Start As You Mean To Go On

Five Brilliant Debut Singles

John Lee Hooker - Boogie Chillen' (1948)
I'm not entirely sure if this was the man's first release, but given he is (as I'll point out at any given opportunity) the coolest person who ever lived, he starts this article.

Sparse - it featured Hooker playing his electric guitar accompanied only by the stomp of his foot - it chugs away on a single chord riff over which the Man tells a tale of being a youthful fella who just wants to check out the music playing in the nightspots, to the objections of his concerned parents. Eventually, though, when he lies in bed one night, he hears "papa tell momma/"Let that boy boogie-woogie"/And I felt so good".

Though a bluesman, and one who would perform classics like It Serves Me Right To Suffer, Boogie Chillen' stands as a classic song of the excitement of youth and discovering the feelgood factor of music for the first time.

The Go-Betweens - Lee Remick (1978)
As we all do, when I got together with my good lady, we both bombarded each other with our respective favourite bands to get the other "into" them. Her most successful volley so far has been Australian cult favourites the Go-Betweens, who started their highly acclaimed career with this jaunty little love letter to an American actress.

Charmingly, it doesn't try to be too fancy about it: the chorus just notes that "I-I-I-I-I love Lee Remick/She's a darling" while the verses have brilliant couplets like "She was in the Omen with Gregeory Peck/She got killed - what the heck?". Musically, it's fairly basic, as the songwriting duo of Robert Forster and Grant McLennan were hardly proficient at the time, but it all adds to the charm.

The Specials - Gangsters (1979)
I was smitten with Two-Tone from an early age, with Divine Madness being the first album I ever owned. But the Specials were the ones who pinned down the whole sound perfectly with their debut single and subsequent album.

Kicking off with the shout of "Bernie Rhodes knows, don't argue!", Gangsters is helped by having one of the great riffs of all time, a groove you can dance to and Terry Hall's deadpan vocals about "living in real gangster times". Of course, it nicked from Prince Buster's source material, but that didn't matter so much when the "re-packaging" of the ska sound became so much better than the originals.

The Wild Swans - The Revolutionary Spirit (1982)
Bill Drummond reckons this was the best thing they ever put out on Zoo Records, and I'm inclined to agree, even in the face of the Teardrop Explodes' sublime Sleeping Gas, which also featured Wild Swans frontman Paul Simpson on keyboards.

This song came about in large part due to the generosity of Bunnymen drummer Pete De Freitas. Using an early royalty cheque, he agreed to fund and produce a Wild Swans single. When the drummer failed to show, he took on that role too, putting in his usual blistering performance to propel the song into the cosmos.

The rest of the band match him, with Jeremy Kelly's intense guitar strumming and Ged Coyne's keyboard playing taking it higher, higher... Paul Simpson puts in his mystical lyrical imagery to the usual great effects. It's a song that I struggle to describe because it might not make sense to many - but to me, it's a glorious piece of art.

The Smiths - Hand In Glove (1983)
It's also hard for me to convey just how much the Smiths meant to me when I was aged 15 and 16, but perhaps I don't really need to as I know people either relate or don't.

The key is, I think, to avoid all the Morrissey-related cliches about how he understood what being a solitary teenager was like. So, instead, I'll just say that this is a fucking great record that sounds unlike anything the band would later record. Marr's harmonica blares out before giving way to the Moz bark. I can remember hearing it for the first time, aged about 14 or so, and thinking "what the fuck is this?", so different was it from the prevalent Britpop trends of the time. A light went on somewhere in my head, and life was never quite the same again.