77. New Order - Shellshock (Factory)

Four weeks at number one from 5th April 1986

After four successive indie number ones from bands who had never graced the top spot before, here we are, back with the big boys on terra firma, gazing with wonder at their luxurious Peter Savile sleeves. Right from the start of this blog, New Order have had a dominant presence, scoring the eighth number one with “Everything’s Gone Green” then afterwards failing to reach the top (with a non-import release) only once.

Both they and Depeche Mode have been the two constant presences throughout, and that throws us a distinct challenge; whereas Depeche grew up in public and reacted against their earliest material in some interesting – and very occasionally misguided – ways, New Order eventually became (and indeed remain) comparatively staid fellows on vinyl. Dressing up games and intense, friendly interviews with the media were not their thing; the group’s lack of tolerance for the latter was summed up neatly when Peter Hook roared with laughter at an innocent business question following the collapse of Factory, then said “You journalists. You think you know it all”.

What that leaves us with is the recorded evidence and its gentle, unforced evolution (yeah, I know - the fiends) and also the reaction from outside their fanbase, which tended to vary from bowled over (“Blue Monday”) to frankly indifferent – their previous single “Sub-Culture” failed to even get inside the National Top 60.

“Shellshock” marks something of an about-turn in their declining commercial performance. Possibly helped by its appearance in the “Pretty In Pink” soundtrack and the fact that it wasn’t available on any other album, the single returned them to the Sunday chart rundown with a number 28 peak. Perhaps mindful of the fact that they’d pushed the twitch and groove of modern club music into the background of their more recent singles, they collaborated with producer John Robie whose 1983 club hit “One More Shot” they had admired.

It subsequently becomes the basis for “Shellshock” without a single riff being wholly lifted; but its ghost is there in that jerky, propulsive beat, in the continued sense of peril and danger (though it eschews the broken glass noises, which perhaps felt as if they were tempting fate on the dancefloor). The cries of “One! More! Shot!” get replaced by the blare of “Shellshock!” and the track stammers into life, introducing the symphonic touches New Order were always compelled to use when they were at their most ambitious. Picked strings meet autumnal, world-weary melodies, thrashed guitars, a stuttering drum machine and one of their most powerful and purposeful choruses in a long time. While I prefer the “Substance” edit of the 12 inch for taking the correct decision to cut the most hesitant verse and leave it on the studio floor, ten minutes doesn’t necessarily feel too long for this track. It has enough drama and enough of a groove to hold its own.

What it also has throughout is a noticeable itchiness and irritation. New Order singles were very often led by Sumner sulking about life’s personal disappointments like a moping child – a tendency some critics were keen to mock. “Shellshock” positively bristles, though, with Sumner discovering he can actually growl. Listen to the almost Jon Bon Jovi-esque snarl of “Another day goes by and ALL I do is cry”, or the finger-stabbing delivery of “All I get from YOU is Shellshock”. This isn’t an insolent, murmured objection behind the privacy of a closed bedroom door. It’s the sound of a tin can being hurled down the street, a young adult man’s stomp loud enough to get the neighbour’s curtains twitching.

76. Half Man Half Biscuit - The Trumpton Riots (Probe Plus)

Two weeks at number one from 22nd March 1986

If you love neatly splicing things into sub-genres, and you feel very strongly that groups and artists have clear "neighbourhoods" which cannot be disputed, here’s where things get awkward. Way back at the end of 1984, The Toy Dolls climbed to number one in the indie charts with “Nellie The Elephant”. Not only was that the last major punk hit in the National Charts, I was also going to argue that it was the last big gasp of the Punk Pathetique sub-genre of Oi! Except…

There are critics and punk fans out there who will argue that Half Man Half Biscuit are part of that Gary Bushell adjacent patch. I can’t find any evidence to suggest that the group referred to themselves as such, but even if they didn’t, these views exist. The counter-claims against them are obviously numerous; the differences between The Toy Dolls, The Test Tube Babies, Splodgenessabounds and Half Man Half Biscuit couldn’t be more obvious. The Splodges looked quite striking in their own way, but indulged in facile dingbattery. The Dolls were/are hyper, whacky, squeaky and cartoonish, overgrown excitable children kicking each other’s tricycles whose handlebars were smeared in melted chocolate. 

HMHB, on the other hand, were – and are – another prospect altogether. Dour, scruffy, despondent, moping and despairing they may have been, but they often churned out comedic lyrical phrases which seemed anything but lazy and effortless. Their debut album “Back In The DHSS” was a shambling cornucopia of observations about children’s television, ageing comic actors (Bob Todd) and “Give Us A Clue” approved national treasures (Nerys Hughes, Una Stubbs, Lionel Blair), spliffs and snooker referees (Len Gangley). Punk Pathetique? I'd argue their styles and methods bore more resemblance to their fellow city-dwellers and beat poets The Liverpool Scene (give "Baby" a virtual spin to get the idea). 

