The Comedy of Errors: The Tabs - The Wallop (29 June 1992)

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Peel was always a sucker for records about dances, which is strange given that he was never a dancing man. Indeed, in recent Peel shows I’ve heard from early 1993, he’s addressed this reticence several times, while simultaneously admitting to having found himself dancing either due to drink having been taken or in the case of one event at the village hall in Great Finborough, being manhandled onto the dance floor by the landlady of the village pub, who was much stronger than he was.  I’ve often felt this interest in “dance” records was partially down to a mix of guilt about not being a more enthusiastic dancer blended with nostalgia for his late teens and early years in America - the late 50s and early 60s being the peak years of “Do the (insert dance here)” records.  In the very first “old” Peel show I ever listened to, long before this blog was started, and which came from 18 April 2002, he played The Madison Time by The Ray Bryant Trio
For the writers of these tunes, there was the fervent hope that they would come up with a dance which would seize the public’s imagination in the same way that The Twist had done.  If the video showcases the Wallop, it appears well named as there looks to be a lot of heavy arm action going on which could leave a nasty bruise if it made contact with an unsuspecting arm or head.  The song was written and recorded by St. Louis vocal group, The Tabs in 1963 and issued as the b-side to their recording of Two Stupid Feet on the Wand label.  It’s a great soul stomper despite the fact that its melody borrows liberally from both Twist and Shout (the ascending “Aaaahs” into the beginning of each verse) and the melody of the verses reminds me of Eddie Cochran’s Weekend too. Has to be said though that the Wallop doesn’t sound too thrilling when they sing about it - the only clear move I could make out was doing a little shuffle from side to side.  Hardly, a signal for open debauchery.

The Wallop found its way onto Peel’s playlists at this time due to its inclusion on a Candy Records  compilation album called Shakin’ Fit.  A day earlier, Peel had played Mo Gorilla by The Ideals from the album and he revealed that it featured a large number of similarly animal titled dance tracks such as The Chicken Astronaut (though here chicken refers to cowardice), The Dog, The Frog and Skin the Cat (“Hit him with a bat” as the lyrics implore us at one point). The Wallop knows better than to appeal to our violent instincts and is better than them all.

Video courtesy of MrSerbilly

The Comedy of Errors: John Peel’s Music - BFBS (Sunday 28 June 1992)

John Peel’s Music on BFBS is going to be the main source of selections for pretty much the rest of 1992. Due to timing issues, I had to skip listening to his Radio 1 shows for 26 & 27 June. This show was broadcast on the same day as the dress rehearsal for Falmouth School’s production of The Comedy of Errors.  Rehearsing and working on this show through May and June of ‘92 had served to both maintain the pleasure I had taken from being part of Oliver! as well as providing an enjoyable counterpoint to the GCSE exams I took that summer. I’m pretty sure that I had completed them all by 28/6/92.  Peel’s eldest son,  William was also going through the same thing.  He didn’t use drama as an escape, but instead turned to music. This was facilitated by his father making him a compilation tape of music which he could listen to while revising or use as a means of venting the frustrations he felt about the exams - something which Peel had alluded to the previous week.  On this programme, he played one of the tracks from the mixtape, Living Hell by Pain Teens.  “You might wonder how that could cheer up anyone, but it cheers up our William.”

Peel, who was still suffering the effects of a cold, cheered himself up by playing When I Woke Up This Morning by Jimmy Reed.  This caused him to reminisce about going to see Reed play live while he was living in America in the early 1960s:
“He was usually pretty out of it and his wife would have to whisper the lyrics to him, even the hits, which you would think he would know.  I used to like it though, because as the night would go on, he would get progressively slower.” He demonstrated this with an impression of a sluggish Reed singing
Big Boss Man.

There were more references to records from the past when he played Creme Brûlée by Sonic Youth which put him in mind of Guy Mitchell’s Singing the Blues and which reminded him of one of his most hated records, Little White Bull by Tommy Steele.  Steele had had a Number 1 hit with Singing the Blues in 1957.  From Tommy Steele to Sonic Youth, via Guy Mitchell - I miss the fact that we don’t have a disc jockey able to make those connections anymore.

