Basildon controversy seekers Kunt and The Gang released the single “Boris Johnson is a Fucking Cunt”, then followed it up in 2021 with “Boris Johnson is Still a Fucking Cunt”, two snappy diatribes, the latter of which – thanks to the group’s weaponising of social media, digital music streaming and their fanbase - got to number 5 in the national charts at Christmastime. It’s doubtful anybody who bought either of their singles still plays them for pleasure; the motivation for buying both seems to have been anger, and the sense that the charts were there to be gamed to send a message to Number 10 during the Sunday Teatime chart rundown. Neither are truly terrible records, but nor is Mr Kunt in the business of attempting to pen poignant classics.

Nor is this behaviour unique to people on the left. It’s doubtful that any of Kunt and The Gang’s fans bought George Bowyer’s stiff and commanding 1998 single “Guardians of The Land”, a tepid and tacky CD protest single triggered by the Labour Party’s fox hunting ban (though barely mentioning the details of that “sport” in its lyrics). Countryside Alliance told their members that if they all went out and bought a copy, they should expect a number one – in the event, it managed one week at number 33 and if you’ve forgotten all about it, I wouldn’t be surprised. Most of the people who bought it probably have as well.

Perhaps, given all that, it shouldn't be a shock that the indie chart provides us with an example at the absolute extreme end of the spectrum here. I doubt Crass had the means or even motivation to hype “Who Dunnit” into the national top 40, but it’s the ultimate anarchistic souvenir single. Side A features Crass and some “mates in the pub” singing “Birds put the turd in custard/ But who put the turd in Number Ten?” over and over again in response to the recent General Election result, while a few bits of inconsequential half-baked comedy happen in the background. The B side is more of the same.

The single came on translucent brown vinyl housed in a transparent “evidence” bag, which was placed inside a cover containing turd-and-tissue art. It wasn’t the first time Crass had attempted to use a record to make a statement rather than be listened to for enjoyment – their Casiotone Christmas 45 in 1981 also did that job – and wouldn’t be the last.

There are two dominant theories about why this record existed. One is that the group were wounded by the 1983 General Election result and it was a deliberately hopeless response to that. The other is that they were increasingly tired of boneheaded punks buying their singles and barely paying any attention to the sleevenotes or lyrics, and wanted to leave them in no doubt about their political leanings.

While both theories arguably have a grain of truth about them, this sits alongside a run of other 1983 indie number ones which all, one way or another, tell us something about the mood among a certain section of society. Elvis Costello and Tom Robinson were deemed serious artists – whatever that means in practice - but were producing lyrically scattershot, angry, fearful records which sounded nothing like Crass, but had the same feeling of elasticated lyrical lines barely managing to contain all their rage and ideas.

36. Tom Robinson - War Baby (Panic)

Three weeks at number one from w/e 9th July 1983

At some point in the early eighties I caught a glimpse of Tom Robinson singing “Glad To Be Gay” on the television and sat dumbfounded. I was shocked not because he was gay, but because he wasn’t homosexual in a way I’d been lead to expect. I was a naive child, not even a teen, and my limited awareness came from the music press and national newspapers, who generally put either very camp and effeminate or exaggeratedly butch gay men front and centre of their coverage.

If your childhood is lived in an eighties suburban bubble without much other experience to draw from, that becomes what you think “gay” means (besides a bog-standard playground insult). Yet here was Tom Robinson, a confident but regular looking performer, singing about how proud he was to be gay without make-up or any of the other cliched stylings apparent on his person. How could he be proud if he presented himself as such? Why wasn’t he dragging up like Boy George as he must obviously want to do? So many contradictions here to which there appeared so few answers in deepest South East Essex. I chalked Mr Robinson up as yet another one of those Elvis Costello type performers who was too much of a studious riddler for me to make sense of, and went back to reading my copy of Whizzer and Chips.

Of course, in retrospect I find all this hilarious because – at the risk of heavily signposting the obvious childish errors and ironies – Tom Robinson was an absolute trailblazer for gay rights way before any of the new crop of performers had even left school. Originally discovered by Ray Davies, who briefly signed him to his Konk label in 1973, “Glad To Be Gay” was issued by the charity Campaign for Homosexual Equality (or CHE) in 1975 while Robinson was out of contract. He decided to declare his pride before punk had even emerged, never mind the more open and out aspects of New Romanticism, performing the song defiantly in front of rock audiences. To put this into context, homosexuality had only been decriminalised in the UK for eight years at that point, and seventies rock audiences (and indeed even allegedly right-on rock critics) were not always renowned for their tolerance.

"Glad To Be Gay" remains a superb anthem and portrait of an intolerant, "non-woke" period so many of my moping, sad-arsed fellow heterosexual middle-aged men and ladies would like to return to. Every line is precise and jagged, highlighting hypocrisies and societal inconsistencies so obvious they should never have existed - "Pictures of naked young women are fun/ In Titbits and Playboy, page three of The Sun/ There's no nudes in Gay News, our one magazine/ But they still find excuses to call it obscene". Those were the days, eh chaps? Still, at least we were free to drink water from hosepipes and trepan our skulls or some shit. 

There were other trailblazers besides Robinson, but few actually politicised their sexuality. For his troubles, “Glad To Be Gay” was banned from BBC radio despite containing absolutely nothing that could be deemed controversial a mere 6 or 7 years later. Other tracks of his slipped gay references under the radar and picked up radio play, and for a few years in the late seventies he scored hit singles on EMI, not least the deathless “2. 4. 6. 8. Motorway” which remains an oldies radio staple and heavily compiled anthem.

