Guys and Dolls: Meat Beat Manifesto - Radio Babylon/Soul Driver/Fire Number 9 [Peel Session] (14 May 1993)

 

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Having failed to bill the first airing of Meat Beat Manifesto’s one and only Peel Session when it was broadcast on Saturday 6 February 1993, the Radio Times tried to make up for it when the repeat went out on this 14/5/93 show. Unfortunately, they spelled the band’s name as Meat Ball Manifesto, a mistake which Peel felt moved to apologise on air for. But, all things considered, the Radio Times error wasn’t so far off the mark because the quality of 3/4 of the tracks in this session really was different gravy…

Listeners were treated to past, present and future in this session. The three tracks that would have made it on to my mixtape all differ stylistically from one another, but contain little offcuts and sprinkles that offer moments of familiarity amid the strange melange of sounds and atmospheres in each track. 

Radio Babylon grabs me for slightly more synesthistic reasons than it might to do others. Primarily an exercise in breakbeat, what I like are the samples of Babylon that ring out throughout the track. I had initially thought it was taken from some high-minded, ecstatic reggae record, but why should Meat Beat Manifesto have to reach into the deepest corners of their record collection, when they can just lift the word straight out of the chorus of Rivers of Babylon by Boney M, drench it in reverb and in doing so, transport me back to a mental space where I’m watching exotically filmed adverts on sunny curtain drawn afternoons in the mid 1980s -  The Art of Noise did that to me once. To my ears, what Meat Beat Manifesto did with that sample moved it from the realm of drunken family parties and instead evoked sun blasted landscapes and the bleat of a car horn as a crowd of millions takes to the streets, chanting for something better than the wretched normality they’re served up with as their everyday existence and hissed at to be grateful for.  It’s retro, it’s the sound of Rastafarian New Yorkers playing their mixes on the ghetto blaster on a hot day in the West Side as the fire hydrant plumes its water upwards.  This isn’t bad going for two men - Jonny Stephens and Jack Dangers - from Swindon.

As it progresses though, it becomes slightly stranger, as though the radio is picking up subconscious thoughts and feelings on its frequencies. One of these appears to be a sample of the panicked cry of Oh no! which opens I Can’t Control Myself by The Troggs. It leads me to wonder whether, when Meat Beat Manifesto recorded the session on 13 December 1992, they were trying to warn the world that 18 months later, a cover of a Troggs song was going to be completely inescapable for the whole of a summer. By the end, the track has descended into something which sounds like it’s trying to fuse together the sentiments of Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft with the mood of the final 90 seconds of Bike by Pink Floyd. 

 If Radio Babylon represented the past - it had originally been released as a single in 1990  - then Soul Driver points to the immediate future. Starting out of a trip hop beat, we’re then taken into a lyric in which Dangers details various stages of paranoia, to which music seems to be the only cure:

Soul driver, the beat improviser.

Soul driver, the rhythm organiser.

Soul driver, the beat provider.

Soul driver,  can you turn the lights up on the rhythm.

Which it then does as Meat Beat Manifesto try to take us inside the rhythm, garlanding it with noodling guitar lines of such gentleness, that it feels like the music is trying to cocoon the listener from their troubles. Even the repeated verse of paranoia and worry finds itself being subsumed into the music as it tries to filter out the bad vibes. And from 2:33 onwards to the end of the track, Soul Driver plays out with a repeated Mellotron line which leads the listener down to Eden, to the accompaniment of an aural winding down, which encourages the listener to let go of all feelings of struggle and stress. In a year’s time, this would start to become a dominant sound in dance music, just within a brief window, but long enough and distinctly enough to mark it out as an original 90s scene.

The sense of something winding down also permeates the last 90 seconds of Fire Number 9, which was a remix of a track called #9 Bad Acid, that had originally been recorded by Dimensional Holofonic Sound on the original version of House of God. Jack Dangers’s remix was put out by DHS on a record called LSD3D Acid Mixes. The only real difference between the record mix and the Peel Session version is that the record opens with someone saying It only has to be heard to be absorbed rather than the more hypnotic refrain of You’ve eliminated any interruptions or distractions. For the rest, the track remains dominated by a driving drum beat waiting for Primal Scream to swoop in, take it away and titivate it up for use in Rocks, later that year. It also brings together two of the definitive found sounds of the year 1968:

1) Arthur Brown bellowing I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you at the top of his Number 1 hit, Fire.

