Touched by the Hand of God was recorded by New Order in 1987 as both a standalone single and a contribution to the soundtrack of the film Salvation!, a comedy parodying televangelism - and how delicious it has been in 2020 to see those odiously, slick frauds melting down in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s defeat. It would be even better were it not for the large numbers of people that they have brainwashed or bullied into thinking that the vote is invalid because Trump lost.
But in October 1992, poking fun at the Christian Right was the last thing on John Peel’s mind when he played this. As he explained, the reasoning behind its airing on this edition of John Peel’s Music was altogether more celebratory:
The John Peel Roadshow was out and about in a manner of speaking last night....It was something like the third or the fourth or the fifth anniversary of The Waterfront in Norwich, it might even have been the second, I can’t remember at all. But I went along there to play one or two records, and it was quite moving actually because when I got up on stage, I couldn’t speak because there was so much cheering and shouting. I think they thought I was Andy Peebles to be quite honest with you. I soon got rid of them, I mean I cleared the dance floor in no time at all and ended up playing records to a deserted room, by and large. And this is one of the records that I played because, I’ll let you into a little dee-jaying secret here, what you tend to do is put on long records so that you can just stand there, look bored and wait for it all to end. And this is one of the records that I put on in those circumstances and it sounded pretty darned good at huge volume, so turn your radios up.
With Christmas imminent, my work being excessively busy and various domestic and international problems to think about, I’ve found myself spending more time worrying about the various spellings of this track and artist than has probably been legally sane. Was it Green Line or Green Light? One pressing of the single that I saw plumped for Greenling. And was it Garnet Silk or Garnett Silk?
Being a reggae infused record, there was also the consideration of what the eponymous Green Line meant? Was it ganja related? A particular type of hemp, maybe? Alas, no. Silk seems to have been far too clean-living a man to have indulged in that during his short life, and it certainly wouldn't have benefitted his gorgeous singing voice. A lot of his material, including this track, was deeply spiritual in its tone. I think the green and red lines mentioned here refer to lines that if followed either lead to redemption (green) or temptation (red). In other words, the track is an affirmation of faith towards Jah, a commitment and expression of love to God. Which makes it a perfect pre-Christmas track for this blog.
Stay safe and well over this festive period, friends.
John Peel’s compilation album of choice through late 1992/early 1993 was a multi volume series called Girls in the Garage. Released through Romulan Records and described as “A collection of girl garage and girl groups from the 60s”, the series had just issued an EP labelled Volume 6 1/2. Future blog posts here will hopefully be able to bring you more of the selections Peel played from some of the volumes including tracks with such alluring titles as I’m Gonna Destroy That Boy as well as a 1965 cover of a Shangri-Las b-side which appears to have invented The Jesus and Mary Chain.
To begin with though, let us take you to an alternative vision of pop-life. The 1950s saw an explosion of songs about cars, predominantly from a male point of view in which they not only offered the invitation of a ride in their cars, but also plenty of lovingly described detail about the physical make-up of their cars. Gleaming bodywork, powerful engine, plush interior - the Freudian inferences about sexual and romantic fetishisation of their cars are inescapable. The car was both a status symbol and an expression of their identity. As a result, listeners were invited to consider automotive expressions of masculinity such as Buick 59 (The Medallions) or aspiration as in Somethin’ Else (Eddie Cochran). In the 60s, and especially with the emergence of Surf music, the car song would soar to greater heights. What’s your favourite?
But while the men obsessed over their cars, what of the women? Well, while the likes of The Delicates did sterling work in expressing female love of cars, The Darby Sisters were speaking for every woman who found themselves fighting an unequal battle with a car for their lover’s attention. Written by the sisters as a b-side to their 1959 debut single, Misunderstood, Go Back, Go Back to Your Pontiac sees the sisters giving their lover an ultimatum to choose either the car or them. It’s all quite charmingly lo-fi with the cowbell sounding like the clank and clatter of engine repairs serving as a backdrop to the laments about late arrivals to dates because the needs of the 1933 Pontiac superseded those of the sisters. Listening to it with my greasepaint hat on, I wondered if it may have been a favourite track of playwright, Alan Ayckbourn, whose repertoire of plays through the 70s and early 80s specialised in family dysfunction whereby wives lost their grip on their sanity due to being married to men who spent more time exploring the world under the bonnet of their car instead of within the heart and mind of their wives.
Alas, Peel had little sympathy for the sisters’ plight. Being an enthusiastic petrolhead, he agreed with the sleevenotes to the album in that, given the choice, he too would probably fall for the charms of a ‘33 Pontiac ahead of a socialite.
Taking their name from “the Hindu God of Cosmic Dance”, The Visions of Shiva were a German nu-Age, techno, trance duo. One half of the duo was Harald Blüchel, who under the alias, Cosmic Baby provided one of my favourite tracks from Peel’s shows over the summer of 1992 with Cosmikk Trigger 1.
Perfect Day has none of the sensuality which made Cosmikk Trigger 1 quite so intoxicating to listen to but does a better job as a dance floor filler.
If the Discogs link above is working - and this is a moot point because I’ve been having problems pasting links on the blog tonight - you’ll be able to read the comments and spend your time listening to the various piano pieces which the track is built out of and trying to place where they come from. The opening, circular piano riff is said to be based on the piano part in the outro of Purple Rain by Prince. This is quickly usurped by synths which range from the understated to the declamatory. At 3:35, it’s time for another round of Name That Piano Piece. Again, the Discogs comments range from We Love You by The Rolling Stones to the more contemporary Love 91 mix of Playing with Knives by Bizarre Inc, though I’m not entirely convinced by either suggestion.
My notes for this show selected this track from Belgian dance duo, Astrospider’s debut release, Rave Odyssey 2001 as my favourite track of the night, so apologies if anyone’s worried about the quality of my other selections from 25/10/92 as they roll out over the next fortnight. There’s nothing especially world-changing about Synthetic Happiness, but once the synths drop in at the 50 second mark, I think you’d have to have a hard heart to not be up and dancing. I’d also wager that DJs in nightclubs and discotheques all across Europe probably hit their strobes in unison at the 2:30 mark.
