Indie Top 20 Volume 3 Side 4 - Sugarcubes, Throwing Muses, My Bloody Valentine, Wedding Present, Joy Division

1. The Sugarcubes - Birthday (Icelandic Version) (One Little Indian)

When this was released in 1987, the initial response could only be described as enthusiastic bewilderment. It wasn't that anyone in the position to promote it (music journalists or late night DJs) disliked it, more that they didn't understand how to describe it or put it neatly into context with anything else that was happening at the time.

Partly for that reason, I suspect, The Sugarcubes ended up becoming a band-come-tourism-campaign-for-Iceland, with almost every announcement, review, interview and Chart Show fact box referring to the fact that they came from a remote, frozen island with the same "population as Camden Town". A place hardly anyone visited, where music made strange ethereal noises and television only broadcast for three hours every day. The only way to describe "Birthday" in a way that might have made it saleable or caused it to make any sense to the time-pressed observer was to make it sound like an exotic cultural phenomenon occurring in some strange, faraway place.

Trouble is, as anyone who has become acquainted with Iceland or its music scene since fully understands, "Birthday" isn't really typical of anything happening there, or indeed anywhere else. Sure, music journalists compared the band to the Cocteau Twins at this point, and there's no question that there's an influence at play, but even so... those whining, weeping guitars, chiming bells, ponderous percussive elements, and Bjork's echoing, sky-reaching howling combine to create something actually really very creepy. The word "beautiful" has been occasionally used to describe the single, but it's not a well sounding record to my ears; it reaches, it surges, it staggers, it collapses like a yearning ballad being played from a vinyl record on a boat at choppy seas.

The video, screened on "The Chart Show" more times than I can sensibly count, adds to the sense of unease. The background picture is Bjork dancing and singing in an empty room with a darkened window. The foreground shot zooms in and out of Bjork's face, and as it zooms in she becomes pixellated like a Crimewatch video of a witness talking about a heinous murder. It's cheap and basic, but it again gives the impression of something slightly more sinister.

Bjork later referred to this as a "tasteless pop song", clarifying: "It’s a story about a love affair between a five year old girl, a secret and a man who lives next door. The song’s called Birthday because it’s his fiftieth birthday... I was always changing my mind about what the lyrics should be about. I had the atmosphere right from the start but not the facts. It finally ended up concentrating on this experience I remembered having as a little girl, among many other little girls’ experiences. It’s like huge men, about fifty or so, affect little girls very erotically but nothing happens . . . nothing is done, just this very strong feeling. I picked on this subject to show that anything can affect you erotically; material, a tree, anything.”

Which doesn't really clarify anything concretely, except to say that from the foundations up (the premise, the overall sound, the delivery) "Birthday" is consciously awkward, naive and confused, reaching for past emotions it can't get to or explain, and seems to want to unnerve the listener with its ideas.

I have my own particular memories of being five years old which relate tangentially to this record: My parents used to have an old 1960s stacking record player in the corner of our front room which was as big as a cupboard and contained a large number of old singles in its compartments. I used to regularly plough through the singles and stack them on the central spindle, spinning Fats Domino, The Beatles, The Animals, Ray Charles and other classic records of that era. On occasion, the stacking process wouldn't work, and a record would drop and as it span, would slip and slide against the label of the one beneath it, causing the melody to create a slightly discordant, wobbly noise. I hated this. It caused me to run from the room crying out to get help, I found it so unsettling.

To this day, I still have a stronger gag reflex than most around music which feels unsettled and faintly discordant (and not, crucially, heavily discordant) in a similar way (so it's lucky we won't have to discuss My Bloody Valentine much). It causes me to admire the way "Birthday" was put together rather than actually outright enjoy it.

But whatever I think, or reflexively feel - this single launched Bjork outside of Iceland and created a fascinating and unique pop star who remains an inspiration to many, and you could argue it was even the first pivotal step towards putting Iceland on the tourist map, giving the country more glossy magazine and newspaper coverage in Britain and beyond than it had enjoyed since the Cod Wars. If The Sugarcubes caused you to pull the Atlas from your parent's bookshelf and look further north than usual, you weren't alone. Maybe it was the start of the nation being patronised as being weird, quirky and out-there, when in reality it's no weirder or quirkier than any island nation - but that's the price everyone paid.