Later releases struggled, however, with even a songwriting collaboration with Elton John “Never Going To Fall In Love… (Again)” failing to chart. He was dropped by EMI, formed the rock band Sector 27 who signed to a reactivated Fontana records, scored no hit singles with them and promptly found himself completely broke, without a record contract or group and bereft of direction. He moved to Hamburg for a while acting as a musician for hire and gigging around the circuit in Germany, before having an unpleasant, alienating evening in a gay sauna which would at least partially inspire this song.

Frustrated, he spewed various stream-of-consciousness lines into a notepad, including the opening lines here “Only the very young and the very beautiful can be so aloof/ Hanging out with the boys, all swagger and poise”. Having emptied his pen of his thoughts, they sat in his notebook for an undefined period before eventually being used to fill “War Baby”, each line a complaint, a charge, or a recently excavated nugget from his anxious belly, each one not necessarily connected to the one before - “Corresponding disasters every night on the TV/ Sickening reality keeps gripping me in its guts” sits alongside “I don't wanna batter you to your feet and knees and elbows/ When I'm kneeling by the candle at the foot of my own bed” as personal angst jars and rattles against the universal.

You can speculate all you want about what “War Baby” is actually about – Tom Robinson has never helped us in this respect, and the safest conclusion to draw is that the chaotic state of life in the early eighties and his own personal life coalesced to create a frustrated outburst on 45. While the song itself is almost as anthemic as “Motorway”, the lyrical scansion is almost as loose as a Crass record, some lines stumbling hither and tither, stretching to try and fit the melody; I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that many of the lines weren’t radically adapted from his notes. Misgivings topple into panic then into grievance and fear before Robinson sings the chorus’s final hook of “I’m scared, so scared, whatever it is you keep putting me through”.

So far, so unbelievably uncommercial, but “War Baby” has major features on its side. The first is the gentle, rocking melody and seductive sax – two things much beloved in the early eighties – but the aforementioned anthemic chorus acts as a glorious, luminous lighthouse beam, spinning around and hitting the listener amidst the choppy scramble of the lyrics. There, in the middle of it all, is the message we could all cling on to. 

35. The Imposter (aka Elvis Costello) - Pills And Soap (Imp)

Three weeks at number from w/e 18th June 1983

Not really much of an “imposter”, more an interloper to the indie charts. While “Pills and Soap” was presented in some quarters as a pseudonymous “mystery single”, in reality Elvis Costello did virtually nothing to dupe the public with this, not even bothering to disguise his extremely distinctive voice. By the time it emerged in the UK National Top 40, he even appeared on Top of the Pops, where John Peel and “Kid” Jenkins both sarcastically pretended not to know his true identity (Peel: “It’s not Shakey, is it?”)




There were some very dull reasons underlying this quarter-hearted deception. In 1983, Elvis Costello’s record label F-Beat were undergoing a change in their worldwide distribution arrangements, moving from Warner Brothers to RCA. The protracted legal discussions had delayed the release of his next album “Punch The Clock”, and rather than also delay the release of the first single “Pills and Soap” longer than necessary, Costello opted to release it under a pseudonym on F-Beat’s “indie” subsidiary Imp Records.

There are two possible reasons why he took this path – firstly, there’s a strong chance that he may have been impatient while bureaucratic issues were being discussed in the background, feeing that if he didn’t get something fresh out soon, momentum may be lost. There was also the small matter of the imminent General Election in the UK, which caused the subjects touched upon during this single to potentially feel more relevant, pressing and explosive.

“Pills and Soap” could, to a half-listening person, be referring to animal cruelty with the references to Noah’s ark and melting animals “down for pills and soap”. This was the explanation Costello gave to the BBC when they nervously asked him what the song was about. Closer inspection reveals this to be nonsense, though. Firstly, the chorus refers to “children and animals, two by two”, then points its finger towards the aristocracy and perhaps even the royal family: “The king is in the counting house, some folk have all the luck/ And all we get is pictures of Lord and Lady Muck/ They come from lovely people with a hardline in hypocrisy/ There are ashtrays of emotion for the fag ends of the aristocracy”. There are other sharp, bitter tasting lines on offer besides, such as “You think your country needs you but you know it never will”, which totally give the game away.

If “Shipbuilding” was a sympathetic gaze at a community (and country) in crisis, “Pills and Soap” is unfocused invective – an unfixed list of the malaise that Costello feels the UK fell under in the early eighties; decadence, distraction, blind patriotism, the establishment worshipping view of the tabloid press. The animals and children being melted down are the expendable lower classes; though of course, the fact Costello is a vegetarian isn’t a complete coincidence here.

Musically speaking, it’s absurdly simple, with a drum machine generating simple, clicking beatnik Daddio rhythms which combine with Steve Naive’s thundering, Hammer Horror piano lines. It’s an extraordinarily daring first single to lift from an album, offering the polar opposite of so much eighties pop – while that was often elaborate and multi-faceted, “Pills And Soap” is threadbare and puts the emphasis and weight of the record’s worth on its lyrics.

How you feel about it really depends upon how receptive you are to such earnest singer-songwriter minimalism, and also crucially when you first heard this. In 1983, there’s little doubt that Costello’s observations were controversial and insightful. Britain was under the early spell of Thatcherism and the behaviour of the press and the Government in power was quite radical – earlier Conservative governments obviously held aspirations to defeat Trade Unions, but few had swung the axe with as much enthusiasm and as little regard for communities as Auntie Maggie.