— 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.
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