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