The Comedy of Errors: Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry - I Am the Upsetter (29 May 1992)

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One day, someone with more time and commitment than I will ever have will present a fully comprehensive guide to all the categories of human experience that have been covered in popular song.  I suspect that love won, love lost and love making will take the gold, silver and bronze medals, but there’s a good chance that the fourth place holly medal will go to score settling disses to former musical colleagues.  And if so, then I Am the Upsetter will be pushing for attention alongside the likes of How Do You Sleep?, Too Many People and Sorrow Will Come in the End.

Reggae is no stranger to beef in its grooves and this blog has featured a number of reggae tracks in which performers are either calling out their musical or criminal rivals, but when Lee Perry recorded this in 1968, he had one target in mind; his former mentor and boss, Coxsone Dodd.  Perry had worked under Dodd since the late 50s and as well as managing his sound system for him, Perry had recorded a number of records on Dodd’s Studio One label.  However, the pair’s relationship began to deteriorate as the 1960s wore on, and by 1968, Perry was his own man and ready to tear things up when he came to record this on Amalgamated Records for Joe Gibbs.

Despite the gentle rise and fall of the verses and Perry’s winsomely high vocal, the track drips with contempt and sour feeling.  Perry feels ill-used and paints Dodd as self-obsessed, selfish  and a leech:

You take people as fool
Then use them for a tool

There’s a reckoning to be paid, according to Perry, who sets it out in terms that could be construed as threatening violence or more likely, with Dodd representing the old guard against which “the avenger” Perry was comparing himself, obsolescence.  This would be harder to achieve, but far more damaging if it could be done.  Nevertheless, Perry is arming himself for a scrap which he intends to win.

I promise you the left and the right
And there’ll be the uppercut

But it’s the refrain of “Suffer, you’re born to suffer” that pushes this track to another level of nastiness.  The pupil determined not just to better his teacher, but to grind him into the dust.  We’ve
all had moments like that towards bosses, but very few of us can express it this well.  Ultimately, Coxsone Dodd’s legacy was safe but if nothing else, the track gave Perry, who recorded it under his original monicker of Lee ‘King’ Perry both a name for his own record label and more importantly,
his sublime backing group, who would see their work chopped up and repurposed by him in the name of dub to gamechanging effect over the subsequent years.

Video courtesy of trojangilly
Lyrics copyright of Lee Perry

The Comedy of Errors: Bauhaus - Dark Entries (29 May 1992)

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If you were going to choose a year to write a book about Gothic Rock, then 1991/92 would have been an ideally timed choice.  With Grunge as the ascendant form of guitar-rooted music at the time, it made sense to look at a scene with which it shared a lot in common on a thematic basis, if not a sartorial one.  We’re still a year or so away from I Hate Myself and I Want to Die at this point, but it was a message which Goth rock bands had been extolling well over a decade earlier, and just as with Nirvana, the best of them had been doing it with a touch of flair and exuberance that made the material more intoxicating than it otherwise may have seemed when set down on the back of a record sleeve.  And while Kurt Cobain may, on the face of it, have little in common with Bauhaus’s lead singer, Peter Murphy - described by Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 as “teeteringly tall, gaunt, with a bruised pout and perfect cheekbones..a Goth pin-up, the ultimate erotic enigma.” (Reynolds, page 432), what was Courtney Love but Grunge’s repackaging of Siouxsie Sioux? Which leads us to the question, when is a Goth not a Goth?  As far as Reynolds was concerned, Siouxsie and the Banshees were Goth rock, but not everyone seemed to agree with this and that is where Peel’s play of Bauhaus’s Dark Entries on 29/5/92 comes in.

