The problem with living through a golden age is that you’re usually unaware of it going on around you. But in 1980, having just turned twenty and wholly invested in the power and possibility of music, I knew damn well that I was living through a golden age of music culture that was unlikely to be repeated in my lifetime, a feeling that anything could happen reverberating through the early years of the decade just as it had for punk, except even more so.
What made this keenly felt sense of possibility even more remarkable was how it played out against the joyless background of Thatcher’s Britain, a country at war with itself just as much was it was with a division of teenage Argentinian conscripts squatting a lonely rock in the South Atlantic no-one had ever heard of. Operating in the shadow of fascist violence, mass unemployment, the miner’s strike, the Wapping print workers dispute and the crushing of the Trade Unions as a force to be reckoned with, it was inevitable that the abysmal state of the nation would play a major part in our lives and music culture was no different.
Musician or non-musician it mattered not. In the eighties it felt like we were all bound together by the belief that it was still possible to create your own culture and change the world, even if it was just your own small corner of it. Promoting shows and running my own Criminal Damage record label, I was doing it for myself and changing my world too. Signing on the dole every two weeks I was living the dream, albeit in a rot infested, inner city terraced house with one gas heater, a colony of feral cats and the clothes I stood up in.
Admittedly, there were times when my listening was dominated by my own artists. Yet that never stopped me listening to plenty of other stuff ranging from post punk to Two Tone, synth pop to electro, Goth to psychobilly and everything in-between. One of the more visible and notorious eighties genres was new pop with its avowed mission to finally consign the old, seventies, trad rock and pop guard to history. It very nearly succeeded too with an onslaught of hits by The Human League, The Associates, ABC, Simple Minds and many more until Bob Geldof, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ and the orgiastic spectacle of Live Aid arrived ripe for exploitation by fading rockers and new, anodyne, pop stars alike.
Thank God then that the final years of the eighties offered something more substantial that sonically at least would prove even more revolutionary than punk. Built on the synergy between human imagination and an advance in music making and recording technology, acid house may have come from America. But it was over here that a new generation of sonic terrorists transformed it into rave by fusing post punk futurism with a hedonistic, drug fuelled take on peace and love.
Once again anything seemed possible although ironically, just as music expanded beyond the confines of the guitar, my active involvement in it came to an abrupt if expected end, and I found myself having to get by like everyone else with a failing marriage, a regular job, a mortgage and a couple of young kids. Approaching my thirtieth birthday I was feeling old and not a little exhausted. And yet remarkably I continued to uncover an abundance of brilliant music to tell my story and provide a ray of hope in an otherwise dreary existence.
For any reader bored by the music of today or drowning in the cares of the world, there really is no better antidote than the 100 songs here. They certainly inspired me!
Chris Green
January 2025
1980
1. A CERTAIN RATIO ‘Flight’ (The Graveyard And The Ballroom Cassette January 1980)
A Certain Ratio were one of those intriguing, under-valued outfits who had the willingness and know how to lift your spirits, their first album a cool, Peter Saville designed, cassette only document of their Martin Hannett produced Graveyard studio demos with a lo-fi live recording from the Electric Ballroom on the B side. The missing link between the avant-garde experimentation of The Pop Group and Haircut 100, they liked nothing more than to hitch vocalist Simon Topping’s sub Ian Curtis mumbling to Peter Terrell’s brittle guitar and let seriously funky drummer Donald Johnson push them to the edge of punk funk reason.
2. THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS ‘Sister Europe’ (The Psychedelic Furs LP March 1980)
The Psychedelic Furs were another group who felt significantly different and one that could only have existed in the sea of post punk creativity. A bunch of Bowie/Roxy Music wannabe’s from South West London, their beautifully chaotic wall of sound and Richard Butler’s coarse, Rotten-esque voice, especially on the dark, elegantly sombre ‘Sister Europe’, fanned my dimming post punk optimism.
3. THE MONOCHROME SET ‘Goodbye Joe’ (Strange Boutique LP April 1980)
The first time I read the words ‘new pop’ came when NME journalist Paul Morley used them in his review of The Monochrome Set’s Strange Boutique. The term would soon become a genre in its own right, synonymous with those who preferred to espouse the healthiness of pop rather than the decay and darkness of post punk. Unfortunately, no matter how clever, delightful and irritatingly catchy they were, that didn’t include The Monochrome Set because they weren’t new pop at all, their choice of oddball lyrics, chiming guitars and exotic rhythms a million miles away from the commercial mainstream.
4. THE CURE ‘A Forest’ (Single A Side April 1980)
In the early months of 1980 I kicked off my eight years of brilliant misadventures in the music business by setting up a new cassette label, X Cassettes. Initially what that meant was spending every Friday and Saturday night driving around a host of tiny pubs and village halls in the wilds of Berkshire and Oxfordshire with my good friend Richard Griffin of (the rather ironically named given the circumstances) No Cure fanzine to hear a multitude of spotty, teenage outfits, most of whom sounded like they’d swallowed The Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys debut whole. Less a song and more of an atmosphere, the era defining ‘A Forest’ changed all that nonsense by removing the copyists overnight and introducing the sound of The Cure as we know and love them today.
5. THE BEAT ‘Whine & Grine/Stand Down Margaret’ (I Just Can’t Stop It LP May 1980)
I Just Can’t Stop It was jam packed with ebullient ska-punk-pop anthems but never received anywhere near the kudos The Beat so obviously deserved. Maybe it was because underneath all that frothy exuberance lay a heart of darkness and confusion with songs touching on male possessiveness, suicide, even the ska revivals anti-Nazi raison d’etre. Best of all though was ‘Whine And Grine/Stand Down Margaret’ wherein Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger took it upon themselves to make a stand without getting too preachy or mentioning any specific event, so prolonging the songs meaning and intent.
6. GRACE JONES ‘She’s Lost Control’ (Single B Side June 1980)
The late seventies collision between punk, reggae and ska inevitably led to some groundbreaking musical experiments, Grace Jone’s adoption of Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’ one of the more radical. The end result was an idiosyncratic, Jamaican heavy reconstruction with the original meaning turned on its head by Jone’s simply swapping ‘She’s lost control’ for ‘I’ve lost control’.
7. JOY DIVISION ‘Heart And Soul’ (Closer LP July 1980)
Plenty has been written about Closer and most of it is true, yet it has rarely featured in my own writing. Dense, unorthodox and containing clues to the mental and physical torment surrounding Ian Curtis’s suicide two months after that fateful event, the chilling elegance of a song like ‘Colony’, the spectral serenity of ‘The Eternal’, the ghostly insight of ‘Decades’ and the haunting shadows of ‘Heart And Soul’ were unlike anything I’d heard before. Some of the saddest and most beautiful music ever made, Closer remains an intensely personal listening experience and yet one I am only willing to undergo when my spirit is strong for fear of its brutal and unsettling effect.
8. ORANGE JUICE ‘Blue Boy’ (Single A Side August 1980)
Orange Juice’s second single on Alan Horne’s Postcard label, the indecently exciting ‘Blue Boy’ was three minutes of slightly askew pop writing with charmingly off key Edwyn Collins vocals that over time would prove a major influence on everyone from The Smiths to Franz Ferdinand and beyond.
9. THE CLASH ‘Bankrobber’ (Single A Side August 1980)
The Clash were never a part of the post punk future but I loved them regardless. 1979’s London Calling had been a thrilling, comprehensive exercise in good old fashioned idealism, something that was reflected by its rockabilly, jazz and dub influences. Nonetheless, there was still a suspicion that The Clash were indulging in some kind of genre tourism which is why ‘Bankrobber’ was so appealing. A contradictory, non-album single as much downtempo reggae as it was rebel ballad, and as much anti-capitalist as it was myth making, to my ears it sounded like the most quintessential Clash song of them all.
10. THE SPECIALS ‘Do Nothing’ (More Specials LP September 1980)
Dumping the joyous, youth club ska for which they were known, The Specials second album replaced it with the kind of muzak produced more for shopping centre lifts and dentists waiting rooms than top twenty hits. It shouldn’t have worked but it did, Jerry Dammers unusual, upbeat, sonic vision contrasting with the depressing subject matter of songs like ‘Stereotypes’, ‘International Jetset’, ‘Man at C and A’ and most of all the abject hopelessness of Lynval Golding’s ‘Do Nothing’, which, in a little under four minutes, tells you everything you need to know about the mindset of early eighties Britain.
