A Midsummer Night’s Dream: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 29 November 1992 (BFBS)

 Throughout 1992, John Peel had been a staunch ally of The Wedding Present during their monthly campaign of releasing a new single for each month of the year. However, after playing The Queen of Outer Space on this show, he admitted that he had received a number of letters from listeners stating that they were looking forward to a period of silence from the band. As the old showbusiness adage should go, “You gotta let ‘em forget you before they want to hear you again.”

The playlist contained both the sickliest record I’ve heard Peel play and a recommendation to check out the Swingers EP by Los Angeles band Slug due to its cover art, however anyone rushing to buy a copy expecting something controversial or outrageous would instead find themselves subjected to something approaching mindless good taste.  He was also touched that Mercury Rev had included their Peel session on their latest release as well as the comment, Lord, protect John Peel in the sleevenote.

The recording was of the full 2 hour broadcast and included the news bulletin from BFBS. Highlights included the Queen returning to live at Windsor Castle a week after after the fire there. Meanwhile, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and post Black Wednesday punchbag, Norman Lamont was under fire for using Treasury money to evict a sex therapist from a flat they were renting from him. Just writing that down reminds me that Peel shows between 1992-97 went out against a backdrop of Tory Party sex/finance/ethics scandals. Watch out for more long forgotten names from the past as the years go by, though Lamont was never truly forgettable, not least for the extraordinary way his eyes and his eyebrows seemed to merge together whenever he smiled, making him look like a kind of mandarin, alien insect.

There were at least four tracks which I slated for inclusion, but which ultimately didn’t make the cut:

Drop Nineteen - Mandy  After opening the show with this, Peel remarked, I don’t remember Barry Manilow’s original version but I bet it was a corker.  Unfortunately, Drop Nineteens didn’t manage to repeat the oracle of their Madonna cover, much as I was open to them doing so.  On this one, I suggest sticking with Bazza.

The Irresistible Force - Spiritual High Peel revealed that the Irresistible Force was a pseudonym for My mate, Mixmaster Morris (Morris Gould).  Well, I carry his records around at Glastonbury.  This one should have stayed in the case.  I think it might have kept me onboard had the meditative, relaxation voiceover been used throughout the track, but once it is removed all we’re left with is a further 5 minutes of ambient tedium structured around a rhythm that sounds like a radio stuck between a pair of static medium-wave frequencies.  Relaxation ebbs into irritation, very quickly.

Pavement - Shoot the Singer By this point, I have to wonder whether I’m ever going to like anything by this band, apart from Two States.

Freefall - Mirror  This probably should have been included on the metaphorical mixtape because in common with other Freefall tracks that I’ve heard Peel play, parts of it are tremendous.  The music is epic and sweeping.  At times, Mirror succeeds in transporting the listener off into another world in the way that great music can do....and then - just as with other Freefall tracks that I’ve heard Peel play - those God-awful vocals come in and drain all the life out of the track.  Even when the music is soaring and bursting with life, you can’t fully feel it because you know that at any moment, their lousy singer is going to open his mouth and bring everything crashing down from the stratospheric to the mundane. It was a conundrum which Freefall could not solve adequately, and nothing more was heard from them beyond the Dehydrate E.P.

Full tracklisting

Merry Christmas everyone and here’s to happy and healthy new year.  In 2022, we will wrap up 1992 and then move into 1993, a year in which I was doing shows pretty much continuously, so we’ll get our first uninterrupted year of music from John Peel shows.  I can’t wait.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Nelories - Banana (29 November 1992)

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I know it’s tempting to take the lyrics of songs by Japanese girl groups at face value, and goodness knows the chorus of Banana is so sparklingly effervescent as to sound like it had been recorded specifically for a commercial promoting the importance of having your 5 a day, but I’m calling it here and now. This is an ode to fellatio.  The fruit of choice for the title clearly gives that away even before Jun Kurihara starts singing telltale lines about dreaming of bananas and eating them gently.  She even mentions a friend who she appears to be sharing the banana with, and how watching her eat the banana slowly and gently makes them “feel fine.” Yes, I bet it does...

Now, at this point, I’m sure regular readers (evening, Webbie) may be saying, “For God’s sake, David! In recent posts, your thought processes and selections have taken us from exhibitionism to masturbation and now you’re forcing fellatio down our throats. You’re in danger of getting a one track mind about this kind of thing. Don’t you have any other observations?”  Well, if you don’t agree that it’s a sex song, I maintain that this is a knowingly, subversive song because it may also be related to drugs.  Either through the urban myth about being able to get high from smoking banana peels or via the reference to mellow yellow banana in the choruses, which suggests that the Nelorie girls may have been fans of hippy par excellence, Donovan and wasn’t Mellow Yellow about getting high from smoking banana skins?  Well, no, it was actually about a vibrator, according to Donovan, so subversion begat subversion and Banana remains a sex song, as charged.

Whatever the track was about, it clearly excited the band who put in a performance of such spirit and energy that the accordion solo mentioned by Peel as he read the notes provided by Nelories’s UK label, Sugarfrost doesn’t sound like a novelty instrument, but instead fizzes and sparkles with the suggestion of lust and rampant hormones running wild.  It all builds up to a suitably thrilled climax which sounds as though Nelories had been listening to some of Pulp’s recent songs.  It’s a most heady brew and arguably the second best track by a Japanese band that I heard Peel play in these 1992 recordings after White Kam Kam, who were also distributed through Sugarfost.

Video courtesy of Webbie who I am most grateful to for providing the track directly from Peel’s BFBS show as broadcast on 29/11/92.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Nirvana - Spank Thru (29 November 1992)

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I’m grateful to Charles R. Cross for pointing out in Heavier Than Heaven, his wonderful biography of Kurt Cobain, that Spank Thru is a song about masturbation. I’d been too distracted to make the link with spanking the monkey and also missed the fact that Cobain uses the word “masturbate” in the song, albeit in an exaggeratedly, slurred drawl which makes it difficult to catch. This may have been a deliberate obscuring of the word, so as not to affect the already slim chances of the record receiving airplay on American daytime radio channels.

Spank Thru was one of Nirvana’s earliest issued songs and was chosen as their contribution to the compilation EP, Sub Pop 200, released over Christmas 1988.  

Listening to it, one is initially struck by how funny the first verse is.  Singing in a lower register, Cobain sounds like an old style balladeer conveying a mood of romanticism, almost like he’s taking his love out for a picnic in the countryside. It quickly becomes apparent though that the relationship has been long dead and that Cobain still yearns for it both in his heart, but more especially in his loins. Thank God, that we still have that as a means to relive (and relieve) emotions for past love affairs.  The song is refreshingly free of feelings of guilt or self-disgust and its closing lines suggest that Cobain has got VERY good at it, while the end squall of feedback does indeed dribble out like an aural suggestion of the song’s subject matter. Definitely one to file under ‘Music as Lived Experience’ I think.