Released via Wonka Beats, Peel had picked up a copy of Rave Odyssey 2001 during his fortnight driving around Europe. He revealed that he had made contact with a number of different record labels during his trip. The labels had eagerly sent him records for his consideration. These arrived together with the many other records sent into him from all over the world. He revealed that the amount of records waiting for him after his fortnight away measured 23 and a half feet.
The recent 2020 US presidential election was the second one in this blog’s lifetime. I’ve been fortunate that happy accidents of scheduling have meant that within a few weeks of the elections, I’ve been able to post a track from John Peel’s 1992 playlists which has somehow managed to predict the political mood of the last two US presidential elections. In late November 2016, I was able to mark (because I sure as hell wasn’t celebrating it) the victory of Donald Trump with The Corner Hot Dog Stand by Gag, a story of a Mexican family business getting pushed out of its pitch and replaced with a faceless, neon restaurant. Gag did at least draw the line at making the Mexicans pay for it. Now, nearly a month after voting day, I’m delighted to be able to celebrate Trump’s defeat with Youth Against Fascism, originally recorded for Sonic Youth‘s 1992 album, Dirty. The actions and behaviour of a large number of prominent Republican Party leaders and officials since the election make it a perfect track to mark the occasion.
Just as it was 4 years ago, Trump would always be the story of the election and that remains the case even after he has lost this one. It’s been incredible to see how, either through not being able to bring themselves to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory at one end of the scale or by clamping themselves to the ongoingclown car that is Trump’s legal challenges driven by Rudy Giuliani who is as determined to shred any dignity and gravitas he may once have had as he is to uncover evidence of voter fraud and accompanied by Jenna Ellis who went from arch Trump critic to breathless fangirl over the course of Trump’s sole term. Of course, she’s not the only person in Republican circles to do this. Step forward Senator Lindsey Graham, who over 4 years went from a Trump critic to the only named person, so far, who tried to influence this election in a way that could be considered questionable. Don’t take my word for it, ask Brad Raffensperger, The Republican Secretary of State for Georgia. Trump has galvanised the right wing of American politics in many different ways over the last 5 years, but I don’t think anybody quite foresaw that he would be skilled enough to make the response to his defeat one where so many people on the right essentially try and argue that he should be granted the powers of a dictator and be allowed to stay in power regardless of the numbers.
When Sonic Youth recorded Youth Against Facism, their targets were fairly obvious symbols of the extreme right wing such as the Ku Klux Klan or Westboro Baptist Church. Although they made jibes against George H.W. Bush, they would have any number of targets to aim at within the Republican Party now, especially those like Mitch McConnell who through either their silence or belligerence towards compromise and lack of a view of the bigger picture ending up fomenting an atmosphere which has seen fascism and totalitarianism drift more centrally into the American body politic than at any time since the late 1960s. Given the potential problems that the Republicans face in trying to get voters out to vote in 2 Senate seat runoff elections in January - Republican National Committee Chair, Ronna McDaniel, has just these past few days discovered the difficulties of trying to both claim electoral fraud and convince those whose votes your party needs to trust in the system - I find myself asking which will be destroyed first: The United States of America or The Republican Party? Given the way the Conservative Party crashed the UK in order to achieve Brexit as a means of securing their own survival, I’m not optimistic about the answer to that question.
Youth Against Fascism is built around three main elements: a rotating bass line, a frantic - almost apoplectic guitar part - which sounds like a hundred people spewing invective and which may have been played by Ian Mackaye, who was invited down to the studio by the band while they were recording this song. On arrival he was handed a guitar and asked to improvise a guitar part. The final main element is provided by Thurston Moore‘s refrain at the end of each verse, “It’s the song I hate” which takes in the poison spread by white supremacists, the bigotry of rednecks, American foreign policy especially in relation to the 1991 Gulf War and in yet another reminder that things never really change in American politics, a sideswipe at the behaviour of a Republican nominee - subsequently appointee - for the US Supreme Court. The line “I believe Anita Hill” showing support to her allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. Has anyone in recent years written anything supporting those who made similar accusations against Brett Kavanaugh? And don’t get me started on the way Republicans have manipulated the make-up of that court over the last 5 years and the blatant, stinking hypocrisy of blocking an Obama pick for the Supreme Court for 10 months before an election while being happy to nod a Trump pick through just 35 days before one.
Among Sonic Youth, the song became the hit that could never be. DGC Records, feeling that the record might be topical in an election year, chose it as one of the singles to be taken from the album. Unfortunately, no radio station would go near it and the record bombed, although UK record buyers nearly got it into the Top 50.
Looking at it from this distance, it feels like a record out of its time and I’m sure that at the time, one reason it failed to connect was that it seemed unnecessarily gloomy in its predictions given the mood of optimism that was still widely felt in the post Cold-War years. But now, despite the respite brought about by Biden’s victory, it could be turned from a simple 3.39 rock song into a full-scale musical.
During this edition of John Peel’s Music, our esteemed host received a postcard from a regular contributor called Oink. Whether they called themselves this because they were readers of the anarchic mid 1980s UK comic of the same name which Peel was an occasional contributor to is unknown, but Peel was disappointed that during his recent drive around Europe, he’d been unable to make time to meet up with Oink in Berlin for a drink. He proposed taking another tour around Europe at the earliest opportunity in which he intended to meet up with and get drunk with as many of his correspondents around the continent as possible.
Oink’s postcard contained a question asking why so much of the African music Peel played was concentrated in the same regions. Peel attributed it to cost and a tendency to fall back on French-DRC connections because he was more certain that he would like the music. He agreed to take Oink’s point on board and given his friendship with Andy Kershaw, he certainly had a gateway to music from all over the continent if he wanted to exploit it.
Peel certainly gave credit to Kershaw after playing Claudie by the Haitian compas musician, Coupé Cloue, who had been a star in Haïti for several decades, but was now seeing his work gain appreciation in Europe due to exposure on Kershaw’s programme. It wasn’t only Kershaw's musical judgement that Peel admired but his globe-hopping bravery. Kershaw had come across Cloue’s music on visits to Haïti, a country Peel had always wanted to visit but admitted to being too timid to do so. Kershaw’s mix of intense curiosity and headstrong attitude towards foreign travel had, during the previous two years, landed him a gig presenting Channel 4‘s live travelogue show, As It Happens, albeit with a presenting style described by TV Cream as “forever heading down the first dark alley in sight and swearing profusely.”
