SMASH HITS singles in the issue 14th of April 1983

I left out the Tubeway Army re-issue thing.

whoops

https://i.imgur.com/wSd4w2X.jpg

as a kid - Beat It

as an adult - Overkill

lmao at the "Beat It" and "Little Red Corvette" blurbs

I know....

There's a dub version of Now Martin's Gone that I'd like to hear but can't find anywhere.

https://img.discogs.com/HusXvQRBx4KFh9uwmU20YG9CbaA=/fit-in/600x599/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-4546262-1509782809-6060.jpeg.jpg

I'm impressed by how much this guy looks like Dieter Meier from Yello - the song doesn't sound a million miles away from early Yello either, it's got that end-of-the-pier synth-pop vibe a bit like Telex or Captain Sensible's cover of Happy Talk

Oh, I found it. It's aka Now Richard's Gone. https://tomrobinson.bandcamp.com/track/now-richards-gone

He really does. xpost

I left out the Tubeway Army re-issue thing

That's a shame, it's the only one I would have voted for.

I remember Dave Rimmer being a trusted voice at Smash Hits, but he sure does overdo the snark this week - that said, I specifically remember his double rave over New Edition and the Jonzun Crew (the latter still tantalisingly on import), and I fully agreed - those were my two favourites at the time. I'd already bought "Candy Girl' a week or so earlier, and elicited a rare response from the normally sulky staff at Selectadisc ("have you heard it yet, it's a KILLER"). Close behind them were 'Temptation' and 'Miss The Girl', followed by 'Beat It', while 'Little Red Corvette' and 'Money's Too Tight To Mention' completely passed me by at this early stage. I've got vague memories of the Bauhaus and Prince Charles tracks, and no memory at all of the others.

lol at the prince review. "there's a car in the title so obviously the song is about a car!"

Here's my personal chart from April 12th. In retrospect, a few of these positions were inflated by the enthusiasm of my boyfriend at the time (my first ever, as it happens) - but I was scrabbling for common ground, and we didn't last much longer. It was a temporary second week dip for 'Candy Girl', which quickly bounced back and eventually reached number one.

01 (02) Blue Monday/The Beach - New Order
02 (NE) Fields Of Fire - Big Country
03 (NE) Church Of The Poison Mind - Culture Club
04 (NE) Whistle Down The Wind - Nick Heyward
05 (NE) The House That Jack Built - Tracie
06 (NE) Boxerbeat - JoBoxers
07 (NE) Words - F.R. David
08 (03) Candy Girl - New Edition
09 (01) Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don't Stop) - Man Parrish
10 (NE) Don't Talk To Me About Love - Altered Images
11 (05) Total Eclipse Of The Heart - Bonnie Tyler
12 (10) Let's Dance - David Bowie
13 (11) Shoot Your Shot - Divine
14 (06) Rip It Up - Orange Juice
15 (07) You Are In My System - Robert Palmer
16 (04) My Jamaican Guy - Grace Jones
17 (08) Rock The Boat (High Dynamic Re-Mix) - Forrest
18 (19) Muck It Out! - The Farmer's Boys
19 (NE) Celtic Soul Brothers - Dexys Midnight Runners
20 (13) Cry Me A River - Mari Wilson

(point at car)

As ridiculous as the comparison initally seemed, I can actually imagine Springsteen doing a good version of LRC.

I hadn't heard Miss the Girl until this week and I really like it.

Are your charts just your current favourite songs in order of how keen you were on them that week, mike?

I don't think the Springsteen comparison is out of line at all but following it up with "and that's why it's bad" is incredibly lol

xpost - pretty much, but also somewhat weighted by how much I'd heard them around and about during the previous week, so not just based on home listening.

...which makes this an unusual week, with all those high new entries and big falls, as I'd just spent a few days staying at my boyfriend's place in London, and so a lot of the new entries were singles which he'd just bought.

so which one was inflated the most by bf’s enthusiasm? could it be “Words”?

Hah, it must have been, as 'Words' crashed straight out of the chart the following week!

Other notable inflations: Nick Heyward 'Whistle Down The Wind' (which plummeted to 20 the following week, and exited the week after that), and Altered Images 'Don't Talk To Me About Love' (down to 16, then 20, then out).

