Indie Top 20 Vol 5 Side 4 - Darling Buds, Talulah Gosh, Sugarcubes, Another Sunny Day, Swans

1. Darling Buds - Shame On You (Native)

Ah memories, misty water coloured memories, of the way we were... it sounds almost unfathomable now, but The Darling Buds were an incredibly big deal around this time, featuring in the "Great Hopes for 1989" section of many a music magazine at 1988's tail end. Bursting out of Newport way before Cool Cymru was dreamt up, and fronted by the very blonde and pretty Andrea Lewis with the moody, smouldering Harley Farr on guitar, they looked the part, sounded spiky and could clearly pen a catchy ditty. Whatever could go wrong?

As always with this question, it's difficult to give a precise answer, really, but they never quite hit the same heights as the rather similar Primitives, never mind The Stone Roses or even The Wonder Stuff. "Shame On You" makes some hints as to why - sharp and sparky the whole affair might be, but there's actually very little to set the band apart from their indiepop compatriots apart from presentation. It zips along in one big rush but doesn't sound in any way significant, cheeky, snappy little lines like "Of all the things you could have said/ you had to say 'let's go to bed'" aside.

Away from all the hype, though, it is possible to admire the track's sheer driving force and sassiness. And in fairness to the band, they had better tracks up their sleeves, albeit none strong enough to really push them into the frontline of pop.

Overall, though, another group for the "Not quite as good as The Flatmates" file. And once The Darling Buds of May became a major hit television series, their name became faintly absurd too, rather than them seeming like another indie band named after an old tome.



2. Talulah Gosh - Bringing Up Baby (53rd & 3rd)

Some unintentionally cruel track sequencing here. 1989's great hopes are followed by a group who had largely fallen into irrelevance in the music press by this point. At one particularly fruitful, fresh post-C86 point, you couldn't even pick up a copy of the glossy Record Mirror without reading about Talulah Gosh, but by the end of 1988 eyes had turned elsewhere.

It's not overly surprising, really, because while the music press love to champion fresh new faces and underdogs for a year or two, they tend to lose patience and wander off if the act either remains resolutely underground or just plain doesn't break through. Talulah Gosh were clearly in the former camp - despite the enormous strides they had made by the time we last caught up with them on Volume Two, they remained on a tiny indie, always sounded charmingly amateurish (or irritatingly so, depending on your point of view) and continued writing songs about subject matters which were never going to resonate with the broader public. "Bringing Up Baby", for example, seems to be partly based on a 1938 Katherine Hepburn film of the same name. I've never seen it, but it's apparently a "screwball comedy", which makes the slightly melancholic air and detachment of the song feel rather strange. It seems more likely that this is about an ordinary couple desperately imagining themselves to be like Hepburn and Cary Grant in the film.

It's a sweet, lonely, fragile little song which sounds like the band beginning to explore more interesting depths, but their final single "Testcard Girl" was just around the corner, and that would be the end of that. Like The Flatmates before them, there would be no album, although Amelia Fletcher, Mathew Fletcher and Peter Montchiloff would re-emerge in Heavenly, who became full-on indiepop legends with a much more rounded, tougher style. "Atta Girl" in particular highlights how much their lyrical and musical approach would build on the Gosh foundations.

Fun Indiepop fact - In 2014 Amelia Fletcher was awarded with an OBE for her services to Competition and Consumer Economics.



3. The Sugarcubes - Deus (One Little Indian)

"Birthday" was such a beguiling single that there was a period spent wondering how on earth The Sugarcubes would follow it up. Most journalists predicted a Cocteau Twins styled career, consisting of atmospheric, wobbly songs with disorientating lyrical content. It didn't happen. "Birthday" was a complete one-off, and the follow-up single "Cold Sweat" was an aggressive, almost threatening single about sexual intercourse.

We won't get a chance to discuss that one here - a shame, because it's probably one of the more under-rated singles in their catalogue, forever referred to as a "disappointing follow-up" for not being another "Birthday". Third single, "Deus", on the other hand, did get space on "Indie Top 20" and is different yet again, being a piece of laidback, loping funkiness about a God figure who forces people to have baths upon meeting them. "He was not white and fluffy!" complains Einar about the deity before him. "He just had sideburns and a quiff!"

Musically, the track has chiming guitars and a polished finish - it sounds like laidback, FM, adult pop, with only Bjork's vocal acrobatics and Einar's bizarre interjections skewing it in stranger directions. The group once claimed in an interview that it had been designed to be a French pop hit, in what was widely regarded to be a slightly sarcastic comment to a typically parochial British journalist who enquired about when they were going to have a "proper" hit in the UK charts. However, it may have had some truth behind it. From my parent's house in sub-suburban Southend, you could clearly pick up French and Belgian radio, and "Deus" definitely got on there alongside all the middle-of-the-road pop hits of the day.

