This is a random selection of singles that came out between 1980-81 when I was in my Pale and Interesting phase, think of it as the soundtrack to my late-teenage angst. What they have in common is that they’re gloomier than a wet Bank Holiday, or what I like to think of as Big Overcoat Music. Though there wasn’t a post-punk “uniform” in the way there was for Mods or Skinheads, you could still spot a fan of the gloomy stuff: tight black jeans, pointed suede boots (mine were from Shelly’s on the King’s Road) and — most importantly — a big second-hand overcoat like the one Ian McCulloch wears on the cover of the “Crocodiles” album, with the collar turned up to protect you from the harsh existential winds that afflicted a sensitive young man. England felt like an Eastern Bloc country back then so we dressed as though we lived in one. The McCulloch hairstyle was optional, but that long fringe was useful for hiding your eyes from the world.

The Passage were a Manchester band with an erratic line-up that seemed to change from record to record. I think vocalist Lizzy Johnson was only with the band for the “Devils and Angels” single and her alluring feminine tones warm up the cold and eerie sounds provided by band leader Dick Witts. With it’s moody electronics and pop hook it’s amazing how modern this sounds even though it’s over 25 years old. Good grief.

Download: Devils and Angels – The Passage (mp3)
Buy: “Seedy: The Best of The Passage” (album)

Like current neo-post-punkers Interpol, The Comsat Angels used to pull the “Joy Division? Never ‘eard them before” excuse when people mentioned how much like them they sounded, but “Independence Day” does have the same spacey dynamics and tortured lyrics as the Mancunian misery mongers. A great single though (this is the original version) and that chiming guitar riff still sounds terrific.

Download: Independence Day – The Comsat Angels (mp3)
Buy: “Waiting For A Miracle” (album)

Au Pairs were like a musical version of “Spare Rib” magazine, writing very serious songs about sexual politics and gender roles. But don’t let that put you off, they played a Gang of Four-ish scratchy funk and sounded brilliant. “Diet” was a great single about brainless, tranquilized housewives though all these years later I do detect an annoying Polytechnic-educated Marxist’s moral superiority about it.

Download: Diet – Au Pairs (mp3)
Buy: “Stepping Out Of Line” (album)

Believe it or not but there was a time when Simple Minds weren’t overblown stadium rockers and were actually an interesting (if derivative) and arty electronic outfit in the Bowie/Kraftwerk mold. There was also a time when they were a punk band called Johnny & The Self Abusers but that’s another story.

Download: Changeling – Simple Minds (mp3)
Buy: “Real To Real Cacophony” (album)

I can pinpoint the moment I grew out of this stuff and “got happy” so to speak. I bought Siousxsie & The Banshees “Dear Prudence” single in 1983 and it just left me cold. Admitedly it wasn’t one of their best efforts but I’d been a huge Banshees fan up until that point and the rest of their stuff suddenly wasn’t doing it for me either. It all seemed like so much histrionic caterwauling over nothing, even “Unknown Pleasures” made me want to slap Ian Curtis and tell him to stop being such a miserable bleeder and cheer the fuck up. Then there was this new band called The Smiths everyone loved who just seemed a bit too whiny for me. The only thing I can put it down to is I’d just turned 21 and wasn’t that kid sitting all alone in his bedroom listening to John Peel anymore, dancing to Northern Soul was where I was at instead.

I might have had a wee little crush on Clare Grogan but I was completely gaga over Pauline Murray. Not just because she was a real treat for the eyes (see above), but was also one of the best singers to come out the punk era with a warm, soaring voice that stood out like a jewel in a field of spitters and snarlers. She never got the recognition that more stridently iconoclastic female singers like Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene did, and being lead singer of a rather ordinary punk band like Penetration probably didn’t help her profile much either. What made me fall at her feet in a fanboy swoon was the solo album she made in 1980 after the group split up.

That album, “Pauline Murray & The Invisible Girls” is something of a minor post-punk classic and, despite the fact that it was produced by the great Martin Hannett (with a beautiful Peter Saville sleeve) has somehow been ignored in the current fad for the era, probably because it doesn’t sound what post-punk is “supposed” to sound like. Instead of the gloomy boys miserabalism Hannett usually had to work with, his spacey sonics are used in the service of airy, feminine, and relatively commercial, pop songs. Playing Phil Spector to her Ronnie, Hannett gave Pauline an ornate and expansive wall of sound with a freedom to breathe she never had with Penetration. It’s a shimmering dream of record, like someone throwing a disco in a cathedral.

