A word of heartfelt thanks to my benefactor, Webbie, for providing an upload for this track, which out of 24 tracks from this 7/5/93 show that made my initial list of inclusions, was the only one that wasn’t shareable. He may well have provided the very best from this show at the very last.
So, it’s late Spring/early summer 1993. And if you’re of a certain age, like me, that period of time means the first stirrings of Britpop. It was a phenomenon that was going to be the making of some bands, the destruction of others and the revitalisation of a couple of bands who were either perceived as having blown a big chance (Blur) or had been quietly toiling away for years and were finally about to be noticed (Pulp). If there had been any justice, it should have worked its restorative powers on Fishmonkeyman too.
Their story is closer to Blur’s than Pulp’s given they had spent 1990 into ‘91 attracting considerable interest and radio-play with their first two singles: If I’ve Told You Once and Breathing. After signing to Warner Music UK, they recorded an album called Gryst, only to suffer an almighty slap in the face when Warners chose not to release it. After an intense year of recording, gigging and writing, this decision knocked the stuffing out of the band. Three-quarters of the personnel left and guitarist and songwriter Paul Den Heyer spent 1992 writing new material and looking for new colleagues to play with.
With a new band around him, Den Heyer and Fishmonkeyman returned with a four-track EP, Seven Monkeys Sitting in a Tree, which they released through own label, Groovey Cardboard. After the trauma of late 1991, Den Heyer was determined to just have fun on this release and the lack of pressure appears to have contributed to him writing one of the earliest unknown Britpop songs. What’s the World Coming To? features a lyric about a character, a singable chorus line, tunefully noisy guitars and, in keeping with the period 1993-95, a tremendously carefree spirit to it.
The target of the song is a faceless government bureaucrat, but this isn’t an Ernold Same-type sneer at boring people doing boring jobs. Instead, it looks at the notion that if governments bring forward legislation that harms people, the effects of those policies are enacted by people like the subject of What’s the World Coming To?. Your mortgage has to go up? Council tax on the rise? Cuts to services? Losing your benefits? You could be living next door to someone who has had to ensure those measures are implemented. And, depressingly, the song suggests that not only do these people not feel conflicted by it (The man with no conscience has plenty to do), but that there are more of them willing to do this than we realise (He works in your office, he lives in your street/He’s everyone that you are likely to meet.)
The song briefly tries to offer some element of McCartney-esque sympathy towards its lead character by implying that they lost something of themselves when a love affair broke up, but it doesn’t dwell on this, especially once it tells that the man is a tyrant towards his current wife and children, and that, come rain or shine, they’ll be out there waiting for the train that takes them to the job which sees them wield power over people and communities.
If we’re looking for contemporary parallels (in 1993), while lines like He’ll stop at nothing, to get his own way/Never stops talking, has nothing to say suggest that he would have found plenty in common with Blur’s hyper efficient Colin Zeal*, the later lines in the song such as When there’s a war, he’ll be first in the line/Cutting off ears with his Swiss Army Knifesuggest that their bureaucrat may have found more common cause with someone like the bigot sampled on Countryman by that evening’s Peel Session guests, Fun-Da-Mental. After all, a phrase like What’s the World Coming To? can sound like a lament in anyone’s mouth, but what they may be lamenting could have different connotations depending on who says it.
Whether they intended to or not, Fishmonkeyman caught an early whiff of the British guitar zeitgeist in this track, but it did them no good commercially, albeit Den Heyer might not have been too keen to jump back into a major label’s arms again so soon after the Gryst fiasco. This interview on Cloudberry Cake Proselytism V.3 suggests that the experience left scars he wasn’t in a hurry to expose to the music business again. The band instead signed to Copasetic Records…where history repeated itself! After releasing a couple of singles, Fishmonkeyman had an album, This Is Where You Are, recorded and set for release, but Copasetic Records couldn’t put it out due to financial problems, at which point Fishmonkeyman disbanded.
Rib Donor was the first track Peel played on this 7/5/93 show and, as was generally his style, he went straight into the record without any mention of who it was by. So, as I listened to the brewing atmosphere of malevolence and the full-blooded shouts of someone haranguing an undesirable neighbour with implications that they are either a murderer or a pedophile, I found myself thinking that it sounded a little like Therapy? in one of their murder metal tracks. But it was actually the work of Gloucestershire’s Wayne Travis, aka Oil Seed Rape, who had started the project as a one-man outfit, before expanding it into a quartet.
In this live video from November 1992, Travis introduces Rib Donor as being a song about a sweet old lady who makes us scones. A throwaway line maybe, but it conjures the image of an angry woodcutter, leading a group of forest folk to harangue the witch’s house in the weeks before Hansel and Gretel go there. (Song starts at 2:55).
