Shop Assistants - Shop Assistants (1986)
Artist: Shop Assistants
Author: Sarah
Date: 08/09/2026
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
After hearing C86 for the first time back in college, the Shop Assistants were the band that stood out most to me. So, more than any other, this is probably the album that really was my first encounter with indiepop. It's got an eternal place in my heart for that reason, but looking at it purely based on its quality, it does tend to fall a bit short of its contemporaries.
At its heart, Shop Assistants is basically a toned-down version of Psychocandy; it's got the same idea of roughing up girl group melodies a bit, but the Shop Assistants aren't willing to go nearly as far with the noise as the Jesus and Mary Chain were. They're also more willing to forgo the noise, with a handful of songs that sound like lullabies complete with gently chiming bells (incidentally, this is also what my first exposure to them sounded like!) In itself, that's not necessarily a bad thing; after all, the Primitives are also a more polished version of the same sound, and I love them! But unfortunately, the Shop Assistants come off a bit lifeless.
One common thread uniting most of the various C86-era pop bands is that there's a feeling of unrehearsed spontaneity to them. Like, when you listen to someone like Talulah Gosh, it feels almost like they found instruments lying around and immediately started playing! But with the Shop Assistants, they just come off as overly-mannered. For example, they play "What a Way to Die" at a tempo that would suggest wild abandon, but nobody's performance comes off nearly as frantic as the song's lyrics would suggest.
I don't mean to suggest that there's nothing good about this album, obviously, because there is! Even the stiff performances given here can't disguise their obvious ability to write uptempo romps like "I Don't Wanna Be Friends With You", "All Day Long", or "Seems to Be". They also do what the Jesus and Mary Chain only dreamed of and deliver one of the best ever covers of the Shangri-Las with their version of "Train from Kansas City". It's just that, on the whole, I sort of wish they had practiced a bit less, you know?
On the whole, I think Shop Assistants falls into a bit of a no-man's-land. It's far too rehearsed for those of us who like our indiepop shambolic, but it's not quite polished enough to ever have a real chance at troubling the mainstream charts (though ironically enough, the even-less-polished Psychocandy had more chart success than the Shop Assistants!). But on the other hand, that no-man's-land is also the perfect territory to stake out to become everyone's gateway to indiepop. After all, it worked on me, didn't it?