Mick Mercer’s book, Gothic Rock: All You Ever Wanted to Know....But Were Too Gormless to Ask was released through Cleopatra, with an accompanying compilation album released through Jungle Records.  The book pre-dated the album by a few months and Peel made reference to the fact that he had played some records earlier in the year based on bands/artists covered in the book and was now turning his attention to the album. He mentioned the sleevenotes to the album, which opened with a quote from a letter written by Tim Collins, the manager of Siouxsie and the Banshees to the label putting the record together, “Many thanks for your wonderful offer to be included in a cavalcade of Goth-geek.  I’m frankly amazed that some of the bands listed have agreed, however I can understand why others have.  I’m afraid we will decline this wonderful opportunity on the grounds of Mick’s comment that Siouxsie and the Banshees were not part of the Goth movement. We’ll just have to hope that our exclusion from this project won’t reflect too badly upon us.”  Peel felt that it did, but he didn’t read out Mercer’s response to Collins as set down in the sleevenotes, “How could it? Nobody even thinks of you anymore.  The Banshees, Showaddywaddy, Baccarah (sic)...all legends in their own time but sadly no longer with us.” (Mercer). What’s most surprising to me, as someone used to bands rejecting that they were part of any scene, is to hear a representative of one displaying such petulance at having not been thought to be part of it, especially when considering that, by 1992, Goth rock suggested the likes of The Cult and The Sisters of Mercy trying to ape mid-80s U2, rather than its then contemporary exemplars, Rosetta Stone or Creaming Jesus.

Bauhaus’s 1980 single, Dark Entries was the opening track on the compilation, and having spent most of yesterday’s England-Tonga match working through the tracklisting by navigating YouTube, it was very much the best track on there, though I’d give an honourable mention to The Danse Society.  The lyrics are psychosexual bollocks, albeit delivered with a passion and conviction that pins the listener back in their seat but it’s the arrangement that really scores - all skittering drums, descending Hammer Horror style guitar lines and distortion effects suggesting frantic sexual encounters in street alleys and hovels.

Video courtesy of Mindkid

The Comedy of Errors: God is my Co-Pilot - I’m Not the One (29 May 1992)

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NOTE - the video features all five tracks from God is my Co-Pilot’s On a Wing and a Prayer 7-inch release through Funky Mushroom Records.  I’m Not the One starts at 4:33.

It’s the evening of 21 December 2018 and your humble blogger is sat in the spare room of his parents’ house in Falmouth, wrapping Christmas presents ahead of a journey back to London, that will have to begin at 5am because he wants to watch Ipswich Town play before he rejoins his wife. Mad fool, though at least they made it partially worthwhile.  As I worked my way through my usual bodge job of wrapping the various gifts, I wasn’t listening to seasonal tunes from Bing, Woody or even Shonen Knife, but I was listening to a full-length file of the John Peel show from 29 May 1992. I often have the files playing while I do other things because I reckon that if a track can distract me from what I’m working on then it justifies its place on my initial lists for blogging.  The crunch comes when I go back to listen to them again subsequently.  For Peel shows where there are lots of tracks which appeal to me then, as I’m sure you can imagine, it takes a lot longer to get anything done.  But for the 29/5/92 show, I found it was a case of 1 good track followed by 4 dull ones.  Needless to say I’d got a good wodge of wrapping done while Peel played tracks by Mudhoney, Scorn, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Oliver Mtukudzi, before suddenly perking up from the scissors and sellotape as a yelping, 51 second blast of off-kilter drumming and scratchy guitar introduced both me and Peel’s 1992 listeners, as it was apparently his first inclusion of them on his show, to  God is my Co-Pilot.  They were to become staples of his show over the next seven years, popping up, as they did here, to provide quick caffeine blasts of sexual ambiguity and romantic anguish.  I don’t think I’m Not the One is a particularly great introduction, I much prefer the second track, I Hate My Friends, which starts at 1:23, and which Peel appears never to have played on the radio. Nevertheless, I highlight it here for all those Peel mixtapers who would get jolted out of their lethargy by short sharp shocks like this one.

Video courtesy of youtubedotmp3

The Comedy of Errors: The God Machine - Pictures of a Bleeding Boy [Peel Session] (29 May 1992)

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Well there I was, a few days ago, talking about Sun Carriage following the yellow-brick road from Plymouth to London, and yet one post later we come to The God Machine, who make that journey look like a stroll to the corner shop.
Formed as a quartet in San Diego, during the mid-80s and calling themselves Society Line; only to re-locate as a trio to New York and rename themselves The God Machine, by the early 90s Robin Proper-Sheppard (guitar/vocals), Jimmy Fernandez (bass) and Ron Austin (drums) had swapped the US for London after meeting someone in New York who promised to record them and put out their music  if they re-located to London.  It appears that this was a vague promise given that when the band got to London, they realised they didn’t have any means of contacting their would-be benefactor.  With money low, they threw themselves into the London squat scene and passed their time with writing and rehearsing between off-the-books work.  In 1991, they released a single on Eve Recordings called Purity and which sparked enough interest for them to be signed to Fiction Records, best known as home to The Cure.  At the time which they recorded this Peel Session, the band were promoting their EP, The Desert Song, the contents of which make up three-quarters of this session, except for the third track which is a cover of a Bauhaus song called Double Dare (and any Bauhaus fans who may be looking in on this blog should sit tight for an appearance from them on this Peel show which I will be covering in the next couple of posts).

