Up to about fourteen, I didn’t realise that there was a modern alternative to pop music that got in the charts. That’s not all that surprising really, because I also hadn’t realised that you could go into a record shop and buy whatever records you wanted either.

Then I saw The Smiths on Top of The Pops and it was like having your body and brain realigned – click – and then I started getting the NME and Melody Maker to read interviews with them, which lead me to other indie bands of the time, and that was it, really.

The indie music of the mid-late 80s appealed to me because it was a bit different from the music in the proper charts of the time which was, as it often tends to be, a bit trite and showbiz. As I headed into adolescence, like most adolescents, I was horrified by the hypocrisy and phoniness of the world in general – like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye – and looked for a more meaningiful alternative to the crass, basic stuff that the mainstream rammed down your throat via conventional media outlets.

To an extent.

In looking for an alternative to the plastic world of commercial music in the 80s, some people rejected conventionality to a far greater extent than I did and got into atonal noiseniks like The Butthole Surfers and industrial sounding hardcore bands. I liked a few records of that sort of thing: Locust Abortion Technician by the Butthole Surfers, I enjoyed a lot, although as more of a palate cleanser. I wasn’t going to go far down that road because, at heart, even though I rejected phoney showbiz claptrap, I liked melodies, harmonies and tuneful guitars. Ideally with some words that resonated. And there was plenty of that sort of thing around then in the indie world because The Smiths were basically that sort of thing, apart from not really having much in the way of harmonies. I still liked a lot of the chart music because there were always good pop stars around, even if they were a bit showbiz. Madonna and Duran Duran were great too, but I kept pretty quiet about that because I was a sixties psychedelic-garage band-indie kid who wore striped t shirts, needle corduroy trousers, suede jackets and a mop top.

Being into The Smiths was one thing, and they were my favourites by far, but I was also into Echo and The Bunnymen because they were tuneful and jangly and interesting too. The Jesus & Mary Chain, I had a soft spot for because I liked surly 60s girl groups too – thanks, again Morrissey – and they were a bit like that, except with feedback and lyrics that were all about Honey, Jesus, Candy and Death.

By late 1987 though, everything changed because The Smiths split up at the end of that summer, and Echo and The Bunnymen ran out of ideas at about the same time, splitting up slightly too late, unlike The Smiths, who packed it in at exactly the right time.

What that meant for me was that I was on the lookout for something to fill up the gap they’d left. By then, I was listening to old records at least as much as anything new. I was into The Beatles, The Stones – up to 1968 only, Donovan, The Velvet Underground, Love, The Byrds, The 13th Floor Elevators, and The Pebbles and Nuggets compilations of 1960s garage bands. But, being a kid, I wanted something that was happening now, ideally that most people didn’t know about, and that was untainted by showbiz. The sort of thing that the squares who went to Romeo & Juliet’s and LA’s would think was weird, because I wasn’t like them.

Eventually, by late 1988, The Smiths and The Bunnymen were, more or less, permanently replaced in my affections by The Stone Roses.

1988 then, was a period of transition for me. I still listened to The Smiths – I was pretty obsessed, even though I never had a quiff or a cardigan. I liked Morrissey a lot, but not sartorially. I was more a Johnny Marr man/boy in terms of clothes, but not completely. To be frank, I was more into looking like I was a cool psychedelic kid in America in 1966. Some of Johnny’s stylistic choices rankled with me. Slip on shoes and tying your jumper around you waist didn’t look cool to me.

Morrissey was out of the blocks quickly with Viva Hate, which I really liked. The Smiths split in, what? September 1987 – and Viva Hate was out in March 1988. That’s pretty rapid, isn’t it?

Apart from that, the music press was on the lookout for something to replace The Smiths with – they were massive in those terms, and the press needed them.

1988 saw the Melody Maker and NME champion a few bands – in addition to the odd bit of hip hop – which I also liked a bit, but again as more of a palate cleanser in between angsty youths with guitars and Velvet Underground records in their collections – and they were The House of Love, The Wedding Present, The Wonder Stuff and several bands who comprised the Blonde Explosion of mid-late 1988, as if they were auditioning the next heirs to the Indie throne. They were all alright, apart from The Wonder Stuff, who were bordering on being a comedy band. A sort of Hale & Pace of the alternative world.

Most of that lot were, with hindsight, the tail end of the C86 shambling, jangly movement which Primal Scream headed, during their Byrds period, prior to trying and failing to be the MC5 and The Stooges, until they decided that there’d always been a dance element to their music and then they were something else again.

C86 was, as far as I was concerned, about amateurism, which I had no problem with. I was under the impression that competence in terms of playing musical instruments meant a step towards Prog Rock, which I was scared of – Pink Floyd and King Crimson – not for me. I still can’t be doing with King Crimson, but I do enjoy some Pink Floyd records now I’ve lightened up a little bit. I still don’t think musical competence is the be all and end all of being a musician, but there are advantages and disadvantages at either end of the skill spectrum as far as musical ability goes.

The Smiths, bear in mind, weren’t amateurish in the slightest. Johnny Marr was streets ahead of every other guitar player in the world at that point as far as I was concerned. He wasn’t flashy for the sake of it, although there were complicated, fiddly things that he was doing on records, but he also had taste and he wasn’t self-indulgent with it, which is rare. What I’m saying is, it’s a fine line between being crap and being so good that you just noodle over everything, and Johnny Marr consistently walked that line through the entirety of The Smiths. Andy Rourke, particularly unusually for indie bass players, was really good too. Most indie bands’ bass players were dreadful. Mike Joyce was no hot shit though. He was good enough, but still the weakest link. It worked perfectly: you wouldn’t want Clyde Stubblefield in The Smiths.

