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.
I think there are two major themes which Happy Shopper is based around:
1) Personal disenchantment - There are certain metaphorical signposts which show us that our lives are not moving in the direction that we would have hoped. One of the most dispiriting is when our food and everyday household items come exclusively from own brand sources. It’s pure snobbery, of course, but if you’ve been used to Fox’s Biscuits and Twinings Tea, you may consider McVitie’s and Tetley to be something of a comedown. But there is further to fall, if you’re not careful. And this song plunges into that poverty with its screams of OH CHRIST! WHO BOUGHT THESE TEABAGS/BISCUITS!, delivered with the absolute disgust of someone who has taken said biscuits and teabags out of the cupboard only to discover the Happy Shopper logo on the packaging.
It may be that they taste perfectly acceptable - for instance, my wife loves Sainsbury’s own brand of tortilla chips ahead of Doritos - but that garish orange and yellow logo, as was, shines out one message loud and clear: this is your failure. You can’t even afford “proper” biscuits and teabags. You might as well be supping water straight from the tap while chewing a slice of mouldy bread for all the nutritional satisfaction you’ll get from this. You thought you deserved Fortnum’s and yet here you are, scrabbling around with stuff that Spar would look down their noses at. You need better. You deserve better. Why haven’t you been able to enjoy better? Something….or someone…has led you to this crappy state of life….
Which leads us on to the second major theme of Happy Shopper:
2) Domestic discord - the song makes no bones about the fact that domestic relationships can easily sour once you get enmeshed in the tediousness of household chores. The ongoing relentlessness of keeping a house clean ends up meaning that intimacy and romance ends up as a clumsy fumble over the kitchen table.
As I write this, I’m thinking of my dirty bath upstairs, which needs cleaning. The eight stroke guitar riff that opens and underpins the song sounds like the circling motion of tired arms, windmilling to try and wash away stains that will refuse to shift. That eighth beat is the brief moment of respite before restarting the seemingly endless scrub. And in the back of your mind is the dull, draining thought that once this piece of drudgery is finished, there’s a whole list of other chores to work through. And in a few weeks’ time, you’ll be back scrubbing away another set of stains from this same spot and rotating your way through the same set of chores again.
The regular, metallic clattering which pops up throughout the track sounds like an amalgamation of endless bins needing to be put out with the pots and pans being pulled out of drawers and thrown to all corners of the kitchen. Once you throw children into the mix, and the day starts to become centred around ensuring that you’re in time to relieve the babysitter of their duties, so that you can make dinner with your groceries bought from Happy Shopper, then it’s hardly surprising that the facade cracks and the concept of domestic bliss and the nuclear family becomes something to be hated in as violent way as possible.
As the shout becomes Domestic, domestic, domestic bliss/Oh God, I hate it!, the answer to theme 1 starts to come into sharper focus. You’re not having the better life you deserve because of your responsibilities to others. All the rushing around to pick people up/drop them off, the cooking, the cleaning, the looking after the kids - that’s why your life is a misery. It’s their fault!
And as the track plunges into its final 20 seconds, with Jeff Leahy’s hatred of the crappy teabags being underscored by the clatter and bang of the drums, it sounds disconcertingly like the pots and pans are being used to bludgeon his partner to death - a man finally pushed over his limit by own brand produce, and changing his life in the most terrible way.
Jauntily psychotic, Happy Shopper is Foreheads in a Fishtank’s masterpiece, and I’m only sad that when the time comes for me to do this blog’s version of a Festive Fifty for 1993, I won’t be able to include it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a bath to scrub.
*Peel had meant to play Happy Shopper on the previous Saturday, but had left the record at home. He was apologetic that this meant that it had thrown the schedule out by a week and meant that the eventual reveal of the Number 1 record on the Phantom Fifty would end up taking place a week later than planned - People have had to reorganise their summer holidays and everything.
The video is taken from Peel’s Radio 1 show on Friday 5 March 1993. By the time he came to re-broadcast Sissy Bar, seven weeks later, he had a clearer idea over what The Peter Fonda Album was all about. It was released by a collective that called itself Peter the Man Eeter and comprised six different artists, some of whom never released anything other than the track that they recorded for this album. I suspect that the artists involved all knew each other to some degree, not least because a couple of them appeared on a follow up album which was dedicated to Night of the Living Dead. One of the artists who appeared on both records, an underground film maker called Jon Moritsugu recorded a tune for the Living Dead record called The Death of Peter Fonda.
The Peter Fonda Album appears to have been inspired by a group of people who hero worshipped Fonda. I’ve not heard the album in full, and some of the tracks listed on it leave me wondering what they have to do with Peter Fonda. Zip Code Rapists for instance offer up a cover of Her Majesty, the shortest Beatles song, but surely She Said She Said would be a better choice given that Fonda inspired John Lennon to write it in the first place. Sissy Bar, though, offers a direct and obvious link to Fonda, being as it is a complete deconstruction of Born to be Wild by Steppenwolf, one of the key tracks on the soundtrack to Easy Rider, a film which Fonda co-wrote. As you’ll hear in the video, Peel was absolutely knocked out by what K-Tel Wet Dream had done and rightly so. There appear to be four different versions going on throughout the track, including snippets of the original recording, but interspersed with wild percussion, oriental guitar, funk freak outs, a refrain of the chorus which sounds like it’s been cribbed from a Liverpool rehearsal room space, a Woodstock-style ending, and at regular intervals throughout, Born to Be Wild’s iconic riff - albeit presented in thunderously compressed form.
