A new year in both real and Peel life senses. And the similarities with the first weekend of the year both now and 24 years ago are hard to ignore. In 1992, I was facing up to the end of the Christmas holiday and the return to school. In 2016, I'm writing this, hoping that I have the gumption to follow through on my plans to return to work an hour or so earlier than I usually do, so I can use that time wisely and make sure I can go home at 5pm.
1992 heralded my 16th birthday and the imminent enormity of my GCSE exams. 2016 will herald my 40th birthday and a sense that I need to make some professional changes to my life.
Both years were linked by a show - 1992 would finally see Oliver come to the stage, though we will have to wait longer for it on this blog as it was staged in April of that year, and 14 months worth of updating this blog has only taken us from November '91 to January '92. In 6 weeks time, the production of Dracula that I'm directing for Hayes Players in Kent will be staged. Different disciplines, same excitement. Only Peel is absent, though of course thanks to the wonders of the Internet, he's never truly absent. What can Huw Stephens play that would allow me to write this up as the sound of Dracula? Would it have the same level of variety? I doubt it somehow, but I must start listening to his programme again. I love what I'm doing on this blog, but I'm aware of the fact that I'm essentially living in the past with it and that Peel kept 9/10s of his sight fixed on the present and that this in turn, facilitated the future. Perhaps one day, I'll start on Peeling Forward the Years, a blog focussing on Stephens/Rob Da Bank selections aiming at bringing the whole caboodle up to the present day.
But for now, we ring in 1992. Due to the vagaries of the time boundaries I've put on the shows, I've listened to, I've had to skip the first show of the year on Saturday 4 January, one which David Cavanagh wrote about in Good Night and Good Riddance and which means I've yet to hear the fabled KLF/Extreme Noise Terror collaboration, which looks a right bag of shite going by the clip from the Brits 1992 (includes traces of Simon Bates). I was also unimpressed at time of writing anyway, with the Festive 50 winner for 1992 which sounded incredibly ordinary to me.
I was spoiled by Peel's late '91 shows which included track after track which was available for sharing. However, 5 January 1992 saw a number of selections which I couldn't share. The missing tracks include:
Calton Sounds - Mediwa Jose (African soukous music - "a most agreeable 7-inch single")
Milk - Wrong Again (Peel Session - "Love those kids") this fantastic group about to end their recording career as spectacularly as they began it.
Calamity Jane - You Got It Rough (female fronted grunge rock from Portland, Oregon)
Nothing Painted Blue - Let's Kiss (a song which included the line "I struck a fender with a pipe wrench". Peel described this as one of the greatest lines in popular song).
The selections were taken from the first 45 and last 45 minutes of the 5/1/92 show. What nuggets did I miss in the time between?
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