Indie Top 20 Volume 2 Side 2 - Close Lobsters, Flatmates, Pastels, Soup Dragons, Mighty Mighty

1. Close Lobsters - Never Seen Before (Fire)

If there was ever a band who were inappropriately cursed with the C86 tag - in Britain, at least - it was Close Lobsters. Rather like their labelmates The Blue Aeroplanes, their approach was considerably more quirky and arthouse than it was twee or shambling, and perhaps unsurprisingly they picked up a greater volume of critical appreciation (and airplay) in the USA than this country. It's very easy to imagine them being spun on college radio between REM, 10,000 Maniacs and Wall of Voodoo. I'm not trying to claim they sound the same, you understand, but it's possible to sense a shared aesthetic.

Sadly, the band never really sold huge amounts of records either here or in the USA, with their cult LP "Foxheads Stalk This Land" only reaching number 12 on the indie albums chart, and it was all over by 1989 (again!) They have recently reformed and have started gigging and occasionally releasing new material, and remain a strong cult act with many devoted fans preaching the gospel about their under-rated work.

"Never Seen Before" is a faintly peculiar brew and definitely an acquired taste. Jangly guitars collide with drawled vocals and beefy basslines, and they ultimately sound like nobody apart from themselves. The backwards tape playing at the end of the track is a lovely touch as well.



2. The Flatmates - Happy All The Time (Subway)

Back straight after Volume One, The Flatmates sound much sharper and more confident here. "I Could Be In Heaven" sounded slightly cheap and rushed, whereas "Happy All The Time" has all the hallmarks of something which might have been a hit had it been issued eight years previously. It's a thrilling little confection of 60s girl group sounds colliding with the dumb aggression of The Ramones, and the squeals and yelps throughout the single sound every bit as spontaneous and unplanned as Ray Davies' yelling on "You Really Got Me". It's the sound of a band totally thrilled to be getting their ideas down on tape, and that's a contagious feeling.

None of this would have the same effect if "Happy All The Time" weren't, as they say, a Tune. And it is. Like the best Indiepop, it has raw enthusiasm and a superbly hooky melody. These are the moments which make you want to form a band yourself. You feel like you could do it too, but tracks this deceptively simple and hook-ridden are actually harder to create than they seem.



3. The Pastels - Crawl Babies (Glass)

I've made a couple of slightly piss-taking comments about Stephen Pastel so far on this blog, but that's primarily because in the eighties he was a ridiculously unique (and quietly influential) character, and it's easy to parody lead singers who operate in a territory of their own making.

A friend of mine once briefly planned to start a series of cartoon strips called "The Adventures Of Stephen Pastel", during which some misfortune would always befall the boyish lead singer in the final frame. This could involve giving himself a migraine due to consuming too many sweets to getting one of his toys stuck up a neighbour's tree. "Och! Oh noooo! Not again!" he would exclaim, while staring wearily out at the reader. Inevitably, these never really got written purely because in those pre-Internet days, it would have been hard to find a place for them. And anyway, none of it was actually that funny.

One of these strip ideas, I seem to remember, featured Stephen Pastel rejecting a chocolate from a friend.

"Would you like a chocolate, Stephen?"
"No, I should not. They give me terrible migraines. A terrible, terrible banging in my head, and all for the sake of a coffee creme".

That's the reductive view you could take of him, and indeed The Pastels themselves; slightly sickly and precious children, forever stuck in pre-adolescence. That's definitely a line many music journalists took at the time. But, in truth, there was (and is) much more to The Pastels than that, and they're possibly one of the most unfairly maligned bands of the period. Whereas a great many of their travelling companions were self-consciously childish to no positive end, The Pastels often took the Syd Barrett approach of using childhood memories and activities as a desperate means of escape; or, as Stephen himself once said "Everything is fucked. Let's get back to the garden".

"Crawl Babies" is the noise of a band utterly nailing that doomed but child-like feel. "I wanna build her up, up as tall as a church" he sings hesitantly in the chorus, which is an odd line in itself. As tall as a church? Why not the Empire State Building, or the Post Office Tower? But no. Too urban, too dangerous. Churches tower over their immediate surroundings without being threatening. They're safe, holy places. Skyscrapers are the products of humans aspiring to something The Pastels cannot comprehend. So it's best to build someone up to high expectations within reasonable, non-threatening boundaries. Except...