Video courtesy of Incesticide23

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Dave Gray and the Graytones - The Weird One (29 November 1992)

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Well, this will make you smile. The Peel show that I’m currently making selections from included Shine by David Gray, released well in advance of his success with White Ladder.  I haven’t included Shine among my selections and it remains to be seen whether David Gray ever appears here.  However, what I can offer you today is Dave Gray, lead guitarist with the Graytones, who released a solitary 45 in 1959 called You’re the One, and pretty execrable it was too.  However, the B-side, a slinky, stylish instrumental called The Weird One was a different beast entirely.  Peel was often apt to play records which sounded like things he would have played at home while getting ready for a night out during his early years in America, and there’s a swagger to The Weird One which evokes walking down boulevards past all-night diners, bars and clubs, while young people talk to each other from open-top cars while pulled up to the sidewalk.  

It’s a wonderfully evocative record, given a potential new audience through its appearance on a 1986 compilation album called Strummin’ Mental! Volume One.  The only false note is struck by the scream/depraved laugh towards the end of the track which suggests that The Weird One of the title is a flasher.  I think this may have been a deliberate intention, if only to contrast with its insipid A-side.

Video courtesy of Bob Bradley.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Moonshake - Sweetheart (29 November 1992)

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As with the previous Moonshake track to be played by Peel, Sweetheart was one of “hers”, so consequently it takes on strange, mysterious, disarming textures.  Just like Little Thing, it feels like what we’re hearing are the mechanics of music making - here evidenced both by Miguel Moreland’s clattering drumwork and kronky guitars which sound like they’re trying to hawk up a lungful of phlegm - while, tantalisingly heard in the background, we can make out the performance of Margaret Fiedler’s subdued vocal. Her performance walks the line between sex kitten and femme fatale, but it was too quiet for me to be able to make out whether her character was giving a come on or a kiss off. The high, fluting backing vocals suggest the former, but the stabs of acid jazz brass suggest the latter.  It may be hard to pin down but it all sounds seductively brilliant.  

Indeed, as the blog heads into the home strait of Peel’s 1992 shows, and I reflect on one of the long forgotten aims of this blog to buy as many of the records that caught my ear as possible, I find myself pondering that the Eva Luna album may be one of the few from Peel’s 1992 playlists that I would actually want to own.  Discogs UK dealers may be having turkey for Christmas after all.

Video courtesy of We Came to Dance

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Coupé Cloué - Souvenir D’Enfance (29 November 1992)

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Having recently brought you tracks which deal with depression/isolation and suicide, it’s a relief to be able to lighten the mood with some Haitian party music courtesy of Coupé Cloue.  I don’t think the childhood memory of the song’s title suggests anything too traumatic, though full translations will be gratefully received.

Video courtesy of Bon Melomane

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Therapy? - Perversonality (29 November 1992)

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After a couple of recent instances where my teenaged affection for Therapy? wan’t strong enough to include tracks of theirs played by John Peel across the autumn/winter of 1992 on this blog, it comes as something of a relief to be able to embrace Perversonality like a newly met, long-lost friend.  If that analogy sounds like an oxymoron, I should explain that I had never heard Perversonality before hearing it on this edition of John Peel’s Music but straightaway it reminded me  of exactly why I liked Therapy? back in the day. 

All the elements of classic Therapy? are there: strong opening guitar line, funky bass, drumming which feels like a character in its own right, Andy Cairns with another cosplaying serial killer style vocal, lyrical themes of emotional conflict Love you and I hate you in the same breath etc, only for a definitive verdict to be arrived at by the 2:10 mark and which heralds a rapidly building sense of anguish/mania; the aural equivalent of someone prepping themselves for a suicide attempt. This is followed by a burst of guitar which sounds like emergency room procedures desperately trying to bring the victim back to life, only to level off and guide the listener safely through to a sampled testimony from what sounds like a support group meeting for emotionally vulnerable people.  Therapy?’s use of samples was always one of their most fascinatingly striking qualities because, as is the case here, it helped to ground their songs into some kind of relatable reality.  The sample used here feels perfectly in sync with a track whose object of affection and disgust appears to be Cairns himself.  People often got hurt, rejected and damaged within the narrative of Therapy?’s songs, and that damage was often turned inward.  

It’s naughty of me to describe Cairns’s vocal style as cosplaying. Regardless of whether he sang from experience or as a persona, his voice was the sound of scars which were either inflicted on other people’s bodies or his own psyche. For a brief period, Therapy?’s music helped me to both land and absorb my own blows, trivial though they were. Perversonality is the first track of theirs that I’ve heard in a long time which reminds me of how valuable that was for me.

Video courtesy of Therapy?

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Codeine - Realize (29 November 1992)

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This was a knife-edge, borderline inclusion and I can well imagine that if I ever had put it onto a metaphorical mixtape, I’d be impatient with it 9 plays out of every 10.  Not to mention the fact that the title is spelled incorrectly - but I’ll have to go along with their foolishness this time, I guess.

Whether they wanted the label or not, New York band Codeine were the anointed kings of slowcore in the early 1990s, a fact which John Peel would wryly reference when cueing Realize up on this programme.  What seems to be apparent is that Codeine were pretty faithful to the tenets of slowcore during their 5 year  career.  Not that they lacked range, they could do loud and they could do strange, but they never really did fast.  This meant that they provided a valuable offshoot to the prevailing sound of American rock music in the early 1990s: all the angst and introspection of grunge but without the harsh, abrasiveness of Nirvana et al. This really was music for people who kept the curtains drawn against the afternoon sun all day, every day.  There’s no rage here, only melancholy mixed with fear, exhaustion and fragility.  If you sprinkle some sugar and food colouring on it, you’ve virtually got twee pop.  For myself, I can only take it in small doses and that’s still the case even after listening to - and enjoying in parts - Codeine’s debut album, Frigid Stars LP (1990), which FACT Magazine, the same people who felt that Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was the best album of the 90s, also found space to include on their list.  It was placed at 97th on their list which is where I would put it if someone held a gun to my head and told me to compile a list of what I felt the best albums of the 90s were but ensuring that I put Frigid Stars LP on there somewhere. I’d likely have it between Left of the Middle by Natalie Imbruglia and One Love by Delakota.

Realize was intended to be part of Codeine’s follow-up album to Frigid Stars LP, but in 1992 there seemed to be something in the air which stopped bands from successfully recording sophomore efforts after making their names with commercially or critically successful debut albums. British rock fans of a certain musical persuasion will be able to tell you the story - like an old folk tale passed down these last 29 years - of how Blur tried and failed to record a follow up to their Top 10 debut album, Leisure, and nearly suffered a premature dissolution as well as squandering EMI’s time and budget.  Well, through an odyssey of studios dotted around America’s East Coast and on a tighter budget than Blur’s, Codeine went through the same fruitlessly, abortive process thanks to a mixture of bad luck, bad decisions, perfectionism and technical incompatibility between the sounds they heard in their heads and the sounds the studios actually made.  However, unlike Blur, who went back to the drawing board, resurrected the best of the content they had tried to record in 1992 and supplemented it with newly written songs to produce Modern Life is Rubbish in 1993, Codeine did have enough completed material from the sessions to put them into an EP which they titled Barely Real and which featured Realize as both its opening track and breakout single release.