The C86 bands tended to be made up of four Mike Joyces – at best, at worst not up to that level – and no Johnny Marrs, Morrisseys or Andy Rourkes. And that was alright too, because it meant it was never going to be showbiz, even if the bands wanted to be, and that was the main thing.

When The Stone Roses blew up – late summer to winter 1989 – they killed all that off in a way. I’ve gone into detail about that here.

Still, in 1988, nobody knew that that was in the post, and the smart money was on The House of Love to pick up The Smiths’ discarded crown and run with it into the proper charts, in a similar way to how The Smiths had. Which is to say, some singles getting into the top 30 for one week and then dropping out because the hardcore indie fanbase would buy it on the day of release, and nobody else would touch it.

I’m going to write about The House of Love in another of these things, but today’s all about The Primitives, who set off the Blonde Explosion of mid-late 88. I’ll cover The Darling Buds, Transmission Vamp and Voice of The Beehive too, but only in passing, really. Probably. You know how it goes. I won’t go into Debbie Gibson here though, even though she was similarly blonde and big in 1988…

The Primitives

As a 15 year old indie kid with no older siblings and no friends who liked anything apart from chart music, I looked to the music press to guide me. What that meant for me was, whatever Morrissey said was good, I gave a go. Most of it, I didn’t really like. Bradford were crap, I didn’t like James, and there are probably others that I’ve forgotten about. He always championed indie bands and he always fell out with them six months later, but that didn’t matter because I was just looking for pointers in the right direction. I couldn’t imagine Morrissey would be very into The Byrds or Arthur Lee either. I wasn’t that tragic, I was just looking for inspiration.

Anyway, in 1987, this happened: Morrissey started wearing a Primitives t shirt for the entirety of the late summer, more or less at the same time I started my YTS. It had been extraordinary timing: The Smiths formed in 1982, when I started secondary school, and split up in September 1987, when I started work – they’d existed only for the duration of secondary school while I was there. How perfect is that? Then The Stone Roses released their debut album when I just turned 18. Perfect timing, really, but maybe that sort of thing happens to everyone.

Anyway having noted Mozzer’s latest flames , off I toddled to the basement of Sydney Scarborough’s under Hull City Hall, found myself the 12″ of Stop Killing Me, and decided to see how it went.

Stop Killing Me

I love Stop Killing Me.  I liked it before I even heard it because it’s such a great title: it’s melodramatic – which appeals to adolescents anyway -and you can see why Morrissey was into it because it’s nothing like The Smiths lyrically or musically,, so he wouldn’t feel threatened. The only real Smiths connection is to the sense that the world still wouldn’t listen to anguished cries.  

It’s straightforward, because The Primitives were straightforward. In a lot of ways, The Primitives got their shit together really early on. You knew what they were all about immediately. They were called The Primitives, which was a reference to The Velvet Underground via a pretend band that Lou Reed wrote and recorded songs for before he was in The Velvets, which was even more achingly cool than The Velvets were, and they were pretty fucking achingly cool all by themselves. But, even though it was a nod towards Lou Reed, it worked in the same way that The Smiths worked as a band name. The Smiths was a boring name, but it was British as you could imagine. It was about parochial Northern towns that suffocated young people. The Primitives suggested a bit of a racket, musically, and they were, at least to begin with. But not a racket like the Butthole Surfers were a racket, because The Primitives probably took more from The Jesus & Mary Chain than from The Smiths, which is to say, simple three chord songs with cool sounding, ragged but still jangly guitar bits, some violent lyrical imagery, delivered through sweet melodies with a bit of feedback over the top. Which, in a way, isn’t a million miles away from The Velvet Underground, full stop. The Velvets and The Byrds invented indie, fundamentally, and that includes The Primitives, naturally.

The Smiths took from both those bands too, but had enough about them to help themselves from plenty of other art as well. There was a lot going on in The Smiths, which you only picked up upon when you paid attention, which most people didn’t. Which was why Morrissey was casually dismissed as a miserablist, and Johnny Marr reduced to being King of The Jangling Guitars, when they were both so much more than those things. It didn’t do them any harm, really, because if you were into The Smiths, you knew that, and you knew that other people who were into them knew that too. The kids who reduced The Smiths to generic moaners were just identifying themselves as insensitive, humourless, and bovine. It was kind of the same thing with The Stone Roses, but the opposite of what happened with Oasis, who claimed to be like The Beatles, and the fans just parroted that back. There was less to Oasis than met the eye, and it was the opposite with The Smiths and The Roses. There was more to The Primitives than met they eye too, but maybe not quite as much as with those two Manchester bands.

Stop Killing Me is about how her boyfriend blows hot and cold and it’s killing her, and she wants him to stop.  That’s it, more or less.  That’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?  But it would be, wouldn’t it, if it was killing you?  You wouldn’t piss about if someone was killing you, would you?  As far as songs about things that require urgent attention go, it’s at least got the right idea.

Tracy Tracy – which was, again, very much of the era as far as names of indie popstars went – delivers it in exactly the way something with a title like Stop Killing Me needed to be delivered in 1987, which is to say, not screaming like she meant it. Indie was always about being cooler than the mainstream. The Primitives were straightforward alright, but they weren’t basic. They weren’t obvious. That was what the mainstream was all about.

As far as it goes, with Stop Killing Me, they had their sound straight away. There were a couple of earlier singles that I didn’t know about where they hadn’t quite nailed it, but this was their equivalent to The Stone Roses’ Elephant Stone: three or four singles in to find their feet before they got it right.

What they didn’t quite have down yet, was the look. And when I say the look, I mean for Tracy. She was attired in standard Goth girl clothes, apart from having blonde hair, and that didn’t really work. It was a bit off the peg, to the extent that Goth was off the peg at all.

