The Soup Dragons: "Mother Universe"

3 October 1990

"The Dragons seem to have settled comfortably into being a "floppy" band after their weedy indie beginnings."

— Sian Pattenden

One of the things that makes 1989-90 so musically fascinating is that it was a time in which previously unsuccessful groups suddenly made it big. The Farm, Happy Mondays, James, Primal Scream, The Stone Roses and, yes, The Soup Dragons had all been languishing in the indie scene until seemingly out of nowhere they all began scoring hit singles. The cause? Changing styles and tastes no doubt played a part but it shouldn't go unnoticed that they all began putting out better records at this time.

It was the Roses and Mondays who ended up carving out the bulk of the sales and acclaim and they remain baggy's best remembered groups. The latter were perhaps the first indie guitar group since The Smiths to really excite young people while the former was being fronted by the most charismatic yet peculiar pop star since Ian Dury. The latter headlined Spike Island while the former earned album-of-the-year honours from both the Melody Maker and the NME. They were a veritable Beatles-Stones, Slade-T-Rex and Blur-Oasis. Everyone seemed to have a favourite baggy group but it was always between those two; it was whoever you happened to have in third place that could vary from person to person.

Rounding out the Madchester Top 3 in my esteem was Motherwell's The Soup Dragons. True, their output is thin. As I say above, their work in the mid-to-late eighties is feeble, something that Sian Pattenden agrees with. Listening to some of their early singles, it's like they were trying to emulate The Jesus & Mary Chain but had no idea how to go about doing so. (Modern art buffs will tell you that while Jackson Pollock's drip technique was made to look random and, thus, easy to replicate, it was in fact deliberate and studied and this goes some way to explaining why thousands of young artists have failed to come close to his brilliance; I think there's a parallel there with J&MC and their many imitators). They also fell apart rather rapidly — and on the heels of a bit of a North American breakthrough with 1992's "Divine Thing".

But in between they were every bit as good as either ver Mondays or ver Roses, two bands who also might as well have packed it in when ver Dragons did so. Initially a flop that managed to do worse than lame attempts like "Soft as Your Face" and "The Majestic Head", the original version of "Mother Universe" is nevertheless their first record that anyone would ever choose to listen to. It has quite a good tune, the band is tight and there's no way you won't be singing along before its three minutes are up. Longtime fans (to the extent that they had any) may have been upset by this change in direction but it's pointless to scream "SELL Out!" when you only reach number ninety-four.

Taking a page out of the Mondays' book, they went and recorded a cover version for their next go at the charts. "He's Gonna Step on You Again" had been a hit twenty years' earlier but no one seemed to remember it in '90 and the Dragons replicated it by covering an early Rolling Stones song that somehow flew under the radar for a quarter century. Given what this Scots indie-dance act would do with it, you'd think that Jagger and that lot would've punched out a rip roaring take of "I'm Free" but, sadly, it sounds reflective when it didn't need to be. For a band that often put everything into their music

In some ways, this Soup Dragons' cover is like imaging what the Stones' original should have been like. Sean Dickson belts out a vocal that Mick would've been proud of, it has a lot more musical bounce and the use of a choir is something that the world's greatest rock 'n' roll band would come to use later in the sixties on cuts such as "Salt of the Earth" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want". Maybe I'm making the obvious connection with Jagger's guest spot on Peter Tosh's "(You Gotta Walk) Don't Look Back" but it's easy to picture them bringing in a toaster not unlike Junior Reid joining ver Soups on "I'm Free".

"I'm Free" gave The Soup Dragons a Top Five smash which was only topped or matched by fellow baggy groups Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses. In an attempt to follow it they went back to what should have worked before. Pattenden says it's "completely re-recorded" though Wikipedia describes it as having been "reworked". Dickson's vocal sounds a bit different while the musical additions are so vast that they could very well be covering up the exact same rhythm track underneath. In any case, the results do the trick: what they did to a lackluster Stones song, they had now done to one of their own numbers.

On the other hand, this rave-friendly "Mother Universe" is a bit like "I'm Free"-lite. The gospel choir isn't as much like a Baptist church in the deep south and in place of Reid's toasting there's that very common sample that has always sounded — to these ears, at least — like "bring in my Buddha culture y'all". It's still catchy and you'll no doubt still be singing along just as with the original but it doesn't quite manage to capture that ecstatic pop thrill that they got out of their biggest hit. I would agree with Pattenden that it's "more exciting" than the original but it's still worth pointing out that they seemed to have an easier time covering the Stones than they did when they tried covering themselves.

