Guys and Dolls: The Electric Prunes - Get Me to the World on Time (16 April 1993)

 

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Peel was still receiving correspondence about his week covering for Jakki Brambles and on this show he read a letter from Barry Warren congratulating him on his stint.* Warren said that he had last written to Peel back in the days of The Perfumed Garden to request a play of Get Me to the World on Time by The Electric Prunes. Peel hadn’t played it for Warren in 1967, and he wasn’t holding his breath in 1993, to which Peel could only reply, Better late than never, Barry….

A US top 30 hit - and only 2 places away from breaking into the UK Top 40 - in March/April 1967, Get Me to the World On Time does an excellent job of reworking the trick of a song like Got To Get You Into My Life in that every line of its lyrics could be interpreted either as a love song or a drug song. 

The love song angle leans more towards the sexual than the hand holding, and it’s supported by the music which sounds at times like it’s evoking heavy breathing, throbbing heartbeats and the surge towards an orgasm. The world in this case means the sweet spot inside James Lowe’s lover, rather than Planet Earth. 

If Get Me to the World on Time was a drug song, the songwriters Annette Tucker and Jill Jones chose to hide in plain sight by referencing chemical reactions, disturbed minds and shaken hormones, in a trip to the world on the other side of perception. But, so skilful is the writing that the song could be performed either at the church disco or during a full-on, freak-out orgy and would fit in either setting.

I can find no evidence of Get Me to the World on Time being hit by airplay bans or censorship, but it’s possible that the ambiguity of the lyric stopped it going as high as it should have. If so, it would be another example of the way in which the acts of others conspired to make life difficult for The Electric Prunes. Nobody seems to have been content to let them do their own thing. Although they wrote songs for their first two albums, their producer, David Hassinger, encouraged them to record original material by other writers alongside their own content. This gave them their chart hits but in December 1967, it led to the band going into the studio to record an album which would be written, arranged and produced by David Axelrod. Mass in F Minor yanked The Electric Prunes from Bo Diddley-style psychedelia to religious music, sung in Latin and Greek, albeit fed through a psychedelic pop-rock filter.**  The classically trained Axelrod’s compositions were more complicated than The Electric Prunes were able to cope with, but instead of changing course, the Electric Prunes found themselves being sidelined - only 3/5 of the band played on the record; session musicians taking up the brunt of the work. 

After some poorly received attempts to play tracks from the album on tour in early 1968, the original Electric Prunes lineup disbanded, but as the rights to the name were held by Hassinger, he put together a new lineup and set them up to record another album with Axelrod, Release of an Oath, which was released in November ‘68.  

The Electric Prunes name was finally laid to rest in 1969 after the release of Just Good Old Rock and Roll.

30 years later, the original line-up reformed to play live and record again, releasing three albums since the turn of the Millennium. The band has continued to the present day, but in a case of history repeating itself, none of the original members are with the band anymore following James Lowe’s death in May 2025.  

Video courtesy of Duophonic for Stereo Phonographs ll

*Barry had already been in touch with Peel on Wednesday 7 April.

**I listened to a bit of Mass in F Minor while writing this post, and “awkward” doesn’t even begin to describe the stylistic fit. Take your Prunes from either 1966/67 or 21st Century and it’ll keep you regular. Anything else will go right through you.

Guys and Dolls: Arcwelder - And Then Again (16 April 1993)

 

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As with The Wedding Present’s Rotterdam, And Then Again owes its place on the metaphorical mixtape to a single piece of sound which lifts the track above the swamp of indifference - though that being said, I do think this is a better song overall than Rotterdam.  

Starting the track off and then recurring throughout each verse is a ringing, single note that serves as an almost celestial presence over Arcwelder’s performance. I tried to think what it was that the note reminded me of: tear ducts as in the piano riff on Trouble by Coldplay? Not quite, it put me more in mind of the “guitar in a bell” sound that Datblygu achieved in their Peel Session version of Carpiog. The bell motif stayed with me, and then I got it. That note: insistent, urgent, remorseless was like an alarm clock, desperately trying to arouse its owner from a dream. Though this isn’t a particularly striking revelation given that the chorus begins with the line, This is a dream…

 

When we consider the content of And Then Again, we find ourselves in a sad domestic nightmare. At least one half of the relationship realises that they’re in trouble, given that the second line of the chorus is This is a lie.  The woman has left because she can no longer believe in the relationship or get her partner’s nose out of the paper to notice her. Instead of an alarm clock, the ringing note could be an alarm bell ringing from inside the man’s subconscious about the state of his relationship. And the sudden shut off of the note at the end of the song feels like recognition of the problem suddenly arriving, only to be drowned out by the fading echo of the recently slammed door.