The thing about Tracy was that she was quite limited in terms of what she could do well, like almost all pop stars, really. She didn’t have much range in her voice, it was pretty thin and flat, and she couldn’t put a lot of expression into it; she wasn’t much of a mover – neither was Debbie Harry: watch Blondie videos and live performances, she can’t dance, she’s got no rhythm at all practically, but it doesn’t matter because she had an enormous range of subtle facial expressions that she used beautifully. Anyway, even though Debbie Harry might have been the spiritual godmother of the 1988 Blonde fronted indie bands, we’re not here to talk about her. And I’m sure they were sick to death of getting asked about Blondie in interviews. The Primitives were sick of most things from the get go, really. A point they made explicit in 1989.

Tracy, on the surface of things, might have looked like a limited front woman who lacked the ability to connect with an audience, lacked the ability to sing with much strength, and lacked the ability to move groovily. Which you’d think would be disastrous. Most front people of bands have one of those things at least. Ian Brown can’t sing or dance very well, but he can connect with an audience. Morrissey’s the same. Liam Gallagher could sing, and could connect, but couldn’t move. Ian McCulloch was the same as Liam Gallagher. You don’t need all three – great if you do, but one’s fine, two’s great.

And this is where The Primitives set themselves apart. They worked with what they had. Meaning, the difference between having an indie hit like Stop Killing Me, and having a worldwide smash hit, like Crash, wasn’t just because Crash is a perfect pop song – even though it is – it’s because they got Tracy’s image exactly right. Partly.

The Primitives got big because of Crash, and also because they got their image spot on – briefly.

When Tracy ditched most of the overtly Gothic stuff – she’d been a big Siouxie & The Banshees fan – apart from the jewellery and replaced it with the secretly psychotic secretary look – she knocked it out of the park. Elegantly coiffed hair, smart little black dresses. Just enough of a hint that she could be a bugger when she felt like it. A little bit dark on the quiet. Standoffish. Not so much an ice maiden as a bit hard work, but possibly interesting with it. Still waters run deep, sort of thing. Less is more. Keeping it together, but actually on the brink of losing her shit below the surface. It’s the complete package working together with the generally fairly consistently irritated lyrical content. I don’t know if they worked it out on purpose. I suspect not, but that’s how it goes.

Perhaps it was the record company’s intervention – they certainly complained of that a bit at the time. In interviews, they tended to not be particularly enthusiastic about anything, preferring to take swipes here and there, but that was the indie way, as it would be. Indie set itself against the mainstream until The Roses successfully and consistently made the leap, and took the rest of indie over the cliff with them Banal things stick in your mind sometimes, and one of the things that sticks in mine is Paul, the guitarist, telling some interviewer how much he hated Jimmy Tarbuck, how he’d like to drive a lorry through the gap between Tarbuck’s front teeth.

The first label they were on was Lazy Records, which was set up by Wayne Morris, T-shirt designer and owner of European Son – presumably named after the Velvet Underground song on their debut album – Coventry’s premier clothes emporium, from the proceeds of a ubiquitous and edgy early 80s t shirt, which featured a stencilled photo of Adolf Hitler, featuring the text, Adolf Hitler European Tour 1939-1945, the proceeds of which went towards promoting The Primitives. The original (male) singer of The Primitives couldn’t stand their manager and quit, leaving the door open for Tracy to answer an advert placed, pleasantly, in Coventry Library.

Whether this manager had anything to do with the changing image, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Gareth Evans, The Stone Roses’ manager had a big impact on their career, although I don’t think he influenced their sartorial or musical direction overly. Whether the interference that The Primitives faced was down to Morris or the suits at RCA, I have no idea, although my money’s on RCA.

However, that’s to get slightly ahead of myself because the image only really came together when Stop Killing Me was re-recorded.

I didn’t get all of the previously released singles because I couldn’t find Really Stupid, but I got Thru The Flowers though – the first version – and that was okay, except what that mainly showed how far they’d got their shit together in between that and Stop Killing Me.

Thru The Flowers

It’s a nice song, even if it’s, basically, I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend by The Ramones. And the early version sounds like it too.

Then they re-recorded Thru The Flowers, utilising the same tricks and sound that they’d sorted out on Stop Killing Me, and it was a big improvement. It was still noisy and scuzzy, but the noise and scuzziness was shoved backwards in the mix second time around. They’d found their sound. I hesitate to suggest that The Primitives had an Imperial period, as The Pet Shop Boys referred to the point in a band’s career when everything they do goes right because it’s more like a graph shaped like a pyramid that rises and falls fairly sharply with Crash at the apex because they blew it in a way – although the slightly polished sound of their major label debut meant that they probably had greater success than they would have if they’d stuck with their scuzzy sound, but it couldn’t possibly have lasted because of the law of the Indie jungle. They weren’t a one hit wonder, in the same way that the Boo Radleys weren’t, but they both did have one record that was bigger than everything else they did put together, which isn’t the same thing, but it’s not far off.

Going back to the earlier stuff would be a bit like what would happen in 1989, when I went back through The Stone Roses’ earlier singles and sessions once I was sucked in by Elephant Stone. It was getting there, but it was hard to go back to the gaucheness after you knew where it was headed. I liked Sally Cinnamon, but I wasn’t taken by So Young or Tell Me. When Thru The Flowers was re-released, I got that too, and was delighted.

It was becoming clear that The Primitives had found a formula. Three chords, simple, sweet melody, sung high and slightly absently, basic drumming and bass by a player who couldn’t really play.

The art was in the guitars though, which also followed a formula. Harmonically, The Primitives never really went too far away from the basic three chords, but they didn’t sound like it because Paul Court, the guitar player and songwriter arranged the guitars imaginatively and intelligently. Certainly to a greater extent than most indie bands of the time ever did. And most that followed, too. The beauty was in the arrangement of the guitars, and in Tracy’s less-is-more singing and performance. Tracy brought you in, but Paul kept you there.