The next line is "Just to watch her falling down" at which point he has a frantic dialogue with himself, "I just can't see her again/ I've got to see her again", he moans contradictorily. He's building a love affair and obsession out of nothing, out of ideas of what somebody could be, then terrifying himself with the stature of them, and backing off into isolation.

Frankly, "Crawl Babies" could be straight off a Syd Barrett solo LP - I was just getting into Barrett at the point I first heard this, and it triggered immediate associations for me - and some of the other lines are even peculiarly Barretty in a bleak post-Floyd way; "I go blind and my bones start to rust", for example. Doubtless the band would claim that Daniel Johnston was the actual reference point they were going for, but nonetheless, "Crawl Babies" has a very eerie sense of something not quite right within its hesitant, innocent delivery, whilst still carrying a marvellous and rather intricate melody - those guitar lines running towards the end of the track are beautiful, for example.

On the surface, you could call this twee indiepop, but no way is it just that. And The Pastels were certainly guilty of being twee at other points in their career, but "Crawl Babies" is a marvellous, full-bodied and beguiling single, and one of my favourites from the period.



4. The Soup Dragons: Head Gone Astray (Raw TV)

Mind you, this Soup Dragons track has an air of despondency about it, and a similar sense of childlike disappointment: "Climb a big tree to see what I can see/ But then find out that nothing's for free" sings Sean despondently. What was in the water at this point? Was the music press attention getting to these people, who until this point had lived in a world of flexidiscs and fanzines? (Though credit is due to Chet and Bee for seeing the possibility of sticking this after "Crawl Babies" in the track listing).

If "Hang Ten" was supersonic indiepop, "Head Gone Astray" is a bit more contemplative and jangly. It also gives clear pointers to where the Soup Dragons heads were at during this point in their careers - this has the Bellshill sound running through it like a stick of rock, and the band's roots are incredibly apparent. Eventually they would go careering all over the place with their sound, exploring strange T-Rexy indie-glam sounds with "Backwards Dog" and baggy with "I'm Free", but it's possible that if they'd held their nerve they could have developed this particular direction into something much more successful, akin to Teenage Fanclub's later achievements.

Ignoring the "What-ifs", "Head Gone Astray" doesn't make its strengths fully apparent on the first play, but does steadily worm its way into your affections with each subsequent listen. And releasing it straight after "Hang Ten" was a canny move - it certainly did a lot to cause critics and listeners to realise that they weren't just a thrashy indie band producing two-minute punk pop songs. Why, they could take faintly Byrdsian melodies and string them out to three-and-a-half minutes instead.

This was also the first song of theirs to chart in the "grown up" Gallup charts, albeit at a modest number 82. But for a band of their ilk in 1987, these achievements were rare and important. Suddenly, The Soup Dragons were music press cover stars and future bright hopes. No, really. This happened. I saw it. I was there.



5. Mighty Mighty - Built Like A Car (Chapter 22)

Mighty Mighty drop the polite, considered indiepop for this single and really let rip in the chorus, making it sound almost like a sixties garage band having a rave-up. Still, though, the stretched syllables in the vocals as the track begins are pure Morrissey, and root the band firmly in eighties territory.

"Built Like A Car" is a sturdy and confident sounding single, and yet another example of an indiepop group suddenly waking up and smelling the coffee and getting into a better recording studio to produce a brighter, leaner piece of work, perhaps in the expectations of bigger things. Of course, this is a serious problem for some purists of the genre who really see this period as the moment a lot of bands went off the boil, whereas I obviously disagree.

Whatever your thoughts, this was Mighty Mighty's biggest indie single, climbing to number 6 in the indie charts. Their career was shortlived, however, as they split the following year, sensing that the tide was already turning against their music. They weren't wrong. Things moved quickly in those days. 

Indie Top 20 Volume One - Tracks 16-20 (Razorcuts, Flatmates, Talulah Gosh, Mighty Mighty, BMX Bandits)

16. The Razorcuts - Sorry To Embarrass You (Subway)

While there's been indiepop aplenty on this volume, this is the first example of sensitive, considered guitar jangling about being useless with girls. While records like this one became the subject of much scoffing and mocking amongst the confident Alpha A males at IPC Towers who felt entitled to a shag just because they'd once been in the same room as James Brown (either he of "Loaded" magazine fame or the legendary funkster), they did do something to capture teenage angst and hopelessness in a way that rock hadn't bothered to try since the early sixties. And more to the point, the tone had subtly shifted as the times changed.

