Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  3 The labels were Rough Trade (London), Factory (Manchester), Y (Bristol), Zoo and Inevitable (Liverpool) and Fast Product (Edinburgh). The distributors listed on the very first chart were Rough Trade and Fresh (London), Pinnacle (Orpington), Red Rhino (York), Graduate (Dudley) and Bullet (Stafford).

  4 A bunch of other insular mid-eighties movements emerged at the same time who harked back to punk’s spirit of ’76, tending towards the Clash’s set of beliefs and the assumption that there was an inherent true grit in roots music. There was psychobilly (the Meteors, King Kurt), cowpunk (the post-feminist, Calamity Jane-inspired Boothill Foot Tappers and Yip Yip Coyote) and a neo-folk scene forged by London’s second- and third-generation Irish (the Pogues, the Men They Couldn’t Hang). It was an understandable hankering for something of flavour in an era of shiny blandness, but these scenes led nowhere – only the Pogues made any commercial headway thanks to a brace of exceptional singles, ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ (UK no. 72 ’85) and ‘Fairytale of New York’ (UK no. 2 ’87). Abandoning post-punk, these ersatz and mannerist movements were heavy on symbols of rebellion and were epitomised by the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, who, with his slurred, gravelly brogue and rotten teeth, made for a bleak Irish caricature. It was a convincing act, and hid well the fact that he had attended the private Westminster School (fees at time of writing: £7,000 per term), whose alumni included Christopher Wren, Henry Purcell, John Gielgud and Tony Benn.

  5 Post-punk had eschewed love songs. The Au Pairs said their songs were ‘about politics, personal politics’, while Gang of Four’s ‘Damaged Goods’ took the biscuit for anti-love songs: ‘Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you, but then I know it’s only lust … your kiss so sweet, your sweat so sour.’

  6 The first mention of music being described as ‘indie’ is in a 1981 Record Mirror review by Sunie of a Modern English single. They may have recorded for 4AD but at this point the music produced by independent labels had no specific style, just a shared attitude, not-for-profit values and a sense of spontaneity.

  7 The Bangles’ name, though, did not suggest particularly intellectual leanings. They emerged from a west-coast sixties-revival scene called the Paisley Underground and wrote some stunning jangle pop which was perfectly suited to college radio. Then they jumped the fence and became major pop stars with ‘Manic Monday’ (US no. 2, UK no. 3 ’86), ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’ (US no. 1, UK no. 2 ’86) and ‘Eternal Flame’ (US and UK no. 1 ’88), while looking like a million dollars in their videos. In this, they fell between every possible alternative stool – hipster boys in specs scorned their chart positions, bowl-cut girls sneered at their big cakey hair – and they had to settle for wealth and fame. They never got their due as one of the best girl groups of the decade, but ‘Going Down to Liverpool’ should feature in any list of the greatest singles of the eighties.

  8 If you’re looking for a starting point for alt country, the predominant US indie sound of the early 2000s, the sleeve to Murmur is as good as any. Attempts to combine punk aesthetics with country had been pioneered by groups like Nashville’s Jason and the Scorchers, but REM’s artwork and gothic myths and legends added a third layer. Cowboy Junkies, Red House Painters and American Music Club came in REM’s wake, doing further acoustic, harmonic and old-west mythic groundwork, and their music was tagged Americana; Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression in 1990 would be retrospectively regarded as the first fully-formed alt-country album.

  9 Morrissey’s solo career has produced a lot of decent songs (‘Hold On to Your Friends’, ‘Alma Matters’, ‘Seasick Yet Still Docked’, ‘Suedehead’) but they could all have been released at any time between 1987 and the present: they have no time-specific references, and – in spite of using a variety of producers and musicians – all sound like he is trying to re-create the Smiths.

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  1985: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?

  One can have great concern for the people of Ethiopia, but it’s another thing to inflict daily torture on the people of England.

  Morrissey, 1984

  A collective madness took control of Britain between the post-Falklands War general election in ’83 and Black Monday in ’87. Against a backdrop of the miners’ strike, AIDS campaigns, mass unemployment, a steep rise in homelessness and heroin usage, and endless TV montages of trading floors, much of pop was surface noise.