Video courtesy of rp61productions.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: The Fall - Service/I’m Going to Spain (16 April 1993)

 

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As was previously mentioned, Peel had received a copy of the latest album by The Fall. In this case, his first listen to The Infotainment Scan came via its cassette version. This was useful as he had had recently had a new car radio fitted, which had included a cassette player. He was pleased about this as it meant that he could listen to demo tapes while out driving again. Peel continued his campaign against the onslaught of developing technology by taking the time to find a radio which could be tuned by turning a dial rather than by pressing buttons.

So, the essential website, The Annotated Fall appears to be no longer operational. This is dreadful news for Peel show bloggers because it means we now need to stick our necks out and try and interpret for ourselves what Mark E.Smith meant in his lyrics. I guess it’s the image of the old bastard, sitting up in a pub on a cloud somewhere, pissing himself laughing and saying to himself, “He’s a genius this bloke, isn’t he? He really should be teaching musicology somewhere. I could learn from him.” that has us so wary of interpreting his material. However, in the case of Service, I have a theory which I think fits well enough. So using the Who-What-Why-When-Where-How theory and mixing it with the kind of mental deductions required for the latter rounds of 3-2-1, my take on Service is that it is a poignant song about ghosts and mental illness.

Winter is here declares Smith. A line setting which gets further clarification with references to kicking rotting leaves, the brownness of tree branches and streets washed clean by the rain. However, the lines referring to vulperines (anything with the features of a fox), wolverines (which here refers less to the X-Man and more to the carnivorous animal, which by extension leads to thoughts of werewolves) and the witch that is at Smith’s left shoulder all conspire to give a strong Halloween vibe. But Service doesn’t exist in the world of little kids in plastic masks and cheap capes going door to door for fizzy candy, it lives squarely in the realm of the supernatural. Smith’s character is putting on his hat and corny brown leather jacket in order to go to work at the local mental hospital. I assume he sometimes has to sleep in at work on some nights and that the man who would spit out two or three teeth a night on the floor is the same patient who also laughs at everything and nothing. I think that this particular patient might be equally at home with the witches, vulperines, wolverines and all things associated with All Hallows Eve. It’s my supposition that the patient is R.M. Renfield, the servant of Count Dracula - which is where the title, Service is taken from in this song. Renfield spends the majority of his time in an asylum, both proclaiming the coming of his master and fearful of it.

One striking thing about Service is how elegant it is, with its central piano figure managing to conjure both the feel of a once stately castle and the approaching storm clouds of Dracula’s flight. If it wasn’t for some poor mixing which drowns Smith out at times and the dated synth trumpets, I’d be calling this one of my favourite Fall songs to listen to for pleasure.

During his stint covering for Jakki Brambles, Peel played The Fall’s cover of Lost in Music. On this 16/4/93 show, he played the other cover tune which made it on to The Infotainment Scan, the lesser known I’m Going to Spain, recorded by Steve Bent, an actor who was best known for his appearances in the ITV soap opera, Crossroads.  His single, which was released in 1976, appears at face value to be trying to cash in on the vogue for holiday themed singles which became big hits on the UK charts in the mid-70s, such as Y Viva Espana or Barbados. Unlike them, Bent’s more modest effort missed out on the charts, but was considered awful enough to merit inclusion on the 1978 compilation album, Kenny Everett - The World’s Worst Record Show.* Outside of this, the record had languished in obscurity. Peel didn’t have a copy of his own, and when he signed Bent’s single out of the BBC Record Library so that he could include it in a future programme, he noted that he had been the first person to borrow the record in 17 years.