1981
11. SCRITTI POLITTI ‘The Sweetest Girl’ (NME C81 Cassette January 1981)
‘The Sweetest Girl’ first appeared on the NME’s C81 cassette, a compilation initially only available on mail order. A brilliant post punk smorgasbord of 25 tracks ranging from Pere Ubu and Robert Wyatt to James Blood Ulmer and John Cooper Clarke, Scritti Politti were side one, track one. Once a bunch of late seventies, DIY until death squatters revelling in scratchy, discordant, political noise, ‘The Sweetest Girl’s lush, mournful tone showcased Green Gartside’s new melodic style and postmodern interpretation of pop lyrics. An essential, transformative song, it was never a hit but changed a lot of attitudes towards pop music, including my own, and is now rightly regarded as one of the foundation stones of new pop.
12. BOW WOW WOW ‘W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah No! No! My Daddy Don't)’ (Single A Side March 1981)
Bow Wow Wow were an extraordinary group who continually courted controversy in their early years due to arch manipulator Malcolm McLaren’s less than subtle plans for the teenage Annabella Lwin. What he hadn’t reckoned on was the top notch musicianship of original Adam and The Ants guitarist Matthew Ashman, drummer Dave Barbarossa and bassist Lee Gorman who were more than capable of producing the most astonishing rhythms of African tribal drums, funk bass, surf guitar and spaghetti western chants ever cooked up by a bunch of London white boys.
13. ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN ‘A Promise’ (Heaven Up Here LP May 1981)
Closer to a spiritual experience than an album, Heaven Up Here was the first time Echo & The Bunnymen made me feel truly alive. Permeated by a post punk chill, tight, rhythmic, funky as fuck masterpieces like ‘Show Of Strength’, ‘With A Hip’ and ‘No Dark Things’ shimmied in the shadows celebrating the misery in cool, chemically induced delight. Finest of all though was the astonishingly beautiful ‘A Promise’, a rarely played gem that proved once and for all how The Bunnymen could navigate the delicate and graceful just as easily as the powerfully haunting.
14. KRAFTWERK ‘Numbers/Computer World 2’ (Computer World LP May 1981)
Kraftwerk’s last great album, Computer World underlined their supreme focus and confidence just as their influence began to be heard across an extraordinarily wide range of genres. A mesmerising record with a futuristic concept about the rise of the machine and our reliance on them, the immaculate ‘Computer Love’ prophesised with unnerving accuracy how one day technology would help to satisfy man’s deepest, darkest, carnal desires while the synth based groove of ‘Numbers’ unexpectedly became the rhythmic template for hip hop.
15. TOM TOM CLUB ‘Wordy Rappinghood’ (Single A Side June 1981)
A side project of Talking Heads husband and wife rhythm section Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth, in 1981 the Tom Tom Club threatened to overshadow their day job. The highly distinctive ‘Wordy Rappinghood’ was the first track they recorded, the rapping based on a Moroccan children’s song Tina and her sisters used to sing on childhood trips to France. Released at a time when rap as a genre was still considered a novelty, it proved both groundbreaking and enormously popular.
16. MAXIMUM JOY ‘Stretch’ (Single A Side September 1981)
Maximum Joy came out of a political, punk funk scene unique to the city of Bristol. Formed from a combination of Glaxo Babies and Pop Group members, and fronted by eighteen year old vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Janine Rainforth, they set about creating a mad, one of a kind blend of danceable tunes wrapped around elastic basslines and complex percussion. ‘Stretch’ was the first fruit of their labour, an ecstatic performance that could only be made by musicians operating within the freedom of their debut.
17. JOHN FOXX ‘Europe After The Rain’ (The Garden LP September 1981)
Whereas John Foxx’s solo debut Metamatic was all about one man and his synth, The Garden offered a warmer, more organic sound reflecting his new found obsession with the abandoned cities and wild jungles of J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World. Decaying architecture, overgrown gardens and churches were recurrent themes, the new romanticism of ‘Europe After the Rain’ not only taking its name from Max Ernst’s landscape painting of the same name but acting as a reminder of what had once been and what was still to come.
18. HUMAN LEAGUE ‘Love Action (I Believe In Love)’ (Dare LP October 1981)
Arguably the most perfect pop artifact of the decade, Dare represented both the past and the future of the Human League in one gloriously sumptuous package. The culmination of Phil Oakey’s hopes and sonic dream of a wonky arts lab version of Abba, constructed with the not inconsiderable help of a couple of seventeen year old students he spotted dancing in their local disco, ‘Love Action (I Believe In Love)’ remains irresistible.
19. JAPAN ‘Talking Drum’ (Tin Drum LP November 1981)
Japan never really made it big, certainly not in the conventional, Human League, pop star sense. You could even be forgiven for never having heard of them. And that would be a travesty because, for one brief moment in 1981, Japan were exactly where they wanted to be; a talented, highly innovative, pretentious group on the brink of genius. An album of tasteful soundscapes and exotic instrumentation, what made Tin Drum so extraordinary was its other worldly nature and the fact that songs like the beautiful and artful ‘Talking Drum’ didn’t bear any resemblance to anything that Western pop had done or would do again.
20. SOFT CELL ‘Say Hello Wave Goodbye’ (Non Stop Erotic Cabaret LP December 1981)
Soft Cell’s imperial phase arrived early, the seedy, camp perversity of their first album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret yielding their best work, the wonderful ‘Say Hello Wave Goodbye’ a prime example. Was there ever a more evocative opening couplet than ‘Standing at the door of the Pink Flamingo / Crying in the rain’, Marc Almond’s delivery operatic and dramatic, his barbed put-downs and sense of hopelessness merging perfectly into a sorry tale of a love that was never meant to be.
1982
21. AFRIKA BAMBAATAA & THE SOUL SONIC FORCE ‘Planet Rock’ (Single A Side April 1982)
In the immediate aftermath of punk, I genuinely believed that the only way forward for rock involved a sharing of ideas with black dance music to bridge the veiled strain of racism that had been the foundation of modern music culture since its conception. Perhaps that belief came from my teenage years that were just as open to soul and disco as they were to glam. Alternatively, maybe it came from white, post punk pioneers like The Pop Group’s eager embrace of funk.
Wherever it came from, I had no problem admitting that dancing was anathema to me. I never had any desire to engage with the music’s natural club environment and I knew for certain that the posing, the selective door policies and the endless jazz funk imports were not for me. And neither was rap. When it first appeared in the late seventies, I considered it equally redundant. Certainly there was no way I would ever have believed that by the end of the eighties it would be dominating music culture so absolutely. At least not until the spring of 1982 when two records arrived to convince me otherwise.
If the urban strife and specificity of Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’ was the big bang that blew away raps novelty reputation once and for all, it was Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’ that provided the next quantum leap forward. By combining the computerised, glacial melody of Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans Europe Express’ with the bottom end of Computer World’s ‘Numbers’, Bambaataa and producer Arthur Baker rewrote the dance music rule book in seven and a half glorious minutes. A natural end product for New York’s black communities surprising fondness for European electro pop, ‘Planet Rock’ created the new, sci-fi pulse of electro, the first wholly electronic, black dance genus.
22. THE CLASH ‘Know Your Rights’ (Combat Rock LP May 1982)
By the spring of 1982 my interest in The Clash was fading fast. Nostalgia may have painted over the many faults that made them human, but Sandinista had been a dog, a great single album buried within a tortuous, two and a half hour triple. Thankfully, Combat Rock and ‘Know Your Rights’ was more like it, a brief return to the glory days of old, Joe Strummer’s caustic yet righteous humour shining through on lines like ‘You have the right to free speech / As long as you’re not dumb enough to actually try it’ and ‘Murder is a crime / Unless it is done by a policeman’, sentiments that continue to ring true more than forty years later.
23. THE ASSOCIATES ‘Party Fears Two’ (Sulk LP May 1982)
If ever there was a record to soundtrack my early twenties it was the staggeringly complex Sulk, an album of grandiose arrangements radically out of step with the prevailing pop dream, yet one that could still boast such masterful behemoths as ‘Club Country’, ‘Skipping’ and ‘No’. The only song to top them was the surreal noise of ‘Party Fears Two’, Alan Rankine and Billy Mackenzie’s incomprehensible, over the top paean to God knows what, the singers barely controlled, operatic croon unable to to hold back the shadow of darkness that sat so uneasily on his shoulders. Was there ever a record so strange yet so delightful?
