The Housemartins: "There Is Always Something There to Remind Me"

20 April 1988

"In fact, it just makes the whole thing even sadder and...excuse me while I blub..."

— Josephine Collins

In an age when bands never really breakup anymore, it's almost impossible to imagine a group closing the curtain when things were only just getting started. The Housemartins had only been a name act for two years and it naturally caught a lot of people in UK pop off guard. And this was still a time when groups did decide to end things early. The Police were only just reaching a mass international audience when they went on permanent hiatus. Similarly, Wham! wereat the height of their powers when George Michael concluded that going solo was what was best for all concerned — except for Andrew Ridgley. Paul Weller took The Jam to pasture as he began to realise that his musical ambitions were beyond his bandmates.

Speaking of which, the last time this blog dealt with a farewell single was when we looked at "Beat Surrender" by "La confiture". It was Single of the Fortnight as much for its place as an event in British pop than for its quality. The Jam did many, many better singles in their day and their finale could well have been their weakest since the Bruce Foxton-penned "News of the World" (and that was done when they were still finding their feet) but try telling that to their still-loyal following: the group went out on a high note with an exciting, piano-driven rocker with some of Weller's patented sloganeering. It hit number one so who am I to question it?

The breakup of The Housemartins was caused a similar out-of-nowhere shock. They weren't huge like The Jam or The Police or Wham! but, then, they never gave themselves a chance to get that big either. They never did much in America (and sales of their records in New Zealand were never anything special) and weren't quite critical darlings the way The Smiths had been. (For all of its end of decade embrace of all things pop, Smash Hits got behind them more than the weekly music journals for students, venues one might assume would have been a more natural home for ver Hoosies) They were just two albums in and who's to say how much bigger they would have become?

Looking back to childhood is a popular subject for songwriters — and the results generally resonate with fans. "In My Life" was described by John Lennon as his first "serious" composition and reflective songs of this sort have since been taken up by many (including by former Housemartin Paul Heaton with "I'm Your No.1 Fan" from The Beautiful South's 0898 album). Others go for a more playful look back at younger days. Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" is filled with fond reminisences of youthful hijinks of hanging out with "hoodlum friends" and "playing doctor" while "Baggy Trousers" by Madness just lists off examples of "all the fun we had" in spite of some terrifying teachers. There's more than a little of this going on in "There Is Always Something There to Remind Me" too: "drawing mustaches and glasses on the ruling classes" does appeal to boys bored and bratty alike but there's also something less-than savoury going on. There's some real fear in some of Heaton's lyrics and they still manage to nag at him in adulthood.

A seemingly playful song like "Baggy Trousers" is able to hide its dark side underneath all that nutty boys fun but there's less of that here with the equally goofy Housemartins (their image as merry men of pop was something they all despised and it likely contributed to how The Beautiful South were received as confrontational and prickly just a year later). I listen to it and think of the many slights I have felt at the hands of teachers, students and even friends and how they still come back to me on occasion. I am also reminded of stupid things I said or did that still cause me to shudder. "I've more than you" — incidentally, I always thought it was "Our mother knew": I am always finding new mondegreens — is not a phrase that haunts me but I imagine it would stick with young people growing up in a class-based society like Britain. We finish school and get on with our lives but we never quite move on from those incidents that were traumatic.

While last singles like "Beat Surrender" and Wham!'s "Edge of Heaven" were both number ones, "There Is Always Something There to Remind Me" underperformed, only reaching a peak of 35 in May of 1988. This broke a nice streak of six top 20 hits on the bounce and it's bizarre that such a good single would fail where others had done well, especially as it was their swan song. A problem, however, was that the single wasn't brand new. It had been recorded several months' earlier for a John Peel session and buyers may have been turned off by the group calling it a day with some recycled product. (They admitted in Smash Hits that they weren't interested in prolonging the end by playing a farewell concert which stands to reason considering they couldn't even be arsed to record a proper final single) More importantly, there's little that's self-congratulatory to it nor does it bring the group to an end by bringing tears to the eyes of their fans. They went out the way they wanted to go out and didn't much care what anyone thought. Luckily, they left plenty behind to remind us of them.