I made my selections  from a full 2 hour programme.  There was only one choice that I couldn’t share:

Dressed ‘n’ Black - Discretions - Catchy female fronted hip hop released through Kold Sweat “which is an immediate indication that it’s going to be pretty darned neat” and it was. The discretions of the title referring to the hoops that our heroine has to go through to spend time with her lover.  Don’t do it, girl!  Should have been a hit.

One selection fell from favour:

Some Velvet Sidewalk - Peel - I spent the early days of lockdown reading Charles R. Cross’s superb biography of Kurt Cobain.  Plenty of bands from Olympia, Washington get namechecked by Cross but not Some Velvet Sidewalk.  And who can blame him...

Full tracklisting

The Comedy of Errors: Hum - Roar, I’m a Tiger (28 June 1992)

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If you like your Speed Metal sound with a sprinkling of surrealistic poetry, then step right up to the Family Planning Clinic and let Champaign, Illinois’s finest musical sons take you through your options.  

Roar, I’m a Tiger was the B-side to Hum’s calling card single, Hello Kitty.  Both songs deal with sex I feel, though Roar, I’m a Tiger is far more oblique about this than Hello Kitty which is filled with references to “bedroom eyes” and “naked minds”.  By contrast, Roar, I’m a Tiger alludes to sing-ships and other vague non-sequiturs. But, having looked up the lyrics I keep being drawn to the line, “I’d like to feel your fair hand in seventeen weeks” which occurs twice in the song and occasions a brutal response in both cases:

“I’d like to beat myself all over the place” in the first instance.

“I’d like to kill myself all over your shoes/sheets” (Reddit says “shoes”, I hear “sheets” which would fit the sex analogy at least.)

I read the 17 week wait as the countdown to the birth of a baby - perhaps one conceived in the fever of passion represented by the throttle-revving guitar riff that drives the track.  The baby’s conception proves a double edged sword given that it offers proof of the narrator’s virility/fertility (as referenced by the track’s title) while simultaneously scaring him to death (or suicide) due to the onset of sudden parental responsibility.  It’s as if Henry Spencer from Eraserhead was setting his thoughts about impending fatherhood to music, but without the soothing entreaties of The Lady in the Radiator to reassure him.

Video courtesy of h-u-m.net

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

The Comedy of Errors: Whipping Boy - Astronaut Blues (28 June 1992)

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Another tremendous cut from the Dublin quartet’s debut album, Submarine.  Peel was talking this album up over late June ‘92, confessing that he had not cared much for Whipping Boy’s previous work but in the case of the Submarine LP there were “...4 or 5 tracks I would recommend without reservation”.

Having previously included and raved about the title track on here a few weeks ago (one of my favourite tracks of the 1992 selections), we now go from the depths of the ocean, out into to the Solar System, grazing “Martian skies” in a gorgeous glide through dreams, space and the edges of Heaven all furnished with Fearghal McKee’s spacey echoed vocals, brushed drums and liquid guitars including one line that sounds like it’s been handed down to them by Pink Floyd all the way from 1969.  It aces the whole spacey-love-bliss-comedown vibe that so many bands were striving to attain in 1992 and does it in three-quarters of the duration that The Verve used to drone on for at that time.  Dublin’s better than Wigan too.

Video courtesy of Arcenstone

The Comedy of Errors: Purple Om - Armageddon [Mix 2] (28 June 1992)

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Sent to Peel by “Two people who live in a caravan in Cornwall, according to the letter they sent me”, John was a little unconvinced that the music matched up to the title.  However, I think that Simon Posford and Nick Dixon were more focussed on the none-more-1992 concerns about deforestation than they were on trying to bag a future spot alongside Aerosmith on the soundtrack of Michael Bay’s 1998 magnum opus.