The Soup Dragons would go on to release a pair of strong albums. 1990's Lovegod sold well and remains one of the better Madchester LP's. Two years later they put out Hotwired which failed to replicate the success of its predecessor. The dumper beckoned but for "Divine Thing" being a Top 30 hit in the US. This was a feat that their contemporaries wouldn't come close to matching (no, EMF and Jesus Jones don't count in spite of what I thought about baggy back then). American college radio had a thing in those days for witty and playful guitar rock and the Dragons briefly found a niche.

In time it would become cool to say "when it comes to Blur vs. Oasis, I'd choose Pulp" (BTW, this is no longer a hot take). I suppose if it was down to a pair of successful but creatively stagnant groups I might also go for a third option even if I don't personally agree with it in this case. But going back to the Big 2 of Madchester, when it comes to Happy Mondays vs. The Stone Roses, I'd (maybe) choose The Soup Dragons. I really have to be in the mood for the latter and I've long since outgrown my interest in the former. A flash in the pan though they certainly were, the Dragons had four or five quality singles and a pair of fine albums — and with "I'm Free" and "Mother Universe" they proved that no one did communal acid dance gospel like them. Even for those of us who preferred listening to them in their bedrooms.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Beautiful South: "A Little Time"

"...and would be quite pleasant and dribbly if it didn't feature that awful woman who sung on "You Keep It All In" doing her best Shirley Temple impression once again", argues Pattenden. Ouch. Briana Corrigan wasn't for everybody. I personally think The Beautiful South were never the same after she left but I'm sure there are others who reckon that was precisely when they became any good. No accounting for taste and all that lark. With a killer video and that rarest of things in a duet (the narrative resolves by the end of the song!), "A Little Time" is no deep fan's favourite South track (it's certainly no "From Under the Covers", "I Think the Answer's Yes" or "I'm Your no.1 Fan") but it's one that great deal of people are fond of. A good way in to all things Beautiful South. Pattenden things there's something amiss with them but I think they were only getting started. That is until Corrigan left which was only a couple years away. Worse luck.

Monie Love: "Monie in the Middle"

11 July 1990

"Monie delivers a high speed rap in which she pretends to be a schoolgirl in love with, but not doing so well at it because at the same time she's being pursued by a complete lunkhead who's totally and pathetically in love with her, thus leaving her "in the middle"."

— William Shaw

"I see hip hop today as school", Monie Love told someone from Smash Hits' Bitz section in the summer of 1989. "My teachers are Public Enemy, my classmates are the likes of The Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Boogie Down Productions, MC Mellow, MC Lyte..." She was righter than she knew. If Chuck D was that stern Language Arts instructor who you ended up learning far more from than you ever would have expected, then The Jungle Brothers were those unruly boys who never gave Mr. D a moment's peace. If Flavor Flav was the popular Social Studies teacher who coached the hopeless junior boys volleyball team and ran a board games club in his classroom over the lunch break, then the members of De La Soul were the lads who got involved in activities but never bothered doing their homework (just my kind of people!). If Professor Griff was the scary librarian with sketchy views on race and gender, then Monie Love was that crotchety old fool's worst nightmare. (I can keep this going too: if PE's anonymous armed guards were the home ec and shop teachers no one cared about, then MC Mellow and MC Lyte were the students who no one recognized while flipping through the yearbook; I can't seem to come up with student-teacher comparisons to Terminator X though)

Of course, what Love probably meant was that she and her Daisy Age rap cohorts were learning from Public Enemy but I like to think that they were acquiring lessons and skills from them while disregarding others. That's an effective student-teacher relationship. I hope she has subsequently become the teacher herself, passing on what she learned to the next generation. She'd have a lot to contribute to a group of impressionable hip hop youngsters and that's not even touching the fact that she had a lot to say about her education at the time.

