The Clothed Maja

1985: THE WORST YEAR FOR MUSIC EVER

It is an odd truth that years which tend to be good for music are usually years which on a personal level have proved to be unpleasant and horrendous (1981, 2001) and that, conversely, years which tend to be good years for this writer’s life have proved to be terrible years for music (1985, 2003). In 1985 I had just graduated, had got together with Laura and had begun to embark upon what was then still a promising career – a superb year for me, then. But, as my recent research has reinforced, a uniquely awful year for music, even up against strong contenders such as 1960, 1975, 1983 and 1993; a year in which I gained much pleasure from music, little of which was recorded or released that year; a year in which my generation very strongly felt that, music-wise, and perhaps revolution-wise, we had missed the boat; too young for punk, we were left in the metaphorical waiting room – waiting for The Next Big Thing, having to make do and mend with the inadequate options available.

It was a year in which every hit single seemed to peak at #14; an exceptionally slow-moving singles chart which was essentially the American singles chart with an inbuilt two-month delay, padded out with bad imitations of American music – indeed, the chart in the first three months of 1985 was mainly occupied by records which had entered the top 40 in late 1984, profiting from the post-Christmas sales downturn (and consequent discount pricing). In the following summary I have not specifically listed such singles, though have referred to the important ones passim. It is worth noting that in his Bizarre column in The Sun of 11 April 1985, Jonathan King referred to that particular week’s top ten as the worst he could remember, and such commentary cannot be easily put aside, even given King’s subsequent fate.

But if we are to simplify things into Them and Us battlegrounds, then how were “We” responding? The answer is, in most cases equally badly. The music press in 1985, be it the mainstream weeklies or the ever more marginal fanzines, were obsessed with the perfect past and recreations of same, of an imaginary era of Authenticity when…well, When Music Was Music. When people Meant What They Sang and Had Soul. Thus the pious worshipping of dead icons which has continued to ensure the systematic degeneration/disintegration/self-imposed shaming of pop to this day. When even the most seemingly iconoclastic of musicians turned out to be the staidest of conservatives. Though not a uniformly sad story, the following list may make grim reading.

I have based the following on three sources:

1. The Gallup UK Top 40 singles charts of 1985. All singles to enter the Top 40 during 1985 are listed thus:
Single: title (date of chart entry – highest chart position reached)

2. The NME critics’ end-of-year Top 50 singles chart, entries in which are listed as:
Single: title (NME – position ranked in chart)

3. The NME critics’ end-of-year Top 50 album chart, similarly listed:
Album: title (NME – position ranked in chart)

Rather than list everything in order of chart appearance, as per my 1982 article – as I found that this would lead to needless repetition – I found it more useful simply to categorise the list alphabetically by artist, although in some instances I have grouped certain artists and records together in ways which seemed logical for a proper analysis of the year.

Why 1985? What “relevance” does this have to anything? Perhaps it is only relevant to recent email conversations with Simon Reynolds following the appearance on another unspecified weblog of an article which proclaimed 1985 the best year for pop ever. How to prove or disprove this? We both agreed, having both lived through the year in question, that musically it had indeed sucked an almighty one. But it may also be relevant to the stratum of writers whom Reynolds has christened “Poptimists” – those eager young chaps (mostly) who continue to proclaim, with ever increasing desperation, that the era through which we are currently living is the greatest era for pop ever, despite several mountain ranges of evidence to the contrary. Is it age-related? Not particularly – I was 21 in 1985 and even then knew that music of the time was of an especially poor standard. So finally the following may simply serve as a cautionary tale and the need to absent oneself for extended periods of time to consider whether the path we are currently travelling is in fact the most desirable one.

RUSS ABBOT
Single:
All Night Holiday (6 Jul – 20)
Despite the media popularity of what was then still termed alternative comedy, statistics reveal that the comedians who enjoyed the most popularity throughout the ‘80s were almost uniformly those of the old school – the conservative (both with a small and capital C) comics who existed to reassure and redouble the prejudices of their audiences, or those comedians redolently of a prior era who had no innate desire to change comedy, but simply wished to be Good At Their Craft. Comedy as an alternative to double glazing or being a postman. One of the most popular was Russ Abbot. Having started out as drummer in a failed Merseybeat group, the Black Abbots, which soon mutated into a comedy group, he went under the wing of another refugee from Merseybeat, Freddie Starr, and appeared in what was intended to be the pilot for a new ITV comedy series, Freddie Starr’s Madhouse, in 1980.

My father recorded this programme on video at the time, and it is just as well that he did, for such was the controversy it engendered that Starr was abruptly removed from the forthcoming series and the pilot itself was quietly wiped from the archives. I watched it again over Christmas and was stunned by what unapologetically comes across as the most avant-garde, free-form hour of comedy ever broadcast on British television, going even beyond the polite limits of anarchy delineated by Q and Python.

There seems to be no script. The entire programme is played out live on one stage. No one seems to know what’s going to happen next. Starr stomps around the front of the stage, lapsing into stock impersonations (his Mick Jagger will forever be the Jagger of “Not Fade Away”), at other times free-associating to the point of blissful incoherence. He physically throws himself, or at least custard pies and water, at other members of the cast, goes into long intractable monologues, demands a screeching intensity at all times. Most of the cast – among them Les Dennis, Dustin Gee and Abbot himself – look bemused and not a little afraid, and are happy simply to act as unilateral straight men, never taking (or threatening to take) the lead. They are as much of a background as the wood of which the stage is made. The only one who seems to respond to whatever Starr is doing is the young Michael Barrymore; always, when Starr gets too wrapped up in his ancient Hitler routine, one’s eye strays over to Barrymore on stage left; always watching intently, learning and unafraid to jump in and confront Starr wherever he feels it necessary. It is a shotgun marriage of (visually) A Show Called Fred and (sonically, especially when Bella Emberg starts to squeal cod-operatically) Sonny Sharrock’s Monkey-Pockie-Boo.

It couldn’t last, of course. Abbot was considered a safe pair of hands to take over, and indeed the subsequent interminable series of Russ Abbot’s Madhouse throughout the ‘80s were devoid of danger or anything resembling humour. Barrymore is mulleted, cramped and awkward, Dennis and Gee look content to go through their respective cigarette cards and collect the cheques at the end (at least until Gee died of a heart attack in 1986). Throughout, Abbot reiterates his limited routine (Tommy Cooper does Superman, Abbot can only mock either; or the mainstream-friendly, diluted Teddy Boy image, carefully and ferociously filleted of all threat or androgyny).

In the midst of all this, someone deemed it a good idea to get Abbot in the studio to record some pop songs. The most successful was “Atmosphere” which charted in December 1984, peaking at #7 two months later; and it is truly amongst the most horrible of pop records – seemingly recorded in a Dalston shunting shed with a 1973 Bontempi, Abbot’s unlovely wobbly croon, the song’s embarrassing attempts to be “contemporary” – “You’ve got your favourite re-KKKords/And Frankie’s got his band (or should that be “banned”? – accompanied by a trademark FGTH “bleurgh”)” – and perhaps worst of all, an abominable “video” which looks as if it had been shot for two bob in an Ealing scouts’ hall, featuring Abbot in a singularly unsexy multicoloured pullover, pretending to be happy.

They couldn’t of course let it lie, and so it was that in the summer of 1985 Abbot had a hit with a soundalike follow-up “All Night Holiday” with its crass attempt – in the chorus line “Everybody COME ON DOWN” – to gain extra sales by once-removed association with the then popular TV gameshow The Price Is Right. Thankfully, the sequel to that - “Let’s Go To The Disco” – settled at #92, and nothing more of Abbot’s pop career was heard.

An apocryphal story has it that sometime in the late ‘80s, at one of the big festivals, New Order, exasperated by repeated audience yells to “play Atmosphere” announced that they would indeed play “Atmosphere” and to big cheers launched into the Russ Abbot song. Certainly this, if not true, is funnier than anything Abbot has ever done. In the ‘90s he struggled, appearing in a dreadful piece of sentimental dreck called September Song on ITV which also managed to squander the talents of the late Michael Williams, and since then has settled for undemanding, mainstream West End stage rôles – Fagin in Oliver!, working well with Eric Sykes in Cooney’s low farce Caught In The Net, and currently Jason Donovan’s dad in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. One could hardly picture the blameless Abbot as the Childcatcher.

ABC
Single:
Be Near Me (6 Apr – 26)
With a melody line referred to – though I don’t think deliberately – in Pluramon’s “Time For A Lie,” this was the only hit single of any substance from ABC’s third album, How To Be A Zillionaire, although significantly the album was far more successful in America, where audiences seemed to catch on more quickly to the group’s then dayglo, post-glam image – predating Deee-Lite by half a decade – and Martin Fry’s astute recognition of the power and radicalism of black electropop throughout 1984 (especially Shannon’s awesome “Give Me Tonight”), if not by the music, which continues to suffer from anaemic mid-‘80s UK pop production – boy, how they needed Horn – and a curious lack of focus (“Vanity Kills” – “It don’t pay bills”). After this, Fry fell seriously ill with Hodgkin’s disease, and only returned to music in 1987 with Alphabet City – a shameless attempt to do Lexicon Of Love II, but fatally with abject worship (“When Smokey Sings”) replacing the smart Brecht-Barthes fusion, and inadvertently flushing away all the pained emotion which went with it, on the original Lexicon. One really feels that, having recovered from cancer, Fry’s heart was no longer in it, and it was left to his younger brother Jamie to push the envelope by means of his involvement with Earl Brutus – and how differently Your Majesty, We Are Here would have been received if billed as an ABC album!

COLONEL ABRAMS
Single:
Trapped (10 Aug – 3)
STRAFE
Single:
Set It Off (NME – 44)
Like them or not, these were the two records of 1985 which pointed the way to the future. House music actually reached Scotland before it did London – evolving very naturally from the Hi-NRG playlists of gay clubs such as Edinburgh’s Fire Island, audiences responded much more enthusiastically and speedily than the jaded Londoners, who at the time were still pretending that Go-Go was the way to go…go (see below for a further post mortem). “Trapped” was the first intimation of House to reach the mainstream and the charts – in essence a traditional soul chestbeater (with the same lyrical plot as the Manhattans’ “Kiss And Say Goodbye”) which could easily have been sung by Tom Jones – but audibly lessons have been learned from electropop such as Shannon and Full Force; the beat is staccatofied, made slightly more brutal and minimalist (i.e. less “authentic”) and it undoubtedly paved the way for the beginning of the House invasion proper with “Love Can’t Turn Around” in August 1986. The Strafe record is, as you’d expect, far more radical – never released as a 12” in this country thanks to a quick soundalike cash-in by Morgan Khan (as “Masquerade”), it nevertheless spells out exactly what to expect in the months to come – gospel shouts cut up, robbed (denuded?) of their "soul,” punctured/punctumised by a beat which sounds like the off-beat from C-Bank’s “One More Shot” multiplied and amplified by a billion. The blood-red sleeve in which it came demonstrated that a revolution was about to happen.

BRYAN ADAMS
Singles:
Run To You (5 Jan – 11)
Somebody (16 Mar – 35)
Heaven (25 May – 38)
It’s Only Love (with Tina Turner) (2 Nov – 29)
Then again there were those who preferred to stick with the trusty old conservatives. Bryan Adams might have been old in mind but looked sufficiently young and New Wave-ish for undiscriminating punters to decide that this was “new” music. His Reckless album was one of the biggest sellers of 1985, underlined by the fact that no less than five singles were drawn from it (the missing one is “Summer Of ‘69” which stopped at #42). “Run To You” sounds like the Police stripped of all New Wave pretences and shipped back to the era of Nazareth. “Heaven” proclaims “sensitivity.” The Tina Turner duet suggests “snare the over-40s market.” And it worked commercially because Adams sounded as if he actually believed all this panacea. When he sings “I’d die for you” at the climax of 1991’s 16-week chart topper “Everything I Do (I Do It For You” it’s hard to think that anyone could sound sincerer, even as it’s equally hard to listen to without vomiting. A far more damning indictment of just how sincere Bryan Adams is lies in the fact that he bought and closed down a perfectly decent pub in Cheyne Walk because he lived next door to it and the noise disturbed him, and his subsequent career as a toff photographer, which even Peter Sellers never managed.

A-HA
Singles:
Take On Me (28 Sep – 2)
The Sun Always Shines On TV (28 Dec – 1)
More “authentically” neurotic and suicidal than the likes of Tears For Fears – the title track of their 1986 Scoundrel Days album proclaims: “Cut my wrist on a bad thought/And head for the door” – this forlorn Norwegian teenpop group, who I suspect would really have preferred to have been Jan Garbarek’s backing band, or maybe Air, worked where hardly any of the other New Pop operatives managed in the mid-‘80s, largely because, whereas Duran Duran were fattening up and waving their wads in our faces unasked like any pools- winning syndicate from Digbeth, A-Ha revived the vulnerable, indecisive, vaguely arty side of teenpop (the “sureness” of Cassidy, the “someone help me, help me please” of D Osmond) and could as well have been on 4AD. That their opening two hit singles were also their biggest is in large part due to the astute production of Alan Tarney (the Cliff of “We Don’t Talk Anymore” and “Some People,” the Saint Etienne of “You’re In A Bad Way”) - perhaps unthinkable without the comic-strip video for “Take On Me” with its genuinely poignant ending (given the song’s structural similarity to “Television Satellite” by Sophie and Peter Johnston) but doubly so without the epic quality which Tarney brings to “The Sun Always Shines” – the pop record Ultravox never quite made; hear how the string-synth crescendo leading to the climactic instrumental chorus refrain before Morten Harket’s voice re-enters builds the song up before Harket explodes it with his final “TO ME!” after which the song atomises.

THE ALARM
Singles:
Absolute Reality (2 Mar – 35)
Strength (28 Sep – 40)
There was still a sizeable market in 1985 for U2 wannabes. Prominent amongst them was the Alarm, an unbearably righteous Welsh trio – are you reminded of any subsequent ones? Their big hit was “68 Guns” in 1983, but indeed throughout the ‘80s they continued to “mean it” (1986’s “Spirit Of ‘76” sounds exactly like the sort of overblown rock epic which would have been unceremoniously shown the door in 1976) until the hideous climax of “A New South Wales” complete with male voice choir (which even Test Dept managed to make work). The expression of Harry Secombe as the latter song was performed on Wogan was priceless.

MARC ALMOND
Single:
Stories Of Johnny (24 Aug – 23)
It must have been galling for Almond that all his major hits post-Soft Cell – and even Soft Cell’s biggest hit, while we’re at it – were cover versions. His main commercial success in 1985 was his guest appearance on Bronski Beat’s “I Feel Love” farrago (see below), and pulling himself back from the ‘83/Immaculate Consumptives brink, set about trying to return to “pop.” “Stories Of Johnny” is typical of his dilemma; he is trying so hard, but the “pop” just isn’t there, and perhaps doesn’t need to be. How his recent interpretation of Russian songs works this writer has yet to ascertain.

AMAZULU
Singles:
Excitable (6 Jul – 12)
Don’t You Just Know It (23 Nov – 15)
The Belle Stars weren’t really around any more, Bananarama were in semi-hibernation, so we had this ghastly lapsed brown rice girl group merrily selling out with pop almost insulting in its deliberate deadness. “Don’t You Just Know It” was a cover of the old R&B hit by Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns, who probably are all now buried in paupers’ graves, but pop music is a wonderful world and they can come back any time they want to, so howzabout that then? (Except that one of them was Ed Blackwell, who went on to assist in Ornette’s revolution)

ANIMAL NIGHTLIFE
Single:
Love Is Just The Great Pretender ’85 (6 Jul – 28)
Momentarily hip London band from the Robert Elms ripped Levi’s school of worthiness who tarted up their 1983 flop without anyone really noticing.

ANIMOTION
Single:
Obsession (4 May – 5)
An example of the occasional truism that getting it wrong can more often than not lead to getting it right, Animotion were (I think) Swedish and scored an enormous international hit with this attempt to beef up the Human League – and a far more successful attempt, actually, than “The Lebanon” (“And where there used to be some shops” indeed!). This is in fact awesomely brutal electropop trying to go rock (“What do I have to do/To sleep with you?”) which still sounds powerful.

THE APARTMENTS
Album:
The Evening Visits…And Stays For Years (NME – 41)
THE TRIFFIDS
Single:
Field Of Glass (EP) (NME – 45)
Intelligent Australian rock as it was in 1985 (Nick Cave really has to be dealt with separately – see below). Peter Walsh’s Apartments jangle interestingly and quietly, but as with the Go-Betweens, slightly too quietly for my tastes, though this album has plenty of vociferous champions. More mysterious, and therefore better, were the Triffids – where the Go-Betweens were sometimes just wet, the Triffids were aqueous. Certainly no other antipodean band of the time approached the quiet power of tracks like “Bright Lights Big City” and the brilliant “Monkey On My Back,” both of which appear on this (Mark Radcliffe-produced!) EP, although one needs to cut to 1986 for their absolute masterpiece, the melting summer of an album which is Born Sandy Devotional. Poor David McComb deserved a much better fate.

ARCADIA
Single:
Election Day (26 Oct – 7)
DURAN DURAN
Single:
A View To A Kill (18 May – 2)
POWER STATION
Singles:
Some Like It Hot (16 Mar – 14)
Get It On (11 May – 22)
Was there ever a more arrogant stage entry than Simon Le Bon methodically striding down the stairs to the TOTP stage to perform “Election Day” in the autumn of 1985? I mean, who the hell did he think he was? Bowie? (Even Bowie wasn’t Bowie in 1985 – see below) So Red The Rose was the parent album of one of the two Duran Duran spinoffs, but Le Bon’s demeanour suggested that Blue Is The Colour might have been a more appropriate title.

In any case, 1985 was an abysmal year for Duran Duran; more or less divorced from each other, apart from the terrible Bond theme tune which was their sole group product that year, they split into two factions. The “Chic” half – i.e. all the Taylors – went off with Robert Palmer and the Chic rhythm section to record an album, a record which simultaneously managed to sound overblown and undercooked. Palmer grimacing his way through “Get It On” proves only that he would have been the ideal singer for Heaven 17’s “Come Live With Me,” while the band try to recycle “Let’s Dance” behind him. The “Pistols” half – Le Bon and Rhodes (hah!) – went off to do their arty prog record, which in fact sounded like an assemblage of Flock Of Seagulls B-sides. “Election Day” wants so much to be the greatest single ever made, but it was, and remains, ludicrous and (literally) hysterical.

STEVE ARRINGTON
Singles:
Feel So Real (27 Apr – 5)
Dancin’ In The Key Of Life (6 Jul – 21)
The former Slave driver returned with one of the genuinely uplifting moments in 1985 pop. Electro-punctum? “That I’ve just got to sa-YAY-yay!” before he launches into the second chorus of “Feel So Real” – the middle “YAY” suddenly swooping up an octave but not quite managing it so he returns, enlivened, to his normal register. By thanking God he becomes one with God. And Freddie Hubbard’s trumpet injects the song just as Dizzy Gillespie did Stevie Wonder’s “Do I Do.” A record which says YES to life…and these are always the most precious of records. Like “Let Me In” a song of praise which works as well if directed to God or to any Other.

ARROW
Single:
Long Time (13 Jul – 30)
His 1983 Notting Hill Carnival soca anthem “Hot Hot Hot” inexplicably missed the Top 40, kept out by such masterpieces as “Dr Heckyll And Mr Jive” by Men At Work and “Get Down Saturday Night” by Oliver Cheatham, but this even more inexplicably did make the Top 40. Tuneless soca which makes me wish that Charlie Gillett just worked behind the counter in Sterns, or something.

ARTISTS UNITED AGAINST APARTHEID
Single:
Sun City (23 Nov – 21)
BAND AID
Single:
Do They Know It’s Christmas? (7 Dec – 3)
DAVID BOWIE AND MICK JAGGER
Single:
Dancing In The Street (7 Sep – 1)
THE CARS
Single:
Drive (27 Jul – 4)
THE CROWD
Single:
You’ll Never Walk Alone (1 Jun – 1)
STARVATION//TAM TAM POUR L’ETHIOPIE
Single:
Starvation/Tam Tam Pour L’Ethiopie (9 Mar – 33)
USA FOR AFRICA
Single:
We Are The World (13 Apr – 1)
DIONNE WARWICK AND FRIENDS
That’s What Friends Are For (9 Nov – 16)
MARTI WEBB
Single:
Ben (8 Jun – 5)
The arguments over Ethiopia continue. John Vidal claims that the media are overemphasising the country’s presumed poverty, that Band/Live Aid probably did more harm than good – contributing just 5-10% of the total estimated grain received by Ethiopia over the last 20 years, most of which was seized to feed the Ethiopian army and never reached the starving – while Michael Buerk asserts that the country still has crippling problems, mainly due to unrealistic debt repayments to the IMF and the reluctance of Western governments to do anything more practical for them. Add to this the recent conversion of Bob Geldof to Conservatism and it might reasonably be wondered what the point of Band Aid was.