The vibe here is for the most part New Age dance, but Purple Om sneak through plenty of diverting surprises which lift this track up for higher attention.  The doomy bell sounds running alongside the exotic birdsong set the scene of an Eden being prepped for upheaval. The metallic, gated synth riff sounds for all the world like articulated lorries pulling themselves into position to begin unloading the equipment needed to begin paving over the rainforests and putting up the office blocks. Then there’s the bass riff which bubbles away like the wildlife of the forest taking up positions to defend their turf and call out to each other about the coming encroachment, which is first evidenced around the 2:15 mark as guitars ring out like chainsaws being made ready to start cutting a swathe through the vegetation.  Sonically, the track is tremendously warm and the fact that it leans so heavily on analogue instrumentation amid the beats and effects helps to convey the sense of an eco-system being simultaneously defiled and attempting to protect itself.  There’s also something quintessentially British about the fact that while Joni Mitchell might have predicted this kind of despoliation while sitting on the porch in Laurel Canyon; it took two blokes cooped up in a caravan on Kenwyn Caravan Park in Truro (I hope...) to envisage the actual building site.

Armageddon never saw commercial release, though I would hope that as Cornish residents, Purple Om would have maybe dropped white labels into some of the local record shops for discerning collectors to take home to their record collections (which would have ruled me out in 1992, for sure). The disc Peel received had five mixes on it, all of which can be sought out on YouTube.  He played Mix 2 on the 28/6/92 BFBS show, but Mix 1 contained vocals which emphasised the message that the  destruction of the title was playing out around us.  “Running away from a life to say/Escaping from the world I’m leaving”. A brilliant one-off that borrows the jagged intensity of 70 Gwen Party and looks ahead to the analogue/digital wonders of future Peel favourites like Hint

Video courtesy of Giant Kettle
Lyrics copyright of their authors.

The Comedy of Errors: The Cravats - Burning Bridges (28 June 1992)

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A quickfire, bracing blast of Post punk knees-up energy from one of Peel’s favourite bands of the late 1970s/early 1980s.  Burning Bridges was the lead track on The Cravats’ The End. Spring 1979. EP.  It’s a good example of the era’s predilection for gloriously spiteful break-up songs.  Only the Contemporary R’n’B scene has rivalled the late 70s for this sub-genre of song.  But it was only in the 70s where a lament about the loss of “...a chance to be tender” sounded more like an expression of anger than regret.

Driven along by Yehudi Storageheater’s swarm of bees-like saxophone and Rob Dallaway’s anguished, fuming vocals, the relationship in Burning Bridges has hit the buffers due to a multiplicity of late 70s tropes: communication breakdown, chemical dependency and infidelity - either with another person or with drugs (“I don’t mind if you don’t tell me about the things you do on your own....Chemicals you can’t account but I’ve been hardened in the night.”).  They do a great job of smuggling through some pretty bleak subject matter under the cover of a jolly mosh.  Clearly, the mood within The Cravats was at a low ebb when they recorded the EP given that the other tracks on it  alongside Burning Bridges are the poppy but unambiguous I Hate the Universe (clearly they had premonitions about the result of the imminent UK General Election) and The End, a sci-fi/horror movie type jazz instrumental.

However, it wasn’t the end for The Cravats, who continued to release records up to 1982/83.  Peel remained a supporter throughout and his appreciation for their music extended to personal admiration for them as people, especially bassist/vocalist The Shend.
“One of the reasons I liked the band, to be honest was because he was a really nice bloke.  In fact, that’s what he put on his business card - ‘The Shend: A Decent Bloke’” (Peel interviewed by Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, p.222, Faber and Faber, 2005).

To my chagrin, it appears that this was the last time Peel played a record by The Cravats in his lifetime.  A Shend-led version of The Cravats reformed for live gigs in 2009 and through 2016/17 released their first new recordings since 1983 including the pre-EU Referendum single Jingo Bells and the album Dustbin of Sound.  March 2020 saw them release a new album, Hoorahland.