With its unchanging tempo, Realize feels like a first draft idea, but what the band achieve successfully with it is to filter through the track a tangible sense of ennui and drift that, for all my carping about it, successfully draws the listener in to its unhappy mood.  I can sense just how comforting the wash of John Engle’s guitar and the gentle implorations of Stephen Immerwahr’s vocal must have been to listeners who either found the weight of the world too heavy to bear most days or as implied by the line, Look at me just with your eyes were desperately, shyly trying to catch the attention of the love of their life.  People needed the protection which a track like Realize offered.  It would have been churlish to deny it to them back then, and equally churlish to deny it to them now.

Video courtesy of tommygunx.  Lyrics are copyright of their authors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Aphex Twin - Schottkey 7th Path (29 November 1992)

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Having started 1992 by releasing one of the year’s most striking 12-inch singles, Richard D. James ended the year by releasing his debut album. Seven years in the making, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was a collection of ambient electronica tracks recorded by James, predominantly live and in many instances, on nothing more complex than a cassette.  It took the ambient templates set down by the likes of Brian Eno and incorporated loose elements of acid house and techno - arguably the two key non-verbal  musical genres to emerge over the period 1985-92 - with a subtlety and immense technical precision which helped birth a new sub-genre: Intelligent Dance Music (IDM).  Having listened to the album for the first time yesterday, I found myself reflecting that the tone of the album sounded familiar, mainly because so many other artists jumped in on the sound in the intervening years.  For a viewpoint on why Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was regarded as a gamechanger on its release, I recommend reading factmag.com’s selection of the 100 best albums of the 1990s, not least because in their view, it was the best album of the decade.

On its own, Schottkey 7th Path is a pleasant, contemplative piece of music.  It conjures a dubby, slightly jungalist vibe and on a mixtape, would represent a welcome moment of breathing space.  Heard in context of the album, it sits between  We Are the Music Makers, another track which showed just what an influence Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory had on dance musicians. and Ptolemy.  These are two of the more upbeat tracks on the album and both invite the listener to lose themselves in the collective consciousness of the crowd. Schottkey 7th Path provides the lifeline to one’s individuality among the masses. It’s an aural Blue Room for trippers to decompress before throwing oneself back onto the dancefloor.  If I ever find myself back in a job where I have to commute into the city and charge around in the pursuit of a living, I may make this part of the breakfast time playlist.  A moment of individual calm before submersion into the motorway or train carriage.

Video courtesy of R & S Records

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Automatic Dlamini feat. PJ Harvey - Putty (29 November 1992)

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John Peel’s programmes could get people to overcome all sorts of biases and ignorant attitudes towards music.  Although there may be genres of music that one wouldn’t rush to embrace, Peel’s playlists invariably meant that there would always be something that would catch your attention and cause you to reassess your attitude towards the merits of that genre.  Likewise, Peel shows could also help you to look more closely at artists and performers that you may previously have been dismissive of or inattentive towards.  Such is the case here for me with John Parish and his band, Automatic Dlamini.

When I fell for the charms of PJ Harvey in 1995, John Parish was part of the picture and sound that helped sweep me along through the television appearances that Harvey made that year promoting tracks from her To Bring You My Love album, a record which Parish had co-produced with her.  Standing to her left, in classic lead musician position and either playing the relentless, unstoppable riff on Meet Ze Monsta or playing the shaker on Working For the Man, he clearly played as much of a part in constructing the soundscapes and ambience of Harvey’s music in that period as she did herself.  It shouldn’t be forgotten just how much of a stylistic shift To Bring You My Love was to those who remembered the PJ Harvey trio

sound of Dry and Rid of Me.  But it paid off, critically and commercially, and this may have been what persuaded  Island Records to sign off on their next PJ Harvey release being a collaboration between herself and Parish, in which he would set her lyrics to his music. It may also have been the label realising that this would probably be the only way in which they were liable to get any kind of timely follow up record from Harvey who had run herself into the ground during 1995 touring To Bring You My Love with the result that she ended up being signed off sick at the start of December 1995 and cancelling a string of live shows through that month, including the last show of the year in Bristol, which would have been the first ever “proper” gig that I was going to attend.  In the circumstances, sharing the load on a new album seemed like a sensible idea.

When the album, Dance Hall at Louse Point was released in September 1996, I learnt a little more about the ties that had bound Harvey and Parish together and how Harvey had started her musical career by joining Parish’s band, Automatic Dlamini. He had clearly been a huge influence on her, yet if you had said to me then, “Would you like to listen to an Automatic Dlamini album so you can hear a bit more of John Parish’s music?” I’d have probably made my excuses that I had something more urgent to do.  And this would have been purely down to snobbish incuriosity on my part.  I didn't mind hearing him working behind PJ Harvey, but why would I have wanted to hear him on his own?  She had the profile, he didn’t. And if he was so influential, why wasn’t his profile higher?  Oh, such shallow thinking and as ever, thank God for John Peel providing an opportunity to learn some musical lessons which I would otherwise have been too ignorant to do.

Formed in 1982, Automatic Dlamini look to have been a frustrating band to have followed if you were hoping for regular material from them. Their first releases including debut album, The D is For Drum came out during 1986/87, but 5 years had passed by the time their second album, From a Diva to a Diver appeared.  Not that they were inactive during that time. Harvey joined the band in 1988 and played on an unreleased album titled Here, Catch, Shouted His Father.  But she left in early 1991 together with drummer, Rob Ellis, although she contributed to several tracks on From a Diva to Diver including Putty, which with its brushed drums, slide-acoustic guitar and dustbowl blues tone feels like a warm up for tracks on Dance Hall at Louse Point such as Rope Bridge Crossing.  Lyrically, it has clear resonances towards the kind of music they were to make together on future projects with the sculptress of the song putting together the model of a feckless man and making cuts and slices into the clay like a voodoo sorceress.  A role which Harvey seemed born to play on a future track.  You can be sure that somewhere, some poor soul was experiencing a burning sensation somewhere painful as the sculptress uses fire to firm up the putty that she mutilates.

I had to take the opportunity to listen to other John Parish compositions on earlier Automatic Dlamini tracks and what struck me, from the admittedly limited sample I heard, was how Putty appeared to mark something of a departure for him from the predominant tone of Automatic Dlamini songs.  In Putty, and through his future work with Harvey, he sounds like Nick Cave with songs which feel like they are set in small, dimly lit cabins in the middle of vast desert wildernesses.  But with earlier tracks like Principles vs Feelings or Crazy Supper, he writes like Jarvis Cocker and sounds like Nick Heyward, by creating songs of intense but lyrical urban domestic disharmony.  If ever you wanted to make a Spotify playlist titled Yuppie Kitchen Sink music, then Automatic Dlamini would need to feature on it.  So, Putty represents quite a shift for Parish in the way that To Bring You My Love would be a shift for Harvey.  Their artistic bond has lasted up to the present day, but ultimately, who influenced who?