In many ways it was a very conservative enterprise; relieve the Government of the pressure of actually having to do anything to alleviate the situation by doing it ourselves – charity as the supreme exemplar of free market economics. Yet most people agree that, even if its effects were limited, it was better done than not done. As with South Africa, the publicity in itself would have been sufficient to draw the minds of governments to the issues involved.

“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was number one over the Christmas/New Year period of 1984/5 and sold over three million copies, and returned to the top three when reissued (with special – except that they weren’t at all special - Trevor Horn and Paul Hardcastle remixes) at the end of 1985 – the biggest-selling single in the UK until “Candle In The Wind ’97.” As a record it was a glorified High Street charity box with a touch of the BBC’s Night Of 100 Stars; all your favourite singers singing a song which barely exists. Bono is about the only featured lead vocalist who doesn’t mumble. Buy the record, contribute your £1.49, don’t worry too much about anyone’s future.

It was of course the beginning of the end of the fag ends of New Pop, and the final coffin nails were hammered in with Live Aid in July; if you played at the gig(s), you were somebody; if you didn’t, you just weren’t important enough. Thus the solidification of the idea that “indie” equalled defeatism, thus the consequent retrenchment of the left wing of British pop into the Mary Chain’s “little underground,” thus the almost complete non-appearance of “indie” acts in the 1985 singles chart. Is Morley right when he asserts that, by 1985, the major record companies would only allow a certain number of singles into the charts in order to provide a sufficient number of tracks for their Now and Hits compilations? Thus also the idea that soul/authenticity was to be preferred over sex/mischief (because you’re laughing at the poor starving Ethiopians with your cocktails, aren't you? A big red X on your door forthwith!), that “experiments should be kept under glass where they belong” (Danny Baker, to his eternal shame), responsibility over irresponsibility, practical ambitions over pies in the sky (why offer a Barthesian analysis of “The Look Of Love” when you can sing a cosy little ditty about a dustman saving up to buy a dinghy which, moreover, he will call “Dig-Nit-Y”?).

And they were all so bloody sincere on Live Aid, weren’t they, all the way through from the Style Council’s “Internationalists” to McCartney apologising for the mike failing, to Helena Spriggs’ grotesque caterwauling over the final assembled singalong, Harvey Goldsmith waving his fat carcass in front of everyone like Chris Moyles’ recidivist uncle? Maybe the only honest one amongst the lot of them was Adam Ant, shamelessly plugging his then current single (“Vive La Rock”!) which appropriately and predictably stormed down the charts the next week (having peaked at #50). Billy Connolly weeping over the video of dead children soundtracked by the Cars’ “Drive” (the latter of which returned to the top five for the second time in 12 months as a result), a piece of video necrophiliac pornography which even Throbbing Gristle could not have envisaged (remembering, of course, that TG were among the most moral of pop groups; they are “about” pornography in the same way as the tourist standing in the middle of Berwick Street). Bowie and Jagger grimacing their way through “Dancing In The Street” as though they might as well have been Russ Abbot and Freddie Starr (note that “like there’s no to-morrow!” followed by presumably deathly silence at the song’s end).

And worse, so much worse, was “We Are The World.” While “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” could to a degree be excused for being a turn-on-a-dime job run up on a Sunday morning in Ladbroke Grove – the Britishness of it – USA For Africa was cynical, corpulent corporatism. No need to embed oneself in the song’s sordidity; the best critique lies in Culturcide’s re-recording (as “We’re Not The World”) on their great 1987 album Tacky Souvenirs Of Pre-Revolutionary America. Yes, I suppose there is a smidgeon of poignancy in Uncle Ray and Stevie trading lines, at least until you recall Uncle Ray bawling out “God Bless America” at Reagan’s inaugural do one month previously – deaf, dumb and blind.

However, the subsequent barrage of charity records, sometimes on the flimsiest of pretexts, succeeded in lowering the bar even further. At least Jerry Dammers’ “Starvation,” put together with UB40 and the other remnants of 2-Tone, was worthy – if, of course, dull – and the Miami Steve Van Zandt-helmed, Arthur Baker-produced “Sun City” with its vocals by Bono, Dylan, Springsteen, Reed, etc., attacked a more specific virus, even though its chart position was accordingly affected. Conservative record buyers don’t want to be reminded of nasty little politics – which also explains the reluctance of the Band Aid cast (Martyn Ware excepted) to become involved in Paul Weller’s NUM fundraising anthem “Soul Deep”; issued as the Council Collective, with additional vocals from the likes of Jimmy Ruffin and Junior Giscombe, it struggled to #24 in the same month as Band Aid conquered all.

Conversely, a very big hit was “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Gerry Marsden leading “The Crowd,” an assembly of D-list Tory-voting celebrities – Bernie Winters, Jimmy Tarbuck, Rick Wakeman, Jim Davidson, Tony Christie, the Nolans, Jim Diamond, even Bruce Forsyth – crying crocodile tears over the ancient standard to raise funds for the bereaved following the fire at Bradford City FC stadium a couple of months previously, and also for the families of the victims of the Heysel Stadium disaster which occurred in the week of the single’s release. Never mind that it was Thatcherite cost-cutting which enabled the timbers of dead wood to catch fire in Bradford – they’re dead so let’s all pretend we care. And the record largely became a hit because of Heysel rather than Bradford. Meanwhile, Marti Webb sobbed her way through a cover of Michael Jackson’s love song to a rat to raise funds for leukaemia treatment for a nine-year-old kid featured on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life! show, which campaign only brings to mind the words of the late Bill Hicks: “Does that mean that when they reach a certain age, they’re off your love list? Fuck your children if that’s how you feel, and fuck you too. You either love people in general of all ages or you shut the fuck up!” Again, the worthier AIDS charity single “That’s What Friends Are For” was noticeably less successful, although it is possibly, after “Heartlight” and anything on that Elvis Costello record, the worst song of Burt Bacharach’s career (has anyone ever sounded more disinterested, more disembodied than Elton John glumly asserting “yeah” at the end of the song?).

Over subsequent debasements of music and society such as the Ferry Aid 1987 chart-topper I shall draw a discreet veil; and I will only mention that the best (musically) charity record of them all – “Let’s Make Africa Green Again” by BRAFA (British Reggae Artists For Africa) – rose to #100 in the spring of 1985.

PHILIP BAILEY
Singles:
Easy Lover (with Phil Collins) (9 Mar – 1)
Walking On The Chinese Wall (11 May – 34)
The truest disciples of Sun Ra may have been Earth Wind & Fire – Maurice White did do time in Mr Blount’s band, there are some AACM connections, the first two EW&F albums are pretty strictly in post-Ra free-funk territory and indeed the group’s stage act (pyramids, etc.) was lifted from Ra virtually wholesale. Nevertheless, by 1985 EW&F were in a bad way (listen to 1987’s abysmal “Systems Of Survival” to determine just how bad) and drummer Bailey went off on his own for awhile – successfully with another singing drummer named Philip in the case of “Easy Lover,” though Mr Collins largely gets in the way of what is otherwise a fairly passable EW&F standard song, and rather less successfully without the name of Collins to help him sell records.

BALTIMORA
Single:
Tarzan Boy (3 Aug – 3)
The year’s big Club 18-30 novelty of cheese. He was Irish.

BANANARAMA
Single:
Do Not Disturb (24 Aug – 31)
This might have been their motto for the year. Disheartened by the failure of their more “serious” songs (e.g. “Rough Justice”) to get much radio play or have much commercial success, Bananarama were at a loose end, and this listless lament over nothing in particular probably explains why. In 1986 they resigned themselves to waving the white flag, surrendered to SAW and went to number one in America with their low-calorie revival of “Venus.”

DONALD BANKS
Single:
Status Quo (NME – 19)
E.U.
Single:
Sho’ ‘Nuff Bumpin’ (NME – 22)
LITTLE BENNY AND THE MASTERS
Single:
Who Comes To Boogie (2 Feb – 33)
THE REDDS AND THE BOYS
Single:
Movin’ And Groovin’ (NME – 46)
TROUBLE FUNK
Single:
Still Smokin’ (NME – 27)
Music critics in the ‘80s, as they largely remain now, are glorified plantation owners; middle-aged, middle-class white men who think that they have the moral right to dictate to black people what music they can play, to maintain an element of “purity” in the H S Chamberlain sense. Thus the breathtaking arrogance of ‘70s two-Xmas-novelty-hit-wonder Chris Hill, who in 1983 stated that: “It speaks volumes that the biggest influence on black musicians today is Kraftwerk.” Hip hop just wasn’t “real,” you see. By the mid-‘80s, therefore, to avoid retrenching their positions any further and to keep face, theories had to be convoluted to such an extent that the Washington Go-Go genre of music was nominated unilaterally to be The Future Of Black Music.

Although it is the common complaint voiced by any listener who is “outside” any given genre of music, it is entirely reasonable to assert that all Go-Go music sounds the same. It has one rhythm – mid-tempo, percussion-driven, determinedly undanceable except by, say, the world’s Rob Flemings – and one subject, namely itself. Listening again to interminable 12-inchers such as “Sho’ ‘Nuff Bumpin’” and “Still Smokin’” one is reminded of Constant Lambert’s comments of 70 years ago:

“The most irritating quality about the Vo-dodeo-vo, poo-poop-a-doop school of jazz song is its hysterical emphasis on the fact that the singer is a jazz baby going crazy about jazz rhythm. If jazz were really so gay one feels that there would not be so much need to mention the fact in every bar of the piece. Folk songs do not inform us that it’s great to be singing in six-eight time, or that you won’t get your dairy-maid until you have mastered the Dorian mode.”
(Music Ho!, Faber & Faber, London: 1934, chapter 3(g), “The Spirit Of Jazz”)

Sometimes there are crude attempts to bring in some form of sociopolitical commentary, such as Donald Banks’ “Status Quo” – which, as you would expect, bravely rhymes “nation” with “inflation” – but equating Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers’ “Bustin’ Loose” with the chorus crying for bread in Boris Goudonov is frankly not on. There is not the fist-in-face immediacy with which the likes LL Cool J and Schoolly-D were shortly to shock us. And the reviews treating Trouble Funk’s September 1986 gig at the Town And Country Club (the Forum as was) as the Second Coming were beyond embarrassing.

The gulf between critics and public is starkly underlined by the inclusion of four Go-Go singles in NME’s list and the fact that only one Go-Go single – the Go-Go lite of “Who Comes To Boogie” – made any major, or even moderate, inroads commercially. The lesson was that the Go-Go rhythm was a very useful ingredient – used to devastating effect in Grace Jones’ “Slave To The Rhythm” (see below), the Real Roxanne and Howie Tee’s “Bang Zoom (Let’s Go-Go)” and Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love” – but not the whole recipe. The public wisely opted for a synthetic future.

BB&Q BAND
Single:
Genie (6 Jul – 40)
“Grace” (#41 in 1982) was their best record, Joy (#24 in 1983) their biggest, and indeed they only had one song, very gracious though it was.

PAT BENATAR
Singles:
We Belong (12 Jan – 22)
Love Is A Battlefield (23 Mar – 17)
Yes, in the ‘80s this was still America’s idea of a “strong rock chick.” Suzi Quatro without all the interesting factors, Benatar quivered unironically through a galleon of hits in the USA, but only had two register here; the entirely unremarkable quasi-electro of “We Belong” and the “Tusk” rhythm track-pilfering (divest of Lindsey Buckingham’s vision and arranging genius) “Battlefield.” The horrid belch of “WE ARE YOUNG!” reminds us why the Americans always preferred Christine to Stevie.

GEORGE BENSON
Single:
20/20 (19 Jan – 29)
“With-a hindsight/It’s 20-20 vision.” And then he goes doo-doo-doo in unison with his guitar as he’d done a million times before, Miles In The Sky the most distant of memories.

AGNES BERNELLE
Album:
Father’s Lying Dead On The Ironing Board (NME – 44)
“Authenticity” took many critical guises in 1985. Somewhere along the line Weimar cabaret was deemed “relevant” and thus did Elvis Costello’s Imp label revive the career of the veteran cabaret singer Bernelle. She fled Nazi Germany in 1938, decamped in Ireland for a time where she became a prominent feminist, later worked with Orson Welles, was in at the beginning of the Establishment club. She was well into her seventies when she made this album, which assembles sensitively (and sometimes saucily) arranged interpretations of Brecht, Eisler, Behan and others. Overall the feeling is still somewhat akin to having Wyclef Jean producing Tom Jones, but her acting ability sees the record through.

BIG COUNTRY
Single:
Just A Shadow (19 Jan – 26)
Some quarters of the music press still felt that Steeltown, Big Country’s second album, was The Way Ahead – socially relevant, impassioned, not plastic cocktail crap, etc. I must admit that a little of Stuart Adamson’s suffocating earnestness goes a very long way; nonetheless his life did not deserve to end the way it did.

BIG DADDY
Single:
Dancing In The Dark (EP) (9 Mar – 21)
Novelty rock the way it was in 1985 – the idea being that these were Vietnam vets who’d got lost in the jungle for the last 20 years, returned to civilisation and recorded “new” songs in the only style they knew how to do. Thus Springsteen’s song is done as doo-wop lite. My sides, how they ache.

BIG SOUND AUTHORITY
Single:
This House (Is Where Your Love Stands) (19 Jan – 21)
Oh, Joseph of Arimathea, lead me away from worthy, right-on 1985 Britpop. There was a rash of these bands who all seemed to have signed the Weller Purity Pledge, to make properly soulful and authentic music which would tell it like it is, out with Thatcher, etc. (wonder how many of these musicians are now Blair-voting property developers, or similar). The Faith Brothers were perhaps the worst, but the most successful were Big Sound Authority, appropriately led by a squalling foghorn of a female lead vocal, admonishing, piercing with common sense and righteousness. Actually it now sounds like Texas. And don’t even get me started on Latin bloody Quarter…

BLACK LACE
Single:
The Hokey-Cokey (30 Nov – 31)
“Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table,
And we are introduced to Goodness every day,
Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults;
He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect,
But wears a stammer like a decoration:
And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;
It is Evil that is helpless like a lover
And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,
And both are openly destroyed before our eyes.”
(W H Auden, from the poem “Herman Melville (For Lincoln Kirstein)”

RUBEN BLADES Y SEIS DE SOLAR
Album:
Escenas (NME – 36)
The Steve Winwood of salsa was widely applauded for this album, though it has since disappeared from the catalogue and is pretty well nullified by Fairlights and Linn drums. He has done better (for example, 1990’s stunningly poetic Buscando América).

BLANCMANGE
What’s Your Problem (7 Sep – 40)
Poor lads. I never cared much for Blancmange but this was an ungracious end to their brief chart career; a woozy attempt at doing electro-C&W by the sound of it, although they forgot to add a song.

BOGSHED
Single:
Let Them Eat Bogshed (EP) (NME – 38)
THE JUNE BRIDES
Album:
There Are Eight Million Stories… (NME – 25)
THE LOFT
Single:
Up The Hill And Down The Slope (EP) (NME – 30)
Extreme actions are not always a necessary by-product of extreme measures. There is such a thing as revolting against the wrong things, or for the wrong reasons. Though not born with the Jesus and Mary Chain (see below), that group’s conservative experimentation was largely misinterpreted as a go-ahead for amateurism to masquerade as vulnerability or truth. But it was not enough, as history has proved, simply to go against the grain, to be out of step. Too many groups thought that it was. Such misinterpretation took various forms, mostly either a reduction of Beefheartism to an ugly, lumpen hump of arrhythm – did the Fire Engines count for nothing? – or a regression to a false early-‘60s girl group idea of “innocence” and “frailty,” on both of which counts a reading of Ronnie Spector’s biography Be My Baby should act as sufficient correction. “Every Conversation” by the June Brides was everywhere in 1985 as a supposed antidote to the Grotesque Monolith of State Pop; throughout its three twee minutes it virtually apologises for existing, and also contains the worst trumpet playing ever inflicted upon a record, worse even than Stanshall on “The Equestrian Statue.” It was apparently enough just to embark upon this “quiet revolt.” Meanwhile, virtually unnoticed, less twee characters such as Steve Albini, Juan Atkins, Marshall Jefferson and Rick Rubin were busy inventing the future.

DAVID BOWIE
Singles:
This Is Not America (The Falcon And The Snowman Theme) (with the Pat Metheny Group) (9 Feb – 14)
Loving The Alien (8 Jun – 19)
This is not Bowie, either. Well OK, “This Is Not America” is quite affecting in its sub-ECM way (Metheny hardly does anything on the song apart from one rhythm chord) but one has to say no to “Loving The Alien.” The Pet Shop Boys deployed the “O Superman” motif far more effectively and emotionally on “Love Comes Quickly.” His Live Aid appearance – brisk, businesslike, boring – confirmed that we can only be “heroes” if we wear the right suit.

BILLY BRAGG
Single:
Between The Wars (EP) (16 Mar – 15)
KIRSTY MacCOLL
Single:
A New England (12 Jan – 7)
“Sweet moderation/Heart of this nation.” So that’s what pop music should be about…sweet fucking Jesus. Moderation. Temperance. No sex, no drugs, no rock and roll if we can get away with it.

How can I loathe Billy Bragg so virulently when I agree with just about everything that he says? Does his career, his existence, represent the ultimate argument against socialism? Pop or socialism – what do you want, and why moreover does it have to be an either/or? Why does pop have to be this glum, this morose, this isolated? How can we even begin to think of Bragg as being in the same universe as someone like Leon Rosselson? My dad saw Rosselson once in the late ‘60s and found him to be one of the scariest performers he’d ever seen in his life – it was ten to one whether or not he was about to take a swipe at someone in the audience. I saw some clips of him on Tony Palmer’s All You Need Is Love back in early 1977 and these were quite astonishingly raw. Billy Bragg? He’s so fucking friendly, he just wants to be your mate, what you see is what you garotte. We once had occasion to walk past the queue to see Bragg at the Forum in 1991, and without exception the queue comprised well-dressed middle-class couples who were probably ridden with guilt about voting Tory on the quiet. We fantasised about machine-gunning them as per McDowell in If…. Sometimes when walking through Hampstead on a Saturday lunchtime, I still do.

SARAH BRIGHTMAN AND PAUL MILES-KINGSTON WITH THE WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL CHOIR (DIRECTOR: MARTIN NEARY), JAMES LANCELOT AND THE ENGLISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA CONDUCTED BY LORIN MAAZEL
Single:
Pie Jesu (23 Mar – 3)
Andrew Lloyd Webber is the Ivor Novello of his age, I suppose, although he is not a closet gay from Wales. He is an avid collector of Stanley Spencer’s paintings, which despite his Toryism makes him a good man in my book. And we deny at our peril the fact that he has written (or co-written) some fantastic pop songs. With songs like “Memory” (as sung by Paige) or “Argentina” (as sung by Covington, never by Madonna) sometimes it has to happen to you before you can appreciate what the songs are trying to communicate, and you know exactly what I mean by that; you’ve been here two years.

As a classical composer he remains a fine contemporary Novello. His Requiem, from which the above aria is taken, is pretty much faux-Fauré throughout; were you overhearing it from the next room, you’d easily mistake it for Fauré, but the emotions and finality present in the latter’s Requiem are – for now – unattainable. You cannot imagine Inspector Morse drifting out of this world to the strains of “Pie Jesu,” and that is where, and why, it fails.

BRONSKI BEAT
Singles:
Love To Love You Baby-I Feel Love-Johnny Remember Me (Medley) (with Marc Almond) (20 Apr – 3)
Hit That Perfect Beat (30 Nov – 3)
THE COMMUNARDS
You Are My World (12 Oct – 30)
And as for worthy gay pop – oh, give me the Scissor Sisters, or even Franz Ferdinand, any day. Yes I bow to the mute grief of “Smalltown Boy,” to Somerville’s closing scream of “Why?” on the similarly-named song, but there wasn’t much more to Bronski Beat than that. After the pub singalong with Marc Almond, Somerville quit to form the Communards. The remaining two Bronskis soldiered on with new lead singer John Inman, and initially had the greater success, though Sarah-Jane Morris, on day leave from avant-garde Brechtian big band The Happy End, would ensure that the Communards got to number one in 1986. With a cover version.

