The Housemartins 'Think For A Minute'

Chart Peak:
YouTube

Charted at No. 47 on 30th September, had progressed nicely to reach No. 18 by 28th October. 'Think' is the group's second Top 20 success following 'Happy Hour'.

Sadly the last time we get to hear from the Housemartins on this blog, it being rather unfortunate that their brief span of success was in the days of only two Now albums per year. I don't have the toilet-shaped picture disc of this single, but I was lucky enough to obtain the original 12" for less than a pound, as pictured to the left.

If their debut album London 0 Hull 4 has a flaw, it's that a lot of the tracks do sound quite similar, and the original album version of 'Think For A Minute' (a title which I always thought should have an exclamation mark in it but doesn't) is a little bit Housemartins-by-numbers with its typical jangly guitars in the same tempo as many of their other songs. I love a jangly guitar, but so long into a running order of similar tracks it sells itself a bit short.

For single release we get an entirely new recording of the song, in an acoustic arrangement. Obviously slowing a song down can have mixed results, though the most common one is boredom. That's not the case here, thanks to the quiet intensity of the playing and Paul Heaton's outstanding vocal - there can't be many vocalists who've been so successful and yet so underappreciated. It concentrates attention on his more recognised talent as a lyricist, in which he's produced a susprisingly compelling song about apathy. A lovely trumpet solo from Guy Barker serves to preclude any monotony. And of course one of the reasons I've always loved the Housemartins is because they temper whatever messages they have with humour, as in the video for this song where drummer Hugh Whittaker mocks his minor role on the track by attempting to dominate the performance. Of course, the fact that he later served time for attacking somebody with an axe makes this slightly less funny now but we didn't know about that in 1986. For an indie band of the era they have some surprisingly good dance moves too, but then their interest in other music is also demonstrated by the affectionate parody B-side 'Rap Around The Clock'.

"Top pop stars or total willie noses?" they ask on the back cover of the 12". I'm voting for the former this time.

Also appearing on: Now 7, 9, 10
Available on: London 0 Hull 4 - Deluxe E Album Set

Freak Power 'Turn On, Tune In, Cop Out'

Chart Peak: 3 [29 in 1993]

YouTube

'Turn On, Tune In, Cop Out' is the soundtrack to the current Levi's advertising campaign... It charted at No. 3 on 12/3/95 after just one week on release giving Norman Cook (ex-Housemartins and Beats International) his biggest hit to date with latest venture Freak Power.

OK, so my original plan was to write about Now 30 in the thirtieth anniversary year, but as you may have noticed that ended eight months ago. Still, it's an interesting album, or am I just saying that because it was released around the time of my 17th birthday? One way or another there's stuff in here I wanted to write about anyway, and besides, it's a chance to repay the investment I made in actually buying a copy of the opening track.

As the note there slightly glosses over, 'Turn On...' had been a minor hit two years earlier but was revitalised by that advert, which perhaps hasn't dated too well but certainly got the song (or at least a heavily re-edited segment of it) noticed. It was a clever choice, actually, fitting both the apparent 1970s setting of the ad and the somewhat mocking tone. As with most of his projects, Norman Cook didn't directly front the band; the most visible member was singing trombonist Ashley Slater, he of the baritone voice and shaven head. I'm not entirely sure about the health and safety implications of balancing a candle on one's head, as he does in the video, but at least he doesn't have any hair to worry about singeing.

It's hard to know how seriously to take the apparent anti-drug message of the lyric (my guess is "not very") but it does at least raise the song above some of the more earnest funk pastiches that were around then (and now, indeed). Slater's trombone solo also adds a slightly cheeky edge to the finished article.

Despite Cook's previous success, Freak Power went the way of most acts who have a breakthrough hit from an advert and never enjoyed a big hit again. They just about scraped the Top 30 with one-off single 'No Way' in 1998, but Cook had already turned his attention to other projects like Fatboy Slim, Mighty Dub Katz and Pizzaman so they're deservedly best remembered for this. It's a good song if possibly a bit quiet for the opening track.

