
The Woodentops
ROUGH TRADE 1985
A-side: ‘Move Me’
Top pop chops over haywire beats.
As with close compatriots the Jazz Butcher, the Woodentops didn’t fit neatly into the prescribed 80s indie scene. Too upbeat and energetic to be explicitly indie, with a clearly identifiable electro-acoustic pulse, their early run of singles was genre-slippery pop at its most unabashed, epitomised by the rousing climax to A-side ‘Move Me’, a crowd-pleaser for the ages. With its moddish beat, stutteringly rapped verses, acoustic strum and intricate lead guitar detailing, the flip was joy incarnate, any semblance of sturdy structure upended by a swarm of buzzing bee horns after its tender middle eight. The joyous rush of Alice Thompson’s frantic organs glitch into an all-round hyper speed loss of control so breathless that the early fadeout feels like butchery. Apparently frontman Rolo McGinty’s first composition, ‘Do It Anyway’ nodded towards the blissed out, more danceable direction they’d pursue later that decade. The Woodentops early run of singles was an experimental B-side goldmine, from the undigested grief of three-chord death song ‘Steady Steady’ (on this single’s 12-inch) to the slow-pulsing otherness of ‘Cold Inside’ [‘Well Well Well’, 1985] and tripped-out psych of ‘Plutonium Rock’ [‘It Will Come’, 1985].