SHIRLEY BROWN
Album:
Intimate Storm (NME – 15)
MARVIN GAYE
Album:
Dream Of A Lifetime (NME – 36)
AL GREEN
Album:
Going Away (NME – 23)
ISLEY, JASPER, ISLEY:
Album:
Caravan Of Love (NME – 26)
Single:
Caravan Of Love (NME – 14)
WOMACK AND WOMACK
Album:
Radio MUSC (NME – 34)
BOBBY WOMACK
Album:
So Many Rivers (NME – 8)
In the meantime, Old Soul soldiered on, in the NME end-of-year poll if not in the charts. But all of this music sounded, and sounds, so middle-aged in all the wrong ways; clinging on to concepts of “real” but simultaneously drowned by these damnable (in this context) Linn drums. Bobby Womack sings of being worried about lusting after his best friend’s wife while he’s away on business trips. “Soul” for Southern spivs, as Reynolds so memorably put it. The only thing here which indicates anything resembling a future is, ironically, the album made by the dead guy – Dream Of A Lifetime sees Gaye about to embrace electro, and songs like “Sanctified Lover” are considerably sharper than you’d expect. Typically, the two best Old Soul albums of 1985 were missed out altogether – the eponymous debut from Alexander O’Neal (see below) and Luther Vandross’ The Night I Fell In Love – the latter’s closing track “The Other Side Of The World” would have worked well in Lost In Translation (again, see below).

But a word for “Caravan Of Love” – as simple and moving a song of transition via death into renewed life as Mayfield’s “People Get Ready.” The original version stopped at #52, while 12 months later the Housemartins gave it the Flying Pickets treatment and went to number one – perhaps fitting, then, that they were deposed from the 1986 Xmas #1 slot by the late Jackie Wilson’s 29-year-old “Reet Petite.”

KATE BUSH
Album:
Hounds Of Love (NME – 10)
Singles:
Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) (17 Aug – 3; NME – 3)
Cloudbusting (26 Oct – 20)
No need to reiterate what I said about Hounds Of Love on CoM two years ago (go on then, off you go and read it!); just rejoice, or lament, at how far above everything else this unprecedented, visionary music stood in 1985. If you cannot understand “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” then you cannot begin to understand pop music.

CAMEO
Album:
Single Life (NME – 31)
Singles:
Single Life (14 Sep – 15; NME - 8)
She’s Strange (7 Dec – 22)
Can someone please confirm that it’s not just me; that the spectre of Larry Blackmon in his red codpiece slimily intoning “I’d like to tie you up awhile” is one of the most repellent I can think of in pop? And why does the music have to be so bloody great in order to confuse me further?

CASHMERE
Single:
Can I (19 Jan – 29)
Not as good as 1986’s deathless “Mine All Mine” which either rips off, or was ripped off by, the Fatback Band’s “I Found Lovin’.”

DAVID CASSIDY
Single:
The Last Kiss (23 Feb – 6)
A sad and mercifully brief return for the previously immaculate isolée of teenpop; a glutinous and overbaked ballad not helped by George Michael’s sergeant-major backing vocals.

NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS
Album:
The First Born Is Dead (NME – 50)
Single:
Tupelo (NME – 5)
Over the last 20 years or so, Nick Cave has worked very hard to convince us that he’s a normal guy. 20 years of reasonable and respectful records, of which this was the first. The old demons burn, if not to a crisp, fusing Ezekiel with Elvis, on “Tupelo,” but it’s a decided turning away from the future and back into the past. Growing up. Making Proper Music.

Except we saw the Birthday Party at the Brixton Academy in October 1982 and knew that Nick Cave was a demon, one of the few genuine demons pop or rock has produced. Perhaps he had no choice but to walk away from the demonic; the frazzling of nerve and bone around the time of the Mutiny! EP would, if repeated regularly, have been enough to finish the strongest of bodies. But there is also a sense in which the last 20 years of rock have been a decisive walking away from the Birthday Party and what they stood for – and to a lesser extent a walking away from Joy Division – as if afraid of getting that close again, that scorched. You hear it rear its head forcefully in “The Mercy Seat” but otherwise the volcano has been quiescent; when it tries to erupt (2003’s “I’m In Love”) it has difficulty producing any lava. But has anyone yet risen to the gauntlet laid down by side two of Junkyard? Will anyone ever have the nerve to do so?

CHANGE
Single:
Let’s Go Together (16 Mar – 37)
Not “Searchin’” – but then what is, certainly not “When The Going Gets Tough” – but a nice sub-SOS Band groove. Talking of which…

CHERRELLE WITH ALEXANDER O’NEAL
Single:
Saturday Love (28 Dec – 6)
O’Neal’s eponymous debut album sold heavily in London over 1985 but nil anywhere else – its hits were to follow in 1986 – but here we have Jam and Lewis breaking out of the SOS Band cocoon, en route to the glorious double-header of Janet’s Control and Alex’s Hearsay (the latter represents everything that Terence Trent D’Arby can never be) with this glorious voice-trading session. O’Neal’s descending falsetto of “When I look at you” en route to the second chorus is what some people call an uplifting moment in pop.

CHICAGO
Single:
You’re The Inspiration (26 Jan – 14)
Hard to believe that Chicago started out as a Hendrix-endorsed free-jazz/prog/soul outfit – guitarist Terry Kath even essayed a “Free Form Guitar” improvisation on their first album, which was a nice try if not exactly Sonny Sharrock – but by the mid-‘70s they could only get hits in Britain with gloopy, Peter Cetera-sung ballads (and even the best of these, “Wishing You Were Here,” was a flop). I note the passing harmonic reference, surely not intentional, to the Cocteau Twins in the bridge leading to the chorus, but there really is nothing else of note here. Their final UK hit single, as it happened, but Cetera did have a top three solo hit in 1986 with “Glory Of Love (Theme From The Karate Kid).”

CHINA CRISIS
Singles:
Black Man Ray (16 Mar – 14)
King In A Catholic Style (Wake Up) (1 Jun – 19)
Produced by a stoned Walter Becker and, oh God, I’m falling asleep even thinking of the rock-bottom haemoglobin contained in these “songs.”

THE CLASH
Single:
This Is England (12 Oct – 24)
Strummer says goodbye to pop, to punk even, with the Clash’s final and greatest single. As London finally burns down before his eyes, his guitar continues to thrash on autopilot even after the song has ended…and might well still be doing so.

LLOYD COLE AND THE COMMOTIONS
Singles:
Brand New Friend (14 Sep – 14)
Lost Weekend (9 Nov – 17)
Fucking Londonbeat backing vocals on “Brand New Friend.” And “James” should have been the single.

PHIL COLLINS
Singles:
Sussudio (26 Jan – 12)
One More Night (13 Apr – 4)
Take Me Home (27 Jul – 19)
Separate Lives (with Marilyn Martin) (23 Nov – 4)
“Sussudio”’s chart performance undoubtedly suffered as a consequence of being released just one week after Prince’s “1999” was reissued. Thereafter it was seen as a shameless “1999” ripoff; is it too late to point out that “Sussudio” is by far the better record? More assured generally, more confident, less literal (I mean, who or what is “Sussudio”?) and with the great ending where the Phoenix Horns turn the whole thing into Philip Glass minimalism, a stroboscopic brass section?

No Jacket Required was indeed, at its best, Collins’ most complete pop album – and the TV theme “Inside Out” really ought to have been a single – though it was the ballads which sold best as singles, none more lachrymose than “Separate Lives,” which opening line “You called me on the ‘phone from your hotel” – and specifically Collins’ faux-whisper of the word “hotel” – temporarily makes me feel like discharging all positive thoughts about Collins and quote what an incredulous Ms Brand said about him: “Phil Collins? He couldn’t improvise his way out of a paper bag!”

THE COLOUR FIELD
Single:
Thinking Of You (26 Jan – 12)
All of the Specials suffered after “Ghost Town.” Dammers has become something of a ghost, periodically surfacing as a DJ in the ICA and elsewhere; how does he get by? Are the royalties that large? And, following the break-up of the Fun Boy Three, Terry Hall has never found a proper context for his talents. With the Colour Field he essayed postmodern MoR four years before the Beautiful South; since when he has floated between odd Britpop poles (Lightning Seeds, Blur, Tricky) or tried the Buena Vista Social Club trick to no great effect with last year's The Hour Of Two Lights. A waste of one of pop’s most splendidly isolated voices.

THE COMMENTATORS
Single:
N-N-Nineteen (Not Out) (22 Jun – 13)
Rory Bremner sends up Paul Hardcastle by means of impersonating Richie Benaud and similar. And this was seen as radical? It almost makes one nostalgic for the good old days of Russ Abbot.

THE COMMODORES
Single:
Nightshift (26 Jan – 3; NME – 13)
Puke-inducing “tribute” to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson which tries to disguise its ripoff of its former leader’s “All Night Long” in tears of pure crocodile.

THE CONCEPT
Single:
Hey DJ (14 Dec – 27)
Old-school scratching at this late stage, about to be made redundant by the opening ten seconds of “Rock The Bells” (how fitting that the revolution should begin with an Arthur Russell sample – from “In The Light Of The Miracle,” fact fans).

BILLY CONNOLLY
Single:
Supergran (9 Mar – 32)
This kids’ TV theme tune was not the worst cultural crime committed by Connolly in 1985; as noted above, his weeping at the necroporn of the “Drive” Live Aid video fits that category. So why were we falling over ourselves when we saw him at the Hammersmith Apollo scarcely five years ago?

THE CONWAY BROTHERS
Single:
Turn It Up (22 Jun – 11; NME – 39)
Absolutely unremarkable standard-issue Britfunkpop. Its appearance in the NME list is even more baffling.

SAM COOKE
Album:
Live At The Harlem Square Club 1963 – One Night Stand (NME – 7)
In his commentary to the NME end-of-year lists, Fred Dellar asks how musically healthy 1985 could have been when two of the critics’ top ten albums were recorded in the ‘60s (they qualified as being “previously unreleased”). Perhaps a more relevant question might have been, how musically healthy were the critics? Or was there really so little choice?

Nonetheless it was completely correct for this record to be mentioned, as it is an overwhelming listening experience. The absolute antithesis of the Live At The Copa, MoR-friendly Cooke, this sees the great singer loosening up and exploding in front of a home crowd. Guralnick’s sleevenote remarks that as Cooke was coming downstairs to the club to start his show, he encountered a scorpion – without breaking his stride, he stepped on it and continued towards the stage (“I gotta be a MAN to tell you this!” he remarks at one point). Still, the music here is phenomenal, every bit as intense as Coltrane at the Village Vanguard. The highlight is the incendiary medley of “You Send Me” and “Bring It On Home To Me” – just listen to Cooke’s scream of “Darling, YOOOOOOUUUUU send me!” as the horns swell up behind him. The mask is ripped off to reveal the raw human underneath. If Kevin Rowland could (re)find a band as powerful as this, the Dexy’s revival might be worth taking a little more seriously.

THE COOL NOTES
Singles:
Spend The Night (23 Mar – 11)
In Your Car (13 Jul – 13)
Peter Powell was not in a good mood when “In Your Car” entered the Top 40 as he was doing his Tuesday teatime chart rundown. “This spineless, anaemic record!” he snarled. “Is this record going to be remembered in five years’ time? No. In five months’ time? No. In five WEEKS’ time? No. It is only clogging up the charts because 20,000 club DJs go out and buy it. We should have a separate chart for this kind of stuff and leave the REAL charts to REAL musicians who are…trying to make a living. Thank you.” One could tell that his days at Radio 1 were numbered. He was right up to a point, though, Copper – this really was bland, generic Brit“funk” (“You wock and you woll me in your car!” goes the second line of the chorus to, er, “In Your Car”) although the lead singer did redeem herself three years later by singing lead on Bomb the Bass’ “Don’t Make Me Wait.”

THE CULT
Singles:
She Sells Sanctuary (25 May – 15)
Rain (5 Oct – 17)
Revolution (30 Nov – 30)
In an odd way, we’ve got Ian Astbury to thank for the state of rock today. After all it was he who, at the time when the Cult finally crossed over into the mainstream with “Sanctuary,” dared to stick his head above the parapet and declare unironic, unambiguous love for Led Zeppelin and similar – at the time (nine years after punk) virtually a crime punishable by hanging; though it wasn’t until he hooked up with Rick Rubin to record the gloriously silly Electric album in 1987 that the group’s sound matched his ambitions – and Electric is still the album which the Darkness will never make, as opposed to A Night At The Opera, which I have no doubt they will end up making. So it’s quite apposite that he’s ended up turning into Jim Morrison in the 21st Century Doors, and everyone seems happy that he should do so. Who’d have thought it?

THE CURE
Singles:
In Between Days (27 Jul – 15)
Close To Me (21 Sep – 24)
I have not included the Melody Maker’s end-of-year lists in my round-up, largely because they only did top tens in 1985, and pretty well all of the items listed turn up one way or another in this list, but it is worth noting that The Head On The Door by the Cure was voted the critics’ album of the year (they topped the MM poll again in 1989 with Disintegration, ahead of De La Soul, the Stone Roses, the Pixies, New Order, NWA…). Worth noting because I have never understood the appeal of the Cure. While I am sure that Robert Smith is a good and friendly man, the Cure have always seemed to me as if they were chasing the tails of Joy Division and New Order two years too late. Thus “In Between Days” is really just New Order’s “Age Of Consent” and “Close To Me” is silliness which doesn’t really go anywhere particularly captivating. I know they are honoured as part of The Canon now, and I wouldn’t chuck out my copy of Pornography willy nilly, but…are they really that great?

D TRAIN
Single:
You’re The One For Me (Paul Hardcastle Remix) (27 Jul – 15)
Exactly twice as successful as it had been on its original release three years previously, this more or less recharted because of the Paul Hardcastle effect (see below). “You’re The One For Me” it was that inspired Hardcastle to start his career, but seeing him gurning at the camera in his Sue-We-Are-Not-Going-To-The-Isle-Of-Dogs-I’m-Off-To-Play-Cards-With-Den! perm on TOTP was somewhat offputting.

THE DAMNED
Singles:
Grimly Fiendish (30 Mar – 21)
The Shadow Of Love (22 Jun – 25)
Is It A Dream (21 Sep – 34)
The Damned had an unexpected commercial second wind in the mid-‘80s. Captain Sensible’s solo hits aside, their only previous Top 40 entry was with “Love Song” (#20 in 1979). By 1985 they were of course creatively bankrupt – “Grimly Fiendish” is a Goth xerox of Madness – but the fans seemed to like them. And in 1986 they finally made the top three with their misbegotten misinterpretation of Barry Ryan’s “Eloise.”

MILES DAVIS
Albums:
Live In Stockholm 1960 (with John Coltrane) (NME – 45)
You’re Under Arrest (NME – 43)
Single:
Time After Time (NME – 29)
With You’re Under Arrest, with its Sting cameo and Cyndi Lauper cover version, Miles came as near to the mainstream as he had done since the days of Bitches’ Brew. But like most Miles albums of the ‘80s, it’s merely a template for where he could take these tunes live on stage (certainly, seeing him at the Hammersmith Odeon, as was, in the mid-‘80s, he actually seemed to have a far firmer grasp of where to take the Go-Go rhythm than the likes of Trouble Funk ever achieved). A pity that this album’s predecessor, 1984’s Decoy, remains so underappreciated; it’s a superb record of neurotic funk noir, a place where A Certain Ratio could have gone, and a place where I think only Arthur Russell also went (see, for instance, Dinosaur L’s “Cornbelt”).

The 1960 Stockholm set similarly finds him in a place of transition/indecision; the band run through the Kind Of Blue/Milestones staples, but already Davis and Coltrane are both noticeably impatient; Davis is listening in his mind to what Hancock and Williams could do with this material, Coltrane palpably with one foot out of the group already, thinking about how much more this Elvin guy Mingus keeps telling him about could add to/underline what he’s playing.

DEAD OR ALIVE
Singles:
Lover Come Back To Me (20 Apr – 11)
In Too Deep (29 Jun – 14)
My Heart Goes Bang (Get Me To The Doctor) (21 Sep – 23)
They hit number one, of course, in March 1985 with “You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)” – a slow climb, as the record had entered the chart in November 1984 – which was one of many recyclings of “Blue Monday” produced by the nascent Stock/Aitken/Waterman team. None of the succeeding hits was anywhere near as memorable – all were stock Stock, so to speak – and by early 1987 the hits had ended in Britain, though Pete Burns continued to prosper in Japan and remains a witty and quick-minded presence, particularly useful when faced with misogynistic and homophobic programmes such as Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

DEBARGE
Single:
Rhythm Of The Night (30 Mar – 4)
Why Motown died.

DEPECHE MODE
Singles:
Shake The Disease (11 May – 18)
It’s Called A Heart (28 Sep – 18)
With only a singles compilation album to promote in 1985, Depeche Mode were comparatively quiet, and neither of these hits, while typically intelligent, was particularly remarkable.

DEXY’S MIDNIGHT RUNNERS
Album:
Don’t Stand Me Down (NME – 13)
The intractable problem is that I saw the second version of Dexy’s Midnight Runners performing the Projected Passion Revue at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh in August 1981, scarcely a month after my father had died and about two months before I was to leave Scotland for good. And it remains one of the most transcendent, nakedly brilliant shows I have ever seen – and one to which none of Dexy’s subsequent records has ever lived up.

Why should this be? The Projected Passion line-up didn’t last, and by the time Kevin Rowland assembled a new band he had refreshed his memory of Saint Dominic’s Preview and wanted fiddles in the line-up rather than horns. So Too-Rye-Ay is still a remarkably intense record, but there’s something missing. The horns, virtually replacing the guitar on Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, were mixed too far back to make any impact; the music in general is too polite to contain Rowland’s emotions.

Don’t Stand Me Down suffers from the same problems. Although three different mixes have now been made available, the album remains somewhat unsatisfying. This is no reflection on the performance of Rowland himself, who is on transcendent form throughout; yes I want to believe in the wordless bliss of “This Is What She’s Like,” I marvel at the post-Pinter dialogue, I applaud the fact that the album doesn’t quite know where it’s going, and I am touched by “Reminisce Part 2” (particularly where Rowland’s voice sounds as if it’s about to fall apart as he sings “I’ll say forever my love”). But the fact remains that the music doesn’t hit as hard as it should; apart from Vincent Crane’s organ stabs and the occasional snarl from Jimmy Paterson and Nicky Gatfield’s horns, everyone is just too damned civilised. It doesn’t overwhelm the listener as the first album did. It tends to sound like Jools Holland and his mates having a boogie woogie piano magic jam session whereas it should perhaps sound like the Brotherhood of Breath.

It is a problem which has not been resolved. The lush AoR backings work on My Beauty as they act as a wall against which Rowland can howl and scream his pop-as-psychotherapy autobiography as written by others. But with the new song “Manhood” and the new band in performance, the feeling persists that Rowland is just too good, too powerful, for ageing hacks like Neil Hubbard to cope with. I agree that Rowland’s “yes” halfway through “Manhood” is a moment of punctum, but what’s the point when it’s set against what might as well be a Clodagh Rodgers backing track?

DIO
Single:
Rock ‘N’ Roll Children (10 Aug – 26)
Something quite reassuring about the fact that Ronnie James Dio was still able to have hits in the mid-‘80s with songs called “Rock ‘N’ Roll Children.” Or alternatively something quite terrifying.

DIRE STRAITS
Singles:
So Far Away (20 Apr – 20)
Money For Nothing (6 Jul – 4)
Brothers In Arms (26 Oct – 16)
Quote from disgruntled gig-goer in the NME, circa November 1985: “I don’t really like Dire Straits, but I’ve got tickets to go and see them – at least they put on a show, not like all them little indie groups.”

Are Dire Straits the ultimate make-do-and-mend pop act, or at least up there with Dido? They’ll never be anyone’s favourite group, but they exist (or existed), and you know they’re good value for money (“Money For Nothing”!!) and you can sing along to their tunes, not like all those so-called rappers, I mean that’s not really music is it? They dare you to hate them and as such incite permanent hatred.

Maybe that’s not really fair. “Your Latest Trick” I do like, even if only because of Michael Brecker’s tenor or the Prefab Sprout-ish chord sequence. And the little Johnny Marr homage at the end of 1991’s “On Every Street” is bearable. But “bearable” is the key adjective. I suspect they don’t really “speak” to or for anyone, but because they are there, well we all have to make a living, and anyway Dido’s got such nice tunes, and yeah she could be singing about my LI-ife, and cut it off quick

DIVINE
Single:
Walk Like A Man (27 Apr – 23)
“You Think You’re A Man” (#16, 1984) was another SAW “Blue Monday” wannabe which succeeds as pop only because of the sheer force of Divine’s delivery. Prior to that the real innovative work (“Love Reaction” etc. – the stuff which actually influenced “Blue Monday”) had been done with Bobby O. He died not long after this tepid Four Seasons low-NRG retread.