  By 1985 new pop seemed to have evaporated through the walls. Despite all the talk about destroying the canon, and making it onto TOTP without any rockist baggage, it had proved a very small step from ‘soundtracking the eighties’ to conspicuous consumption; the ironic sleeve of Heaven 17’s Penthouse and Pavement – pop group as corporation – was taken by many at face value. New pop had sown the seeds of its own demise.

  What had gone wrong? With the commercial failure of bridge-burning, path-finding sequels to major albums (ABC’s Beauty Stab and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s Dazzle Ships in ’83, Dexys Midnight Runners’ Don’t Stand Me Down in ’85), it became apparent that the British public had lost its appetite for invention and change. The Conservative government, which had scored all-time-low poll ratings just two years earlier, won a landslide election in the spring of ’83; the Republicans did likewise in America a year later. British hits of early ’83 – Kajagoogoo’s ‘Too Shy’ (no. 1), the Thompson Twins’ ‘Love on Your Side’ (no. 9), Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams’ (no. 3) – had the synth leanings and some of the glide of new pop, but were airless and humourless. It hadn’t taken long for the industry to right itself, and by 1984 more malleable acts (Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw, King, Paul Young) had superseded the art-school boys (Soft Cell, Human League). Much of new pop’s superficial style remained, though; a glume of electro pop, dotted with pre-punk, rockist guitar runs, given gravitas by du jour, post-Phil Oakey soulful singing.

  One honourable exception to new pop’s implosion came from Liverpool, a city Margaret Thatcher had sought to destroy by ‘managed decline’. Frankie Goes to Hollywood were a cumbersome mixture of blokey builders and gay macho men. None of them were pin-up material, but somehow they soundtracked 1984, scoring number ones with their first three singles, something that had only been done once before, by fellow Liverpool act Gerry and the Pacemakers in 1963.

  In spite of the lack of mid-eighties chart excitement, the British music press had remained alert. Paul Morley reasoned that if musicians weren’t learning from the lessons of post-punk and new pop, then the writers would have to take matters into their own hands. Having already written new pop’s manifesto, it was no great surprise when Morley set up a label, ZTT, with one of the genre’s sonic architects, producer Trevor Horn, and Horn’s wife, Jill Sinclair. Off the bat, Morley signed Frankie Goes to Hollywood: their first single, the sex hymn ‘Relax’, was banned by the BBC’s breakfast show DJ Mike Read and by the end of January ’84 it was number one.

  By the time their second single, ‘Two Tribes’,1 was released, Frankie were a phenomenon. Singer Holly Johnson, with a face like a cruel mouse, licked his lips every time he appeared on TV to declare, ‘We are living in a world where sex and horror are the new gods.’ He especially relished the word ‘sex’. Soon everybody wore their T-shirts, and ‘Two Tribes’ spent nine weeks at number one (with a reactivated ‘Relax’ storming back up to number two). They made the biggest-sounding record of 1984 and it was the biggest hit of the year. But somehow it didn’t feel like much of a victory for new pop; it felt more like playing the likes of Phil Collins and Queen (whose first post-Frankie single, in ’85, was a raised fist of a thing called ‘One Vision’) at their own game. It was all too big. You yearned for a lightness of touch, the wispiness of a Thereza Bazar vocal, a tender Chic guitar line, and there was none. Even when ‘The Power of Love’, a ballad, gave them their third number one in three releases, Johnson’s sniggering ‘make love your goal’ made it seem like a joke. Their first album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome, was a double, almost unheard of since the pre-punk era, and it dragged. One too many thunderbolts,
their records have not aged well. In retrospect, it feels like Britain got carried away by the enormity of the Frankie event.

  By 1984 Britain had the most conservative pop media of any period since the fifties. Specifically, Radio 1 actively encouraged adult-orientated pop. The man in charge was Derek Chinnery. He told John Peel that his programme was only suitable for undesirables, and cut it from four nights a week to three. Off the record,2 Chinnery had also told Peel that he wanted Radio 1 to be a soundtrack for ‘young professionals in the car on their way home from the theatre, or to the restaurant, who want to listen to something familiar – like Kenny Rogers’. Anything new that had a chance of making it onto Radio 1’s playlist was necessarily conservative. So the record companies aimed low. UB40 embarked on their endless retreads of reggae classics with a Bontempi beat. Go West, two men in their early thirties, a little sweaty, clad in fake leather, scored a short string of air-pumped funk-pop hits – the biggest being ‘We Close Our Eyes’ (UK no. 5, US no. 41 ’85) – which defied any kind of logic; people bought these records only because they were used to buying records. The same went for Hue and Cry’s ‘Labour of Love’ (UK no. 6 ’87) and ‘Living in a Box’ by Living in a Box (UK no. 5 ’87), singles entirely made up of over-stylised soul tics.