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Also of some cop

Joyce Sims: "Walk Away"

"Come Into My Life" had been a hit single that made you wonder why there weren't more songs just like it. A rare groove with stylish soul and a club hit that managed to crossover to the UK charts. It's still a great song but why weren't there more? No one managed to emulate it and Joyce Sims herself struggled to match it. "Walk Away" is perfectly acceptable eighties' soul-pop but it suffers from being not up to scratch alongside its predecessor. Well sung by Sims and it's not a song I'd turn off though nor is it anything that commands the listener's attention. She never did another "Come Into My Life" but just be glad she pulled it off the once.

The Housemartins: "Me and the Farmer"

26 August 1987

"This single proves — once and for all! — that The Housemartins have wit, intelligence, brevity, humour and the sparkliest nippy pop tunes ever created."

— Sylvia Patterson

With all due respect to the likes of Brian Wilson, Carole King, various members of Fleetwood Mac and Max Martin, none of them can write a song about relationships like Paul Heaton. During his time with The Beautiful South, he captured couples on the brink of breaking up ("A Little Time"), dealing with an unwanted pregnancy ("Bell Bottomed Tear"), being unable to communicate ("You Keep It All In"), growing old ("Prettiest Eyes") or sticking with loving but unfulfilling relationships ("Tonight I Fancy Myself", "We Are Each Other"). These traits would eventually descend into either grotesque pieces about dominance and S&M ("Worthless Lie", "Mini-Correct", a song so vicious that it prompted Brianna Corrigan to quit the group and she was able to put up with the controversial "36d") or self-parody ("Perfect 10") but these shouldn't gainsay how he was once able to craft work dealing with couples that was realistic yet imaginative, cynical yet romantic.

This quality was a marked change from when Heaton was leader of previous group The Housemartins. A common charge leveled at The Beautiful South was that they had become "soft", that the boozy Marxism of "Happy Hour" had been watered down to songs about cozy domestication. Yet, socialism and football terraces aside, there had always been the spirit of the individual buried in his material. "Happy Hour" is drunkenly sung along to in pubs all over the world to this day but this belies the fact that it's about being alienated by the jollity of crowds and the watering holes they frequent. The skiffle-drenched favourite "Sheep" deals with being baffled by the mentality of mindless mobs. Yet, they didn't really do one-on-one human interaction.

The very day that Heaton and the supposedly dishy Stan Cullimore (sorry, Sylvia, but I just don't see it) wrote "Happy Hour", however, the pair composed a song about a relationship. It wasn't about a miserable couple who may once have been in love but about an employer and his employee. "Me and the Farmer": workplace dysfunction in song. Though it was kept, it didn't make the cut for their first LP and would have to wait so it's possible they weren't as thrilled by it as they should have been. They weren't to know it then but they had a breakthrough on their hands.

It's hard to picture this song having a basis in reality. A peasant toiling the land wouldn't have had this kind of close contact with his feudal lord. In more recent times, a migrant worker or a penniless labourer wouldn't be so indentured to their boss to the point that quitting their job would be (at least technically) impossible. Nit picking? Sure but the song is so great that it retains its potency.

Heaton refuses to allow the song's narrator to feel too sorry for himself. The song opens with a line, "me and the farmer get on fine / through stormy weather and bottles of wine" that indicates a camaraderie. But if this farmer sometimes treats Heaton well, then he's still a ruthless land baron and has no qualms about using humans, animals and nature to his ends. Being very much of its time, it's clearly a parable for Thatcherite deregulation, albeit one told on the scale of a single individual.