Video courtesy of blackartfox

Oliver! appendix: Krispy 3 [Peel Session] (7 December 1991)

Long time readers of this blog may remember that I often cited the Peel Session recorded by Chorley hip hop trio, Krispy 3 for broadcast in his Radio 1 show on 7 December 1991 as one of my Holy Grails given how much I loved it on first hearing and its apparent unavailability.  Whenever a previously missing track from 7/12/91 turned up, I would include it as an appendix here, but never lost an opportunity to reference that Krispy 3 session, almost as a way of saying, “Yes, New Mind were great, but if you had heard Krispy 3’s Peel Session, then you would truly be in the presence of greatness.”

Well, my benefactor and champion, Webbie has kindly uploaded a recording of the session from that show together with Peel’s links.  It’s a wonderful capsule which showcases just how entertaining and fun, Krispy 3 were.  Peel had been an enthusiastic supporter of them through late 1991, and they first came to my attention through their excellent single, Don’t Be Misled. Which made it all the more surprising that I’ve heard nothing from them in any of Peel’s 1992 shows, although he may have played some tracks from their debut album which was released just as The Comedy of Errors was finishing and I was about to go on a short acting hiatus which meant that Peel’s shows and tracklistings for the period July-September 1992 fell outside this blog’s remit.  All is not lost given that they continued to record music up to 1999, so hopefully more music from them will turn up through the years.

Krispy 3’s particular genius was the way in which they used seemingly mundane or unglamorous scenarios as cover for more serious topics.  Second track, Where We Going? starts out with the crew pondering the problems of getting lost while going camping in the countryside - a notion since reclaimed in recent years by the black community in the rush of “Ever See a Black Person go to/do....” memes*. However as the track progresses, the Where We Going refrain changes from “which way up do I hold this compass?” fish out of water style self-mockery to a more searching question of where the black community may find itself going in the future. Similarly, opening track Answer Me, Will Ya uses the pretext of a customer survey to ask the audience about the associations (and prejudices) they may have towards anyone in a hip-hop group.  It’s all done with subtlety and with a heavy layer of humour, but no irony, so it cuts through more deeply and invites more self-recognition from the audience than might be offered up when they are lectured by The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprasy, though by the time they get to session closer, Hard Times, they are less coy about confronting the listener with tales of degradation, hypocrisy, poverty and lack of charity. 

As entertaining and enjoyable as Krispy 3 were in this session, they did show themselves as being inescapably in thrall to some of hip-hop’s more eye-rolling traits. Third track, Too Damn Ignorant, takes its cue from the inferiority complex which seems to bedevil so many hip-hop groups, namely the sense that they’re not getting the respect that they feel they deserve. In Krispy 3’s case, that might be rooted in the fact that they came from Chorley rather than Manchester, and it provokes an attack on those who accuse them of lacking big city authenticity. Though while the complaints may be genuine, “We’re not country bumpkins!” etc, they manage to turn it around in order to attack the small-mindedness and bad habits of some of the city-slicker figures in the hip-hop fraternity.

*I didn’t come up with a very good label for this, but earlier tonight I saw an advert promoting European Black History Month which featured a number of black people talking about things which they and their community didn’t generally do despite being a part of British society. It was all very tongue in cheek but included statements like “Black people don’t eat Sunday roasts” and “Black people don’t go to Cornwall on holiday” which is the black community’s loss, if true.  But the point remains that these perceptions/prejudices have been reclaimed by the black community in recent years.  Nobody did it better than Stephen K. Amos in his alleged response to a punter after a stand-up gig in Bow, who approached Amos and said, “Fuck me, mate! I never knew black people were funny.”

To which, Amos replied, “Some of us ride bikes.  Have been known to ski. Can work with rudimentary tools.”

Video courtesy of Webbie.  Check out their Peel related podcast.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 22 November 1992 (BFBS)

 The audio files which contain the BFBS shows for October-December 1992 appear no longer to be accessible. In a YouTube world, that makes no odds in terms of presenting the selections I chose from those Peel shows, but unfortunately it means that the notes posts which cover Peel shows for the periods will be a little scant for a while.  For instance, on this show, Peel told an anecdote about being taken to watch horse racing as a child by his parents at Bangor-On-Dee. He was surreptitiously encouraged by his father to place some bets and had a moderately successful time of it, winning as he remembered, about £40, which in those days would have bought you a small country estate with full shooting rights.  Unfortunately, he never got to see or spend the money he won due to his father looking after it.  Now, I’m able to present a little context to that anecdote, but as things currently stand with those audio files, I can tell you nothing about how a play of Superstar by French band, Lucievacarme linked to Peel’s own experience from earlier in the week of spending 90 minutes in a hot TV studio to record a 30 second link for a French television programme.

Had the Luicevacarme track been available, it was a definite candidate for inclusion from this show, which it has to be said contained a fairly high number of tracks which made my list. Inevitably, a few fell from favour, such as...

Therapy? - Accelerator - This nearly got in on retrospective grounds given that in early 1993, I became quite a fan of Therapy? but listening to this track, and a few others from the period which didn’t ultimately make the cut, I wonder what I saw in them.  It gives me no pleasure to write that.

Pond - 11x17 - Taken from a CD released on Sub Pop which Peel admitted he hadn’t liked during his initial listens to it, but which he was learning to love on subsequent listens.  It obviously grabbed me first time around, but lost its impact when I went back to it.

Nirvana - Here She Comes Now - a cover of The Velvet Underground track.  When I revisited it, I learnt that when it comes to Here She Comes Now, all I can say is that as far as my preferences are concerned, There She Goes Again.

Full tracklisting

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Strobe Man - Punished For This [Dalek Mix] (22 November 1992)

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I’ll spare you my Dalek impressions, they’re barely recognisable anyway. John Peel after playing Punished for This on 22/11/92.

Strobe Man was a one-off alias for Andrew E. Beer.  The Strobe EP was his only release under this name and the highlight of the record was Punished for This, which would have stood a very good chance of inclusion on this blog even if it had been terrible, due to the title sample being taken from the Doctor Who story, Genesis of the Daleks (1975).  In this case the line, “You will be punished for this!” is not said by a Dalek, but rather by their creator, Davros.  How could I resist a record which gave this Doctor Who fan the opportunity to enjoy MC Michael Wisher.

I don’t know where the opening sample of speech comes from but having ended it on the line about “evil” and then segueing that onto the rantings of the creator of one of the most evil alien races in science-fiction, Beer’s audio masterstroke is the introduction of angelic diva vocals from around 1:05 onwards.  These serve to act as a soothing antidote to Davros’s ranting and the other harsh, metallic sounds which punctuate the track.  It serves to act as a reminder that even amidst barbaric surroundings, goodness can still be found in the most unexpected places.  However, the way that the track fades out on both the angels’ sighs and Davros’s threats is a reminder that good and evil, violence and peace constantly live side by side. The question is which one will drown out the other?