Throughout 1992, I’d got progressively more interested in music from the 1960s. One of the bands which I started to become curious about was Manfred Mann. My interest having been piqued by watching footage of their rather campy performance of My Name is Jack on an episode of Sounds of the Sixties in late 1991. By the autumn of ‘92, I’d bought a vintage compilation album which gathered together all of their hits and would have been content to leave things at that until I heard, by chance, on the radio that over December 1992, the band would be going out on a tour in support of a new compilation album with a lineup that featured both Paul Jones and Mike d’Abo as well as a number of other musicians that had been part of the band during the 60s. They were calling themselves The Manfreds, ostensibly because Manfred Mann himself was not participating. On December 29, the band were due to wrap up the tour with a gig in Torquay, so I asked if tickets for the show and a trip up there with my parents could count as a Christmas present. It was a cracking night, even if me and my mate Martin, who came with us because I'd been due to go to the pub with him that night, so we offered him the chance to come to the gig instead, were the youngest people there. Nevertheless, Martin’s comment about the then 50 year old Jones, “I hope I look like him at that age” will hopefully give you some impression of how joyous and fun the night was. The bulk of the tunes were recently familiar to me, but they played a couple of songs I hadn’t heard before. In one instance, Jones went into a spiel about how gratifying it had been to have hit singles (3 UK Number 1s, a US number 1 and 12 other singles which charted in the UK between Number 2 and 11 over a 5 year period between 1964 and 1969), but that the band had always maintained that if the listener wanted to get a true sense of who the band were and what made them tick, they had to turn the single over and listen to the b-side. And then they launched into, arguably the best of their b-sides, I’m Your Kingpin, a bluesy, misogynistic, slightly threatening track which is a million miles away from Do Wah Diddy Diddy
They may seem unlikely bedfellows, but it struck me while listening to Hit the North (Part 1) that The Fall were another outfit who were perhaps ill-served by judgements made about them based on their hit singles, even though they were more modest than those achieved by Manfred Mann. Hit the North scraped into the Top 60, though it arguably deserved a higher placing due it’s splendidly distinctive sax sample which propels the track forward but is insanely catchy enough to merit afternoon radio show play. However, the track sidelines Mark E.Smith to the extent that he sounds like an interloper in his own band, bawling on about nothing very much at all. This may have worked well in terms of releasing something palatable to wider markets, but it doesn’t make the track especially distinctive as a Fall song.
Nevertheless, it’s a good example of the way in which writing a hit, of any description, is a tough thing to pull off. As Smith confessed in his 2008 memoir, Renegade, There are times I’ve wished I could knock out hits. But I can’t. There’s a skill to it and it’s not in me.....I always try to write a Eurovision every two years but there’s no way it’s going to happen. (Smith, p.63, Renegade, Penguin, 2008).
However, The Fall had in their midst a musician who was subtly guiding them towards both a minor hit and an increasing integration of machines into their sound. Simon Rogers had joined the band in 1984, initially on a short-term basis to cover for bassist Steve Hanley during a spell of paternity leave, but he proved so versatile and enjoyed a good relationship with Smith that he remained in the band once Hanley returned and by the time The Fall came to record Hit the North (Part 1) in 1987, he was entrusted with production duties for the track, as well as the attendant album which the band recorded at the time, TheFrenz Experiment. The distinctive opening riff was cooked up by Rogers while he was experimenting with a new sampler. It was a random collection of sounds, but one which Smith picked up and ran with straightaway. As Rogers explained in a 2015 interview with Sound on Sound, I’d just got this [sampler] and literally the first thing I put into it was a bass and a snare just on two pads, a little tiny Indian bell -which I’ve still got - and a sax note and a bass note from a Gentle Giant record. Mark came round to my bedroom studio and I said, “Oh here’s the new sampler, have a look at it,” and just pressed play and out comes the basis for Hit the North. He said, “What’s that music?” And I said, “Well that’s the first thing I put in.” He said, “I’ll have that, just do me a tape.
Once in thestudio, the band saw their instruments, especially the drums, going through the sampler and even Smith’s vocals were not immune from this - a process of necessity in some cases given that Smith’s preference was to sing into a hand-held microphone. Rogers is particularly proud of the hi-hat sound being fed through a vocoder left in the studio by Marc Almond. Although, Rogers left The Fall after the release of The Frenz Experiment in early 1988, he would return to produce two Fall albums across 1992/93. The work done on Hit the North (Part 1) would be put to even more impressive effect on the single, Free Range which would crack the Top 40 in 1992.
Did he really just sing, ‘She’s somewhere taking a pee’? I think he did, you know.” - John Peel after playing Double Trouble on 25/10/92*
In the unlikely event there are any heterosexual teenage boys with an interest for joining their local amateur dramatics groups, who are reading this post, I have good news and bad news for you. Well, maybe bad news is overstating it somewhat, but based on personal and witnessed experience mark well what I say.
The good news is that if you join an amateur dramatics group at any age between 15 and 18, you stand a very good chance of seeing girls get interested in you. It happened to me over 1993/94 when I was 17/18 years old and I saw it happen to another friend of mine, a year or so later.
The bad, or at least harsh news, is that you will only be able to enjoy this status of being the centre of half a dozen crushes for a very short time before you have to decide how much of a bastard you are going to be. You start out by noticing a girl among the throng that you like and start making moves towards them, trying to gauge interest etc. Maddeningly, they are usually completely inscrutable in return, so nothing appears to be possible. Then you hear rumours about other girls fancying you, so you start preparing the ground with one or more of them. Things start to look promising in one direction, while other girls fade into the background and then just when tentative steps are taken towards romance, you hear that the first girl who you really liked - the inscrutable one, you remember? - actually really does like you. But by now, kisses have been exchanged or a date has been arranged which you’re going to have to attend while thinking about another girl and having to reconcile heart, self-esteem, lust and brain. There’s too much choice and you’re in the position of having to decide who wins and who loses the prize. The prize being you.
