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.
I had a question mark against this track when I first heard it and it probably owes its place more to the fact that it’s going onto a blog rather than an actual mixtape. I say that because a lot of the things which make Cinnamon Brow so appealing to me are the traits it shares with other, better tracks that are already on here.
With its strummed guitar, a bassline which rises and falls like a skateboarder navigating dips and rises in a road and watery waves of sound that pass over the listener like shades of consciousness, I found myself drawn towards Cinnamon Brow due to its resemblance to the fantastic Astronaut Blues by Whipping Boy. Whereas that sounded like it was being beamed back to Earth from deep in the recesses of Outer Space, Cinnamon Brow comes across as its Earthbound brother. Desperately scanning the skies while standing in the rain washed streets of the Warrington borough that the track is named after. In those moments where vocalist Jane Weaver’s singing rises above a whisper, the desperation to escape is palpable. The masterstroke is setting the band’s performance against the cocktail chatter mentioned by Peel as he cued the record up (the video did not come from his 11/10/92 BFBS show). The noise could either be the sheeplike residents of Cinnamon Brow going about their business, chatting incessantly and not noticing the wonder of the universe around them. It could be the sound of Purgatory, the interference caused by ghosts and restlesss spirits with their endless conversation and declarations of penitence. Do they make Cinnamon Brow a starting point for an ascent to Heaven or a stopping off point on the way to Hell? Perhaps we’re there already and the chatter is every sapping office meeting or post last orders pub conversation all gathered up and going on outside Kill Laura’s bubble of concentration. If they allow it to penetrate, their own thoughts and impulses for escape will become overwhelmed. The fadeout shows both sounds battling for supremacy and no winner decided.
The material is so sketchy and yet the interpretations are limitless. To pull that off is quite an achievement. I’ve heard plenty of better tracks on John Peel shows as I’ve trawled through 1992 and yet this one will stay with me like a fragrance in the air, long after some of the other, more immediate thrills slip my mind.
John Peel got considerable mileage out of the compilation over October/November ‘92 and a few of those selections will crop up over the course of these Midsummer Night’s Dream shows. Anyone hoping for a guitar-based overhaul of Kraftwerk’s 1982 Number 1 hit would have been disappointed as Ride chose to break out the keyboards and presented a very faithful rendition of The Model, albeit in a slightly lower-sounding key than the original. It’s impossible to miss with The Model which manages to balance its futuristic sound without ever sounding chilly or cold.
Later in the programme, Peel played his wife’s favourite track from Ruby Trax, Billy Bragg’s cover of When Will I See You Again by The Three Degrees.
Kraftwerk perform the original German language version on the German equivalent of Pebble Mill at One.
Videos courtesy of Disorder 213 (Ride) and 80smusicfan (Kraftwerk)
Buy this at Discogs
The debt that American alternative rock owed to Mudhoney in the early 1990s was considerable. Singer Mark Arm coined the phrase “grunge” as part of a dismissive put-down of Seattle, and yet by 1992, the term he had used was the epitome of the musical zeitgeist and the sound that Mudhoney and bands such as Melvins and Tad had come to attention with had helped make Nirvana into the biggest band in the world, and inspired a major label feeding frenzy of signing bands with long hair, loud guitars, a passing acquaintance with Seattle and singers who could pull off something approximating a vulnerable, angst-ridden roar.
For Arm, Nirvana’s success must have been like looking in a mirror and seeing his doppelgänger being given the keys to the kingdom. Arm and Kurt Cobain shared several traits such as hairstyles, good looks, vocal styles that were distinctively memorable and predilections for heroin. I’m Spun, a track from Mudhoney’s major label debut album, Piece of Cake positively thrums with the restless, itchy, impatient energy of someone between fixes. The relentless, almost mocking six note riff that drives the track along sounds just like somebody standing up to stop sitting down and then walking around to stop standing around before sitting back down again so as to avoid wearing a hole in the carpet. And rinse and repeat...
A better title may have been I’m Bound because the over-riding feeling in the lyrics is of someone in thrall to their addictions. Arm sounds simultaneously energised and angry about this - the drugs give him a sense of life, (“I’m a ricochet” etc) but the majority of the song is a warning to others about the consequences of getting too close to him or keeping him from his fix, (“Bouncing off these walls, I could hit you all/When you see me come, you’d better run”.). However, by 3:07, Arm is openly acknowledging that the games he’s been playing are dangerous and that he’s in danger of spinning off down a road he may never return from (“Never know when you’ll snap/Never know when you’ll break/Never know when you’ll crack/All you know is you can’t trust fate.”).
In the event, Arm’s heroin use reached breaking point on New Year’s Eve 1992 when he suffered his fourth experience of an overdose. Having survived it, he cleaned up through 1993, helped by beginning a relationship with his future wife and doubtless to the relief of the rest of Mudhoney who attributed some of the poor feeling around Piece of Cake to Arm being in the grip of his demons.