2) The most famous use of the words Number 9 in Western culture; namely as part of the refrain heard at regular intervals throughout Revolution 9 by The Beatles. 

For me, it’s that juxtaposition that makes the track essential to keep. 30 years on from this session, Meat Beat Manifesto and DHS would come together again to collaborate on an EP called Man From Mantis.

The fourth track in the session was Drop, a discordant electronica track which had an additionally atonal vocal thrown in for added annoyance. But three out of four isn’t bad and in many ways Meat Beat Manifesto were only getting started. With Jack Dangers as the only constant member, they have continued to issue singles, albums and collaborations up to the present day. But Peel, whose support had only been occasional since they started issuing records in 1988, didn’t go with them. Barring a single play of one of their tracks on a 1997 compilation album called Sally’s Photographic Memory, they never featured on a Peel Show again after this session repeat.

 

Videos courtesy of Dub Records.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Turbulence - Whurlstorm (14 May 1993)

 

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I had a question mark next to this when I added it to the long list of selections from this show, but its place on the metaphorical mixtape was never in doubt once I established which version of Whurlstorm - out of four different mixes - Peel had played on 14/5/93.

Whurlstorm first surfaced as the flipside to the first Turbulence release, Whurlwind. Issued on Industrial Strength Records, it was essentially a slightly sped up version of the one that Peel played on this show, which was the lead version on a trio of mixes which were put out on Super Special Corp,  the label that put out the rest of Turbulence’s releases during the 90s.

What makes Whurlstorm essential is that it’s one of those techno tracks where its highpoints really stand out when they arrive. Dance music is built on mythology and hype, and for all the talk about laying down the groove or setting up the beat, so many dance tracks are a series of longueurs, interspersed with moments of extreme, ecstatic activity designed either to get you busting a move if you’re on the dancefloor or looking up in interest and exhilaration if you’re sat listening to it. Such is the case here, where after 35 seconds of low key beats and bleeps, we’re thrown into something which sounds like processed turn-table needle scratching fed through a wah pedal, but done at such speed and with such musicality, it makes you immediately want to start breakdancing to it. It crops up again at 1:34.

But as with a soukous track, it’s the final 2 and a half minutes that contains Whurlstorm’s true ace. You’ll hear throughout the track treated vocal cries of Whurlstorm and Yeah, mixed in such a way to make them sound like they are being growled by a subterranean monster. From around 3:34, that monster makes its presence known. Firstly, there’s a descending line of sound which sounds like power circuits running down. Then at 3:45, there’s a brief bit of white noise which evokes birds flying off into the distance, just the way that they do in nature when they become aware, often ahead of man, that a natural disaster is about to happen. 

And then, from 3:55, it strikes. Imagine if the pulverising, juggernaut bassline ripping through the earth in Humanoid by Skyflyer -  played by Peel almost a year before this programme - had laid an egg. Now, a year later, that egg hatches a full size monster, rearing up and destroying everything above it. The final two minutes encapsulate a sense of disorientation, destruction, panic (represented by a couple of returns for the breakdance music), before ultimately ending on a note of calm after everything has been razed to the ground.

This mix of Whurlstorm is known as A1. Of the other two mixes of Whurlstorm that came out alongside it, I’d recommend B2 on the grounds that if A1 deals in destruction, then B2 concerns itself with rebirth and reconstruction. Its relentless beat and throbbing synth-line evoking a community fixing its buildings and its spirit after the monster has gone.

Video courtesy of Les Enfants Terribles.

Guys and Dolls: Leatherface - Books (14 May 1993)

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I’ve been off work this week and have been enjoying and enduring record breaking temperatures for May in the United Kingdom. What I discovered in the early part of the week, when temperatures were at their hottest, is that they are not good conditions for listening to anything by Leatherface.  Each time I tried to start listening to Books, which was recorded for their fourth album, Minx, I found myself skipping on elsewhere after 30 seconds, “I’m too tired for you today” was my general attitude.  And if thrashy guitar noise was all that Leatherface had to offer, I may still be sitting here, necking cloudy lemonade and putting them off until the drizzle returns next week. But I persevered and in doing so found I was reminded of something I wrote about when they last featured on this blog - you really have to listen to the words. They may have looked like they were all you ever need to meet your bricklaying needs, but they were virtuoso musicians and romantic poets, in a way that contrasted with their sound. They had you cherishing beauty and melancholy, even while you moshed as though your life depended on it.