I never knew The Housemartins when they were active. I was still a good decade away from entering university during their brief two years of activity so I was well outside their target audience. For me, they were primarily the group that Paul Heaton used to be in. Going from the 'Hooses' to ver South was hardly the most radical creative shift that a singer-songwriter has made (bassist Norman Cook's post-Martin career took a much more unexpected turn, even if he always had an affinity for DJing and house music) but it wasn't without howls of protest. Early South gigs from 1989 were marred "fans" chanting for Heaton's old act as well as demanding they play calling card single "Happy Hour" (the band, for their part, responded in kind with a barrage of rude words hurled back at the crowd).

As I mentioned earlier, critics, too, weren't always crazy about where Heaton was going as the nineties progressed. The Beautiful South's more MOR-friendly sound (as well as, implicitly, the fact that they always had a female vocalist) resulted in reviews that weren't always glowing. And the music journalists could never seem to get past what Heaton had previously done; by comparison, even Morrissey's hit-and-miss solo career wasn't as dogged by his days with The Smiths and only occasionally did New Order reviews bother to mention Joy Division. As a longtime fan of 'the Pet Shop Boys you can't dance to', I never understood this. It wasn't until after several years of South fandom that I turned to The Housemartins, and even then I did so reluctantly. The hacks were always trashing my second favourite band and I had little desire to discover that they may have had a point.

"Happy Hour" was their biggest self-composed hit and would cast an unwelcome shadow over both The Housemartins and Beautiful South. Well before the rise of laddish groups like The Stone Roses and Oasis, the Martins acted like a bunch of goons in their videos and looked like normal blokes who signed on every week, were regulars at the local betting shop and had wives who looked like barmaids. They enjoyed a pint and read The Sun. Their socialism didn't matter since you could sing "Happy Hour" with your mates on a bus and they looked just like their fans. All of this was completely true except for the fact that it was bollocks.

Heaton had been a longtime fan of Motown and Northern Soul and the influence of black music is all over his work. Added to the mix was some skiffle and indie rock of the age. All of these styles tended to appeal to working class types but it was a sound they began refining for their second album The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death. Just as the last Jam album could almost be the first Style Council LP, the use of a choir and horns on People... makes it a proto-Beautiful South record — at least in places. There's also a tougher sound with some rock guitar and pounding drums from new recruit Dave Hemmingway. This subtle change of pace might explain its lack of big hits and its lower album chart placing. Indeed, it would prove to be the lowest charting LP of Heaton's career until The Beautiful South's Gaze in 2003 (that said, it would also prove to be the last album of his to produce three top 20 hits for over ten years). But it's a better album than the very fine London 0 Hull 4 and there are hints that they were already keen to ditch what had made them successful.

"Me and the Farmer" was one of the rockier numbers from their forthcoming album. Predecessor "Five Get Over Excited" had the skiffle shuffle of old and a singalong chorus for the crowds to appreciate and the catchy "Bow Down" would prove to be a fan favourite album track but "Farmer" seems cut from a slightly different cloth. For one thing, the chorus is tricky to join in with due to the call-and-response (I can never decide if I should join in with his bandmates' backing vocals — "won't he let you go? — or with Heaton himself — "probably no"). And though the tune itself is yet another jolly number, the subject matter hardly seems fitting for a knees up round the pub. Fittingly, for an early piece about an individual, it appeals more to the solitary listener.

Much of this was obscured by the group's image, which remained steadfastly ordinary. It has a typically wacky video too. But people couldn't get behind it the way they did "Happy Hour", a song that they wrote ten minutes later but which sounds like it's from a much earlier age. Using up every second of its just-under-three-minute playing time to fullest effect, "Me and the Farmer" is simply wondrous pop, the kind of song that can easily hold up to repeated listens and which never fails to delight, as well as being a welcome reminder of just what an underrated group of musicians they were. You can have "Happy Hour" and I'll take this: a song they never bettered and which Heaton would struggle to equal.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Bros: "I Owe You Nothing"

Matt, Luke and Ken would soon be causing a stir by getting the British youth to start putting Grolsch bottle caps on their Doc Martens (though no one ever explained how they got the ruddy things to stick) but they were far from a sensation in the midst of 1987. "When Will I Be Famous?" is one of the great boy band singles and a perfect debut for a trio so keen to grab hold of the spotlight but, in truth, this ode to their well-documented grumpiness is probably just as much a part of their reality. "People think we're completely contrived," complains Matt in this same issue of the Hits, a high horse they would never descend from. No, they didn't owe anyone anything but they sure felt they deserved everyone's respect from the off.