  At the apex of this shiny pyramid was Phil Collins. The Genesis drummer had made a break for freedom in early ’81 and his first solo single, ‘In the Air Tonight’ (UK no. 2, US no. 19), was a claustrophobic triumph. Martin Hannett’s dub-handed influence could be heard in its sparse fug of misery and impending apocalypse (which occurred with the loudest drums pop had yet conceived, at around three minutes forty). To promote his first solo album, 1981’s Face Value, Collins appeared on TV with a pot of paint and a brush on his piano – his wife had run off with a decorator from Teesside.3 It was painful to watch, but not good painful. When Morrissey sang, ‘What do we get for our trouble and pain? A rented room in Whalley Range,’ it was leavened by the self-parody of ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’. Face Value contained some impressive blue-eyed soul – the Bee Gees would have been proud of the eerie ‘If Leaving Me Is Easy’ – but the problem was that Collins wouldn’t let go. Three years later he was still banging on, making aesthetic capital from his years-open wound, like a revival of the Plastic Ono Band with Elton John production values. It was the perfect soundtrack for divorced men in wine bars who couldn’t find their voice in the Smiths and the impermeability of indie culture but recognised a kindred spirit in bald, angry Phil, standing on his ex-wife’s lawn at two in the morning, shouting up at her bedroom window: ‘Take a look at me now!’ (‘Against All Odds’, US no. 1, UK no. 2 ’84).

  With this epic self-pity, Phil Collins became one of the biggest-selling artists in the world, and with his drum sound – the one that had stood alone in 1981 – he infected all pop. Collins believed that everything sounded better with gated reverb, which gave the off beat that jackboots-on-rice-krispies sound. Most producers agreed. Studios were rebuilt, stripped bare, all seventies cushioning removed to accommodate this stark, bass-free sound. Collins was a jazz drummer, and his inventiveness could circumvent the brutality of this sound on a 4/4 beat, but most drummers were less talented. Everything got bigger, tinnier, thinner, as the eighties progressed, until it reached some kind of crescendo with T’Pau’s UK number one ‘China in Your Hand’ in 1987. Even Britain’s independent sector was no help. They should have been clamouring to change the sonic state of pop, and rising to T’Pau’s challenge. Instead, they retreated. Morrissey sang ‘Hang the DJ’ rather than ‘Appoint better DJs and adapt radio to our needs’, and pop became a husk.

  Lower down the shiny, slippery, mid-eighties pyramid, and desperate to clamber upwards, were groups who had felt the need to move on from the post-punk independents but then failed to realise their commercial potential: Orange Juice enjoyed an isolated hit (‘Rip It Up’, UK no. 9 ’83) but the sound was squelchy, synthetically silly, primped and processed by Polydor until it was hummable and little else.4 But it certainly fitted into the new Radio 1 aesthetic – it had a sax break – and even felt slightly daring with its Little Richard-quoting title on the air next to the white soul of Paul Young.5

  The mid-eighties saw a new wave of pirate radio growing in London, playing new American electro and early hip hop (rap, as it was still known), which Radio 1 and mainstream commercial stations like Capital still avoided entirely. Given the popularity of rap and electro in specialist shops that had no influence on the chart, and on specialist radio stations, the Top 40 – though it pains me to say it – clearly wasn’t reflecting what people were listening to, or even buying, in the mideighties. It felt like the BPI, the BBC and the major labels were all part of the Thatcherite military–industrial complex.

  The peak of this retrenchment into middle-aged, moneyed pop was Band Aid. While I don’t doubt Bob Geldof’s sincerity, the Band Aid single released at the end of 1984 was, for Britain, an enormous feelgood exercise, and one which has arguably done Africa more harm than good. In a year of event singles (‘Two Tribes’, ‘Careless Whisper’, Chaka Khan’s electro-soul ‘I Feel for You’, Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’), ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ was the biggest, and it was atrocious.