I was too cowardly to string several girls along, so always ended up making a decisive choice towards who I wanted to spend time with. Honesty was the best policy in my eyes, but the few times I did break girls’ hearts because I fancied someone else, I felt as wretched as it’s possible to be. So much so in fact, that my period as teen heart-throb was calmed down by me because it was just too much aggro. I cooled the heat down by dating girls who weren’t involved with amateur dramatics. It was the right thing to do as well because the relationships I did have with girls who acted usually fizzled and burnt out within 6-8 weeks and were invariably ended by the girls themselves. It’s not nice to find you’ve failed to live up to the expectations of someone who’s still to take their GCSEs. We’re talking low-stakes stuff though. Enduring friendships were built out of these teenage affairs and no one was left holding any babies or never talking to anyone again.
My friend, T, did try and play both sides against the middle when he inherited the role of teen heart-throb among the Cornish am-dram community and while he had more short-term fun than I did, he found himself similarly chasing situations he thought he wanted but could never quite pin down while having to satisfy relationships that would do to be going on with but which were not quite what he wanted. It messed him up for a spell simply because of how exhausting it is to keep that many plates spinning while admiring other crockery that’s for display only instead of eating off - or out ....Urgh!!! That’s enough twisted metaphors, how does this link to Beres Hammond?
Well, in Double Trouble, we find Hammond at the end of his rope. He’s sneaking back home to his wife or partner after spending an evening with his lover. He’s now at the point where he realises that awkward questions will be asked about why he’s been out till quarter to three in the morning and can he get the lipstick marks off him without his wife noticing them. Double Trouble looks at adultery from a perspective that I can’t remember being presented too many times before - and I would gladly welcome any other examples in the comments. Namely, the cheater coming to the conclusion that whatever excitement there may have been when the affair started is now being outweighed by the nightmare of logistics. Does he want to leave his wife? No. Does he want to end the affair? Possibly, but is that because he loves his wife and hates deceiving her or because he’s finding the concealment too much of a pain in the arse? It appears to be the latter, and Hammond knows what a cruddy reason that is.
When considering adultery, there are two questions I want to ask of committed adulterers:
1) How do you handle the guilt?
2) Where do you find the energy to cover your tracks and come up with all the lies and stories you have to tell?
In Double Trouble, Hammond has reached the point where that energy is starting to fail him. He knows that tonight’s story needs to be the best one he’s ever come up with given that the woman at home has made him something special and that he should have been home hours ago. Although there are allusions to tiredness (either physical or mental) and a wish for death to free him from the awkwardness of what he has to go through once he gets home, ultimately Double Trouble works best as a comment on the mundanity of adultery and how it ultimately becomes less about love, lust or guilt, but self-preservation. No wonder he’s exhausted.
*Sadly, this lyric video shows that the line was something less surprising.
By request of The Jukebox Rebel and supplied by the ever generous Keeping It Peel, I’m delighted to be able to post an additional, much desired track from the BFBS show of 18/10/92 in which I, Ludicrous tell us all about how they smashed it out of the park supporting The Fall on an odyssey which took them around such rock ‘n’ roll hotbeds as Bradford, Nottingham, Reading - albeit out of festival season - and Cambridge. Along the way they discover that cash doesn’t stay in hand very long but that by the end of the tour, they’ve grown to relish their status as the“second best band around.”
I live my life by several different creedos. Arguably, the one which gives me most pleasure when I’m able to do it guiltlessly is, “Life’s great! I’ve got somewhere to sit, I’ve got something to drink and other people are doing things.” So this is one of the rare occasions in which I can claim to know precisely how John Peel felt when he related how much he and his BFBS producer were enjoying watching a triathlon on television while they recorded the programme. “It’s quite reassuring sitting here with a cup of tea and a sandwich watching them running and cycling and swimming, because they do need to sort of feel superior so they can point at people and say, ‘Well at least I look better than that bloke sitting in the corner’ and I’m happy to be that bloke sat in the corner. It’s a public service really.”
The programme featured a lot of cover versions and older records, as you’ll see if you read through most of the selections I made from the show. One of the covers which didn’t make my cut was Gallon Drunk’s version of Ruby originally recorded by Silver Apples. Peel had been an enthusiastic supporter of Gallon Drunk up to this point, but admitted that he was starting to go off them, “Their moves toward Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are not something I enthuse about...I’m sure their career prospects will lie in ashes as a result.” However, this appears to have been a passing disenchantment. I’m currently listening to Peel shows from February 1993 as part of prepping selections alongside Equus by Peter Shaffer and he’s been enthusiastically championing tracks from their From the Heart of Town album.
Another oldie which turned up on the playlist for this show was Alamein Train, a 1980 track by the brilliantly named Pete Best Beatles.
From my original selections, there was 1 choice I couldn’t share and 2 which fell from favour. I would have liked to share:
I, Ludicrous - Bloody Proud - Taken from their album, Idiots Savants, this is a wonderfully entertaining account of their adventures while supporting The Fall on a tour, something they would have the pleasure of doing on a number of occasions. Peel received a letter from his friend, Robert Lawson who was based in Taiwan, but was occasionally to be found, “...buying me Indian meals in London.” Lawson asked Peel what he thought of the I, Ludicrous album, but Peel was in such a hurry to play something from it, he didn’t venture an opinion. (UPDATE - The track can now be heard on the blog.)
As for the two tracks which fell from favour:
The Groove Corporation - Hypnotherapy - played by Peel because “I always like to have something relaxing to play you near the start of the programme to get you in the late night mood. Of course, it may not be late night where you are...” Unfortunately, when I listened to this a few times, it went from relaxing to soporific. A shame.
Jimmy Reed - I Know It’s a Sin - Now I said at the start of this post that myself and Peel appeared to be of one mind when it came to relaxing with a cup of tea and letting others get on with doing stuff. However, the realisation I came to while listening to I Know It’s a Sin, recorded by Reed in 1959, would have had Peel cursing me as someone who shouldn’t even share a planet with him, let alone a mindset. And yet, I’m afraid it cannot be avoided. Come closer so I can whisper it to you. But I learnt the undeniable fact: all Jimmy Reed songs sound the same. And once you’ve learnt that, it cannot be unlearnt.
Before the next edition of John Peel’s Music, Peel reported that he would be undertaking some driving around mainland Europe over the course of the next week and that he hoped to meet up with the Austrian folk-music/hip-hop duo, Attwenger. As we would discover, it did not go well...