When he played Blinding Sun the previous week, Peel had mentioned that his son William had passed no comment about Piece of Cake, something which worried his father. This week the plot thickened further as Peel revealed that Mudhoney had cancelled several dates on their UK tour including shows in Cambridge and Norwich, which had robbed Peel and his family of the opportunity to see Mudhoney play relatively close to where they lived. Peel was philosophical about it, reasoning
that the venues may not have been regarded as big enough for a band that was on a major label and
that such decisions were very likely not taken by the band themselves. However, William was livid
about the cancellations. So much so that, “I think they may have lost a fan.”
Ten years later, I had cause to sympathise with William when The Electric Soft Parade cancelled a gig they were scheduled to play at The Pirate Inn in Falmouth, so that they could support The Who at
the Royal Albert Hall. I understood the reasoning from the band’s point of view, but I was massively pissed off with them too. Never did the cultural slap in the face of living in Cornwall seemed to sting more than it did in that moment. I could just picture them sitting around deciding “Fuck those carrot crunching bumpkins down there. Why should we bother going to honour a booking for people who will treat us as the top of the bill when we can do a shorter night’s work and get ignored by most of the crowd, just so we can get a photo with Pete Townshend. And if we’re disappointing anybody, then fuck them. They’re only Cornish, they don’t count compared to London music fans.” Although things like The Eden Sessions were imminent, featuring bands much bigger than The Electric Soft Parade, the ease with which they could drop the gig felt incredibly isolating to a Cornish music fan. I should have marked them out as wrong’uns based on that and had nothing more to do with them but somehow, I found myself spending large amounts of time during 2002 on the message board of their website, connecting with some fascinating characters but feeling jealous of people on there who were going to see gigs in better connected parts of the country which weren’t getting cancelled because the bands thought there was a more prestigious gig on offer elsewhere. I did make one long-lasting online friend from the site who sent me a lovely mixtape containing The Last Thing I Should Do by Jetplane Landing which became one of my favourite songs ever, but my abiding memory from my time on the site was of being emotionally manipulated and then unceremoniously ghosted by another girl - we didn’t call it ghosting back then though, it was known by its old-fashioned label of behaving like a fucking piece of shit. It hasn’t quite spoiled my appreciation of the brilliance of Silent to the Dark, but between that and the cancelled gig, The Electric Soft Parade remain off my Christmas card list. At least no-one on the Mudhoney mailing list buggered around with William’s emotions. He should give thanks for that, as sometimes there are worse things to go through than a cancelled gig.
Many thanks to the lovely Fiona for introducing me to this wonderful song and Merry Christmas to her in advance.
Videos courtesy of Suck O Rama (Mudhoney) and Jetplane Landing - Topic
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
Electro-samba from Birmingham? Yes please!
Taking their name from the legendary Augustus Pablo album, DJ duo Glyn “Bigga” Bush and Richard “DJ Dick” Whittingham grabbed attention around dancefloors in 1991 with Push Push, a dub’n’beatz gem which fused early 90s dance with Lee Perry-style atmospherics and a catchy chorus. My wife just heard me playing the original version, which you can hear below, and remarked “Great sex song”.
But good luck with getting your rocks off to this mix by Fabi Paras which strips out all the sensuality of the original version and replaces it with the perfect soundtrack to a Mardi Gras in Handsworth with samba drums battling against urgently insistent keyboard figures.
My notes for this track say that, “It may get a bit repetitive,” and even Peel himself faded the record out ahead of its ending with, “I think they’ve shown us all they’re going to show us”, but having noted the repetition my notes continued with, “...but for now, I fucking love it!”
I still do.
How many babies were made to this, I wonder?
Videos courtesy of Analogue Catalogue and Bunker Headz.
First broadcast as part of Datblygu’s first Peel Session on 13 May 1987, Carpiog or Ragged to give it its English translation is, according to the sleevenotes on the Ankst compilation of their first three Peel Sessions... an anti-graft song about the futility of digging holes and filling them in again. Retrospectively dedicated by the singer to all the fascist scum bosses he has encountered in the Wales Tourist Board and Welsh education system.
Being a non-Welsh speaker, I’ll have to take their word for that, but what made me fall in love with the track was the way they use what sounds like closely miked and capoed guitars to sound as though they are recording from inside a giant bell, though that could equally be down to the skills of Maida Vale stalwarts such as Dale Griffin. Whoever takes credit, it produces a most interesting background to the song, causing it to sound both ominous and awesome in equal measure.
After playing Carpiog, Peel went into a slightly slightly impassioned speech about his horror over the fact that Datblygu seemed to be turning into a rock group and his hopes that this would not be a permanent state of affairs. He may have been thinking of tracks like No Law, No Property from their Peel Session of 12/6/92 which veered closely to pub-rock singalong in its chorus, as well as the feeling that several of the tracks were stretched past their logical ending as the band got drunk and an air of self indulgence permeated most of the proceedings. They were a million miles away from the sharply, concise sounds of Carpiog.