Not that he was a virtuoso, but he was still better than most indie guitar players. Like Squire in 1989, although to a lesser extent, he was pretty good. Mainly what he had was taste and an intelligent approach to playing and arranging. In the same way that Squire criticised the guitars on first Stone Roses album as “we sounded like a two guitar band, and we weren’t,” The Primitives, once they refined their sound, also didn’t sound like a band with one guitarist on the records. No problem, apart from playing live meant that they could sound a bit thin. Squire got around that by just not playing certain songs live – Bye Bye Badman and What The World Is Waiting For. The Primitives just muddled though, primitively.

Following these singles, RCA records signed their label – Lazy – and immediately they broke through.

Crash

Crash, the first single, is the one that everyone knows, of course. It’s a record that’s more famous than the band, the one that the band tended to be a bit dismissive of, at least fairly soon afterwards.

Crash is a perfect pop song in most people’s books, and certainly mine. It’s bubblegum: it’s short, it’s sweet, it’s got a great guitar intro and chorus hook, a nah-nah-nah vocal hook, and just enough lyrical bite to keep you interested. The Primitives regularly dismissed their lyrics as not being likely to change anyone’s life, and maybe they wouldn’t, but despite the sugary first impression you get, actually, it’s not really. It’s not Morrissey, but it is sort of The Shangri-La’s, and that’ll do me.

Despite the repeated line, “Slow down, you’re gonna crash,” it doesn’t sound like they’re actually concerned for the wellbeing of the driver. Who, frankly, might not even be in a car – it’s vague enough that it could be a metaphor for anyone doing anything a bit recklessly. Tracy’s delivery of the line, like her delivery of most lines, is pretty far from impassioned. It’s like someone doing the least they could possibly do and whispering their warning in the hope that the recipient won’t receive it, and will crash and do themself harm, which seems fairly explicit on the opening line, “Here you go, way too fast, Don’t slow down, you’re gonna crash.”

And that’s a lot sexier than a sensible, sober warning. It plays on Tracy’s implied, lurking below the surface, sense of madness. But it’s not one-dimensional, like most bands’ lyrical approach. The narrator’s an observer, an outsider, and they’re not involved in the haste displayed by the subject of the song. They’ve been asked to join in, and they don’t want to. And there’s more than one reason for their refusal.

The subject’s hasty approach to life is dismissed as a symptom of “misery“, which the narrator has “no cure for“. Furthermore, the narrator also shows absolutely no sympathy, “Shut your mouth, ’cause I’m not listening anyhow.” It’s arsey, and maybe it’s arsey because Tracy looked a bit arsey generally, but The Primitives were always a bit arsey, and I liked that.

If anything – as suggested by the opening line’s “don’t slow down” encouragement to crash, the narrator’s hope is that the subject will crash, “I’ve had enough, enough of you, Enough to last a lifetime through.” The subject‘s lifetime, not necessarily the narrator’s, you’d suppose.

So far, so arsey. However, it wouldn’t be half as good without the slight change of perspective in, “And if I go around with you, you know that I’ll get messed up too,” and that’s the killer line because it subverts everything else that’s gone on before it.

Where everything else has been pretty much teenage snottiness and sticking two fingers up at a self-destructive misery who goes on and on interminably while doing stupid things, that line suggests that, actually, the narrator is bothered about the subject after all, and what they really feel is scared. Like most arsey people, including me, it’s often coming from a place of fear. Of course they’re bothered – they’ve gone to the effort of writing a song about them, even if the best line isn’t about the subject, but about the narrator. And that’s what makes it great, lyrically, despite what the band say about it. Tracy’s delivery of that line is also bordering on sad. Look at how she does it on the video above. There’s regret there, and it’s beautiful, in a sad sort of way.

So, ultimately, Crash is lyrically ambivalent about its subject, and that complication, that nuance supplied by that single line gives the whole thing a depth that it’d lack without it. Yes, it’s a bubblegum pop record, but as with all bubblegum, you need teeth, or what’s the point?

I don’t know whether most people who were into Crash thought about any of that or not, you don’t need to for it to be a great bubblegum pop record because there’s also the outstanding nah-nah-nah chorus, which The Primitives used in a lot of their songs, albeit to lesser effect than here.

Musically, Crash is all about the guitars though. I’ve mentioned that Paul Court had worked out a formula of how to arrange them, and this is one of the examples of one of the types of song that they had: fast, jangly, melodic guitar riff song. They weren’t all about this sort of thing, but this was their commercially acceptable type of song, and there are a lot of them, which I’ll get to.

Right, how did he do it, then?

Crash is fairly typical of The Primitives’ jangly guitar tunes, so I’ll break down what he did on the record, because it’s basically the same thing for all of those types of tune – at least on Lovely.

For starters, the whole song is three chords all the way through: B, E and F#, the classic three chord trick, but he, again, makes the most of them as the song progresses.

In musical theory, the three chord trick is I-IV-V. B=1, E=IV, F# is V. Most of the time, you play I-IV-V-IV, with the bridge being V-IV back and forth to create a bit of tension, before going back to I-IV-V-IV. It’s the obvious thing to do with three chords. It’s more or less exactly the same on Thru The Flowers, except in a different key.