DREAM ACADEMY
Single:
Life In A Northern Town (23 Mar – 15)
Yes the Dream Academy were pretty right-on, weren’t they? Poor old pure unsullied Northerners. Patronising rubbish. Nick Laird-Clowes was last sighted as the not-very-decided-fi Trashmonk.

STEPHEN “TIN TIN” DUFFY
Singles:
Kiss Me (2 Mar – 4)
Icing On The Cake (18 May – 14)
Meanwhile the Durannie I forgot to include above had his only real chart success this year. The Art of Noise people spruced up the old warhorse “Kiss Me” while “Diddy” David Hamilton was moved to describe “Icing On The Cake” as the best pop song written in the last 15 years. And I haven’t heard a single note of music played by the Lilac Time and I do not believe that any wisdom has been lost as a result of not doing so.

SHEILA E
Single:
The Belle Of St Mark (9 Feb – 18)
Britain still really wasn’t ready for Prince. This was the only Prince side-project which did anything commercially; “The Glamorous Life” was reissued as a follow-up but stiffed at #99; perhaps too rich for the watered-down pop tastes of 1985 (similarly, Sheena Easton’s “Sugar Walls,” a massive American hit, stalled at #85 in the UK).

ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN
Single:
Bring On The Dancing Horses (19 Oct – 21)
MM’s choice for single of the year; God knows what must have been in the drinks at the Oporto. A listless, lethargic trudge of a song; even Mac sounds as though he’s falling asleep.

EDDY AND THE SOUL BAND
Single:
Shaft (23 Feb – 13)
Dutch outfit whose discofied update had to compete with another version by Von Twist.

(Pause)

You know, some entries are easier to write than others.

EINSTURZENDE NEUBAUTEN
Album:
Halber Mensch (NME – 40)
Single:
Yu-Gung (NME – 50)
Haus der Luege (1989) remains their masterpiece, but this was Neubauten’s first attempt at entering the world. Following the limited shelf-life Dada of their early incarnations (drilling the ICA floor, etc.), Halber Mensch (with its extraordinary use of a choir on the title track) is a terrific and propulsive record, one perhaps informed by Blixa Bargeld’s simultaneous existence as a Bad Seed. And “Yu-Gung” (what’s Bargeld chanting? “Sister Marinego”?? Biba Kopf to blog) really ought to have been a hit. The CD also includes the single’s B-side, their deliciously minimal take on Lee Hazlewood’s “Sand,” and, conversely, perhaps the most extreme nine minutes of their recorded career in “Scraping.”

DAVID ESSEX
Single:
Falling Angels Rising (16 Feb – 29)
“We are falling angels rising” intones Essex gravely. “They say they’ll shoot us on sight.” What the fuck is he going on about? His last solo hit. (His chart career! What the fuck was he going on about?) (That’s meant as a compliment)

EURYTHMICS
Singles:
Would I Lie To You (20 Apr – 17)
There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) (6 Jul – 1)
Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves (with Aretha Franklin) (2 Nov – 9)
Oh Eurythmics, let me count the ways in which I hate you. I perhaps hate the cattle who bought your records more than I hate you. Give them the Associates, give them Japan, ABC, Was (Not Was), Art of Noise, Grace Jones…and what do they want? The fucking Tourists.

Be Yourself Tonight? Yes, that’s what our Annie and Dave decided – drop the pseudo-futurist synth spiel and reveal yourselves as the leather-trousered Marquee America-pandering dinosaur rockers you always were. And boy how “we” loved them doing it.

Where to start? How to end? The despicable “realness” of “Would I Lie To You.” The desecration of Elizabeth Frazer’s vocal visions which comprises the intro to “There Must Be An Angel” (and the Cocteaus’ own “Aikea Guinea” only made #41). Lennox’s rhyming of “thees” with “blees” in the same song. Stevie Wonder’s harmonica solo on the same song (can’t you discriminate?). And above and below everything else, the reprehensible, purulent pigswill of “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves,” the falsest and most detestable song ever written. Gangrenous goatfuckers! SUCKERS OF SATAN’S COCK!

(Pause)

I quite liked the first album though.

EVERTON 1985
Single:
Here We Go (The Official Team Record) (11 May – 14)
Guess which song this is. They lost. Officially the worst drum machine ever recorded – 50p out of Cash Converters?

THE FALL
Album:
This Nation’s Saving Grace (NME – 6)
Single:
Cruiser’s Creek/L.A. (NME – 26)
Just an inch below Hex Enduction Hour as their best album of the ‘80s, but the Fall really were at the top of their game throughout this record. Highlight: the astonishing “Paintwork” which achieves what only PiL had previously achieved in terms of sudden-onset varying intensity in “Memories.” And and the non-album single “Cruiser’s Creek” reminds us of a time when it was still worth buying singles.

HAROLD FALTERMEYER
Single:
Axel F (25 May – 2)
The theme from Beverly Hills Cop, as every schoolboy knows.

THE FAR CORPORATION
Single:
Stairway To Heaven (26 Oct – 8)
Frank Farian (he of Boney M and Milli Vanilli infamy) tries to make a quick buck by doing a Eurotrash cover of the Led Zep forces’ favourite (which itself was never released as a single in the UK). Strangely enough, he made a quick buck.

BRYAN FERRY
Album:
Boys And Girls (NME – 42)
Singles:
Slave To Love (11 May – 10)
Don’t Stop The Dance (31 Aug – 21)
“Don’t Stop The Dance” might be the saddest song in Ferry’s canon – sadder even than “Song For Europe,” for while in the latter there was least the acknowledgement of the existence of an Other (even though the affair had obviously ended), here, as elsewhere on his most successful solo album, Ferry is utterly alone in his Prospero’s cell, even if surrounded by the finest musicians his money can buy; they are all rendered anonymous by his self-inflicted aura. Here he is dancing with no one except himself, and it cannot stop – “or else I’ll die,” the single most stabbing moment with which he ever came up. Andy Mackay’s soprano sax sounds as though it’s already playing a funeral march. As though Ferry had already ceased to exist. He has become the world.

FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS
Singles:
Johnny Come Home (8 Jun – 8; NME – 16)
Blue (NME – 20)
Essentially the Beat with Roland Gift on vocals, “Johnny Come Home” was 1985’s “Smalltown Boy” – basically a rewrite of “Too Nice To Talk To” but none the worse for that. But 18 years of not having to listen to the awful “Blue” (a double meaning, you see – I feel blue and I hate the Tories! – which still didn’t stop it getting stuck at #41) have not weakened my quality of life.

FIVE STAR
Singles:
All Fall Down (4 May – 15)
Let Me Be The One (20 Jul – 18)
Love Take Over (14 Sep – 25)
Thatcherite pop demanded, above all else, efficiency. The career of Five Star was certainly brutal in its efficiency. Interviewed in Melody Maker in 1986, Doris Pearson opined that she couldn’t possibly marry anyone who earned less than £50,000 per annum: “Love is nice and all that, but we (italics are mine) have high standards which we would expect any potential husbands or wives to meet.” Was that the father talking, Jackson-style?

Buster Pearson, a ‘60s reggae producer of alleged note (if anyone knows anything about a single piece of music for which he had previously been responsible, please keep it to yourselves) had five children – three daughters and two sons, the same gender ratio as Steps – and was determined that they should Amount To Something. The above were their first three singles, and they became popular by sheer annoying persistence – always eager to turn up on daytime and children’s TV, always on time, always efficiently choreographed, always effectively empty. The big hits – “System Addict,” “Rain Or Shine,” “Can’t Wait Another Minute,” etc. – came in 1986/7, and with the possible exception of Jon Wilde, who at the time valiantly tried to build an aesthetic case for their Silk And Steel album in Sounds, I doubt whether many people remember a single note of them. Functional, anaemic white-bre(a)d pop-soul with a touch of electro here, a splash of low-budget SOS Band there, but nothing to upset Will Hay. Could the Pearsons even remember a single word they sang? Did they believe in any of it?

Perhaps they still do. The wind changed; they tried to harden up in 1988, but succeeded only in hardening up in the manner of rigor mortis. The hits ended and the Pearsons were compelled to do a midnight flit from their mansion to dodge the bailiffs. Since then they have floated around in various configurations – US-only album releases (well, one in 1995), looking uncomfortable in nostalgia tour packages – as yet more proof of the fact that unregulated free market capitalism only rewards those it wants to, and very few others besides.

JOHN FOGERTY
Album:
Centerfield (NME – 12)
An agreeably arid romp, entirely sung, played and produced by himself, and Fogerty’s first romp of any description for a decade. Highlights: the Jonathan Richman-esque grade 1 sax solo on “Rock ‘N’ Roll Girls,” the lyrical “shuffle off to Buffalo” reference in the same song, and the unresolved high-register guitar refrain which ends “The Old Man Down The Road.”

FOREIGNER
Single:
That Was Yesterday (6 Apr – 28)
“I Want To Know What Love Is” was the first “new” number one of 1985, displacing Band Aid. The parent album in question was nearly produced by Trevor Horn (see directly below) and more typical of its contents (which is not to recommend the ghastly glorified campfire singalong that is “I Want To Know What Love Is”) is this midden of a pseudo-melodramatic ballad whose main melody inadvertently anticipates Europe’s unforgettable (I’ve spent 17 years trying) “The Final Countdown.”

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
Single:
Welcome To The Pleasure Dome (An Alternative To Reality) (30 Mar – 2)
GRACE JONES
Single:
Slave To The Rhythm (12 Oct – 12)
PROPAGANDA
Album:
A Secret Wish (NME – 28)
Single:
Duel (4 May – 21)
What place was there for ZTT in 1985? Not much of one – a bedsit rather than a penthouse. And yet four ZTT acts appeared in the Top 40 over 1985, the fourth being Art of Noise (before they jumped ship and fatally added a definite article) whose “Close (To The Edit),” having entered the chart in November 1984, climbed to #8 in February 1985, a mere 18 months after its initial release on the Into Battle EP.

But the moment of punctum had passed. Faced with the suffocating sincerity of SS Geldof and the accompanying return of “authenticity” to pop, ZTT was deemed an unnecessary luxury, its product perceived as somewhat hammy, perhaps already a little creaky in its gratuitous grandiloquence – and not entirely unfairly. What point was there, for example, to Frankie Goes To Hollywood after their first three singles? Sex, death/war/sex, religion/love/sex; they had completed their own immaculately equilateral triangle. Before their first album was released there was talk of making it a triple box set (Escalator Over The Hill?) with none of the singles included. But then – well, listen to side four of Welcome To The Pleasure Dome with FGTH doing the rest of their actual repertoire, and there’s no avoidance of the compost crapness of these songs. Then again, they had to be crap – what could Trevor Horn have possibly brought to, say, the Smiths (for the probable answer, see Belle and Sebastian’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress)? Listen to “Relax” and “Two Tribes” as done in session for the Janice Long Show, without Horn’s words or Morley’s music, and one is flabbergasted by just how hopeless a band they were.

And what the hell was “Welcome To The Pleasure Dome” doing as a single? On the album it needs its 14 minutes; as a slowly unfolding electronic oasis it’s certainly shares at least a postcode with Gil Evans’ “There Comes A Time” (even if much of it was recycled by Horn from an abandoned Steve Howe solo album). But it can never be a single; as a single, it still managed to reach #2 on sheer momentum. Nonetheless the death throes were already taking a firm grasp (for the first five minutes after death, see Holly Johnson’s 1989 #1 solo album Blast - was the title a jibe at ZTT via Wyndham Lewis? Would Holly even have had the wit to think of that? – and for the post mortem, Stan Boardman’s voiceovers on the unbought second FGTH album, Liverpool; hear especially the latter in tandem with Michael Jayston’s voiceovers on Saint Etienne’s Finisterre, and wonder how Saint Etienne got it so bloody right and ZTT, in the middle, didn’t).

Then there was Propaganda. A Secret Wish remains a fine album but is compromised by the absence of the band’s Third Way (Andreas Thein) and the absence of Horn himself – he delegated production duties to Steve Lipson, whose Hornisms are efficient, but not much more. On both levels does “Dr Mabuse” leap out of its surroundings and grab you by the neck. Nonetheless, readers may be surprised at the low chart showing of “Duel” – or, as it should have been listed, “Duel/Jewel”; one side giving us Abba/Mael heaven, the other side the same song after Abba have gone to hell and shared a needle with Darby Crash, or at the very least Ian Curtis. A lacklustre TOTP appearance was partly to blame, but really its peak position of 21 was appropriate for the mores of 1985 – there is no place for sex or mischief in the Top 20 of 1985; this is the time when pop stars have to start meaning it, because of course children are dying. A mere 12 months after FGTH’s one-two punch at the top of the chart with “Relax” and “Two Tribes,” it already seemed as though a century had passed. Propaganda got to number 21 for a reason.

And anagrammatise the number 21, and you get the number 12, which is where Horn’s greatest and truest achievement – Grace Jones’ “Slave To The Rhythm” – found its commercial battery had run out prematurely following a dazzling start. Thus equally there was no place in the top ten – twice removed – for the greatest number one single of all time; Jones’ billionfold-amplified breathing turning the song into a proclamation from the gods, Horn’s architecture all in perfectly imperfect (De Chirico?) perspective; and for once, artist and producer need each other – Grace needs Trevor to breathe, Trevor needs Grace to blow the world up into a lifesize replica. The triple flute figures underpinned by French horns; the systematic crescendo leading to Grace announcing herself, Grace applauding herself, Grace beatifying herself – “And now, ladies and gentlemen” (where are the audience? where is the singer?)…”here’s Grace.”

And then, just as the cheers abruptly cease as McGoohan is elected No 2 in the “Free For All” episode of The Prisoner, precisely because the Villagers have outguessed him and know that he has no real power (even though the series’ whole premise turns out to be that he does), thus does silence rapidly fall; the beat breaks, the Fairlight decelerates, words like “slave” and “rhythm” are cut loose – apart from the odd maraca crack as death rattle (cf. “The Electrician” by the Walker Brothers) everyone seems to have gone to the moon. Grace’s final reversed intake of breath is akin to God having second thoughts and swallowing up the universe for his supper. And where could anyone, let alone ZTT, have gone from there?

DOUG E FRESH AND THE GET FRESH CREW
Single:
The Show (9 Nov – 7)
Not quite the future yet, human beatbox or not; if hip hop was going to chart, it still had to take the form of novelty (“Inspector Gadget” quotations). Kind of sounded like the future in the winter of 1985, but two weeks later I heard “Rock The Bells” and realised what the future really was.

GLENN FREY
Singles:
The Heat Is On (23 Feb – 12)
Smuggler’s Blues (15 Jun – 22)
DON HENLEY
Single:
The Boys Of Summer/A Month Of Sundays (19 Jan – 12)
The Eagles are hated because they made it and the Flying Burrito Brothers didn’t. The Eagles are loved because – well, why? How come Hotel California did so phenomenally well in Britain? America one can obviously understand, but what did we see in them? A Ford Cortina soundtrack for Reggie Perrin’s wife to dream the graveyard of suburbia away? More pertinently, how can nine-year-old Sheila Behman singing “Desperado” on the Langley Schools Music Project project make me cry, and the remainder of the Eagles’ work, together or separately, make me sleep?

The bitter truth at the heart of Behman’s rendition of “Desperado” may be that in her innocence, the schoolgirl has cut through the smug cocaine bullshit of the original song – those tiresome playing card metaphors – and seen right through to its hollow heart. Instead she sings a song in her head which may approximate “Desperado” but is clearly the song Don Henley should have written. She kills the clichés so that music can breathe again.

Henley? I just don’t get him. He sounds so pissed off about everything that he might be the Victor Meldrew of AoR; whether it’s the bargain-basement Simple Minds/Lindsey Buckingham mongrel of “Dirty Laundry” (hear his climactic “We all know that crap is king!” – he must have felt like the natural heir to John Lydon when he dreamed that lyric up) and throughout his skeletal oeuvre it’s the same story – that Deadhead sticker should be his oxygen mask rather than a Cadillac bumper magnet. He wants so much to be pop’s Raymond Carver, but we had to wait for Kurt Wagner before that particular persona turned up. Maybe gormless Glenn Frey had the right idea – do cynical songs for Beverly Hills Cop and Miami Vice, pick up the cheque (And it sounds as though Arthur Russell used the rhythm track of “The Heat Is On” as the basis for his own divine “It’s Us/Wild Conversation”). But Henley – what did Stevie Nicks see in him? Was he ever capable of even a capsule of the passion and electricity of a song like “Silver Springs”?

FULL FORCE
Singles:
I Wonder If I Take You Home (Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam with Full Force) (3 Aug – 12)
Alice, I Want You Just For Me! (21 Dec – 9)
Whatever happened to Full Force? They were great; among the most inventive pop producers of 1985 (not that there was much competition) and it’s high time their work was properly anthologised. Content yourself here, however, with the sublime stutter of Lisa Lisa’s “I Wonder If I Take You Home” and the bumptious burping of “Alice,” and look forward to their masterpiece, the Real Roxanne and Howie Tee’s “Bang Zoom (Let’s Go Go)” in 1986. Oh yes, I remember what happened to them – they did a lame electro album with James Brown in 1988 (“I’m Real” – just before he went off on a gun-toting car chase with his missus).

SOPHIA GEORGE
Single:
Girlie Girlie (7 Dec – 7)
The sort of winsome little-girl-lost slice of pop-reggae which is allowed to be a hit every year. And yet Louisa Marks’ “Caught You In A Lie” was never a hit.

GO WEST
Singles:
We Close Our Eyes (23 Feb – 5)
Call Me (11 May – 12)
Goodbye Girl (3 Aug – 25)
Don’t Look Down – The Sequel (23 Nov – 13)
In my archive of 1980s Melody Maker issues there is a classic photograph of David Stubbs pictured with the two halves of Go West. Following an interview in which Peter Cox and Richard Drummie cheerfully confirmed that Go West were all about such original concepts as “soul,” “passion” and “honesty,” the good Mr Stubbs stands in the centre of the picture, flanked by Cox and Drummie bearing bumptious grins. Stubbs looks as though he has truly witnessed sorrow beyond the realms of human comprehension and wishes to shield his eyes from all future manifestations of such baseness.

Go West can fairly be said to be the first commercially successful pop group since 1977 who owed absolutely nothing to punk. Dave Rimmer fingers Wham! as the point of departure, but even in their earlier days they briefly wanted to be the Specials, and “Wham Rap” with its pro-dole lyrics is the slightly naff elder brother of Bow Wow Wow’s “W.O.R.K. (No No My Daddy Don’t).” But Go West’s ancestry traced to points nowhere near the Roxy or CBGBs; rather to what New Pop would have sounded like without Morley or Barthes – an unironic salute to American AoR with a Touch Of “Soul” (like “soul”-flavoured Smarties). Thus did their songs sound BIG and SKYSCRAPER-LIKE; pushing all the most convenient Linn drum buttons and never knowing why. And Christ on a rope, how the boys at Radio 1 loved them – “Turn! This! UP!” exclaimed Gary Davies whenever he played “Don’t Look Down.” We should have pushed the fuckers anyway.

GODLEY AND CRÈME
Single:
Cry (23 Mar – 19)
Just about the last musical gasp from G&C before they concentrated on video full time (though Lol Crème temporarily rematerialised in the 1999 Art of Noise) and this Horn-produced recycling of “Wedding Bells” (“You don’t even know how to say goodbye!”) worked nicely in tandem with its flexiface video. Its climactic speeded-up “CRY!” sends 10cc’s canon into a loop and regresses us straight back to “Neanderthal Man.”

JAKI GRAHAM
Singles:
Could It Be I’m Falling In Love (with David Grant) (23 Mar – 5)
Round And Around (29 Jun – 9)
Mated (with David Grant) (16 Nov – 20)
To paraphrase Mr Grant at the beginning of his career: “I wonder what you’re doing now?” Well, we all know what Grant is doing now – flogging lame Fame Academy spin-off videos (“You Can Sing!” With special appearances from celebrities, i.e. a Fame Academy finalist and Melanie C, whose recording contract was recently terminated. Almost as irritating a commercial on Christmas TV as the DFS advert or the Harry Corry Interiors advert [“The Janu-Harry sale starts Friday!” – I wish to see no more of the horrors of this world]).