Video courtesy of BzERK IE

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Lisanga - Samba Bert (22 November 1992)

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Lisanga, which translates as “meeting”, appears to have been something of an African supergroup (weren’t they all?)  Alas, the Africa - Force Unie Vol 1 album has not to date been followed by further volumes, while the cast list of performers on the record includes many luminaries of the African music scene who have featured on Peel playlists throughout the year such as Lucien Bokilo, Mav Cacharel and inevitably, Diblo Dibala.  But, as Peel pointed out, even the great Diblo found himself overshadowed on the sleeve credits for this record. For while Dibala was credited with lead/solo guitar,  Africa - Force Unie Vol 1 also included contributions from N’Gouma Lokito and Miguel Yamba on “Magic Guitar”.  I don’t know how that is differentiated on the recording beyond saying that they ALL provide magic guitar.

Video courtesy of Lisanga - Topic

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Ciccone Youth - Addicted to Love (22 November 1992)

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Groups start side projects for all sorts of reasons.  It can while away time between album releases/tour schedules, allow for musical experimentation in areas that may alienate their core fans if done under their established brands or just give an opportunity for collaboration with other artists without risking those brands.  But when the members of Sonic Youth hatched a plan for a side project in 1986, they weren’t doing it for any of the reasons stated above.  Instead, they formed the side project to help a friend in need.

On 22 December 1985, D. Boon, guitarist and songwriter with Minutemen, died in a car crash, aged 27 years old. For his devastated bandmates, drummer George Hurley and bassist Mike Watt, Boon’s death not only spelt the end of Minutemen but also their participation in the music business.  Watt fell into a deep depression, unable to contemplate making music without his friend.

Meanwhile, Sonic Youth, who had built up a friendship with Watt over the previous year after sharing several bills with Minutemen, offered him a shoulder to cry on while he processed his grief and managed to coax him into playing bass on a couple of tracks during sessions for their EVOL album.  One of these tracks, a cover of Bubblegum by Kim Fowley, was to have something of an influence on their imminent side project given that the band recorded it by playing along to Fowley’s record then erasing everything but themselves from the recording.  This would be repeated again during the EVOL sessions when Sonic Youth recorded a version of Madonna’s Into the Groove  put through a mixture of stabbing discordant guitar, distant basslines, percussion, intermittent synth effects, a toneless Thurston Moore vocal and occasional snatches of the original Madonna recording being brought into the mix to harmonise with Moore.  It wasn’t quite the “worlds in collision” stunt that it could have appeared at first glance.  

Madonna and Sonic Youth were known to each other from Madonna’s pre-fame days fronting No Wave bands at Danceteria, “...sitting on Mike Gira’s lap...hanging out and smoking cigarettes” as Moore remembered it.  Into the Groove(y) as the Sonic Youth cover became known was paired up with a one man recording by Watt of another Madonna song, Burning Up to create a 3 track 12-inch put out under the name, Ciccone Youth, a fusion of Madonna’s surname with the second part of Sonic Youth’s name.  

Burnin’ Up sold particularly well in the UK, but in the main it achieved the purpose which Sonic Youth hoped it would and persuaded Mike Watt to stay in the music business. By the time 1987 rolled around, Watt and George Hurley were ready to get back on the horse again as fIREHOSE.

By 1988, Sonic Youth reactivated the Ciccone Youth name and used it to gather together both the material recorded with Watt in 1986 and several other tracks which didn’t fit the Sonic Youth mould.  These included spoken word interludes on dying in a sinking boat such as Me and Jill or the business proposal floated during Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu!, a silent tribute to John Cage and a number of other offcuts and fragments heavily overladen with deconstruction, sampling, compression and other experimental tangents.  They called it The Whitey Album though any similarities to The Beatles 1968 double-album are only to be found in tracks which recall the spirit of Helter Skelter, Revolution 9 and the unreleased What’s the New, Mary Jane?

But this is Sonic Youth we’re talking about and inevitably their love of straightforward pop would have to find expression in some form. On The Whitey Album, it came about through this version of one of the most iconic songs of the 1980s, Addicted to Love by Robert Palmer.  It is arguable that Addicted to Love owes much of its iconic status to its striking music video in which Palmer was backed by a band comprised of identical female models, but it’s worth remembering that no less a figure than Noddy Holder regarded Addicted to Love as the song he would have most loved to have written. Ciccone Youth’s presentation of Addicted to Love is considerably less polished than Palmer’s original given that Kim Gordon is intoning over a karaoke backing track. No models in the video either, though Kim made the video herself using a film-your-own video booth at a branch of Macy’s and decided to go for a Vietnam War vibe.  I’d spent many years regarding Addicted to Love as an 80s relic, I think I felt that even at the time that it came out, but this version of it has caused me to reassess my attitude towards it.  The truth is that it’s been stuck in my head this last week both in its Ciccone Youth and Robert Palmer versions. Kim’s video may seem to give a subtle middle finger to the glossy decadence of the original video, but even reviewing that , I hadn’t realised just how tongue in cheek the Palmer video was.  It’s a great, indestructible song and any way of performing it will ensure it remains an earworm regardless of whether you want decadence or grime.

Addicted to a good night’s sleep in my case...Peel was not so easily persuaded by it in either version.

Videos courtesy of sonicboy19 and Robert Palmer.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Helivator - Speed Your Trip (22 November 1992)

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‘That doesn’t go anywhere very much,’ you might be saying, but that’s kind of what I like about it.  John Peel after playing Speed Your Trip on 22/11/92.

If, as seems possible to judge from its title and the sonic atmosphere of the recording, Speed Your Trip by New York based noisecore band, Helivator is about drugs then all I can say is that their dealers are sadists.

This is an ultimate bad-trip instrumental which manages to make the elements audible as the guitars, predominantly played by Mark Laramie, seem to conjure up both scorching fire and rushes of air. The repetitive ascending scale, which caught Peel’s attention, acts as a foundation around which the music swoops and soars.  From 2:22, we get signs of the body consciousness trying to break through in the form of feedback as the track gets dangerously close to ripping the sky open. But having flown so high, the track eventually deposits the listener back to ground again by the end.  And in a track in which so much mental feeling is made manifest, the final crashing guitar note encapsulates the immense exhaustion felt at the end of this particular trip.

Video courtesy of Various Artists - Topic

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Georgie Best’s Dreamhome (22 November 1992)

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By November, the football season was in full swing and that invariably meant that Exotica Records would have their latest volume of football related songs and spoken word curios out.  Over the coming weeks, Peel would play several selections from Bend It! 92, most of which have made it onto my lists of future selections. Providing I don’t go cold on them, I can promise you calypsos, The Nolans and a paean of love to The Beatles courtesy of a football pools company.

For now, sit back and listen to George Best talk about the problems of building his own home - one of the great examples of the brilliance/awfulness of late 1960s modernist design - and having to contend with the dual issue of protecting his privacy at the point where he was one of the most famous men in Europe as well as the more prosaic problem of trying to turn his television set on.

