Day 303. I've got you under my skin... (30/10/13)

...where the rain can't get in.

It's Uncertain Smile by the wonderfully/appallingly named 'The The' - it's from the early 80s and it's one of my favourite things ever in any one of three versions. There's the 7" version as caught on the greatest hits album (45RPM), all jangly guitar, electronic drums, flutes and sax, hypnotic, bewitching. The 12" has all the above and obviously goes on for significantly longer but the real gem is the take on the first 'The The' album 'Soul Mining' which closes side one of the vinyl (as was) by falling into a genuinely brilliant extended piano outro played by none other than Jools Holland, back when he was a full time musician, prior to 'blokehood' and Later.

I wasn't writing about that originally; I'd intended to tell you about how I'd just heard 'I'm not in Love' by 10cc on the radio and how my feelings about that song had changed over the years. I'd hated it on its original release in the full flush of post punk, detested all that winsome breathiness but as I've grown older I've realised that it's actually a slice of true pop genius; an incredible accomplishment with limited technology and a witty incisive lyric.

So I was going to listen to it as I wrote about it. But I don't own it and I found myself a little sidetracked and I fell into the works of a band that I'd absolutely loved for 8 or 9 years but hadn't returned to for quite a while. They're as great as I remember.

And my mood had been further informed by reading a Rolling Stone piece that said that Matthew Sweet (for those that don't know him, a fantastic American songwriter) and Susanna Hoffs (ex Bangles, the woman that every man my age was in love with in the eighties. Her and Clare Grogan) were reuniting for their third volume of cover versions. The first (wonderful) outing had covered the credible and unknown of the sixties. Their second (how did I miss that?) the seventies. The new one will be the eighties.

Which has sent me looking through the list gems of the dark corners of a decade that has been needlessly vilified for shallow nonsense when it was actually endlessly inventive, devastatingly creative.

And the names that you think that you know aren't necessarily what you think that they were.

Technically, writing in real time, I'm still on The The and their gloriously overblown apocalyptic warning shot 'Armageddon Days (Are Here Again)' with its Johnny Marr guitar, Russian army choirs and 'Ballroom Blitz' aping intro:

"Are you ready Jesus?"
"Uh-huh"
"Buddha?"
"Yeah"
"Mohammad?"
"Okay"
"Well alright fellas, let's go"

But if I flick back a little I'll hit Talk Talk who, if you think of them at all, you may remember as a slightly twee synth pop band. In reality, Talk Talk had a career arc of a Beatlesesque level of genius; starting with the New Romantic Durannie pop of 'Today' but ending the decade at a Pink Floyd level of blessed out melancholy, producing (in Laughing Stock and Spirit of Eden) two albums that channelled the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and the pastoral beauty of Nick Drake but actually sounded like nothing else that you've heard before or since. In between there was the lush, off kilter pop of 'Life's What you Make It' and 'It's My Life'.

Madness. You know Madness. Wacky ska based posters, 'House of Fun', 'One Step Beyond' all that. And obviously all that is absolutely splendid but if you look at their later eighties there are a couple of absolute gems of melancholic magnificence. Both 'One Better Day' and 'Yeterday's Men' make sadness beautiful, hymning the lost and lonely.

Oh and Michael Caine is a bloody odd song to get into the top 10.

When REM put out '(Don't Go Back To) Rockville', country music was still a dirty word. The charts were filled with glossy sounds, swamped with perfectionism and plastic; messrs Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe kicked off their second album push for the big time with a southern twang that spoke of Nashville and Memphis and barely held itself together in the race to get to the middle of the 7". It'd take a few more years for the world to discover them. Good. It meant that we had them to ourselves.

The Simple Minds that knew global success (and I've banged on about this point before) weren't the real Simple Minds; they were a pale Hollywood shadow of the euro futurists that existed in the hinterlands until 'Don't You Forget About Me' ruined them with fame and fortune. It's not that they turned to anthems, they'd always had anthems but their earlier anthems had been of the level of wonder of 'New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) and the world wasn't ready for that kind of grandeur.

I could go on for hours. And I probably will. But it's twenty five past nine and somebody is getting married in Mount Pleasant (Sky living)

On this side of the headphones it's eighties night in the Salmon household

But then, isn't it always?