Sharpe & Numan: "New Thing from London Town"

10 September 1986

"In a fortnight sadly lacking in dazzling delights, this was the only single that demanded to be heard again."

— Ian Cranna

Looking at the quotation above you'd think that that "super"group Sharpe & Numan's competition this fortnight is nothing but a bunch of mid-eighties mediocrities and you may not be wrong (UB40? Paul Young? Sir Billiam of Idol? Falco? Nik always-a-laugh-and-a smile Kershaw? Ultravox for god's sake) but for the fact that Ian Cranna is pretty impressed with the bulk of what's on offer. True, there's nothing that's lights out brilliant or anything and some of these acts were beginning to look like relics even then but it's a respectable batch nonetheless. I might not demand to hear any of these again but I wouldn't turn very many off if they came on. If the singles here are low on "dazzling delights" then that certainly goes for this issue's SOTF.

My junior high school library had this one book that my friend Ethan and I spelled each other on perpetual lone. The Rock Book wasn't actually called The Rock Book but that's what we called it (it was something like The Rand-McNally Book of Rock or The McMurray-Douglas Real Estate Book of Rock but I have no idea) and it was something the two of us devoured. It was hardly a flawless work of reference: discographies were leaden with howlers (I'm still looking for that elusive Smiths album Sheila Take a Bow) and the fact that they reckoned The Police merited a larger spread than The Beatles was puzzling but it had a lot going for it as well, not the least of which being that it was the only thing available. While there were write ups on plenty of artists and groups we were familiar with, I tended to be drawn more to the acts I had no idea about. Love had a dead boring group name and didn't have any hits but the cover of one of their albums (Forever Changes, it would turn out) looked good and they were definitely something I promised myself I would look out for (until I promptly forgot all about them; good thing I had a chance to discover them years later). The Jam was Paul Weller's first group (I had no idea he'd done anything prior to The Style Council) in which he actually dared to rock (it didn't sound too promising but I hoped to give them a go). But the act I found myself especially drawn to was Gary Numan.

He seemed a quixotic character with brooding persona that was one part Peter Gabriel at his most outlandish in Genesis and one part Morrissey. British mope rock had its stars (in addition to Moz, there was Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux) and synth pop was still a major factor (The Rock Book was my thing in 1990 when two of synth's three greatest albums, Behaviour and Violator, were released; the other one is Dare) and Gazza seemed like a perfect meeting point. Sure, Depeche Mode were around but I always considered them to be too pervy and poppy to really fit in with the glum contingent. Turns out, it was too perfect a crossover. Still, he seemed charismatic, his album covers looked great and he looked like just the sort of figure to woo a moody adolescent. Perhaps it's for the best I never got the chance to listen to his music at the time.

LA act Sparks have recently been re-evaluated. Actually, it seems like they're always being given critical reconsideration, which is strange when you consider they've never really fallen out of favour. I'm not sure what to do with them myself. I got the triple set Past Tense collection last year and though I love material on the second disc, there's not much for me elsewhere. Plus, I think I'm getting weary of being told how underrated they are by everyone on Twitter. (I didn't think it possible to be underrated when you seem to get nothing but glowing reviews but there you go) They are, however, important to this week's entry since they invented the concept of the synth pop duo. Having jettisoned previous members, brothers Ron and Russell Mael managed to similarly rid themselves of glam rock and had become an electronic act by the end of the seventies and the commercial and creative second wind they enjoyed with the No.1 in Heaven album proved influential. While larger acts — The Human League, New Order, ver Deps, Propaganda — would also thrive playing synthesizers, their fuller lineups tended towards bringing guitars and drums and other "proper" instruments in to augment their sound. (Even synth-adjacent duos like Eurythmics and Tears for Fears gradually became open towards more analogue-friendly modes) Pairings had little to work with, a deadpan vocalist and his/her very camera-shy partner doing as little as possible behind a keyboard, but I think that kept them on the right path.

