39. THE KLF – “Last Train To Trancentral” (1991)
I think the mystique of the KLF had probably gone about as far as it could – once you have a full length book treating the group as essentially a magical working you’re running out of road. The release of the group’s back catalogue to streaming helps bring things down to earth, lets us hear the band in the context of other pop thinkers and chancers of their era, from the Pet Shop Boys to Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
And also in the context that probably suits them best – banging Europop. As I argued when I wrote about the KLF for One Week One Band, secret ingredients Ricardo Da Force and the choirs of Mu Mu are what makes the ‘Stadium House Trilogy’ feel like Britain’s great contribution to 90s nonsense Europop, less a strange branch on the tree of the Illuminati and more the local equivalent of Culture Beat.
Obviously the genius of “Last Train” is that they’re both at once – it’s just (‘just’) another transcendent rave banger from an age of widescreen, Dad-baffling pop; and it’s also just another text in the codex of KLF self-references. Is the soaring riff what makes the song magical? It is. Does it make it more so if you recognise it from a load of other KLF records? Yeah, kind of. Building trails from the same breadcrumbs, again and again, until they got bored and drew a line: we will not see their like again.
38. CAMEO – “Word Up” (1986)
The apotheosis of mid-80s pop funk, the dry kick of the drums bouncing around an environment in which everything else is rubber. You could get a whole Hanna-Barbera season out of what Larry Blackmon is doing with his voice here, though they might balk at the costume. With no access to videos, I thought for years that Blackmon’s red codpiece on Top Of The Pops was a special treat for the British listeners. In my experience the playground-talk-the-next-day aspect of TOTP (and Doctor Who, for that matter) gets hyped up a bit. There was plenty of chat about pop, wise pronouncements as to the real subjects of certain songs, envy of people who’d seen ‘banned’ videos, and the usual set of homophobic pumped stomach and removed rib rumours that got passed down with each new set of performers. But actual “did you see that?” discussion? Not so much. The two exceptions I can remember most were Nena showing her armpit hair and Cameo’s codpiece. It made an impression.
37. RAZORCUTS – “Sorry To Embarrass You” (1986)
No codpieces here, with this piece of indiepop standing in for a genre I devoted a bit of time to in the white heat of my Smiths love era, 1988-1989. I never explored too far beneath the surface – I only owned one measly Sarah Records 7” – but most of my 16th year on this planet was spent with the conviction that the best music in the world involved jangly guitars and lyrics by sad men about being fated to misery.
This is not the case. I diversified pretty quickly, though it was a long time before I came to think of Morrissey as a basically malign influence, valorising self-pity in unhelpful ways given that I was a shy, self-righteous kid who probably should have just got over himself and engaged with the world a bit instead of sit on the sidelines grumbling at it. Not that a good old moan can’t be therapeutic, and for years afterwards I found indie a comforting listen when my emotions had dealt me a bad hand.
But for this exercise this Razorcuts song had a definite advantage, in that I only heard it for the first time in 2003, when someone posted it to I Love Music. It’s a song I could imagine identifying with intensely if I had heard it back in the late 80s (or – as was usually the case – I would spin my own circumstances in ways that fit the song I liked). But I’d built up an immunity by 2003, so I never actually did relate to it. I just enjoyed it as a great example of the style.
“But,” I hear you say, “it’s borderline incompetent”. Well, I guess it is. The band has a very uneasy relationship with tempo, and the singer makes Morrissey sound like Henry Rollins. Those things don’t matter. The point of this genre is to capture a feeling as directly as possible, and you work through your technical limitations to do it. Back in the day – as a reaction against the highly produced pop that Razorcuts et al co-existed with – there was a tendency for people to mistake the technical limitations for virtues in their own right, but I don’t think “Sorry To Embarrass You” is doing anything terribly different from a Scritti Politti or Shirelles song – all of them finding the best way to capture and express a sentiment.
One reason I like the song is that it gets at something left implicit in most indie – “Sorry To Embarrass You” is explicitly a song about class, about the bruises left by an attempt to pass and fit in to a different social world, and the way class in particular, and a bad relationship in general, can sap someone’s identity. Even Jarvis Cocker, who sang about this stuff a lot, never wrote anything as perfectly bitter as Razorcuts’ concluding thought: “I can hear your voice in every word that I say”. For a long time, that’s how I felt about indie itself, so perhaps I do relate after all.
36. PM DAWN – “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” (1991)
I did not know a lot of things about this record. I did not know that it was a hit in the UK first and then it got a release in the US and became the first Black hip-hop act to get a No 1 there (a claim I also did not know). I did know that Prince Be insulted KRS-One and got shoved off a stage by him, but I did not know that this incident basically didn’t hurt PM Dawn’s career much and they kept on having hits. A strange group! Heavy-lidded hippie mysticism felt like a natural progression from De La Soul, but De La themselves turned their back on the DAISY Age concept, leaving PM Dawn as floaty, tie-dyed outliers.
Decades later this seems mostly a footnote, but I think their mumbled rapping has worn very well. “Set Adrift”’s luxurious bubblebath production settled next to my token indiepop track in the ranking for a reason; there’s no musical similarity but they’re both essentially diffident songs, sensitive guys looking back on where things might have gone wrong. Where Razorcuts are bitter, Prince Be has a zen acceptance that some things just aren’t meant to be. The best moment in the song for me is still the “I wanted her to be a big PM Dawn fan” bit – a brag that ends up in a sigh and a shrug.