The Comedy of Errors: Spasms - Circuits Overload (13 June 1992)

Buy this on Discogs

My notes describe this piece of Dutch techno as “a grower” but I will freely concede that it’s a borderline inclusion.  I think what swung a place on the mixtape for Circuits Overload was the hypnotic low synth piece that comes in at 2:53.  It also shares a similar Ground Control style vibe to the sublime Techno Stylin by Lethal, though it takes a much lower NRG route.

Spasms was an alias for Arno Peeters, who after 15 years of making music in groups and releasing records decided to go down a similar route to Peel’s former producer, John Walters and move from music making into production.  He worked with Dutch radio and television services but mostly concerns himself with sound mixing and creating soundscapes through his company, Tape TV.  Peeters’s Vimeo page provides a good showcase for what he’s doing: sonics that stay in the background, don’t draw attention to themselves, but instantly let the listener know where they are.

Last year, Peeters reactivated the Spasms name, albeit with a slight change of name to Sp@sms, probably because, hey it’s the 21st Century now, and returned with an EP on U-Trax called Titanic



Videos courtesy of picolettouao and Spasms-Topic

The Comedy of Errors: Delta 5 - Mind Your Own Business (13 June 1992)

Buy this on Discogs

Until I heard the file for this 13/6/92 show, I had always believed that Mind Your Own Business was a Chicks on Speed song due it to being on their debut album and its sentiments fitting the group’s chilly, stentorian, darkly humorous aesthetic.  However, it turns out that the origins of the track were not to be found in pre-Millennium Munich but rather 1970s Leeds.

Delta 5 provide a couple of templates for Chicks on Speed in that their core membership was three women, 2 of whom played bass guitar (though the band also included 2 male musicians on guitar and drums respectively) and they did a nice line in chilly, stentorian, darkly humorous songs themselves.  The divergence, based on what I’ve heard of Delta 5 so far, is that they used that dual bass-lineup in order to go down a funk-punk route rather than exploring synths/electronica although the two jarringly, angular guitar solos at 1:43 and 2:47 sound like something which could feature on a Chicks on Speed track.
If you were to put 50 essential post-punk tunes in a capsule as a guide to future generations as to what defined that scene then Mind Your Own Business would have to be part of it. Like so many tracks of its era (1979), it borrows from what went immediately before it by setting its lyric out as a stroppy, playground chant.  Interestingly, the vocal melody remains the same throughout the track, but in contrast to how this may have turned out had it been recorded in 1977, Delta 5 use layered and delayed vocals in order to amplify the number of demands and requests being fired towards the subject of the song.  The content of the song deepens as it goes on and what may have started out as a rebuffing of unwanted interference starts to look at wider themes of alienation within a relationship.

Can you feel those people behind me?
Looking at your feelings inside me?
Listen to the distance between us
Why don’t you mind your own business.

Another reading is that the lyrics are a duologue between one half of a couple craving to be let into the emotional depths of their loved one, while the title refrain is that other half refusing to give them admittance to their inner thoughts and feelings.  The end of the song suggests that Hell will freeze over before any emotional openness is possible.
The refusal or inability to communicate openly was a recurring theme in Delta 5’s work.  I particularly like their 1980 single, Try, which concerns itself with both the inability to communicate and the impossibility of it when one side only wants to communicate solely so that the other side agrees with them, no questions asked.

A third reading of the song takes us back to the cinema.  While Vertigo might have been recording after going to see My Cousin Vinny, there are touches, especially in the opening verse, that suggest  Delta 5 had seen Robert Altman’s 1977 psychodrama, 3 Women.  The opening requests i.e. “Can I interfere in your crisis?” etc and the emphatic rebuttal of the title line both suggesting an attempt to assimilate another person’s life and behaviours being met with a frantic attempt to hold on to a self-identity which is being leeched away.

Mind Your Own Business owed its place on Peel’s playlist for tonight due to him reaching the D
section of his singles collection in his ongoing search for the Little Richard cover version.  “Nice to
hear that again, at least a decade old.”

Video courtesy of Beauty Above All
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

The Comedy of Errors: Vertigo - Rocket V (13 June 1992)

Buy this on Discogs

Taken from Vertigo’s second album, Ventriloquist, Rocket V is an entertaining hybrid of Seattle-esque riffs and Happy Flowers-like whinging.  A more suitable title for the track would be Insomnia because the track is essentially a litany of things that are keeping singers Jared Aos and Gene Tangren awake.  The list includes cold temperatures, noisy children, the person sharing their bed (“Just lie there quietly/and close your eyes”) and a freight train which passes the house at 2am.  This may be the Rocket V of the title.  I also suspect that the band may have seen My Cousin Vinny, which was released in the Spring of 1992, before they wrote and recorded Rocket V.

