35. HAPPY MONDAYS – “Kinky Afro” (1990)
At the suggestion of Bluesky’s own Jel I have been allotting each song in my UncoolTwo50 list a BAGGY RATING, indicating how they align with the most important (to me) micro-scene of my teenage years. Baggy aka Madchester aka Indie-Dance is a weird little moment – a genuine vibe shift for British indie as groups suddenly discovered house, hip-hop and funk, but also one which flowered up (do you see) and flamed out very rapidly. One of the things people forget about Screamadelica – one of two indie-dance LPs which still has a solid critical rep – is that it came out extremely late, well after the party was finishing up, which might explain why Bobby Gillespie and company pivoted to rawk so quickly.
I said “suddenly” but it wasn’t sudden really. Happy Mondays had been making greasy, lairy sort-of-funk for five years before Pills’N’Thrills’N’Bellyaches (the other Good Baggy Album) and they were hardly the first Factory Records act to embrace the groove. Baggy is part of an indie-dance continuum as much as it is a singular movement, one which goes back to early 90s punk-funk and on to Britpop-era big beat remixes. There really has always been a dance element.
I liked “Step On” but pocket money triage meant I didn’t get the album, so I first heard “Kinky Afro” at the end of 1990 on John Peel’s Festive Fifty. Its overripe, saturated disco strings and the self-loathing sleaze of its lyrics jumped out at me as an immediate favourite, a song I rewound again and again. Maybe if I’d known more about its templates – “Lady Marmalade” most obviously – it would have made less of an impact. But I don’t think so. Pills’N’Thrills as an album feels decadent now, the Mondays cutting the sound of their first albums with something that makes it brighter but more brittle, a party going on too long. But even if I’d use Bummed first to try to convince someone the Mondays were good – not an easy job, in my experience – this album and this song still have my heart.
34. UTAH SAINTS – “Something Good” (1992)
I was faffing around as to whether to include this at all – big chart rave hits were a bit over-subscribed in my list, and also whenever I actually played it “Something Good” sounded less.. thrill-powered than I remembered. Something was missing. Then I realised I was playing the full length version. There’s a difference between rave music and, say, disco, where in general you need the 12” to get the full effect. Because the pleasures of rave singles are so immediate and frenzied, it’s often worth chasing down the single edit to get them in compressed form. That’s certainly the case with “Something Good”: on the long version the Kate Bush sample shows up every minute or so, in the edit it just repeats, an omnipresent ecstatic moan. The different house piano hooks come at you with pulse-pounding rapidity on the 7”. And most important of all, you only get the dude yelling “Utah Saints! U-U-U-Utah Saints!” on the short version, and if he’s not there what even is the point of the thing?
33. SAINT ETIENNE – “He’s On The Phone” (1995)
Obviously they kept making good singles after 1995 but Saint Etienne’s records kept turning up at particular moments in my University life, from Avenue coming out just after I arrived to this song’s release a few months after I left, with So Tough, the Xmas 93 EP, “Pale Movie” all coming out just in time to be on my walkman during particularly wonderful or disastrous times. So while I’ve liked them ever since, I think of them as my student band, and that partly guided my pick. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” is more important, and maybe more accomplished, but it wasn’t part of my emotional life in the way “He’s On The Phone” was, at the end of a wonderful summer.
The lyrics of “He’s On The Phone” do what Saint Etienne often do well; a song that hints at and evokes a situation without telling anything as specific as a story. A bittersweet vignette. Etienne Daho’s murmured appearance only adds to the mystique. The music, on the other hand, is startlingly direct for them – one of their most upbeat, club-ready pop singles, a boshing handbag/europop crossover in a style I rather wish they’d tried more often.
32. FRANKIE SMITH – “Double Dutch Bus” (1980)
Goofy, affable funk songwriter Smith looks around late 70s New York and mixes three of its fads and pastimes for a novelty smash hit. There’s “-izzo” cant, double-dutch jump rope, and, in the wake of hits for the Sugarhill Gang and Curtis Blow, there’s rapping. The guy isn’t a technically brilliant rapper – he has the same very basic flow a lot of Brits will pick up on for their early-80s novelty records (“Wham! Rap” and Captain Sensible’s “Wot”) – but it does the job, and at the moment of writing I love “Double Dutch Bus” more than any other early hip-hop track because it’s a silly funk record which happens to use rapping alongside a bunch of other things Smith has found lying around.
Rap took over the planet because it works in such a huge range of contexts, and “Double Dutch Bus” more than most 1980 records shows that, an old dude slipping smoothly in and out of the style and proving how flexible and fun it is. And it is! It starts “Gimme a HO if you want that funky BUS FARE!” before Frankie loses his fare, has to walk, grumbles about it, croaks like a frog, back-talks and gives Missy Elliott the bones of one of the greatest singles of the next century just for good measure.