24. ABC ‘All Of My Heart’ (The Lexicon Of Love LP June 1982)
There’s an argument to be had that The Associates and ABC were new pop’s last stand. Certainly, few records evoked the spirit of 1982 as much as Sulk and The Lexicon Of Love. Indeed, Martin Fry, Stephen Singleton and Mark White’s debut is a much revered benchmark of perfection and sophistication; a joyful, synthetic, girl friendly, anti-rock album that proved how a bunch of unlikely lads from Sheffield could make literate and creatively ambitious, virtuoso pop like the gorgeous, string laden swirl of ‘All Of My Heart’ and take it into the Top Ten.
25. YELLO ‘Pinball Cha Cha’ [Club Mix] (Single A Side June 1982)
Even in the nonsensical eighties there weren’t too many pop combos around like Yello, let alone a record like ‘Pinball Cha Cha’. Instantly unforgettable, the first time I heard it was at The Batcave in the summer of 1982. An intriguing blend of French Chanson over a bonkers cha cha rhythm with all kinds of outlandish exotica layered on top, it lodged in my brain then and has never left.
26. DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS ‘Liars A To E’ (Too Rye Ay LP July 1982)
It’s impossible now to explain how brave Kevin Rowland’s idea to rejig the successful Searching For The Young Soul Rebels Dexys as raggle taggle gypsies playing an unfashionable blend of tug on the heart, Celtic soul was, certainly in 1982. And yet incredibly the songs on Too Rye Ay were even better, Rowland toning down the pretentiousness before ramping up the passion and integrity to turn a song like ‘Liars A To E’ into something surprisingly meaningful and uplifting.
27. SIMPLE MINDS ‘Someone Somewhere (In Summertime)’ (New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) LP September 1982)
One group thrown unexpectedly into the burgeoning new pop and rock explosion were Simple Minds, a group whose past had been rooted in multiple stylistic switches from tenth rate punks to staid new wave and whirling European dance rock. New Gold Dream though was at odds with anything they had done before. Revelling in a new found freedom, the records sparkling fusion of pop, funk and muscular symbolism pointed to a mainstream music blessed with a formidable emotional and intellectual hinterland. Full of hope and glory, songs like ‘Someone Somewhere (In Summertime)’, ‘Promised You A Miracle’, ‘Glittering Prize’ and the title track gave me a renewed sense of enthusiasm and heightened my expectations for the future, a rare achievement for any album!
28. SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES ‘Slowdive’ (Single A Side October 1982)
By rights Siouxsie & The Banshees should feature more on this soundtrack for the eighties, but in the late seventies and early eighties I struggled to find much substance beneath the surface mystery of their records. Then, at the tail end of 1981 they released Once Upon A Time, a best of collection that lined up their singles from ‘Hong Kong Garden’ to ‘Arabian Knights’ and suddenly, rather belatedly, they made a lot more sense. ‘Slowdive’ followed almost a year later, bettering all those that had gone before, its hypnotic, violin led motorik another indication of The Banshees ascent from the post punk darkness into the light.
29. ORANGE JUICE ‘Rip It Up’ (Rip It Up LP November 1982)
Over an insanely catchy guitar rhythm inspired by Chic and the first use of the squelchy, soon to be iconic, Roland TB-303 bass synth, ‘Rip It Up’ was the undisputed highlight of Orange Juice’s album of the same name. As meaningful as the listener wanted it to be, Edwyn Collin’s loveable blend of rock'n'roll retroisms, wit and cheeky chutzpah, capped off by a knowing nod to the Buzzcocks ‘Boredom’, became a deserved number eight hit single three months later. And yet despite turning Collin’s into a bona fide, albeit brief, pop star, ‘Rip It Up’ also reinforced a growing belief that the new pop dream was turning sour, its daring originators soon to be replaced by bland, careerist opportunists like Paul Young, Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw, Kajagoogoo and the Eurythmics who had little or no connection to punk, yet chimed absolutely with the ‘I’m alright Jack’ politics of Thatcher’s Tory Reich.
30. FAB FIVE FREDDY & BESIDE ‘Change The Beat’ (Single B Side December 1982)
Despite its legendary status in rap history, infamous New York graffiti artist, painter and face about town Fab Five Freddy’s sole vinyl venture was on a par with Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Girls’ for novelty value. Then again, while the A Side was a slightly tedious seven minutes plus of Fred rapping poorly in French and only slightly better in English, the fabulously experimental electro of the B Side featuring journalist Bernard Zekri’s wife Ann was infinitely more interesting.
1983
31. PORTION CONTROL ‘Raise The Pulse’ (Raise The Pulse EP February 1983)
Portion Control came up through the DIY cassette movement I had been involved in. Sharing a sense of purpose and community with fellow experimentalists SPK, Lustmord and Nocturnal Emissions in South London, I came across them again at Illuminated Records Fulham Road HQ while negotiating a deal to finance my new Criminal Damage label. Rummaging around the warehouse for some Sex Gang Children albums to sell and bump up my meagre dole money, I came across ‘Raise The Pulse’. A pioneering, ahead of its time record, not only did it sound radically different to the Portion Control of old, it was also the first rudimentary step in the development of a dance orientated underground that ultimately would lead to ‘Pump Up The Volume’.
32. TEARS FOR FEARS ‘Mad World’ (The Hurting LP March 1983)
It seems daft now but Tears For Fears The Hurting was a pivotal record of my early twenties. Once late night John Peel favourites, their songs tapped into a very personal kind of despair and anguish that nonetheless felt heartfelt and wholly relatable. That was certainly true of the haunting ‘Mad World’. Inspired by the theories of Arthur Janov, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and author, the line ‘The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had’ was of huge significance due to the night terrors I’ve suffered from since I was a boy. In the mid-eighties they were at their most horrific and intense, the dreams in which I was dying the best because once they were over I was finally able to get some rest.
33. BAUHAUS ‘She’s In Parties’ (Single A Side April 1983)
I never realised just how important Bauhaus were until I started putting this soundtrack together. Much maligned even at their peak and ignored ever since by weedy post punk commentators, they were one of the most progressive, popular groups to develop from the wreckage of punk. Even Joy Division were early fans, the similarities between the two strikingly obvious, especially on their debut album In A Flat Field’s songs of love, death, hope and life.
However, it was on their run of singles that Bauhaus truly came into their own, a run started by ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ and capped by the glorious, metallic dub of ‘She’s In Parties’. The final act in a sparkling litany of thrillingly dark kicks, critically despised and fatally wounded by Pete Murphy’s lengthy bout of pneumonia, they simply faded away. At the time there was so much going on that we didn’t realise quite what it was we’d lost. Yet today their influence continues to stretch as far, if not further, than those of their more lauded contemporaries.
34. NEW ORDER ‘Your Silent Face’ (Power, Corruption & Lies LP May 1983)
Released three years after Ian Curtis’s suicide, Power, Corruption & Lies may have looked commemorative with its basket of rose’s sleeve, but in truth it was a significant move beyond Joy Division. Never much of a fan, I didn’t care about such things, yet even the cynical 23 year old me could appreciate that they were still finding their own way. On many of the songs it was even possible to hear Bernard Sumner struggling to find his own voice, the spectre of the man who came before him continuing to cast a very long shadow. Then came the heavenly ‘Your Silent Face’, a shimmering six minutes of pure wonder that despite some hopelessly daft lyrics sounded so transcendent and emotional it damn near made me cry.
35. MARC & THE MAMBAS ‘Black Heart’ (Single A Side June 1983)
A primer for his harrowing Torment and Toreros album, ‘Black Heart’ was my first experience of Marc Almond doing the complete opposite to the sleazy electro pop of Soft Cell. As bleak as bleak could be, it accurately depicted the overwhelming feeling of despair I was experiencing in my stupidly young marriage, a mismatched union that was already sliding into misery.
36. ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN ‘Never Stop’ [Discotheque Version] (Single A Side July 1983)
Echo & The Bunnymen had it all, brilliant songs, a golden throated front man and a guitarist who ranked among the finest of his generation. But it was never obvious until he departed that their secret weapon all along had been drummer Pete de Freitas, his relentless, metronomic rhythm the beating heart that enabled them to reach for the stars. Nowhere was that more evident than on ‘Never Stop’, a merciless, groove driven monster of a tune mixing jittery cello’s, an insistent synth, chiming guitars and Ian McCulloch’s response to the re-election of Thatcher the month before, to my ears it sits right at the top of their majestic canon of career defining work.
37. THE THE ‘This Is The Day’ (Soul Mining LP October 1983)
Conceived more as a multimedia art collective than a group, The The emerged from the teenage Matt Johnson’s interest in film soundtracks, musique concrete and more traditional songwriting. Soul Mining arrived soon after to showcase the 21 year old’s feelings about the world he lived in, many of which mirrored my own. The finest example was the unusually optimistic, shuffling, lo-fi beat of ‘This Is The Day’, a song that succinctly captured the idea that while most folk spend their time dreaming of a better life, they would rather take the easy option and wallow in misery than put in the required effort and do something about it.
38. THE BIRTHDAY PARTY ‘Mutiny In Heaven’ (Mutiny EP November 1983)
The Birthday Party’s swansong EP was a halfway house between the lunacy of old and the emergence of Nick Cave as a solo artist with The Bad Seeds a year later. Sounding like a demented preacher delivering a sermon, a persona he would hone to perfection over the coming decade, the best song on it was the devilish ‘Mutiny In Heaven’. If the party was nearly over, this was a malevolent Cave signalling that the last guest should leave immediately, the chorus of ‘If this is heaven I’m bailing out’ shredding every last notion of what rock’n’roll was supposed to be about over a swaggering bassline that was just too good to waste.
39. 23 SKIDOO ‘Coup’ (Single A Side November 1983)
23 Skidoo were another Illuminated signing I’d see hanging around Fulham Road. Seldom spoken about these days, much less heard, they spent their entire anti-career bewildering fans and critics fans alike with their rhythm and noise and general lack of interest in white, Western music. A ridiculously funky track from the underground dancefloor, ‘Coup’s outer space electronics, ferocious horns, experimental vocal samples and innovative use of two hypnotic basslines (played by Sketch from Britfunker’s Lynx) produced a record that is now rightly regarded as the highpoint of British, post punk funk.
40. HASHIM ‘Al-Naafijsh (The Soul)’ (Street Sounds Electro 2 December 1983)
If you were from the suburban wasteland of smalltown Britain, the only place you’d be able to hear the new, urban, street music from America called electro was on Morgan Khan’s Street Sounds series. Collecting eight or so 12 inch singles on one album was a genius move but getting them into provincial outlets like Our Price, W.H. Smiths and Boots was essential. Suddenly, tracks that had only been available on import from specialist shops became available to everyone and immediately began to have a profound influence.
I brought all ten of the original series in their immaculately styled, graphic sleeves but Electro 2 stayed with me over the decades for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it had Rammellzee v’s K-Rob’s radical and downright weird ‘Beat Bop’ on it. Secondly, there was the seventeen year old Hashim’s masterful ‘Al Naafyish’, a track which not only encapsulated everything other worldly about early Bronx electro, it also raised the bar for shaping the hip hop of the future.
1984
41. NEW ORDER ‘Lonesome Tonight’ (Single B Side April 1984)
Releasing anything less than great was something New Order just did not do, their B Sides of such high quality we took them for granted. Hidden away on the reverse of ‘Thieves Like Us’, ‘Lonesome Tonight’ was the consummate example; a sublime, melancholic yet soaring soundscape with an extended instrumental coda that was just as brilliant as the song itself.
42. ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN ‘Seven Seas’ (Ocean Rain LP April 1984)
Presenting their slightly more tempered, accessible side, the Echo & The Bunnymen of Ocean Rain were far less enigmatic, intricate songs like ‘Silver’, ‘Crystal Days’, the immaculate ‘Killing Moon’ and the title track highlighting their lighter touch. My favourite, the dreamy ‘Seven Seas’, prophesied to mean more than was possibly intended, Ian McCulloch offering up the ocean as a place of healing and embrace rather than loneliness and peril, his advice to ‘Paint the whole world blue / And stop your tears from stinging’ exactly what I needed to hear in troubled times.
43. DAVID SYLVIAN ‘Nostalgia’ (Brilliant Trees LP June 1984)
The peculiarly British form of melancholy that permeated almost every facet of New Order and Echo & The Bunnymen’s work was something David Sylvian also possessed in spades. Fusing funk, jazz and ambient tones, Brilliant Trees was certainly an eclectic affair, an album that sounded completely out of sync with everything else that was going on. Nonetheless, some songs were still pleasingly pop oriented while the brilliantly moody ‘Nostalgia’ suggested an eighties Bryan Ferry evoking Sylvian’s all too familiar veil of sadness.
44. FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD ‘Two Tribes’ [Annihilation Mix] (Single A Side June 1984)
‘Two Tribes’ [Annihilation Mix] was the high point of that peculiarly eighties phenomenon, the 12 inch single, a format Trevor Horn and Paul Morley’s ZTT label flogged to within an inch of its life. Nine minutes of drama, sirens, funk, fear and excitement with quotes from the governments notorious Protect & Survive booklet and the nuclear bomb drama Threads, in its various mixes the song spent nine weeks at number one; a gay disco juggernaut with a punk hard on beating the likes of Wham, Culture Club and Spandau Ballet at their own game. An apocalyptic, anti-war record inspired by US President Ronald Reagan’s insane belief that Jesus would return to earth following the mutually assured destruction of World War III, it ramped up the paranoia to such an extent that some teen mags asked their adolescent readers to write in with how they would spend their last four minutes after the warning sirens blew.
45. NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS ‘Saint Huck’ (From Her To Eternity LP June 1984)
Calling time on The Birthday Party, Nick Cave came up with something completely different to his old group’s unholy force of evil noise while retaining the same dark energy. In need of some originality and authenticity, From Her To Eternity captured my imagination as one of the most intelligent, literate and unhinged records I’d heard in a long while. Walking a troubled line between the weird Americana of the Deep South and the Old Testament, ‘Saint Huck’ was a remarkable reimagining of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as a devilish ne’er-do-well wading through the stinking, sinful swamp, much like Ol’ Nick himself.
46. SCRAPING FOETUS OFF THE WHEEL ‘Lust For Death’ (Hole LP August 1984)
The mid-eighties was an extraordinary time for experimental music. Even more extraordinary is how a record like Hole and Jim Thirlwell’s other Foetus projects mix and match of swing, industrial hardcore, electronic weirdness and random acapella death marches got made in the first place.
47. CABARET VOLTAIRE ‘Sensoria’ (Single B Side September 1984)
As one of the greatest flurries of energy, creativity and adventure in music history drew to a close, Sheffield’s notoriously self-sufficient experimentalists Cabaret Voltaire adopted the strategy of subversion from within, opting for an oddly dysfunctional form of industrial dance music with its roots in post punk and New York electro. It didn’t always work but when it did, as on the buffed up, ultra-modern sheen of ‘Sensoria’, the result was astonishing.
48. PAUL QUINN & EDWYN COLLINS ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ (Single A Side September 1984)
Paul Quinn and Edwyn Collins had been friends since their earliest schooldays in Dundee and were determined to join forces once their respective groups Bourgie Bourgie and Orange Juice imploded. The first release on Alan Horne’s short lived Swamplands label, their wonderful cover of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ was the first time I noticed an overt reference to the past creeping into the records I was listening to.
49. LLOYD COLE & THE COMMOTIONS ‘Forest Fire’ (Rattlesnakes LP October 1984)
Maybe it was something in the Scottish air but Lloyd Cole’s Rattlesnakes also had a whiff of the Velvet Underground about it. A one-time, 23 year old, English student reading philosophy at Glasgow University, his love for Lou Reed and the albums ten, intense, tragi-comic songs about doomed love affairs crammed with literary references caught me unawares. In fact, so good were the wondrous melodies of ‘Perfect Skin’, ‘Charlotte Street’, ‘Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?’ and ‘Forest Fire’ that for the last few months of 1984 Rattlesnakes became my most cherished album.