Books is another example of the music of aggressive reflection which appears to characterise many of Leatherface’s songs. Here, author Frankie Stubbs examines a relationship between a brother and a sister which has seen both of them become paralysed with inertia. It’s not explained whether one is caring for the other, or if both of them have seen their lives shrink due to uncontrolled circumstances. Throughout the song, there are references to things and objects from another time, which have stayed in place through habit for so long that the house they share seems to be physically crying out for change:

A house full of things some of which they hadn’t seen

Since they bought the sodding things in 1980-something.

And if only their place 

Had a little more space

And a little less waste

That would be something.

Stubbs is an observer to this unchanging picture, chafing at the bit to get out and get away:

I don’t wanna be, bound up like books.

I don’t wanna be a sad ornament of a place.

However, the cracked vocal note on which he ends the song implies a moment of doubt as to whether he will avoid the same fate.

As the year progressed, Leatherface moved towards a split. They recorded a third session for Peel on 23 December, which was broadcast in February ‘94, by which time Stubbs announced their dissolution, onstage, during a gig at The Garage, Islington. They reformed again, 5 years later and released four further studio albums between 1999 and 2010. 

Apart from their final session, Peel never played anything else by them after this programme, though he had been reading up on the band through an article in a magazine called Paint It Red, which focussed on the music scene in the North East. He was particularly taken by a photo in it of PJ Harvey, who were about to play a gig in Newcastle, which he thought was the best one he’d ever seen of her/them. That evening, the band* had played at the University of East Anglia, with Sheila and William in attendance.

While researching this article, I discovered just how highly rated and influential Leatherface were, with some describing them as the best UK punk band of the 90s, and their third album, Mush, venerated as one of the best guitar records of the decade. So, why did they not reach wider acclaim? Some answers may be found in this article/interview with Laurence Bell who had the group signed to his Roughneck Recording Company label and also put out a posthumous album after Leatherface’s first split, on Domino.  

Video courtesy of Leatherface - Topic

*I can’t wait till we get to the To Bring You My Love phase and know conclusively that all references to PJ Harvey refer to a person rather than a group.

Guys and Dolls - Gunshot - Bombing in 5 Minutes (14 May 1993)

 

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NOTE - On this video, Bombing in 5 Minutes begins at 20:00.

To celebrate the release of their debut album, Patriot Games, the Leytonstone rap trio, Gunshot’s label, Vinyl Solution also commissioned a limited edition (1000 copies) of instrumental mixes from the album.

Bombing in 5 Minutes takes its title from a hot-mic joke made by Ronald Reagan before recording his live weekly radio address to the American people on 11 August, 1984. Reagan intended to use that week’s recording to announce legislation which would allow student religious groups to meet on school premises outside school hours. During a soundcheck ahead of the broadcast, Reagan spoofed his announcement by saying:

My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes. 

How we laughed back in the day - John Peel after playing Bombing in 5 Minutes on this 14/5/93 show.

Although always intended as a joke, in the Two Tribes-esque atmosphere that still characterised the Cold War at the time, it wouldn’t have done much to reassure a scared world that any of these people had the slightest clue about what they were doing*.

As a reflection that the world of 1993 was in a happier place than had been the case, nine years earlier, Peel played Bombing in 5 Minutes as a response to a story in one of the news bulletins, which punctuated his programme, that America was decommissioning its Strategic Defence Initiative, otherwise known as the Star Wars programme, which had been in operation for a decade and intended to protect America from missile attacks.

As to how the instrumental version of Bombing in 5 Minutes compared to Gunshot’s vocal performance on the original Patriot Games album, I have to say that it doesn’t sound to me like much was being missed by going with the instrumental version. The vocal is so muddily recorded that it’s difficult to really get an handle on what’s going on beyond them using it as a self-motivation talk to themselves ahead of future rap battles against other crews. They certainly seemed to see these contests in apocalyptic terms given that Patriot Games included tracks with titles like World War 3 and Reign of Terror.

A contemporaneous musical take on the story courtesy of Jerry Harrison and Bootsy Collins, released under the name, Bonzo Goes to Washington.

*Things have changed so much, haven’t they…

More on the background and fallout from Reagan’s gaffe.

Video courtesy of SteveWonda and Talking Heads.

