I’m still in St Lucia, so I’m still skipping through my selections from Peel’s 9/4/93 show to pick out any Caribbean influenced tracks that he played that night.
In comparison to Man Beware by The Slickers, Bucky Skank, a 1973 Lee Perry production with The Upsetters, is a trickier listen. Unlike Man Beware, I wouldn’t put this on at a party, unless I was hoping to hurry people home. Although it has a narrative running through it - the scolding of a wannabe bank robber (bucky meaning a home made gun in patois) - it’s really more of a mood piece than a sound system floor filler. The track seems afraid to draw attention to itself, almost afraid to blow its cover in the same way that its protagonist would be while preparing for a robbery.
With its plangent guitar notes and strikingly, strange vocalisations, the listener is taken into the jittery, disturbed mind of the track’s protagonist. I’ll be honest and admit that this is a borderline inclusion, but what carries it through is precisely that strange, almost nocturnal atmosphere that pervades the track.
I’m hoping to go to the weekly street party in Gros Islet tomorrow evening. I don’t expect to hear Bucky Skank played there, but I’ll let you know if it is.
Video courtesy of Rare Samples and Songs Oleg Tsoy.
I’m writing this while on holiday in St Lucia, so posting a rocksteady reggae track feels entirely appropriate. Man Beware was released in 1969 and was produced by Joe Gibbs. On this show, Peel dedicated the airing of Man Beware to John Downey of Lolworth, who had written in to assure Peel that the 1988 compilation album, Joe Gibbs & Friends - The Reggae Train 1968 - 1971 issued by Trojan Records was still available as he himself had recently bought a copy at Daddy Kool Records in London. That compilation not only featured Man Beware but other Peel show favourites such as Kimble and People Grudgeful.
Clocking in at Number 24 on the Phantom Fifty, I couldn’t understand how this track hadn’t secured a similar placing on the mainstream UK singles chart in late 1990/early 1991, given how terrific it was. Granted, it’s not the smoothest production in the world, falling three quarters of the way towards Hit the North, but it’s tight as a drum, catchy as hell and features Mark E. Smith’s ruminations on both the march of technology into people’s lives and the first stirrings of the property bubble, a phenomenon which led to our current cultural hellscape where seemingly every second television programme is either about converting properties or moving to new ones. High Tension Line is so good, I rate it as that rarest of beasts, at least to my ears, the repeatable Fall song. I could listen to it on a loop 4 or 5 times, I reckon.
It should have been a nailed on Top 40 hit at least, but it got nowhere near the charts. I suspect that its prospects were harmed by the dickish decision that the band made to film a video for the song in which they sat around in SS uniforms while ripping up magazines and newspapers. Book burning on a Woolworths budget was never likely to tickle the interest of Top of the Pops or The Chart Show. Smith attempted to brush off the controversy at the time, by claiming that the Fall were taking the piss out of “controversial” bands who played it safe. Remember, children, being a Northern contrarian means never having to admit when you’ve acted like a twat. Ultimately, a distracted record buying public and poor decision making meant that a splendid song fell down the cracks. It wasn’t even featured on the vinyl version of the Shift-Work album. Instead, if you had missed the single release, you had to buy the CD or cassette versions.
For more information on High Tension Line, including the avant-garde classical piece that inspired its title, I can only direct you to the recently deleted Annotated Fall website and hope, along with every other blogger out there, that The Internet Archive continues to hold that most precious of content safe.
When I saw The Manfreds play at the Riviera Centre in Torquay in late-1992, one piece of between song patter always stayed with me. Singer Paul Jones explained to the audience that although they were known for their hits such as Do Wah Diddy, Pretty Flamingo or The Mighty Quinn, if people wanted to know what the band were really like or what their true sound was, they should listen to the b-sides, as they captured the band as they saw themselves musically. And with this they launched into a rendition of I’m Your Kingpin. Anyone interested in hearing what this duality sounded like - at least over the first half of their career - is advised to buy Manfred Mann at Abbey Road 1963 to 1966.
In the same vein, I feel that if you want to get an idea of what I’m like as a musical curator, skip past whichever tune I’ve put at Number 1 in either of the Festive Fifties that I’ve compiled for the blog - this and this respectively - and instead listen to the Number 49 choices: Black Metallic by Catherine Wheel and, most relevantly to this post, Music by The Safehouse. Time hasn’t been kind to the former tune, if I had to choose which of the two to listen to on a loop, I’d go for Music everytime. It struck me as a tune that only I could love, it was warm and comforting, the aural equivalent of a cup of warm soup on a bitterly cold day.
But fast forward a year and The Safehouse turned up on Peel’s playlist with a track which sounded like they would now be more inclined to throw the cup into your face. Given the gnarly, squally quality of most of the sound on this track, the hardcore child of the title track appears to be going through the terrible twos. Any attempt to soothe the listener, by throwing in bursts of electric sitar for instance between 0:48 to 1:04 is overridden by more audio grumbles/teething and there’s an especially epic tantrum thrown between 2:05 and 2:28, which is followed by a duet between the sitar and a set of beats which sound like the child is smashing anything it can get its hands on. Tellingly, the sitar quickly retreats, and by the end, of the track, the child is left lying amidst the debris it has created.
That description might sound like an unappealing listen, but The Safehouse haven’t entirely lost their gift for melody here, and it’s much less abrasive than a similar idea would have been in the hands of, say, 70 Gwen Party.
