Chic - I Want Your Love (1979/ No. 4/ 11 weeks/ Atlantic)

Hearing this song in its original March 1979 top ten context on Pick of the Pops is an instructive experience. Surrounding it are many records that I really like, and could easily write about instead (The Players Association, Squeeze, The Real Thing, Elvis Costello, Gloria Gaynor) but even so, this immediately stands apart, as a more serious and higher order of being than anything alongside it. Why should this be?

I'm not sure that there have ever been another group of musicians who I react to quite as deeply as I do with Chic. Is it the bass or the guitar that's leading the tune? The thing really is dependent on the interplay between them... Bernard Edwards' bassline seems to slow down time, make the experience more sonorous and make the song a really autonomous world that the listener is inhabiting - and then Nile Rogers' guitar keeps things moving, frisky. Both instruments are always playing to each other as much as combining to create a tune. You're following two different lines of feeling that are entwining around each other. And then the drumming gives the whole thing a pulse.

What is unique about this is that there is so much going on in this music, so much fascinating and joyous detail, and yet it seems so spacious and uncluttered. The arrangement is clever, too, strings, brass and bells are all thrillingly deployed but very sparingly used.

And what a song this is! You could perform it a capella and it would still be pretty devastating;


Do you feel ?
Like you ever want ?
To try my love ?
And see how well it fits?
Baby can't you see?
When you look at me
I can't kick this feelin'
When it hits
All alone
In my bed at night
I grab my pillow
And squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze it tight
I think of you
And I dream of you
All the time
What am I gonna do?

The song that supports all of this magnificence is so simple, so unembellished, that it is always an uneasy, personal thing to hear, no matter where or when you hear it, as if its being sung directly to you, or you're being made to imagine yourself singing it.

Sandie Shaw - Girl Don't Come (1964/ No. 3/ 12 weeks/ Pye)

This single demonstrates the largely-forgotten value of supa-concision in the construction of pop songs. In only just over two minutes the situation is set up;


"You have a date for half past eight tonight
Some distant bell starts chiming nine
You wanna see her...
You wanna see her, oh yeah!...
So you wait
You wait and wait...
Girl don't come..."

Verse swings into chorus in an instant! Just to rub it in, Shaw then expounds upon what you must be feeling;

"You've been stood up!
Tears fill your eyes! (oh oh oh)
You're hurt inside!
You wanna die! (oh oh oh)"

Yes, thank you, Sandie, that's highly accurate appraisal of the situation.

Something rather marvellous then happens in this song. Years of pop listening have attuned our minds to expect some kind of final act reversal - she turns up, apologising for being late, you see her with another man, that type of thing. Rather more interestingly 'Girl Don't Come' just stops dead. You know that she's not going to come. How much longer shall I stay here waiting? This absence of songwriterly embellishment is actually a lot more true to life, and makes this the definitive song about being stood up.

A word as well about the masterstroke of getting Sandie to sing this in the second person, addressed to a man. How much less engaging this song would be if she had to put personal empathy into singing it about herself. Instead, the rather blank and fierce delivery of a blank-faced striking Dagenham teenage beauty, certainly not overflowing with emotive empathy, accentuates the female inconsideration and harshness of the world as shown in the song.

Suzi Quatro - She's In Love With You (1979/ No. 11/ 9 weeks/ RAK)

1979? She was still having hits that late? Wholly deserved though. An interesting single for two reasons;

The sheer joyousness of the music -

"She's in love with you!
(bass goes dumdadalumdumdadalum! - drums go fump! clik!
That's all she wants to do!
(dumdadalumdumdadalum! fump! clik!)
She'll never let you down!
She'll never fool around!
Cos she's in love with you!
(dumdadalumdumdadalum! fump! clik!)"

- not to mention the masterstroke of the continuous Hammond organ drone, like Focus or the like.

It also has a deeper, lexical, fascination. Songs declaring somebody else's love are surprisingly rare - 'She Loves You' being is the obvious example - especially when you consider how integral "My mate fancies you" is to schooldays courtship. Suzi offers a lot of special pleading on behalf of the 'she' who she's lobbying for;

"So if you happen to be out one night
and someone asks you where you're gonna go
Just remember she's not like the other girls
she may not want them all to know
Though she may need a little time
she never wants to stand in line
the way they would
So treat her nice!
Treat her good!
Treat her like you know you should!
You may never find another girl like her"

The note of caution is always apparent. There is a real sense of lived experience, and misfortune, to the message. Suzi brilliantly manages to convey both the joy of the lovestruck girl, and the worldy wisdom of the woman who's been around.

Donna Summer - Down Deep Inside (1977/ No. 5/ 10 weeks/ Casablanca)

"Down deep inside
there's a place in me
I'm yearning to explore"

Written by John Barry, not Giorgio Moroder this time, but the great soundtrack man has learnt a trick or two from the disco king. All of the great Summer singles have an extraordinary effect on perception in replicating an altered state through tempo and instrumentation; 'Love To Love' ever more unfurling and internal and orgasmic, 'I Feel Love' with its combination of refraction and motorik movement replicating the dislocating moment when body, thoughts and feelings start to go out of synch with each other.

"something warm is turning inside of me"

'Deep' creates the sensation of feeling oceanic, swimming or sexual. The cricket chirps make it fussy and tropical, but then that central section where it all dissolves into aqueous dub before the strings re-emerge like the Titanic's bow port. And then the waves start to roar..

London Boys - Requiem (1988/ No. 4/ 21 weeks/ Warners)

Oh, poor dear departed London Boys, two huge hits in 1989, both dead in a car crash in 1996, forgotten in 2011.

