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.
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.
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).
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.
For all that though, why have I only included one track from Roovel Oobik’s session? Well, I should say that it was touch and go that Betterlife [Recreation Version] made it on to the metaphorical mixtape at all, but having listened to the session again this morning, I did seriously consider including the whole session here. We’re back in Revolver territory again…
All of the songs in the session follow a pattern: strong, melodic starts which get undercut by weak vocals - albeit I need to make allowances that vocalist, Tonu Pedaru, was singing in a second language - and that ultimately lead onto slightly overindulgent playouts. I did nearly change my mind and include Masters of Day Dream Machinery here as well, but I think that Betterlife [Recreation Version] does all anyone really needs to be able to enjoy Roovel Oobik. For me, the gorgeousness of the wah-wah guitar work and the ska-dub playout counterbalance the gormless vocals. We can’t have one without the other, so let’s embrace the glorious and the grim here.
Peel hoped that Roovel Oobik would come back and do another session the following year, but in the event, he never played anything by them ever again after the session was repeated on 20 August 1993. He doesn’t appear to have played anything from their 1994 album, Psychikosmos, and it took him a decade to discover that from the mid-90s onwards, several members of the band had been recording and gigging as a dance act called Una Bomba.
He always spoke fondly of them though, remembering when, during their brief stay at Peel Acres, the band would always go outside to smoke on a grass verge opposite the house. During one smoking break, Peel went out to join them and told them to consider the verge as a part of Estonia, the band even made up a sign which they planted on the verge saying, Welcome to Estonia. In 2003, an Estonian TV crew interviewed Peel about the band and took footage of the verge. They also passed on to him a copy of the Una Bomba album, Aerosol and Peel played a track from it on 19 March 2003.
In 2005, Roovel Oobik reformed to release an album called Supersymmetry. Since then they’ve released two further albums, the most recent being 2024’s Transcent.
Video courtesy of VibraCobra23 Redux
Apologies for not being able to include the dots over the o in the band’s name.
The video is taken from Peel’s show on 17/4/93, and as you’ll hear him say, Come Alive is taken from the album, Cake and Eat It, but what he didn’t mention was the lengthy journey that The Blue Up? had gone through to get an album distributed.
Formed as an all-female quartet in 1984, the Minnesota outfit released two singles in the mid-80s on Susstones and by 1989 were set to record their first album. The album, called Introducing Sorrow, was due to be released by British label, Midnight Music, but it ultimately never saw the light of day due to Midnight Music going bust. By the time The Blue Up? recorded Cake and Eat It, they had reduced themselves to a trio and, clearly eager to make up for lost time, produced an album boasting 23 tracks, albeit half a dozen of them were snippets ranging between 7 & 23 seconds in length.
With its jittery time-signature verses and strident choruses, Come Alive somehow marries together Eastern European folk with Goth rock. In the verses, singer Rachel Olson - now better known as Ana Voog - sounds as though she’s channeling the heroine of Another Day by Paul McCartney, a woman out of place in the modern world, simply trying to get through another day without being harmed or hurt. And yet lurking under the surface is a more confident, sensual figure waiting to burst forth when the time is right. The cries of despair after each chorus showing how desperately the heroine wants to break free of the constraints placed upon her, constraints which in Voog’s case were later attributed to Post-traumatic stress disorder and agoraphobia. These conditions foreshadowed Voog’s later work as a visual and internet artist, where she would garner notoriety with anacam, one of the earliest life-casts on the nascent internet, in which she set up a webcam to broadcast her life 24/7, and did so for 13 years. This Vice article by Voog from 2018 gives more details of why she did it and what she learnt from it.
The band clearly had a high opinion of Come Alive as they re-recorded it for their only major label album, Spool Forka Dish, released on Columbia Records in 1995, but the snippet of that which I heard on genius.com suggests that, like Shonen Knife before them, The Blue Up? lost something of what made them so compelling once they stepped into bigger and shinier facilities. Stay in the Catacombs where The Blue Up? recorded this version and enjoy something both catchy, chilling and icily magnificent.
Back in the 60s and 70s, if John Peel was excited about the release of a new album, it was common practice for him to play the whole record on one of his shows. Examples include Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles* and Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan** (as well as Desire by the same artist). In subsequent years, Peel would content himself by playing trios or quartets of tracks from new records that particularly excited him.
On 17/4/93, he dotted 4 tracks from Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, the debut album by Swirlies, throughout his programme. My notes show that only Pancake would have interested me enough to keep on a mixtape. I like the tension between the driving, grinding rock sound coming up against the woozy keyboards and off-key singsong vocals of Seana Carmody. The lyrics mentioned missed classes, and given that the album’s tracklisting featured titles such as Bell and His Life of Academic Freedom, I wondered whether the album might be a concept record about life in college. I listened to the record last night and soon discovered that it wasn’t. If the record has any kind of theme, it’s around those of regret and tough love, but most of the lyrics are too abstract to be definitively pinned down.
What I must say about Blonder Tongue Audio Baton is that it is very much a record of two halves, and as I waited for Pancake to roll around - it’s the sixth track out of eleven on the album - I found myself wishing that I hadn’t felt the need to satisfy my curiosity about whether the record was a concept album. I found the first five tracks a slog to listen to, mainly because Swirlies fell into the trap of layering them in all kinds of discordant sounds and weird modulations, while simultaneously failing to lift the tempo above meandering, and I discovered last night that I really cannot get on with meandering drone rock, no matter how scuzzed up the band make it.
Then we reached Pancake, the halfway mark in the album and the first track that Carmody sings on. The first five tracks were sung by Damon Tuntunjian, which had me wondering whether Swirlies were in the same category as Moonshake and whether I would find myself leaning more towards “her over him”. Nevertheless, it was a welcome harbour to reach after 5 tracks of audio gristle. But then something rather wonderful happened. Over the second half of the record, Swirlies leave behind the sonic kinks and knots and let the material breathe a bit more. The album becomes progressively more “songy”, more involving and more exciting to listen to. I’m always happier to hear an album which has a stronger second half than first half, not least because it’s better to be looking at the time and thinking “How much more have I got left to enjoy?” instead of “How much more have I got to endure?”
But I only took one track out of the four that Peel played. A look at the tracklisting for this show reveals that, alongside Pancake, Peel played Bell, His Love Just Washed Away and His Life of Academic Freedom, which are…let’s see…tracks 2, 4 & 5 on Blonder Tongue Audio Baton. So, Peel was leaving us in no doubt which half of the album his preferences lay with. In fairness, he did play tracks from the second half of the record in subsequent programmes, ***but based on my experiences with it, I can’t help but wish that he’d gone back to his 1970s self and played the whole album, so as to give a fuller and truer picture of what it was like. Sometimes, John Walters’s attitude of We’re not here to give the public what they want, we’re here to give them what they didn’t know they needed could work against both audiences and artists, and that’s something which I feel happened in this programme.
Video courtesy of Swirlies - Topic
*Strictly speaking, the link doesn’t go to a Peel show. Radio London got an advance copy of Pepper about three weeks before it was released, and Ed Stewart was the first DJ to play it, albeit with a highly emotional Peel sitting in with him as he did so. I’d be surprised if Peel didn’t give the album a full play on The Perfumed Garden at some point.
*** On 1 May 1993, Peel played what I think may be the best track on the album, Jeremy Parker, but aggravatingly, the file of that show, which I made my selections from, missed the track off, so it won’t be blogged about here.