"Birthday" itself was never a conventional hit, but hung around the bottom of the National Top 100 across the whole of Autumn 1987, and ended up selling 50,000 copies - more than many "proper" chart hits.



2. Throwing Muses - Cry Baby Cry (4AD)

"Cry Baby Cry", on the other hand, isn't much more settled than "Birthday", sounding like an agonised country record performed in sheer panic by some musicians held at gunpoint. "He moved me and the chains changed!" yelps Kirsten Hirsch in a way that's one part joy, the other part total fear, while the band chug along rapidly behind her.

It's a deranged sounding single which has a rawness later Throwing Muses releases wouldn't necessarily possess. As the years rolled on, they discovered ways to decant their angular sound into more poppy structures, whereas "Cry Baby Cry" is almost all sharp edges. As an introduction to the band, it's interesting but not particularly accessible.

As a teenager, I actually thought this was probably what a band would have sounded like if Sylvia Plath had been a lead musician rather than a poet. Full marks for being a pretentious boy, then, but I'm going to put that comment here anyway because there's still a slight ring of truth about it for me. It has the same driving energy combined with disquieting ideas.

"You're wrong, Dave, and you're a pseud. Comparing bands to Sylvia Plath, honestly, you're not 14 anymore".
You're probably right, but I can't help it.



3. My Bloody Valentine - Strawberry Wine (Lazy)

And after all that, we get My Bloody Valentine at probably their most "normal". In their earliest days, MBV were usually regarded as being a sideshow in Indiepop quarters, a fey, merry group with some syrupy sixties ideas in their veins. That's an undeservingly simplistic view, as you can actually hear some of what would eventually make them significant here - the mix is much more interesting than anything, for example, The Pastels would be bothered to create. Feeling set on one constant droning mid-point, with the coo-ing backing vocals dominating and faintly buried lead vocals, it sounds faintly blurry, out of focus and claustrophobic. Something was already starting to happen, even if the details hadn't been fully fleshed out yet.

"Strawberry Wine" also sounds like a psychedelic folk song booted into the laps of an indie group, having a faintly otherworldly quality as a result. This is bit parts Indiepop, Shoegaze and early Incredible String Band at the same time.

Of course, if anyone had been played "Birthday" and "Strawberry Wine" back to back at the time and been asked which group would go on to make widely critically acclaimed and groundbreaking albums with their recording studio experiments, I still doubt the answer "My Bloody Valentine" would have cropped up much. Hindsight is a funny thing.



4. The Wedding Present - Anyone Can Make A Mistake (Reception)

This starts with high-powered guitar jangling, then revs its engine and speeds off, leading one critic of the time to comment: "The Ben Johnsons of indie take off around the track so fast they go straight past any tune".

That's a bit unfair, actually. "Anyone Can Make A Mistake" has become slightly sidelined in the Wedding Present's catalogue, but it's actually a brilliant little single, combining some superbly melodic, growling guitar riffs with an unstoppable energy. Even at this point before they signed to RCA, you can hear that their future would include "Kennedy" - "Anyone..." contains very similar elements in its sound.

Bigger and better things were to come in terms of exposure for the group, however, and this single acted as their last to sit outside the official UK Top 100. (Until they went "down the dumper" again, anyway).



5. Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart (Peel Session) (Strange Fruit)

And here we are again, discussing a classic track everyone knows, dating from well before 1987, purely because it was on a Peel Session EP and entered the indie chart as a result.

This time, though, at least the track is more than marginally different from the finally released single version, and in my view actually better. Some might see this as sacrilege, but the Peel Session version adds more beef to Peter Hook's clattering basslines and the driving percussion, giving the track a sense of drama it didn't eventually have. Of course, other people believe that this destroys the sense of atmosphere the song later had - it's entirely a matter of taste.

The Peel Session EP climbed to number three on the indie chart, and number 98 on the Offical Top 100.

Indie Top 20 Volume 3 Side 3 - Cookie Crew, Hotline, Erasure, Ghost Dance

1. Cookie Crew - Females (Get On Up) (Rhythm King)

"Females" followed hot on the heels of the initial non-success of "Rok Da House", and climbed to number 78 on the national charts - a fairly big deal for a British rap act at that time. Seemingly focused on the slicker dressed female rappers with snobbier attitudes on the circuit, the pair put them on the straight and narrow: "Females, they wear a lot of gold/ be careful of them homeboys, because they're ten years old". Mmmm.

