The The: "Uncertain Smile"

30 September 1982

"Some of The The's earlier efforts have been a bit aimless, but this is right on the the button."

— Johnny Black

"The The were an act that I had occasional encounters with over more than a decade but who I could never conjure up much enthusiasm for, which also goes for their name."

As I believe I've discussed previously (I can't be bothered to check), Smash Hits really used to knock Prefab Sprout for their useless name. Maybe I'm just used to it or perhaps it's the fact that I love virtually everything that Paddy McAloon had a hand in but it has never bothered me. What does it mean? Who the hell knows and who cares! I spent a great deal of time trying to think up a better name for this blog than simply VER HITS but I eventually gave up and settled for what had been its working title.

It's easy to forgive a band you genuinely love for having a silly name (and, let's face it, they're all rather stupid; the only group name I care for anymore is Strawberry Switchblade) but it's a whole other matter when you're indifferent towards them or worse. In a sense, 'The The' is the opposite of something like 'Prefab Sprout': rather than sounding a bit naff a first that you eventually just get used to, it seems clever to begin with only to become tired rather quickly. It's easy to imagine Matt Johnson along with whoever happened to be with him at this early stage drunkenly jotting down possible band names only to burst out in hysterics when someone suggested 'The The' — and they liked it enough in the cold light of the next morning to stick with it. Not unlike The Be-Sharps only not as clever — nor as funny.

"All that said, what am I to make of "Uncertain Smile"? Well, I will acknowledge that it would be my choice of SOTF as well."

Did I really like it this much? "A lovely, floating melody"? "An intriguing lyric which manages to read rather well as poetry?" (Laying it on a little think, aren't I?) I clearly enjoyed it during the time I worked on the original blog post but I quickly forgot all about it. 1982 had some stellar Singles of the Fortnight — "Love Plus One", "Party Fears Two", "View from a Bridge", "Faithless", "Man Out of Time", "Pass the Dutchie" — which may explain why a record that I had some fondness for seemed to slip through the cracks. Listening to it now, I still like it but I can't say I'm as willing to gush all over it as I had been.

Context could be a key as to why it stood out at the time. I had long grown weary of all that white boy funk that had been all over the place in early eighties' British music so anything that provided some sort of alternative was welcome. Now, I'm more willing to take all those UK groups who were trying to be just like Chic as they provide relief from over-serious American R&B acts that dominated the early nineties. As long as you're not whatever it is I'm sick to death of then you're in my good books. It is at this stage I remind myself that The The weren't earnest, keeping-it-real Romeos and admit that they did have that going for them.

"Perhaps it's time I filled in the gaps, not just to see if Matt Johnson was up to churning out more equally formidable gems but also if I can catch where it all began to go south."

It's been just under five years since the last time I blogged about this record and the gaps remain unfilled. The The have been covered in this space twice and both times I've had praise for what they had to offer, even if my feelings towards 1986's "Heartland" are somewhat more mixed. Still, they were a band I never thought much of whose earlier efforts impressed me though not enough to get me to investigate "their" output further over the last half-decade. In truth, the thought hadn't crossed my mind ever since blogging about how I really ought to give them more of my time. There's plenty of time for me to explore and, indeed, lots of time left to put off said exploration. Till we meet again, The — or not.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Kid Creole & The Coconuts: "Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy"

"Although certainly a marked improvement over last fortnight's glum crop of singles, the likes of Ultravox's "Reap the Wild Wind" and The Pretenders' "Back on the Chain Gang" are pleasantly unremarkable efforts but nowhere close to this good."

I clearly didn't spend a great deal of time considering the virtues of every new release in this issue. I had started this blog intending to listen at least once to everything that was reviewed but it was something I abandoned almost immediately. (I'm pretty sure I managed to give everything a go from the first two singles reviews covered only to give up because (a) it was pointless and (b) I couldn't be arsed) Take this fortnight. While certainly there are a fair number of "pleasantly unremarkable" newbies, for whatever reason I let this memorable number two hit get away from me. (I blame it being buried at the bottom of the right-hand side of the page rather than my carelessness) A little August Darnell goes a long way but this never hurt his many quite brilliant singles and "Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy" is probably his finest since "Cherchez la femme". Sultry, cool, sleazy and funny. Deserves to have been covered by people who completely miss the song's point — and I say that as someone who isn't sure of it's point either. A good deal superior to "Uncertain Smile" so pay no attention to my nonsense from way back when.