Back in 1985, although Grant had fatally scuppered his own career by turning into a Godhead and agreeing with Mike Read about banning “Relax” (see also post-Limahl Kajagoogoo, or rather don’t), he still had the merest of foots in the Britfunk door. Both the duets with Jaki Graham were drivel, but Graham herself was an undervalued Britsoul singer – “Round And Around” is a fine single, and 1986’s “Breaking Away” with its unexpected chord changes was even better – and should have achieved more.

CURTIS HAIRSTON
Single:
I Want Your Lovin’ (Just A Little Bit) (27 Apr – 13)
Goodish electrosoul in the old style which had already flopped in the autumn of ’83. I doubt that I shall ever listen to it again.

DARYL HALL AND JOHN OATES
Single:
Method Of Modern Love (2 Feb – 21)
Their greatest album (the Arthur Baker-produced Big Bam Boom) which contained two of their greatest singles (the astonishing “Out Of Touch” and the only marginally less astonishing “Adult Education”). So what does the British public do? Why it goes out and makes a hit out of the album’s worst track (“Method Of Modern Love”). Silly British public!

JAN HAMMER
Single:
Miami Vice Theme (12 Oct – 5)
Well the TV show was about immaculate blankness, so I’m not going to spoil that aura by saying anything about this top five hit composed and performed by the ex-Mahavishnu Orchestra keyboardist in October 1985!

(Pause)

Although, given the wrong circumstances, his #2 hit from 1987, “Crockett’s Theme,” might be one of the saddest songs ever to make the Top 40.

PAUL HARDCASTLE
Singles:
19 (4 May – 1)
Just For Money (9 Nov – 19)
There’s no getting around it or beyond it; “19” by Paul Hardcastle, 18 years after it became an international chart-topper, is one of the most stupid, irresponsible and reprehensible records ever to make the charts. Why? Why attack this and not “Two Tribes”? Perhaps because Trevor Horn had no bones about the latter: “We didn’t give a fuck about World War III; we just wanted to play around with the idea of nuclear destruction!” But of course no piece of art, however blank it prepares itself to be, can ever be entirely divorced from emotion, and by “playing” with the concept of nuclear destruction, “Two Tribes” becomes a deeply emotional record – Chris Barrie doing Ronald Reagan doing Hitler in the dock after the Beer Hall Putsch still chills the blood, and Patrick Allen’s Protect And Survive voiceovers are truly frightening in their deliberate absurdity. Why is “Two Tribes” transcendent? Barrie as Reagan whispering, suddenly frail and frightened, “I don’t want to die” just before he is drowned in the storms of FGTH’s rendition of “War” – as a concept, as a record of two sides, it works brilliantly.

But with “19” there’s no evidence that Hardcastle gives a fuck about, or even understands, what happened in Vietnam. Although I am sure it was put together with the utmost of good intentions and sincerity, as a listening experience it feels detached, uncaring, cold. All that happens is that a late-night Nam documentary is cut up into danceable forms, soundtracked only by a melody so close to the fugue section of Tubular Bells that Mike Oldfield sued, and – worse than any of this – a gormless female backing vocal chorus uttering the most banal of platitudes, culminating in “De-de-de-de-de/De-de-de-deSTRUCTION!” Certainly a con in that deCONstruction. Similarly, the video simply cuts up the documentary footage with equally idiotic large red number 19s and equally moronic large red DESTRUCTIONs flashing across the screen intermittently. Pain and death as a lifestyle option, to pretend that you care.

Compare the cynical Hardcastle with Tom Clay’s “What The World Needs Now Is Love/Abraham, Martin And John” single from 1971, where the DJ cut up segments of JFK, Martin Luther King and RFK – speeches, assassinations, TV commentaries and funeral orations – against Gene Page’s choral and orchestral MoR arrangements. It should come across on paper as the corniest of records, but in fact is one of the most deeply moving singles ever made, if only because of the prologue and epilogue where Clay himself appears, asking an infant classroom the meanings of words like hatred and prejudice (to the latter, one kid replies: “Mmm…I think it’s when people are sick.” The record stops dead). Because the artist himself appears and justifies the record’s existence.

There was also controversy that Hardcastle might have been listening too closely to Tackhead’s “What’s My Mission Now?” which was released a couple of months earlier (see Gary Clail’s cackles of “Saigon!” on the Tackhead Tape Time album mix of the track), although to these ears Sherwood and LeBlanc’s John Wayne cut-ups are just as cynical – it is only when Mark Stewart makes himself known that the Tackhead/On-U Sound set-up really works. In any case, Hardcastle’s coldness was confirmed by a very cynical follow-up single which cast the hapless Bob Hoskins as several Great Train Robbers and Al Capone (?!) and the ailing Lord Olivier as the Edgar Lustgarten-esque narrator. Guess what position it got to!

DAN HARTMAN
Single:
I Can Dream About You (24 Aug – 12)
Late momentary resurgence for the “Instant Replay”/”Relight My Fire” man – a fine record too, strangely reminiscent of Hot Chocolate in Hartman’s vocal delivery and verse construction. Sadly he died from AIDS - in the same black weekend in 1994 which also saw the premature passing of Kurt Cobain, Bill Hicks, John Candy and Lee Brilleaux.

WHITNEY HOUSTON
Single:
Saving All My Love For You (16 Nov – 1)
Material’s 1982 One Down album is a wretched affair, but worth hanging on to if only for the closing track – a rendition of Hugh Hopper’s song “Memories” performed by a very young Whitney Houston with typically acidic accompaniment from Archie Shepp’s tenor. It’s a direction which I wish she could have explored more – her quivering exclamation of “I want you, I want you in me” suggests a depth which her subsequent pop career never really required her to revisit.

It’s something of a shame that Houston has been Bateman-branded as symbolic of the worst excesses of ‘80s mainstream pop (or that she has subsequently branded herself with far more fervour), because then we are in danger of missing out on some of the decade’s most sublime mainstream pop. “Saving All My Love” is atypical, but in her vocal performance Houston is careful to stop just short of going overboard and blends very well with the tenor sax (the far more malleable Tom Scott). And in any case it’s a terrific song, as Lester Bowie correctly saw when his Brass Fantasy drew out the sexual subtext in their cover version (on 1986’s Avant Pop album). Houston is one of the few mainstream female singers to come to prominence in the ‘80s who seems to produce emotion naturally, as opposed to the 48-notes-where-two-would-have-done melisma overdoses favoured by Carey, Dion and Co. And subsequent hits like “How Will I Know?” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” are superb updates of Brill Building teenpop – Ellie Greenwich would have been proud to write either.

Which all fuels further the key question – Bobby Brown notwithstanding, how did it all go so wrong for Houston in the ‘90s?

HUSKER DU
Albums:
New Day Rising (NME – 9)
Flip Your Wig (NME – 33)
Single:
Makes No Sense At All (NME – 23)
Possibly Hüsker Dü’s prolificity in the mid-‘80s has worked against their durability in the long term. So many albums – seven in four years, two of which were doubles – and as yet no compilation to, so to speak, make sense of it all. Thus they seem to have faded slightly into the shadows – one of those bands who are occasionally spoken of as an indistinct influence, but a band to whom I suspect few are currently listening.

All of this is a pity, for at the time it was difficult to underestimate the seismic impact which Hüsker Dü made on rock in general. Venturing far beyond anything of which British rock at the time seemed to be capable – can you imagine the Jesus and Mary Chain coming up with something like “Reoccurring Dreams”? – the directness and hard-hitting qualities of Hüsker Dü’s music were beyond question a wake-up call, as the opening title track of New Day Rising makes abundantly clear. No other rock music at the time was as clear in its enormousness as that of Hüsker Dü. Songs like “The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill” seem to stem from a different (if parallel) planet to anything else happening in 1985 – and let us not forget that Hüsker Dü were capable of writing great songs.

Of their two 1985 albums, New Day Rising is the more coherent and exciting; Flip Your Wig is marginally less intense, but does include “Makes No Sense At All,” a shoo-in for number one had it been released in, say, 1994. Out of their oeuvre, however, the two doubles - Zen Arcade (1984) and Warehouse: Songs And Stories (1987) – are the places to start. And while I’m here, let us not underestimate the quiet brilliance of Bob Mould’s 1989 Workbook or forget that “JC Auto” from Sugar’s 1993 Beaster mini-epic might be the most painfully intense five minutes of rock music ever recorded.

BILLY IDOL
Singles:
White Wedding (13 Jul – 6)
Rebel Yell (14 Sep – 6)
The former William Broad still has his fervent supporters, but I was never one of them – I didn’t mind 1984’s roughed-up OMD of “Eyes Without A Face,” but these, his two biggest hits, seem to be nothing more than radio-friendly xeroxes of a notion which at a distant time might once have been termed “punk.” Everything touched by producer Keith Forsey (see Simple Minds below) seems to handcuff itself to a plod.

JAMES INGRAM WITH MICHAEL McDONALD
Single:
Yah Mo B There (12 Jan – 12)
Here if only to remind Go West of How It Actually Should Be Done. Two great voices who don’t have to try, the ineffable, inalienable songwriting genius of Rod Temperton and the continued, Miro-like awareness of spatiality of producer Quincy Jones.

THE INSPIRATIONAL CHOIR WITH THE ROYAL CHORAL SOCIETY
Single:
Abide With Me (14 Dec – 36)
THE WINANS
Single:
Let My People Go (NME – 34)
What’s the point of gospel choirs, I ask you? Isn’t it irritating when TV people drag them out for no good reason, just like every maverick TV policeman/detective is a closet jazz fan, and it’s always Michael Parkinson’s idea of jazz, never Valerie Wilmer’s? The gospel choir at Billy and Little Mo’s wedding in EastEnders, for example – no it was not a fucking surprise; Little Mo would in reality have been bored out of her tits, wishing that they could have afforded to get Busted. Gospel just drags music down into pseudo-righteousness. Another example! The recent Gospel Choir competition on GMTV! Every morning for what seemed like 95 months, poor old Eamonn Holmes had to pretend to be interested in this morning’s interchangeable gospel choir for five minutes and politely applaud. Were GMTV obliged to fill some obscure EC-imposed quota or something? No, it’s because the 45-year-old Tristrams of TV are all polluted by Hornbyism – that gospel is somehow still “authentic,” even though Ray Charles denuded and raped it half a century ago, it’s PROPER MUSIC and frankly we have had enough proper music to stock 1800 branches of Waterstone’s. POP SHOULD BE IMPROPER.

IRON MAIDEN
Singles:
Running Free (Live Version) (5 Oct – 19)
Run To The Hills (Live Version) (14 Dec – 26)
Call it intuition, but I faintly suspect that Iron Maiden might have had a live album to promote in 1985.

JERMAINE JACKSON
Single:
Do What You Do/Tell Me I’m Not Dreaming (9 Feb – 6)
Jermaine’s only hit of consequence apart from “Let’s Get Serious” – a bland ballad which was really bought for the other half of the double A-side, that year’s annual neurotic duet with Michael Jackson (cf. Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me,” #6 12 months previously).

RONALD SHANNON JACKSON AND THE DECODING SOCIETY
Album:
Decode Yourself (NME – 39)
MICK JAGGER
Single:
Just Another Night (16 Feb – 32)
Two more examples of how Bill Laswell had no idea how to produce a record; and Laswell himself is generally the proof of the dictum that assembling dream bands of musicians is a pastime which should be kept within underused minds of impressionistic teenagers. Laswell’s productions reduce everything to a formulaic Esperanto soup; all the sounds end up in the fuzzy middle ground with neither top nor bottom (certainly for a bassist, his records are curiously bassless). Even the most cursory of listens to records he made with Sly and Robbie (Language Barrier, Rhythm Killers), Fela Kuti (Army Arrangement), Motorhead (Orgasmatron) and PiL (Album - how can a band which included both Ginger Baker and Tony Williams on drums end up sounding so anaemic?) will confirm that he didn’t have the slightest clue about how to approach a record, let alone make one.

Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society seemed a good idea at the time. Less diffuse in make-up and manifesto than Ornette’s Prime Time, Shannon Jackson seemed to be about the only improv drummer at the time with the slightest interest in nailing the rhythm as well as stretching it. But was he actually that great? Note that in Prime Time he was one of two drummers; with the Cecil Taylor Unit (One Too Many, Salty Swift And Not Goodbye) he merely follows Cecil’s lead rather than challenging it. And everywhere you hear him, mostly what you are hearing is a trademark clipclop gallop. Admittedly, on the title track of Decode Yourself the build-up through the chorus until both Jackson and Vernon Reid’s guitar simultaneously cut loose is genuinely exciting, but how much better it would have been if it didn’t sound as though the microphone had been left out on the balcony (Liam Watson should have recorded them). In any case, Reid’s subsequent career with Living Colour has shown him to be a no-trick pony, and everyone else here seems too timid; even the usually forceful Melvin Gibbs has to share bass duties (to no great audible effect) with the Reverend Bruce Johnson.

Jackson was better within the context of Bill Frisell’s Power Tools trio; the altered musical landscape (as Sinker described them: “the Jimi Hendrix Experience in negative”) forces him to relinquish his usual tricks and for a change concentrate. But in Last Exit (which seemed the greatest of all ideas at the time), Laswell and Jackson repeatedly drag the group’s freedom into bluesy bogs of turgidity when you simply want to hear Brötzmann and Sharrock blasting into outer space.

Mick Jagger’s She’s The Boss album proved that Laswell knew nothing about pop, either. Dreadful, anonymous, ‘phoned-in Holiday Inn ‘80s “rock” which even the collapsing bass in the instrumental break of “Just Another Night” cannot rectify.

JASON AND THE SCORCHERS
Album:
Lost And Found (NME – 38)
LOS LOBOS
Album:
Will The Wolf Survive (NME – 24)
Single:
How Will The Wolf Survive?/Don’t Worry Baby (NME – 42)
The “Paisley Underground” was passionately hyped in the music press of 1985 but none of it made its way into the charts or end-of-year polls. Pretty much a uniform precursor of Americana, the best group of the group (the Dream Syndicate) went unheralded, while the Long Ryders, Rain Parade, Opal (Mazzy Star as would be), etc., more or less went nowhere (Sid Griffin’s comment that the Pistols were dumb to get rid of Matlock because he loved the Beatles showed how little he understood the inarticulable magic and alchemy of pop. The Pistols might have been dumb to get rid of Matlock, but not for that reason), preferring to surrender into another imposed fantasy of “authenticity” which has directly led to today’s surfeit of middle-class college graduates breaking bottles of tequila at the barbed wire crossroads.

The above two acts were usually associated with this proto-Americana movement , but neither was really part of it; instead they were glorified bar bands (indeed the highlight of Lost And Found is “Broken Whiskey Bottle”) and, in the case of Los Lobos, ultimately a one-novelty-hit wonder (“La Bamba” - #1, 1987). “How Will The Wolf Survive?” is as laboured in its analysis of decay as “The Boys Of Summer;” “Don’t Worry Baby” merely a grotesque insult to its author.

THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN
Album:
Psychocandy (NME – 1)
Singles:
Never Understand (NME – 1)
Just Like Honey (NME – 2)
You Trip Me Up (NME – 6)
PRIMAL SCREAM
Single:
All Fall Down (NME – 21)
Note the lack of corresponding chart positions for the above records (Psychocandy reached #31; the three singles peaked at 47, 45 and 53 respectively). I would further note Jon Savage’s recent comment to me that “the JaMC didn’t make it.” And I doubt whether they even intended to make it. By the time they were scoring major chart hits (starting with 1986’s “Some Candy Talking”) the permutations of their one song had already been wrung dry; indeed it may well be that “Never Understand” (morose half-beat glam with feedback) and “Just Like Honey” (barbed wire ballad with female backing vocalist and no feedback) are the only Jesus and Mary Chain songs you will ever need to hear.

A generation on, it’s clear that the Mary Chain were what we might term conservative anarchists. From the B-side of their debut single (a cover of Syd Barrett’s “Vegetable Man”) they were already too much in thrall to tradition, to respect for their record collections. In the Glasgow of 1984 it was easy to believe that they represented radicalism, a fist in the faces of dullard Glasgow club promoters, that any feedback was infinitely preferable to Nik Jones or Howard Kershaw, of making do and mend (again).

For about five minutes Psychocandy seemed exciting; Andy Gill commented in his NME review that the feedback represented the confusion and ecstasy of falling in love far more accurately than the dippy Hallmark card clichés evident elsewhere in pop at the time. But avoiding cliché doesn’t avoid you from inventing new clichés, and the Mary Chain were quick to do the latter. It represented a dead end from which “indie” took almost a decade to recover, and in addition more or less laid the template for ‘90s Britpop – sound new, but actually be very old indeed. Even in 1985, Husker Du rocked more fiercely (and wrote better songs), Sonic Youth had a better grasp of where to take guitar “noise,” the Swans at their most authoritarian made the Mary Chain at their most ferocious seem like Timmy Mallett, Kate Bush was just more radical, Prefab Sprout better at talking candy. Kevin Rowland ranting about “the scum from Notting Hill and Moseley – they’re called the CND” was more directly confrontational in 1985 than anything the Mary Chain could muster, either then or subsequently (“I wanna die like JFK” they were mewling as late as 1992). Eventually, of course, My Bloody Valentine took up the feedback slack and took the Mary Chain’s stance into genuinely new waters.

Bobby Gillespie, perhaps realising this, bailed out early and concentrated on Primal Scream. Their debut single “All Fall Down,” however, was beyond twee. And the subsequent career of Primal Scream has not disproved the notion that they have always been at root a conservative rock group; everything “radical” about their records has been down to external input (Weatherall, Wobble, the Orb, Shields, Sumner) – take out the outsiders and you have…Emotional Rescue. Only on “Don’t Fight It, Feel It” do they, for five brief minutes, stop being Primal Scream.

I wrote the above in some frustration, having played Psychocandy for the first time in maybe 15 years and blaming it for everything that went wrong thereafter; but before I had seen Lost In Translation. In essence it may be the shallowest of films – a crossbreed of Brief Encounter, The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone, The Accidental Tourist and Vertigo, foreigners stuck in a nameless state of ennui, who never dare express the possibility that love may not happen – but how shallow is Tokyo? The opening section, where Bill Murray is driven into the neon-lit city, is enchanting enough to make you want to book the next airline ticket out; the emptiness which follows can, the characters know, never really be filled; Murray and Scarlett Johansson can go out to karaoke bars, but…Murray’s expression and resignable tenor while singing Ferry’s “More Than This” (“you know there’s nothing”) admit that nothing’s wrong except what we choose to make wrong. They cannot bond sexually, are prevented from doing so by the lack of incentive from their respective other halves. Murray’s wife merely tries to look after the kids and keep the house in order (the burgundy carpet sample); Johansson’s photographer husband is a little scatterbrained, a wee bit self-obsessed, and always running off to assignments, but essentially he is not a bad man. The fax which he sends through to his wife at the film’s end expresses, in its cute and clumsy way, the emotions he himself cannot.

But will the wife respond? Note the expression on Johansson’s face as she turns back to camera after she realises that Murray has gone back into his car and back to the airport; it is as full of grief as Emma Thompson on the bus in the rain in The Remains Of The Day.

The key moments in the film are (a) when Murray and Johansson are lying in bed, chewing the fat, both lonely insomniacs – Murray puts his hand on Johansson’s foot (the same one for which he insisted on taking her to hospital to have treated) and says quietly, “You’re not hopeless”; and (b) the two moments when Murray and Johansson, both alone, transcend their environment – Johansson goes off for a reverie among the temples of Kyoto (the family strolling through the temple gardens, so reminiscent of Julie Andrews’ surrogate mother leading the von Trapp kids in The Sound Of Music, a film about the efforts of someone to lead a bereaved and suicidal man back into the world by means of reinvesting new meanings in music, by showing that music, and therefore life, can still matter) while Murray plays a solo round of golf in the shadow of Mount Fuji. It almost looks like a studio backdrop, and he purposely tees a ball off in its direction as if to prove to the audience that it isn’t – it is seemingly detached from the rest of the film, and yet is actually its centrepiece; the only moment when Murray is actually satisfied and happy with life, on the green, in the sunshine, alone.

The experience helps both of them to get by this awkward business of living. And the film glides to a graceful (if semi-grieving) close as a song is played to sum up the state of uncertain humanity. The song in question is “Just Like Honey” by the Jesus and Mary Chain; and in that instant, it suddenly seemed as if this song had started to matter again. In terms also of recent commentary by another blogger on the minimalist dub ethic in Psychocandy - this may mean that I will have to apply myself to this record, and to the Jesus and Mary Chain, again.