“Dream Sequence” (mp3) was the first single from the album and has the kind of swirling, celestial atmosphere The Cocteau Twins and a few others would later ride to indie glory. The line “they stared at my naked body” used to make me blush with naughty thoughts – it still does actually, and the record still sounds magnificent too. “Screaming In The Darkness” (mp3) is a propulsive number powered by the mighty drumming of The Buzzcocks’ John Maher. This could almost be a Blondie record except for all the peculiar noises Hannett throws at it which keep it balanced nicely on a tightrope between mainstream and avant garde.

This video is for the second single “Mr. X” which is dark mutant funk with echoes of “She’s Lost Control” (it came out at the same time as Joy Division’s last album) and the brittle, dry-as-a-bone electronic beat that New Order (and a million other synth-poppers) would be mucking about with a year or two later.

The b-side of “Mr. X” was the dreamy, minimalist ballad “Two Shots” (mp3) which is just Pauline, a drum machine and a piano. When the album was re-released on CD with bonus tracks this was left off for some reason, so here it is and it’s lovely.

The album was only a minor success and I think it was ahead of it’s time. It threw off the gloom and doom of post-punk and put on a luminous, dancefloor-friendly face before the new pop dream of the 80s had happened, and a lot of it anticipates what the coming decade was going to sound like. Siouxsie Sioux may have been the girl who landed the leading lady role but Pauline got the interesting and memorable bit part.

As I said, the album was put out on CD a few years ago but unfortunately that’s out of print now. But if you see a copy – in any format – buy it. That’s an order.

(I’m trying a different format for mp3 links. As I’m writing longer posts I thought it might be better to put them in the actual body copy to save you scrolling all the way down to see what songs it is I’m talking about. Good idea, no?)

Parents, be warned: This is what happens to a young man who hears “Unknown Pleasures” at an impressionable age. The milk-bottle white skin, the sullen expression, the black clothes are all outward signs of the “pale and interesting” youth. Before you know it he’s doing the hard stuff like the first Velvet Underground album and reading William Burroughs novels. I know all this because for a time I was once such a youth. Not that I was particularly depressed or angst-ridden, I just had the usual arty young man’s attraction to the dark and edgy. I must have seen “Taxi Driver” about 20 times, which in those days meant I actually went to the cinema to see it that many times, mostly at late night showings in shabby little arthouses with dirty, cigarette butt-encrusted carpets.

“Dark and edgy” was basically the zeitgeist back then – the whole country felt like a cigarette butt-encrusted carpet – and Joy Division’s records were like black holes which had absorbed all the pessimism, uncertainty, and violence that built up by the end of the 70s. With “Unknown Pleasures” they answered Nigel Tufnel’s question in This Is Spinal Tap:

It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

For most other bands bleak angst was just a pose, something to wear with a big overcoat in your Anton Corbijn portrait, but with Joy Division it all sounded very real. Which, of course, it was. I still remember turning on John Peel that night in May 1980 and hearing him announce at the start of his show the news that Ian Curtis had died. I went downstairs with an empty feeling in my stomach and said to my mum “Ian Curtis is dead” and she said “who?” which I guess is fair payback considering my nonchalant attitude toward Elvis snuffing it a few years before. I don’t think I found out that he’d topped himself until I read it in the next week’s NME (oh, those pre-internet days. Waiting a whole week for news) I also discovered for the first time that he had a wife and kid which started me thinking maybe he wasn’t just a tortured artiste, but a bit of a selfish prick too. In hindsight, his death neatly bookended the previous decade as if some sort of terminus had been reached. The 80s were beckoning and it was time to start dancing.

Now it all seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. They were the soundtrack for a country that has since been scrubbed, polished, streamlined and had it’s rough edges swept under a designer carpet where they can’t be seen. What does still sound astonishingly new is the production work of Martin Hannett, the Phil Spector/Lee Perry/Brian Wilson of post-punk. Have a listen to the 6 minutes of slow-burning menace of “Autosuggestion” from 1979. The dubby production is full of empty space but he manages to make it sound claustrophobic and suffocating with the dank atmospherics of a piss-stinking stairwell in a Manchester tower block.

This was recorded during the “Unknown Pleasures” sessions and first surfaced on the Fast Records 12″ mini-album “Earcom 2″ which, I’m very glad to say, is worth quite a pretty penny these days. I could put my daughter through college if a few more of my records appreciate in value like that.

Download: Autosuggestion -Joy Division (mp3)
Buy: “Unknown Pleasures” (album)
Buy: “Substance” (album)