  At the very least, Geldof and Midge Ure should have listened hard and long to local African experts who spoke from informed, critical and realistic perspectives.6 Instead, the whole of pop rose up as one with its own idea of how to feed the world based on ten minutes of BBC news footage. The lyric was comically weak. Just one example: ‘There won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time’. Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner could have jogged Ure’s memory about The Snows of Kilimanjaro. So could the Teardrop Explodes’ Julian Cope if he’d been invited along to the party. But he wasn’t, and nor was anyone else who could be regarded as a radical or potentially divisive.

  Where were the Smiths? Kevin Rowland? Madness?7 Band Aid, and the following year’s Live Aid concert, saw the final triumph of ageing rockers (Phil Collins), new-wavers (Sting) and the most conservative eighties stars (Dire Straits) over progressive pop forces; they built a castle from Live Aid and pulled up the drawbridge on anything daring or different. It gave all of their careers an extra year or two’s grace as the public felt warmly towards their do-gooding. Evidence of this was Midge Ure’s ‘If I Was’, a chest-beating number one in the autumn of ’85. Jon Savage declared that ‘the Live Aid effect has smeared middle-brow values all over rock music’. The healthy camaraderie and competitiveness on the indie scene, its jostle and crackle, was entirely absent in the Live Aid line-up. Quo, Queen, Clapton, Collins, the taste of a new generation.

  Light relief came almost immediately after Band Aid’s five weeks at number one, from a production team in South London. Stock, Aitken and Waterman were the jokers in the pack. While Tears for Fears talked in interviews about the weeks they spent agonising over a drum fill, SAW had backing tracks reduced to two or three push buttons. Off-the-shelf hits, largely identical, were their speciality. Stock Aitken Waterman made music for the masses and, beyond the fact that Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan were soap stars, there was very little difference between the people singing the records and the people buying them. Mel and Kim clearly bought their clothes at Top Shop. Their very lack of glamour is what made SAW’s catalogue both successful and hated. Kylie, Jason, Dead or Alive, Rick Astley, Sonia, Mel and Kim,8 Bananarama – they scored a dozen UK number ones between them, and a brace in the States. The SAW sound was everywhere from ’84 to ’89.

  At the beginning of 1984 the homely trio of backroom boys came up with their first production – it was the Cypriot Eurovision entry, and it came seventh. They had to start somewhere. Within months, they were in the UK Top 20 with Hazell Dean’s ‘Searchin’’ (no. 6) and Divine’s none-gayer ‘You Think You’re a Man’ (no. 16). By Christmas they had the biggest club hit in the country with Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round’, and it became their first number one in February ’8
5, displacing ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’. The SAW sound initially came from hi-NRG, the heavy-hitting sound of gay clubs that blew up in the early eighties, but they swiftly adopted house as its pulse beat in ’87. It all looked so good on paper, but the records sounded like they had been recorded on keyboards that had come out of a Christmas cracker. No matter. SAW took the underground, married it to light entertainment and became – with their hit rate and production line at least – the closest thing to Motown that Britain has ever produced. Kylie Minogue: ‘Stock Aitken and Waterman and the Hit Factory weren’t so far removed from my role in Neighbours: learn your lines, red light on, perform lines, no time for questions, promote the product, et voilà!’

  Pete Waterman had cut his teeth as a DJ in the north, starting at the Leeds Locarno with Jimmy Savile in 1965, then working on the Mecca circuit for fifteen years – he knew his Thelma Houston from his Cissy Houston. So once in a while a SAW record like Kylie’s ‘Hand on Your Heart’ (UK no. 1 ’89) sounded a little more than cheap and cheerful, had a tug within the tinny tinkling; maybe a chord change sneaked in that caught you on the hop (the move from bridge to chorus on Big Fun’s ‘Can’t Shake the Feeling’). And, occasionally, the whole record worked this well. Brother Beyond’s ‘The Harder I Try’ (no. 2 ’88) took a hitless boy band and made them the Temptations for four minutes. Hook was piled upon hook, and the budget even stretched to a real string section. But Waterman – who would have been the foreman of a cotton mill a hundred years earlier – stood by his Woolworths production values, watched the hits roll off the conveyor belt and refused to upgrade. He saw sampling as ‘wholesale theft’ and, when the underground went entirely overground with the dance-music explosion of the early nineties, the SAW aesthetic swiftly died.9