"Monie in the Middle" is one of many hip hop singles of the time with a video set in a school (just off the top of my head there's also De La Soul's "Me, Myself and I" and Young MC's "Principal's Office" but I'm certain there are plenty more). But where the majority of the others deal with students having troubles with their teachers, this one concerns that worst kind of classroom love triangle: Monie in between a "knucklehead" loser who wants to be with her and the "homeboy" who apparently likes her back. I say "apparently" because she's composing letters to him just as the jerk she spurned was doing for her — and there's nothing in the lyrics to suggest that he hadn't "scrunched up the letter" in turn. Is Monie so obsessed about the silly twit in her class with a crush because she sees a bit of herself in him? (There probably wasn't much she could learn from teachers Mr. D, Mr. Flav and Griff the Giant Git)

In any case, the song is a good warning call for guys like myself who could get a little too hung up on girls that clearly had no interest in them. (In my experience, however, not a whole lot changed even after some began to reciprocate my desires) Sadly, few of us teenage dweebs were unable to heed it because not enough people bothered to go out and buy it. It seems hard to believe that "Monie in the Middle" didn't even get a nominal Top 40 placing. Were spotty British youths turned off by her being so forthright with them? If that is the case, then where were the empowered girls who should've felt that they had an ally? (I never descended so low that I followed anyone into the "ladies' bathroom" but I'm sure more than enough sad types who'd now be regarded as incels would've done so) Overt feminism in pop seldom does as well as it deserves and this was no exception.