The album was recorded as the test-run of a new eight-track facility in Liverpool where Nigel Blackwell worked as a caretaker following seven years of unemployment. “The caretaker’s band”, as they were somewhat disparagingly known by his colleagues, were allowed to give the desk its first dummy run and the album was recorded for the mate’s rate of £40. They handed the resulting tape around to record companies more in hope than expectation; Factory Records politely and predictably passed on it, but local record store Probe picked it up for their backroom label.

“Back In The DHSS” has a slightly rushed, demo-level sound as a result of its thrifty beginnings, but that only works in its favour. The underproduced sounds collide perfectly with lyrics which provide endless hints to Blackwell’s lifestyle (and possibly the band’s) – his world is one of front room televisions being switched on in the daytime at the height of summer, the heavy curtains fully drawn to stop the sun’s rude interruptions. Spliff and tobacco smoke hang in the air, while he sits on a pouffe passively absorbing the day’s televisual offerings, occasionally getting frustrated but feeling too powerless and groggy to even change the station. Trumpton comes on. He laughs his first stoned giggle of the day, imagining the central characters to be dabbling with drugs. We've all been there. 

As a result, the album felt as if it accidentally found three target markets – students, the unemployed, and stoners. All were able to recognise themselves in these beaten-up novelty folk-punk ditties, able to not only laugh along but rub their eyes in despair. Here’s where the punk pathetique comparisons fall apart; The Toy Dolls and Splodgenessabounds were celebrations of stupidity and passive consumption. HMHB seemed, consciously or otherwise, to be wanting to walk away from it but found they were snookered at every turn, empty-pocketed prisoners to the worst of eighties light entertainment culture.

They were also strangely obsessed with the gentle stop-motion children’s programme “Trumpton”, which besides forming part of the album in “Time Flies By (When You’re The Driver Of A Train)” (“speeding out of Trumpton with a cargo of cocaine”) now became the backdrop to their debut single “The Trumpton Riots”. In many respects, it’s more of the same, except perhaps even more lo-fi. 

75. Shop Assistants - Safety Net (53rd and 3rd)

Three weeks at number one from 1st March 1986

At the time of writing this, I’m ploughing through Justin Lewis’s marvellous book “Into The Groove”, which performs the unenviable job of trying to tie together the hundreds of narratives around eighties music. How you remember the decade probably depends an awful lot on a wide variety of factors besides the big headline events – how old you were, where you lived, how much money you had, and ultimately what mattered to you most; the microscopic silk threads that weave in a dizzying number of directions. 

It’s not that the eighties is the decade where audience fragmentation becomes the norm, but you can just about see the 21st Century and its cornucopia of unmixed, niche experiences on the horizon. Underground and DIY movements, started by people with perhaps more ideas than financial sense, and invisible to most but their small target audiences, began to feel more viable. For club music, urban pirate stations cropped up which were avidly followed by those in the know, creating surprise hit singles for artists nobody in the mainstream media (apart from the likes of James Hamilton) were writing about. Numerous low-budget indie labels, fanzines and club nights also popped up, all collectively pushing a roughly shared agenda and creating a scene which could see a good single by a relatively new band selling 10,000 copies with only minimal bites of mainstream exposure.

Amidst the avalanche of short-lived indie labels around the period, 53rd and 3rd is one which seldom seems to get written about, despite having an enormous cultural clout for a couple of years, almost exclusively releasing records by the kind of groups we would refer to as “indiepop” these days (and far ahead of bigger cult labels like Sarah Records).

Launched in Scotland in 1985 with Stephen McRobbie (of The Pastels), David Keegan (of The Shop Assistants) and Sandy McLean (of early indie Fast Product) running affairs, their sleeves were amateurish and none-more-indie, usually consisting of smudged designs in two colours. The contents inside matched the artwork, being simple, frequently fey, cheaply recorded and sometimes scratchy pop tunes performed by usually very young or naive bands. Their roster, if you could call it that, is essentially everyone any self-respecting indie kid of the era has heard of; Talulah Gosh, BMX Bandits, The Vaselines, The Pooh Sticks and Beat Happening all at least passed through. Their catalogue numbers usually began with AGARR, which stood for “As Good As Ramones Records”, thereby solidly etching a firm ambition on all their output, right in the middle of the run-out grooves.