So, the once hugely popular Gary Numan had been seeing his chart fortunes waning for some time and it's a credit to his loyal posse of Numanoids that he managed to avoid the dumper for longer than most. By 1985, he was six years on from the peak of "Are 'Friends' Electric" and "Cars" but he must have seen how the likes of Soft Cell, Yazoo and Blancmange had been doing with vocalist-keyboardist dynamic. He promptly went out and brought in Bill Sharpe of Shakatak to be his very own David Ball, Vince Clarke or, er, other one from Blancmange. The pair got off to a promising start with the Top 20 hit "Change Your Mind" but they didn't immediately follow it up and soon Numan was back doing solo material. It wouldn't be for another year-and-a-half that they would be back: so much for building upon momentum.

"Change Your Mind" had been Numan's biggest hit of '85 with solo efforts barring a live EP missing the Top 40 altogether. 1986 got off to a better start with back-to-back chart entries but now all of a sudden he's back with his partner Sharpe in a synth duo. "New Thing from London Town" is reasonably good, not quite up to the scratch of "Change Your Mind" but probably of a higher standard than much of his other recent work. Sharpe's playing does its best to rescue Gazza from the goth rock sewer, its sound not unlike the cinematic darkness of Propaganda's "Dr. Mabuse". Cranna wonders just what this "new thing" is supposed to be and it's a good question (a quick study of the lyrics doesn't reveal much). If it's meant as a statement of intent then Numan doesn't go far enough and it's not helped by being yet another one off effort. A redone version cropped up on solo album Strange Charm and the pair wouldn't be heard from again until they had a minor Top 40 entry in early 1988. Automatic, their one album as a unit, wouldn't come out until '89.

Gary Numan had been resistant to give the Sharpe & Numan tag a proper go, admitting that he didn't wish to alienate the few fans he had left. A pity since the project might have given him the shot in the arm his career needed at the time. It seems he never wished to stray too far in one direction, either by going fully synth pop or by going with a stronger goth-industrial approach. While it may have been admirable for him to try to toe that line, there's too much compromise to his work as the eighties progressed. Synth duos Soft Cell, Yazoo and Blancmange were largely gone by this point but the Pet Shop Boys and Erasure had now emerged and both would carve out excellent careers loaded with hits and strong albums. On the other hand, by the time the one-and-done Sharpe & Numan pet project LP had finally come out a new American act called Nine Inch Nails was busy finishing off their debut Pretty Hate Machine. Trent Reznor has always made a point of citing his debt to Numan but this is arguably a case of the protegee surpassing the mentor. Sometimes you just have to take a side already.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Housemartins: "Think for a Minute"

Housemartins backlash has begun: Cranna despises their "weedy, contrived silliness" and you have to think this is down in large part to "Happy Hour", their huge hit that had ver blokes all over England chanting along while downing pints. Yeah, yeah, the song was in fact about socialism (or something) but they were asking for it with such a stupid video. "Think for a Minute" was the follow up and is a marked improvement to Cranna. I have a lot of time for Paul Heaton and his first two bands but this is too much trying to right a wrong with another extreme. This time it's self-righteousness that harms the record. Heaton and co-writer Stan Cullimore (and later collaborator David Rotheray) would soon come up with much better tunes about society's descent into me first Tory solipsism but I guess this is acceptable as a early go — though, having said that, early flop single "Flag Day" is similarly themed and also superior. Spoiler alert: we'll be seeing them before long when it really starts to go right. Stay tuned, readers.