I don’t know whether the bands who participated made their own choices or whether the NME sent out specific requests over which artist should cover which track, but in 1992 the idea of Toni Halliday, lead singer of Curve, ethereally cooing Donna Summer’s game-changing, colossal 1977 hit, I Feel Love would have been like something out of Central Casting. Possibly only Marina Van-Rooy could have come close to sparking the same amount of endorphin/pheremonic aural release among the album’s core male target audience. Or at least that would have been the case had I known about any of this in 1992. When the idea was floated of Curve covering the track, I’m sure it was high-fives and Charlie all round. What’s more, unlike the ultra-faithful cover of The Model by Ride, which Peel played the week before, Curve do attempt to stamp some of their own musical identity on the track with synth effects that sound like someone machine-gunning a hail of ping-pong balls on a corrugated roof as well as what I can best describe as a shoegaze cloud that passes over the track like a cloudburst in waiting - ominously poised but never quite ready to unload. Nevertheless, the band realise that even with Halliday on vocals, the whole enterprise will be sunk unless they incorporate that unforgettable Moog synthesiser line as the foundation stone of the whole thing. And rightfully so, after all that synth line wasn’t just the foundation for I Feel Love, but effectively for modern dance music itself, which in 1992, was still firmly in hock to the offcuts from Giorgio Moroder’s ideas.
On the face of it, to hear The Jesus and Mary Chain produce a Delta blues, sludge-rock version of Howlin’ Wolf’s Little Red Rooster after hearing Curve’s version of I Feel Love may feel like the epitome of landing in the muddy swamp after being caressed by an angel in Heaven, but there’s less to separate them than might otherwise be imagined. I’ve seen two readings floated about Little Red Rooster. The title character represents either an enforcer figure within the context of the farmyard (and Sam Cooke’s slinky take from 1963 feels like a template for Trouble Man, 13 years early) or it’s a sex song. The Rolling Stones saw their UK Number 1 single version of Little Red Rooster banned from American radio stations in 1964 as it was felt that the lyrics were sexually suggestive. It was absurd, especially given that the feel of the Stones’s version was that of a late night cruise around looking for sex, but Mick Jagger sounded as though he knew deep down that he’d have fruitless night traipsing around and failing to find action.
But with the Jesus and Mary Chain, the cock of the walk is getting his rocks off in no uncertain terms. The bassline sounds like a headboard slowly but rhythmically banging against a wall. Everything’s smothered in fuzztone: vocals, bass, guitar which rumbles and ruts away like a groaning lover under the relentless thump of the bass headboard. You can feel the sweat on the naked bodies as the East Kilbride boys succeed in conjuring up the feel of an endless, erotic Georgia coupling. It’s a real grower of a version, possibly the best one I’ve heard for unleashing the pent-up sexuality of the track which, with no trace of irony, culminates in a feedback orgasm.
So Love and Sex in music form, but who’d have guessed that it would be Jim and William Reid bringing the latter....
Videos courtesy of opalstardream (Curve) and lagustatu (Jesus and Mary Chain)
I had a question mark against this track together with the withering note, “Goes on a bit.” But ultimately it’s catchy and enjoyable enough to merit inclusion.
In the absence of any deeper analysis, I can only encourage you to try and enjoy the music alongside the lo-fi visuals which showcase a time capsule of awful early 90s fashions - you can still get shirts like that if you wander round most urban London markets -, a brief glimpse of what looks like Brussels version of the market at Elephant and Castle, some rather interesting close-ups of the fingering style used in playing soukous music and in its final shots, we see someone playing a guitar whose shape seems to have given Prince the idea for Love Symbol#2, which is rather apt given the track was recorded for an album called Au Revoir Prince.
Stockholm was the lead single from New Fast Automatic Daffodils’ second album, Body Exit Mind. It’s a rather curious song in that it appears to mix its wonderfully catchy refrains around the measures and worth of a man’s achievements and the quest for direction and purpose in life with an extract lifted, by the sound of it, from a tourist guide to the city of Stockholm itself.
Peel played the radio edit of Stockholm, which is about a minute shorter than the version in this video. He mentioned that a couple of reviews he’d read about the track were comparing New Fast Automatic Daffodils to Joy Division. Peel felt that it sounded something like what Joy Division might have done had they been able to continue for another 2 or 3 years. It’s not a bad analogy, maybe the New Pop era would have prompted Ian Curtis to look to Scandinavia for inspiration rather than the Eastern Bloc, and it may well have been good for them. I think Stockholm is much a better song than Joy Divsion’s own Warsaw for instance.
Peel admitted that he’d never been to Stockholm, and he wasn’t in a hurry to change that, suspecting as he did that the Swedish capital was a place of “unremitting tedium”. When this blog covers the Carnon Downs Drama Group’s October 1993 revue, Something Old, Something New, we’ll discover whether Peel’s instincts were justified as it was during the run of that show that he found himself hosting an edition of his Radio 1 show, live from Stockholm.
A comment on the weedy Home Office sanctioned LIBERACE-ISM of UK band transmissions. Taken from a press handout promoting the Look, Know b/w I’m Into C.B. single on Kamera Records.
In the UK, its scope was somewhat smaller but no less devoted among its users. Mark E. Smith was probably not saying “Breaker, breaker” from a back room of his house in Prestwich. It’s more likely that he may have got the idea for his lyrics during the Fall’s lengthy American tour of Summer 1981 - a theory I’m basing on comments about the track posted on The Annotated Fall.
It was recorded during sessions for The Fall’s early 1982 album, Hex Enduction Hour. Musically, it’s built out of a piece of standard Fall-like melodic repetition, with everybody playing one note repeatedly for long stretches. Drummer Karl Burns reported that the drum pattern was a one handed beat, played repeatedly over 6 and a half minutes.
Smith’s lyrics start out in playful mood as he plays the part of two C.B. users: Happy Harry and C. Blank (or Cedar Plank, no-one seems quite sure). The verses cover topics as diverse as Government job creation schemes (Blank), drunkenness (Harry) and family relationships (both) though any social comment is kept to a minimum, the drinking is experimental sampling of Martinis and while there are things that annoy our narrators about their families (Harry’s sister has bad taste in pop music, Blank’s father is a bit uncommunicative), there’s nothing particularly dysfunctional to be concerned about. Indeed, the bulk of the track is quite light and almost affectionate. You could imagine Half Man Half Biscuit using the song as a template for a similarly, light piss-take of a niche hobby.
