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