The track we most agreed on was Big Country 'Fields Of Fire' (also their early gay lumberjack look totally worked for me).

try and stop me from voting for bauhaus. oh boo, too slow!

just looking at a list of arthur bakers productions in 1983, crazy stuff:

new edition - candy girl
new order - confusion
freeez - pop goes my love
planet patrol - cheap thrills
cuba gooding - happiness is just around the bend
afrika bambaataa - looking for the perfect beat

I don't think I'd ever heard this O'Bryan track before, but it's great

Don't forget Freeez's I.O.U.

didn’t know it either, but I love it too - he does very cool things with his voice there. I might vote for it - Lil’ Red Riding ‘Vette will do probably do just fine without me

https://images.genius.com/287f7d09c505eff1760ab7694ed241f3.220x220x1.jpg
so sultry

xp

Dave Rimmer's book, "Once Upon A Time In The East" about his and Mark Reeder's adventures in the Eastern Bloc in the mid 80s is one of my favourite things. His reviews here are ridiculous.

Then it would have been Bauhaus, The Creatures or Heaven 17. A year later maybe Jonzun Crew or Prince Charles & The City Beat Band. I think I'll go Bauhaus because of the inane review.

I lapped up Dave Rimmer's Culture Club book, "Like Punk Never Happened", where as I recall he travelled with them on an international tour; there were some shrewd observations.

Working through these tunes now. The Men At Work track is dimly familiar. My best music and clubbing buddy at the time was emerging from a massive Bauhaus phase, but "Bela Lugosi's Dead" aside, their stuff never grabbed me; I found them a tad jejeune, and proto-goth wasn't a path that looked enticing. "Temptation" is so hard-wired into me that it's impossible to assess it objectively, but adding Carol Kenyon's soul diva vocals to an electronic backing felt like a fresh and thrilling move, with little precedent beyond Yazoo, and Jenny Burton on C-Bank's "One More Shot". JK's "I'll Slap Your Face" was a barely changed reworking of a track he'd first released as A Handful Of Cheek, ten years earlier; I inherited a promo copy of the latter, and took some perverse pleasure in it before his cancellation.

The Creatures "Miss The Girl" still sounds fantastic, and the album (Feast) which followed it a month later has remained an all-time favourite - it's a record for hot, sticky nights in high summer, with a unique sonic palette, and forever linked in my mind with Malcolm McLaren's Duck Rock, which evokes a similar mood via different means. Seriously, if you've never heard Feast, you really must.

Thinking back to Bauhaus: I'd already heard enough doomy/angsty post-punk to last me a lifetime during 1979/80, turning away from it all when Killing Joke and Spear Of Destiny came along, and this felt like a thin prolongation of a mood that had long since reached full fruition. Meanwhile, I'd discovered sex and dancing, and was busy embracing the light.

"Candy Girl" has to be one of the least remembered UK number ones of the 1980s, and for a record with such an immediate impact it had a short shelf life, but combining electro with early Jackson 5 felt incredibly exciting at the time. ("It's the first electro number one!", I trilled, while my music/clubbing buddy rolled his eyes.) Not having heard "ABC" since childhood, I hadn't quite twigged the extent of Starr & Jonzun's plagiarism, but hey. Meanwhile, "Space Cowboy" may have the Jonzun Crew's silliest cut, but silliness has never particularly bothered me. I'd been all over "Pack Jam" and "Space Is The Place", but THE killer cut ("We Are The Jonzun Crew") surfaced on their Lost In Space album, and I've only just discovered that it had a full-length video too (and if it slightly flattens the stunning percussion, it compensates for the loss with its visuals).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GqM6OuyU_U

(And then Starr and Jonzun eventually moved on to masterminding New Kids On The Block, hey ho.)

Turns out that the Veterans record first came out in 1979 (1980 in the UK). And never mind Dieter Meyer, I'm getting massive "Shalom Jackie" vibes from the same guy in the video - it's quite uncanny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-8xMWA6_ZE

Heaven 17 all the way. Obviously.

He really liked that Questions single, didn't he?

Why?

The orginal demo of Temptation is so great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2f_2jBMKcY

Sounds like Deborah Evans-Stickland from the Flying Lizards doing the deadpan vocals... and I'm assuming this was recorded after Soft Cell's "Tainted Love", but it would be amazing if it was before.