Available on: Turn On, Tune In, Cop Out

The Housemartins 'Caravan Of Love'

Chart Peak: 1 (1 week)

YouTube

Charted at No. 23 on 2nd December 1986, had flown to No.1 by 16th December. It was their third consecutive Top 20 single of the year.

There are quite a few unusual things about this single, none of which are really accounted for in the sleeve note. I suppose they were too busy congratulating themselves on that "flown" joke. It's chiefly notable as the UK's second and - to date - last a cappela Number One single, after the Flying Pickets version of 'Only You'; interesting to note with hindsight that they were so close together in time, and that both were cover versions released in the winter. Indeed, 'Caravan Of Love' was only a week shy of being a Christmas chart topper (as previously mentioned, it had to play second fiddle to the late Jackie Wilson), which makes it an odd record to be writing about during the biggest heatwave for several years.

Of course, the big difference between the Housemartins and the Flying Pickets is that the latter were stylistically consistent, whereas the other Housemartins hits were all self-penned and featured instruments. They weren't strangers to unaccompanied singing though, having occasionally appeared as their own support act under the pseudonym Fish City Five and released a version of 'He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother' on the CD version of their debut album. Had this stayed on top for that extra week it would have been the first religiously-themed Christmas Number One since 1978, though in the event the nation had to wait another four years for Cliff Richard's 'Saviour's Day'. This too is a slight diversion for the band who, unlike Cliff, were not known to be truly religious; though Paul Heaton seems not to have been as fiercely anti-clerical as he later became, his stated aim in the use of Christian imagery was to "take religion away from the right-wing" and reflect the Christian Socialist tradition he obviously felt some sympathy with. He and the rest of the band evidently had a genuine love of gospel music too. 'Caravan Of Love' was originally written and recorded by Isley Jasper Isley, a spin-off group of the members who'd joined the Isley Brothers in the Seventies, after their Motown hits but in time for their groundbreaking funk-rock success: Marvin and Ernie Isley and their brother-in-law Chris Jasper. During their tenure with the group, the Isleys became masters of the cross-genre cover version so it's somehow fitting that the most famous song written by those members went the other way. As sung by Chris Jasper it's a lilting call to evangelisation swamped in treacly 80s production, but the Housemartins obviously strip it down considerably and draw attention to the lyric and Heaton's vocal (easy to forget how good a singer he can be). Presumably buying into the song more as an anthem of togetherness and co-operation rather than one about God, they even sneak in a bit of humour during the call-and-response fade, appearing to sing "He's coming/run for it".

Now, I might be slightly biased here because if there are two acts I particularly associate with my childhood, it's the Housemartins and the Isley Brothers. A Telstar-label Isleys compilation (which featured 'Caravan of Love' as one of  two Isley Jasper Isley tracks) was a regular on my Dad's car stereo back then, and the songs became so familiar to me that I was actually surprised when I grew up and met other people who didn't know them all or even hadn't heard of the Isley Brothers at all. So a combination of the two bands was bound to press all my buttons and indeed it does, as well as the nostalgia I have about hearing this song itself; I also remember the video, which is just as well since it seems to be blocked to UK viewers online. The TotP performance I've linked to up there is notable not only for the band showing their usual glamorous dress sense but also for the fact that the camera operator seems to trip over at about the three-minute mark and they left it in. Anyway, even if the song isn't really as great as I think it is, it's certainly highly distinctive, very different from the rest of what was high in the chart at this time and the rest of the album. That might be one reason why it works for me where the Blow Monkeys don't.

Also appearing on: Now 7, 8, 10
Available on: True Acoustic (3CD Set)

Fatboy Slim 'Praise You'

Chart Peak: 1

YouTube

'Praise You' provided man of the moment Norman Cook with his first Number One single as Fatboy Slim... Norman was awarded the '99 Brit for Best British Dance Act - over ten years since he won his first Brit Award as a member of the Housemartins for Best British Newcomer.