Despite the thrashing and the shouting, I’ll happily concede that Rib Donor is quite a slight track to put on to the metaphorical mixtape. Ultimately, as with Slugger by Tsunami from the same show, it owes its place here to me thinking that it was someone else. There’s a case to be made that in Rib Donor, Oil Seed Rape sounded more like Therapy? than Therapy? did themselves at this time. At least, that was what I would have been feeling…
So, having declared myself a fan of Therapy? around the time of my 17th birthday, I did what any good bandwagon jumper would and immediately went cold on the new material, because it didn’t sound like what had grabbed my attention in the first place.
I’d been hooked by Screamager from the Shortsharpshock EP, and I was excited to see a new EP, Face the Strange, following hard on its heels. Hell..there was even a chance that I’d actually buy this one. But when I saw them perform the lead track, Turn on Top of the Pops, I felt quite disappointed. It was a bit of a drag, which wasn’t a description I generally associated with Therapy? (from my one experience of hearing them). A recent re-listen to it showed me the error of my ways, but in the early summer of 1993, the damage was done, and I didn’t end up buying Face the Strange, because its public face wasn’t giving me what I wanted.
I wasn’t alone in this given that, after receiving an acetate of the EP, John Peel bypassed Turn and went straight to the second track, Speedball. This would have been much more like it from my point of view; full of skittering Fyfe Ewing drum patterns, thorny guitar storms and a wonderfully singable chorus line, You make me sick etc. But, I suspect for the band, they may have regarded it as being too much like a Screamager retread, while their label would have faced pushback from radio stations who would have blanched at giving daytime radio play to a track named after a drug cocktail. Such were the compromises of major label life.
I went on telling anyone who was interested* that I was a Therapy? fan, though shamefully, I only bought one album, Semi-Detached (1998) and that was a good 20 years after it came out. Meanwhile, Peel, after several years of airplay, bade them farewell at this point.
Video courtesy of balbees.
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
*Nobody. However, given that Therapy?’s former producer, Al Clay, went onto to produce the debut album by my favourite band of the 1990s, it feels to me that, my initial dalliance with Therapy? essentially served as the preparation for my love affair with Marion.
While preparing this blogpost, it became apparent to me that Man-Size is currently my least favourite PJ Harvey song. I’ve written previously about my dislike of a lot of the Rid of Me era tracks, and how what I struggled to engage with was the way in which they try to Americanize Polly’s style and vocals. This reaches its nadir in the closing lines of Man-Size when she sings the word gasoline with an American twang which makes me want to rip my ears off the side of my head, anytime I hear it.
But all was not lost for Man-Size, because she gave us a second version on Rid of Me consisting only of her voice, percussion and various string instruments, which I think she may have played herself.
Although the title Man-Size could be seen as a comment on Polly’s own sexual nature and awakening, the lyrics suggest she is playing the role of a man who is now sexually switched on and looking for something to do with his equipment: Good lord, I’m big/I’m heading on. Not to mention tangible excitement at having someone to use their equipment on: Got my girl and she’s a wow….My babe looking cool and neat/I’m pretty sure good enough to eat etc.
On Rid of Me, Man-Size Sextet is sequenced four tracks ahead of Man-Size. Stylistically, this makes sense because the vocal on Man-Size Sextet sounds far more uncertain than the one on Man-Size. Taken together with the stabbing, dissonant strings, it does an excellent job of conveying the chaos of puberty and sexual awakening. Polly wants to fuck in Man-Size Sextet, but despite the favourable conditions, s(he) is a bundle of nerves. Emotions are churning up all over the place, and although s(he) has the tools, it doesn’t sound as though s(he) knows what to do with them. I know how s(he) feels. I had my first passionate experiences with a woman in December 1993, but it took me another four years before I actually achieved anything. Nerves, excitement, tension, desire, delusion all played their part. As the strings scream out over the repeated refrain of Man size from 1:40 to 1:52, it sounds nothing less than someone desperately trying to cross the threshold into adulthood and leave both their and the girl’s pre-sex self behind. You almost feel the pelvic thrusts between two hot groins.
The closing note shows that, together, the boy and girl have become man and woman, but Polly nails the one-eyed nature of the conquering male. They’ve made a girl into a woman, now burn that childhood version with gasoline, so that the newly made woman can service the man again, and again. Notice how the man doesn’t burn their boyhood self. Presumably this is so they can have it both ways: be serviced like a man and waited on like a child, when the mood takes them.
