The Comedy of Errors: Geek - Night Moves on the Catwalk (22 May 1992)

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Here’s a question for anyone reading this who has their finger on the pulse of pop music culture these days.  Feel free to comment below or message me on Twitter @greasepaintpeel. Is the pendulum swinging competition between the UK and the USA over which country was the epicentre of popular music culture at any one time still a thing?  The competition I refer to saw America throw down the gauntlet in the 50s with Elvis and the rock ‘n’ roll explosion.  Britain struck back circa 1963/64
through The Beatles and  the British Invasion and so it rolled on through the following scenes and fads:
-folk rock (US)
-soul music (US)
-psychedelia (an honourable draw)
-country rock (US)
-glam rock (UK)
-punk rock (a UK phenomena but birthed in the US through The Ramones and CBGB crowd)
-new wave (US)
-post-punk (UK)
-hip-hop (US)
-new pop (UK)
-gangsta rap (US)
-acid house (UK)
-grunge (US)
-Britpop (UK)
-garage/grime (UK)
-R ‘n’ B (US and dominant now)
And then I finally lost track around the time of New Rock when The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Von Bondies and other stripped down garage US bands were held up as the zeitgeist.
Is this still happening? It used to vex the music weeklies and it remains to be seen whether Peel ever picked up a copy of the much missed Select magazine’s infamous, Yanks Go Home! issue.  He usually managed to sidestep debates over which country was better in the popular music stakes, feeling they were reductive and pointless.  However, several shows during the early 90s find him lamenting the state of British guitar music for derivativeness, while talking up American bands for being less in thrall to an established canon of influences, their willingness to pay tribute to acts who were not widely known and also for being less openly competitive with and disrespectful of one another.

Tribute/cover albums of esoteric bands/performers were a frequent staple of release schedules on smaller American labels.  Virginia based label, Simple Machines were no exception to this and in 1992 they put out an album called Fortune Cookie Prize, a selection of 12 tracks by Beat Happening, performed by the likes of Unrest, the perpetually out of luck on this blog Superchunk, Sub Pop’s latest hopes Seaweed as well as Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon in combination with Epic aka Kevin Godfrey - it being federal US law that members of Sonic Youth appear on any tribute compilation album being released with a product run of less than 2000 units.

Peel played Geek’s reworking of the track Cat Walk from Beat Happening’s 1987 album, Jamboree.  The performance is quite slapdash and shambling for most of its running time, sounding like a B-52s out-take at times, though I think it’s a better performance than the original’s junior school music lesson vibe.  Like Gospel Fish’s Brush Dem, it’s a song of contradictions.  It starts by lamenting the sight of a former lover going around with a new man and adding insult to injury, the girl is still swanning around wearing his sweater.  However by the next verse, the singer feels that it’s for the best that they’re not together given that “She has a nasty habit of being pure”. What Geek bring to the track that wasn’t in the original are their own female snarled intermissions (possibly delivered by  Jenny Toomey who went on to form Grenadine) between the original verses and containing the brutal but undeniable truth that “Sometimes you have to settle for second best” and the potentially beguiling but probably stomach churning “Night moves under my sweater”. References to playing songs from 1962 and the doleful male vocals suggest this is a small town romance and that the participants will take what they’re given in terms of who they rebound to and be grateful for it or else.  Geek’s version at least suggests that “It doesn’t matter” because there are plenty more fish in the sea, while Beat Happening suggest the protagonist will be fine about it all once he gets back under the bonnet of his car.  It’s almost Ayckbournesque in its sense of male futilism.

Peel looked forward to receiving more US compilation albums.  He read out a press release from Cargo Records promoting albums paying tribute to R.E.M and Wipers.

Take out your claves now, children...



Videos courtesy of YT2006 (Geek) and Ashley Ince (Beat Happening)