Guys and Dolls: Chubby Chunks - Testament Two (17 April 1993)

 

Buy this at Discogs

The dance sensation that’s sweeping the nation - John Peel after playing Testament Two on 17/4/93.

And indeed, it’s very easy to picture walking into any club in Britain over the last 32 years and hearing a clued in DJ playing any one of the three Testament tracks that make up Chubby Chunks (Vol 1).  The disco swing and the house beats on all three tracks sound utterly timeless, and I have no hesitation in recommending Testament Two as perfect accompaniment either for a party or while doing work around the house. 

Going by the John Peel wiki, Testament Two appears to be the only one of the tracks that he gave any airtime to. Listening to them all, this morning, it seems just about the right choice though I think that Testament One would have been in with a shout as it’s an absolute banger for the most part, but is let down by a piano piece which seems to have been lifted from a school music lesson. It’s clunky enough to lift the listener out of the track, whereas Testament Two is seamless in comparison. I’m also a little surprised that Peel wasn’t tempted by Testament Three, which is a little jazzier and more sonically interesting than the first two Testaments.

A year later, Chubby Chunks Vol. II came out - as with Vol. 1, on the Cleveland City label, out of Wolverhampton - and brought us Testaments 4, 5 & 6. While still focused on the dancefloor, they were a little more quirky and playful than the previous year’s tracks.  Testament 6 is a good representation, I think, but there is no record of Peel playing anything from Vol.2, nor from the remainder of Chubby Chunks’ output. Nevertheless, the early Testament tunes appear to have stuck in the memory, with Testament One receiving fresh remix releases in 1994 & 2021. Testament Two was paired with Testament One on a 2003 re-release through S12.

 Video courtesy of Javi’s House 90s.

Guys and Dolls: Fluke - Spacey [Original Version] (17 April 1993)

 Buy this at Discogs

I’ve spent the last couple of days soaking up the relaxing, dreamy, ambient tone of Spacey, which was presented on this 17/4/93 show, courtesy of the compilation album Volume Six, as a dry run for the overhaul which it would receive when it was recorded for Fluke’s second studio album, Six Wheels on My Wagon, later in the year.

The chilled feel on this first version is a perfect setting for lyrics which read as a counselling session set to music. Amidst the burbles of rainforest-like keyboards and descending piano scales, vocalist Jon Fugler delivers some gentle thoughts on the process of maturing and accepting that the certainties of youth can and should evolve with greater life experience: Everyone changed, always the way and always the same.

Perhaps, this was because he had turned 30 during 1992? All that being said, the lyrics suggest that change is good, providing you maintain some kind of link to your younger ideals: You can’t stop the love in you.

It makes for a calming, yet exciting mixture, and I think it’s superior to the album version, Spacey (Catch 22 Dub), which dispensed with the homilies, only retaining the various You can’t stop the fighting…refrains. The version on the Volume compilation outdoes the final recorded version, which wasn’t always the case, and in one infamous example threw a spanner in the works of this blog’s 1992 Festive Fifty.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Video courtesy of Dub Records.

Guys and Dolls: PJ Harvey - Me-Jane (17 April 1993)

Buy this at Discogs 

Me-Jane sounds like it shares its lead riff with 50Ft Queenie, which gave PJ Harvey her first Top 40 hit, but it’s much the better song.

I’ve got so used to hearing Harvey songs where she’s either prostrating herself to a lover (Oh My Lover), or trying to dominate them (Rid of Me) that’s it a bit of a shock to hear one where she’s so viciously giving up on her man. During 1992, Harvey went through a relationship breakdown, which appears to have provided inspiration for the lyrics to a number of the tracks on Rid of Me. In the case of Me-Jane, the contempt and hatred is on full display as Polly reaches the end of her tether with her brutish, alpha-male other half. She may have fallen for the John Greystoke figure of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels, but the song suggests that he has now morphed into the apeman figure of the films, but without any of his redeeming values.

We know that there’s trouble brewing thanks to both the riff and Rob Ellis’s drum pattern, which very effectively convey a sense of foreboding within the tribe, which can be heard from one side of the jungle to another. While Polly starts out by conveying her contempt in coldly, unemotional tones, things quickly start to build to a more violently upset conclusion.

It’s not just a break-up song though. There’s a thread of self-affirmation running through the track, highlighted by the reversal of the famous line, Me Tarzan, you Jane (though this apparently was a misquote), which now sees Tarzan left out entirely and Jane foregrounding herself around who she is and what she wants. If it inspired one other woman to get out of a similar situation, it will have justified its existence.

Video courtesy of PJ Harvey.

Guys and Dolls: Lloyd Hemmings - Heartical Decision (17 April 1993)

 

Buy this at Discogs

Heartical is patois for genuine or sincere and this 1990 recording sees Lloyd Hemmings getting straight to the point on nothing less than the key tenet of Rastafari: The time to pack up, leave behind the everyday world of Babylon and make the journey to Zion to reconcile with Jah. The problem is, as Hemmings notes, too many people are obsessed with fighting wars or fighting with each other, to set their differences aside and make the collective move. Whether it’s warring countries or warring family members, Heartical Decision is a lament for the time and energy wasted on negative emotion. 

It’s just unfortunate that it’s only in its last 20 odd seconds, from 3:00 to 3:25, that Hemmings really seems to get animated with a message to the older generation about how they may be able to persuade their children to accompany them, instead of being bidden off by them in ill grace. Typical that just as we start to get some detail on how this split could be avoided, the fade out kicks in - though the video segues on to the dub side of the single which was overseen by Augustus Pablo and Rockers All Stars.