The – great – jangling introduction is clever in its simplicity. It’s played on the open strings and it’s not the sort of thing a beginner would be able to manage without stumbling over their fingers, but it’s also too simple for your virtuoso to even contemplate doing. The clever thing about it is that there’s a repeated b note that drones all the way through it on the open b string, even when he plays the fretted b note on the fourth fret of the g string – that’s the sort of thing that “better” guitarists would baulk at doing – missing out on playing another note as well. It’s busy but economical. It’s well thought out – it follows the implied chords, without actually playing full versions of them, which gives the impression of watching something – a car possibly – approaching from the distance, rapidly and it’s like changing perspective, from watching from a distance to leaping into it as it speeds past you when the band kicks in.

It’s also – the intro riff, as far as I can tell – played on an acoustic guitar, which is another trick that John Squire used on their first album a lot. Quite a lot of lead guitar lines on The Stone Roses are played on an acoustic guitar, while the rhythm is on an electric. Starting from Elephant Stone, at least. To be fair, it’s the same on All Across The Sands on the b side of Sally Cinnamon, Most guitar players would play jangly lines on an electric to give them more power, but doing it acoustically allows for a more dynamic approach, and Squire and Court both understood that.

A couple of times around that gorgeous introduction – 10 seconds, that’s it – then wham – into the verses, which the riff could have continued over as it’s all the same chords, but he doesn’t. It’s all palm muted electric guitar chugging through the chords as the bass does the same thing and the drums are as simple as they could possibly be. That goes on for the next 15 seconds, and then a third guitar joins in on the line “Shut, shut your mouth.” It’s the most distorted so far, and it’s a guitar of frustration, again, playing exactly the same chords in the same order, but like someone throwing their arms around in exasperation at the subject’s interminable wittering.

34 seconds in, and here comes a fourth guitar, a slightly crunchy electric, possibly with the first (acoustic) guitar playing the same thing – which is a picked, slightly syncopated take on the intro riff to lead into the chorus, which is – as you’ve gathered – exactly the same chords as the verse and the intro – but the bigger distorted guitar from the second half of the verse drops out here, leaving just the palm muted chug and an electric and acoustic guitar playing the intro riff over the nah-nah-nah chorus.

It’s also worth noting here that the sound of the guitars is absolutely spot on at this point. Previously they were far too distorted, Squire’s lead guitar never sounded as good as this. I don’t think John Leckie did such a great job on the debut Roses album as is often suggested. The band said it sounded a bit flat, a little monochrome, and I think it does too. It’s neat, but lacking in bite. The best thing Leckie did was the mixing of Fools’ Gold, which is an outstanding mix, especially the 12″,

Second verse is, guitar wise, the same as the first, although the bridge is dragged out a bit for added tension. Same chorus arrangement of guitars, except it repeats, and the big distorted guitar comes in again, over the chorus this time. Fade to end.

Two and a half minutes – bam. How does that grab you, darling?

Pffft!

It’s shit hot. As a song, it’s as simple as it gets. There’s no harmonic variation at any point in it, it just churns around. No middle eight, no guitar solo, no breakdown.

Without his clever arrangement of the guitars, those two and a half minutes would seem a lot longer, as it is, like a speeding motorcar, it just zooms past and the first thing you want to do, once it’s over, is play it again. Crash is about someone who’s outstayed their welcome, and it doesn’t make the same mistake.

Crash was a proper hit in the proper charts in England – number 5 in early 1988. It was on the radio a lot, as well it might have been – like The Eagles’ Take It Easy and Jane Wiedlin’s sort of oppositely themed 1988 single Rush Hour – co written with Peter Rafelson, who also wrote Open Your Heart for Madonna – and it sounds like a hit, too, Crash is practically made for drive time radio

It hung around for a couple of months, but its radio friendly sound and theme meant you heard it regularly for the next few years on Radio 1, but it’s also a perennial Indie Disco song.

And that’s how things stayed until 1995 when it featured – in remixed form – on the Jim Carrey explicitly low-IQ cinematic vehicle Dumb & Dumber. However radio friendly the original might have sounded to the likes of psychedelic sixties indie kids in corduroy trousers and suede jackets like me, it obviously wasn’t seen in the same terms by Uncle Sam, who extended it to about three and a bit minutes, which smoothed it out a bit, but also added synthesisers and an enormously American sounding distorted guitar to the bridge, dragged out the original bridge guitar line to suggest a guitar solo, topping it up with that horrible American guitar, then the chorus goes on, replete with the Yankee guitar wailing a sustained note over it, like a train’s squealing brakes, incongruously enough, given the theme of the song.

As a result of its appearance on Dumb and Dumber, cover versions started springing up. One of the kids out of Busted – a teenybopper guitar band of the late 90s – covered it for the Mr Bean movie soundtrack, adequately, if not wonderfully. There are a few versions on YouTube, and none of them do anything very different with the arrangement, although some follow the Dumb And Dumber extended version.

Which goes to show, a bit like Alone Again, Or, by Love, as a song, it’s pretty good, but more than anything, it’s the arrangement that makes them such good records. In both cases, it’s an outstanding intro riff for starters. In Alone Again, Or‘s case, it’s also the orchestration.

Anyone who covers either of those songs plays it straight – because they’re both so slight, yet appealing. Exactly the same thing goes for There She Goes by The La’s. If you’re going to cover it, you need to do it exactly like the original record because it doesn’t work otherwise. Which makes covering them a bit pointless. They’re great pop records that you can’t improve on, because they’re not necessarily great songs.

Lovely – Debut Album

Crash came out at the end of February 1988, by which time I was not yet 17 and now working at County Hall in Beverley, in the Dispatch office, which was the mailroom. Meaning, my job consisted of sorting through huge sacks of mail sent to the council into various departments, whose own gofers picked it up and took it away, bringing their outgoing post. Also, I was, basically, the internal postman for the County Secretary’s department, which I quite liked, delivering post to the various offices. I also ran the stationery cupboard, which I also didn’t mind. What I did mind though, was the woman who was in charge of Dispatch, who did nothing at all, except be married to someone high up and who justified her existence by finding problems where there weren’t any and making everything less efficient and more complicated and upsetting. Despite quite enjoying it, as far as jobs went, I couldn’t be doing with her, and left to go to Trading Standards within about 8 months.