50. TIME ZONE FEAT. JOHN LYDON & AFRIKA BAMBAATAA ‘World Destruction’ [Industrial Remix] (Single A Side December 1984)
While Paul Quinn, Edwyn Collins and Lloyd Cole found a ready-made solution to the post, post punk quandary of ‘What next?’ by going back to the records they loved the most, and groups like The Smiths signalled a shift from independent to indie, the nation was forced to suffer Band Aid’s puke inducing ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, the repercussions of which would change the face of British pop forever.
Not for the first time I turned to permanent dissenter John Lydon, not to Public Image’s woeful 1984 album This Is What You Want, but to his Time Zone collaboration with Afrika Bambaataa. With hip hop not quite the dominant force it would soon become, the audacious, forward thinking ‘World Destruction’ displayed Lydon’s keen ear for the zeitgeist, while his vitriolic ‘The human race is becoming a disgrace’ sounded very much like post punk’s last gasp.
1985
51. SISTERS OF MERCY ‘Marian’ (First And Last And Always LP March 1985)
The Sisters Of Mercy were always divisive but with its sinister chord progressions, driving beats and Andrew Eldrich’s deep and doom laden vocal styling, First And Last And Always is still hailed as the standard template for Goth. Not only that, it stands proudly as the most cohesive work released under the Sisters name, and is still regarded fondly by the once wild and youthful legions now hurtling reluctantly towards pensionable age.
52. THE CULT ‘She Sells Sanctuary’ (Single A Side May 1985)
Given their subsequent slide into long haired, hard rock parody and their shameful rejection of every punk principle known to man, it’s impossible now to imagine how early Cult records carried a palpable sense of adventure promising their legion of disaffected and directionless followers the escape route of ritual, ceremony, magic and mystery they were seeking. ‘She Sell’s Sanctuary’ was a step on from all that but no less effective, a mighty, anthemic tune and giant top twenty hit they would only better chart wise on the heinous ‘Lil’ Devil’ two years later.
53. NEW ORDER ‘Love Vigilantes’ (Low-Life LP May 1985)
Low Life came packaged in one of Peter Saville’s most iconic sleeves, a wonder of typography, monochrome photography and design wrapped in tracing paper. The music within may not have been quite so wondrous, but it did kick off with ‘Love Vigilantes’. Bernard Sumner’s sorry tale about a soldier killed in action and his family back home was far from the country music it was purported to be, but it did possess an extraordinarily sad, heartbreaking quality that was unlike any other song in New Order’s long history.
54. THE CURE ‘Inbetween Days’ (Single A Side July 1985)
I turned away from The Cure after ‘A Forest’ and the icy angst of Seventeen Seconds, the misery of Faith and Pornography just too much for me to bear. Then something rather remarkable happened and Robert Smith began to write pop songs. And not just any old pop songs either. His upbeat, easily digestible tunes were more than a little kooky and transformed his writing into something completely at odds with The Cure’s impenetrably dark albums. ‘Inbetween Days’ was the real gem, a gloriously bittersweet three minutes that touched those of us who have no choice but to live out our lives within the confines of the real world.
55. NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS ‘Tupelo’ (Single A Side July 1985)
The post punk years were one long rush of excitement and creativity with so much happening most of us struggled to keep up. Nonetheless, by 1985 the spirit of futurism that had once sustained it had almost completely disappeared before Live Aid delivered the final, fatal blow by turning music culture into just another part of the ‘entertainment’ industry. Scratching around for anything different, Nick Cave reared his ugly head again, this time with ‘Tupelo’.
A haunting narrative intertwining a legendary Mississippi flood with the birth of Elvis and his stillborn twin Jesse Garon into a rock’n’roll creation myth, it was the first of Cave’s truly epic tales. A rich tapestry of metaphors and cultural references filled with a sense of dread, artistically it was the polar opposite to Live Aid and everything that unseemly parade represented.
56. THE POGUES ‘The Old Main Drag’ (Rum, Sodomy & The Lash LP August 1985)
There were many directions for punk to take but locating a part of its after life in some hellish brew of Irish myth and traditional folk song was not an obvious one. How bizarre then that in 1985, The Pogues were an uncontrollable whirlwind dragging centuries of Irish rebellion and murky London history into Thatcher’s Britain for all to see. Dominated by the irrefutable genius of Shane MacGowan, Rum, Sodomy & The Lash reintroduced grimy, ugly reality to a brainwashed generation threatening to zone out completely. What’s more, it made us want to get in touch with our inner Irishman, something my long gone, Dublin born, grandmother would never have believed possible.
57. KATE BUSH ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ (Hounds Of Love LP September 1985)
The most potent example of Kate Bush’s brilliance, Hounds Of Love was brimming with significant moments, one being ‘And Dream Of Sheep’, the first song on side two’s seven part, stranded at sea concept piece ‘The Ninth Wave’. A beautiful, introspective, piano led moment dotted with ghostly snippets of the BBC shipping forecast, Bush’s own mother whispering ‘Come here with me now’ and seagull cries, it reminded me of my own childhood nightmares when I would call out to my own mother, albeit that she was somewhat less sympathetic, telling me coldly not to be so stupid and to go back to sleep immediately!
58. BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE ‘Medicine Show’ (This Is Big Audio Dynamite LP October 1985)
For a microscopically brief moment in the mid-eighties, Mick Jones was the hippest ex-punk rocker around, piecing together a collective that defined the musical spirit of West London in a way that hadn’t been heard since his old group relocated to America. However, whereas the Clash’s most celebrated work looked to a past of tried and tested musical roots, Big Audio Dynamite took a step into the unknown with a sound heavy on the crafty samples and minimal beats of electro. Representative of a time when the possibilities of technology seemed boundless and hearing scraps of film narrative felt genuinely ground breaking, crucially This Is Big Audio Dynamite was also music you could dance to!
59. JESUS AND MARY CHAIN ‘Just Like Honey’ (Psychocandy LP November 1985)
For all of their bluster and revolutionary rhetoric, the Jesus and Mary Chain built their records on the music of the past. Equal parts Phil Spector, The Beach Boys, The Velvets and The Ramones buried deep beneath a wretched, ear splitting squall of feedback, brothers Jim and William Reid resurrected a new sense of elegantly wasted rock’n’roll, the like of which punk had supposedly consigned to the past. A bit of a one trick pony, Psychocandy was their one essential record, fourteen strangely déjà vu, fuzzy pop melodies I couldn’t resist even if I’d tried.
60. THE FALL ‘Cruisers Creek’ (Single A Side November 1985)
Mark Smith undoubtedly cackled his head off at The Jesus and Mary Chain’s black leather, sunglasses after dark posturing. And yet a couple of years after his wife Brix first appeared in The Fall, the Prestwich cynic himself could be found wearing an Armani suit, a leather coat and mascara in an uncharacteristic bid for stardom. The Fall’s music changed too, their tendency towards dirge like repetition tempered by melody, the results yielding a glorious run of their most pop sensible singles. ‘Cruisers Creek’ was one of the first and the best, both leftfield and outsiderly yet with an insistent tune that was about as catchy as The Fall got.
1986
61. THE CRAMPS ‘What’s Inside A Girl?’ (A Date With Elvis LP February 1986)
While other less inspired and intelligent artists concentrated on becoming more sophisticated, the wonderful Cramps chose to regress back even further. Their last great album, A Date With Elvis was really nothing more than a bunch of dumb arse, rock’n’roll songs in praise of the vagina, Lux Interior playfully exposing the horror of misogynistic, sexual repression while delivering immortal couplets like ‘Whoa, there’s some things baby I just can’t swallow / Mama’s just told me that girls are hollow’.
62. TALK TALK ‘I Don’t Believe In You’ (The Colour Of Spring LP February 1986)
Functioning as the midpoint on Talk Talk’s career arc between the arty synth pop of their early years and the subsequent rejection of commercial success on their esoteric late period albums, The Colour Of Spring came as an unexpected revelation, not just to me but to anyone who had previously written them off as heinous bandwagon jumpers. A genuine landmark record from a group with a defiant non image, the album drew on jazz, classical, folk and pop without ever falling into one distinctive style.