Video courtesy of Classic Man Utd Videos and Clips

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Scaremonger - Soon We All Will Have Special Names (22 November 1992)

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Scaremonger was a one-time only alias used by Christoph Fringeli as a launchpad for the debut release on his own Praxis label.  I’m assuming that he must have had his mind on start-up administration matters for the label as a reason to why the title of this track and the verbal sample that runs through it: Soon, all of us will have special names are different from each other - boy, I really hope someone got fired for that blunder.

However, that discrepancy apart, this is a fascinating and near flawless piece of industrial techno, which after taking the time to lay down an exciting beats ‘n’ tempo foundation starts to crank up the sense of dystopian dread from around the 1 minute mark onwards.  Fringeli creates sounds which evoke giant metallic kookaburras pecking at the surface of a membrane, while the drill-like inserts, which crop up throughout the track from around 58 seconds in, put me in mind of the noisy industrial hellholes that populate George Lucas’s debut feature film, THX 1138.  Fringeli manages to walk the tightrope between evocation and danceability without losing his footing once.  A year later, Praxis released a 12-inch set of remixes of this track. For me, the best of them was by friend of this blog*, Andrew Lagowski

Video courtesy of piteronio

*He left a brief comment on one of the posts.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Phil Phillips - Stormy Weather (22 November 1992)

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This was a borderline inclusion.  Stormy Weather, one of the great standards, has been running around my head as an unconscious musical memory for most of my life, probably because it featured in a TV commercial when I was a kid, I expect but whatever form it’s had, it’s generally been sung better in my head than Phil Phillips manages on this recording.  It all sounds so white bread bland, it could be me singing it. There’s definite elements of Don ‘No Soul’ Simmons about the vocal here.  But some songs are genuinely indestructible and if ever there was a case of content rescuing form then this is Exhibit A.

Stormy Weather also serves as a potential example of a track for the Alternative John Peel Obituary Jukebox. When he played the record on this show, Peel admitted that the song was a big favourite of his.  So much so that he could regularly be found whistling it to himself, when I should have been whistling  something hipper.  Again, had Teenage Kicks not come into his life, it’s entirely possible that Phil Phillips may have been piped over Radio 1 as a tribute to Peel when news came through of his death.

Video courtesy of DangerousDaveRR

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Moonshake - Little Thing (22 November 1992)

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If you think there's a lack of nuance in discourse nowadays, then I have to ask you which side you picked during the Moonshake wars of 1992/93.  Did you identify more with David Callahan or Margaret Fiedler?  When Moonshake last appeared on this blog, it was with Callahan's angsty, sour rocker, Secondhand Clothes, a track which I liked enough to include on the  Oliver! mixtape.  However, this track, taken from  Moonshake's imminent Eva Luna LP was my first exposure to Fiedler's songwriting and I have to say that had I been keeping a scorecard at the time, Little Thing would have helped her steal ahead.

We like to believe that the spirit of healthy artistic competition within bands is as positive a thing for the bands themselves as it is for music fans. After all, it worked for The Beatles long enough didn't it? However, it's often a fallacy.  The history of rock music is littered with bands that tried to accommodate multiple creative visions and in doing so produced both musical eclecticism and fractured relationships; the dreaded "creative differences".  In Moonshake's case, this was still a year or so away at the time Peel played Little Thing on this show, but had they heard his summation of a recent gig he had seen them play in Cambridge which left him broadly unimpressed but by and large of the view that I liked her stuff  more than I liked his, then a further degree of erosion in the relationship between Fiedler and Callahan would have been quietly added.  All just artistic sport to us punters, but a tiny dagger to the heart of the artist.  You can accept being compared to contemporaries in other bands, but it’s much harder to accept comparison within your own band, especially when neither party is prepared to accept the role of junior partner.

Despite that, the recording of Little Thing feels like a genuinely collaborative effort.  My notes describe the track as “sounding like a Heath Robinson contraption” as Moonshake lift the bonnet to show the inner workings of the idea of a smooth, functioning band.  In the background we hear lounge-jazz basslines, Leslie speakered guitars and Fiedler’s huskily, sultry vocals with their arresting “Maybe I’ll start bleeding” refrain. But dominating the sound are cacophonous drums and samples which sound like relentless, grinding machinery.  It’s the sound of the blood, sweat, tears and conflict that make for great bands.  The moving parts straining on the production line to turn out beautiful, intricate music. The abrasive and the beautiful working in sync with each other to create exactly the kind of musical magic which made Moonshake so special.

Video courtesy of TommyGun Angel

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Velocity Girl - Warm/Crawl (22 November 1992)

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In my opinion, there is 75% of a wonderful song in Warm/Crawl.  If it had ended at the 3 minute mark, I’d have gone as far as calling it one of the best guitar tracks that Peel played in 1992.  The fusion of Sarah Shannon’s vocal and the high guitar line, which almost doubles as a second vocal is so beautifully arranged, it strikes me as one of those instances that demonstrates exactly what a guitar is for.

Unfortunately, the track goes on for a further minute and the atmospherics of the first three-quarters of the track are replaced with a generic rock thrashabout in which Velocity Girl appear to have lifted a bit from the end title music of Blackadder the Third.  This may have been the band trying to subvert their melodic reputation by including some of the louder/hardcore elements of their live shows, as touched upon in this interview.  I suspect though that Warm/Crawl came about by bringing together two separate fragments of songs;  Shannon’s ethereal vocal and the blistering guitars reflecting the warmth of a dozen suns and the rockout in the last minute sounding like a crawl in the dirt.

Video courtesy of manicdogbert1

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Hanson Brothers - Road Pizza (22 November 1992)

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Another burst of Ramones-style homage from the Gross Misconduct album. However, unlike My Girlfriend’s a Robot, this quickfire field notes ode to roadkill sees vocalist Johnny Hanson sounding alternately like Joey Ramone one moment and Elvis Presley the next.  Musically, the track also reminds me of a slightly more ghoulish twist on Slow Down by Larry Williams.

Video courtesy of gilpow.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Drop Nineteens - Angel (22 November 1992)

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While my wife was making lunch on Friday, a Madonna song was playing on the radio and she was singing along with it. I told her “My next blogpost is going to be about a cover of a Madonna song.  Do you remember Angel?”  

“No,” she replied, with immediate certainty.

“Neither do I.”

Of course, as I’ve prepared this blogpost, that hasn’t quite been true. The melody of the chorus has come running from the distant edges of my mental jukebox, shouting more insistently as it’s got closer, “Yes, you know!  The one that goes ’You’re an angel’. Yeah?  That’s right, the one that nobody remembers,” all while other “forgotten” Madonna tracks like Everybody or Where’s the Party look smugly on, thinking, “Well, at least he could make a passing stab at singing our choruses.”