For more background on the work of Vertigo, I can recommend this excellent guide by Mark Prindle.



Videos courtesy of Irresponsableful (Vertigo) and vh602 (My Cousin Vinny)

Lyrics are copyright of their authors.

The Comedy of Errors: The Inspirations - Take Back Your Duck/Culture - Babylon Big Dog (13 June 1992)

Buy The Inspirations on Discogs

Buy Culture on Discogs
Two crackingly good slices of reggae, which in my original listings were separated only by a mix of The Shamen’s L.S.I that I have been unable to track down.  It was basically this one but with the vocals taken out.  However, the radio edit of L.S.I will be turning up here soon enough, which is a treat to look forward to, isn’t it?  So in the meantime, I thought I’d do the decent thing and bring these two tracks together in a double bill.  Plenty of intelligence, not to say genius, in both of these cuts.  Not much love though and the sex is strictly business.

Take Back Your Duck was recorded by The Inspirations for Joe Gibbs in 1969.  It was getting fresh exposure in 1992 as it featured on a compilation album called Explosive Rocksteady - Joe Gibbs’ Amalgamated Label 1967-1973 which both Peel and Andy Kershaw had been getting plenty of mileage out of on their playlists.  Peel had started from the beginning of the album, Kershaw had gone from the end and now they had met in the middle.  Indeed, Kershaw had played Take Back Your Duck on his show, the previous weekend. Now it was Peel’s turn.  He suspected that the lyrics had
sexual connotations, which I make him correct on.  But, the sentiments within the track appear to be
every bit as sour as the last track from this LP to have featured on this blog.  Despite the catchy melody, the lyrics are spat out with the ferocity of a john rejecting the services of a prostitute because she’s too old to raise money or interest.  Indeed, rejection and contempt for the cougar is stamped through this track to an almost frightening degree and highlights an uncomfortable truth that women don’t come out well as the subjects of reggae/Rocksteady tracks.  They are either regarded as commodities to be exploited or find themselves being ignored by the male protagonists due to their obsession with money/religion/ganja.

Certainly, the vagaries and complications of business and small time capitalism appeared to be racking Joseph Hill’s mind in Babylon Big Dog, taken from Culture’s seminal 1982 album,  Lion Rock.  It appeared to be a track that Peel was fond of playing judging by his comments after its airing on this show: “You may recall that this is the song where Joseph Hill appears to tell us that he hasn’t got a dead man laying down in his car.  I think I must have misunderstood that though.”  Not quite though, John.  If you listen carefully around the 55 second mark, Hill indeed  says that he doesn’t have a dead man lying down in his car boot.  While there are crime stories going on throughout this track, it’s clear that Hill isn’t playing at being a Rastafarian Jimmy Cagney.
In the Culture tracks that I’ve heard, Hill tended to sing as two personas depending on what the track was about.  On the one hand, he could be the wide-eyed, joyful Everyman who took in the world and all its wonder in tracks like Life.  But then he could swing into an exasperated, vaguely comic, Stressed Eric persona, which could address big issues of injustice and corruption in tracks like Want Go See, but was more likely to be used when singing about everyday irritations in life.  The small things that conspired to stop him being able to relax, smoke his weed and do his thing.  The irritations were generally caused either by other people or by prevailing attitudes which were contrary to how Hill felt things should be and which caused him nothing but disruption.  I’ve not heard a misogynistic track by Culture (yet) but part of me wonders whether they ever could do it.  Whereas the Duck so bitingly dismissed by The Inspirations might be expected to slink away in tears, one suspects that she would haul off and belt Hill if he was ever so rude towards her.  In this persona, you feel Hill suspects it would play out that way too.
There’s no misogyny at play in Babylon Big Dog though it uses a classic reggae trope as its starting point: boys from the country coming to the city and attempting to make their fortune, but in Culture’s worldview, the streets are not paved with gold but rather, frustration.  This comes through in several ways ranging from the perception that he and his friends are thieves given that they are outsiders in the city right through to Hill’s biggest bugbear of all: sitting on mountains of ganja, growing all around them but prohibited from being able to enjoy it freely.  Either due to the law or more likely, other criminal gangs wanting their cut and protecting their stashes.  In the brutal reality of a (Babylon) dog eat dog world, Hill is eventually driven to declaim the one thing he has left:  “I have got my credentials as a human being”. One of the great “impotently howling into the void” lines, I’ve ever heard.
Backing this up as evidence as to why this would be an essential track to keep on a mixtape is the “runna-runna-runna-chase-I-round-with-your-dog” chorus line that becomes an  ear worm within the very first hearing of it and some wonderfully ostentatious Moog synthesiser work which dominates after every chorus.