Cook's only solo chart topper arrived, funnily enough, as the third single from his second album in this guise. It was one of those cases where it felt like a matter of time before he got a Number One anyway, such was the excitement around the album, and perhaps the record company even chose to hold back this crowd-pleasing single for an opportune time in the spring. It's certainly a song of broader appeal than 'The Rockafeller Skank' and 'Gangsta Trippin', both of which featured highly repetitive vocal samples. 'Praise You', by contrast, has a more conventional song structure and a full vocal, derived from Camille Yarborough's 'Take Yo' Praise', which most people would never have heard before. I'm not accusing Cook of anything here, though, it's not as if he pretended it was him singing; and in this case at least it's clear that he's acted out of affection for the source material, blending it with various other samples and reviving it for a wider and younger audience.

The other thing everybody remembers of this is of course the promo video, directed by and starring Spike Jonze. If anything it seems a little ahead of its time - it looks more at home on YouTube, where we're used to seeing videos shot in public without proper lighting, and where people publicly sharing their own interpretation of a popular song is commonplace. One of the actors who played a dancer posted a sort of making-of video although most of it seems to have been cribbed from a tacky BBC3 I Love 1999 segment. Towards the end there's a brief excerpt of future Cook collaborator David Byrne showing his autocue-reading skills, which are as convincing as you'd expect.

To tell the truth, I'd got a bit tired of this song because it was so ubiquitous for so long, and these days I'm as likely to listen to the flipside 'Sho Nuff', but I still have fundamental affection for this record and it's here that Disc 2 starts to get good.

Also appearing on: Now 40, 41, 43
Available on: Cruel Intentions

The Housemartins 'Happy Hour'

Chart Peak: 3

YouTube

'Happy Hour' charted at No. 58 on 3rd June 1986 and had raced to No.3 by the end of that same month to give "the fourth best band in Hull" their first hit.

That's more like it! Although this was already their third single, it's the first time I (and many others) became aware of them, and the semi-claymation video alone had my attention instantly. And the song sounded like I thought a pop song should sound when I was eight, all bouncy and jangly. Only gradually did it dawn on me that the song is actually a rather caustic satire on power relationships in employment and sexism, but then that's probably for the best at that age; I don't even think I'd heard of a happy hour outside this song.

Of course, drinking culture has proved to be a regular motif in PD Heaton's songwriting (and indeed in his life)
so with hindsight this is just one chapter in the story. But from a 1986 perspective this remains a classic example of why the Housemartins seemed the ideal pop group during their brief existence: they had something to say, but more to the point they made you want to hear it because they had enough swing and soul, and they weren't afraid of the mainstream. Most of all, they get through the whole song, even the bells solo, in a sprightly 2-and-a-half minutes. That's a lesson many others on this album could do with learning. 

Also appearing on: Now 8, 9, 10
Available on: Dad's Jukebox

Fatboy Slim 'The Rockafeller Skank'

Chart Peak: 6

YouTube

It's slightly hard to imagine now that there was ever a time when this record seemed unfamiliar enough to necessitate that little sticker on the cover associating it with the lyric "Right about now, funk soul brother". This wasn't quite the first Fatboy Slim single to hit the Top 40 (a rerelease of 'Everybody Needs A 303' had done that late in 1997) but as the sleevenote points out, this built on the "incredible success of his Cornershop and Wildchild remixes" (both of which turned up on Now 39) to become "one of the summer's hottest tunes". Even the peak position of 6 seems to understate its popularity somewhat, as it was released in the same week when the football songs in the previous two posts and the official tournament song by Dario G were all new entries to the Top 5.