ELTON JOHN
Singles:
Act Of War (with Millie Jackson) (15 Jun – 32)
Nikita (12 Oct – 3)
Wrap Her Up (7 Dec – 12)
What is the point of liberating a poor oppressed Russian girl (in the year of glasnost) if you are only going to “wrap her up” and “drag her down on her knees”? In the latter instance we have the illness-inducing and frankly hypocritical spectacle of Elton John and George Michael having their way with said unfortunate female (Michael also appears in the distance on “Nikita” which additionally “boasts” Nik Kershaw on rhythm guitar). And you thought that Wyngarde’s “Rape” was extreme?

ALED JONES
Single:
Walking In The Air (23 Nov – 5)
Raymond Briggs’ work is about nothing except death. Its meaning only exists in the knowledge that everything beautiful – a snowman, a polar bear, his parents – will eventually no longer exist. I am unsure whether by extension Briggs is saying no to life; merely that even now I cannot watch or read any of his work for fear that it will reawaken ideations for which I now have no need. I felt the same way watching the new adaptation of The Mayor Of Casterbridge on ITV at Xmas. Make one mistake – even if that mistake is being born, let alone getting pissed and auctioning off your wife – and the “President of the Immortals” will have his sport with you, although you might choose to interpret that as Thomas Hardy being a sadistic bastard who gets off on making his characters suffer. At least you might think that a feasible interpretation if you knew nothing about Hardy’s life, about the spectre of Emma Gifford which finally swallowed him up, if you do not know that Laura’s dad makes a cameo appearance in pages 74-75 of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse mystery Death Is Now My Neighbour quoting Hardy’s A Photograph (this scene sadly did not survive the TV adaptation). The question is: at this moment in time, do I need to be reminded of Thomas Hardy? I would do ill not to keep him in mind; to remember that the damaged visionaries (Jude) always decline and the dullards (Donald Farfrae, Gabriel Oak) end up running the world.

HOWARD JONES
Singles:
Things Can Only Get Better (9 Feb – 6)
Look Mama (20 Apr – 10)
Life In One Day (29 Jun – 14)
NIK KERSHAW
Singles:
Wide Boy (16 Mar – 9)
Don Quixote (3 Aug – 10)
When A Heart Beats (30 Nov – 27)
Irresistible to tie the two carpetbaggers together, isn’t it (preferably in a carpet)? The only thing you need to know is Howard Jones’ wedding photo from 1976; there he is in feathercut hair, Colin Hunt spectacles, lapels as airstrips, a neck haemorrhage of a tie. Still he recently undid some of the horror by means of his work with the Sugababes (although that’s now nearly two years ago) so the diminutive failed jazz-rock guitarist from Colchester whom Mike Smith repeatedly called, in his repulsive clenched teeth singsong voice, “Nin Kinshin” still awaits redemption. And he’ll be awaiting it for a long time. Miles’ wish to do an album with Kershaw, or of his songs, might indicate either his lax grasp of pop or a cultivated sense of mischief. No, no, no (to paraphrase Dawn Penn) – for his anguished “Jesus Christ Al-Might-EE!” on “Save The Whale,” for his loathsome cod-Jamaican singing voice, for, above all else, “Don Qui-ho-TAY/Whaat do you SAAY/Are we tilting at windmills like YOUN?” – straight into Room 101. Straight to hell.

KATRINA AND THE WAVES
Single:
Walking On Sunshine (27 Apr – 8)
Rob Fleming asks Barry to turn this song down in High Fidelity. It is presumably a joke at the expense of Barry’s presumed hipness that he comes into Championship Vinyl of a Monday lunchtime, slags off Dick for playing uncool rubbish, and then plays the least cool record ever made. Or it might be that Hornby actually thinks that “Walking On Sunshine” is the apogee of coolness. It’s actually quite a good and spicy pop record, and yes that opinion is somewhat dependent on the fact that Kristina was, and is, highly fanciable. But, purely because of High Fidelity, I never want to hear it again. Let’s hear it for objective music criticism! (Pardon?)

CHAKA KHAN
Singles:
This Is My Night (19 Jan – 14)
Eye To Eye (20 Apr – 16)
“I Know You, I Live You” is one of the greatest female soul-pop vocal performances ever. Chaka Khan is great. Even the studied hipness quota of “I Feel For You” made for terrific pop. The parent album, however, was less impressive than Arif Mardin’s other project of the time, the second Scritti Politti album (see below).

KILLING JOKE
Single:
Love Like Blood (2 Feb – 16)
Surprisingly their only UK Top 40 hit single – “Empire Song” was performed on TOTP three years earlier, with a bandaged dummy on keyboards, and introduced by Garth Crooks with the words: “This is the future!” but still couldn’t get past #43. Was last year’s Grohl-assisted album their best? I have a feeling that it might be.

KING
Singles:
Love And Pride (5 Jan – 2)
Won’t You Hold My Hand Now (23 Mar – 24)
Alone Without You (17 Aug – 8)
The Taste Of Your Tears (19 Oct – 11)
“Love And Fucking Pride.” The tartan mullet accident Paul King himself essaying his tuppence-halfpenny Martin Fry impersonation, and so starved were the public come New Year 1985 that only the formidable duo of Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson (with “I Know Him So Well” – an Abba song in all but name) stopped him from getting to number one. Worse was to come – “Won’t you hold my hand now?” he wailed. “These are heavy tiiiiiiiiimes.” “Alone Without You” sounded like the March Violets playing the J Geils Band’s “Centerfold” (and nowhere near as interesting as I’ve just made it sound). “The Taste Of Your Tears” sounds like Squeeze with diarrhoea. Their only subsequent hit was the never more appropriately titled “Torture” in 1986. Thereafter – MTV repentance.

EVELYN KING
Single:
Talking In My Sleep/Your Personal Touch (9 Nov – 37)
Oh make this one up yourselves. “Your Personal Touch” is probably a marginally better song than “Personal Touch,” Errol Brown’s sole solo hit (#25, 1987) but the words “life,” “too” and “short” spring to mind like a newly defrosted Niagara Falls.

KOOL AND THE GANG
Singles:
Misled (9 Feb – 28)
Cherish (11 May – 4)
Several years past their best – “Misled” is flaccid non-funk, while “Cherish” which spent 286 weeks in the chart (well OK, 22 weeks then) is music to soundtrack a redundant Brian Dennehy rowing a canoe out into the middle of the lake at the dead of night before returning to his wife (Cheryl Ladd). Get the 2CD Gangthology as proof that they were once, in fact, great.

DENISE LA SALLE
Single:
My Toot Toot (8 Jun – 6)
Dunno – as far as cajun pop goes, even Shakin’ Stevens’ “Oh Julie” shakes a bit more than this shoo-in for Junior Choice. And Johnnie Allan’s “Promised Land” still hasn’t become a hit.

DEE C LEE
Single:
See The Day (2 Nov – 3)
Glutinous sub-Cilla Black ballad in the ‘60s style by Paul Weller’s then other half.

JULIAN LENNON
Single:
Because (7 Dec – 40)
CLIFF RICHARD
Single:
She’s So Beautiful (14 Sep – 17)
Both songs from the dreadful musical Time which featured a hologram of Lord Olivier. Bunched together because I can’t be bothered writing about Cliff Richard below; also here to highlight (on “She’s So Beautiful”) that Stevie Wonder really will play on any old shit.

LEVEL 42
Singles:
Something About You (21 Sep – 6)
Leaving Me Now (Re-Mix) (7 Dec – 15)
Ah, some proper music, in the best sense. No need to reiterate how the parent World Machine is pop Adorno; Sinker’s done it enough times. The use of the word “mesmerised” in “Leaving Me Now” is better than the collected works of Elvis Costello.

IJAHMAN LEVI
Album:
Lilly Of My Valley (NME – 48)
BARRINGTON LEVY
Single:
Here I Come (NME – 12)
WAYNE SMITH
Single:
Under Mi Sleng Teng (NME – 31)
Of the year’s reggae, “Under Mi Sleng Teng” – the “Planet Rock” of reggae – was by a continental mile the most radical record of 1985; Sean Paul still seems to be relying on it. No one seems to have done anything to develop the bizarrely enticing stop-start rhythm matrix of “Here I Come” either (a #41 hit). The venerable Ijahman seems rather out of place here - Lilly Of My Valley is typically warm lovers’ rock like they used to make, though Haile I Hymn remains his one great record. Still I must take this opportunity to recommend the Cedric Im Brooks and the Light of Saba compilation on Honest Jon’s, seeing as everyone else is; lovely, deep and aquatic stuff, a very nice follow-up to listening to Arthur Russell (see imminent Naked Maja piece on the late great Mr Russell, assuming that I have any energy left after finishing this).

HUEY LEWIS AND THE NEWS
Single:
The Power Of Love (31 Aug – 11)
One of three songs with this title which charted during 1985 (the others being Frankie Goes To Hollywood, a number one in December 1984 just before Band Aid, and Jennifer Rush – see way down below). Bateman said the rest.

THE LIMIT
Single:
Say Yeah (5 Jan – 17)
I think they were Dutch. Great pop-funk, the punctum coming as the alto sax cascades downwards between the vocals halfway through the second chorus.

LOOSE ENDS
Singles:
Hangin’ On A String (Contemplating) (23 Feb – 13)
Magic Touch (11 May – 16)
“Hangin’ On A String” is, as every schoolboy knows, the greatest British soul record ever (even if produced by an American – Nick Martinez). Gaye and Terrell ghostdancing in space, as I said somewhere else. You really ought to invest in a copy of their recently-released The Best Of Loose Ends compilation. Mmm, “Choose Me” – “When I’m lying in the ghetto, come and rescue me” – isn’t that just the greatest of all choruses?

MADNESS
Album:
Mad, Not Mad (NME – 5)
Singles:
Yesterday’s Men (31 Aug – 18; NME – 7)
Uncle Sam (26 Oct – 21; NME – 48)
Madness were not supposed to be about sanity. Some regard their final album (in their original incarnation) as a masterpiece of bleakness (in the NME’s Top 100 Albums Of All Time list of November 1985 it was even listed at #56). Others, like this writer, view Mad, Not Mad as a record made to please the NME. Within it they get right on about South Africa (the embarrassing Gil Scott-Heron paraphrase in “The Coldest Day”), American imperialism (“Uncle Sam” – their last, desperate attempt at a community singalong which the public saw right through and noted its complete lack of heart; it became the first Madness single to fail to reach the Top 20) and getting old (“Yesterday’s Men” with its Red Wedge-friendly quotation from “Spanish Harlem” at the fadeout). Made to please a once great music paper which by 1985 had degenerated into a house magazine for Red Wedge, the enormous impact of which was felt at the 1987 General Election.

MADONNA
Singles:
Material Girl (2 Mar – 3)
Crazy For You (8 Jun – 2)
Into The Groove (27 Jul – 1; NME – 18)
Holiday (3 Aug – 2)
Angel (21 Sep – 5)
Gambler (12 Oct – 4)
Dress You Up (7 Dec – 5)
She ended 1984 crawling around on the TOTP studio floor in a pink wig simulating masturbation to “Like A Virgin.” She ended 1985 crawling around on Sean Penn’s kitchen floor, but had otherwise ensured that she had become untouchable. The most successful by-product of No Wave imposed herself on the world without asking. No less than five singles were taken from her Like A Virgin album (six if you count “Into The Groove” which was added to later versions); in addition there were two singles released on another label from the soundtrack to an obscure film called Vision Quest; and “Holiday” improved four places on its previous 1984 chart showing following her performance on Live Aid.

As with Adam Ant in 1982, all Madonna’s hits (the generic soundtrack AoR of “Crazy For You” and “Gambler” notwithstanding) were about herself. “Material Girl” was an unironic Hazel O’Connor B-side soundalike whose video marked the point when she could no longer be touched (in either sense of the word). On the 12-inch of “Dress You Up” the rhythm is provided by a crowd chanting “Madonna! Madonna!”

But “Into The Groove” is the only one of these seven songs worth preserving because, by getting into herself, Madonna manages for the only time in her career to lose herself. “Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free/I lock the door at night so no one else can see.” You feel that if she really felt free she wouldn’t have to lock her door – and besides, does she keep it open during the day? Nevertheless, if you accept that in “Into The Groove” Madonna does indeed lose herself, then the song becomes the opposite of “Downtown” (freedom in confinement and isolation) and the kin to “How Soon Is Now?” (check those very Morrissey-esque “In my lo-o-ove” lines in “Dress Me Up”). “Now I know you’re mine” she sings to her mirror on the record; but it became far more frightening when she performed it on Live Aid and announced to the world: “Now I know you’re mine” like Blofeld. Within her untouchable armour of resentment hides an extremely frightened person.

MAI TAI
Singles:
History (25 May – 8)
Body And Soul (3 Aug – 9)
They were Dutch (I think). “History” is a quite reasonable SOS Band facsimile (“Our love is HIS! TOR! Y!/Like the burning letters you were sending me.” Eh?). “Body And Soul” is bollocks and shit.

MANCHESTER UNITED FOOTBALL CLUB
Single:
We All Follow Man. United (18 May – 10)
Sung to the same traditional tune as Andy Cameron’s “Ally’s Tartan Army,” a big hit in the first half of the summer in 1978 (B-side: “I Want To Be A Punk Rocker”). In the second half of the summer, Bruce’s Record Shop in Union Street, Glasgow (where Fopp is now) were selling them off for 10p a throw. As an early experiment in performance art, one Saturday afternoon my schoolfriends and I walked in, bought the entire stock, walked back out into Union Street and smashed them all to smithereens, with much applause I might add. This was more successful than our second performance art exercise outside Bruce’s Record Shop one year later, when we all trooped in at two-minute intervals to buy OMD’s “Electricity” single on Factory. Sadly our tactics failed to get the record into the charts, as it was ruled out on the basis of “local sales only.”

TEENA MARIE
Single:
Lovergirl (NME – 33)
I like what Lester says about Teena Marie in this month’s Uncut - “the Laura Nyro of disco.” In which case, “Lovergirl” was her “I Met Him On A Sunday” – the last great burst of vocalese before she disappeared.

MARILLION
Singles:
Kayleigh (18 May – 2)
Lavender (7 Sep – 5)
Heart Of Lothian (30 Nov – 29)
The parent album, Misplaced Childhood, is a kind of ‘80s-prog equivalent of what I think was intended with the In My Room CD of the Scott Walker boxset; the reveries of a drowning man, desperately trying to make sense of all the signifiers which have been aimed at him throughout his life. Thus “Kayleigh” works not as a single, but as it slowly emerges from the ruination of “Pseudo Silk Kimono;” and the resignation of the final gesture (the songs “Childhood’s End” and “White Feather”) is gracious in its grief. In “Kayleigh” Fish is of course talking to himself, prodding himself, demanding that it all meant something – did the stilettos in the snow end up on the floor in Belsize Park? Or, as Jimmy Webb summed it up on “MacArthur Park”: “After all the loves of my life, I’ll be thinking of you…and wondering why” (Richard Harris sings that last “why” as though his oxygen mask had suddenly been snatched away from him).

WYNTON MARSALIS
Album:
Black Codes (From The Underground) (NME – 14)
Or perhaps from “My Little Underground” except that Marsalis’ underground has subsequently become much larger. He is as conservative an experimentalist as the Jesus and Mary Chain but it would be inadvisable to write him off as an Al Hirt de nos jours - Black Codes is deadly serious in its cautious adventurousness, though note particularly how drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts prods Marsalis ceaselessly, especially on the building storm of the title track. An intelligent advance on ESP which unfortunately would have been more intelligent if it hadn’t been so quick and eager to rule out Filles De Kilimanjaro.

MATT BIANCO
Single:
Yeh Yeh (5 Oct – 13)
Written by Jon Hendricks and Sun Ra baritonist Pat Patrick, a number one for Georgie Fame in 1965, a dead-in-the-water number thirteen for this bunch of Blue Rondo rejects in 1985. The history of pop in a nutshell.

THE SIMON MAY ORCHESTRA
Single:
Howard’s Way Theme (19 Oct – 21)
REBECCA STORM
Single:
The Show (Theme From Connie) (29 Jun – 22)
Two reminders of Thatcherite TV in 1985. In Howard’s Way boats were sailed; in Connie Stephanie Beacham was the boss of a fashion company who Took No Shit From Anyone and as a result ended up in Dynasty.

MAZE FEATURING FRANKIE BEVERLY
Singles:
Too Many Games (20 Jul – 36)
Back In Stride (NME – 15)
“Back In Stride” was inescapable in the London of 1984/5; a rolling dance anthem which Robbie Vincent must have played solidly for six months, a club monster but, strangely, not a chart hit.

PAUL McCARTNEY
Singles:
Spies Like Us (30 Nov – 13)
We All Stand Together (From Rupert And The Frog Song) (with “the Frog Chorus”) (7 Dec – 32)
Is it just me or does Macca sound like Julian Cope on “Spies Like Us”? (“Ooh, ooh, what do you do?”) The frog thing had been a top three hit the previous Xmas and should really have ended Abbey Road.

THE MEAT PUPPETS
Album:
Up On The Sun (NME – 16)
Terrible to hear the news about Cris Kirkwood, shot by a security guard after an altercation outside a post office just before Xmas – more details of his decline can be found on the relevant thread on ILM – which makes the achievement of this quietly radical record all the more astonishing. Reducing the volume but heightening the intensity, songs like “Two Rivers” helped to redefine the geometry and relationship of guitar, bass guitar, drums and a voice which seemed to emanate from beyond this galaxy. The rhythmic and harmonic interlocking is never predictable, the end result magnificent. You remember that thing called post-rock? It starts here.

THE MEN THEY COULDN’T HANG
Single:
The Iron Masters (NME – 47)
NEW MODEL ARMY
Single:
No Rest (27 Apr – 28)
Geoffrey Palmer’s courtier in Mrs Brown, despairingly: “We cannot begin again.”

FREDDIE MERCURY
Single:
I Was Born To Love You (20 Apr – 11)
Another of Mercury’s occasional and not very successful Moroder-assisted forays into electropop, though the follow-up, “Living On My Own,” a mere #50 in 1985, was remixed and topped the charts posthumously in 1993.

MICRODISNEY
Album:
The Clock Comes Down The Stairs (NME – 49)
Single
Birthday Girl (NME – 49)
The group from which were bisected the High Llamas and Fatima Mansions, both probably better separately than together. The album cover shot of Clapham Junction station emphasises that Sean O’Hagan’s Wilsonian chord changes are yearning to fly, but Cathal Coughlan’s matter-of-fact moper’s drawl keeps them anchored.

GARY MOORE
Singles:
Out In The Fields (with Phil Lynott) (18 May – 5)
Empty Rooms (27 Jul – 23)
“It makes no difference if you’re black or if you’re white” intoned Lynott on his final chart appearance, and he was right; if you become an alcoholic your liver’s going to end up fucked in any case.

ALISON MOYET
Single:
That Ole Devil Called Love (16 Mar – 2)
Because Billie Holiday was, like, real, yeah, and I mean you can, like, feel the pain. Sorry – the only pain which we can realistically feel is our own. The tragedy of humanity is that we are much better at sympathising than we are at emphathising.

JIMMY NAIL
Single:
Love Don’t Live Here Anymore (27 Apr – 3)
Because Rose Royce was…no it doesn’t quite work does it? Queen’s Roger Taylor produces Oz doing Royce in the Howard Jones style. Rather overshadows the fact that Nail produced two of the smartest pop hits of the ‘90s – “Ain’t No Doubt” (Saint Etienne-style song deconstruction) and McAloon’s “Crocodile Shoes” (even if it is an update of Leo Sayer’s “One Man Band”).

PHYLLIS NELSON
Single:
Move Closer (9 Feb – 1; NME - 41)
AMII STEWART
Single:
Knock On Wood/Light My Fire (17 Aug – 7)
Two jobbing, not-quite-famous soul singers lost in Europe. “Move Closer” feels like a factory-made attempt at doing an American soul record but can’t quite align itself with the template, so it ends up an odd counterpart to Berntholer’s contemporaneous “My Suitor.” Stewart came back in December 1984 with the luscious “Friends” – from a concept album about emotion written and recorded in Italy. Thus when her 1979 Bacofoil disco diva covers were reissued in the summer of 1985, they seemed even more out of – well, that place.

NEW EDITION
Single:
Mr Telephone Man (23 Feb – 19)
Yes, but apart from that how and why did Whitney go wrong in the ‘90s?