Prince Charles was lauded by the rock and style press, but cold-shouldered by funk/soul clubs - James Hamilton in Record Mirror was repeatedly witheringly scornful, saying it was funk for gullible trendies. Like "Money's Too Tight To Mention", "Cash (Cash Money)" must have fitted in with the prevalent "hard times" aesthetic, and I do quite like it - the rock and style press sometimes got it right on otherwise cold-shouldered funk, most notably with Defunkt's superb "The Razor's Edge" (Neville Brody sleeve art and all).

Peaking at 42, "Telegraph" ended OMD's unbroken run of Top 20 hits that had begun with "Messages" in 1980, and I recall Dazzle Ships being greeted with some bafflement. It's... OK. They bounced back in 1984, so no lasting harm done.

Although far from great, The Questions "Price You Pay" is better than expected, rhythmically effective, and not dissimilar to King "Love And Pride" at times. Actually, I'd take it over "Love And Pride".

if I vote for JK do I actually get to slap his face?

I see Jonzun Crew I vote Jonzun Crew.

I thought The Questions song was really good as well. That Temptation demo is fantastic.

"Nightmares" is one of my all time faves but it's hard to not vote for "Beat It"

How Rimmer can call the gumby pyschobilly Tall Boys track "slow" is beyond me - it rattles along at a very brisk pace. Astonishing that Tom Robinson would follow such a piss-poor track as "Now Martin's Gone" with the hugely affecting (at least if you were me!) and hugely successful "War Baby" - he sounds beyond redemption here. Dismissed by James Hamilton as "a formula gigolo whipper", O'Bryan's single flopped, as fast "whippers" were mostly prone to do at the time (this is 130bpm, which would have been fine for Hi-NRG but not for anything else) - I quite like it, but "whippers" were never much my thing (then again, "Beat It"...)

Hah, the opening lines of "Nightmares" put me in mind of "These Boots Are Made For Walking".

I was all set to vote for "Miss The Girl", but c'mon, "Little Red Corvette" is unimpeachable (unlike, alas, its creator). It didn't become a UK hit for nearly two more years, though - top 10 in US, but a mere #54 here in 1983.

Hah, the opening lines of "Nightmares" put me in mind of "These Boots Are Made For Walking".

Yes, immediately. Such a blatant rip.

the hugely affecting (at least if you were me!) and hugely successful "War Baby"

God, yes. I haven't heard or thought about this song for 30-odd years but what an amazing thing. According to wiki he wrote it in despair after a visit to a gay sauna in Berlin!

Prince Charles was lauded by the rock and style press

They seemed to be ubiquitous in '83/8. Tons of my (gullible trendy) friends had the album, which hasn't aged very well.

Defunkt have aged well.

"War Baby" is eternal. x post.

except for the saxaphone. ;-)

I was quite mystified by the (very short-lived) Prince Charles hype as well (maybe the UK music press was tittilated by his name idk)

Defunkt were and are great - “The Razor’s Edge” is a stone cold classic

"Only the very young and the very beautiful can be so aloof" - they don't write opening lines like that anymore. :(

must have fitted in with the prevalent "hard times" aesthetic

When you're in the grip of an unrequited, unfulfillable and overwhelming crush one someone who lives in the shared house next door to your own, "War Baby" is strong meat indeed!

Wow, where has that demo version of "Temptation" been all my life? I love the Numan-esque arrangement, and the deadpan female voice somehow brings into focus something I'd always missed, that the lyric is about a man's terror of getting his girlfriend pregnant.

Sounds like Deborah Evans-Stickland from the Flying Lizards doing the deadpan vocals...

According to this (below) it's a German student they knew but Claudia Brücken used to join them to do it in concert:

https://postpunkmonk.com/2013/02/14/a-young-persons-guide-to-heaven-17-temptation/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-wp0Mywpf4

Wow, where has that demo version of "Temptation" been all my life?

My first time hearing it too. Great.

Re the Questions, yeah I like it, bought it at the time. But in this company, it seems odd to have escaped any snark. Maybe Paul Weller was a mate, or hopefully might be...

Shame they were about five years late for electroclash with releasing that demo. Would have seemed like a scam in 2001.

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Surely, an upset...