For Stephen McRobbie aka Stephen Pastel, the enterprise might have been motivated by his recent experiences on Creation Records (although we’d have to ask him). His group had recently been booted off the label alongside a number of others during an Alan McGee organised clear-out, partly motivated by criticisms from his artists about what the label now represented and how he was handling their affairs. If Creation had once seemed like a convenient safehouse for oddballs and mavericks, the artists residing there had perhaps not appreciated how ambitious McGee truly was, which became only too apparent during the Jesus & Mary Chain’s first run of success. He suddenly stopped being the over-excitable man who folded single sleeves with his friends and associates until the early morning, and instead became a sunglasses-at-night wannabe McLaren figure.

53rd and 3rd backed completely away from grand statements and kept themselves firmly on the amateur side of the street. Despite this, their first release “Safety Net” quickly climbed to the top of the indie charts, and unlike The Sisterhood or Easterhouse before it, remained there for more than one token week, far above the current Depeche Mode single “Stripped” and also outpacing new contenders such as The Wedding Present and The Mighty Lemon Drops. 

It was, despite their amateur aesthetic, a strong opening statement for the label. The Shop Assistants had been slowly building up an audience since 1984 with releases on various labels, and their previous single “Shopping Parade” had peaked at number 3 in the indie listings. The group – a mixed gender quintet – had also spent some of 1985 benefitting from national support slots with Jesus & Mary Chain, bringing them to much larger audiences than they would have experienced had they been stuck on pub bills with the Jasmine Minks or A Witness. On top of that, their work and live shows were cut through with a bonhomie which didn’t seem fake; without seemingly even trying, their interviews, video clips and even the records themselves made them sound like a joyful gang of people who could be your new best friends. In underground circles, where bands toured the country bumping into the same fanatical individuals in Norwich, Leeds and Bristol, that mattered. There was a sense of belonging. 

If you were so minded, you could see “Safety Net” as being a very cynical move as a result. “Lucky you’ve a safety net/ lucky you’ve somewhere to go,” the song begins. The indiepop community was by this point becoming tight and solid friendships were forming – like most small music based cults, it contained people who may only have had a few slabs of vinyl and a surplus of idealism in common, but that seemed like enough to forge lasting bonds. The opening lines, then, could be addressed to the “lucky people” in the audience. “Afraid of dying and afraid of life/ But wishing we could stand around the stars again,” lead singer Alex Taylor sings again later on, addressing the simultaneous neuroses and child-like wonder of a lot of their fans.

It would be harsh to call it calculated, though. Musically, it’s poppy and sweet but undercut by the thorny scrape of cheap guitars and a bare, Mary Chain-esque backbeat. It couldn’t be trying less hard. If it’s an anthem, I’d argue it gets there by chance rather than strategic manoeuvres, purely by sharing themes common to twenty-somethings in an increasingly harsh economic environment.

74. The Sisterhood - Giving Ground (Merciful Release)

One week at number one on w/e 22^nd February 1986

When we last visited the NME Indie Number One spot, we bore witness to a group riding the wave of some arguably unjustified hype with a nonetheless marvellous single. If Easterhouse have since become largely forgotten, nobody could fairly begrudge them their one moment in the sun. “Giving Ground”, on the other hand, is a bird of a different feather, a one-off indie hit created through gossip and confusion with some of the public potentially not understanding who the group even were.

The Sisters Of Mercy began to have some serious wobbles while recording their second (aborted) album, the prophetically and provisionally titled “Left On Mission And Revenge”. Guitarist Wayne Hussey offered a series of songs to Andrew Eldritch for potential inclusion, all of which were promptly rejected by either Eldritch or guitarist Craig Adams. Eldritch then put forward his minimal ideas, one of which, according to Hussey, consisted of just one chord. Adams and Hussey promptly left the group due to the usual (and in this case not inaccurate) claim of “musical differences”, and formed their own group The Sisterhood, announcing their plans to the music press and releasing news of a forthcoming live show and radio session with Janice Long.

Eldritch, however, was rattled by this, seeing the name The Sisterhood as a deliberate continuation of The Sisters of Mercy brand, which all parties had agreed not to use after the group’s dissolution. As a result, he considered his limited options, and decided to put a single out using that band name himself – later stating in Melody Maker that they “patently had to be stopped. And when they wanted to be called the Sisterhood, there was nothing I could do but be the Sisterhood before them – the only way to kill that name was to use it, then kill it.”

He promptly registered a company under the name and spent five days recording the single “Giving Ground”, playing all the instruments himself and giving lead vocal duties to recent Merciful Release signing James Ray (of James Ray & The Performance) to avoid any contractual complications.

Meanwhile, Hussey and Adams were left at a sticky wicket, and had to record their Radio One session under the ungainly pub rock name The Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams Band, reverting to the name The Mission at the end of February. Eldritch responded with a press release stating “We assume that their choice of name is entirely unconnected with the forthcoming Andrew Eldritch album that for some months has had the working title ‘Left on Mission and Revenge’”. This might have suggested further legal brouhaha was to follow, but fortunately the bickering stopped there (in public at least; Hussey has since said that various solicitor’s letters still circulated in private).