This is slick, sassy and smart, though sadly some of the sampled elements in it - most especially the "Yeah Woo!" sample - do datestamp it rather firmly in 1987. In the pair's defence, though, they weren't directly responsible for the fact that absolutely everyone, including Timmy Mallett, ended up using it.

After the success of "Rok Da House", The Cookie Crew became a steady mainstream presence for awhile, until it became clear that a pop life within the belly of the beast simply wasn't for them.



2. Hotline - Hellhouse (Rhythm King)

(Guess who just had to upload a YouTube video for this himself, as nothing seemed to be available?)

House music was huge news in both the national charts and the indie charts at this point, and Beechwood Music would have been fools to ignore the fact. It was seen as a vibrant and underground music form which was starting to change the way the music industry operated - pressed up by independent labels and distributed by either Rough Trade or Pinnacle, it succeeded and sold seemingly whether it picked up airplay or critical praise or not, with clubland dictating the end result. In fact, it usually sold in much greater quantities than your average Mighty Lemon Drops release, and sounded considerably less retro.

Did the kind of kids buying Indie Top 20 albums really care, though? That's a good question, and one Beechwood would have to grapple with in interesting ways by the time Volume 4 of the series rolled around. For now, though, "Hellhouse" sits slightly awkwardly between Erasure and The Cookie Crew here, and while it's a sturdy enough example of the genre, I doubt there are many people who would regard it as being an important or pivotal release - you get the impression that all involved with Volume 3 would have preferred the eternal 1987 indie number one "Pump Up The Volume" to occupy this space instead, but they couldn't afford the rights to it.

Having said that, listening to it again through good headphones for the first time in years, there's a corking groove to this one, sitting neatly between House music and mid-eighties funk. I didn't remember it being quite as good as this, and it's aged like a fine wine.  This is the kind of bass-heavy, complex, slowly evolving groove the retro-kids in the old school clubs are into now more than they were at the time, and while it might have sounded like neither fish nor fowl to me in 1987, now it seems like an incredibly effective piece of work. Or, to put it into context - it made me dance around my living room and I've got a bad knee. That's high praise at my age.



3. Erasure - Victim of Love (Mute)

Whether they could afford "Pump Up The Volume" or not, they clearly could afford the rights to Erasure again, although "Victim of Love" was a mere number 7 national hit for the pair. Falling back on one of Vince Clarke's subtle-as-a-sledgehammer choruses and an almost unfeasibly vibrant melody, it's strangely uplifting given the fact that its lyrics are about giving up on the idea of relationships. "I'm building a wall, every day it's getting higher" sings Bell happily. Please yourself, mate.

Erasure do not appear on the Indie Top 20 series again, which seems like an act of total denial, as the indie hits kept on coming. The reality seemed to be that their favour among indie kids had almost entirely waned by this point and they steadily became regarded as being "merely" a pop group. But, lest we forget, "merely" a pop group who produced "Drama", an overloaded piece of electro-gospel featuring The Jesus and Mary Chain shouting "Guilty!" in the background, the indie chart number one "Ship Of Fools", the Wheatus-covered "A Little Respect"... and even then, when they were truly, undeniably pop, they did it far better than most during their imperial phase. "Stop!" proved that without a doubt.

It's a shame, but not surprising, that we won't have the chance to discuss them again. Their absence from the series makes it feel as if they produced nothing else of note, when their ideas became much taller and mightier than this one. It's proof that when studying these LPs, we can't really treat them as being wholly reliable documents of what was or wasn't happening on the indie chart at any particular point.



4. Ghost Dance - Fools Gold (Karbon)

And no, this isn't an early version of the Stone Roses classic. Rather, "Fools Gold" is an epic Goth Rock tune which has been strangely overlooked by most people in the years that have followed. Discarding the basic strum and stomp of "Grip of Love" from volume one, it instead goes overboard and unveils something that sounds like classic rock - and genuinely so.

