NOTES FROM THE GOOD SHIP SHOPPIE POP

NOTES FROM THE GOOD SHIP SHOPPIE POP
Under Thatcher, both practitioners and aficionados of the arts were considered enemies of the state. Thus any output from anyone halfway aware of the situation can be considered political, regardless of content. Here is moored the good ship Shoppie pop.

Edith, 4 years old, said to me in an accusatory tone, "Daddy, you don't know much about girls, do you?"
"No, I bloody don't!" I guffawed bitterly. We were not talking about the same things.

It's the Need for Symmetry again. Geometrical patterns forming around the retina. Here she is, everyone's little investment.

I am unaware unsure intrepid and unavailable, unfathomable and intractable, tumbledown and slapdash, helium-filled and Simonized, celibate and consumptive, terrible and indifferent.

Playdoh clit-flick Anti-Christ.

The first EP proper came in a hand-coloured sleeve. Like all hand-coloured sleeves, hand-coloured meant carelessly scrawled upon. Still, it was carelessly scrawled upon by one of the objects of one's obsession, and therefore to be pored over and treasured. I imagine these hand-colouring session were a riot: all the band members lying on their fronts, Chelsea boots kicking leisurely in the air, tongues lolling out with the effort and concentration. Mine must have been done towards the end of the session, when the colourist was dying to get back to their effects pedals or watching a battered videotape of The Monkees or The Banana Splits, maybe Get On Board With The Double Deckers, in their very own Shop Assistants hideout, a converted bus in an Edinburgh lock-up, electricity pilfered from a lamppost outside.

I am one of the select group of people who think The Shop Assistants are one of the best bands of all time. What's more, I am one of the even more select group of people, a group that might just be a one-man band, who think they went downhill after their first single, which is actually their second single.

I got the third single on twelve inch because it was on offer. I bought it from, sin of sins, HMV on Sauchihall Street, Glasgow. The person who served me was the kind of 80s vintage HMV employee, job for life, who seethed with contempt for anything that might not have been willing to bow down before the twin gods of Buster-era Phil Collins and frizzy-haired conquerors Dire Straits, anything that might labour under the weight of the "alternative" label a label that meant hhomosexualityand socialism, to name but two 80s evils that required eradication, preferably through the effective wweed-killer of the approved blandathons known as Radio One playlists. The barcode rang up the normal price. I meekly, that is to say, indiely, pointed to the dayglo orange pay-no-more-than 79p sticker. Mulletman sighed heavily, brutally, much like a Glaswegian taxi driver if you ever dared not to have the right change. I thought I was finally going to be able to die for my art, decapitated by a black vinyl disc, a martyr to buzzsaw guitars smothering plaintive melodies. But he just sent me to another till, where the correct price was applied and I lived to dither another day.

I had a friend who was a fellow Shop Assistants fan. I guess it brought us together. She walked through Angel Delight, I stumbled through porridge. She was from Edinburgh and she told me the Shoppies' singer Alex could often be seen "clanking around Edinburgh in her leathers." Think about that image for a moment. The streets of Edinburgh, I think it is fair to say, have seen their fair share of clanking, both real and supernatural, but rarely has it been caused by a young woman with a fine folk voice dressed head to toe in black leather. She wore a Marlon Brando cap and went on to front a group called The Motorcycle Boy. She probably couldn't afford a motorbike until she reached middle age. In fact I bet she's still saving up now. Her vocals were like a rainbow slick of oil on an autumn puddle, and her defiance was as old as the volcanic rock she walked upon - You leave me and I'll scratch your eyes out.

The Shop Assistants gave one of the best concerts I've ever been to. The Beastie Boys were still in Cookie Puss mode, so support band Pop Will Eat Itself were still good, the ideal warm-up really. What's so fucking good about Candy? That kind of thing. Then, sandwiched between The Poppies and The Shoppies, came Peter Case, a bewildered Jay Gatsby who was forced to suffer a great deal of vociferous abuse. For some reason, I had heard of him, and tried to listen. But it was hopeless, and so was Peter Case. Then came the Shop Assistants and they were loud and brash and had two drummers and if they were shambolic, as legend has it, I didn't notice. I don't know if it still happens now, but in those days women performers got lecherous comments hurled at them by drunks and numbskulls. After a while this became intolerable for the guitarist, whose name was, I think, David Keegan. I think he might have been from up north. He kicked someone in the crowd in the head, or rather he brought his Cuban heel down on someone's head, pressing it down like one of the plastic footballers in Subbuteo poor-substitute Striker. The atmosphere became electrified with the promise of rioting. It didn't really develop into anything major, but it was thrilling, it was rock'n'roll, it was what I wanted from life. Add to this the troubled expression of one of the drummers as events unfolded, and I was in something approaching heaven. This was what eighteen-year-old me wanted from life. Rarely was I to experience it again in such a mountain-pure form.

I got their album on the popular musicassette format, a format second only to the cassingle in the embarrassment stakes for pop fans. It's a hard-contested field. 8-track cartridges have been revered for some time, lauded by Big Black et al, but there are, as far as I know, no songs about musicassettes or cassingles. I would like someone to take the opportunity to tackle these artefacts in song before they disappear from the collective memory for ever.

The album was, at the time, a dreadful disappointment. It was on some kind of major label, Chrysalis, I think, so it had to be shit. And that was the end of that really. They disappeared, dissolved. The unavoidably inferior Motorcycle Boy, drumming for Meat Whiplash, guest guitar on a Vaselines record, not much else as far as I know. Which is the way it should be really, like a slowly disappearing vapour trail in a blue blue Scottish sky.