Inside Above was the first track I heard when I listened to the file for this 23/4/93 Peel Show, but it wasn’t the first record on that night’s programme, and I wish it had been. The file cuts in during the opening seconds of the track and I hope that Peel didn’t announce it before playing it, because the opening 40 seconds are by turns intriguing and bewildering. Just where was this going to go? As it transitions from an early ringtone through what sounds like machinery being cranked into life, it has the feel of some bizarre, unwieldy invention, like a home-made aeroplane, being taken through its start-up procedure. Tonally, it sounds like a close relation to Cumulus by Pram, but once Dan Curtin, the man behind Apogee, gets his invention up into the air, it soars and swoops into some exciting destinations over its near six minute running time.
Unlike the other tracks on the Tales From the 2nd Moon EP, which I all found to be a bit one-note, Inside Above features plenty of light and shade contrasts throughout. The flight metaphor seems particularly appropriate during the opening 80 seconds as the ticking beats click away alongside synth notes that sound like the murkiness inside rainclouds. We’re waiting to get above the cloud-line and into open sky.
Once we do at around 1:20, it sounds like the equivalent of flight-time rush hour, as the synths get more ominous and the squelches sound like the chatter of a persistent air-traffic controller trying to talk the unexpectedly airborne plane through the jams of the air.
At 2:45, we’re back to the start-up sequence, which suggests that space in the sky has been found, but this temporary respite leads into my favourite part of the track around 3:20, when underpinned by spooky minimoogs, what sounds like the world’s smallest samba band heralds what sounds like the plane’s moment to show its tricks. The synth brass is cheap and tacky, yes, but the brio with which it comes in appears to soundtrack the plane doing loops and corkscrew twists in the sky. It’s a brief moment of liberation before the ominous sound of flight-time rush hour crashes in again and the plane begins its descent back to ground. Does it make it back safely? The final collection of squelches and sound oscillation is ambiguous, but it was a hell of a flight while it lasted.
NOTE - Submarine’s Peel Session has not been made available yet, so the videos of the tracks are all taken from studio versions.
There’s an old joke about a little boy who joins a marching band. One day, the band is part of a parade in their town and as they march through the main street, every member of the band is leading off on their right foot, except for the little boy, who is leading off on his left foot. As the band goes by, the little boy’s mother turns to the person standing next to her and says, Well look at that, my little boy is the only one marching in step.
I’m reminded of that joke as I consider the work of Submarine, whose work over the early to mid-1990s met with very little in the way of commercial success. Having already released one of the singles of the year in Dinosaurs, this three track Peel Session, which included two songs that would feature on their eponymous 1994 debut album, shows that they were marching in one direction, while we were all marching in a different one. Our failure as an audience to follow them is a greater indictment of us than it is of them.
It’s debatable though whether Submarine would have been comfortable with mass adulation. Singer/guitarist Neil Haydock was once seen furiously berating a punter who told him that they had enjoyed a Submarine concert given to an unresponsive audience in Aberdeen. I can also see how easy it would have been for people to fall into the mindset of thinking that the band were trying to rip off The Verve, whose work at the time also leant heavily into dream pop and atmospherics. But, Submarine appeal to me more - and would have done then, as well - because they’re both more concise in what they do and more emotionally direct.
Take session opener, Fading, which has me hoping that - at the time of writing - I continue in the happy state of not having suffered a direct family bereavement, until the addition of more posts to this blog causes me to forget about Fading (though I suspect it will be a contender for a place on my 1993 Festive Fifty, when the time comes.) Its elegiac and heart-rending guitar riff leads us into a place where Haydock has been dreaming about someone he loved. The intensity of the dream is so strong, that even after waking, he can feel their presence and see them in the stars. In the Peel Session, the line I couldn’t stop myself is followed by the word, crying. But the problem with dreams and starry skies is that time causes them to fade. If the subject of the song has died, it feels like Haydock is going through the stage of grief where they are trying to keep the memory of that person alive; a process which, in the words of the actress Natascha McElhone, feels like …blowing air into a balloon that deflates faster and faster each time.* The louder moments in the track suggest precisely that struggle. The Peel Session version didn’t include the brass section, which on the studio recording did a good job of diluting the sadness and suggesting that it is worth keeping memories alive as a way of providing comfort and happiness, as opposed to it being simply a form of life support for the one left behind.