"Fools Gold" is a truly soaring anthem, whose exposure suffered slightly from being the second track on side one of an EP the band released. Track one "When I Call" may have felt more likely to pick up airplay, but "Fools Gold" gave a much stronger impression of the scope of the group's songwriting abilities. Chunky Goth Rock basslines meet with chiming guitars and the track gradually builds into an almighty chorus. Intricately produced and arranged, and with some killer guitar riffs at the tail end meeting with ex-Skeletal Family member Anne-Marie Hurst's powerful vocals, it really isn't terribly alternative or indie, to be truthful. Rather, it sounds like a band declaring to the world, and perhaps major labels in particular, that they have the skills in place to take things further.

Chrysalis raced forward to sign them, and another single "Down To The Wire" emerged in 1989, followed by an LP... but neither really delivered commercially on their promise. Internal tensions within the group ensured that far from realising their potential, they all but disappeared shortly afterwards.

Hurst occasionally performs with The Skeletal Family these days, but Ghost Dance seem to have been completely consigned to the past.

Indie Top 20 Volume 3 Side 2 - Fields Of The Nephilim, The Shamen, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Happy Mondays, Brilliant Corners

1. Fields Of The Nephilim: Preacher Man (Situation Two)

Fields of the Nephilim emerged out of Stevenage like some post-apocalyptical newtown cowboys, and while such an opening sentence may sound very pretentious, that is largely the image they seemed to want to portray. Covered in dust (or flour, actually) with milky eyes, and a doomy gothic sound combined with some beautiful twangy Morricone inspired riffs, they were frequently dismissed as a daft concept, but on form they could actually create some beguiling sounding records. Elements of "Moonchild", for instance, sound like a lot of the post-rock inspired bands emerging today, with as much Joy Division in the mix as Sisters of Mercy.

Preacher Man was their second single, and while it was a key breakthrough moment for the group, compared to what came later it does sound a little less ambitious and dependent on some rather weighty riffs and repetition of doom-mongering lyrics about "contamination" and "radiation". When acting as the soundtrack to the video, it seems slightly more appealing, which makes me wonder which idea came first.



2. The Shamen: Christopher Mayhew Says (Moksha)

The Shamen may have found success as commercial purveyors of Dance Music, but way back when, they were actually a neo-psychedelic rock band who gradually introduced beatbox loops and samples into their particularly suspicious brand of mushroom soup. However, their debut LP "Drop" was quite straightforward compared to the post-LP release "Christopher Mayhew Says", which incorporates samples of the Labour/ Liberal MP Mayhew taking a mescaline trip while a film crew recorded him (which can be heard in its original form here).

The Syd Barrett inspired interstellar guitar screeching was certainly trad psychedelia, the hammering beatbox and thrashing guitars were not. Listen to this while on LSD, and your trip might not necessarily be a happy one. It's a collision of two worlds, the old and the new, which works in a unique way and acts a signpost to the future.

Of course, it wasn't completely without precendent. Gaye Bykers on Acid's "Nosedive Karma" from the previous year had a similar mix of psychedelia, samples and thrashed guitars. All these tracks signified the rise of left-field rock music melding with the ideas in Hip Hop and Dance music, albeit in a faintly clodhopping way... and The Shamen shifted direction with greater ease than most. Fewer groups could more easily claim "There's always been a dance element to our music" further down the line and genuinely mean it.

"Christopher Mayhew Says" sounded astonishing at the time too, certainly to this young listener. Heard for the first time on "The Chart Show", it sounded like an adrenalin packed cocktail of The Beatles, early Floyd, Grebo, the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, Sonic Youth, and God knows what else. Whether it sounds tamer now or not - and I'd guess that it almost certainly does - in 1987, it felt simultaneously confusing and exhilarating. The psychedelic pop revival was in full swing in London in small clubs in the mid to late eighties, but little of it sounded quite like this.

For his part, Mayhew continually insisted that he had enjoyed long, heavenly experiences outside our standard concepts of time while under the influence of mescaline. He passed away in 1997.



3. Red Lorry Yellow Lorry: Open Up (Situation Two)

More Goths, though they denied it until they were blue in the face, insisting they were more interested in art-punk and garage rock. Still, those growling vocals and incessant pounding rhythms would have made this a natural second track after the Nephilim (which makes me wonder why it wasn't placed there - did a bribe exchange hands?) Unlike that group, though, this is claustrophobic and minimal, locked in a wardrobe in a derelict house rather than wandering around in the American desert looking for mutants to dictate to.