K-Tel Wet Dream are smart enough to present all this in a little over 3 minutes and they keep the changes in mood and volume coming at regular intervals so nothing ever gets boring or irritating. I think that Sissy Bar nods to Fonda in a couple of other respects. The track as a whole could be taken as an attempt to set the acid trip scene in Easy Rider to music, but the use of compression in it makes me wonder whether they were inspired by Fonda’s cover of Donovan’s Catch the Wind. In late 1965, Fonda released a single, November Night, which he backed with Catch the Wind. Although Fonda sings it with a light sweetness of tone, the backing is considerably heavier than Donovan’s original with producer Hugh Masekela providing piercingly mournful washes of brass and a bassline that sits down heavily on the recording as though the wind that Fonda is trying to catch is less a breeze and more a mistral.
This is a very appropriate track for me to be writing about at the moment, because my wife and I have both been under the weather this week with one of those irritating viruses that isn’t strong enough to send you to bed for a few days, but instead contents itself with making you go through the week coughing grizzling and feeling generally underpowered.
Cough & Spit Out is the name given to the dub flip side of Danger Zone by Super Morris. The cough in question comes from the chestier end of the spectrum. For some reason which I can’t fathom now, I originally had a question mark against including this, but it’s a concise and pleasant piece of dub music. I suspect it may have been because I was still reeling in shock and wonderment at the tune by K-Tel Wet Dream which Peel played directly before it - more on that in the next post.
Wikipedia describes Tiger Trap as being part of the twee pop scene. I think they sound a bit more muscular than that, but what they do have in common with some of the other twee pop exponents that we’ve heard previously (The Orchids, Brighter, Cub etc) is an ability to confront painful emotions head on and with strength. The Supreme Nothing of the title appears to be someone that the narrator had regarded as a friend, only to find themselves being snubbed, so rather than trying to keep them in their lives, they’re rejecting them, without any sense of regret for what’s being lost. It all goes to prove the theory that a kind person is a vengeful person, and you cross them at your peril.
Life on the road in the music business is mythologised as one long round of alcohol, groupies, drugs, pranks and freedom. And for megastar bands, there’s probably enough of those distractions to alleviate the boredom of the travelling which takes up so much of the time on a tour. One other advantage that The Rolling Stones/U2/Guns ‘n’ Roses etc also enjoyed is that they were backed by enough money to overcome logistical setbacks and problems without too much difficulty. But for those further down the touring chain, the reality is very different, especially if you’re not travelling by plane, train or in a record-company backed Winnebago. And when things go wrong while you’re out on the road, then your future and your sanity is in the lap of the Gods - or at the very least the mechanics at Firestone. Indianapolis is a tune for every musician who strikes out on their own in a van which has done more miles than it should have, and for whom every penny in the tour kitty has to be used for a specific purpose. At this level, unexpected overheads can be life-changing in the worst way possible.
The problem here stems from a broken fuel pump necessitating an expensive repair job and a prolonged stay in Indianapolis, Indiana, where the only sexual activity that Brian Henneman can access is the tow-truck driver’s story of his arrest for sexual misconduct. Indianapolis serves as a reminder of how easy it was to be mired in boredom if you were stuck somewhere in the pre-Internet age. Phone calls had to be rationed to save money for instance, meaning that Henneman had to go 10 days before speaking to his girlfriend, doubtless while waiting for money to be sent through via Western Union. I’m guessing that a lack of available disposable income, after saving up for the repairs on their van, is why Henneman and friends find themselves stuck in a bar which has John Cougar playing on rotation on the jukebox. The only thing sustaining Henneman from killing himself or his bandmates is the thought of the road out of Indianapolis and how the sight of it will inspire him to greater musical heights in the future.
Henneman based the story of Indianapolis around a real life incident which befell him and members of the alt-country band, Uncle Tupelo, whose songwriters Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy, both play on the recording; Farrar provides the blistering harmonica solo. Henneman recorded it for a one-off single release after his previous band, Chicken Truck had dissolved. The record attracted enough attention for Henneman to win a new record contract, which he used to invite some of his colleagues in Chicken Truck to form a new band with him, The Bottle Rockets, which would last up to 2021. On their 1997 album, 24 Hours a Day, The Bottle Rockets would record a new version of Indianapolis.
Peel really liked Indianapolis, and was sure that Andy Kershaw would like it as well. However, the copy that Peel had got for him was faulty, so he ended up playing the second purchase of the record that he had made for Kershaw, on this programme.
On the Soma recordings, Dot Allison sings of an angel which managed both to reanimate one of her former lovers and to possess her like an Incubus. On the Boys’ Own version, which this mix was originally released on, the angel is a contradictory mix of lover and master; it enslaves her because it wants to save her. Allison’s breathy Justify My Love style-storytelling reveals the potentially abusive nature of this relationship as she swears the listener to secrecy on other mixes, but this one takes time to describe how the attentions of the angel invigorate and revitalise her. If she is a captive, then she’s a willing one.
The chorus, They say we‘re hard to please/They say we have too much/As if all this would do/When all we want to have is fun speaks for an entire generation, lost to convenience and trinkets, but aching for spiritual gratification of mind and body.
This mix featured on the compilation, Volume Six. I think it may have been acting as a curtain raiser to listeners who would hear a lot from One Dove over the course of 1993. They released a debut album, which made the top 30 and two of their singles had also charted in the top 30 by the end of the year. That could have given them a platform to go on and enjoy further success over the coming years, but they had not enjoyed the compromises that their record label had forced them in to, and disbanded while writing material for a second album.