In Beverley, which I like a lot, there wasn’t actually a dedicated record shop at that point, let alone an Indie one, which meant that day-of-release record shopping was only available at WH Smiths and Woolworths, which were next to one another. It also meant that they didn’t stock indie records: only chart stuff. Which meant that I could buy Lovely, The Primitives’ first album on the day it came out, rather than having to wait for Saturday when I could go into Hull, where there was Offbeat, Syd Scarbs, Andy’s Records, HMV, Our Price, plus WH Smiths and Boots at a pinch. Not to mention Spin It in the indoor market for second hand stuff. Or Disc discovery on Spring Bank , then Golden Oldies on Prinny Ave on the way home

I didn’t move to Trading Standards exclusively because it was just around the corner from Offbeat records – the newly opened Indie shop in Hull – and to get away from my boss at County Hall, but both of those things did no harm. Mind you, I only lasted 18 months there because I realised that the problem I had with working for a living wasn’t necessarily where I was working, or what I was doing, or even who I was working with, it was more the basic concept that I was working and I really couldn’t be arsed, so I went to university to pursue indolence at a more leisurely pace, without people going on at me to do some work. And to get away from my mother, naturally.

Lovely, despite being slagged off by the band itself to a degree – record company interference again – although not to the extent that The La’s slagged their debut – and only – album off 18 months later, is a great Indie Bubblegum Pop record.

Indie had high standards in some ways, and low standards in others. The records weren’t slick or well produced a lot of the time – Lovely, being on a major label was slicker than most indie records of that time, but less slick than say, T’Pau or Jane Wiedlin records – but they retained a bit of the British 60s idea of value for money, meaning that singles on albums were frowned upon a little bit. The idea, like with The Beatles, was that albums were one thing, and singles were something else. All the indie bands released stand alone singles that didn’t appear on albums. The Stone Roses’ album didn’t have Elephant Stone, Fool’s Gold or One Love on it, even though the latter two came later. She Bangs The Drums was on it, as was Made of Stone, but that was it – until Silvertone released Waterfall and I Am The Resurrection, in remixed forms, and they were slagged off for commercialism as a result. Later, Primal Scream were widely seen as a rip off by the Indie kids I knew for releasing Screamadelica, being fundamentally a compilation of singles, with some burbling, non-songs as filler to pad it out.

Lovely was viewed a bit like Screamadelica would be three years later by the Indie Judicial System. Thru The Flowers had been released twice, and it was the re-recording that was on Lovely, and not only that, but it also had a b side of that single – Buzz Buzz Buzz, again re-recorded. The original had Paul doing most of the singing, the re-recording with a lot more Tracy on it. Stop Killing Me was on it. Crash, naturally, was on it, but so was its b side I’ll Stick With You. Ocean Blue and Shadow had been released on a limited 7 inch given away at a London gig, which I didn’t go to and hadn’t heard, so I wasn’t bothered by the inclusion of those. Nothing Left had been on a Sounds giveaway.

In short, of the fourteen tracks on the original album, eight of them had already been released in one form or another before the album came out.

And it only got worse in those terms because I’ll Stick With You was also released as a single. Then Way Behind Me followed in early September 1988, which would have been standard Indie policy – a stand alone single to follow the album five or six months later, except RCA stuck that on Lovely as well, which die hards would have felt obliged to buy. I didn’t. Then it also appeared on Pure in autumn 1989 as well. Spaceheads? Breadheads, more like.

But that was the 80s major label way. Albums were defined as good by how many hit singles were on them. Thriller, I suppose was a big example of that, but it wasn’t the only one – Madonna albums had stacks of singles taken off them, as did all the big hitters of the day.

But that was the major world. The Indie world defined itself against the majors, and one of the key guiding principles was value for money. When indie bands started getting picked up by the majors, they kowtowed to what the majors always did – which was not only having albums full of singles, but also having multiple formats of each of those singles. It was about attitude as much as anything, and if your attitude wasn’t indie, it didn’t matter how cool the label you were signed to was because attitude trumped everything in the Indie world, in the same way that money trumped everything in the major world.

Standard Indie practice was: 7 inch, 12 inch, Maybe a cassette single, possibly a cd single, probably not either of the latter two. When Crash was released, it came out on 7 inch, 12 inch – initial copies with a poster, 7 inch 33rpm EP, with Crash appearing three times on the a side, same version(!), and a 10 inch single in an autographed gatefold sleeve. No cd single, but this is early 1988, and you didn’t get many of those yet. Same with cassette singles. Four vinyl versions. You wouldn’t get that on Squirrel Records.

The effect of that was one of perception. Indie kids tended to define themselves against chart music fans. There wasn’t much crossover. Indie kids would have lapped up The Primitives and enjoyed Crash, probably. And they did. However, once it became apparent that they were looking for mainstream popularity at the expense of the indie attitude – except surliness – the indie kids were less likely to play ball, and from then on, it was up to the chart music pop kids to take over. And they didn’t really, because The Primitives were obviously an indie band – they looked like one, even if their records were slightly too slick, and Tracy’s lack of obvious double pull down arm moves and vocal gymnastics meant that they were neither muckling nor mickling. They did alright for a bit, but they never really recovered from the typically harsh, brutal judgement from Indie kids who were, naturally, as sanctimonious as they come.

Exactly the same thing happened to The House of Love at more or less the same time, although they had problems recording slick enough versions of their songs for their second album, and it took much longer to come out, by which time it was all over anyway because The Stone Roses did what THoL did much better and they didn’t have Guy Chadwick being a bit creepy as their frontman.