Videos courtesy of 1468inhouse (Inspirations) and StrictlyRasProphecy (Culture)

The Comedy of Errors: The Verve - Feel (13 June 1992)

Buy this at Discogs

Oh fuck, it’s The Verve again.  The musical equivalent of cod liver oil or Brussel sprouts: good for your health, occasionally nourishing in certain situations but a real struggle to get through without grimacing.

Feel, the B-side to She’s a Superstar, runs for 10 minutes and 44 seconds.  You only probably need to bother with the first three and a half minutes, because after that, boy does this meander on.  At around  the seven and a half minute mark, you’ll be brought out of your coma when the band start launching into a Day in the Life style ascent.  But, frustratingly, this dissipates leaving the band fading out as the song ends and presumably they carried on playing until the studio caretaker told them that he would be locking up and turning off the power in 5 minutes, and didn’t they have homes of their own to go to?  Peel felt that elements of the track reminded him off Children of the Future by the Steve Miller Band.

So irreverence reigns in terms of how I look at Feel, but for all my carping, the opening third of Feel is a gorgeous piece of music. Gentle, reflective but with a soundscape that sounds like a summertime night sky stretched over a desert.  Richard Ashcroft’s hushed, delicate vocal sounds like it’s calling the listener to take part in some kind of collective emotional connection.  A desperate plea for physical and spiritual feeling in a world that’s forgotten how to let its guard down.  The morbid strangeness of the lyrics (“I’ve never seen this before/See you dead on my floor”) eventually, and in classic Verve fashion, leads onto a chorus that feels like it will lift all who hear it up into the sky, caused in this instance by Nick McCabe’s shimmering guitar work playing underneath Ashcroft’s gently insistent exhortations, “And I want to know/And I want to feel”.  They sound like rocket boosters gently engaging with a line which if taken up by a full congregation could lift the listener off into the stratosphere through a sheer sense of will. Verve gigs were often compared to spiritual events, and for non-converts like myself, could look very po-faced and solemn.  But Feel, despite the longeurs, does an excellent job of showing what disciples of The Verve could find in their music.  A sense that their music will save us all and there will be cod liver oil and Brussel sprouts at The Last Supper.

As for me, I would have been eating with The House of Love.



Video courtesy of Emanuele Miraglia (Verve) and xcitergr (House of Love)

The Comedy of Errors: Love Child - He’s So Sensitive (13 June 1992)

Buy this on Discogs

I find myself chuckling with rueful self-regret while listening to this track from New York trio, Love Child’s Okay? album. Because for a period of about a year from June 1992 to August 1993, I found myself wondering whether “sensitivity” might be the key that would unlock my way in the Kingdom of the Girlfriend.  Prior to this, I was trying to use humour to smooth my path towards the fairer sex but as 1992 progressed, I learnt that I needed extra tricks and emotions to access. Certainly, once I left school and started studying a BTEC diploma in Performing Arts, surrounded by girls who were a few years older than me and in some cases, damaged by life and fate, the ability to be sympathetic to their problems and attentive to their needs led me into some interesting discussions and set-ups.  The frustrating thing was though that too often, my shoulder was all these girls wanted.  And no one seemed to be extolling my virtues the way that Rebecca Odes does of her new beau in He’s So Sensitive.

Those who find New York rock a bit too affected for their tastes may not want to linger here too long, for all the tropes associated with that city’s rock scene can be heard here. The production is pindrop sharp, but it sounds like it was recorded in a Tribeca loft (though the band came together when its members were studying at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie).  The guitar sound from Alan Licht has that curious and oxymoronic staccato looseness so prevalent on the CBGB/No Wave scene.  Leo Baum’s drumming contains a breakout moment which you can imagine him practising while reading one of his college textbooks, while Odes’s vocals contain just the right degree of blank-eyed sincerity.  It’s also completely unrepresentative of what Love Child’s sound was and could be.  The Okay? album is currently sitting in full on YouTube and it blew me away.  21 tracks over 45 minutes and not an ounce of filler on there.  Even the throwaways are perfect little nuggets and like all great bands, they realised that variety was everything if you were going to throw that many songs in a concentrated period of time.  The majority of the tracks on it are angular, noisy, contained thrashes with Licht taking the lead vocal but filled with ideas, invention and emotion.  Along the way, cropping up like rest stops on the journey, we get lighter, poppier moments like He’s So Sensitive and the switch in tempo and intensity makes perfect sense rather than seeming to jar.  Love Child were only around for two albums, 1992’s Witchcraft album would be their final release, but on the evidence so far, they could turn their hands to anything.  Track the album down if you can, I definitely intend to buy a copy soon.