At 2:48, the two characters appear to be talking to each other at which point, Smith does a great job of structuring an argument between them both in a foreshadowing of social media spats. The row is broken up when the characters receive an official letter warning them both off continuing to use C.B. frequencies - it was still illegal in the UK to operate domestically on the C.B. channels at the time that Smith was writing the lyrics, though by the time I’m Into C.B was released, Parliament had passed the necessary laws allowing for legal domestic use of C.B frequencies. Nevertheless, by 4.10, Smith has skipped off, turning his back on the hobby and leaving his bandmates to grind on for another 2 minutes, playing the aural equivalent of dead air between the frequencies.
I know it’s always tempting to listen to Fall recordings, especially from their early period, and describe
them as down at heel, scuzzy flipsides to slicker, better produced, “professional” takes on similar themes by other bands, but I couldn’t forgive myself if I failed to pair it up with 1982’s other C.B. influenced pop classic. I refer of course to Calling Captain Autumn, the closing track on Haircut 100’s Pelican West, album which came out about 6 weeks before The Fall released both Hex Enduction Hour and the Look, Know single. Was Smith influencing Nick Heyward or vice versa? Sadly, I don’t think Smith would have gone near an Aran jumper.
Videos courtesy of Dr Hfurhuhurr (The Fall) and SD Remastered Music (Haircut 100)
I spent Christmas 2017 in Paris thanks to my mother in law’s skills as a wedding planner. She occasionally organises weddings for people and earlier that year had put together a successful wedding celebration in County Cork for an American family. They were so happy with it that they offered her use of an apartment which they had near to the Champs Elysees and so we spent 10 wonderful days there. I loved that holiday. Paris is one of the best cities in the world, the Parisiennes were, contrary to expectations, charming and welcoming and I would gladly go again once the COVID-19 crisis passes. However, I will freely admit that any time we were outside in Paris, my mind was in a 90/10 split between soaking up the atmosphere, ambience and sights while simultaneously preparing for a car to be driven at high speed at us or for a bomb to go off. Why? Because, we were on holiday and as history shows us, tourists stand a similar 90/10 split between either being ripped off or murdered. If we stopped to think about it in any great depth, no-one would visit any other country for pleasure given the potential - occasionally realised - for carnage. It could be Egypt, Tunisia, Nice, Stockholm or London; nowhere is really safe apart from Romania according to a 2015 global terrorism index compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace. We just take our holidays hoping to come back with a headful of good memories and both of our legs.
This is by no means a recent development. Indeed, it’s intensely depressing just how little has changed since 1980 when the Forestville, California band, Felix Culpa released their sole 7-inch single, Terrorist Love Tourist, which picked up on the mood of global violence prevalent in the late 1970s/early 1980s and created a gem of a song. One which, according to Peel, was one of the most requested records from BFBS listeners. As a child, I lost count of the number of plane hijackings or attacks on airports which took place through the late 70s/early 80s and it’s against this backdrop that Felix Culpa recorded Terrorist Love Tourist.
Over an achingly-of-its-time “dry” production with guitars in the verses that sound like they’re being played through a bacon slicer and effects that sound like gunfire in the distance, a dispassionate vocal notes potential scenarios in which terrorists could strike at unsuspecting holidaymakers. It could be with rifles or grenades and we’re basically advised not to go shopping or on bus trips, perhaps inspired by the 1970 Munich bus attack, but its trump card comes in the final verse with its prediction of what could happen once the tourists return to the safety of their homes:
Tourist go home
Secure in your bed
Wake up in the morning
Gun barrel to your head.
The vision of a world in which violent death can follow you into your home is one that plenty of people live with, but in its simple way, Terrorist Love Tourist taps into the fear of anybody who in 1980 was lucky enough to go on holiday, that the dangers of a violent world could find them out and sacrifice them just as easily as those who lived in these dangerous hotspots full time. Europe in the early 80s was by no means immune to any of this. Ironically, the United States was considered less at risk from terrorism back then despite being equally dangerous thanks to their citizens’ constitutionally permitted right to carry arms.
This kind of nationally sanctioned domestic terrorism may have inspired the title of the only other record released by Felix Culpa, 1985’s compilation album, Small Arms.
At least two other bands have taken the name Felix Culpa in subsequent years, I hope they were inspired by the original incarnation and their sublime, stunning one-off single.
Having been unable to share one track from 4/10/92 and going cold on another from 11/10/92, it is with some relief that I’m finally able to include a track from the Wawali Bonane et Generation Soukouss Enzenze Vol. 1 album. Peel adored this album to such an extent that when he was asked for a list of his Top 20 albums for a Guardian feature in 1997, this album was included alongside some of his usual suspects like Trout Mask Replica and Ramones.
Peel bought the Generation Soukouss Enzenze album, in late September 1992 during a spree of impulse record purchasing with no prior knowledge of Bonane and as he confessed when first playing the track, Fatoumata on 4/10/92, “I picked up a CD and thought to meself ‘I like the look of that.’ The fellow on the front looked kind of reassuring and I thought, ‘Well I’ll try that.’ And I’m really glad that I did because it is stupendous!”
I agree with him in regards to Fatoumata, not so much in terms of Bayaya, but there’s enough there to merit inclusion here. Furthermore, given that Bayaya was the opening track on the album, it’s nice to imagine Peel being confronted by it as the first thing he heard when he played the record for the first time and the smile of happiness and warming of his soul spreading through him as Bonane and his collaborators including Beniko ‘Popolipo’ Zangilu worked their magic for him. Indeed, Peel resolved after playing this track to go out and find any record which had Popolipo playing on it. He was still keeping this up a decade later. On this programme, he would call Bayaya his favourite track on the album.
There is some unintentional hilarity at the end of the track as the brass section wait patiently for 5 minutes to start playing their part only to be faded out within 15 seconds. It brought to mind Bill Bailey’s observation about the tendency for TV theme tunes to be faded out before reaching their best bit with Exhibit A being the guitar break on the BBC snooker coverage. “I’m shouting at the television, ‘PLAY THE REST OF THE TRACK!’ I got thrown out of Dixons for doing that.”