Leeds' Red Lorry Yellow Lorry (briefly known as The Lorries for a time) were cult figures for what seemed like an endless amount of time, emerging in 1981 and continuing for ten years. Whether they saw themselves as Goths or not, they certainly attracted the right crowd, and it saw them through other changing fads and fashions. By the nineties, though, they had been dropped by Beggars Banquet (parent label of Situation Two) and it was all over.

Still, "Open Up" was single of the week in the usually rather goth-phobic NME, showing that certain critics favoured them.



4. Happy Mondays: 24 Hour Party People (Factory)

Now considered something of a classic in the band's catalogue, and loaning itself to the title of the film of the same name, "24 Hour Party People" pushed the Mondays outside of their usual audience in 1987 by appearing on "The Chart Show". Still though, its bow-legged, jagged funk rhythms and Ryder's stream-of-consciousness lyrics felt slightly like a hangover from post-punk at the time. It's easy to point at the track in retrospect and consider it the dawn of a brave new indie era, but back then nobody seriously thought Shaun Ryder was a future tabloid pop star. If anything, the Mondays were more commonly regarded as being a second division version of The Fall.

Still, "24 Hour Party People" is a confident and staggering single, and showed the group moving beyond their likeably ramshackle beginnings and into records with much more mainstream structures.  Ryder later claimed that the only reason the group didn't deal with strong choruses early in their career is "we didn't know how to write them". It certainly shows they'd moved on a long way from that point, if his claims are true. "Party People" is so laden with hooks it's hard to know where to point, though crucially none of them seem like chartbound sounds - certainly not by 1987's standards. The track has far too many sharp points and angles to easily slide into the Top 40, and only a slight sanding down of the group's sound and a gradual easing of tolerance to alternative ideas in the mainstream would begin to generate results.



5. The Brilliant Corners: Delilah Sands (SS20)

The Brilliant Corners actually took a slightly peculiar turn themselves on "Delilah Sands", although only relatively speaking. While most of their singles were chiming, brassy indiepop, "Delilah Sands" utilised surreal and faintly icky imagery ("I'd bite you if I had the teeth") and was altogether less strident.

When this was finally shown on "The Chart Show", my mother was moved to comment: "Who is this? Roxy Music? Whoever it is, I don't like it". A piss-poor guess on her part, really, but even a Radio Two listener of the 80s wouldn't have made the same mistake with "Brian Rix". None of this hurt The Brilliant Corners' "career" any, as "Delilah Sands" reached the Indie Top 10 with ease, but they'd be back to business as usual for future single releases.

Indie Top 20 Volume 3 - Side One - New Order, Depeche Mode, Leather Nun, Danielle Dax, PWEI, Motorcycle Boy

Indie Top 20 Volume 3
Format: Double LP, Double Cassette

Volume 3 of the Indie Top 20 series suddenly adopts a style which would last for years - the familiar Indie Top 20 logo has established itself along the left-hand side of the cover. That xeroxed "paper clip" would reoccur as a motif across the next few LPs too, and the Melody Maker sponsorship is now front and centre of all formats (dominating a goodly chunk of the sleeve here).

This was also the debut release on the newly formed Beechwood Music, presumably named after Bee and Ch(et) (Sel)wood, the driving forces behind the series. Beechwood would go on to release other LPs outside the Indie Top 20 series, eventually making more money out of the ever-fruitful Dance music compilation market. However, there were other odd excursions into Indie in their catalogue which didn't fit the rubric of the main series, and we might briefly explore those eventually in slightly less depth (please don't ask me to cover them in more depth, for Christ's sake).

This was also the start of the brief period Beechwood Music started giving titles to each album. Volume 3 is "War of Independents". It's not too clear what marketing purpose this served, and after a few of these sub-headers I suspect the idea got quietly dropped as a probable waste of time.

So what of the contents? Well, it's musically much more of a mish-mash, and you get a clear sense of the reign of indiepop fading away slightly and heads being turned towards different strands of "alternative music" which were less light and frivolous. In particular, several ground-breaking artists emerge for the first time, including two whose influence remains enormous, even though one of them still has their feet in the past at this particular point. Goth Rock remains hanging about the place as well, whiffing faintly of patchouli oil.



