Listening to this show, one gets the sense of John Peel being beset by issues on all sides. Some of them were self inflicted, such as the moment when he realised, around halfway through the programme that his playlist for tonight’s show was about 15 minutes shorter than it should have been:
I’m either going to have to talk for a quarter of an hour or get Lynn Parsons to start a quarter of an hour earlier, I guess. I suspect I shall dip into the records I had scheduled for tomorrow evening.The timing issue may have been caused by issues at home, given that Peel told the audience early on: I’m trying to do some serious parenting while playing you records. The two really don’t go together, it has to be said.
Externally, things weren’t much better, though at least he could laugh about how an attempt to help
The Fall’s new American record label* out had ended up going south:
I got a phone call from the new label to which they are affiliated….and he said, “Listen, John, we’d love to have a quote from you to use in the marketing here.” Normally, I don’t get involved with these things but I thought, well it is the Fall and I’d like them to sell some records over there..I’m sure they do already. So, I sat down and wrote a really, like, heartfelt thing. Cause obviously I care about the band and I wrote this stuff and I sent it off to them. And he was on the phone, saying, “John, this is really beautiful, we loved it here in the office. We just wondered if you could say something more along the lines of…” and then proceeded to give me 2 or 3 things that he would have liked me to have said. And I said, “No, I’ve told you what I think.” And he was really quite astonished that I wouldn’t allow him to make up quotes from me for marketing purposes. Most odd.
The selections for the show came from a full-length recording, and there was only one track that made my list which I was unable to share:
The Strookas - Wish You Were Here: Hailing from
Maidstone and bringing with them an album called
Deaf By Dawn, Wish You Were Here was an enjoyably melodic piece of punk rock. The band had been getting played by
Mark Radcliffe, which Peel felt was recommendation enough, though he was also drawn towards them for less tangible reasons:
Lead singer, John Edwards looks like he might be the type of bloke who’d buy you a drink in a pub. First impressions clearly mattered to Peel, who let himself down shortly after playing Wish You Were Here by going on a scathing rant about a family he’d witnessed parking in a disabled space earlier in the week, while he waited to pick up
Sheila from a French lesson at the local adult education centre. The crux of Peel’s rant was that having parked in the disabled space, a seemingly able-bodied family got out of the car. This all pre-dates the “Not all disabilities are visible” awareness campaign. Nevertheless, Peel blundered on:
They were the kind of people you thought, I bet you never, for a moment, a single one of you have ever been plagued by self-doubt. I mean presumably father, mother and a rather loathsome looking ten-year old child…You thought I know what you’re going to be like when you’re 19 or 20. I mean a real monster and a horrendous child. I wished I was the kind of person to have the courage while they were in the school…to go up and, like, urinate, in the petrol tank of the car. In fact, I’ll give you the number and you can do it yourself if you see it. No, I’d better not because it’s probably against the law.…But my goodness me, I do dislike people like that a great deal.
To 21st Century ears, although Peel’s ire sounds justified, it makes him sound like the petty one. As the man himself would say, Most odd.
The Strookas had been recording intermittently since the mid-80s, with albums appearing on a very occasional basis into the late Noughties. Peel’s assessment of them as fun types appears to be borne out by some of their track titles. The 2008 compilation album of their 80s demos,
Summer to Fall, includes track titles such as
Chatham Pout,
Bobby Crush is Innocent and Indigestion (But It Might Be Heartburn).
There was one track in my original list of selections which fell from favour:
Terror Fabulous featuring Wayne Wonder - Talk ‘Bout: One of the things I have to battle with when blogging is hearing a piece of music that I’m drawn towards while simultaneously worrying about whether I’m going to be able to actually write about what draws me towards that piece. I don’t simply want to say, “I like this”, but equally, I never want to pass on a borderline inclusion because I’m thinking, “I don’t know what to write about this.” Such justifications battled for my attention when it came to considering this
dancehall collaboration between deejay
Terror Fabulous and singer
Wayne Wonder.
Talk ‘Bout seems to be addressing rumours about the faithfulness of the singer’s girlfriend. On the streets of the Caribbean, it did no good to a man’s reputation if he was with a woman who slept around. And for the woman herself it could mean public shaming, physical violence or murder being visited upon her. I wondered whether Terror Fabulous was the man trying to process the rumours and decide what he would do, with Wonder acting as a voice of reason, trying to dissuade Fabulous from doing something he may regret.
The problem was I couldn’t tell from Fabulous’s patois, whether he was playing the part I thought he was, or providing support to Wayne Wonder’s arguments. But, there was the rub - my objections were how they would impact on my writing ahead of whether I actually liked the piece.
Ultimately, it came down to the Patience Test. If I heard Talk ‘Bout on a mixtape, would I be happy to hear it, or would I be impatient to get past it to listen to other things? By a very slim margin, it failed the test.