The video captures the full session that The God Machine recorded for Peel including his links where he gently sends up the portentous nature of their press release (“No verb in that sentence”) and it’s a strange thing because, for me, I can hear good things in each track especially the funk-industrial groove of second track, The Desert Song, but the only track I find myself wholeheartedly embracing is the final one, Pictures of a Bleeding Boy (starts at 19:28), mainly because it’s the only one where the music seems to be given space to breathe and touches such as Ron Austin’s cymbal washes seem to fit perfectly with the environment that the band are creating.  When carried out in earlier tracks like session opener, Commitment, it feels bludgeoning.  I’m aware though that the faults are probably more in my listening or emotional response.  I always feel that way when I hear pieces of music which clearly have much to recommend them but which I cannot seem to engage with.  In a fantastic  article aboutThe God Machine’s 1993 debut album, Scenes From the Second Storey, Ned Raggett talks about how utterly serious and intense Robin Proper-Sheppard was both within the songs he sang  and when talking about them. Raggett was seduced by that intensity, conceding that The God Machine will not work for a listener if they are not granted your permission to be that intense. Too often, I find myself withholding that consent, but blaming myself for it.

But on Pictures of a Bleeding Boy, all equivocation or doubt falls away.  Lyrically, the track goes to dark places with its allusions to self-harm and depression.

“What if I was to cut my wrists and paint pictures on the wall?
Could you see?/Could you see?
What if I was to cut my wrists and paint pictures on the wall?
A damaged sunset over a blood red sea.”

It fuses gothic rock with grunge and the spirit of Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross. But there’s none of the ethereal peace on offer here that Peter Green and friends produced.  Instead there’s only a wish to eradicate the self through the harming, but no clue of why it has to be this way.  The intensity is still there but in the quieter setting, I find myself more readily able to empathise than I did in the louder, industrial settings of the earlier songs in the session.

Video courtesy of Vibracobra23
Lyrics copyright of Robin Proper-Sheppard

The Comedy of Errors: Sun Carriage - A Kiss to Tell (29 May 1992)

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Even if I disliked this track, it would probably still have made the cut given that Sun Carriage came from Plymouth and even though I come from the other side of the Tamar, West Country boys have to stick together.
Formed in Plymouth but matured in Camden, Sun Carriage briefly flared in the early 1990s with a sound that was a million miles away from The Scene That Celebrates Itself or shoegaze with a combination of drip feed lyricism and swamp rock riffs. They released two EPs on Wiiija Records of which A Kiss to Tell was the last of them.  The contents of the EP, which are presented in full on the video, were studio versions of tracks that the band had recorded in a Peel Session nearly a year earlier.  Peel himself was horrified that the EP had been recorded in August 1991 and had escaped his notice until now.  A Kiss to Tell takes its time to get going with verses that feel like the listener is gazing through a heat haze while having water drops falling onto an exposed scalp.  Eventually, it ratches up the intensity before going out in a blaze of hammer head drum/guitar interplay that sees Sun Carriage encroaching into grunge territory.  Maybe, this would have been a sign of their future direction had they not called it a day in early 1993.  For myself, while A Kiss to Tell has plenty of interest, I think they would have stood a better chance of making a third release if they had put B.A.B.E., the second track on the EP, out front as the lead track given that it had a lot more hit potential.

A Kiss to Tell covers the first 5:57 of the video. The third track, Written By... starts at 9:35.