This soap opera played out in the press and on the airwaves across a number of weeks, and gave both parties more gossip column and news section inches than they would ordinarily receive – for some reason, there is little music fans enjoy more than two stubborn, egocentric band members at loggerheads with each other. Such things are usually the preserve of rock monsters rather than cult goth bands who had yet to score a single hit, but the subsequent publicity seemed to drive fans into record stores out of curiosity. As well as those swept along by the press, there may also have been a few confused fans in the mix who thought they were buying Hussey’s new record due to his earlier announcement.

And what were these unfortunate souls getting for their money? Not much. “Giving Ground” suffers from being a rushed creation recorded with a strategy, rather than a strong creative outcome, in mind. Opening with a minute of Numanoid synths before introducing a somewhat tedious bassline and basic drum machine track, it takes an indulgent two minutes to bring Ray’s vocals properly into the mix, which are hesitant and slightly too bright, failing to sell the idea (such as it is). The song then spends seven-and-a-half minutes going nowhere in particular. You wait and wait for something to emerge – a chorus, a change of mood, a rush of adrenalin or fury, or even some ambience - but the track bumps along the seabed, a flatulent seacow mooing along a dull, non-divergent course.

73. Easterhouse - Whistling In The Dark (Rough Trade)

One week at number one from 15th February 1986

Regardless of their claims otherwise, the “serious” music press have always been just as susceptible to hype as glossy teen magazines. Unlike Smash Hits and their metaphorical "dumper", however, they have often been more coy about their failings, crowing about their successes while hastily burying their dud predictions. The itinerary of NME hopefuls whose subsequent careers were either cruelly brief or never got off the ground is long; from Department S to Gay Dad to Terris to Brother (all of whom were cover stars) sometimes it's been hard not to wince at the risky long shots or desperate decisions.

As 1985 drew to a close, Easterhouse began to be sold as a solid proposition. Formed by brothers Ivor and Andy Perry in 1982, their credentials were impeccable – the group's association with The Smiths was strong, beginning with a Manchester support slot in 1983, and Morrissey and Marr had loudly proclaimed their brilliance to anyone willing to listen. The band also gave socialist diatribes to a music press happy to run over the word count for such things, and their first two Martin Hannett produced singles on London Records, while poor sellers, indicated a charged yet serious band.

Despite having all these credits on their side, London Records didn’t feel it was worth the effort investing further and dropped them, leaving them to be rescued by Rough Trade where, somewhat miraculously, the press enthusiasm continued unabated. One listen to “Whistling In The Dark” gives the game away as to why; this is an incredibly good and staggeringly robust record. It opens on a swinging Motown beat which subsequently dominates throughout, but that beat is augmented with hard, heavy guitar sounds – walloped metallic bass lines meet rhythm guitar lines which sound as if they’re echoing around a steelworks. “Let’s get to the point/ Get to the heart of it” bellows Andy Perry at the start, making it immediately clear that this was a band for whom toughness and directness were seen as virtues.

In a world where a band’s presence in the indie charts increasingly meant either deeply experimental music or delicate whimsy (or in the case of the Cocteau Twins, both) “Whistling” suggests that the powerful ideas birthed by punk rock weren’t necessarily exhausted. The music press were quick to suggest that Easterhouse may be Rough Trade’s Clash to The Smiths’ Pistols as a result, but in reality the bark and swing of the track feels as if it owes a bigger debt to The Jam; there’s the same strident, hectoring edge combined with a muscular but nonetheless irresistible delivery. 

Just when you think the track has shot its load and made its point, the final few moments turn out to be among the finest – “Don’t get caught the same way twice/ You give them money for old rage” yells Perry and the group completely let loose, thrashing, jangling and upping the dynamism past the point you thought it possible for them to go. It is, in short, a fine single and one I still play to this day.

Despite this, Easterhouse’s problem in the long term was multi-faceted. Firstly, a straightforward political punk revival clearly wasn't going to happen; even Paul Weller didn't want his records to sound like The Jam by this point. Besides that, the mid-eighties were a confused period in the music business, and nobody at either Rough Trade or any of the major labels seemed to effectively predict the way the wind was blowing. One of the common bets being placed by journalists and A&R reps was that if alternative music was going to crossover, it was going to have to adopt mainstream arena rock's production values and delivery. Throughout 1986 and slightly beyond, groups such as Goodbye Mr Mackenzie and Love And Money took the attitude and the sound of the alternative sector but turned their noise on vinyl into something airbrushed, vast and blown out. In the mid-eighties, any indie band getting signed to a major may have ended up sounding faintly like Big Country or Simple Minds in the end.