In the end, though, it had to content itself with a number 51 placing in the UK and not a great deal anywhere else (apart from, presumably, their home country). I'd also argue it's not the finest single in the band's catalogue - it's enjoyable but the inventiveness begins and ends with the lyrics, and the band were at their best when they all really pushed the boat out. You could imagine elements of "Deus" being given to The Police to use as a backing track, which isn't something you could easily say of most of their other output. Still, if nothing else it showed they had baffling versatility.



4. Another Sunny Day - I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist (Sarah)

Whenever a music journalist seeks to skewer the output of Sarah Records with their case for the prosecution, "I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist" is normally first on the list. And why in hell not, I suppose? This, really, is a mere minute-and-a-half of sparsely recorded guitar plucking and musing on unrequited love, the musical template for weak, fragile young souls with tea-stained Sartre books from the library in their satchels that they're never actually going to read. AmIrite?

Not really. While I can't get geared up for this single in the manner that a lot of Sarah aficionados can, its economy of style and folksy melody are significant plus points. There's an awful lot going on within not much time, in a manner that the best sixties folk rockers managed but very few cult indie figures did.

Lyrically, of course, it's as simplistic as anything ever produced by a hair metal band, if not more so - it has delicate sensitivity in buckets, but Harvey Williams (the main driving force behind ASD) despairs "I could speak to you, you could speak to me/ Oh but it will never happen, what will be will be", which besides being startlingly lazy writing also underlines adolescent romantic idealism. He's in love with a girl who doesn't know he exists, purely because her dialogue with him has been non-existent. All she's aware of is that occasional intense gaze across the playground, which is getting more and MORE intense and uncomfortable by the day... pack it in, Harvey. She probably fancies a boy in the year above anyway.

As I pointed out in my entry about The Razorcuts, though, swap the gender roles around in the song to the more traditional "I'm In Love With A Boy Who Doesn't Know I Exist", and the creepiness and hopelessness somehow fades away. Which is maybe at least half the point.



5. Swans - Love Will Tear Us Apart (Jarboe vocal) (Product Inc)

New Yorkers Swans are usually known for piercing, grinding experimental rock, and tend to repulse as many people as they attract. Their 1988 cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" marks a sudden and surprising change of style. Rather than overload the song with harsh, eardrum threatening guitar noises, they handled it with respect and care, recording two versions. One, the Michael Gira sung version, was so close to the original as to be of questionable worth. This, sung by their keyboardist and co-vocalist Jarboe, takes a different tack.

Jarboe seems to interpret the song as a spiritual, hollering the words to a minimal keyboard backing. It sounds at times agonised, other times resigned, sweeping upwards before falling earthbound moments later.

It's ambitious despite its simplicity, and is a worthy reinterpretation, but it's not something I return to very often. It certainly showed that "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was a powerful piece of songwriting which could stand up to all manner of arrangements, but nothing new unveils itself after the first listen here. It does, however, act as a downbeat, sombre and calm resolution to Volume 5.

Indie Top 20 Volume 2 Side 4 - Michelle Shocked, Passmore Sisters, Blue Aeroplanes, Brilliant Corners, Talulah Gosh

1. Michelle Shocked - If Love Was A Train (Cooking Vinyl)

For the first time so far on this blog, I've come unstuck - the original version of this track is nowhere to be found on YouTube or Spotify. If you want to listen to the 1988 studio version, however, it's on Vimeo.

Her debut album "The Texas Campfire Tapes" was a seemingly very unlikely underground hit in 1987, although it actually adhered to a commercial pattern hopefully familiar to most of us by now. Recorded on a Sony Walkman while Michelle Shocked performed an impromptu set around a campfire at the Kerrville Folk Festival, it's not as ragged sounding as you'd expect, but is nonetheless raw. There are background noises in the mix on numerous tracks (including occasional vehicle sounds) but it did nonetheless do a great deal to document the intimacy of the performance and Shocked's strong delivery.

For every phase in popular music history where the dominant commercial noise is almost ridiculously slickly produced and heavily airbrushed pop and rock music, it seems that a handful of "authentic" acoustic artists gain major exposure as a conscious counterstrike, usually from members of the public and critics keen to show their support for "real music".  Whether it was intended to or not, "The Texas Campfire Tapes" seemed to mostly gain appreciation for the novelty of its "realness", and the fact that Michelle Shocked was very radically political in her day-to-day life also gave her an added edge, making her a valuable interviewee.