She originally recorded the song for 1984’s Like a Virgin album, and it was released as a single; a successful one at that, peaking at Number 5 on both the UK and US singles charts.  However, it was 

overshadowed by the other two singles which came off that album, namely the title track and 

Material Girl, both of which in different ways were gamechangers for Madonna’s career.  By contrast, Angel became a footnote.  I would probably have remembered it if she had included it in the setlist for her 1987 Who’s That Girl Tour, the live video of which I must have seen around 30 times due to indulging a school friend of mine who was, and remains, a massive Madonna fan and who had bought the video but had nothing to play it on.  I think I saw that show more times than some of the videos I owned back then, but I assented to the regular plays of it because I fancied one of the backing singers and in 1989 with puberty jumping down onto me from a great height, I considered the hairspray, high heels and leather dresses look to be the apex of eroticism.  Madonna, by contrast, with her goofy costume changes and the emphasis on Fun! Fun! Fun! wasn’t in the picture.  It took a few years before she caught my attention.

But coming into view to rescue Angel from obscurity, here come Drop Nineteens, last seen on this blog as part of the mass dismissal of tracks played by Peel on his 8/11/92 show.  On the evidence of this cover and some of the other tracks which Drop Nineteens recorded for the Delaware LP, that may have been a case of Peel’s occasional knack of giving prominence to a duff track on a record when he had an abundance of riches to choose from.  Drop Nineteens version of Angel pitches the song at a lower key and while the synth/bass hook of the original is still evident, they build spaciously impressive guitar dynamics around it,  which manage to both drive the song along for those in the mosh pit but also brings an ethereal quality missing from the original.  Madonna’s song saw her falling for an earthbound figure of goodness, a metaphorical “angel”; Drop Nineteens sound like they have had a genuine visitation.  Had saner voices prevailed at their UK label, Hut Records, then it should have been released as a single because an edited version up to the 3:44 mark would have had real mainstream potential.  However, the band may have been wary of tying their future to a cover and potentially always being identified with another artist’s song so instead they released a tribute to Winona Ryder.  Peel had seen them play recently in Norwich and had enjoyed them a lot, despite having previously written them off after seeing them described as “American shoegaze”, which may explain why the band attracted more interest in the UK than in their native homeland.  In person however, as he told his audience, Their sound is a lot more robust than you might imagine.

Yes, it’s that one. Seems obvious once you hear it, doesn’t it?

Videos courtesy of Drop Nineteens-Topic and MadonnaUnusual

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Thunderground - Illegal Rush (22 November 1992)

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Thunderground was a collaboration between the members of Bandulu and DJ Lewis Keogh which released 4 records over 1992-95.

My notes for Illegal Rush describe it as sounding like a cross between a Celtic New Age relaxation track and the theme to an urban cop show; the gold standard for which remains Stewart Copeland’s superb theme for The Equalizer.  But lest you think that all sounds a bit too dark and foreboding, the third element of the track appears to take inspiration from the It’s the Mind sketch on Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  Overall, it’s a slightly repetitive bag of tricks but a constantly enjoyable one nevertheless.

Video courtesy of the IDMMaster

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Putney Dandridge and his Orchestra - Santa Claus Came in the Spring (22 November 1992)

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This record, originally released via Vocalion in 1935 as part of the soundtrack to a film called To Beat the Band will give you some idea of one of the directions of travel which John Peel’s playlists were taking over late 1992/early 1993.  He got on to something of a jazz vibe; you’re going to see the name Camille Howard appear here quite a lot once we get into 1993.

The Dandridge record is also another example of how Peel could find Christmas songs with a twist.  I have to smile listening to the opening salvo of clarinet and trumpet from 8 seconds in given the number of amateur dramatics shows I’ve seen and sometimes been in which use something similar for their opening and closing curtain music. 

And now it’s Christmas everyday, because he brought me you!  I wonder if Roy Wood was a fan of this song?

As for Peel, he revealed that he’d always loved the name Putney, and wished that he’d been christened with it as his own name.  It held such a fascination for him that he’d once used it when confirming an order at a pizza restaurant to widespread bemusement.

Video courtesy of the78prof

Lyrics copyright of Johnny Mercer 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Sebadoh - Vampire (22 November 1992)

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Coming off the previous year’s double-album III, Sebadoh contented themselves in 1992 with the release of two mini-albums, Rocking the Forest and the confusingly titled Sebadoh vs Helmet, which is neither a shared LP with the New York band of the same name or tribute album to them, but rather a series of re-recordings of earlier material.  Because this was the American Underground music scene, both records were inevitably packaged together and, just in time for Christmas, sold as a bumper compilation album called Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock. 

Vampire was originally recorded for Rocking the Forest. I really like it though I could be guilty of reading the song literally as the feelings and thoughts of an actual vampire at the moment when his mark dies and becomes a vampire themself - thus breaking the ties of lust and hunger that bind them while the new vampire makes their own visits and prefacing an endless and loveless union as another vampire walks the earth looking for others to feed on.  It’s like any long-term romantic union; Dracula always appears the suave, sexy suitor when scratching at the window and (love)biting the neck of some buxom, dark-eyed, virginal innocent in her bed, but the moment they become one of his brides, he’s being heavy-handed and moaning at them to leave his things alone.  

Without lapsing into gothic melodrama, Sebadoh include some clever twists on the vampire legend by referencing shadows and reflections, neither of which a vampire can cast.  However, the more likely reading of the song is the recognition that the man is guilty of trapping his partner into an abusive relationship and an acknowledgement of the ways in which his behaviour and suffocating love have caused his partner to become submissive and trapped within the confines of the relationship. It’s quite a depressing picture that is painted in that while reflecting that he should let his lover go free to rediscover herself, he cannot commit to letting it happen due to the sad truth that he rises by her falling: 

My life cuts her up/An evil way to build me strong.

The power he holds over her is his lifeblood and for all the recognition that he is destroying her, he cannot let it go, at least not until his lover finds her own resolution either to board up the doors against him or fashion a stake to his heart. And just like the fate of thousands-year old vampires in fiction, one feels that death would be a release for all parties.

Video courtesy of toiletfromhell

Lyrics copyright of Lou Barlow

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Les Etoiles du Zaire - Pembe (22 November 1992)

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Many, many years ago I was listening to Ken Bruce on Radio 2 talking about broadcasts he’d been involved in which had included features which were unsuitable for radio. Not unsuitable in the sense of being in poor taste, but rather content which was entirely visual in nature and so would lose its impact when put on radio.  Examples included breaking off from one programme to cover a fireworks display - turn your radios up to hear several minutes of explosions - and most farcical of all, a display by a team of jugglers. Question: if you juggle on the radio and no one sees you drop a ball or club, did it really happen?

In recorded music terms, the equivalent is the crediting of dancers on live albums.  It’s fair enough given that they put in the time in rehearsal and on the day of the show, but unless they’re on a percentage of the royalties, I can’t see the point.  But as curious as the process may seem, there are scenes where the presence of the dancer is as important to the musical ambience as as with any musician.  No soukous gig is complete without the presence of dancers, who will invariably spend the whole show shadowing the vocalist.  The dancers were mainly female, but not exclusively and in 1992, a group of celebrated soukous musicians including Pepe Kalle, Nyboma Mwan’Dido Danos Canta and Bopol Mansiamina came together to record a tribute album to midget dancer, Emoro, who had worked with Kalle and was clearly considered to be a major part of Kalle’s shows that he received front cover co-credits on a couple of Kalle’s mid-1980s albums.  Pembe was written by Nyboma and provoked one of Peel’s familiar complaints about keyboard players on soukous records building up their roles more than desired.  The one on the Hommage a Emoro album is credited merely as Tony, like he’s sitting in with The Fall for a week. On the whole though, I don’t think it’ll spoil the enjoyment too much.