Still, as a relatively recent convert to holier-than-thou indie sanctimony, I didn’t know any of that, so I just thought it was a great pop album. And it is. It’s also more varied than you’d expect. It’s not all variations on their jangly fast pop song because there’re elements of psychedelia, Bo Diddley beats, and wistful slow songs. They’re all pretty bubblegummy, but that’s alright.

Spacehead follows Crash, and it’s loose and fast without being jangly – bordering on The Undertones/Ramones. The drumming and guitars are more violent – almost a throwback to the early singles, and there’s a guitar solo on it, even though it’s just feedback, which you wouldn’t find on many Belinda Carlisle records. Sha-la-la-la chorus. Slight, but great. As always – almost always – it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Carry Me Home is bordering on The Smiths, jangling all the way through, but sung by Paul, whose voice is even more slight than Tracy’s, if somewhat deeper. The whole thing’s a bit like a Monkee’s album track, including the bass runs, that have a touch of Pleasant Valley Sunday about them. Fuzzier than that, but you know where it’s coming from. The guitar solo’s simple, but arranged nicely to cover up the limitations of a man who’s not really into guitar solos.

Three songs in, and it’s all pretty varied. Then Shadow, which I can’t imagine many kids who were brought into the fold by Crash would have found too appealing. Again, it’s a bit Monkees – I expect Paul was familiar with their soundtrack to their movie Head, what with the tablas, sitar drones and backwards guitar parts slithering around. It sounds inspired, shall we say, by Do I Have To Do This All Over Again. It’s a bit Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun by Pink Floyd too.

Then it’s back to the jangly two minute pop single formula with the re-recorded Thru The Flowers. Dreamwalk Baby isn’t a million miles away from Spacehead in attitude and scuzziness. Sha-la-la-ing and all.

I’ll Stick With You though, was just thrown away on the B side of Crash. It’s not as good as Crash, of course, but lyrically it makes a change from the usual either dismissal or sadness about relationships that most of The Primitives’ songs are about. More Hey-a-hey-hey refrains. Probably as close as they got to The Jesus and Mary Chain sound.

Nothing Left is miles better than the original version, and it follows the Paul Court guitar arrangement that also featured on Crash, Thru The Flowers, Out of Reach and Stop Killing Me, although the lead guitar jangle comes from an electric sitar by the sounds of it. They knew what they were doing alright. Lyrically, it’s another simple song of being sick of whatever it is you’re currently sick of – a common theme for The Primitives first two albums, if not their third. It’s lovely though – cheers.

Out of Reach was re-recorded for the single, but this version’s great too, following the Court guitar formula. It’s faster and looser than the single, and no worse for it – although the single version is cleaner and more refined, and still great, it’s the difference between an indie band and an indie band on a major label.

There you go, that’s as plain as I can make it. The first one is what an indie band would sound like, the second is what a formerly indie band on a major label sound like. Both are great in their own way, if you ask me.

Ocean Blue, which I’d not heard before is another slow one, and it’s got enormous reverb on the snare drum, as most slow records of the 80s did – indie or major – nobody’s going to mistake it for T’Pau though, it’s not histrionic enough, even if it does have those horrible synthesised wood block clicks on it, which were never great. It’s sweet though, and it breaks the album up.

Run Baby Run is twitchy and slight. Pretty enough, but more like an insubstantial meringue than anything with any substance. Which is fair enough for a bubblegum band, but the bubblegum medium is the 7 inch single, and albums tended to be a bit samey. It’s testament to the intelligently arranged guitars and track listing that it only really becomes apparent on this, the second to last song on Lovely – the second to last song is traditionally the weakest on albums.

Don’t Want Anything to Change ends the album, and it’s a gentler, slower take on the faster jangly songs and lyrically – ironically – something has changed, as it expresses contentment with the relationship that’s been sung about for the entire album in negative terms, more or less. It suits Tracy’s not-especially-expressive voice because why would you get aerated about something you’re happy about. I really like it.

Way Behind Me, which was added to the album later, slots in with the re-recording of I’ll Stick With You. They’ve got the same guitar sounds, which is a change from the album’s. There’s a worked out guitar break, ba-ba-ba-doo refrain, and it’s even got a fourth chord – a minor, which shows some sort of development, even if it is basically Here Comes My Baby – The Tremoloes version of – the Cat Stevens song.

The album went in at number 6, and spent the next ten weeks gradually slipping downwards, only halting briefly with the release of Way Behind Me. With hindsight, the writing was on the wall for The Prims, as they were known. Too indie for the pop kids, too commercial for the indie kids. What are you going to do about that? Well, there’s the rub. Had it been released in 1995, it would have sold a lot more records, but would probably be even less fondly remembered. Naturally, Crash was heard again in 1995, but mainly on the radio.

The sound was a little bit Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, whose Nancy & Lee album was in an awful lot of Indie kids’ record collections then – with Tracy’s high, slight vocals and Paul’s lower pitched drone. It wasn’t as country as that, but there was a definite impression that they were into that too. Paul’s voice wasn’t quite a low as Lee Hazlewood’s, but it was getting there, probably also in thrall to Jim Reid, singer of the Jesus and Mary Chain.

Pure

The second album followed soon after the first, but it was all over, really. I got the impression that they felt that they’d been neutered somewhat by signing to a major, and they were going to go back to their indie roots. Which, of course, they didn’t. What they did was, basically, the same thing, in the same way. Sick of It, the first single was heralded as being noisy punk rock, but it isn’t. If it’s anything, it’s a little bit baggy. Fairly early baggy too – coming out in about Autumn 1989, after the sixties psychedelic approach but on time for the “There’s always been a dance element to our music” cliche that every indie band came out with. It’s not massively baggy, but it is a bit. Certainly more than Primal Scream managed before Andrew Weatherall remixed them. Is that a good thing? I don’t know.

