The first Uncool As Fuck focused on the dreary, fallow, pre-punk years when rock in its many forms ruled absolutely, while Uncool As Fuck 2 concentrated on those artists accused of betraying the punk spirit, but who in reality were furthering the cause of individuality by being true to themselves. Uncool As Fuck 3 offers a different kind of uncool, albeit one that will be only too familiar to those like me who struggled to find anything worthwhile in the musical badlands of the mid-eighties and the subsequent fracturing of pop culture.
1985 was the start of it, a shit storm of a year when even the God like John Peel admitted ‘I don’t even like the records I like’. In a post Band Aid Britain dominated by Bob Geldof’s ‘white saviour syndrome’ and the most conservative, risk averse, pop media of any period since the fifties, the Sturm und Drang of post punk was history, the sugared pill of new pop lost somewhere deep within Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s pleasure dome. All that remained was a retrenchment into middle-aged, moneyed pop and malleable, corporate acts like Howard Jones, King, Paul Young and Nick Kershaw. Much of new pop’s superficial style remained, but it was often just a poor facsimile of electro pop dotted with rockist guitar lines. Alternatively, it was a bunch of earnest, white boy, thirty somethings and their hollow brand of pumped up, funk pop made up entirely of over stylised soul tics and an inevitable sax break.
Worse still was the return of seventies rock prompted by Live Aid ‘legacy’ dinosaurs Status Quo, Queen, Dire Straits, The Who and rather ironically, notorious racist Eric Clapton. Sadly, the even more loathsome Phil Collins was suddenly everywhere too. All of them would extend their floundering careers, seemingly forever, by becoming the de facto favourites of a new generation soon to be dubbed Thatcher’s Children. Renowned writer Jon Savage declared that ‘the Live Aid effect had smeared middle-brow values all over rock music’. He wasn’t wrong!
Amongst that lot, albums like Bryan Ferry’s Boys and Girls, Iggy Pop’s Blah-Blah-Blah and Win’s …Uh! Tears Baby sounded positively revolutionary. And yet, for one reason or another, much like the other albums here, they were consigned to the critical or commercial dumper. And curiously, unlike most of the embarrassing albums I’ve loved, that’s where they’ve stayed, as uncool as they ever were!
BRYAN FERRY / BOYS AND GIRLS (June 1985)
FAVOURITE TRACK ‘Sensation’
In 1985, Bryan Ferry was no longer my kind of thing but I bought Boys and Girls regardless because of my renewed sense of loyalty to an artist who’d been so influential during my teenage years. Featuring a stellar cast of resolutely unfashionable superstar muso’s like Dave Gilmour and Mark Knopfler, his first solo record in seven years was best known for the easy listening, loungecore hits of ‘Slave To Love’ and ‘Don’t Stop The Dance’, but there was a lot more to it than that.
While the sound sparkled and the emotions simmered, the albums sophisticated sonic luxury seemed to envelope me in its soothing balm, transforming the overriding sadness of the lyrics into a comforting form of loveliness. Managing to do that would have been no mean feat for any artist, but to me it felt like Bryan Ferry’s parting gift because as my domestic situation began its gradual decline into sorrow and regret a few years later, Boys and Girls became a welcome, if unexpected, go-to sanctuary to lose myself in.
LLOYD COLE & THE COMMOTIONS / EASY PIECES (November 1985)
FAVOURITE TRACK ‘Grace’
Lloyd Cole & The Commotions were never cool. Too damn intelligent and poetic by half, even the praise garnered by the remarkable Rattlesnakes appeared grudging and reluctant. Of course, I didn’t care about any of that, my love for Easy Pieces revolving around the fact that in November 1985 I was approaching my 26th birthday and for the first time in my life was feeling hugely depressed at the thought of getting older. I tell you this not because Easy Pieces made me feel sad, but because it’s understated, joyful jangle and Lloyd Cole’s evocative lyrics on ‘Rich’, ‘Brand New Friend’, ‘Lost Weekend’ and in particular ‘Grace’, a song focused on a young woman’s struggle with ageing, made me feel a little better.
IGGY POP / BLAH-BLAH-BLAH (September 1986)
FAVOURITE TRACK ‘Isolation’
Live Aid made musicianship and those over 35 fashionable again, so destroying the expectation that contemporary music had to move forward to survive. It also ushered in the age of the back catalogue (via the new CD format) and the emergence of the long serving artist as a brand. If anyone should have benefitted from all that it was Iggy Pop and on Blah-Blah-Blah he gave it a good go.
His attempt at a nakedly commercial, eighties rock album co-written in part with ex-Pistol Steve Jones in LA before David Bowie came a calling for their last collaboration together, while it got nowhere near the career highs of The Idiot and Lust For Life, with Iggy’s new, gloriously deep croon very much in evidence, ‘Shades’, ‘Cry For Love’, ‘Winners and Losers’ and the Bowie soundalike ‘Isolation’ were more than enough reason to love it.
WIN / …UH! TEARS BABY (April 1987)
FAVOURITE TRACK ‘Shampoo Tears’
Similar to Green Gartside’s transformation of Scritti Politti from Marxist DIY’ers to precision tooled, new poppers but without the success, Win followed Davy Henderson’s exploits with the much acclaimed yet thoroughly discordant Fire Engines. A conscious attempt to move into the mainstream, unfortunately, like many before him, Henderson discovered that writing a hit song was not an easy code to crack. And yet to me, the songs on Uh! Tears Baby like the self-explanatory manifesto of ‘Super Popoid Groove’, the trumpets and gospel of ‘Shampoo Tears’, the stirring ‘You’ve Got The Power’ and the fabulously titled ‘It May Be A Beautiful Sky Tonight, But It’s Only A Shelter For A World At Risk’ still sounded like brilliant top ten hits. Then again, what did I know?
ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN / ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN (July 1987)
FAVOURITE TRACK ‘All My Life’
The Bunnymens self-titled fifth album faced the unenviable task of following the life defining quartet of Crocodiles, Heaven Up Here, Porcupine and Ocean Rain which even now possess the otherness to lift me high on their celestial drive of crystal guitars, beseeching vocals and thundering rhythms. Given the title of ‘the grey album’ by the true believers, it was obvious from the dull group shot on the cover to the strangely acquiescent production that this was a valiant bid for superstardom noticeably lacking in the magic and mystery of the past.
Of course, I still loved it. After all, it was still The Bunnymen and ‘The Game’, ‘All In Your Mind’, ‘Lips Like Sugar’ and the new version of ‘Bedbugs And Ballyhoo’ were still great songs, gorgeous closer ‘All My Life’ even hinting at both the group’s future (‘Oh how the times have changed us / Sure and now uncertain / Men not devils have claimed us’) and the stately guitar pop of their Britpop comeback.
WIRE / A BELL IS A CUP UNTIL IT IS STRUCK (May 1988)
FAVOURITE TRACK ‘Kidney Bongos’
The second coming of Wire caught me unawares. Confused by the reformation of a group whose first three albums Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154 had been essential listening, I didn’t know what to make of it until I heard A Bell Is A Cup. Mixing suitably angular arrangements with their natural pop sensibility, most notably on the winning tunefulness of ‘Kidney Bongos’, Bruce Gilbert, Robert Gotobed, Graham Lewis and Colin Newman pulled together the ideas and styles from their many solo projects on ‘Silk Skin Paws’, ‘The Finest Drops’ and ‘The Queen of Ur and the King of Um’ to create a highly listenable, credible album that was almost but not quite so indispensable as their seventies masterworks.
EDWYN COLLINS / HOPE AND DESPAIR (June 1989)
FAVOURITE TRACK ‘Hope and Despair’
Despite his influence on everyone from Haircut 100 to indie pop and beyond, following the dissolution of Orange Juice Edwyn Collins was written off as a has-been leaving him without an album deal until Hope and Despair four years later. Totally unaware of its existence, I fished my copy out of a record shop bargain bin in the summer of 1989 and couldn’t believe my luck. Easily as good as anything he’d ever done, it was an astonishing collection of songs written with the traditions of rock and roll, soul, country and punk in mind, but like those of Collins greatest influence The Velvet Underground, they took a few plays to reveal their true meaning. Funny, bitter and painfully honest, it’s just a pity that all these years later it’s still relatively unknown.
TEARS FOR FEARS / THE SEEDS OF LOVE (September 1989)
FAVOURITE TRACK ‘Famous Last Words’
In 1981/82 Tears For Fears were one of the coolest duos around, their first single ‘Suffer The Children’ earning them a John Peel session until ‘Mad World’ committed the heinous crime of getting to number three in the UK singles charts, whereupon they became persona non grata. Seven years later, emboldened by the global success of their wondrous second album Songs From The Big Chair and growing ever more fanatical in his perfectionism, Roland Orzabal sidelined the supposedly superfluous Curt Smith and spent the next three years fussing over the material that would become The Seeds Of Love.
The end result was a set of songs that apart from the Oleta Adams showcase ‘Woman In Chains’ and the lightweight ‘Advice For The Young At Heart’ were almost impenetrable in their delicate complexity and maddening density. Another exception was the epic title tracks reinvention of the Beatles for the new love generation which once you actually read the lyrics turned it into a simple cry for change after a decade of Thatcher’s hate and war. Even better yet still a deep well of intricate sound was the post Armageddon love story ‘Famous Last Words’, surely the most underrated song in the Tears For Fears catalogue.
THE BELOVED / HAPPINESS (February 1990)
FAVOURITE TRACK ‘Found’
Dismissed and reviled as ‘inauthentic bandwagon jumpers’, Jon Marsh and Steve Waddington of indie New Order clones The Beloved were liberated by their immersion in the early UK acid house scene at Shoom and the Boys Own warehouse parties. Featuring super clean production and singer Marsh’s seductive messages of pensive optimism, Happiness had the added attraction of the big singles ‘Hello’, ‘Your Love Takes Me Higher’ and the sublime ‘The Sun Rising’, not to mention beautiful closer ‘Found’ (‘I promise my affection for all eternity / You are my resurrection, you mean the world to me’). As a lovely, timely, dance pop moment revelling in the sonic adventure of the times it was hard to beat.
THE SHAMEN / EN-TACT (November 1990)
FAVOURITE TRACK ‘Hear Me O My People’
The Shamen’s Colin Angus was another convert to the early UK acid house scene, his ultimate dream being to create a forum for communal freak outs operating far outside the musical mainstream. It was all heady stuff. And yet, while Angus’s rhetoric of utopian positivity was often more entertaining than his music, the original 1990 version of En-Tact was a surprisingly good example of an innovative, indie, techno album, not sufficiently hardcore to satisfy the ravers but enough to introduce hordes of indie loving kids to the joys of the dancefloor. It may not have aged as well as some of the other albums here, but on a track like the early trance stomp of ‘Hear Me O My People’, En-Tact still stands up as a showcase for The Shamen in their purest form before the descent into ‘Eezer goode’ novelty nightmare.