(Click here to see my original review)

The The: "Heartland"

30 July 1986

"This year's "Ghost Town". (Anybody remember "Ghost Town"?) (No - Quite a few readers)"

— Dave Rimmer

He's back. BACK! With seventeen prior goes at reviewing the singles, Dave Rimmer is to date easily the most prolific Smash Hits critic. You'd be hard pressed to find many pop stars of the time who'd released that many singles over the previous five years (I suppose Prince must have done about that many but who else?). Still, he's slowed down of late with just three write ups over the past year but he was no longer a Hits staffer and was doing this for freelance purposes (and possibly because no one else in the office could be bothered) Having heard David Hepworth bemoan the task of handling the new singles, it's nice to see that there was at least one hack who kept coming back for more.

They're back. BACK! Uh, he's back. BACK! Like The Fall and Lambchop, The The are in that gray area between band and solo artist. In the time since he/they last nabbed a SOTF with "Uncertain Smile", the holdovers have amounted to Matt Johnson and appearances from the Zimbabwe-born Zeke Manyika, late of Orange Juice and another guest spot with The Style Council. Johnson has never pretended that his "group" was anything but a solo project in disguise (to the extent that he would eventually have his 1981 solo album Burning Blue Soul re-credited to The The in the early nineties) but it still makes choosing an appropriate pronoun difficult. But let's move on before I get all Jordan Peterson.

At some point in the nineties, Channel 4's Without Walls did a piece about the effect of Thatcherism on the arts. It wasn't so much on how her policies may or may not have decimated theatres, museums, art schools and symphony orchestras (though they surely did) but on how the arts reacted to this new brand of Conservatism. Theatre critic and future right wing blowhard Mark Steyn felt that the failure of artists to make the most creatively of their opposition to her rule exposed the emptiness of their leftist beliefs (or something to that effect; I'm going by memory from something I watched on YouTube a dozen years ago that has long since been deleted). This may well be true for some in the arts but it leaves out UK pop music which flourished in its rejection of everything Thatcher stood for.

"Ghost Town" was one of the first anti-Thatcher numbers and it was joined by many, many more — and, indeed, their top notch cover of Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" was adapted to fit around the current climate in Britain. Elvis Costello's "You'll Never Be a Man", "Shipbuilding" and "Tramp the Dirt Down", The Style Council's "The Lodgers" and "Welcome to Milton Keynes", Billy Bragg's "Between the Wars", The Housemartins' "Flag Day" and "Think for a Minute", The Beat's "Stand Down Margaret", Hue & Cry's "Labour of Love": all dealt with the ill-effects of Thatcherism. Even Morrissey, who probably agreed with the old hag on a few issues, included "Margaret on the Guillotine" on his debut album Bona Drag. The famed Red Wedge tours were formed with the goal of getting her voted out of office.

Like all of the above, Matt Johnson was sensitive to this and the result was The The's second album Infected (third if you count Burning Blue Soul). It covers a broad range of issues from the AIDS crisis to the situation in the Middle East but the whole thing comes down to Mrs. Thatcher and the wasteland of Britain — and "Heartland" is its centrepiece. The misery of being English during this era of football hooligans, troubles in Ulster, lousy summers, strikes and being told that "there's no such thing as society" is captured here.

It's nice of Rimmer to compare it favourably to "Ghost Town" (even though it would have been an easier task back then given that hardly anyone remembered it; today it is one of the UK's favourite chart toppers and is rightly regarded as a classic) but it just doesn't quite measure up. Johnson was fond of the song and said that he wanted to "write a classic song which is basically representative of its time, a record that in 1999 people will put on and it will remind them exactly of this period of time". He probably succeeded but that's precisely where it falters: it's too much of a period piece to be relevant at other times. "Ghost Town" no doubt reminds listeners who were there of riots and crumbling towns but it's as relevant to people who've lived through any form of strife and urban decay; even those of us privileged not to have experienced it first hand may still be able to identify with it via the TV news. But "Heartland" is too welded to its time to be truly captivating.

It is, however, an ambitious song and a grower. Perhaps a wee bit too ambitious as it doesn't quite merit its five minute running time, another element that makes it look weak held up next to "Ghost Town". There's something a bit off about the repeated "this is the fifty-first state of the U.S.A" line that closes the song. Johnson would later relocate to New York so it clearly hasn't aged well but there's more to it than that. It feels tacked on, as if he had a line at the back of his head that he'd been singing to himself that he just had to use and, bloody hell, it would be a great way to cap this opus. But with the song building from "piss stinking shopping centres" to "pensioners are raped" and on to the walls of power, it's an unsatisfying conclusion. "So, it's all the fault of the Yanks, huh?" or "Well, aren't we pathetic for becoming American": either way I don't think becoming the fifty-first state was the main reason Britain in the eighties sucked. (And anyway, surely Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would all have been granted statehood of their own; I wonder how the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man would've figured in this takeover...)