An obituary for Lloyd Hemmings (1959-2022)

Video courtesy of vital sounds.

Guys and Dolls: Dr. Phibes and the House of Wax Equations - Moment of Truth (17 April 1993)

 

Buy this at Discogs

Welcome everyone to another edition of A & R Officers’ Corner, where we once again try to answer the thorniest of questions about the mechanics of the music industry. Today, we go back to a real doozy, a point that’s been debated for as long as the marriage of art and commerce has existed. And that question is: Should singles released from an album serve as a gateway to what listeners can expect from an album, or should they purely be focussed on getting the public’s attention as a means of potentially luring them into buying the album, even if that ends up being something they didn’t expect?

If Kurt Cobain had been happy to write and record three Smells Like Teen Spirit-alikes alongside 9 or 10 tracks of whatever noisy, discordant, abrasive music he wanted to make on subsequent Nirvana albums, then maybe the course of his life would have taken a different turn.  I’ve not been able to establish whether Dr. Phibes and the House of Wax Equations were deliberately trying to fool record buyers with the single releases that led up to their second and final album, Hypnotwister, or whether they were following a plan to put accessible material out there ahead of unleashing the ball of fury that large parts of the album are made up of. I’ll be posting again about some of the tracks that best summarise the vibe of Hypnotwister, in the coming months, but having first suggested that they were trying to channel a spacier Red Hot Chili Peppers vibe with the November 1992 single, Misdiagnosedive, Dr. Phibes and the House of Wax Equations now stepped on to The Verve’s * territory with the spacy and contemplative Moment of Truth. 

Anyone who missed Misdiagnosedive - as I appear to have done on this blog - would have been tempted to hear Moment of Truth and think, “Ah! They’re going ambient.” And that’s no bad thing here. The track is far less tedious than The Verve could sometimes be in similar compositions. Indeed, the 9 and a half minutes fly by, despite the languid tone, and even when the track tries to up its tempo and energy levels in the last 2 minutes, the band maintain wonderful control over things. There’s never any sense of impatience or impetuosity, they know exactly what sounds they want to make and where they want to take the listener to.  The rock solid rhythm section keep things perfectly moored as Howard King Jr. coaxes atmosphere and moodlines from his guitar.

Three times the track coalesces around a scat-mantra from King Jr., which sounds like it’s describing a process of transition. Does Howard’s reference to resurrection soulicide or worlds colliding refer to the moment that the consciousness passes from straight to high, or perhaps from life to death? In contrast to most of the material that the band recorded for Hypnotwister, this manages to be quite supportive and comforting. An oasis of calm in what ended up sounding like an emotionally incendiary record; and all put out in a single to lure in the unsuspecting.

I can only think it must have been a sales masterplan, especially given that neither the band nor John Peel followed the advice I would have been frantically giving to put out or play the album’s best track, Real World.

In other Dr. Phibes and the House of Wax Equations News, I’m pleased to be able to reupload on the blog their live performance of Mr. Phantasy recorded in 1992 for Mark Radcliffe’s Hit the North show, and which is now available in the format it was played by Peel on 29/5/92.

All videos courtesy of invinciblesticks.

*To clarify, we’re talking about The Verve of 1992 rather than the 1997 vintage.

Guys and Dolls: Fats Domino - Blue Monday (17 April 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

Apart from a comment that Fats Domino didn’t seem to get much contemporary radio play, Peel didn’t add anything else about his playing of Domino’s 1956 recording of Blue Monday on this show, but I’m wondering whether he was subconsciously inspired to do it by the fact that Sting’s new single, Seven Days had been released earlier that week, and maybe he felt that his audience deserved to hear a better example of a song about the stresses of a week.

For myself, I call an honourable draw between them, especially given that Seven Days deals with Sting spending his week contemplating having to genuinely fight a rival for his lover’s affection, who is bigger and stronger than he is; whereas Fats deals with the standard blues lamentations of having to face the horror of Monday morning and then dragging his ass through the working week to get to payday on Friday before a day of debauchery on Saturday, and a day of rest on Sunday. You’ve heard those themes a million times but Fats’s style carries the day.

In case you’re wondering, after playing this version of Blue Monday, Peel chose not to follow it up with an obvious open goal.

Listening to Seven Days again, I can imagine Fats Domino absolutely smashing a cover of this.

 

Videos courtesy of Jazz Everday! (Fats) and kirtww (Sting).
 

Guys and Dolls: Shindig - Spunky Marimba [Marimba Mix] (17 April 1993)

 

Buy this at Discogs

A classic case of misdirection in the title as there’s nothing particularly jazzy - or indeed jizzy - in this mix of Spunky Marimba.  The Spunky Mix does feature some keyboard parts which sound marimba like, but is a less interesting track than the Marimba Mix, which, curiously, doesn’t feature anything resembling a marimba.

Instead we have a perfectly serviceable piece of techno electronica, which with its whistle refrains and drum breaks intermingling with pulsing rhythms and shadily, melancholic synth lines does a good job of taking the listener to the Shindig club nights running in Newcastle at the time. Shindig started as a duo (Lee Mellor and Scott Bradford).  On subsequent releases - though not this one - they would be joined by Chris Scott, who would go on to enjoy a top 10 UK hit with I Believe as part of Happy Clappers. That record got its initial release on Shindig’s own label.

Video courtesy of The Space Cadet 90s House and Techno.