Guys and Dolls: The Tribesmen - Hot & Horny (14 May 1993)

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Recommended to Peel by colleagues at Radio 5, Hot & Horny was the final release by The Tribesmen, a house music collective of which there isn’t much clear information available beyond the fact that, on this record, DJ Yomi contributed and that the guitar lines were played by Jez Ansell.

Listening to it, I find myself wondering whether Grant Buckerfield was a fan of it given that he appears to have used at least one of the drum breaks as a direct inspiration in his theme tune for I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!

Video courtesy of The Football Programme and taken directly from a John Peel show, but not from 14/5/93.

Guys and Dolls: Machine - Eighty-Nine (14 May 1993)

 

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Machine was a one-off release from long-time collaborators, Alan Sage and Luke Slater. Eighty-Nine was the third track on an EP called Integrated Harmony. It’s possible that I would have overlooked it entirely had I not initially been engaged by its high tempo opening…which came about because Peel played it at the wrong speed. My notes, though, state that the track was Not without its charms, and although I prefer the EP’s title track, I think that the sentiment holds true when listened to at the correct speed. 

To anyone unsure whether or not to click the Play icon, I would say that Eighty-Nine is a must listen if you prefer the burblier end of acid techno rather than the squelchy end. I hope that helps.

Video courtesy of Acidalia.

Guys and Dolls: Grotus - Good Evening/The Same Old Sauce (14 May 1993)

 

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The last time Grotus appeared on a John Peel show, it was with a cover of We’re An American Band by Grand Funk. Now, 18 months later, they were back with their second album, Slow Motion Apocalypse, a title which, with 33 years’ worth of hindsight, appears laughably self-indulgent now.

I’m not crazy about a lot of violence on the screen, unless it’s done with a certain amount of taste.

Well, there’s more violence on the TV news then there is in the movie….

Taken from an interaction between Michael Rupert and Joe Spinnell when they appeared on an episode of The Joe Franklin Show on 27 January 1981. Spinnell was appearing to promote the slasher movie, Maniac.

Spinnell slightly undercut his own argument in the show by warning people not to come to the movie if they didn’t like blood and gore, but his point about the evening news still stands and has been periodically explored by musicians through the years.

Whether it’s over breakfast, lunch, dinner, before we go to bed, or over the course of the last 40 years, on a 24 hour cycle, the news is always out there and ready to give us a daily diet of murder, mayhem, repression, crime and political chaos that would fill a hundred different films. Good Evening comes from a pre-internet world and through its rising collage of jump cuts, backed by an annoyingly chirpy piece of library music, it shows how, each evening, avuncular looking middle-aged men would sit behind a desk, give us a friendly greeting and then tell us all about the awful things going on nationally and internationally. Americans - or in the UK , anyone watching either ITV News or Channel 4 News - would find the catalogue of misery interrupted by commercial breaks selling products that were intended to help with physical ailments before being pitched back into the rundown of awfulness, that could be happening right outside the front door. 

It’s pretty unsparing stuff. It doesn’t even include the more light-hearted “And finally…” news items that were designed to ensure that the news programmes always ended on an upbeat note. It’s not a new idea though, by any sense. 27 years earlier, Simon & Garfunkel closed their Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album with 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night in which they sang the Christmas carol in counterpoint to a news bulletin from Wednesday, 3 August 1966 which included brief summaries on disputes over the progress of the Civil Rights Act*, the death of comedian, Lenny Bruce, Martin Luther King preparing for a march due to take place in Chicago, disruption at HUAC’s hearings into anti-Vietnam War sentiment, and Richard Nixon calling for more funding for the war effort to prevent it stretching on for another five years, as well as labelling those against the war as a threat to American society. Which shows how intellectually barren MAGA’s appropriation of this crap has been.

Peel let Good Evening run on into The Same Old Sauce, which it was paired with on Slow Motion Apocalypse. I’m not crazy about it, but have kept it here for the sake of completeness and because it is an industrial metal take on the corrosive nature of television on the psyche and intellect. At the end, Lars Fox asks, There’s one thing that I want to know/Were people this stupid before there was TV? to which the only real answer is, well yes, but the population at large probably didn’t realise just how stupid everyone else was before it.

Video courtesy of IJWTHSTD Archives.

Lyrics are copyright of Lars Fox.

*60 years on, Republican Party legislatures seem to be doing everything they can to repeal this.