If we take this idea on a stage, if Man-Size Sextet relates to the virgin trying to use their new sexual awareness for the first time within a fog of nerves, then the rock version of Man-Size finds the man several months on, bullishly confident in their sexual technique, in awe of their physical development and ready to rut.
I respond to Man-Size Sextet because it speaks to where I was at the time Peel played it - all tooled up, but with nowhere to go, no-one to play with and uncertain about what I would do if I found someone. I also like it because it sounds closer to what I want from a PJ Harvey song. It’s telling that this was the only song on Rid of Me that was not produced by Steve Albini and that’s probably why Harvey sounds, to my ears at least, closer to her real self than she does on other material from this period. It also points to where she would take her music next, once Steven Vaughan and Rob Ellis - who did the string arrangements on this track - had moved on.
This session was originally broadcast on Saturday 13 February 1993, at a time when Cell were enjoying some decent exposure on Kat’s Karavan. However, this repeat marked their final appearance on a Peel show playlist.
The studio version of the third track, Everything Turns (from 7:37) has already been featured here and I’d have possibly included it on the metaphorical mixtape for reasons of completeness. Remembering how much I’d enjoyed some of Cell’s music from late ‘92/early ‘93, I was a little surprised to see that it was only the session opener, Halo, that made my list of inclusions, but having listened to the full session here, I don’t feel that I was wrong. It’s the only one of the tracks which has any kind of life and spark to it, as, in keeping with the theme of so many inclusions from this show, our narrator comes back from a period of self-reflection and decides to end a relationship that’s been causing him problems. He suspects that his lover has been cheating on him, and the projection of goodness that they show to him and the world is a false impression.
There is a second reading about Halo, which is that it’s told from the perspective of Death itself, swooping down to take away some unsuspecting person, who has been wasting their life doing nothing and in its closing lines: Get off my face/Baby, I’m not dead being utterly indifferent to protest or pleading. Whichever interpretation is true though, Halo rocks in a way that the other tracks don’t get near. It’s not that any of them are bad per se, but they don’t really engage me.
The second track, Camera is too whiny, the final track, Stratosphere (from 11:50) tries to reach for the skies but ends up leaving the listener behind, and even Everything Turns runs the risk of being left off giving the strained vocals on it.
As the full session is available, you’ll be able to make your own decision, but for me it’s Track 1 and done.
But, as far as I can tell Drop It Cool appears to stay clear of controversy and frames its message around how people approach each brand new day. In Terror Fabulous’s view, the world is split between those who shine and those who glisten. The former dedicate their day to doing right by their fellow man and living a virtuous life; the latter only see the new day as a chance to feather their nest with money. I don’t think he’s being especially critical of people working for a living to put food on the table or a roof over their heads, but the use of the word, glisten, implies an attack on those who earn money purely for status. He also includes a swipe at those who chase money through crime, the ones with an angle of essentially living through wasted days, because they’re only interested in the false prophets of mammon.
If we assume that the Drop in the title refers to the patois meaning die as in drop out, then this song implies that those who dedicate their days to clean living and looking after others will receive their reward in death compared to those who grind themselves into the dirt as part of the rat race or those who may find themselves murdered by rude boys. If you shine, you’re an angel and will soar on into Heaven; if you glisten, then you’ll be marked by a gravestone that will only degrade and wear away over time.
On the evidence of these two songs, which made up both sides of a single released through Sub Pop, if you take a sprinkling of early 1970s Rolling Stones guitar riffs and season with Sonic Youth-style vocals, you get Royal Trux.
In keeping with those two other bands, on both of these tracks, Royal Trux manage to combine a musically sexy but unromantic sound with lyrically striking junkie poetry. The creative force behind the band was a couple, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema. On Steal Yr Face, Hagerty - who had already acknowledged a debt to the Stones when his previous band, Pussy Galore (featuring Jon Spencer) had recorded a cassette only cover album of Exile on Main St. - takes on a hybrid Jagger cum Thurston Moore role, warning of dire consequences at losing oneself to narcotic excess. Meanwhile, Herrema dusts down her Kim Gordon cosplay act on Gett Off, barking out unintelligible orders over a clipped guitar sound, which sounds like Brown Sugar’s autistic, younger brother, before becoming overwhelmed by spooky harmonica playing, as though the solo in Little Red Rooster was having a stroke.
It’s difficult to pick a favourite here, as they both have lots to cause fascination and enthralment. It’s not fair of me either to talk about Royal Trux sounding like other bands, especially given their influence on Sonic Youth - Kim Gordon’s side project duo Free Kitten took inspiration from the Royal Trux sound, for example.