My wife is keen to point out that a lot of rough and ready 60s Garage music (the indie of its day, if you will) is essentially "Sex Pest Rock", using Paul Revere and The Raiders "Let Me" as an example of how the recurring lyrical motif in the song is about one man's sense of sexual entitlement (though to be honest, it's such an enjoyably dumbass record that I think it disintegrates as soon as you try to analyse it in depth, like most slack-jawed Rock tracks of that nature.) What did the likes of The Razorcuts do? Gently announce their interest in a lady, then apologise profusely when it backfired. It's actually quite sweet and endearing in a way, and the lines "I'd rather talk some more/ than look into your eyes/ just waiting for the bell to ring/ so we can live our separate lives" could really easily have been sung by a sixties girl group about a boy - the flipping of the gender roles and the narrative here was almost certainly not a deliberate piece of artistic trickery, but the fact the observation can be made is at least really interesting.

The Razorcuts split up in April 1990 after two albums on Creation Records, but reunited for a one-off single on Sarah Records (where else?) under the name Forever People.



17. The Flatmates - I Could Be In Heaven (Subway)

Bristol's The Flatmates approached their indiepop sound with a much harsher, sandpaper edge to it, on occasion recalling The Ramones at their most Spector-obsessed or a messed up 60s Garage Girl group with bruised knees and menace in their eyes.

"I Could Be In Heaven" is perhaps the most weakly recorded of their singles, but through the lo-fi sound quality is a tune which would be typical of most of their offerings - a buzzing, effervescent love song which sounded like something somebody else should have written long ago. This was another minor indie hit peaking at number 18 on the chart that never really counted, but later releases would be better recorded and better realised, and reach more listeners in the process. The Flatmates failure to release a proper LP or capitalise properly on their early run of singles seems ludicrous now - they were often far better than many of their peers who were swept up by the major labels.



18. Talulah Gosh - Beatnik Boy (53rd and 3rd)

Another group whose finest moments were around the corner, "Beatnik Boy" was Talulah Gosh's first proper single (excluding a split flexidisc with the aforementioned Razorcuts) and is a bit too self-consciously twee for its own good in my opinion - but perhaps not yours. I'm not sure how much of an argument I can be bothered to have about this single.

More so than most groups of the period, Talulah Gosh worshipped at the holy church of Stephen Pastel and made a positive virtue out of childlike cutesiness to begin with - depending on your tolerance for such things, you will either find "Beatnik Boy" charming or utterly excruciating, but there's no question that the sound was overall very much their own. There were precious few groups prior to Talulah Gosh who pulled off a similar childlike sense of jollity and awe, but lots of imitators rushed through the gates afterwards, and their impact and influence can still be felt on alternative culture to this day, whereas most of the bands on Volume One of this series have struggled to maintain any kind of current cultural relevance.



19. Mighty Mighty - Throwaway (Chapter 22)

Rather like The Chesterfields, Birmingham's Mighty Mighty - initially, at least - brought Orange Juice inspired melodic pop to the forefront of their sound, eschewing arrogant rockisms for polite, considered pop and roll. On later singles they would sound slightly more developed, taking on a robust, angular beefiness on "Built Like A Car" and even trying a peculiar kind of indie baroque pop on "One Way", but "Throwaway" was an - erm - throwback to those good old early sixties guitar pop values.

"Like the bubblegum when the flavour's gone/ Why does love throwaway/ Well, those throwaway pop songs are all I play/ Can't you hear what they say?" the group ask, predating the philosophical musings of bloke-lit author Nick Hornby by a whole decade. Once again, I'm inclined to think that better things were to come from the group, but "Throwaway" sets out their stall neatly enough.



20. BMX Bandits - The Day Before Tomorrow (53rd and 3rd)

The BMX Bandits are responsible for one of the most jaw droppingly open, honest and beautiful songs about depression, "Serious Drugs". Like Bacharach being forced to muse on his prescription medication, there's very little anyone can take away from that one towering achievement.

So this, naturally, is my way of getting around to say that "The Day Before Tomorrow" is a strangely naive, shambolic piece of work which is clearly influenced by Daniel Johnston, but doesn't really possess the same degree of charm. It's not their strongest track by any margin imaginable, and it's a downright peculiar track to choose to close Volume One of "Indie Top 20" with. But there we are.