Video courtesy of Bopol - Topic

Oliver! appendix: New Mind - White Star Falling (7 December 1991)

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Before we move forward, let’s take a step back. I always think I’m done with including appendices to shows that I did where a track I wanted from a John Peel show wasn’t available at the time I was covering it, only for it to come to light a few years later.  However, I’m deluding myself clearly because the moment that Twitter user @johnpeel3904 uploaded White Star Falling by New Mind, which I had originally hoped to share when Peel played (and misidentified it) on his 07/12/91, I knew I had to have it here. 

It’s a relief to me to see that whatever fascinations it held when I first heard it are still in place.  Discogs describes the track as electro industrial which seems pretty on the nose to me.  This is not a piece of music for ‘avin it large to.  Indeed, it sounds like nothing less than the sound of war given its sampled shouts of phrases like Incoming and the various Mayday calls which crop up along the way.   The backing is equally intense with the beat sounding like the repetitive, dull thud of distant artillery fire. The first Gulf War was still fresh in the memory at the time that Jonathan Sharp, the man behind New Mind, recorded it. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that the track conjures up the aural equivalent of screaming aeroplanes from which white stars fell and blocked out the starlight in a haze of fire.  We could watch it on television overnight back then, a festival of ongoing news coverage that eventually brought us 24-hour rolling news, a development which should have seen Saddam Hussein put to death 15 years early.

Anyone who understands the vagaries of dance music will not be surprised to learn that the Body Politic EP which featured White Star Falling was the only EP that New Mind ever put out.  However, this was not due to Jonathan Sharp deciding to abandon the monicker for 20 other aliases, but instead because he decided to go down the  Pink Floyd/Moody Blues/Genesis route and make New Mind into an albums only act.  With 5 albums released between 1993 and 2001, there is every chance that New Mind will pop up on future Peel playlists, and if the results are as arresting as White Star Falling, we’ll see them posted here.

Housekeeping: I’m moving house next week which may mean a longer than usual gap to the next post.  Posts have become a little more irregular over the course of this year for which I can only blame pressure of work, but I still have plenty of Peel related music to share and I hope that you’ll continue to find things to enjoy over the coming months.

Video courtesy of John Peel and thanks to Vibracobra23 for recognising the title of the track.  Now, if either of them has the session by Krispy 3 that was broadcast on this programme, one really would have everything one could wish for from 7 December 1991.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 15 November 1992 (BFBS)

 Christmas preparations always start early, but for John Peel, the social whirl of the festive season went on all the way from the moment that the shops start playing Last Christmas to well beyond Twelfth Night.  It was an envious position to be in, there were simply so many friends and people wanting to catch up with him.  I wonder if he ever realised just how loved and liked he was?  This edition of John Peel’s Music brought an invitation for a New Year’s curry with listeners, Robert and Vivienne Lawson while they were visiting the UK during a visit from Macau.

The playlist saw him give a spin to Hard to Find by Codeine who he noted had been celebrated in the press as “Kings of Slowcore”. This led Peel to reminisce about the time he first saw slowcore pioneers, Swans at The Garage in Nottingham, a gig which may have provided one of the tracks on Swans’s 1986 live tour compilation album, Public Castration is a Good Idea.  It was a tiny room and they had everything turned up as loud as it would go.  I really thought I was going to die, it was tremendously exciting.

Another band trying to make a reputation were 8 Storey Window.  Peel played the title track of their 12-inch EP, I Thought You Told Me Everything.  8 Storey Window found themselves in the position of that week’s  British Rock Music’s New Great Hope in the eyes of the media with Melody Maker describing the record as “Exuberant, majestic and self-probing”. Are you allowed to do that sort of thing? wondered Peel before going on to say how destructive he felt the cycle of hyping and dropping bands was when done by the music media.  He felt that invariably the hyping was misplaced to begin with, as many of the bands which the music press talked up were, to his mind, nothing more than OK at best. He understood why it happened, but felt that ultimately, it did more harm than good to the bands themselves.

Unlike the previous week’s programme, I stayed much truer to my initial choices and instincts with only a small handful of selections failing to, in my view, stand the test of time.

Unsane - Breaththing Out Peel declared himself saddened but relieved that what had been his favourite band of late 1991 was going to continue working together despite the death of their drummer Charlie Ondras, a couple of months earlier.  Maybe my own residual relief caused me to wave through this cover of the Slug track Breathe the Thing Out.  It was released in a split single which saw Slug covering Unsane’s track, Streetsweeper, but ultimately it didn’t make me anxious to explore Slug’s discography so had to be considered something of a failure all things considered.

Oliver - Freezing Cold Like an Iceberg: In 1974, farm worker Oliver Chaplin recorded an album at his parents’ farm in Wales.  He called the LP, Standing Stone, pressed up 250 copies and sent them out to DJs, although not alas to Peel.  It became a cult classic and rightly so. 1992 saw it reissued, this time in a limited edition of 500 copies.  With just an acoustic guitar, a handful of overdubbed electric ones and some basic phasing effects, Chaplin produced a record which sounded like something you might get if you locked John Fahey, Captain Beefheart, David Bowie and Marc Bolan in a remote cabin in the woods with a batch of guitars and one bottle of whisky between them. The songs are also distinguished by moments of audio verite, often while they were being played and Peel was particularly tickled by the shout of, "What's this chicken doing in my way?" during Freezing Cold Like an Iceberg. To which one is tempted to say to Chaplin, "It's the chicken's home too, you know, Oliver."  I have a feeling that Standing Stone may have been one of the last physical albums I bought - during a day trip to Exeter in 2017. This probably explains why I included it here in the initial selections from the show.  But unfortunately, the shout at the chicken proves to be the most interesting thing about it. And the album sits, neglected, in the side well of my car.

Loop Guru - Mrabet From their debut EP, I was initially taken in by the Eastern ambience which rose like incense smoke across the early stages of this track. Unfortunately, repeat listens showed that by the end, the track had traded incense for stale pot pourri.

There were a couple of tracks I would have liked to share here which are currently unavailable, such as:

Conrad Crystal and Sheriff - Waan More.  Well, my notes were very excited about this, describing it as a “stunning reggae track”.  Unfortunately, I can’t elaborate on that because the file containing the 15/11/92 show has been taken down recently.

Strangelove - Front.  It was quite interesting to hear something from the early days of this band, who seemed to spend most of the rest of of the decade poised to make a big breakthrough without fully realising it, and enjoying plenty of goodwill and some chart success even when their own personal issues were speeding them towards break-up. That was all way ahead of them when Peel played this track from their Visionary EP.  He was giving them a lot of support having been impressed by their set at the Glastonbury Festival and they had also recorded a session for his Radio 1 programme which had gone down well.

Full tracklisting