One of the few UK indie bands to find any sort of success in the late 1980s were The Primitives. The Coventry-based four piece enjoyed four Top 40 hits between 1988 and 1989, and had a Top Ten album with their debut, Lovely.
Mixing '60s garage rock with sparkly pop, in many ways they were a band out of time. However, their lead singer was a petite blonde who named herself Tracy Tracy, and before you knew it, the British music press were comparing them to Blondie and upselling a ‘blonde’ pop movement out of The Primitives and assorted other guitar groups with blonde singers who were active around that time.
Their biggest hit was Crash – it went Top 5 in March 1988 - and the group have been talking about its making to the Guardian.
Article continues belowGuitarist PJ Court recalls that, when the band started off, they were a fairly abrasive proposition, but “I wrote three new songs – Thru The Flowers, Across My Shoulder and Crash – to test a more pop direction. Crash was simple and noisy, with a basic guitar line that became the ‘Na na na’ hook.”
When the Primitives jumped from the indie ghetto and signed to RCA in 1987 it was an obvious first single. “We went on Top of the Pops, The Roxy and Saturday Live. On Saturday morning ITV show No 73, I looked down mid-song and realised my fuzz box wasn’t plugged in – my guitar sounded like a banjo for the entire performance.”
Happily, footage of that performance exists for all to see, and you can indeed hear that the fuzz tone is conspicuous by its absence.
“When we played Top Of The Pops we stood out because we simply didn’t fit it,” recalls Tracy. “It just felt like we were this independent little band playing bubblegum pop, when the rest of the charts was all Stock Aitken Waterman.”
Crash has enjoyed a decent enough afterlife. For a while it had a habit of turning up on home movie bloopers show You’ve Been Framed; an obvious soundtrack to amusing clips of people falling over.
But Hollywood has used it, too. A remixed version ended up on the Jim Carrey film Dumb And Dumber. “(It’s) about 40 seconds longer,” said Court, “with a repeated chorus and added layers of ukulele, steel guitar, organ and percussion, none of which we were involved in.
“Had it been by Paul McCartney, I don’t imagine they would have told him they were bollocksing around with it, but we couldn’t complain. It gave the song a second life and it became a worldwide hit.”
Tracy neatly summarised its strengths thus: “I think the song has stood the test of time because it’s got all the ingredients: there’s a great melody, catchy lyrics and, at just over two minutes, it’s a perfectly timed pop song.