The Fall didn’t record a cover of it just to take the piss. For a start, Smith liked Crossroads, not least because it starred Carl Wayne for a time, and The Move were one of Smith’s favourite groups. I’m Going to Spain isn’t a great song, but what makes it interesting is that it isn’t concerned about sun, sea and sangria, but about using travel as a way to broaden the mind and life experience.  The refrain at the end of each chorus is I hope I can quickly learn the language, after all. Smith may also have enjoyed the ambivalent humour on lines like :

The factory floor presented me with some tapes of  Elton John.

Though that should keep me company

And I hate them,

Yes I hate the goodbyes….

If we need any further evidence of the regard in which Smith held the song, it’s that he tried to sing it in the same high key register that Bent did. They even sneak the castanets in at the end.

Videos courtesy of The Fall and HexenDefinitive.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

A list of other records released by Crossroads cast members.

*I think this may have been more due to the Crossroads connection rather than the song itself.

Guys and Dolls: Guided by Voices - Exit Flagger (16 April 1993)

 

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It’s exactly 1 year since Guided by Voices first appeared on this blog, a year which covers 3 weeks in terms of Peel shows. My God, how does anything get accomplished here? It’s a good thing he wasn’t doing daytime stand-ins on a regular basis or we’d get nowhere.

So happy anniversary to GbV and it’s a pleasure to come back to a track from the album, Propeller. This was originally intended to be the swansong release for Guided by Voices, who had spent most of the last decade plugging away to widespread indifference. They had quit live performance and chose to make Propeller a bit of a special occasion to sign off with. They restricted its run to 500 vinyl copies and took the time to give each copy a unique cover. 

Exit Flagger, which is the job title given to anyone on a roadworks team who flags traffic off at exits when a road has been closed, alludes to the changes which awaited a band who were ready to take the exit from being Guided by Voices and potentially from music altogether.

I don’t know where I’ve come from.

I don’t know where I’m going.

And I need to find a way out.

And he’s here to help me find it.

The exit flagger could represent all those people down the years who may have advised Robert Pollard that it was time to put rock ‘n’ roll dreams aside and find a “proper” way to make a living. And with the refrain, I’m not going to race you today, it sounds as though Pollard was ready to agree with them. The song continues with Pollard continuing to make promises of change, at least real soon i.e.once GbV have finished their final album. And if Propeller hadn’t found the attention it did, which led the band to carry on, then who knows what road Pollard and friends may have found themselves travelling on. In the event the exit flagger directed them to the future Pollard always wanted.

Video courtesy of PeteAxm.

All lyrics are copyright of Robert Pollard.

Guys and Dolls: Hole - Olympia/Pee Girl/The Void [Peel Session]/ The Raincoats - The Void (16 April 1993)

 

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On Thursday 25 March, 1993, Hole recorded their second and last session for John Peel. In the two years that had passed since they recorded their first session, they had replaced Jill Emery and Caroline Rue with Kristen Pfaff and Patty Schemel on bass and drums respectively. They brought three songs to the session which would eventually feature on the band’s next album, Live Through This, which was released almost a year after this session went out.  Interestingly, Live Through This would also feature two songs which the band had played in their 1991 Peel Session.

Two of the songs saw Hole in attack mode. I wasn’t taken by She Walks On Me, which according to Courtney Love is about the way geeky girls try to impersonate weird girls in order to seem more interesting. Beyond its everyday observation, this could have been a swipe against Riot grrrl bands that Love had so little time for. 

They were certainly the target in Olympia, the capital city of Washington State, noted both for the liberal arts/progressive politics at Evergreen State College, and its music scene which was seen as the hive for riot grrrl bands such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy etc, in the way that Seattle was seen as the hive for grunge music. Although Love’s upbringing was peripatetic, marriage to Kurt Cobain had seen them set up home in Seattle, and on one hand it’s possible to look at Olympia as a song in which one major city disses another major city within the same state. Hole take the piss out of the political earnestness and community ethos of the bands in Olympia, compared to the more nihilistic attitude underpinning the music of Seattle’s bands. The collection of yelped “Yeah?”s which end the track sound somewhat passive aggressive. Less “yeah, I agree with you”, more “yeah, I thought you were a moron and everything you say is confirming it, so I’ll keep drawing out your stupidity for everyone to see.”

