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.