At times ethereal and enigmatic, with a haunting sense of melancholy topped off by Mark Hollis’s pained, deeply moving vocals, The Colour Of Spring also boasted the powerful, rolling piano motif of ‘Life’s You Make It’, the deceptively complex rhythms of ‘Living In Another World’ and the simplistic beauty of ‘I Don’t Believe In You’. To think that pop music used to sound like this!
63. DEPECHE MODE ‘Stripped’ (Black Celebration LP March 1986)
Unlike the unassuming Mark Hollis who shunned fame and success, Depeche Mode chose to embrace it, Black Celebration the album where their journey from lightweight, synth poppets to drug guzzling purveyors of S&M pervery and air punching misery reached fruition. Adding elements of arch experimentalists like Cabaret Voltaire and Einstürzende Neubauten to Dave Gahan’s everyman, English croon and Martin Gore’s songs of depression, decay and dominatrixes, it was all there in the epic, gothic majesty of ‘Stripped’.
64. COLOURBOX ‘Looks Like We’re Shy One Horse’ (Single A Side April 1986)
Colourbox were one of those peculiarly eighties groups whose influence only became apparent in hindsight. Touching on everything from old school R&B, roots reggae and spaghetti western soundtracks, in 1986, when sampling was an alien concept still in its infancy, ‘Looks Like We’re Shy One Horse’ was a startling and thrilling counterpoint to an independent music scene fixated on the ghosts of the sixties.
65. THE WEATHER PROPHETS ‘Almost Prayed’ (Single A Side June 1986)
The Weather Prophets were not so dissimilar to the rest of the Creation Records roster doing their best to survive in the shadow of Alan McGee’s gargantuan ego and ‘genius’ rock’n’roll bullshit. The only difference was that they had Pete Astor, a serious, studious kind of chap who possessed a pleasing voice and a neat way with a melody that all came together on ‘Almost Prayed’, one of the finest forgotten songs of the decade.
66. THE SMITHS ‘I Know It’s Over’ (The Queen Is Dead LP June 1986)
No matter how loathsome he may be now, in the mid-eighties Stephen Patrick Morrissey was a new kind of star. Steeped in the history of pop, he had an acute understanding of fan obsession because he was an obsessive fan himself, one who used his undoubted skill and wherewithal to turn his glorious misery into transformative bursts of otherness. And there was no Smiths song quite as miserable or ‘other’ as ‘I Know It’s Over’. In a decade that revelled in the trite and the superficial, I for one was grateful for that.
67. PET SHOP BOYS ‘Suburbia’ (Single A Side September 1986)
With an innate ability to be part of the pop parade yet somehow separate, the Pet Shop Boys filled the singles chart with wonderful, satirical pop like ‘Suburbia’, a song inspired by the 1985 Brixton riots and the long forgotten fact that in the late nineteenth century that notorious inner city suburb had been considered the epitome of modern living. Contrasting brilliantly with Neil Tennant’s eerie Diamond Dogs spoken intro, the sound of snarling dogs and the dissonant instrumental passages, the ringing optimism of Chris Lowe’s glorious, piano led chorus was so joyous it had to be listened to on repeat to be believed.
68. THE THE ‘Sweet Bird Of Truth’ (Infected LP November 1986)
Matt Johnson was another maverick infiltrating pop with something more than the standard pop platitudes. Following seven years of Tory rule that had left mid-eighties Britain rooted in despair, Infected tackled the issues head on. Accurately documenting the state of the nation and beyond, Johnson’s subject matter has proved particularly prescient; the bastard big shot of ‘Twilight Of A Champion’, the widening class and moral fissures on ‘Heartland’ and perhaps most of all ‘Sweet Bird Of Truth’s horrifying account of a doomed GI Joe going straight to the heart of the West’s mistrust and fear of the Middle East. Not for the first time The The were way ahead of the curve.
69. BEASTIE BOYS ‘She’s Crafty’ (Licensed To Ill LP November 1986)
By 1986 hip hop was finally emerging from its cult scene, novelty pop past to fully fledged art form and million selling records. Amongst the handful of early rule breakers like Run DMC and LL Cool J, it was the Beastie Boys Licensed To Ill that paved the way for us uneducated, British heathens. OK, so producer Rick Rubin’s Led Zeppelin samples were minimalistic, obvious and all over the place, the lyrics mostly stupid, puerile and embarrassing, but sonically Licensed To Ill sounded incredible. Prioritising noise, intensity, feeling and volume to channel the Beasties punky, DIY foundations and tap into the raw essence of hip hop, it’s still a ludicrously enjoyable album to listen to.
70. SCHOOLLY D ‘I Don’t Like Rock’n’Roll’ (Schoolly D LP November 1986)
Predictably, when ‘Fight For Your Right’ hit the UK singles chart in February 1987, the very white, very middle class Beastie Boys were hailed the new Sex Pistols as teenage urchins across the land paid homage by nicking badges from every VW they could find. In reality the Beasties were more of an annoyance than a threat, yet the same could hardly be said of Philadelphia’s Jesse Bonds Weaver Jr, otherwise known as hip hop’s first gangsta rapper Schooly D.
The first rap voice to be heard that wasn’t from New York, Schooly D was also the first to add a malevolent, taunting slur to proceedings. Quietly psychopathic and sounding drugged up to the eyeballs even when he wasn’t, his self-titled debut carried a sense of danger that rock’n’roll had ceased to possess since the demise of punk, except this time it was individual domination rather than societal revolution that kept us all so enthralled.
1987
71. PRINCE ‘Sign ‘O’ The Times’ (Sign ‘O’ The Times LP March 1987)
In an era of faceless corporate soul and MTV brainwashing, while it was easy to appreciate Prince as the only artist capable of synthesising his influences into an original vision, I struggled to find anything within his music that was of any relevance to me. Having said that, I did love the huge electro beat of ‘Sign ‘O’ The Times’ and his bravery in addressing the hopelessness and spiritual desolation of the Reagan years with a stark, social message about AIDS, heroin, crack, gang culture, natural disasters and America’s Star Wars programme.
72. PHUTURE ‘Your Only Friend’ (Single B Side March 1987)
In all my years of listening, I had never heard anything remotely like Phuture’s ‘Acid Trax’, twelve minutes of bubbling and squelching chanced upon by a couple of friends messing around with the dials on a Roland TB-303 bass sequencer. I’d never heard anything like the B Side ‘Your Only Friend’ either. Even more eerily brilliant than it’s much loved yet overlong A Side, in hindsight the tracks robotic denouncement of cocaine was somewhat ironic given how it heralded the arrival of Chicago acid house, a movement renowned largely for its prodigious drug intake.
73. RHYTHIM IS RHYTHIM ‘Nude Photo’ (Single A Side April 1987)
Another month, another new genre, initially Detroit Techno proved even more problematic to distinguish than most due to the fact that by 1987 technology and the sounds it produced was arriving so fast that the lines between began to blur more than ever before. The fact that Derrick May’s ‘Nude Photo’ was a product of Detroit and not Chicago house wasn’t immediately obvious, but its sleek, machine tooled lines and melancholic melodies were. Leaning heavily on such influences as Kraftwerk, New Order and The Human League, ‘Nude Photo’ possessed something that proved impossible to imitate, a liberated human touch so moving it still stands alone, a beautiful, beautiful thing.
74. PET SHOP BOYS ‘It’s A Sin’ (Single A Side June 1987)
Arguably the Pet Shop Boys most popular song, ‘It’s A Sin’s celebration and ultimate rejection of Neil Tennant’s Catholic guilt had nothing to do with the churches attitude to homosexuality. Instead it had everything to do with the inescapable fact that from the cradle to the grave, all we are taught by our supposed elders and betters leads us to believe that everything we desire is a sin. How fitting then that the song itself sounds like the entire history of dance hedonism and pure pop melancholy concentrated into five joyful, if broken hearted, minutes.
75. M/A/R/R/S ‘Pump Up The Volume’ (Single A Side August 1987)
Following hard on the heels of Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley’s seismic ‘Jack Your Body’, ‘Pump Up The Volume’ was a fabulous record. Another significant step towards club cultures takeover of UK pop, it was infinitely more striking if only because it came from a bunch of defiantly independent British artists, Colourbox and A.R. Kane, and their defiantly independent label, 4AD. Sure, the DJ strain of club music M/A/R/R/S gave birth to burnt out fairly quickly due to the ever tightening laws surrounding sampling and copyright infringement, but for me, whatever its place in the wider story of UK rave and dance culture, ‘Pump Up The Volume’ presented the exact moment when the reconditioning of rockist minds began in earnest, M/A/R/R/S nihilistic rejection of traditional song structure, instrumentation and melody causing outrage and upset amongst the disconsolate indie kids holed up in their bedrooms mourning the demise of The Smiths.
