The Housemartins 'Build'

Chart Peak: 15

YouTube

Unlike the Erasure track, this is a song I know very well - indeed it's the first record on this blog that I actually have the original physical single of - so I didn't think there'd be any surprises. Then I looked it up on YouTube and found a version that had been subtitled into Portuguese because it was the theme tune to a Brazilian soap opera.

The Housemartins seem like a big part of my childhood, mainly because I remember my dad buying their first album London 0 Hull 4 and playing it a lot. He didn't actually have the follow-up The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death, which this comes from, but one of the first CDs I remember was their compilation Now That's What I Call Quite Good, complete with the classic record company slogan "Go! Discs - makes other labels seem crap". I thought that was really brilliant when I was 11 or 12. But I liked the music too; not that I understood all the political or religious imagery in it, but then I didn't need to. Perhaps more than any of the bands you might compare them with, they wrote brilliant pop songs. And they knew how to make a video too.


'Build' is one of their less frenetic moments, but it's got an impressive melody. It's also notable for the fact that drummer Dave Hemingway sings part of the chorus, prefiguring his co-vocalist role in The Beautiful South. Indeed, 'Build' was almost the final Housemartins single, as you can see at the end of the video, but the record company were less than happy, and insisted on another single (this proved to be the Peel session track 'There Is Always Something There To Remind Me', which I like even more than this but it was never much of a hit). I think this has aged as well as anything the Smiths did. It's just as well I have an excuse to post a picture of this 45 though - it turns out to be almost entirely unplayable.

Also appearing on: Now 7, 8, 9
Available on: The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death