42. SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES – “Cities In Dust” (1986)
One of the best singles artists of the early 80s – “Fireworks”, “Melt”, “Slowdive”, “Swimming Horses”, “Spellbound”. Like a lot of great singles runs it’s a band finding a sound that’s their own and then working through it with fairly minor variations. Swirling, sensual arrangements, steady rhythms, refrains which work as intensifiers for the mantric verses, Siouxsie’s voice growing more imperious with each release. “Cities In Dust” keeps a lot of that but fits it into a more conventional structure – the chorus is one of their best hooks but it’s also a weird ululating splash of vowels.
It’s that slight tightening of focus that made it my Siouxsie pick in this exercise, but the subject matter plays a part too. I dimly remember seeing a clip of the video and finding it inscrutable and scary – something about Nuclear War, maybe? Most things seemed to be. In fact it’s taking the omnipresent shadow of civilisational extinction and saying, yeah, this has happened to people before. Even if we don’t wipe ourselves out in a flash, what remains of us is dust. What makes “Cities In Dust” appealing is the way the sound and the ideas seem to come together – there is something ancient and pagan about the way Siouxie uses repetition and chanting; if you’d hopped back to 79AD and shown Caecilius or whoever a robed woman with a whitened face and darkened hair hair, howling and pronouncing the death of great cities, he’d have had a reference point for that.
41. SL2 – “On A Ragga Tip” (1992)
There are a bunch of tunes on this list which fit under an umbrella of “pop rave”, songs whose ideal home isn’t so much a warehouse or a field somewhere off the M25 as a waltzer ride at a funfair. Here’s one of them – hardcore that achieves the perfect balance between novelty earworm and properly crunching underground breakbeats. I’m fascinated by the apparent fact that Paul McCartney loved it: hooks will out, but I bet he also appreciated the confidence and simplicity with which the track uses a few parts – the piano intro; the sample; the breakbeat – to make an ever-refreshing whole.
I was 19 when this came out, dizzy with the feeling of having an actual social life for the first time. Rave music was not quite yet what I listened to, or what my girlfriend or my friends liked, but it was out there as a constant wild public presence, something clearly new and exciting and – for many, not just adults – baffling and stupid. The “On A Ragga Tip” video – three minutes of carefree, delighted dancing somewhere in 90s London – captures the mood of the moment: the sound of young Britain, rave music on top of the world.
40. L’TRIMM – “Cars With The Boom” (1988)
The whole UncoolTwo50 project is inspired by a book, Gary Mulholland’s This Is Uncool, which, to my shame, I bought years ago in a remainder bookshop, flicked through, and abandoned: probably it’s at the bottom of a box somewhere now. But I have books like that too, which gave my taste a shove at a moment I needed one. One of them is Chuck Eddy’s The Accidental Evolution Of Rock’N’Roll, which is where I first read about L’Trimm.
Eddy’s approach to rock is hard to describe, which is annoying as it’s that approach which inspires, more than any of the specific records he likes. I suppose you could start with the word “rock”: Eddy likes finding connections between records, and ‘genre’ in its deadening, compartmentalised form is the least useful thread he can pull on. The book is full of lists which careen across time and language and style and credibility, spotting relationships and sparking ideas. And since there was no way – pre-streaming – to follow Eddy through these labyrinths, the implicit lesson is: do it yourself.
Picking up the book to write this post, I was surprised to find “Cars With The Boom” hardly features (it pops up in a list of records with traffic noises in a chapter on Sound Effects Pop). L’Trimm show up a few times and get a photograph – maybe that’s what lodged them in my mind as a thing to investigate. The year after I bought The Accidental Evolution, I downloaded by first MP3, technology catching up with Eddy’s omnivorous approach, turning us all for a while into file-hoarding folder-diggers. I heard “Cars With The Boom” that way. I’ve not talked at all about what it sounds like – it’s one of the final records to have that spark of joyful spontaneity you get in early rap without it seeming like an affectation. You can absolutely buy into the idea that these are two friends kicking back, making great pop because the sun is out and they can.