76. COLDCUT ‘Beats + Pieces’ (Single A Side August 1987)
While M/A/R/R/S took the constituent elements of a DJ record to the top of the charts, it was sonic adventurer Matt Black and DJ Jonathan More who really pioneered the club record by playing around with the pause button on a regular cassette player to create their own breakbeat driven collages. Their first attempt on vinyl was the somewhat rudimentary ‘Say Kid’s What Time Is It?’, the second the more elaborate ‘Beats + Pieces’ featuring everyone from Led Zeppelin to Kurtis Blow.
Needless to say, the Neanderthal music critics focused on the death of traditional musicianship, paying your dues and the usual rockist bullshit in the misguided belief that the end result was essentially stolen. Meanwhile, Coldcut underlined samplings revolutionary nature, the joyful abuse of copyright and their own punky attitude to music making even more by plastering ‘Beats + Pieces’ twelve inch sleeve with the slogan ‘Sorry, but this just isn’t music’!
77. THE SUGARCUBES ‘Birthday’ (Single A Side August 1987)
The extraordinary ‘Birthday’ was our blurry introduction to the strange and enchanting imagination of one Björk Guðmundsdóttir. Released as a counterpoint to the stringent seriousness of the ‘alternative’ eighties, The Sugarcubes idiosyncratic, esoteric pop offered a colourful and imaginative substitute. Absolutely triumphant in making the abstract accessible, ‘Birthday’ sounded wide eyed and inspired, its weird, melodic brilliance and depiction of childhood abandonment evoking a strange kind of whimsical nostalgia with Björk’s piercing shrieks and cryptic lyricism offering us a glimpse into her future.
78. THE FALL ‘Hit The North Pt. 1’ (Single A Side October 1987)
Classic Fall songs came in many guises and yet ‘Hit The North’ is memorable as the one where Mark E. Smith suddenly made his unpredictable and unexpected bid for the dancefloor. A rousing masterpiece of electro pop complete with blaring saxophones and shout along chorus, to my great delight it crept into the charts at number 57 to force even the most jaded Fall hater to tap their toes.
79. ERIC B. & RAKIM ‘Paid In Full’ [Seven Minutes Of Madness] (Single A Side October 1987)
I have always felt an equally powerful attraction to indie rock, pop and hip hop. Certainly, that's how it felt in the second half of the eighties when I was unwilling to choose between The Cramps and Schooly D or EPMD and the Sisters Of Mercy. Of course, I didn’t have to choose, but it’s remarkable how many did. Some white fans invested all of their belief and passion in hip hop, seeing it as the vanguard, the sole bastion of culturally dissident energy, and as a result had to grapple with the complex issues related to being a white acolyte of a music made largely by and for blacks.
There were no such issues when white, solidly middle-class, DJ's Coldcut reconstructed Eric B and Rakim’s ‘Paid In Full’. Turning a low key, thoughtful, album cut into an extended blast through found voices and samples from kids TV shows, what really made it stand out was the liberal use of Israeli singer Ofra Haza’s exotic ‘Im Nin’Alu’. An extraordinary record, it furthered hip hops British cause immeasurably, even though Eric B. and Rakim refused their approval until they saw the size of the cheque. A huge multi-million selling, profile lifting boost for the now legendary Long Island duo, Coldcut themselves received just £750 for their efforts.
80. SISTERS OF MERCY ‘Lucretia My Reflection’ (Floodland LP November 1987)
Derided now as then as the face of Goth, no-one can deny Andrew Eldrich’s legacy and ‘Lucretia My Reflection’ had it all. Recorded in response to Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams leaving to form The Mission, Eldrich collaborated with rock opera maestro Jim Steinman for an almost comedic yet brilliant exercise in sonic excess, the most over the top video ever and the full stop on Goths first and finest age.
1988
81. MORRISSEY ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’ (Viva Hate LP March 1988)
Following the acrimonious demise of The Smiths, Morrissey didn’t mope around for long, his first solo album Viva Hate and ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’ arriving with indecent haste just six months later. Possessing a sad, reflective beauty that pulled on the heart of every Englishman familiar with the mind numbing dreariness of a seaside town out of season, it was Morrissey’s last goodbye to an obsolete working class tradition, our hero visiting a windswept, tatty, seaside town to hymn the memories and decry the desolation.
82. HOUSE OF LOVE ‘Christine’ (Single A Side April 1988)
Bearing none of the mawkish, cutesy sentimentality that characterised much of the fashionably fey indie pop of the time, the haunting yet romantic ‘Christine’ was the last defiantly retro ‘rock’n’roll’ song I would listen to for a long, long while.
83. SMITH & MIGHTY FEAT. JACKIE JACKSON ‘Anyone’ (Single A Side April 1988)
Another record at least five years ahead of its time, together with their friends Massive Attack and Nelle Hooper of The Wild Bunch, Rob Smith and Ray Mighty helped define the multi-cultural sound system scene based in the St Paul’s area of Bristol. Revolving surreally around a cover version of Dione Warwick’s sixties classic and informed by reggae sound systems, hip hop breaks, rare groove and punk’s giant leap into the unknown, ‘Anyone’ laid down the blueprint for just about every British dance record that has ever tried to meld dub, ambient and hip hop together in one dark, threatening brew.
84. PUBLIC ENEMY ‘Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos’ (It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back LP June 1988)
It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back may have made an art form out of sampling and vintage funk, but on ‘Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos’ the Bomb Squad deliberately stripped the noise back to basics to highlight Chuck D’s epic tale of a prison break. Taking a taunting Isaac Hayes’s piano loop and hitching it to an unrelenting, seismic groove gave it a density and sense of danger new to hip hop. It also made me believe for the first time since the dawn of the decade that change really was possible and the morally righteous just might prevail. I was wrong of course, but in the summer of 1988 I really needed that element of hope to get me through.
85. EPMD ‘You Gots To Chill’ (Strictly Business LP June 1988)
It’s sad but true that unlike Public Enemy, EPMD have been all but erased from modern music culture. In point of fact, so unobtrusive and invisible are they today that I sometimes forget about them myself. That’s because being neither political agitators or gangsters, EPMD’s unparalleled influence on hip hop was purely a sonic one, their use of both obscure and familiar samples forcing listeners into associating their snippets not with the original songs but with EPMD’s new, bastardised use of them. Strictly Business in particular was a unique album that stood on its own merits, the likes of ‘You Gots To Chill’ revelling in a swampy, head nodding tempo that was so laid back you could almost smell the copious amount of weed smoked during its creation.
86. CHARLES B. & ADONIS ‘Lack Of Love’ (Single A Side June 1988)
Not all acid house tracks had to be wacked out sonic slabs of noise, some of them were constructed like regular songs which acted as a bit of light relief amongst the avalanche of more outré recordings. Charles B. & Adonis’s addictive ‘Lack Of Love’ was a case in point. Released on seven inch in the UK, it had a vocal sung in a true, un-affected voice by a real person. While it had a far less minimal approach than the Chicago originators, it did possess the all-important gurgle of the Roland 303.
87. SLEEZY D. ‘I’ve Lost Control’ (House Hallucinates Volume One LP August 1988)
1988 was the start of the Second Summer Of Love when acid house, one of the weirdest and most influential trends to zap mainstream pop, hit like a sledgehammer and a bevy of poorly pressed, cash in compilations filled the UK record racks. House Hallucinates was one of the better ones due to its inclusion of Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’ and Sleezy D’s ‘I’ve Lost Control’. Deliciously nuts, it was music that may have been minimalistic and repetitive, but it also managed to unite black, white, gay, straight, male and female on the dancefloor by neatly matching the pulse of electro disco with the aggression and tastelessness of punk. And remarkably, almost forty years later it still sounds like its being beamed in from another galaxy!