Another reading of the song is that it’s inspired by The Man Who Fell to Earth, with Haydock singing from the perspective of the alien, Thomas Newton, abandoned on Earth and unable to rescue his family on their dying, drought-ridden planet. The cover of Submarine’s album, features a drawing of a family of aliens walking together hand in hand across a landscape with their heads starting to catch fire. At the end of both the book and the film, Newton has recorded a message (in the book) and an album (in the film) which he hopes to broadcast back to his home planet for his family to hear. Fading could easily stand as an example of what Newton would want to tell his family.
Let’s move to Junior Elvis and find a place to die: Well when you phrase it like that, how can I refuse. It’s not quite so easy to get a handle on Jnr. Elvis in either of its versions, though as Haydock makes clear I’m half awake, so it follows that he may be talking in the non-sequiturs that we do when talking in our sleep. The bicycle’s shining on me knees as Jasper Carrott once put it, so If it ever stops raining, let’s buy an old car makes perfect sense in that context. However, If the sun keeps on shining, let’s find a place to stay speaks a much more universal language of love and a need for somewhere to call home.
The final song of the session, Tugboat, was a cover of a song originally recorded by Galaxie 500 for their debut album, 1988’s Today. To my ears, Tugboat sounds like a preppy reworking of Bob Dylan’s, All I Really Want To Do, with Dylan’s original list of verbs replaced with a list of collegiate activities that the narrator would be happy to miss out on so that they can provide emotional support to their friend, just as real tugboats help move larger vessels in the right direction. For their performance of the song, Submarine were joined by their Ultimate label mate, Claire Lemmon, who provided the female backing vocals, in the same manner as Naomi Yang had done on the original recording. Submarine’s studio recording of Tugboat wound up as a b-side on a live version of Jodie Foster, a song about obsession.**
My three favourite tracks taken from a repeat of a session recorded by Unsane on 26 November, 1992 and first broadcast by Peel on 15 January 1993. It was their second Peel Session and owes its place here in large part to residual goodwill towards the slew of Unsane tracks that Peel included in his shows throughout December 1991. Indeed, it was only its unavailability on YouTube back in June 2015, that meant I couldn’t include the studio version of HLL when Peel included it as part of a quartet of tracks from their debut album which he played as a suite on 14 December, 1991.
HLL was the nostalgia cut in the session; Broke, Black Book (Vol II) and Body Bomb previewed material that the group would record for their 1994 album, Total Destruction. While HLL was a shot of distilled nihilism, Broke, with its I feel good refrain sounds curiously optimistic, though being Unsane, it’s unclear whether that good feeling is due to falling in love or embracing death. Certainly the shout of Now piss off! that follows the I feel good lines suggests that they don’t trust the world not to mess up their good feeling.
Black Book (Vol II) and Body Bomb, which I didn’t like enough to include, appear to be companion pieces. The eponymous black book found by Chris Spencer contains details on how to make an explosive device, and Body Bomb, which you can hear on the full session dramatises its use. Leaving aside the tastelessness of it, I left Body Bomb off mainly because it lacked the spark and energy of the other three tracks, it was a bit lumbering in comparison.
Well, The Annotated Fall is currently accessible again, through The Internet Archive. It was gratifying to read that they weren’t able to put forward any evidence that I was barking up the wrong tree with my take on what Service was about. Indeed, their own article on it saw them get as close as I’ve ever read on that site to saying, “We haven’t a clue what any of this is about.”
However, on Ladybird (Green Grass), the opening track of The Infotainment Scan, they and some of their contributors have been in accord with some of my opinions about the track. The title suggests a nursery rhyme, perhaps attaching itself to the 18th Century American rhyme Ladybird, Ladybird Fly Away Home, which implores the titular ladybird to fly back to its burning home to try and rescue its children. But the main focus of the song appears to be about the Bosnian War, which had just passed its 1 year anniversary when this programme was broadcast.