Tracy dyed her hair red, and it just wasn’t the same. Maybe she fancied a change, maybe it was something else – I have no idea, but pop music doesn’t deal very much in subtlety, and red hair means fiery, whereas blonde hair means cool. Tracy wasn’t a fiery singer or mover. She suited the understated blonde look, and not so much the overstated redhead look. It’s shallow and it’s fickle, but that’s pop music for you. More specifically, that’s showbiz, and majors dealt in showbiz. Majors like RCA, The Primitives’ label.

They seemed pissed off – see the above clip from Saturday morning kids’ television, in which they’re surly and don’t really connect with anyone – the presenter, the crew or the kids. Tracy’s asked what her favourite food is, and she replies, “Hamsters“, which would have been funny in the NME, but less so on kids’ telly. They’d happily answered inane questions all through 1988, and now they’d decided they wanted to be taken more seriously, following their miming to Secrets? I dig it – they wanted to be pop stars, but having realised what being pop stars meant, they didn’t like it anymore. The end was nigh, but it would be dragged out and a bit embarrassing.

What I do know is that Secrets, the second single was clean, full of ba-ba-ba-ing and light and frothy as a walnut whip. Oddly enough, in a Melody Maker interview on the set of the Sick of It video recording, they were already slagging Secrets off, as what the record company wanted releasing, and how shit it was. It was the next single. Naturally. It didn’t trouble the charts, and no wonder – it was between the devil and the deep blue sea. It’d be alright as a musical interlude on a children’s television programme, probably not one about eating hamsters, but that’d be about it.

There were bits and pieces on Pure that were good, but it wasn’t a success in any way. I went to get mine signed in the basement of Sydney Scarborough, and they didn’t look happy. I didn’t normally do that sort of thing, but as I worked in town, it was easy. Paul asked me if I liked it, and I said it was alright, and he tightened his lips and twitched his eyebrows. I didn’t blame him.

Galore

The Primitives decided that there’d definitely always been a dance element to their music by the third album, which has this, bordering on Flowered Up doing It’s On.

 The rest of the album, produced by Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds, was – as usual by now – light and fluffy, except now really rather baggy in places. To be fair, it was a lot better than Pure, but they’d blown it by then and it didn’t chart at all. Cold Enough To Kill was a bit like a baggy Shadow from Lovely, except without the psychedelic touches, which would have suited a baggy friendly production, ironically. Hello Jesus was presumably inspired by the Velvet Underground’s third album song, but not half as good, even with the baggily flanged guitar two years after the event. Empathise was bordering on shoegaze, and competent enough, but it just looked they were desperate to find a wagon to hitch their career to, and shoegaze was indie, and this just wasn’t. Kiss Mine was back to baggy, Smile sounded like The Beautiful South, and Little Black Egg was a straight cover of The Nightcrawlers’ sweet little garage hit. Tracy’s hair went back to being blonde, but it was too late for that to make any difference either.

And that was it.

They reformed for live gigs and a covers album, and the odd single here and there, and I guess they’re doing alright. I hope they are. They’ll have a small but dedicated fanbase that means that the internet worked out for The Primitives on the whole. They can press a few hundred copies of their singles up on vinyl, and play a few smallish venues from time to time to keep the wolf from the door, and royalties from Crash probably just about pay the bills for Tracy and Paul. Fair dos. Good on ’em.

The first album was, indeed, Lovely. Crash is a killer perfect pop song, and if you like that, you’ll find plenty to dig on that first LP. Slim pickings after that, though. and that was the case, basically, for every last one of the Blonde Explosion Bands of 1988.

Postscript

I ended up not talking about the others too much. I can’t be bothered going into any detail, but I’ll precis them, harshly.

The Darling Buds wouldn’t have existed without The Primitives, and slagged them off a fair bit. Their first album Pop Said was alright, Hit The Ground was their Crash, but nowhere near as big. They followed exactly the same path as The Prims, realising that there’d always been a dance element to their music, funnily enough, and they did a better job of it than The Primitives, but it was still a bit desperate. They too signed to a major, and exactly the same thing happened to them.

Voice of The Beehive were on a major to start with, and had some great singles that were less buzzsaw guitary than either The Primitives or The Darling Buds, but tightly arranged – probably more so than either of those bands. Having two girl singers meant that there were harmonies, and they were really good at them. Also, being American and about a million times more showbiz than either The Prims or The Darling Buds, they were less awkward onstage than either of those two, but it was sort of theatre school in presentation: self-consciously quirky in thrift shop clothes, and great big, shit eating American, toothsome smiles all the way through everything. First album was good, in a mainstream 1988 sort of way, a bit more character than Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven On Earth, but also not a million miles away from that either. After that, it was just chart pap.

Transvision Vamp were also on a major from the start, and Wendy James played up the sexy, bratty pseudo ingénue who made outrageous comments in the press. They had a couple of exciting singles, one of which was Wild Thing by The Troggs, but with different words. Wendy James was probably the best front woman of the lot of these bands, being more of a mover than Andrea Darling Bud or Tracy Tracy, and her singing was fine. But they were slight and not built to last. Like The Primitives, I got the impression that they expected taking seriously by the time of the second album, and that was never going to happen to a bubblegum band. It comes to most bubblegum pop bands, doesn’t it? They get success at the expense of credibility, and then they decide they want to be credible, but once you’ve pickled your gherkin, there’s no getting your cucumber back, is there?

And that’s the moral of the story, in a way. Indie bands were like cucumbers, the major labels were jars of vinegar, and The Primitives ended up in a pickle.