NEW ORDER
Album:
Low-Life (NME – 22)
History will record that in the pop year of 1985 no place could be found for New Order in the charts. The failure of “Perfect Kiss” (a perfect gay love song) and “Sub-Culture” to make the Top 40 should have been enough to induce a generation’s worth of shame on the chart, and consequently only the fans bought Low-Life, with its number one that never was “Love Vigilantes,” with pop so insolent and intelligent that everybody would have queued up to touch the hem of their garments had it been released in 1965. But New Order? Pop music? What about the starving children? Had Rubber Soul been released in 1985 it would probably have suffered the same benign fate.

BILLY OCEAN
Singles:
Loverboy (19 Jan – 15)
Suddenly (11 May – 4)
Ocean’s yearning counter-tenor was put to typically astonishing use as the harmony vocal/alter ego in Scott Walker’s “Track 3” the previous year (the missing link between Joan Armatrading and Billy MacKenzie) but put to the use of Jive Records he had to be content with enormous commercial success, particularly with the pallid xerox of Lionel Richie’s “Hello” that is “Suddenly.”

OPUS
Single:
Live Is Life (8 Jun – 6)
QUEEN
Single:
One Vision (16 Nov – 7)
Bunched together because of course both potential fascist anthems were subsequently covered as such, and effectively, by Laibach. I’ve had a soft spot for Austria’s Opus ever since their contribution to Live Aid which lyrically went something like: “We’re only doing this so that we can feel better,” and “Live (pronounced to rhyme with five) Is Life” doesn’t half stir up one’s blood atop Parliament Hill Fields of a sunny Sunday morn.

Not so sure about Queen. The gulf in quality between Greatest Hits I and Greatest Hits II is vast (even through “Bohemian Rhapsody” you hear the ghost of Brian Connolly, though the unironic “We Are The Champions” was an early warning) and “Radio Ga-Ga” induces too much of a fascist response to survive as an anti-corporate song (especially since EMI recording artistes Queen were in those days still gleefully breaking UN sanctions and gigging at Sun City). Did the tongue go too deep into the cheek and swallow itself? Listen to the “give me fried chicken” aside at the end of “One Vision.” It’s OK, we’re only kidding, just like the end of “Seven Seas Of Rhye.” It doesn’t excuse the dreariness of the rest of the song, however.

ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK
Singles:
So In Love (25 May – 27)
Secret (20 Jul – 34)
The title track of their 1985 album Crush may be the best thing OMD ever did. Art Of Noise vocal cut-ups, Graham Weir’s swooning semi-free trombone, and McCluskey’s final clenched teeth whisper of “I can’t stand the fucking rain.” There were, however, no singles to be found on the album, as the above fans-only chart positions testify.

JOHN PARR
Single:
St Elmo’s Fire (Man In Motion) (7 Sep – 6)
Must say that I preferred the King of Mullet duetting with Meat Loaf on “Rock ‘N’ Roll Mercenaries” (“Money is POWER!”) in the same way that Grand Admiral Doenitz could be considered to be an improvement on Hitler.

THE PET SHOP BOYS
Single:
West End Girls (16 Nov – 1)
The kind of pop group who appear at exactly the time when they are needed, and also the kindest of pop groups, the Pet Shop Boys patiently set about joining all the crucial dots, from post-No Wave disco (Bobby O) via the embers of New Pop, via the seeds in Derek Jarman’s garden, towards the Divine Marriage of Lytton Strachey and Larry Levan. Alone amongst what was left of New Pop in the mid-1980s (if we count New Order as being above and beyond the concept of New Pop) the Pet Shop Boys did not feel the need to shout. They believed in civility but not in eugenics. Their socialism was far more ingeniously and deeply felt than that of Bragg. A post-modern joke? They knew that the best jokes were always deadly in their seriousness. And so there they are, Flanagan and Allen, or should that be Sinclair and Atkins, tracing their own discogeographidelic path through an imagined – and therefore better – London. In doing so they became the greatest of New Pop groups; the artful artifice of “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)” works because it succeeded the open wound of honesty that was “Love Comes Quickly” – and then the camera pans from the newly enriched City to the burning cars of “Suburbia.”

Between “West End Girls” and “DJ Culture” the Pet Shop Boys were pretty, well and perfect. From the Finland Station to the Gulf via King’s Cross. “It Couldn’t Happen Here”? The uninterrupted beauty that was the Behaviour album and the Sistine Chapel of a song that was, and is, “Being Boring” – how appropriate that the greatest song of bitter nostalgia should have come from what was at the time (1990) the most determinedly futuristic of pop groups (but never brutalist futurist – they knew their Bomberg but never forgot the underlying foundation of Spencer).

And so it was that “West End Girls,” already road-tested 12 months previously with a Bobby O production, arrived in the final minute of the final reel of the massacre of 1985 to save pop music. It is very tempting to overlook the alphabet and place the Pet Shop Boys at the end of this story. But that would be to give the story a premature happy ending. Better that it should end as it will end.

After their astonishing stage show of 1991 (Tennant and Lowe die in Doris Lessing’s ice forest, then return to the afterlife in their pyjamas, ready for some rest), and after finally finding some purposeful use for Liza Minnelli, they seemed to have accomplished everything, and their work thereafter accordingly took a downturn. Very (1993) was an excellent album, but found the Pet Shop Boys repeating themselves for the first time; subsequent records have diminished in their returns. Still, their immoral immortality is assured.

THE POGUES
Album:
Rum, Sodomy And The Lash (NME – 18)
Single:
A Pair Of Brown Eyes (NME – 9)
What the NME of 1985 didn’t understand was that the Pet Shop Boys were infinitely more “real” in their unabashed, if dignified, emotionalism, than their favoured “real music,” the nadir of which philosophy was the Pogues. Why were they so fawned over? One understands the point of the Sinn Fein club night entertainment that was side one of 1984’s Red Roses For Me (how close is that title to So Red The Rose), but was there really any demand for the recycled Dubliners-lite of Rum, Sodomy And The Lash with its clichéd roll call of tired standards (“Dirty Old Town,” “Navigator, Navigator” in the year of Sonic Youth!) and equally tired soliloquies picturing the ex-Westminster School pupil Shane McGowan being gang raped or vomiting in doorways. The thing is, to paraphrase Julie Burchill, don’t make a mess of yourself in the first place – especially when you have advantages to begin with.

Oh, and incidentally, the Band of Holy Joy did this sort of thing so much better.

THE POINTER SISTERS
Singles:
Neutron Dance (12 Jan – 31)
Dare Me (20 Jul – 17)
The first is an abysmal lino roll of a sub-electropop kneejerk workout, the second passable pop, and thirdly life is too short.

PREFAB SPROUT
Album:
Steve McQueen (NME – 4)
Single:
When Love Breaks Down (2 Nov – 25)
But in some cases life isn’t long enough. Let this writer be honest; Steve McQueen was my favourite album made by anybody in the mid-1980s, and moreover was instrumental – with particular reference to the album’s highlight, “Desire As” – in bringing Laura and me together, and thus should stand like a Gulliver amongst the rest of 1985’s Lilliput (or at least like Bill Murray in the elevator in Lost In Translation. Glacial yet warmly embracing, the production being the highlight of Thomas Dolby’s career – here he enters as a genuine collaborator, allowing McAloon’s ethereal wordplay interlock with the shabby genteel grandeur of his chord changes. It could even be said that at some points – e.g. the long instrumental fadeout of “Faron Young” – McAloon and Dolby prophesise glitch (all that space and echo!). It is a record infinitely closer to what I perceive as my “soul” than just about anything else discussed in these pages, and perhaps I should simply have inserted a large blank space and said “not for discussion; above discussion.” But no – this formed a major part of my life and is therefore immortal.

PRINCE
Singles:
1999/Little Red Corvette (19 Jan – 2)
Let’s Go Crazy/Take Me With U (with the Revolution) (23 Feb – 7)
Paisley Park (with the Revolution) (25 May – 18)
Raspberry Beret (with the Revolution) (27 Jul – 25)
Around The World In A Day was a problematic record; it genuinely wasn’t that great, and perhaps only the epic McCoy Tyner-meets-Sartre balladry of “Condition Of The Heart” is worth salvaging from it. The faux-1968isms I found forced and irritating, and it’s no wonder that his biggest hit of 1985 was the double A-side of two two-year-old minor hits, Britain at that stage only just discovering Prince. A third single from Around The World, “Pop Life,” stalled at #60 – not as clever or poignant a song as it thinks it is, especially as its structure is lifted virtually wholesale from Heaven 17’s “Let Me Go.”

PRINCESS
Singles:
Say I’m Your Number One (3 Aug – 7)
After The Love Has Gone (9 Nov – 28)
SAW saw what Jam and Lewis were doing with the SOS Band and felt that ripping off “Just Be Good To Me” might make a change from ripping off “Blue Monday.” Actually “Say I’m Your Number One” just about gets away with it.

THE RAH BAND
Single:
Clouds Across The Moon (30 Mar – 6)
An ineffably heartbreaking single, this – Richard Hewson’s wife on Middle England vocals, hiding her heartbreak as her long-distance telephone call (to outer space) is brutally cut short. Side two of Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump starts here.

THE RAMONES
Single:
Bonzo Goes To Bitburg (NME – 24)
An attack on Reagan visiting Belsen from a resolutely Republican band. Why?

CHRIS REA
Single:
Stainsby Girls (16 Mar – 26)
Now I like Chris Rea, as regular readers know, but this is a relatively minor, eventless song, and why this was a hit in 1985 and “Josephine” wasn’t remains somewhat mystifying. Ah, “On The Beach” – Cromer in August 1986…

RED BOX
Single:
Lean On Me (Ah-Li-Ayo) (17 Aug – 3)
THE REDSKINS
Single:
Bring It Down (This Insane Thing) (22 Jun – 33)
1985 record buyers definitely didn’t want politics apart from those which allowed the most facile of consensuses (starving Africans) so here are two songs which exhort us to Change The World. The Redskins were, alas, always too tinny really to have a fraction of their desired impact – frontman Chris Dean, as X Moore, was a useful corrective voice to have handy in the NME of 1982, but the Redskins fell for the whole Weller Real Soul con(sensus) (senseless). 1983’s “Lean On Me” sounded like the Tremeloes covering “Jeepster;” “Bring It Down” was just an over-earnest plod.

Earnest plodders? Let us throw poisonous tomatoes at the abject Red Box whose pullover Play Away singalong was rammed down radio listeners’ throats; “From the very very young/To the very very old/Everybody now say AYE!” Jesus! (well, yes, virtually) And the kiddies’ choir! A million times worse than Howard Jones’ shaking everyone’s hand in the TOTP studio doing “Like To Get To Know You Well”! Why were they not DISMEMBERED PAINFULLY???

R.E.M.
Album:
Fables Of The Reconstruction/Reconstruction Of The Fables (NME – 30)
Recorded by a bad-tempered band in a miserable and wet London with Joe Boyd at the controls, this might still be one of R.E.M.’s best albums; “Feeling Gravitys Pull” was certainly one of their strongest opening tracks, up there with “Radio Free Europe” and “Drive.” In the unresolved chords, the muttered asides of “Wendell Gee,” even the forlorn attempt at a rave-up in “Can’t Get There From Here,” the record sounds like R.E.M. bending into themselves and absorbing themselves into nothingness. As David Stubbs has said elsewhere, they had to go the U2 route after this; there was literally nowhere else for them to go. Yet Stipe avoided all of Bono’s well-meaning pomposity, was still sounding hungry as late as 2001’s “Imitation Of Life” – has any singer sounded nearer the end of his tether as Stipe does when he exhaustedly sobs, “No one can hear you CRY!”? And the rogue, shadowlit chambers of Fables/Reconstruction reassumed themselves in the dark cloisters of records like New Adventures In Hi-Fi - not to mention the black hole of a song which is “Star Me Kitten” which stares at us from the centre of Automatic For The People.

RENE AND ANGELA
Single:
I’ll Be Good (7 Sep – 22)
More SOS Band wannabes. Isn’t it strange that the SOS Band themselves had no hits in 1985?

REO SPEEDWAGON
Single:
Can’t Fight The Feeling (2 Mar – 16)
Never liked REO, not even the fifth-form punnery of their debut album title You Can Tune A Piano But You Can’t Tuna Fish. The singer always sounded like Neil Sedaka having mislaid his suppositories, and their songs plodded like Paul Muni’s ball and chain.

LIONEL RICHIE
Single:
Say You Say Me (16 Nov – 8)
The loneliness of “Hello” shattered by the chronically bad video for same, more or less put an end to Richie’s creativity. This is scarcely a song, but worse was to come - the virtual pederasty of 1986’s “Ballerina Girl,” for instance.

JONATHAN RICHMAN AND THE MODERN LOVERS
Album:
Rockin’ And Romance (NME – 47)
What Richman album had “That Summer Feeling” on it? It’s the only Richman song I’ve liked since the good ole days of ’78, and while I’m glad he’s still out there, it doesn’t mean that I have to pay him much attention. But as the recently reissued The Modern Lovers has come back into my orbit, I wonder whether Richman has spent the last 30 years running away from the palpable pain of “Hospital.” Although the titles of this album’s two best songs are certainly relevant right now: “I’m Just Beginning To Live” and “Now Is Better Than Before.”

RUN DMC
Album:
Kings Of Rock (NME – 32)
Single:
King Of Rock (NME – 35)
Actually “Rock Box” from their eponymous 1984 debut album (the same record which sired the original “It’s Like That”) was a sharper fusion of rock and rap, but this was the record which put Run DMC, and by extension Def Jam, on the map. Eddie Martinez of Quiet Riot scribbles and squeals excitedly over the breaks; but it wasn’t until they got to Aerosmith (or Aerosmith got to them) 12 months later that the world caught up. To contemporary ears it might sound a little cumbersome and slow-moving, but here is where several relevant stories begin.

JENNIFER RUSH
Singles:
The Power Of Love (22 Jun – 1)
Ring Of Ice (7 Dec – 14)
A study of the gradual distillation and dilution of the avant garde into the mainstream of pop. First, Scott Walker produces the most uncommercial, and simultaneously the most profound, pop single ever made (“The Electrician”); a few miles away, Midge Ure studies it carefully, and he and Conny Plank rework the atmosphere, inevitably watering it down a little, for “Vienna.” Five years after the latter, we have “The Power Of Love” which is based entirely on the “Vienna” rhythm track; but there is no pain or death or ambiguity or even camp here; a boringly literal emoting of clichés – and one knew immediately that this would end up at number one. It took its time, however; entering the chart in June, it climbed arthritically, a couple of places per week, until it finally reached the summit in October. Part of this was down to the “local sales” inhibiting factor – for the first couple of months of its chart run it was largely selling in Scotland and the North West. And now it has become the staple of all karaoke staples, sung every Friday night by every despairing, beaten-down woman, fleeing the hell of their home for one evening, pretending that love will still conquer “manhood,” trying to convince themselves that there can still be a happy ending – just like “My Way” being played at funerals, funerals of poor old workers who were treated like shit their whole lives through and never had the slightest say in how their life should be lived.

SADE
Single:
Sweetest Taboo (12 Oct – 31)
So effervescent that she probably did end up dissolving. The parent album, Promise, sold a mere fraction of Diamond Life in Britain, cleaned up everywhere else, as indeed her subsequent records have continued to do. Perhaps we’re just more discriminating.

MATHILDE SANTING
Album:
Water Under The Bridge (NME – 19)
Would that Sade had sounded like this – the best Dutch record of the ‘80s. Again it is the quietude of Santing’s caressing voice which unnerves the mind (“Too much – I’m tired”). The genius which Santing and her musical accomplice Dennis Duchhart bring to wise and penetrating ballads like “Turn Your Heart” and “Sweet Nothings” remains overwhelming. Dido would tear up all her complimentary Screen on the Green tickets to sound this profound. Really this is a record which demands rediscovery and immediate reattention – currently unavailable on CD, this brilliant music urgently requires to be circulated again. And who these days would even dare to set e e cummings to music, and do it so stunningly (“it may not always be so”)?

SCRAPING FOETUS OFF THE WHEEL
Album:
Nail (NME – 29)
WISEBLOOD
Single:
Motorslug (NME – 37)
History seems to have dealt old Clint Ruin a bad hand. Nail and its 1984 predecessor Hole clearly predicate what Trent Reznor would go on to do in the following decade with their jackhammer electro-apocalyptic neurotic drive, but the Foetus himself never really seems to have capitalised on his discoveries. Nail remains for me the most consistent of Foetus records, as well as the most sonically overpowering – “Descent Into The Inferno” is still intense, and it’s a pity that Johnny Cash never got round to covering the climactic “Anything (Viva!)” (“I can do any GODDAM THING I WANT”). Given the admirable concision of his albums, his singles could sometimes be sprawling – witness “Motorslug” which for its first half is an entertaining driving song (driving through hell, naturally) but wears out its welcome by the repeated stuck groove effect which continues for a further five very long minutes.

SCRITTI POLITTI
Single:
The Word “Girl” (11 May – 6)
Madonna could equally have called “Papa Don’t Preach” “The Word ‘Baby’,” for its philosophy is the same as Green’s, albeit less elegantly expressed – the difference being that with Scritti Politti, the genotext (the debonair ruination of Green’s light tenor voice, the aquatic shimmer of the endlessly echoing music) exceeds the phenotext, which I am sure was the intent.

That having been said, I am unsure whether Cupid And Psyche ‘85 stands up as well today as Songs To Remember has managed; often Green does seem to be the equivalent of Bill Murray’s benignly bewildered Tokyo tourist, his soul lost within the unending amusement arcades, peopled by people in suits desperate to avoid suicide. Aided by ex-Material man Fred Maher, nominal producer Arif Mardin and actual producer Gary Langan – so indeed it might as well be a ZTT record – it’s all very efficient (rather than bewitching) and one ends up wondering if the immaculate men’s washroom in which Green is pictured cleansing himself (of indie guilt?) in the inner sleeve photograph will also end up being his tomb.

FEARGAL SHARKEY
Singles:
Loving You (29 Jun – 26)
A Good Heart (12 Oct – 1)
Sharkey is apparently now a Government spokesman for Keeping Music Live, or something equally irrelevant (didn’t he hear Opus? “Live Is Life”!) and after rendering himself from the rest of the Undertones, who carried on a parallel Bizarro world indie career as That Petrol Emotion – you really don’t need to know if you don’t already know – he entered the mainstream, and after a pretty good start with unremarkable AoR material (“A Good Heart” was written by Maria McKee, who then went on to have her own number one in 1990 with the worst record of her career, “Show Me Heaven” while her 1996 masterpiece Life Is Sweet died a commercial death – was this perverse bad luck?) he nosedived into nowhere in particular. He’s done A&R things, he’s resisted the temptation to rejoin the reformed Undertones…does he make his own bad luck?

SHARPE AND NUMAN
Single:
Change Your Mind (9 Feb – 17)
Terrifically alienating record, Numan never sounding more like Robert Wyatt, Shakatak’s Bill Sharpe managing to erase Shakatak from his inner tabula rasa. An album eventually followed in 1988, which is worth your consideration.

SIMPLE MINDS
Singles:
Don’t You (Forget About Me) (20 Apr – 7)
Alive And Kicking (12 Oct – 7)
Written for The Breakfast Club, passed on to Simple Minds after Bryan Ferry had passed on it, “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” comes across like a Spitting Image parody of post-New Gold Dream Simple Minds. Why did Kerr have to be Bono? Not being on any Simple Minds album, it stayed in the UK Top 100 for over a year and reached number one in America. Bluster instead of surrealism, smugness instead of curiosity; “Alive And Kicking” was eventually used to soundtrack a McEwan’s Lager advert, while “Don’t You” found its fitting end when used, humiliatingly, in a Scottish Milk Marketing Board advert featuring Ally McCoist and others: “Don’t you forget about milk…”

SIMPLY RED
Single:
Money’s Too Tight (To Mention) (15 Jun – 13)
The Valentine Brothers and the Frantic Elevators were about as polar a pair of opposites as you could find in 1982. But, three years after post-Ian Curtis New Pop fizzled out, Mick Hucknall finally caught up and ending up outselling everyone else. That cap. The attempt to out-Buckley Buckley on “Holding Back The Years.” But his hits have bankrolled the Blood and Fire label, amongst other things. It’s like a failed blind date; you get on with the other person like a house on fire, agree about everything, have a laugh, but ultimately when push comes to shove you just don’t fancy them.

SISTER SLEDGE
Single:
Frankie (25 May – 1)
Nile Rodgers in 1985? I didn’t fancy you much either.

SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
Single:
Cities In Dust (26 Oct – 21)
Siouxsie sings Gothily about Pompeii. Sad, if predictable, how the Twice Upon A Time post-1982 compilation seems to drag by, as opposed to the concise drama and spunk of 1981’s Once Upon A Time.

SKIPWORTH AND TURNER
Single:
Thinking About Your Love (20 Apr – 24)
Fantastic record, one of the year’s best soul-pop singles, better than anything Stevie Wonder did that year.

THE SMITHS
Album:
Meat Is Murder (NME – 11)
Singles:
How Soon Is Now (9 Feb – 24)
Shakespeare’s Sister (30 Mar – 26)
The Boy With The Thorn In His Side (5 Oct – 23)
We have to ask some hard questions, and one of the hardest is: was there any point to the Smiths after 1984? It seems to me that “How Soon Is Now?” with Morrissey’s grievous langour starting to battle a little with Johnny Marr’s New Gold Dream guitar references and spaces was about as far as the Smiths could emotionally or aesthetically progress. Meat Is Murder is distinctly Marr’s album, and all the worse for it; the interminable “Barbarism Begins At Home” might as well be Spandau Ballet (who are conspicuously absent from this list). The otherness of the first album (“Suffer Little Children” sounds as if it comes from another planet; certainly not from any “rock”) and the tracks collected on Hatful Of Hollow seems to have given way to a dreary prosaicness. And was The Queen Is Dead really that great a record? It sags badly in the middle of side two and even the celebrated side one appears to indulge in emotional tourism rather than emotional reality; grief as orgasm. Perhaps we just need to leave the Smiths alone for awhile – say ten years – and then rediscover them properly.

SONIC YOUTH
Album:
Bad Moon Rising (NME – 17)
Single:
Death Valley ’69 (with Lydia Lunch) (NME – 10)
Sonic Youth’s rock was almost as “un-rock” as that of the Smiths; as with AMM, the long guitar glides seem to be divorced from the input of any human hand. Bad Moon Rising sees them nocturnally warming up on the “songs” touchline, and although it is really “Death Valley ‘69” (with Lunch hamming it up splendidly in the tantrically long middle section) plus supporting acts, there is plenty of evidence of the quantum leap which they would take for 1986’s EVOL and beyond.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Singles:
Dancing In The Dark (5 Jan – 4)
Cover Me (23 Mar – 16)
I’m On Fire/Born In The USA (15 Jun – 5)
Glory Days (3 Aug – 17)
My Hometown/Santa Claus Is Coming To Town (14 Dec – 9)
For the first time, Springsteen started having major commercial success in the UK in 1985, for whatever reason - Born In The USA as the megalithic conscience of Purple Rain? In any event, “Dancing In The Dark” (with its melodic cop from New Musik’s “Living By Numbers” and Courtenay Cox cameo in its video), “Cover Me” (whose intro is uncannily reminiscent of the Smiths’ “Pretty Girls Make Graves”), etc., all became big hits. My feeling is that Springsteen actually works better bawling through a megaphone in an arena rather than the Tom Joad close-up this-is-my-soul routine. If the message is big, then the medium has to expand to fit it.

He has always been wary of “authenticity.” In “Glory Days” he rants against pointless nostalgia (“those bo-ring-sto-ries!”) but in “My Hometown” he realises that the future can’t always promise what the past delivered. And these two double A-sides are appropriate; the cheery knockabout stage patter of “Santa Claus” is light relief from the fin-de-siecle grief expressed on its reverse, and the deliberate bombast of “Born In The USA” (what about that break near the end where drummer Max Weinberg’s frustration explodes and he goes all Milford Graves on the Boss’ ass, Springsteen screaming to avoid going over the abyss) coupled with the troubled quietude of “I’m On Fire” (so much more radical than Nick Cave’s similarly named “freakout”) which ends with Springsteen forlornly replicating the train noise from Presley’s “Mystery Train” (as opposed to the “Hey Baby” quote at the fade of “Dancing In The Dark,” a companion song to “Downtown” wherein Springsteen begs his other to rescue him from self-immolation). Born In The USA remains Springsteen’s greatest record because it was his most visible.

STARSHIP
Single:
We Built This City (9 Nov – 12)
Yes and you were once responsible for “White Rabbit.” “Marconi plays the mamba.” Yes, Grace, of course he does. “Corporation games” sing BMG recording artistes Starship. That awful moment in the video for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” where Slick tries to do her old ’67 come-on routine – embarrassing; go into social work, please.

SHAKIN’ STEVENS
Singles:
Breaking Up My Heart (2 Mar – 14)
Lipstick, Powder And Paint (12 Oct – 11)
Merry Christmas Everyone (7 Dec – 1)
Glasgow-born songwriter Bob Heatlie is an interesting case, even if only because he kept trying to turn ex-Communist Party supporting rocker Shakin’ Stevens into an electrobod – 1983’s “Cry Just A Little Bit” is Gary Glitter meeting the Human League at the Edison Lighthouse crossroads, while from this year, “Breaking Up My Heart” is the jerky younger brother of Sheena Easton’s ”Just Another Broken Heart” while “Merry Christmas Everyone” – unsurprisingly, the Xmas #1 single for 1985 – drags him further right into Russ Abbot. In the meantime, Shaky tried to prove that he still had the old Sunset spunk about him. “There goes my baby up a tree!” he exclaims in “Lipstick, Powder And Paint” (“Is you is/Or is you ain’t?”) – and that certainly had more life about it than anything else he did in 1985. Over his attempt to go Hi-NRG in 1987 with a reading of Glitter’s “A Little Boogie Woogie In The Back Of My Mind” – complete with binliner-clad dance troupe on TOTP while he’s still doing his one routine at the front – it is perhaps best to draw yet another discreet veil.

STING
Singles:
If You Love Somebody Set Them Free (8 Jun – 26)
Russians (7 Dec – 12)
The Dream Of The Blue Turtles is Sting’s equivalent of Peter Sellers’ later Clouseau films; deliberately devoid of all the original input which he derived from the other two members of the Police, he hires most of Wynton Marsalis’ band to make himself look clever. And it simply sounds efficient and empty; from the next room it vaguely sounds like a Police record, but close up the forced artificiality of the construct quickly exhausts one’s patience. As for “Russians”…well, I don’t subscribe to that point of view (or saub-SKRABB as Sting sings it).

THE STYLE COUNCIL
Album:
Our Favourite Shop (NME – 20)
Singles:
Walls Come Tumbling Down! (11 May – 6)
Come To Milton Keynes (6 Jul – 23)
The Lodgers (Or, She Was Only A Shopkeeper’s Daughter) (28 Sep – 13)
Paul Weller in the ’80s really was something of a reluctant surrealist, wasn’t he? I’ve always had affection for Our Favourite Shop because it is so plainly mad as it attempts to summarise the grotesque Britain of 1985, mad enough from certain angles to put it up there with Original Pirate Material. I mean, come on; he has Mick Talbot sing the opening track (“Good morning day/I wonder what can you do for me?”), and then we get Weller cod-sinisterly intoning “South York-sheeer” over an “Eleanor Rigby” string quartet (“A Stone’s Throw Away”) followed by Lenny Henry impersonating Bernard Manning; quotes on the sleeve from Jimmy Reid to Oscar Wilde; Paul ‘n’ Mick looking very gay browsing in the Britpop shop on the album cover; and then the snarling “You don’t have to take this KKKRRAP!” payoff on the closing “Walls Come Tumbling Down!” (and the same song’s “NNNNNumber Ten!” as Weller attempts to go all glitchy on us – Steve White’s drums push Weller all the way here).

And the oddest and most disturbing song he ever wrote; the decaying utopia of “Come To Milton Keynes” with its askew-verging-on-atonal string arrangements, its Ealing Studios voiceovers, its genuinely disturbing (because so atypically blunt) lyrics (“May I slash my wrists tonight/On this fine Conservative night?”). Is this the best Weller record?

SWANS
Single:
Raping A Slave (EP) (NME – 43)
Unleashed right at the end of 1984, the Swans’ Cop album instantly made all other attempts at “avant-garde rock” seem clumsy and rhetorical. Michael Gira’s unchanging stentorian baritone as the band mould their carefully sculpted slow detonations around him. This EP was a bridge to the more considered authoritarianism of 1986’s great duo of albums, Greed and Holy Money.

TALKING HEADS
Album:
Little Creatures (NME – 27)
Single:
Road To Nowhere (12 Oct – 6; NME – 36)
Commercially the most successful year for Talking Heads, artistically probably their worst. Devoid of Eno they opted to become that most damnable of adjectives, QUIRKY, and that second most damnable of adjectives, WACKY. David Byrne has yet, in my eyes, to redeem himself, X-press 2 or no X-press 2. Just because he sings “I’m wicked and I’m lazy” doesn’t mean that he isn’t.

TEARS FOR FEARS
Singles:
Everybody Wants To Rule The World (30 Mar – 2)
Head Over Heels (22 Jun – 12)
I Believe (12 Oct – 23)
Many people in 1985 believed Songs From The Big Chair to be The Future, just like many people in 1997 believed the same of OK Computer. I always had TFF nailed down as trad little-boy-lost balladeers (Del Shannon could have done “Mad World”) dressing up in grown-up Joy Division clothes. In any case, with their second album they decided to Make A Statement; thus, their big comeback hit of Xmas 1984 “Shout” – like Band Aid, an interminable chant which ultimately means nothing – the say-OK-in-the-absence-of-anything-better-to-capitalism ethos of “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” and the faux-angst running throughout which Mansun frankly did a lot better. And their uncalled slaughter of Robert Wyatt’s “Sea Song” on the B-side of “I Believe” justifies damnation alone.

TEST DEPARTMENT AND THE SOUTH WALES STRIKING MINERS CHOIR
Album:
Shoulder To Shoulder (NME – 46)
One of the most electric moments in ‘80s music exists at the beginning of side two of this album, shared between Test Dept and the Miners’ Choir (the latter performing straight piano-accompanied renditions of “Give Me Some Men Who Are Stout-Hearted Men” etc.). At the climax of an anguished and angry speech from striking miner Alan Sutcliffe, his roar merges with and rebounds into the sudden onset of Test Dept noise as the latter launch into “Shockwork.” While this album perhaps works better as a gesture than a consistent listening experience – for their masterpiece, readers are referred to 1986’s still startling The Unacceptable Face Of Freedom - it nevertheless merits recirculation.

THIRD WORLD
Single:
Now That We’ve Found Love (9 Mar – 22)
The 1978 O’Jays reggae cover is re-discofied up and becomes a hit again for no good reason.

THE THOMPSON TWINS
Singles:
Don’t Mess With Doctor Dream (31 Aug – 15)
King For A Day (19 Oct – 22)
Into The Gap was inescapable in 1984 and remains so in the bargain basements of all MVE branches, but in 1985 they smugly blew it. Hey kids, don’t do drugs, it’s nasty heheheh, says former schoolteacher Tom Bailey (cf. the 1986 top five hit for the cast of Grange Hill - lead vocal by Zammo – with a timely message for us all: “Just Say No!”). But they were also Madonna’s backing band at Live Aid and continued to prosper in America. Their #75 cover version of Lennon’s “Revolution” (wherein Bailey sings that you can count him out) more or less summed up this most Thatcherite of cost-cutting pop groups.

THE THREE JOHNS
Single:
Death Of A European (NME – 11)
Their one great moment, an unending drone which eventually disintegrates into cut-up voices, incoherent yelping and guitar offmike freakouts. What the new Franz Ferdinand album should have sounded like.

TOTAL CONTRAST
Single:
Takes A Little Time (3 Aug – 17)
“…to fall in love.” Pete Tong liked it.

TOYAH
Single:
Don’t Fall In Love (I Said) (27 Apr – 22)
The Tory Teletubby punk had her last (belated) hit single, barking out the title in her unlovely Brummie squaddie voice, before Becoming A Proper Actress (i.e. West End musicals), marrying Robert Fripp and petitioning for asylum seekers to be kicked out of the country.

TRANS-X
Single:
Living On Video (13 Jul – 9)
Jon Savage has this nailed as the logical conclusion of the No Wave/Hacienda/New Pop interface, and the 12-inch (big in the clubs for some 18 months before charting) is indeed a soul-free (thankfully) wonder. Fischerspooner and everyone else took up the slack from here, eventually.

TINA TURNER
Single:
We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome) (20 Jul – 3)
BONNIE TYLER
Single:
Holding Out For A Hero (31 Aug – 2)
You couldn’t make up such coincidences. Of the two manifestos, Tyler/Steinman’s is the more convincing as it sounds more urgent – Tyler sounds as though she is literally dying for an Other – while Turner’s film theme is the more resigned, and perhaps works better in its bloated hulk of a song if you’re not already aware of Mad Max and all who drive in him.

UB40
Singles:
I Got You Babe (with Chrissie Hynde) (3 Aug – 1)
Don’t Break My Heart (26 Oct – 3)
Although they ended up a pop reggae karaoke band, UB40 in their early days could be as menacing in their approach as Killing Joke; listen, for instance, to 1980’s bleaker-than-bleak “The Earth Dies Screaming” single, or the virtually subterranean debut album Signing Off. “Don’t Break My Heart” was their last single of note; a static, minor-key OMD lament wherein Ali Campbell warns: “And if you make me cry/You’ll wish that you had not” as though the meat cleaver was already being hoisted into position.

THE UNTOUCHABLES
Single:
Free Yourself (6 Apr – 26)
American ska, a decade before No Doubt. The chorus includes the lyric: “Be a man, boy.”

MIDGE URE
Singles:
If I Was (14 Sep – 1)
That Certain Smile (16 Nov – 28)
Ure got to number one on the post-Live Aid sympathy vote; “If I Was” is essentially a depunctumised Ultravox, while “That Certain Smile” is markedly inferior to the similarly-named 1958 Johnny Mathis hit.

U2
Single:
The Unforgettable Fire (4 May – 6)
I wonder if there is some tumour of guilt within Bono that he has had the career which Billy MacKenzie should have had by right? Admittedly MacKenzie ultimately had no one to blame except himself for becoming the Peter Cook of New Pop (early blazing promise followed by long-drawn-out descent into his father’s garden shed). Listen to the unmistakably “Party Fears Two” keyboards on “The Unforgettable Fire;” the dread with which Eno’s synths underline Bono’s final, cracked “tonight.” The Unforgettable Fire remains U2’s best record; less showy in its radicalism than Achtung Baby, less preachy than The Joshua Tree; the right balance between post-punk/post-prog guitaristics (as with Sonic Youth, the Edge sometimes sounds as though he is playing guitar with no hands) and Another Green World warm futurism. Bono and the audience member dancing like a post-punk Jack Vettriano painting in momentary ignorance of the rest of Live Aid; yet he himself has remained more aware of Live Aid than anyone else who was on that bill. Whether this is a good or bad thing it is still too early to tell.

SUZANNE VEGA
Album:
Suzanne Vega (NME – 35)
Punctum: the fingers accidentally scraping down the neck of the guitar towards the slow deceleration of “Small Blue Thing.”

CHAMPION DOUG VEITCH
Single:
Jumping Into Love (NME – 25)
He was a dustman from Glasgow who did a crazy fusion of punk/soul/C&W/reggae. Or something. Or was that Jesse Rae? The NME list’s obligatory “mad” record (for Christ’s sake don’t say QUIRKY). Mr Veitch’s “rap” in the middle section succeeds in being even worse than Bill Drummond on the JAMMs’ 1987 album.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
Album:
VU (NME – 3)
The other album in the NME’s top ten recorded in the sixties. Not quite the “lost” third Cale album, but as near as anyone’s going to get. Actually Cale throughout sounds as if he’s already got one foot out of the camp – “Ocean” is good but doesn’t begin to compare with the definitive reading on the live VU 1969 double album. Completists may wish to know that this album includes the first issue of the Maureen Tucker-sung “I’m Sticking With You,” lately (ab)used in commercials.

MARIA VIDAL
Single:
Body Rock (24 Aug – 11)
“Flashdance – What A Feeling” by any other name; Vidal sings this as though it’s her only chance, and goodness me, it was.

TOM WAITS
Album:
Rain Dogs (NME – 1)
Not a misprint – it came joint top with Psychocandy which I suppose is fitting. Ostensibly no more than Swordfishtrombones 2, but in the same way that Tropic Appetites was Escalator 2, i.e. it explores different and more disorientating places, future Rod Stewart hit “Downtown Train” notwithstanding. But who has followed his lead?

THE WATERBOYS
Single:
The Whole Of The Moon (26 Oct – 26)
You may even think that so enclosed was the pop year of 1985 that there wasn’t even a great deal of room for the New Supertramp of “The Whole Of The Moon” to be a hit (it eventually made the top three on reissue in 1991). But I rather like that daft old slice of Ayrshire middle cut Mike Scott; I like his absurd pretensions (“Tugboats, towers and tenements!”) and the 1812 firework display at the end. If you’re going to do pomo AoR, do it like this, and don’t apologise.

WHAM!
Singles:
I’m Your Man (23 Nov – 1)
Last Christmas (14 Dec – 6)
What place was there for Wham! in 1985? They went to China. They recorded the worst single of their career, a cynical rewrite of “Freedom,” and shot a black-and-white video for it in the Marquee club (that gurning percussionist really ought to have been sent to Chechnya at bayonet point). And eventually Shane Richie had a number two hit with it late last year – a record deliberately designed to sound like your dad singing Proper Old Songs Like What They Used To Make. Proper songs. “If you’re gonna do it, do it right.” But bless George; since then he has tried his best, even if in a Michael Bentine way.

EUGENE WILDE
Single:
Personality (2 Feb – 34)
“A bottle of Dom Perignon to get us in the mood” sang Mr Wilde on his 1984 date rape smoocher “Gotta Get You Home With Me Tonight.” “Personality” made it sound like the collected works of Andrea Dworkin.

KIM WILDE
Single:
Rage To Love (27 Apr – 19)
Poor old Kim floundered away from RAK Records. Her only hit of 1985 was this awkward rewrite of “Runaway Boys.” Kim was not born to do rockabilly. Rockabilly is not by default greater than gardening.

STEVIE WONDER
Single:
Part Time Lover (7 Sep – 3)
God, Stevie Wonder (the juxtaposition was accidental) really would do any old rubbish in ’85, wouldn’t he? (see above passim) The Arlal O’Hanlon of soul. And the only hit he had in 1985 in his own right was a rewrite of Hall and Oates’ “Maneater” which in turn was servicing the debt of “You Can’t Hurry Love.” The cyclical nature of pop!

ROBERT WYATT
Album:
Old Rottenhat (NME – 21)
Single:
The Wind Of Change (with the SWAPO Singers) (NME – 28)
A quiet, rather bitter album Old Rottenhat was, skulking amongst the dimmer lampposts of geopolitics; its opening track “Alliance” saw Wyatt crooning hatred at his old mate Bill McCormick for crossing over to the SDP (“It’s hard to talk to enemies/And we are enemies/What we had in common/Makes it even worse”). Such rancour sat ill against the good-natured gait of the pro-Mandela “Wind Of Change” single or indeed within the year when, with glasnost, the “beloved” old order’s collapse was set into motion.

PAUL YOUNG
Singles:
Every Time You Go Away (9 Mar – 4)
Tomb Of Memories (22 Jun – 16)
“Your name is on a list of celebrity Tory supporters!” said someone from the Observer to Paul Young about four or five years ago. “Er…um…well they’re obviously working from an old list…obviously one’s politics do, y’know, obviously, change, obviously” – sorry, I’m making Luton’s finest sound like Steph out of Big Brother, but his well mannered, Laurie Latham-traduced Opportunity Knocks cover versions didn’t quite sell as well this year as No Parlez had done in ‘83/4. Although “Every Time You Go Away” was an American number one, its parent album, The Secret Of Association, sold relatively poorly. The most interesting thing this ex- (or still?) Tory did in 1985 was his solemn reading of Bragg’s “Man In The Iron Mask” (the B-side of “Love’s Unkind” soundalike “Tomb Of Memories”) set against glacial Arctic synths. But it wasn’t the death knell for “soul” or “authenticity” in pop – regrettably, very, very far from it.

ZZ TOP
Singles:
Legs (23 Feb – 16)
Sleeping Bag (19 Oct – 27)
How better to conclude this summary of a year of old mutton dressed up as New Pop than to glance askance in the direction of the American Status Quo, who were sufficiently hipped up to underscore their one song with an electro throb and subsequently hopped up by critics desperate for SOMETHING to stand out. The trouble was, they had two beards and a third fellow named Beard, but still only one song.