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

The Psychedelic Furs: "Pretty in Pink"

They still here. HERE! Of all the "major" post-punk acts, ver Furs were always the most forgettable and unremarkable. As Rimmer says, the original wasn't all that good and neither is this. Actually, this spruced up, from-the-film-of-the-same-name version is probably a bit of an improvement: Richard Butler's vocal is easier on the ear and the whole thing feels like more of an effort has been put in. Still, it's not particularly good, likely the weakest track on the still excellent soundtrack-of-the-same-name. (Take a bow, Belouis Some and Danny Hutton Hitters!) The lazy sods couldn't even be bothered to change 'Caroline' to 'Andie' for this remake — or 'Iona' if you reckon Annie Potts' character is the one who really "buttons your shirt".

The The: "Uncertain Smile"

30 September 1982

"Never mind record of the week, this is the week of the The The record."
— Johnny Black

There are many acts I've been dealing with in this space who were unknown to my five-year-old self back in 1982 that I would later became familiar with. The following three fortnight's worth of entries are all of individuals who I came to know during my crucial '88-'89 year in England. (I had been considering doing a trilogy of pieces about what preteen Paul would have thought of these records in the context of their later stuff but I abandoned it when I realised how little he had to say...also I hate trilogies; nevertheless, I hope that at least some of that concept survives below) 

The The were an act that I had occasional encounters with over more than a decade but who I could never conjure up much enthusiasm for, which also goes for their name. Johnny Black mentions their "damn silly moniker" which is about how I've always felt, even if I can appreciate how the double 'the' could potentially throw people. While groups like Eagles, Pet Shop Boys and Talking Heads have bristled at being labelled 'The Eagles', 'The Pet Shop Boys' and 'The Talking Heads', it's always faintly annoyed me when people leave off the definite article from groups that tend to use them. Colin Larkin's absolutely indispensable Virgin Encyclopedia of... series lists groups as 'Beatles' and 'Clash' and — this one's especially jarring — 'Who'. I've never bothered checking but I suspect he chose not to label the present act as simply 'The'. But, yeah, it's a stupid name.

To come upon The The at this early stage has brought back memories of the bits and pieces they later released. "The Beat(en) Generation" with its irritating in-word parentheses was a Top 20 single in the UK in 1989 and was something that I recall deejays and journalists really getting behind, as if they felt it important or something. I wasn't terribly impressed. At the time, I was bothered by its faint whiff of country and western music which I had absolutely no time for. I still don't think much of it now though more due to Matt Johnson's hectoring lyrics which seemed to talk at young people living through the doldrums of Mrs Thatcher's reign rather than to them. "Kingdom of Rain" was a follow up (also taken from their Mind Bomb album) with a video that featured seahorses possibly copulating and a sullen young woman who most certainly was not guest vocalist Sinéad O'Connor. What it lacked was anything approaching a memorable tune. I would later come across singles from the Dusk and Hanky Panky albums which were equally forgettable. Finally, I acquired a promo copy of 2000's NakedSelf when I was supposed to interview Johnson for my university paper; it actually wasn't too bad but I was too interested in Gomez and Grandaddy to care too much (particularly after the interview fell through due to a scheduling conflict; incidentally the only question I can recall preparing to ask him was if The The could be anything more than just a solo project, so it's probably for the best that we never spoke).

All that said, what am I to make of "Uncertain Smile"? Well, I will acknowledge that it would be my choice for SOTF as well. Although certainly a marked improvement on last fortnight's glum crop of singles, the likes of Ultravox's "Reap the Wild Wind" and The Pretenders' "Back on the Chain Gang" are pleasantly unremarkable efforts but nowhere close to this good. A lovely, floating melody with some fine flute and sax solos courtesy of one Crispin Cioe provide a nice undercoating for an intriguing lyric which manages to read rather well as poetry. Johnson's vocal is vaguely whiny which seems to suit such a restless and insecure song. A very pleasant surprise.

My only reservation is that I keep finding myself connecting "Uncertain Smile" to Johnson's later work which I've never thought much of. Johnny Black concludes his review admitting that much of their early stuff was "a bit aimless, but this is right on the button". I agree but from the perspective of what came much later. Perhaps it's time I filled in the gaps, not just to see if Matt Johnson was up to churning out more equally formidable gems but also if I can catch where it all began to go south. Till we meet again, The.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Tears for Fears: "Mad World"

An earnest pair with a truckload of earnest songs and an earnest name, it's no bloody wonder earnest Americans eventually took to Tears for Fears. Earnestness was always their worst trait, especially whenever Curt Smith took on lead vocals as he does here. A pretty great composition that so succinctly captures depression, it is let down a bit by Smith's bland delivery. It's hard to say if Roland Orzbal's mouthpiece for humanity vocals would've been any better suited to such an individualist track so maybe he was right to give it to his more nuanced partner. Perhaps there just isn't a perfect vocalist for such personal work. Best just to sing it to yourself with as much or as little earnestness as you see fit.