The references are both overt:
Green grass was purple black and speckled all around.
and more subtle, especially with the ongoing mentions of Pomerania - a region in the Baltic Sea, which splits between Germany and Poland. The European version of Ladybird, Ladybird Fly Away Home replaces the burning home with something far more apocalyptic:
The war in question is the Thirty Years’ War which raged through Central Europe from 1618 to 1648. Of more recent relevance to The Fall would have been parallels between the war in Bosnia and Second World War atrocities such as the Wawer Massacre over Christmas 1939, which took place in the Polish side of Pomerania. To read about that makes The Fall lounging around in SS uniforms when recording a video for High Tension Line seem even more reprehensible. But, two years on from that, a European war was now being beamed directly into our homes. The Fall also had a seat in the bleachers to witness the spectacle of war while they toured Europe during the autumn of 1992. While touring in Greece, Mark E. Smith claimed that the band could see jets carrying out bombing raids on the former Yugoslavia, though how the band were able to see that from Greece, given that Albania sits between Greece and the Slavic countries was never elaborated on. In interviews ahead of the release of The Infotainment Scan, Smith talked about his belief that Europe had become dangerously unstable after the end of the Cold War, and he considered Government cuts to the armed forces and the coal mines to be acts of outright negligence.
The war motif continues into the performance of the track with the opening burst of reversed hi-hat beats sounding like a salvo of missiles being unleashed, while Simon Wolstencroft’s drumming maintains the barrage of rockets landing and explosions detonating all the way through. Perhaps, most heart-rending of all are the lyrics in which Smith implores the ladybird to take flight and concentrate, not on repelling the enemy, but on getting themselves to safety, away from a home which has nothing to offer them now that their family have all been killed. The message seems to be that it’s not too late for the ladybird, but will they ever return?
Ortanique was a one-off alias for Dave Clarke - aka Directional Force - which he paired up with another alias, Fly By Wire on the creatively named Untitled 12-inch, released through Magnetic North. While the Fly By Wire track, Alkaline 3dH is abrasive and jagged, the Ortanique tracks are mellow and restful.
Nomadic is a borderline inclusion here. There’s nothing especially groundbreaking or game changing about it, and it’s arguably less impressive than the other Ortanique track, People of the Seven Moons, which was the only track on Untitled that Peel appears to have never played. But I found that I couldn’t shake its tribal rhythms from my brain. In their own way, they seemed to suggest settlements beating out the call to nomadic travellers crossing deserts and mountain ranges, to come and join them and share a little time together.
Only an aural palette cleanser maybe, but a very evocative one nevertheless.
On tonight’s programme, Peel played a run of three tracks from Today’s Active Lifestyles, the second album by Polvo. And just as he had done the previous week with Swirlies, he picked three tracks which were unlikely to make any of his listeners into converts for the band in question. To be fair to him, I don’t think he had a great deal of choice given that none of the tracks on the album really stand out as worthy of love. There’s a couple of tracks over 7 minutes long as well, which would have given Peel time to have a cup of tea and a comfy sit on the toilet, but would have seriously tested the listeners’ patience. Too much of the album sounds like a band in the rehearsal room, with the music constantly shifting in tone and tune, but hardly ever taking time to really engage the listener. If I was to be generous, I’d say that the constant shifts are reflective of the hyperactivity suggested by the album’s title, but it’s not an album that really deserves having excuses being made for it.
Lazy Comet gets on to the metaphorical mixtape because it was the only one of the three tracks which Peel played which had me straining to hear more, I’m thinking particularly of the gorgeous section of music between 0:55 and 3:20. Alongside it, he played an instrumental called My Kimono and Sure Shot, two tracks which if I called them nondescript, would make them both sound better than they are.
Over the course of 1992/93, Amir Abadi and Peter Kuhlmann, working together under the name, Escape, released four 12-inch singles which combined trance and ambient music. Thematically, the records were linked by being set on different planets: Earth, Mars, Neptune, with their final record set on the star, Polaris. There would always be two trance tracks on each release, which would be titled Escape to… and Escape from… the respective planets/stars which were the subject of the release. The ambient tracks on each release would be titled Trip to… although the Mars release also included Trip from Mars.
Escape from Neptune was on the third Escape 12-inch, which to my ears was the most enjoyable of the Escape releases. It’s fast, frenetic and melodic stuff compared to some of the troughs and irritating sonic cul-de-sacs which some of the other releases contained. Escape 3 also contains the best ambient track of the set, and the only one which doesn’t follow the titling sequences of the other Escape records. The 17 and a half minute, Atmosphere Processor is the undisputed triumph of the Escape discography.
It appears that when they were putting Escape 3 together, Abadi and Kuhlmann were using the film, Aliens as an inspiration given that all of the tracks on it contain quotes from the film. However, when you think of how quotable Aliens is, the lines they lifted are disappointingly bland. I mean if you’re going to quote Aliens, go big or go home.