88. HUMANOID ‘Stakker Humanoid’ (Single A Side October 1988)
While DJ records by Coldcut, M/A/R/R/S, Bomb The Bass and S’Express marked a turning point, their connection to early rave was tenuous to say the least. Predictably, the first wholly British attempts at authentic Chicago acid were nothing more than identikit copies, weedy sounding pastiches of the real thing. Humanoid’s ‘Stakker Humanoid’ was the next step up. A harsh, uncompromising slab of raw acid created on a shoestring, it not only broke down barriers between the emerging rave movement and the mainstream, incredibly it also hit the dizzying height of number seventeen in the UK Singles chart, a fact that’s actually harder to understand now than it was then.
89. PET SHOP BOYS ‘I Want A Dog’ (Introspective LP October 1988)
It's common knowledge how Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe knew instinctively from the outset that within a year or two house would be everywhere, not only as the basis for all great dance music but as the basis of great pop too. And yet I didn’t believe a word of it. The brilliance of the Pet Shop Boys singles helped a little, but I still wasn’t prepared for the disco pop behemoth that was Introspective.
A mammoth, fuck off collection of monumental, extended mixes for songs that had already been or would be singles, joining the better known ‘Always On My Mind’, ‘Left To My Own Devices’ and ‘Domino Dancing’ was the deep house like hymn to urban isolation ‘I Want A Dog’. Narrated by a pensive Tennant conceding the need for companionship over the course of a hypnotic six minutes, somehow it unexpectedly transformed itself into a profoundly sad, rather extraordinary paean to loneliness.
90. HAPPY MONDAYS ‘Lazyitis’ (Bummed LP November 1988)
My first sighting of the madcap Sean Ryder and his bunch of street urchins came with the glorious Bummed, an album that captured the maverick Mondays at their untrained, uncouth and nasty best. Far from the shambling monotony of their early years, instead we got infamous producer Martin Hannett’s inspired sonic vision of the Mondays shimmering blues funk. The obvious standout was the sleazy, working men’s club band flavoured ‘Lazyitis’ which highlighted both the Salford ruffian’s growing musical adeptness and Ryder’s genius streams of consciousness.
1989
91. WOLFGANG PRESS ‘Assassination/Kanserous’ (Kansas EP January 1989)
It’s possible I originally heard ‘Assassination/Kanserous’ on the John Peel Show one tedious midweek evening but nonetheless Kansas was still one of my more spur of the moment purchases. Kicking off with a banjo picking out ‘Yellow Rose Of Texas’ before a discussion on the death of JFK and a final four minutes of magnificent dissident dance, it may have been an obscure outlier but it was a fine one all the same.
92. THE THE ‘The Beat(en) Generation’ (Mind Bomb LP May 1989)
Released at the height of the now forgotten poll tax riots, ‘The Beat(en) Generation’ could just as easily have been written about Brexit, the mishandling of Covid, the Tory parties subsequent attempt to dismantle the NHS or anything else this ‘once proud nation’ held so dear. Not only that, to make the medicine go down as easily as possible, it was wrapped up in one of Johnson’s more hummable, toe tapping, pop tunes that was literally impossible not to love.
93. THE CURE ‘Pictures Of You’ (Disintegration LP May 1989)
Supposedly inspired by a photograph of Robert Smith’s wife Mary he found in the ruins of his Sussex home following a devastating fire, ‘Pictures Of You’ is one of the few songs to make my blood run cold, the idea that it’s possible to prefer someone as they once were to what they have become a seriously troubling thought. Feeling both devastating and cathartic, ‘Pictures Of You’ featured as track two on Disintegration, yet served as a centrepiece, it’s seven and a half minutes a salutary lesson in glacial elegance and one of The Cure’s greatest songs.
94. A.R. KANE ‘Wat’s All This Then?’ (Single B Side July 1989)
Emerging from nowhere with an unprecedented blend of dub, psychedelic dream pop, house and the avant-garde that did its best to shatter the way we thought about music, critical darlings A.R. Kane’s innovate-not-imitate, dare-to-differ approach didn’t always succeed but on the masterful ‘Wat’s All This Then?’ it absolutely did.
95. PUBLIC ENEMY ‘Fight The Power’ (Single A Side July 1989)
Confirming the idea that Public Enemy had inherited The Clash’s crown of thorns, ‘Fight The Power’ was written at the request of Spike Lee for use in his film Do the Right Thing. One of hip hops biggest tracks, twenty one samples were used to create a mind boggling melee of different sounds and voices that proved a masterclass in construction and just how far subliminal details could make a track sound both funkier and funnier.
96. FORGEMASTERS ‘Track With No Name’ (Single A Side August 1989)
When I took my first tentative steps into acid house, techno and rave, my take on dance music was fundamentally rockist and I struggled to accept how it functioned; how the artist was largely anonymous and how the track was the only thing that mattered. Deliberately faceless and dehumanised, it opposed every trad rock principle I’d been raised on, meaning I would literally have to fight my inbuilt impulse to connect the music to an actual human being.
Forgemasters ‘Track With No Name’ was the first release on Sheffield’s Warp Records and predictably I struggled with the fact that it had been made by an incognito producer. Yet sonically it was spectacularly good. Somehow managing to sound both weighty and as futuristic as the Detroit techno records that inspired it, in hindsight its eerie choir synth, glacial bleeps and gut churning bassline could only have come from the Steel City.
97. HAPPY MONDAYS ‘W.F.L. [Think About The Future Mix] (Single B Side September 1989)
The Happy Mondays and the skanky testimonies of poet laureate Shaun Ryder were a litany of junkie psychobabble and weirdness. Veterans of two albums of surreal magic they were already being bigged up as the next new Sex Pistols when they decided to go for broke with a Vince Clarke remix of their flop ‘Wrote For Luck’. Reworked as ‘W.F.L.’, for the first time Ryder’s voice came over loud and clear, spewing out his contempt for every thieving, two faced, drug fuck there ever was while slyly letting us know that he was one too. Even better was acid house evangelist Paul Oakenfold and fledgling producer Steve Osborne’s immaculate Think About The Future mix on the B Side, the duo’s near six minute manifesto providing a handy guide to what we would be hearing for the next couple of years.
98. THE BELOVED ‘Sun Rising’ (Single A Side October 1989)
Dance and drug holidays to Ibiza spread like fire amongst the more committed acid heads. Through the non-stop nights of raving, the idea was to build to a frenzied peak around three in the morning before gradually coming down until the sun rise and a glorious, all enveloping, ‘Meaning of Life’ glow kicked in. Unfortunately, with two young kids in tow and a distinct lack of funds, there was no way I could partake in such an escapade. And yet there’s never been a more perfect Balearic record than ‘Sun Rising’, a lovely, beautific few minutes that could transport you to a sunny, sandy, Mediterranean beach even when you were sitting on a pebbly, British one in the rain.
99. RENEGADE SOUNDWAVE ‘The Phantom’ (Single B Side October 1989)
When I finally ceased my involvement in the music business I immediately found it liberating, not least because for the first time in a decade I regained the freedom to listen to whatever the fuck I wanted. No more amateur indie noise for me thank you very much! The only one of my former Criminal Damage artists I kept an ear out for was Karl Bonnie and Renegade Soundwave, partly because they were the most visible, but also because trad rock was rapidly becoming passé as music culture was dragged kicking and screaming into a guitar free, dance zone.
Hidden away on a B Side, ‘The Phantom’ had a phenomenal impact as an early example of a breakbeat track that arrived just as acid house was evolving into its own UK variant. While Danny Briottet claimed it as his own, the sonic hand of Karl was all over it, from the clattering drum break to the unmistakable, Paul Simonon approved loop of ‘White Riot’, Clash fanatic Karl’s nod of respect to punk’s DIY spirit and Joe Strummers incendiary fervour.
100. STONE ROSES ‘Fool’s Gold’ (Single A Side November 1989)
The Stone Roses were a former third rate indie pop outfit who ultimately would end up as a Led Zeppelin pub tribute act, yet their fifteen minutes of fame heralded the birth of laddism, all things knuckle dragging, the cretinous Gallagher brothers and play it safe rock conservatism. Yes folks, it all started here, most noticeably in Ian Brown’s swagger and irrelevant mumbling. Odd then that the atypical ‘Fools Gold’, built around a beat lifted from James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’, should be the greatest combination of British psychedelia and Blaxploitation funk ever. And to think the Roses themselves wanted it for the B Side!