Video courtesy of bonbonfabrik

The Comedy of Errors: John Lee Hooker - No Shoes (29 May 1992)

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Imagine an alternate universe Radio 1 where, one day, John Peel is called in to see Derek Chinnery or Johnny Beerling and is told, “Your show is covering too many bases.  We want you to specialise in one genre and base your programme around that.  Which one do you want to cover?”  For Peel, this would probably have been the DJ equivalent of Sophie’s Choice, but if push came to shove, I think he might have plumped for doing a blues music show.  Now, this could have subjected Peel to a lot of records he wouldn’t have enjoyed given that modern late 20th Century blues rock featured plenty of examples of bald men with ponytails playing “serious gee-tar” and other such grisliness.  But I’m sure he would have considered it worth it to have uncovered more White Stripes.  Even if he had been panning for gold in a sea of shit, I think that he would have taken the opportunity to fill the gaps with old blues records.  Even though this would have meant that he was spending more time looking back than forward - something he never wanted to do as a matter of course - I know of no musical form which caused him to revere his favourite artists more than any of those with a smoky voice, an electric guitar and a case of the blues.

This was certainly true on this evening when Peel played John Lee Hooker’s 1960 single, No Shoes, which he was enjoying as part of a 6-CD Hooker retrospective from Charly R&B called The Vee-Jay Years 1955-1964, which Peel regarded as his best period:

“You can fill  stadiums with all the equipment you can get and all of the dancing folk and backing singers and whatever you like, and you’re still not going to get anything that sounds as good as this.” (Peel before playing No Shoes on 29/5/92).

High praise indeed, though it has to be said there are no real surprises in No Shoes.  It’s fairly typical ‘poverty-row’ blues given an added bit of emotional punch by Hooker’s protagonist referencing the effect that “hard times” have on his children as well as himself.  The tune fades out quickly too after 2:24, though one can imagine that in a live context it could have stretched on endlessly.  However, what clinches its place on my mixtape is the sense of atmosphere that Hooker and chums fit in to the recording.  It’s pure late night, booze on your eyelids, blues - lulling you to sleep with the contrast between Hooker’s licks and the electric strum, while snapping you awake to make you consider the poverty that these poor souls have to endure.
“He’s a solid sender.” (Peel after playing No Shoes on 29/5/92)

Video courtesy of EaSy RideR oO7

The Comedy of Errors: Madbox - Clean/Superconductor - Bushpilot (29 May 1992)

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These were my favourite selections from a suite of five records which Peel played on 29/5/92 as examples of recent American singles which he had enjoyed.  The other tracks were Young Splendor by Pond, Turn Down by Three Hour Tour which Peel felt had touches of The Beatles about it and
Somebody Owes Me Money by Small which made my list of selections from this show, but fell down  when listened back to.

Instead, I went with the noise and both of these share the fact that they are short, sharp bursts of pure rock energy.  Clean is marginally my favourite, probably because I like its mix of motorcycle start-up riffs mingled with that Southern Baptist rock vibe prevalent around the “I wanna find the water/Or I will drown.” chorus.  I can’t make out what sins they are hoping to wash away though.  Madbox only released two singles while they were going.  Indeed, Clean is a track on the last of these, the Donkey Boy EP, but someone clearly liked them enough to put out an anthology of their unreleased recordings under the name Making Haste Slowly.  Maybe answers to their sins can be found there.

Superconductor were no strangers to Peel’s show or this blog and with their seven guitarists and two bassists cook up another brew of near impenetrable, but undeniably exciting noise.  I can’t make out the lyrics but the title, Bushpilot gets me thinking that they’ve come up with a fabulously inventive name for the penis.  Indeed the rapidly ascending guitar passage from 1:05 onwards, interspersed with timer beeps and homage to the Thighmaster, sounds like nothing quite so much as a gallop towards orgasm.  Sex was certainly on Superconductor’s mind given that Bushpilot was part of their latest release, Heavy with Puppy.  As well the sonic excess, Peel also enjoyed the bandlisting in the liner notes which revealed that Bushpilot had been brought to us by:
Dream Whip (guitar)
It’s On You (guitar)
Thighmaster - Maybe he was the Bushpilot? (bass)
He Who is Named (vocals, guitar)
Flying Fist (guitar)
Noise Annoys (guitar)
El Impacto (vocals, drums bontempi)
Sweet Bitch (bass)
Alan Smithee (guitar)
Delicious Warm (guitar)

Clearly the North American underground rock scene of the early 1990s contained at least one bunch of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich fans.

Videos courtesy of Irresponsableful (Madbox) and Marshall Clarke (Superconductor)