The version that Hole recorded for the Peel Session had several differences from the out-take version

which ended up hastily substituting for the original album closer Rock Star* on Live Through This. There’s less profanity for a start, and the session version also has a verse scoffing about time spent with someone called Calvin. This appears to be Calvin Johnson, whose record label K, had distributed records by numerous Olympia bands for over a decade at this point. On the album, the track cuts much more quickly to its point that too many of the bands look and sound the same, that they are condescending to their audience and that all of them preach revolution but leave Love unconvinced that any of them would know what to do if they achieved their goal. Love’s whispered “fascist nexus” comment is particular to the session, and in 1993, could be read as a reaction against politically correct feminism, as embodied by the attitudes of the riot grrrl groups.  It’s a reminder that, in the age of wokeism, the terminology changes but the insults stay the same.

I don’t have many things in common with Courtney Love, but one thing we both had to endure was being given a derogatory nickname in our childhoods. For me, the failure to pull out a handkerchief when I sneezed in a lesson at junior school, and exposed my classmates to a shower of mucus, meant I had to put up with being called Bogieman for the best part of two years, until I went to secondary school.** Love’s nickname was marginally worse as she was known as Pee Girl, mainly due to the smell of urine on unwashed clothes that she often had to wear while living on a hippie commune.  In adulthood, Love managed to regain some semblance of ownership on the nickname. She included it in the lyrics to 20 Years in the Dakota, which was recorded as a b-side to their then current single, Beautiful Son.  

Now, it had a song all to itself, but there’s nothing particularly triumphant or self-asserting about its use here. This is a song in which its lonely and vulnerable heroine is seeking a friend to confide in and unburden themself to amid bursts of domestic violence (Pee girl gets the belt) and allusions to potential sexual abuse (Your milk is so sour). When the song was recorded for Live Through This under the title Softer, Softest, the line became even more uncompromising (Your milk has a dick). Having not long become a mother herself, Love appears to be hitting out at her own mother for the abuse she suffered (Burn the witch/The witch is dead/Burn the witch/Just bring me back her head). She also references her own struggles and self-destructive behaviour, which she was trying to break free from (I’ve got a blister from touching everything I see/The chasm opens up, it steals everything from me.)  The song tries to surge in its final 40 seconds, but remains a sad and dispiriting piece.

Peel played The Raincoats original recording of The Void from their eponymous 1979 debut album on this show and broadcast Hole’s cover of it, 10 tracks later. When you hear the chorus line on The Void it sounds tailor made for Love’s voice. Hole slightly rework the lyrics, referring back to their own Olympia with references to revolution, but both versions do a good job of addressing depression and ennui in a manner which seems invigorating rather than crippling, although the churning violin on The Raincoats original recording provides an extra layer of emotion which isn’t quite there on Hole’s cover.

It could be argued that, in 1993, no-one was doing more to boost the reputation of The Raincoats than Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain. The previous autumn, Cobain had met Ana da Silva while she was working in her cousin’s antiques shop in London. He wrote about this meeting and his request for a copy of The Raincoats debut album in the liner notes to Nirvana’s rarities and early tracks compilation, Incesticide. A few months after this session was broadcast, all three of The Raincoats albums, recorded between 1979 and 1984, were reissued in the UK and US. Cobain again contributed liner notes to the reissue of The Raincoats. Early in 1994, The Raincoats reformed after a 10 year hiatus, and exactly a year after this show, Peel broadcast a new session by them, which included a dedication to the recently deceased Cobain.

When considering this session as a whole - pardon the pun - it’s a curious beast really. A cover and 3 works in progress. It shows signs of the poppier direction that Hole were looking to move in, away from the days of Pretty On the Inside and which had prompted original bassist, Jill Emery leave the band.  I wonder whether the content of this session would have produced any new Hole fans. I’m not sure that it would have, but it’s an interesting signpost to where the band were going and would have asked any existing fans, listening in, whether they were going to join them on their journey.  At the end though, I find myself going back to a comment Peel made after playing Hole’s session version of Drown Soda on 13 March 1992: There are so many bands doing pop, but only one band doing Hole.

*Although Olympia replaced Rock Star on Live Through This, the substitution was made after the album artwork and track listings had been completed.  Live Through This was released a week after Kurt Cobain’s suicide and Rock Star’s refrain of You’d rather die was attached to verses about being in Nirvana, creating an unbearably shocking case of art imitating life.  Curiously, the titles have never been changed on reissues of the album, making the Peel Session one of the few recordings to feature Olympia under its own name.