Anyone who’s spent time on social media over the last few days may have been aware of the anger caused by Fatima’s future job in cyber, which is an advert in which ballet dancer, “Fatima” has an exciting future waiting for her in cyber security once she’s got all those notions about dancing Swan Lake at Sadler’s Wells out of her head. The implication being that there’s going to be plenty of exciting “proper” jobs waiting for creatives once the economic effects of COVID-19 finish decimating the arts businesses. The backlash has been swift and furious with even the Government itself disowning the campaign. What would Louisiana rockabilly star, Al Ferrier have made of it? Working in cyber security may be less physically taxing than working in the timber logging industry as Ferrier did, but he was in no doubts that music offered him a way out and one that he was determined to take as best he could. And for Ferrier, the route out of the timber industry was writing Let’s Go Boppin’ Tonight.
“I and my brothers, Warren and Brian, used to get up at 5am and go to Alexandria, Louisiana and go and play a radio show and then come back and haul pulp board for the rest of the day. That was real hard work. I’ll never forget what my dad told us one time. He said, ‘Sons, I used to get mad at you but now you’re ticklin’ me. I’m laughing at you at the way you’re running yourself down with the music and the work.’...It was real hard. My brothers and I would haul logs all day long but still played radio shows. One morning, I told my brothers I was going back to the house and write me some songs, because I want to play music. That’s what I did. In fact, that’s when I wrote Let’s Go Boppin’ Tonight.” Al Ferrier interviewed by Steve Kelemen for rockabillyhall.com circa 2011.
Ferrier’s breakout tune, after he and his backing group, the Boppin’ Billies, had released two singles on the Goldband label, was a classic example of a musical chameleon adapting to changing circumstances and hitting paydirt with it. In mid-1950s Louisiana, country music still held sway as the most popular form of music in the area, but rock ‘n’ roll could not be ignored. Ferrier and his band played predominantly country music at local gigs, but his liking for rock ‘n’ roll saw him write Let’s Go Boppin’ Tonight as a fusion of the two.
“All I did was take a country piece and put a fast tune to it...I did sing a lot of rock ‘n’ roll around the clubs. We played 4 or 5 nights a week back then and would play country and rockabilly . All the while I kept singing Let’s Go Boppin’ Tonight...We started playing it round the clubs and people started requesting it. I knew I had something that people would like.” Ferrier, 2011.
Let’s Go Boppin’ Tonight has clearly been written with a handful of other rock ‘n’roll songs in Ferrier’s mind. I can hear bits of Shake, Rattle and Roll, Blue Suede Shoes, Be-Bop-A-Lula and the other rock ‘n’ roll touchstone of 1958, Johnny B Goode popping up throughout it. The Louisiana punters lapped it up but the first sign that Ferrier had that it may have wider appeal was when Elvis Presley offered to record it.
“I thought, if he thinks he can put it over, I could probably do the same thing, so I didn’t send the song (to Memphis). I did alright with it by not giving it to Elvis.” Ferrier, 2011.
Soon, Ferrier was able to swap the timber yard for the recording studio and concert hall full time. The 2011 interview with the Rockabilly Hall of Fame contains more detail about his subsequent adventures in the music business including destructive times with alcohol, religious redemption and a 21st Century rebirth as a gospel singer. The interview is a poignant reminder of how the World Wide Web now acts as the great library of our times, catching and sustaining all who write on it for posterity, just as it has done here given that Ferrier died in 2015.
28 years to the day since this edition of John Peel’s Music was broadcast on BFBS and how disappointing that all I have to mark the occasion in this post is a Peel anecdote about watching Jimmy Reed, which he subsequently admitted he had never done, in which he said that a feature of Reed’s live performances was the way that he would play more slowly as a gig progressed due to his fondness for drink. As a result, his wife would have to whisper the lyrics to him. “What a great man he was and much missed, especially by me.” Peel never needed an excuse to eulogise Jimmy Reed and in this instance, the impetus came from him reading one of The Black Crowes being quoted in the Rebellious Jukebox feature of Melody Maker that Jimmy Reed “‘...was a forgotten man these days.’ Not while there’s breath in my body, he isn’t!” and he played A String to Your Heart.
The programme was also blighted by the sound of background drilling in the studio. Peel reassured his audience, “It’s just irate music fans trying to get at us.”
The selections from this show were taken from a full 2 hour show. There was one selection I would have liked to include but which wasn’t available:
My Brain - Train - Taken from the same compilation album as featured Puppets! by Syntec, which will give you some idea of the style of the track: noisy, Germanic electro pop.
Fishwife - Almighty Wurlitzer - My notes describe this as “Scuzzy US rock with a lascivious streak” but subsequent listens failed to turn me on. Peel complained that their album, Ritalin was, “...one of those irritating records in which all the tracks run into one another.”
Howlin’ Wolf - Goin’ Down Slow - One of the very first tracks I blogged about on this site was by Howlin’ Wolf and it led me to buy a compilation album of his singles in which this track featuring his sage advice to lovers was included. However, listening back to it, I realised that if I want my Howlin’ Wolf fix from that album, I usually choose any track other than Goin’ Down Slow. Peel played the vinyl album he’d bought in Dallas and recommended that listeners play Goin’ Down Slow “...stupendously loud so as to better appreciate Hubert Sumlin’s guitar playing.”
The Fall - 2nd Dark Age - Taken from their 1980 Fiery Jack EP, I was initially quite taken by the simple, but persistent clatter of this tune, but with my 2020 ears picking up potentially misogynistic lines about the treatment of women in Arab countries and references to “a mediocre Anti-Jew”, I started to get that feeling which Mark E. Smith could occasionally engender in me, where I just found myself thinking, “I’m really not able for you today.” As ever, The Annotated Fall is your best place to unpick the puzzles.
Between Rocket from the Crypt and Drive Like Jehu, John Reis appeared to be cropping up on John Peel’s early 90s playlists as frequently as Mark E. Smith. By October 1992, Rocket from the Crypt were poised to release their second album, Circa: Now!, which would see them incorporate for the first time the “classic” RFTC sound of melding punk rock with brass in an attempt to become an alt-rock version of Chicago. However, in kicking off this edition of John Peel’s Music, Peel went back a year to their debut album, Paint as a Fragrance.