This is gloriously crass mid-tempo Hi-NRG with a very effective contrast between the guttural Euro "rapping" and the speeded-up 1969 ballad choruses.

It sounds like an accelerated Yello, if such a thing were divinely possible.

It is crammed with diverse hooks which should jar horribly, but don't; the cathedral organ, the echoing and plangent desert guitar, the 'Johnny Remember Me' spectral chorus, the constant -

"Never gonna get enough
Never gonna get enough"

- and, underneath everything, the stammering "I - I - I - I love you”s, giving the song a vulnerability and heart that makes you feel that something is at stake.

I'm not entirely sure that they'd looked up the word requiem in the dictionary when they wrote it, but it doesn't matter because this is a great affirming YES! to life and love - performed by two sadly dead men.

Laura Branigan - Gloria (1982/ No. 6/ 13 weeks/ Atlantic)

Jarvis Cocker has clearly heard this song...

From the Guardian obituary of Laura Branigan (31st August 2004);

"Her first and biggest hit, in 1982, was the Grammy-nominated Gloria. It was an English language version of a then recent Italian hit sung by Umberto Tozzi composed by Tozzi and Giancarlo Bigazzi. It was given an arrangement in the power ballad style pioneered in America by Pat Benatar and the music video of the song showed Branigan, in the spirit of the Eighties, in black spandex trousers and knee-high boots with a single discoball spinning above her head. Gloria remained in the United States top 40 for 22 weeks in 1982 and peaked at number two. It was also a British top 10 hit."


Only God and Italian speakers know what this song was about in the original version, but in translation, this might be the most berserk thing in pop history in translation;

Gloria (Gloria!)
I think they got your NUM-BER! (Gloria!)
I think they got the A-LI-AS! (Gloria!)
That you've been living UN-DER! (Gloria!)

Tremendous! And what happens to Gloria (is she on the run? Is she about to throw her youth away on an unworthy man?) is clearly of the utmost importance and significance Laura Branigan.

I know very few records as likely to cheer me up and take me out of myself as 'Gloria'.

The Primitives - Crash (1988/ No. 5/ 10 weeks/ Lazy)

Was there ever a more made-up music scene than Blondism? The fevered invention of one romantic Melody Maker journalist, Chris Roberts, the blondist scene only ever consisted of three bands, none of whom recognised themselves as belonging to it. They were; The Primitives, from Coventry, who even went so far as to have a proper hit, the ludicrous all-male Birdland, also from Coventry, and the much-derided Darling Buds, a kind of slightly superior Welsh Primitives with a less convincingly glamorous singer.

As a philosophy, blondism did have an essential truth behind it, though: that some of the best pop is created through reinvention of the self. The act of dying your hair works as a public significant gesture of re-imagining yourself as a figure of mystique. Crucially though, this means dying your hair a proper no-turning-back peroxide blonde and doing something with it - not some bland off-yellow shoulder length thing. Its a strategy that almost always works for young women, too. (Not so well for men, though! When I was a teenager, I always daydreamed about doing it, but I knew that it wouldn't transform me into David Sylvian)

This act of blonde reinvention works as a signifier of the wider imaginative process of an interesting adolescence. The process of wishing yourself to become someone, trying on different attitudes, and discovering that eventually people recognise yourself as that person who you've been pretending to be. So Crash works because it takes an pop scenario as old as the hills - telling an unsatisfactory boyfriend to fuck off - but has a redoubled force to it, in being sung by a recognisably ordinary girl who's been around the block, but also one who happens to be a glamorous pop star - the wonderfully named Tracy Tracy!

Crash is also a rare example of bombastic eighties production assisting a song, rather than battering it. Jangling guitars can often sound a bit weedy and indie, but here every tickle and curlicue is loud and clear, able to delight even the least attentive listener. It doesn't outstay its welcome, either - two and a half minutes is the proper length for most pop ideas, a lesson that was becoming increasingly forgotten by 1988. Handclaps are almost invariably a good idea, too.

Tracy delivers each line with a bored sigh of exasperation;

Here you go! Way too fast!
Don't slow down - Ya gonna cra-a-sh!
You should watch! Watch your step!
Don't look out - Gonna break your neck!
So shut! Shut ya mouth!
Coz I'm not listening anyhow
I've had enuff! Nuff of you!
Enough to last a lifetime through...
So what? Do? You want of me?
Got no words of sympathy!

The boyfriend has, inevitably, "been runnin' all over town", Tracy having rightly decided that staying with him offers "no cure for misery". The chorus is, once heard, never forgotten;

Na na na na na!
Na na na na naaa!
Slow down ya gonna cra-a-ash!
Na na na na na!
Na na na na naaa!
Slow down ya gonna cra-a-ash!

"Na na na na na!" should ideally be delivered sticking out your tongue and thumbing your nose, Tracy deriving obvious pleasure from the idea of the boyfriend in a horrific crash.

The brash brilliance of this chorus has given the song an extended afterlife forevermore for unimaginative British television researchers, for whom it shall always accompany amusing footage of bad driving for the rest of eternity.

Crash was sadly not the start of a long and illustrious career for The Primitives. Three minor hits followed, two of which - 'I'm Gonna Leave You Way Behind Me' and 'I'm Sick Of It' - bear certain formal similarities with Crash. 'Way Behind Me' also suffered the ignominious fate of having some sales rescinded for chart-rigging, because those copies came with a free sachet of shampoo, hair forming an essential component of the Primitives package. Perhaps their fate was sealed in the 1989 promotion for Sick Of It when Tracy returned as a redhead. It just wasn't what we expected of her.