1. New Order - Truth (Peel Session) (Strange Fruit) 

If I were a cynic, I might argue that this track was placed right upfront to get people to buy the LP by mistake, accidentally believing that it might be New Order's recent huge hit "True Faith". New Order had recently worked with Pet Shop Boys producer Stephen Hague to create one of their finest pop moments, giving their chart career - actually somewhat patchy after "Thieves Like Us", although people seem to have forgotten that - a massive boost. The hugely memorable video featuring sinister primary coloured Michelin man type figures running around slapping each other up the face helped increase the exposure of the track tenfold.

"Truth", on the other hand, was a recently released but ancient New Order Peel Session track stemming from 1981, a point where their sense of identity was still rather incomplete. In short, they still sound rather like Joy Division here, only without one of the key elements. The drum machine and icy synths hint towards a clear future direction, though, and the track has the same cold eeriness that made "Turn The Heater On" such a compelling listen on Volume One.

It's a downright peculiar track to put upfront in the compilation for any other reason than the bankability of New Order's name, though. It's a quiet, despondent point of entrance.



2. Depeche Mode - Never Let Me Down Again (Mute)

If only this had been the opening track... now, I sense trouble ahead with this one. Depeche Mode haven't always been widely appreciated in the UK, and that's a source of enormous frustration for me. People tend to either take the view that they were a middle-of-the-road teen synth-pop band or stadium rock stars scaling unsubtle heights. These simplistic overviews ignore swathes of their output, which include magnificent pop - much of it unplayed even on oldies radio these days - and material which mongrelised pop with epic, scaling hooks with experimental industrial indie and political protest with superb attention to detail, right down to the sleeves and videos. It created a band of heroes across mainland Europe (and even the USA for a period); a group freely mentioned alongside other huge musical pioneers, while Britain often looked the other way.

In reality, most of their naive teen-pop output can all be found on the first LP "Speak and Spell". The alternative stadium rock God phase is mostly encapsulated on "Songs Of Faith And Devotion". Everything else is decidedly interesting, even at its worst. The band even toyed with Marxist and Communist imagery across two LPs, "A Broken Frame" featuring a peasant woman scything a field, "Construction Time Again" a workman with a hammer, raised proud and high up a mountainside. The lyrics on "Construction Time Again" were naive, like most early Mode, but clear - "Pipeline" called for wealth redistribution while playing with industrial soundscapes, the melodic "And Then" dreamed of erasing all existing structures and erecting society from scratch. "I'd prefer to think that things couldn't turn out worse" they sang wearily. The band banged their fists on the table in interviews and talked about the importance of the welfare state. Again, I insist - this all happened while you were asleep, although the central message of "Everything Counts" wasn't too ambiguous on "Top of the Pops" either.

And "A Broken Frame" may be their most derided LP, disliked even by the band themselves, but the spells of pop light and moody atmospheric shade make it feel twin-towned with OMD's "Dazzle Ships". An imperfect twin it may be, but it still has some stellar moments.

Moving forward to 1987, the band had already released their bona-fide classic LP (if you're reading this outside Britain) in "Black Celebration", and had followed it up with the less-good but still frequently startling "Music For The Masses". That was the LP which turned the suburban Essex boys into a stadium band, and created so much of the trouble and confusion ahead. "Never Let Me Down" is a beast, though, an absolute juggernaut of a single which oscillates between slapping industrial rhythms and an almost symphonic sounding chorus. At this point, Anton Corbijn had also got fully on board to produce all their videos, grainy Super 8 affairs laced with dream-like imagery which worked with the music almost perfectly. Everything was gelling.

"Music For The Masses" came in a sleeve featuring a glossy photograph of a huge red megaphone, presumably broadcasting the album to an abandoned piece of twilight countryside, a string of lights from a road in the distance being the only sign of life. Internal sleeve shots showed the megaphone up mountains or by lakes and canals - in my mind, the bash and clatter of "Never Let Me Down Again" was coming out of all of them. It's a truly great single, the sound of all the best and most interesting elements of the eighties rolled into one ball.

Is it indie? Of course. It was released on Mute, a label the band stuck by throughout everything, even when their distribution and pressing plant power wasn't all it could have been ("Just Can't Get Enough" had to satisfy itself with a number 8 chart position, when most people imagine it was a huge top three hit). Is it any good? Well, you're entitled to disagree. But if you do, you're wrong.