Maybelline is one of the more throwaway tracks on the album, built around a riff that hybridises Status Quo and Motorhead. Naming a piledriving rock song after a leading cosmetics firm and referring to the subject of the song as “he” throughout conjures up images of deranged transvestites shambling around their towns, accosting strangers to reel off the list of things that make them happy in the slightly woozy middle section. For myself, I like to think of it as the ramblings of a Maybelline salesman who’s spent too many days on the road travelling out to make sales or pitch up at conventions. Too much time spent thinking of make-up means they’re in danger of becoming make-up. The only thing keeping him sane is the list of his favourite things in the mid-section. Forgive me if this all seems far fetched, but we have little to go on. It doesn’t even seem tangentially attached to the homophonically similar Chuck Berry song, which Peel admitted that he had been tempted to play after Maybelline, but demurred on the grounds that, “It would be too obvious if I did that. You’d disapprove if I did that.” Either way, it didn’t end up with Rocket from the Crypt getting engaged by Maybelline’s marketing department.
I found information to be a bit scant on L.S. Diezel, but contrary to assumptions, the name covered a trio rather than an individual. They worked together amid the endlessly exciting sonic possibilities of Digi-Dub, a form which took the echo-laden canvas of conventional (if it ever was “conventional”) dub music and smeared it with beats, theatrics and other genres of music to create something close to Rastafarian trip hop. It’s certainly every bit as beguiling.
By the time, L.S. Diezel came to record their sole album, 1996’s Suicidal Dub, they were incorporating drum ‘n’ bass and Jungle beats. That though was still a long way off when they released the 12-inch single, Aliens in the Wood, which owes far more not just to Lee “Scratch” Perry but also to Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd and European electronica than it would to Goldie. The title is very well chosen. I get the feeling that E.T. and friends would have been happy to stay in the woods had they picked this track up on their systems.
One of the b-sides on the Dinosaur Jr. single, Get Me which was released around this time, was a cover of Hot Burrito #2 originally recorded by The Flying Burrito Bros for their 1969 debut album, The Gilded Palace of Sin. Peel admitted that he hadn’t heard Dinosaur Jr.’s version but was going to use the fact that it was out there as an opportunity to play a live version of the track from Last of the Red Hot Burritos, a 1972 live album which Peel regarded as one of his favourite live albums ever, even though he couldn’t remember what it was called when cueing the record up.
Listening to the file of the show last year, I was delighted that Peel gave a Flying Burrito Bros recording a spin rather than, at that point, waiting to play Dinosaur Jr.’s competent but unexciting version. I’d fallen in love with The Flying Burrito Bros ever since hearing their version of Dark End of the Street on a free CD of Mojo Magazine’s best albums of 2003. For Christmas 2004, I’d asked for The Essential Byrds ostensibly so I could listen to more of their 1965-67 content, but I really liked some of their country music sound too, most profitably explored from the band’s point of view on 1968’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. The fact that Gram Parsons breezed into and out of The Byrds in less than six months, sparking both a musical reinvigoration within the band and persuading bassist Chris Hillman to jump ship with him on his new project meant I had to check them out. I bought the superb compilation album, Sin City, which gathered together the first two Flying Burrito Bros albums and a handful of b-sides and bonuses. I was bowled over both by the quality of material and how effortless it all sounded.
They worked quickly to consolidate their success, but alas the conflicts and tension which had characterised The Byrds were equally evident in The Flying Burrito Bros. Parsons was effectively fired from the band after the completion of their second album, Burrito Deluxe in 1970, principally due to having lost interest in them and his intention to worship at the altar of his friend and lifestyle inspiration, Keith Richards. It backfired badly as he was dead by 1973. Although the band continued on into 1971, the exodus of key band members continued. At an astonishingly fast rate, the band lost pedal steel guitarist Sneaky Pete Kleinow, lead guitarist Bernie Leadon who went on to be a founder member of Eagles, drummer Michael Clarke and bassist Chris Ethridge, who had co-written Hot Burrito #2 with Parsons. By the time they came to record the contractually demanded Last of the Red Hot Burritos, Hillman was the only original member still with the band and shortly afterwards, he would join Clarke in a highly anticipated but short-lived reformation of the original line-up of The Byrds.
The live recording of Hot Burrito #2 only adds a minute on to the original which is a relief given some of the self-indulgence we might associate with the phrase “a live recording from 1972”. The performance is stunning though with Al Perkins providing that all important steel guitar work. After playing it, Peel implored anyone thinking of starting a band to think about including a steel guitar player due to the incredible variety of sounds that could be brought out of it.
When I was a boy and immersing my time in American adventure TV series and cartoons, one of the tropes that periodically cropped up was the concept of evil mirror images causing havoc, besmirching the good name of the heroes and trying to establish themselves as the superior version. So in Knight Rider, KITT found itself doing battle with the malevolent KARR; In Masters of the Universe, He-Man was pitted against an evil duplicate called Faker and who could forget the fake A-Team?
I was reminded of each of these plot points when listening to Puppets! by German techno-industrialists Syntec, who with their strident, death-metal style vocals and didactic, politicised lyrics sound like aggressive Mr. Hyde to the Pet Shop Boys urbane Dr. Jekyll. I realise that’s a superficial comparison, but I wish that the UK charts had allowed for the hypothesis to be tested in late 1992/early 1993. Maybe not in comparison to anything from the Pet Shop Boys Very album, but to hear the bite and snap of a track like Puppets! when set against the blandness of most chart dance from the period would at least have made the chart a more interesting proposition than it was at the time.
Syntec came to Peel’s attention due to them having two tracks on a Machinery Records compilation album of unsigned German techno-industrial artists called Jung Machines Vol.1. Peel’s copy came with a letter from someone at Machinery called Anna who wrote simply, ‘Hi sir, Do you like the music or don’t you? Just tell me!’ -Well I like some of it.” He also read out the label’s notes on Syntec which described them as “A band based on the traditions of punk, thrash and Kraftwerk.” They were seemingly everywhere that week.