With some stellar production from Andy Cox and David Steel of Fine Young Cannibals (possibly returning the favour from Love's excellent rap on the excellent remix of FYC's 1989 hit "She Drives Me Crazy") and samples from jazz and samba, "Monie in the Middle" is a fantastic single and should have at least matched the Top 20 performances of the so-so "Grandpa's Party" and the marvelous "It's a Shame (My Sister)", which came out later in 1990. She had been all about going to school but this isn't something that can be done forever. Perhaps the first sign that her approach was set to change was the uncharacteristically mature cover art of her debut album Down to Earth, which manages to make her look like an earnest R&B vocalist. Maturity is always difficult for young artists to deal with but luckily we'll be meeting Monie Love again on this blog so we can see how she managed. Stay tuned.

~~~~~

Also of some cop

The Soup Dragons: "I'm Free"

From the end of June in 1991 until I finished school four years later, "I'm Free" was my start of the summer holidays anthem of choice — but why did it fail to catch on with anyone else? Celebratory and with a chorus that everyone can singalong with instantly, it has both terrace chant and high school graduation theme written all over it. An early Jagger-Richards composition, it was nothing special when The Rolling Stones first recorded it but kudos to The Soup Dragons (or their management, or their record label) for seeing potential in it. Happy Mondays had set the template for the baggy cover version with their still stunning rendition of "Step On" but the choir, the dancefloor beat and the memorable toasting courtesy of Junior Reid ramps it up to another levels of joy (even if I'd still take "Step On" over "I'm Free" in a pinch). You can all have your bittersweet numbers by bloody Green Day or Natalie Merchant as you bid farewell to school or the job you hate or as you move to another country but I'll have this. I might even have it played at my funeral, which would be laugh if only for me.

It's Immaterial: "Space" / Lionel Richie: "Love Will Conquer All"

8 October 1986

"It's got a good groove but I'm not very keen on it."

— Martin Kemp

"He's like a black Cliff Richard. I find him nauseating."

— Gary Kemp

As pop stars reviewing the singles go, you'd have to look long and hard to find anyone to match Gary Kemp. He first did the deed back in May, 1983 and if you didn't know any better you could easily assume that he he was a regular member of the Hits staff. His moonlighting gig as critic produced some astute observations, personal reflections that don't detract from the groups he's evaluating and he even has some pretty great quotes (I still love his claim that The Style Council's "Money-Go-Round" is like a "cockney Gil Scott-Heron"). In places, he writes like the pop icon that he was, in others like a star-struck fan. 

This fortnight, however, he's not quite on earlier form. But he impressed me so much the first time round that I'm prepared to make excuses. Let's examine them.

Martin Kemp

Gary's younger brother was either too busy shopping for tunics in fashionable boutiques on South Molton Street or wasn't invited the last time the singles needed evaluating. He chose to turn up this time and their brotherly interactions give it a different tone. Gary is less of a muso around his kid brother and bandmate though he does do more of the talking. And maybe that's the trouble here: talking. His last review was considered and it seems likely that he wrote it. This one is much more in the vein of a 'sit back and chat while the records are on and we'll record your observations'. Observations that happen to be largely negative and, more to the point, aren't particularly interesting to the reader.

Having Martin around also lowers the standards. Even Samantha Fox had the decency to nominate a Prince record when she did the singles but Lionel Richie? Wasn't there anything a little more inspiring? Apparently not. Like the Kemps themselves, Richie was just about at the end of his chart salad days and this limp ballad milks it for all it's worth. Gary's not at his best as a music critic here but his claim that the former Commodore is a "black Cliff Richard" is one I won't argue with. "Love Will Conquer All" is the weakest SOTF since "25 Years" by The Catch (and possibly even further back to Bob Dylan's awful "Lenny Bruce").

The Decline of Eighties Pop

It's been more than three years since Gary last guested as a Smash Hits singles reviewer and a lot has changed. New Pop had been long gone and the music scene was now dealing with the aftermath of Live Aid and the rise of the compact disc. Acts — gasp! — in their thirties did well with affluent yuppies buying their stuff. This fortnight there's a rubbish offering from Elton John, a poor remix of The Police's "Don't Stand So Close to Me", a pretty good "Going Home (Theme from Local Hero)" by Mark Knopfler — if I'm being honest, the deserving Single of the Fortnight — and Aretha Franklin's cover of The Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash" which is nowhere near as good as the Kemps seem to think. Even the likes of Marc Almond and The Pretenders feel like throwbacks. Oh and there's also Cliff doing a duet from The Phantom of the Opera with Sarah Brighman. And even-then milquetoast Bon Jovi seems like something new and exciting by comparison.

Gary had Shalamar (his previous SOTF), The Style Council, Grandmaster Flash, Michael Jackson and Altered Images at his disposal the last time but now much of what's up for consideration is by older acts enjoying a commercial rebirth but mainly on the creative decline. And what of up and comers like Sinitta? Now you're just being silly.

The Rise of Indie

With just three records to choose from, indie hardly dominates the selection. One of them is even chosen by our Gary as SOTF but, significantly, he's focused on its admittedly obvious debt to Talking Heads. Meanwhile, he's less enthused by more contemporary-sounding alternative groups The Soup Dragon (though I can hardly blame him; see below) and The Woodentops. The Woodies would never become a big chart threat but a lot of people got excited about their current album Giant, which garnered rave reviews. Gary and Martin are both unmoved and I suspect it's at least in part due to talking their eyes off what was going on in the clubs and on The John Peel Show. With all due respect to It's Immaterial, trying to copy David Byrne was nothing new and the ground being set by The Smiths was proving to be much more fertile. Gary probably bought those seminal Heads albums like Fear of Music and Remain in Light and, thus, appreciates the rhythm of "Space" but it's a dead end. "Driving Away from Home" managed to transcend their influences but this follow up to its follow up ("Ed's Diner (Friday Night, Saturday Morning)" had flopped in between) is too on the nose with the source material, the polyrhythms not unlike "I Zimbra" and singer John Campbell's intonations coming straight out of "Electricity (Drugs)". "(Love Affair with) Everyday Living", The Woodentops' latest, isn't any more original but at least it had come out of mid-eighties indie, a scene of some relevance at the time, even if tit meant nothing to Gary and Martin.

The Spands Sliding Towards Ver Dumper

1983 was a big year for Spandau Ballet. "True" became a worldwide smash and "Gold" — how does that one go again? — did almost as well. They'd already enjoyed eight hits prior to that and would go on to have a few more as the decade progressed. 1986 was the last of their good years chart-wise with the reflective power ballad "Through the Barricades" giving them their last Top 10 hit but it sure feels like they were clinging on to relevance. This may go some way to explaining the less-than jovial tone here. Sure, they complain about the bulk of the records because they're crap but it's possible that were no longer enjoying the pop life to its fullest the way they would have been when they were riding the Giddy Carousel of Pop. Being a pop star had become a chore and being guest reviewers for Smash Hits no longer had the cachet of old. (I guess this resentment of the spotlight comes and goes considering Martin would later appear on Celebrity Big Brother)

Our Gary Wasn't Much Cop to Begin With

Nah, he still kills it with his earlier review. I might bash him and his brother not unlike the way they lay into most of the singles here but Gary's a lyricist, an excellent bass player and her could hold his own as a pop critic. At least some of the time.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Soup Dragons: "Whole Wide World"

Four years is a long time in pop music as evidenced by the skinhead oiks thrashing out this mercifully short single who would scarcely resemble the baggy, floppy-fringed purveyors of joyous indie-dance. There are doubtless sad types in some lowland Scottish town still resentful of them "selling out" but there can't be a better case for why one should just go pop. Much as I want to rip the Kemps for not being aware of what was going on at the time, I can't fault them for finding this a "load of crap". Because that's exactly what it is. You wouldn't think they'd be an act to look out for but, as I say, four years is a long time in pop.