Indeed, this was one of the most ubiquitous tracks in the second half of 1998, not only because it was able to survive England's exit from the tournament but also because it managed to attract so many audiences; catchy enough for kids, energetic enough for clubbers, funky enough for hip-hop fans and melodic enough for the general pop audience. The so-called big beat scene was a massive crossover to the indie market too, possibly because so many of the people involved were ex-members of indie bands anyway... Norman Cook certainly was, and yet for all his past success in so many forms, this set the stage for Fatboy Slim to become arguably his most consistently successful alias; it was only the first of four Top 10 singles from the album You've Come A Long Way Baby, which is trailed on the single cover under the presumed working title Let's Hear It For The Little Guy. If you're wondering why all the backgound digressions here, it's because I wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to listen to it again. That's not say that I don't like the record, indeed I think it's excellent and I'm still slightly in awe of the imagination that it took to make it. But it's a record that most of anywhere near my age have heard A LOT and given its inherantly repetitive nature it's not as easy to enjoy as it should be. Sorry Norm.

Also appearing on: Now 41, 42, 43
Available on: Why Try Harder: the Greatest Hits

Beats International 'Dub Be Good To Me'

Chart Peak: 1 (4 weeks)

Last.FM

Four tracks in and we hit a Number One single at last. And we intersect with my record collection too, thanks to a recent MP3 purchase.

I've referred before to the fact that the Housemartins seemed to loom large in my childhood, and after they split I remember hearing a dance record on the radio by somebody called Norman Cook who the DJ said had been in the Housemartins. Even at the age of ten or eleven I could tell that was an unusually big change in direction; I could also tell that Norman Cook wasn't a very cool or trendy-sounding name for that sort of music, so perhaps it's not surprising that he didn't remain a solo artist for long, spending much of his subsequent career in groups or under pseudonyms. Beats International (featuring the sometimes credited singer Lindy Layton) were but the first of them.

'Dub Be Good To Me' seems to have gone down in history as the first chart-topping example of what was later called a "mash-up" (although of course the idea is about as old as music itself), blending the lyric from the S.O.S. Band hit 'Just Be Good To Me' with the bassline from 'Guns Of Brixton' by the Clash and the harmonica riff of Ennio Morricone's music for Once Upon A Time In The West. Back in 1990, though, I was only dimly aware of of that, beyond the connection to 'Just Be Good To Me', which I'd probably even heard when it was a hit, although I don't really remember it from then. Really, when I enjoyed this record, I was enjoying it entirely in its own right. When I listen to it now, unlike some of the music I enjoyed at that time of my life, it still impresses me. What strikes me most about the track, especially now, is the deep air of sadness that surrounds it, as the harmonica that sounds like it's in the middle of nowhere weaves its way around the protagonist to enhance the atmosphere of isolation; by the time we get to the fade-out her desperation is palpable; and the whole thing has an emotional weight that I just don't hear in the rather floaty sounding SOS Band record. Oddly, I don't feel that the more obvious "street" affectations detract from this either; they seem to act as a sort of framing device for the main part of the song. I could probably do without that swallowing solo in the middle, though.

Incidentally, I don't know much about the financial arrangements that may have been made in order to get this track released. I do notice that the writing credit is to Cook and Jam & Lewis (writers of 'Just Be Good To Me') and doesn't mention the Clash element. This may or may not be the reason for the little-remembered cash-in release 'Return To Brixton'.

Available on: Let Them Eat Bingo

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

Groove Armada ft Gram'ma Funk 'I See You Baby'

Chart Peak: 17

YouTube

Note: according to the list I'm writing from, the version on the album is the Fatboy Slim remix edit, although that didn't become an A-side until 2004. It's just as well, because Groove Armada apparently won't let me view the original video from the UK. Anyway, I'm open to correction on this point from anyone who owns Now 44.

Groove Armada are an act who've grown on me somewhat in recent years, for reasons I can't wholly explain. Perhaps it's because ten years ago everyone seemed so determined that they were going to be massive, and so much of their material got used for adverts, trailers and so on that it got rather tiresome. One reason I'm not typically a fan of dance music is the heavy use of repetition, and there's certainly plenty of that here, which was a problem at the time but when I hear the track now, I don't mind so much. In fact, I even heard their later hit 'Superstylin' on the radio yesterday and didn't mind it. That's progress.

Also appearing on: Now 50, 67, 68
Available on: The Best Of