Video courtesy of REDPUNK1VINYL
All lyrics copyright of The Cravats.

The Comedy of Errors: The Daniel Grade - Melt (28 June 1992)

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Before playing Melt, Peel read out a press release from Backs Records, the label handling the distribution of The Daniel Grade’s 3 track EP, Pest which revealed that the record was due to be released in 1991, but fell victim to the crash of Rough Trade’s distribution arm.  Backs Records picked up the pieces in order to get the record out for further attention, describing it as “not sounding like anyone else”.  Peel thought the record was great, but wasn’t too impressed by the band’s name.

The whole Rough Trade fiasco sounds like the kind of fate that might befall an unlucky, new band and it could have been particularly galling in the case of The Daniel Grade because the tracks on Pest are all superbly recorded, wonderfully produced and had they slipped on to the correct playlist, I would not have been surprised to see its lead track, Suntrap, sneak into the Top 40.  Maybe it wasn’t meant to be for The Daniel Grade who never again saw a release picked up by an organisation with the potential reach of Rough Trade.  But the curious thing about The Daniel Grade is that the botched attempt to hit the mainstream may very well have been part of the plan all along.

Since at least 1982, the core of the band - vocalist Graeme Gill, keyboardist Brian Monger and guitarist/bassist Adam Pitt - had been collaborating with a changing cast of contributors within Drey Grade, who released a series of cassette only albums with titles like Obscures Cake/Abstract Sponge + which were a mixture of industrial post-punk synth soundscapes, MIDI-beat voice sampling and what I can only describe on some tracks as an early form of beatless Trip hop.  All the earnest seriousness that is ascribed to the cliched perception of early 80s alternative music, though having listened to Obscures Cake/Abstract Sponge + today, I found it continuously compelling, occasionally unsettling and in the case of one track, MKUltra, surprisingly prescient with its samples of 1960s US radio news reports of riots and over-zealous police response having a chilling contemporary parallel.
Drey Grade remained one of Sussex’s best kept secrets.  When a copy of their cassette A-D-E-M-O (geddit) arrived on the desk of an unidentified Melody Maker journalist in late 1982, their chances of a front cover seemed remote when the journalist delivered the verdict, “I played the tape and nearly strangled the cat.”

But around 1985, Gill, Monger and Pitt hooked up with guitarist Bill Waller and drummer/songwriter Daniel Grade to form The Daniel Grade, a more melodic off-shoot of Drey Grade and judging by setlists from Daniel Grade gigs of 1985/86, a way of combining the avant-garde material of Drey Grade with more conventional songs.  Again, the group put out a number of cassette only recordings - given that none of these have turned up on Discogs, I’m assuming that most of these were only
available to buy either at gigs or through mail order.  Daniel Grade himself appears to have left the band by the time it recorded the tracks which made up 1989’s Pure tape, but the band replaced him with Tim Hall, while Garth Moyle also took up bass duties in place of Bill Waller and this was the line-up that recorded Pest.

Melt is the best track on the record.  It’s rock shapes doing a good job of making a lyric about dying sound far more enticing than it might otherwise do.  I have to chuckle at the repeated use of the title line being presented as a completed chorus, but the ferocity of Gill’s vocal in the coda alongside some monolithically jagged guitar work and piano chords which sound like sheets of ice crashing off the side of a mountain is particularly arresting.

By 1992, The Daniel Grade were building up enough recognition to get some eye-catching live work supporting bands like New Fast Automatic Daffodils as well as radio airplay from Annie Nightingale but by the end of the year, the band went on hiatus until 1999 when Drey Grade was revived and the band set up the Fete Records label to curate older recordings and put out newer material under both Drey Grade and a number of other aliases.  The Fete Recordings website is well worth a look around. It contains extensive recordings by both Drey Grade, who are still continuing to record though their work tends more towards field based recordings now - some of which will be ideal for anyone susceptible to ASMR - as well as unreleased tracks by The Daniel Grade.

Video courtesy of Graeme ATG