Hardcore Child was the final track on The Safehouse’s Funkatronics 12-inch. The A-side of that record includes Out of My Body, which sounds like a copper-bottomed mainstream hit track, but it wasn’t. Instead, Hardcore Child was paired on the B-side with Screamer ll and stands as a final, defiant stand by The Safehouse, whose members, Mark Hailwood and Tommy Trainor, wound the project up after this release.
Hardcore Child won’t get to Number 49 when I do the 1993 Festive Fifty, indeed it won’t feature at all. But I’ll take that troubled child into my arms and give it a loving home on the metaphorical mixtape. I hope you will too.
Video courtesy of Bob Murray, and my thanks to him for making the video shareable here.
As Billy Connolly used to say, sometimes my mind sees pictures, and since I heard this short guitar instrumental, which was recorded as a b-side to Wild Jimmy Spruill’s 1964 single*, Country Boy, I’ve been picturing forming an unlikely Terry and Gerry type duo.
In the blue corner, Jimmy Yuill, an actor perhaps best known for his appearances in the Cornwall set police series, Wycliffe, as well his work with Kenneth Branagh, both on stage, on screen and on soundtrack. You can hear an example of this latter talent on Branagh’s short film of Swan Song by Anton Chekhov.
Spruill and Yuill certainly trips off the tongue as a name, but how well their respective styles - cigar box guitar r & b/classical acoustic guitar - would have melded together remains open to debate. I suspect alternating solos would have been the way to go. Plus, Spruill’s death in 1996 means that bringing them together will only ever remain one of my pipe dreams.
This blog will feature more mentions about Jimmy Yuill when we reach 1997, given that I worked as an extra on that year’s series of Wycliffe and was in the background of a number of his scenes in various episodes.
It’ll also feature more tracks of Jimmy Spruill’s if Peel continues to pull out pearls like Scratchin’. Once you get past the first 15 seconds, which sound like the theme tune for an unfunny radio sitcom, we’re into a short, sharp r&b workout that must have thrilled the young Jimi Hendrix, who borrowed a number of Spruill’s visual motifs (playing the guitar behind his head or with his teeth) for himself. The bouncy central riff and brass backing put me in mind of Lonnie Mack’s Sa-Ba-Hoola, which came out the same year. Mack is more of a virtuoso than Spruill, based on the evidence of the two records, but when Spruill cuts loose between 1:04 and 1:19, it sounds as though his guitar has burst into flames.
*Vim, the label that issued the Country Boy single, credited him as Jimmy “Wildman” Spruill, but as this appears to be the only one of his records issued under that name, I’ve chosen to go with his more widely known monicker.
Coming on as a stroppy hybrid of Huggy Bear and Mambo Taxi, Voodoo Queens were quite a fancy of Peel’s around this time. They recorded three sessions for him between January 1993 and February 1994. Peel may well have been taken both by their music and the fact that one of their guitarists shared a name with a track from one of Peel’s favourite albums.
The resemblance to Mambo Taxi isn’t a huge shock as both Ella Guru and Anjali Bhatia left that group in order to form Voodoo Queens. I have to compare Supermodel-Superficial to Mambo Taxi’s song, Prom Queen, which both Bhatia and Guru played on, and which I changed my mind on including on the metaphorical mixtape when making selections from Peel’s show from 30/1/93. Supermodel-Superficial is an improvement on Prom Queen, because its ire is better directed. While not being a direct attack on supermodels themselves, it instead tears to shreds the lifestyle orthodoxy that was forming around the cult of the supermodel and which was being pushed on to young girls as a desirable way of looking and living.
Whose role models do you really think you are?
Young girls that make themselves sick.
Feel guilty for being size 14
Living in their self hate.
This all slightly predates the size zero controversies - indeed my principal memory of 1990s supermodels is that they were slim rather than thin, though Kate Moss veered dangerously close - but Voodoo Queens can see the direction of travel that things are moving in and they call bullshit on it here.
It all makes me wish that Voodoo Queens had lived long enough to take on some of the things which that journey brought into our lives in subsequent years such as It girls, reality TV stars, influencers and OnlyFans.
I think that this may be the best song about money ever written. I’d wager that it isn’t the first track anyone would think of when asked to name a cash centred song, but, to use a Peelism, in a decently ordered society, Dollars by Bajja Jedd (Dwane Jarvis) would be a global anthem.
I appreciate that venerating a song with a title like Dollars in such a fashion may make you feel queasy if you haven’t heard it, but the great thing about it is that it manages to be both admirably practical about why money is important, but does so without ever succumbing to greed is good vulgarity. The song isn’t about materialism, but rather more about how money can improve the lives, hopes and chances of those in the ghetto and more widely. It takes in class, charity, how working the low paid job can offer a foundation to a better future (Remember where you coming from and where you’re going). It acknowledges that the pursuit of money can lead to crime and that the distribution of money is not an easy task, indeed the earliest lines acknowledge that if God made Man to be equal, then Man made money so as to divide the people into classes, where some have more than others.
Dollars speaks to those in the lower and middle classes, while reserving a few tart lines for those who have become rich and stopped caring. This is key to the theme of the track: the pursuit of money for the betterment both of the individual and society. Dollars ends up celebrating two dirty words - money and socialism.
Some of the sentiments here are not new, Money (That’s What I Want), recorded 34 years before Dollars made it clear that without money, love and community were not enough. But whereas Money always seemed like a tantrum track about not having enough and wanting more, RIGHT NOW, Dollars manages to be empathetic and aspirational. I suspect that first adjective is why no political party would ever go near it for use as a campaign song.