She was certainly a huge cult star for years afterwards in the USA and the UK, but a series of record company disputes ensured that after 1992, she was out on her own, producing her own material to continued, if slightly more subdued, success. She eventually became a born-again Christian and was accused of making homophobic comments live onstage ("Once Prop 8 gets instated and preachers are held at gunpoint and forced to marry homosexuals, I'm pretty sure that will be the signal for Jesus to come on back"). This in turn led to a rambling defensive debate on Piers Morgan's show, of all places.  From a Sony Walkman recording for an indie label to talking about your faith and prayer meetings on the Piers Morgan show... never let it be said that life doesn't take some damn unpredictable paths.

As for "If Love Was A Train"... it's deftly performed, brittle and rustic, but truly nothing outstanding, and I'd actually rather hear the synthetic joys of Erasure's "Sometimes" again. Clearly "the devil" has all the best tunes, eh? Meanwhile, up in heaven...



2. The Passmore Sisters - Every Child In Heaven (Sharp)

The Passmore Sisters had already been indie mainstays for years by this point, having formed in 1983 and issuing six singles to interest from late night radio (and especially John Peel). "Every Child In Heaven" has a peculiar Americana feel to it, totally out of sorts with the group's Bradford origins. It's probably one of the slickest pieces of pop the group ever produced, however, and sounds like it could have been a bargaining chip towards bigger things... but to no avail.

The group disintegrated later in the year, with bass player Howard Taylor and guitarist Brian Roberts joining The Hollow Men, who signed to Arista and achieved a greater deal of cult success in the process.



3. Blue Aeroplanes - Tolerance (Fire)

Like most of the acts we first stumbled across on Volume One who re-emerge here, The Blue Aeroplanes land with a more confident, coherent vision. "Tolerance" maintains the imaginative flourishes of "Lover and Confidante", but manages to sound bolder and more crafted in the process. In particular, the chorus here is nagging and effective, and the band's identity sounds fully rounded and finalised.

The group would eventually jump ship from Fire to Ensign Records, where they gained a bigger budget and more attention, but Top of the Pops never beckoned, meaning we never got to see an interpretative dancer frolicking around on BBC1 at 7:30pm while a sunglasses-wearing Gerard Langley delivered spoken word observations to an alt-rock backdrop. We could only but dream of such an occasion, unfortunately.



4. The Brilliant Corners - Brian Rix (SS20)

Rather like The Chesterfields, there was a distinct sense that Bristol's Brilliant Corners really weren't taking this business that seriously. They possessed a fine line in catchy tunes and daft wordplay, and "Brian Rix" is as sharp and witty as a Half Man Half Biscuit record, whilst having the jangle-pop richness and sweetness of a Smiths track.

"We fumbled around in front of the budgie/ she started to laugh/ what was so funny?" enquires singer David Woodward, before the chorus informs us "It's just you remind me of Brian Rix/ When you pull down your trousers it sends me in fits". This is one of the finest lyrical couplets indiepop has ever produced, and certainly one of the most enduring. The vision of the couple in a suburban living room awkwardly fiddling with their clothes is immediately apparent. Teen angst? The Razorcuts mope around it, whereas The Brilliant Corners trip over it unawares and turn it into an Ealing comedy.

Brian Rix, famed for his comedic farces, liked the single enough to appear briefly in the video for it (which confusingly uses a slightly stripped back version of the track - you can here the Indie Top 20 version here). Chart history wasn't made despite his helping hand, but the video appeared on "The Tube" and "The Chart Show" and further bolstered the band's reputation. This isn't the last time we'll be considering them on this blog.



5. Talulah Gosh - Talulah Gosh (53rd & 3rd)

Talulah Gosh in "selling out" shocker! The eponymous second single had a video, a reasonable production, a decent pop arrangement, and a needle-sharp chorus, and some of their fans felt their hearts sinking as a result. The feyness was still apparent, and the band had lost none of their identity at all - man alive, with words like "Talulah Gosh was a film star for a day/ Talulah Gosh was a top celebrity", they were clearly still in their own very pre-adolescent, bedroom dreamer lyrical mindset - but the whopping church organ climax to the tune almost seems sarcastic in the way it abandons their previous understatement so dramatically. (I do have to point out the obvious fact that this was just a big production compared to their last, though. I'm not claiming it was Tubular bloody Bells, and certainly there are elements of the band's timing here which are ramshackle, but not obtrusively or destructively so. It's charming rather than jarring).

Increased airplay, press and even television time followed, but it wasn't really to last. Whatever their actual intentions, Talulah Gosh were ultimately a short-lived prospect, but one who we will have the chance to discuss again one final time.

As for Indie Top 20 Volume Two, perhaps it's only appropriate that it should finish so dramatically. It rounds off a series of confident sounding recordings which seemed to promise a Proper Movement about to do Big Things and go beyond its relatively underground reach. Of course, a handful of exceptions aside, things didn't quite turn out that way. 

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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



19. Mighty Mighty - Throwaway (Chapter 22)

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

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



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

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

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