Video courtesy of attilio tomoselli

The Comedy of Errors: “Weird Al” Yankovic - Smells Like Nirvana (13 June 1992)

Buy this on Discogs

If Instant Hippie owes its place here to how I feel at this exact point in life/history, then Smells Like Nirvana gets on the metaphorical mix-tape as it’s something I would have lapped up when I was 16.

I first became aware of “Weird Al” Yankovic when the video to Eat It turned up on Saturday Superstore in 1984/85.  Precocious brat that I was, I thought it was shit.  Lazy, stupid, needless shit that was piggybacking on a classic original. I watched the video again, yesterday, and my opinion remains unchanged 36 years later.  Even as a parody, I thought it was no better than the playground rewrites of chart hits that I used to hear at junior school:

Uptown girl
She’s been living in her uptown world.
Sitting in the A-Team van
Snogging with an Action Man
(Lyrics copyright of Billy Joel and some kid at All Saints Junior School, Falmouth)

Having written Yankovic off in 1984, I started to reassess him four years later.  This wasn’t done in a particularly scientific manner, but I was walking around the records/books section of a French hypermarket when I saw a copy of the new “Weird Al” album, Even Worse, a twist on Michael Jackson’s Bad album.  Written down, Even Worse comes across as an even lamer pun than Beat It/Eat  It, but maybe because I was on holiday, it tickled me.  And although I suspected that Yankovic had a vendetta against Jackson, he looked the dogs bollocks on the sleeve.  If I’d been really impressed, I could have bought it if only to tease my mate, Kevin, who was on holiday with me and who was a massive Jackson fan at the time.  He’d even gone up to London the previous month to see one of Jackson’s Wembley concerts, which had so wowed Peel in The Olivetti Chronicles.

I was wrong about Yankovic’s “vendetta” against Jackson.  The King of Pop had happily waved through Yankovic’s parodies and the two of them had a good relationship, but flash forward three years to 1991 and it was a different story.  Yankovic approached Jackson for his consent to commercially release a parody of Black or White called Snack All Night.  However, Jackson asked Yankovic not to release the track as he felt the message of his song was too important to be diluted by a parody.  Yankovic respected his wishes but with one of 1991’s most momentous pop songs declared off-limits for his satire, where else was he going to find a track of equal significance to lampoon?
The answer was to be found in Seattle.

Kurt Cobain was happy to allow Yankovic to do the parody, aware of the universally acknowledged truth within American popular music that an act hadn’t truly made it until they were parodied by “Weird Al”.  However, he had a caveat, “Um....It’s not going to be about food, is it?”  Yankovic reassured him, “No, it’ll be about how no one can understand your lyrics.”  And that together with lack of rehearsal and thematic impenetrability forms the basis of Yankovic’s parody.  I particularly like the “Sayonara...sayonara” refrain and it serves to remind me that if you held a gun to my head and asked me to sing Smells Like Teen Spirit, I’d end up coming out with vocalised rhubarb like “Weird Al” or I’d sing the opening to their infamous, live Top of the Pops performance.

At another level, and without wishing to psychoanalyse Kurt Cobain, Smells Like Nirvana is another link in a chain which shows how things were being taken out of his and Nirvana’s control.  It’s possible that Nirvana in mid-1992 never felt more like The Beatles in mid-1964 with audiences hanging on their words and waiting feverishly for their next release.  By the same token, their contemporaries were poring over their catalogue and wondering whether a Nirvana cover could boost their own profiles.  Just a week before playing Smells Like Nirvana, Peel had played a barely bootleg, soundcheck quality cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit by The Honeymoon Killers.  Earlier in the year, he had treated listeners to various selections from the Sub Pop Singles Club compilation album, Smells Like Cooked Sausages.  A little piece of Cobain being appropriated by others for their own needs and creating a monster in the process.  Something that he and Nirvana would always be defined against.
In the case of Smells Like Nirvana, Cobain and company loved what Yankovic had done.  It chimed with record buyers as well and gave Yankovic his highest US chart hit since Eat It.  The record also accounted for an upsurge in sales for Nevermind as well.  So everyone was a winner though it doubtless played a part in seeing this seminal youth anthem become absorbed by the mainstream and eventually covered by the likes of Paul Anka on a swing album or retched up as part of the head-battering confectionery in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge.

Video courtesy of alyankovic