** It could have ended up being replaced by an even worse nickname in subsequent months, given that an attack of diarrhoea during a PE lesson in Year 5 caused me to shit myself. But I got away with that to a large extent because while people were aware it happened, no-one actually witnessed it, they just knew that something pretty extreme had happened which meant I had to be cleaned up by the headmistress in the toilets.

Hole videos courtesy of Anna Logyka, VibraCobra23 Redux and JusticeforCourtney.

Raincoats video courtesy of The Raincoats - Topic

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Metamorphism - Mecano (16 April 1993)

 

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Tony Clements, the man behind Metamorphism, would, over the next couple of years, go on to become something of a fixture on Peel show playlists as part of Distorted Waves of Ohm.

Mecano was the lead track on an EP called Mekanix, and it makes for a wonderful listen with its blend of techno, tribal and musique concrete. As the video shows, Peel made another of his invariably inaccurate attempts to identify the distant voice at the start of the track. His guess at Mark E. Smith may well have been due to over-excitement given that this 16/4/93 show, which the video is directly taken from, featured Peel’s first plays of tracks from the new Fall album, The Infotainment Scan. It quickly becomes clear that the voice wasn’t Smith’s unless he was working for NASA on the side, which provides quite the picture come launch day: Commencing countdown. 10-ah, 9-ah, 8-ah, 7-ah, 6-ah, 5-ah, 4-ah, 3-ah, 2-ah, 1-ah. Lift off! Lift off! It’s cleared the tower. Oh…that’s fucked then, isn’t it?

Peel would continue to make auditory guesses until his last days.

“Spacey” best describes the vibe around Mecano, and the collection of voice samples from Mission Control, tribal cries and I am a mechanical man refrain sounds like a dry run for a concept album where robots from the future land on a planet/time populated by primitive man. I’d have bought that record, but isn’t it curious how yet again in this show, we find ourselves back in the milieu of Planet of the Apes.

Video courtesy of distortedwavesofohm.

Guys and Dolls: The Wedding Present - Rotterdam (16 April 1993)

 

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Placing at Number 22 on The Phantom Fifty and completely unconnected to The Beautiful South’s hit single of the same name, this is something of a damp squib for its first two minutes. That’s not because of the content, despite the fact that it breaks no new ground. It’s a Wedding Present song, so obviously David Gedge is lamenting the latest piece of miscommunication which has left him grovelling apologetically to a woman. She feels sad, and he feels bad for making her that way.  I wanted you but not the way you think. We’ve heard it all before and perhaps because of this, the producer of the track, Steve Albini has decided that we don’t need to clearly hear what Gedge is singing. It isn’t quite John Lennon yelling the final chorus of Yer Blues into a dead microphone, but you have to strain to hear what Gedge is singing and it doesn’t help the song given that Gedge’s singing voice has always walked the line between distinctive and unprepossessing. My notes from this show had a question mark next to Rotterdam, and when I listened to it again for the first time in a year, last week, I was all ready to keep it off the metaphorical mix tape, based on those first two minutes.

And then, at precisely 2:00, the reason for sticking with Rotterdam makes its entrance. Peter Solowka’s multi-note guitar riff encapsulates a choked sob of such distress that it can’t fail to move the listener. Over the last minute, the whole band move in on this as the riffs and drum fills get more urgent, taking the sound from sobs and tears to the metaphorical smashing up of the room. It could be Gedge taking out his regret on anything that isn’t nailed down, or his friend breaking everything in sight while he sits cowering in the corner.  Either way, it’s the closest thing to violence that I’ve ever heard on a Wedding Present song and pulls the dollars out of the fire in fine style.

Rotterdam was recorded for The Wedding Present’s 1991 album, Seamonsters, which marked Solowka’s last work with the band, before he devoted himself full time to The Ukrainians.

John Lennon demonstrates how dead mic singing should be done from 3:17.

Videos courtesy of The Wedding Present - Topic and The Beatles - Topic

Lyrics are copyright of David Gedge and as we can’t hear them, please feel free to read them.