3. The Leather Nun - Lost and Found (Wire)

Given Depeche Mode's dress sense a couple of years prior to this point you could forgive Chet and Bee for following them with a Swedish band called The Leather Nun, but this song is somewhat overshadowed by what precedes it.

The Leather Nun were cult artists and early industrial stars who had been around a fair while, and had constantly courted controversy across Europe with lewd live shows and imagery. By the mid-eighties their reputation began to spread to America, and it seemed as if a major breakthrough would occur - but it didn't. And while the atmospheric "I Can Smell Your Thoughts" received some TV and radio exposure in the UK and pushed the band to new heights, "Lost and Found" did less well, and only reached number 35 in the indie chart. That's perhaps not overly surprising. The rigid groove of the track doesn't really go anywhere interesting, feeling like a graceless, stilted industrial kind of Swing. A baffling inclusion here, and one to skip.

The band soldiered on until 1995, but failed to find much success again after being without a record label from 1991 onwards.



4. Danielle Dax - Big Hollow Man (Awesome)

Southender Danielle Dax was a visual artist and ex-member of the experimental group The Lemon Kittens, and previous collaborator with Robert Fripp. Her first solo LPs continued to explore often harsh and challenging forms, but towards the end of the eighties changes began to emerge in her musical style and she rocked out in a slightly more conventional way.

Always having a striking appearance and to all intents and purposes looking and dressing like an iconic pop star, however ill-suited her temperament may have been for that role, it was probably all worth a shot. "Big Hollow Man" begins with a funky guitar riff which then collides into thumping drums and a forceful melody, part glam, part new wave, and ever so slightly threatening but worthy of constant repeated listening. A cheap but effective video earned her "Chart Show" exposure, and a new phase began - Danielle Dax the possible star, popping up on interview shows, Juke Box Jury, and magazines the length and breadth of the land.

It couldn't last, and it didn't last, but more on that eventually.



5. Pop Will Eat Itself - Beaver Patrol (Chapter 22)

Oh Good God. You see, my wife's theories about "Sex Pest Rock" - she keeps threatening to start a blog with that title, by the way - really are proven right here. "Beaver Patrol" was originally a sixties garage single by The Wilde Knights, and was self-consciously sleazy even by the standards of that period, but at least possibly had a ludicrous enough edge to be titterworthy rather than offensive. In the sledgehammer fists of Pop Will Eat Itself, it becomes a Brummie beer boy sexual harrassment anthem, though, far too heavy and Beastie Boys aping to be easily dismissed as an ironic joke. It received slatings from many quarters, taking the group by unpleasant surprise.

Ignoring the lyrical contents, though, "Beaver Patrol" at least set the template for their forthcoming "Box Frenzy" album, being a loud, proud, British indie approximation of the Def Jam rock/rap hybrid style. Looking back, it all seems faintly amateurish to say the least, but even the KLF's debut "1987 - What The Fuck Is Going On" from the same period also seems like a clumsy sticklebrick creation. This was a new dawn and new rules were emerging, and the public didn't much mind the feel of chaos to start with - "Beaver Patrol" edged PWEI that bit closer towards the grown-up official Top 75, and it wouldn't be long before RCA would arrive with a chequebook in their hands. Unthinkable stuff at the point of "Oh Grebo, I Think I Love You".

Oh, and despite the fact it wasn't a proper hit, "Beaver Patrol" was still quite popular with the teenage boys at my school. Well, it would be, wouldn't it.



6. The Motorcycle Boy - Big Rock Candy Mountain (Rough Trade)

Edinburgh's The Motorcycle Boy consisted largely of ex-members of Creation noiseniks Meat Whiplash, and only hung around indieland for this one single before jumping on board Chrysalis's boutique label Blue Guitar. By the time they finally issued their grown-up work in 1989, the public had largely lost interest, and it was all over before it had even really started.

"Big Rock Candy Mountain" is a pretty and melancholy single with a driving, chugging riff which occasionally sounds like a Flatmates record played at the wrong speed. It stormed to number two in the Indie Charts, the band became NME cover stars, and then there was silence for nearly two years and momentum was clearly lost. "Big Rock" was a damn fine single, but very much of its moment, and not quite good enough to stretch interest in the group to a degree where a long break would have no ill effects on their career.

The group subsequently split in 1990.