A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Sonic Youth - The Destroyed Room (1 November 1992)

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Having really missed out on them at the time, I’ve posted a number of Sonic Youth tracks on this blog over the years. I’ve now reached a point where I can say with some degree of certainty that my preference is more towards those tracks where Kim Gordon is losing her shit with someone, only to break off from her fury to lapse into some kind of incantory trance, before snapping out of it and ending on a final, unarguable note of vituperation.  She had done it to such memorable effect on the joyride from Hell that was Pacific Coast Highway, 5 years before recording The Destroyed Room, a Youth Against Fascism b-side, in which she repeated the magic. 

In most of my listens to The Destroyed Room, I found myself thinking that it was an excellent evocation of the pain and desperation felt by those trying to get through to a loved one suffering from mental health problems.  From her early exhortations about the subject’s inability to communicate: You’re not telling what you feel/ You just say you can’t deal/ You’re just lying in an orange peel/ You’re just saying it ain’t real, Kim sounds worn out, frustrated and at the end of her patience and empathy.  The situation has clearly been going on a while given that the subject’s own family members have also started to crack up in the face of the subject’s problems.  Your mom told you/ And I’ll tell you/ You better straighten up/ You’re such a messy son.  Perhaps the frustration comes because he won’t get help?  Certainly the music reflects a sense of both angry impatience and lurching moods.  This is crystallised when Kim goes into her incantation of teenage memories and simpler pleasures/times backed by the band moving the track into  Cop Shoot Cop style-spookiness.  Are they brother and sister or school sweethearts heading towards crisis point?  

Being that this is a Sonic Youth track, it is somewhat inevitable that the opening line of the incantation, You’re hot, is followed by a response which emphasises that she isn’t talking about his looks.  You’re baked suggests an overheated mind and psyche.  Once the list of items both musical and edible is rattled off like a witch over a cauldron, Kim is back on the attack again and in an astonishing upping of the ante, she begins make it all about her, If you make me cry/ I’ll poke your eye!/ I’ll tear you limb from limb...If what you say is true/ Then I say we’re through.  It’s a shocking turnaround and yet seemingly so typical of Sonic Youth.  You’re in pain?  Well fuck you, mine’s worse because you’re causing it.

And then the theories get blown out of the water by the story that the track was actually inspired by the shockingly, untidy state of J Masics’s bedroom, I wonder how Kim ever saw that?  It does at least explain the references to orange peel, which could be drug related or could just be because Masics is a messy bastard. The title comes from a photo by Jeff Wall and they used both the photo and the title for a compilation album of b-sides and rarities released in 2006.  Curiously, The Destroyed Room didn’t feature on that album and neither did an acoustic version of Purr, which the band recorded for Mark Goodier’s Evening Session.  Peel played it in this programme and it was in my initial list of choices but Thurston Moore’s upbeat sunshine love song didn’t hold me as spellbound as his wife’s fire and brimstone takedown of male slovenliness.  If she’d ever seen my mate, Teudor’s bedroom during 1994/95, she’d have probably shot him.

Video courtesy of Sonic Youth

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: AV8 - Pyrogen (1 November 1992)

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Now this is a little gem.  Pyrogen was a one-shot release by Brixton duo, AV8, who never released another record after this.  If Discogs are to be believed neither D.C. Banks or S.P. Roberts, the writer and producer behind this track, ever put out anything besides this.  Not for them 20 other aliases putting out records on guerilla labels.  No, AV8 was their sole enterprise and the Pyrogen 12 inch their sole contribution to UK music culture.  On the evidence of this, they can die happy.

With its computer game style backing, interesting and bizarre mix of samples (“We can learn to fly!” “He loves me not” and what sounds like the orgasmic moan of a woman, but which is probably just Edith Evans performing a vocal warmup), recurring music box motifs, brass drop-ins which sound like they’ve been salvaged from Yello outtakes and delicate aural dead-ends - I’m particularly struck by the moment at 3:23-3:29 where it sounds like the track physically runs out of road to run on until angels with harps come to carry it off and settle back on solid ground again, it’s a continuously fascinating listen.

All the way through the track, we keep hearing different things designed to catch our attention, but made indistinct by either the bangs and warps that crop up throughout the track, sounding like someone calling for help down a tube and which are only met by recurring, mocking laughter - and which sounds like an ex-girlfriend of mine.  A pyrogen is described as a bacterial toxin designed to introduce raised temperature in the blood and the sense of feverishness is prevalent throughout via the half heard conversations and aural crashes and bangs, which feel like the listener is being dragged in and out of consciousness amid the busy cacophony of an over-populated hospital.

It’s very much a track for the “head”.  Dance music to be listened to and which one can use to transport into the subconscious.  It feels like an uptempo trip hop track, if that isn’t too much of an oxymoron and I think that may be why I like it.  Paired with the flipside track, E, which was very much the “soul” side, designed to drag you out of your internal contemplation and out on to the dancefloor, it made for a stunning one-off.

Video courtesy of unknowntwat.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Blumfeld - Anderes Ich (1 November 1992)

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The title of this German language track from one of the early Blumfeld singles translates as Other Me, so it makes sense to post it after Just Comes Out That Way by Bugjuice which similarly dealt with themes of split personality and behaviour switches.  It’s German rock but from the Post punk school rather than the Heavy Metal one. However, Blumfeld’s achievement is that Anderes Ich is imbued with greater warmth than you might expect from my previous description of it, while the band also find time to include one of those rock cliches that you never seem to hear anymore: the rock time signal, which leaves the listener questioning when the track’s actually going to end.  When you hear it, at around 3:15, you may find yourself thinking, “At the third (down) stroke, the time will be....” There’s even a telephone conversation dubbed in underneath it during the last 30 seconds making me wonder whether Blumfeld were recording something for use by German Telecom’s version of the Speaking Clock.

I like the track for its mix of contrasts and straight-faced absurdities.  Peel may well have been drawn to play this because it was distributed on the Zickzack label from Hamburg.  He reckoned that the Traum:2 single was the first record he’d received from Zickzack since the early 1980s and he was delighted to have confirmation that they were back although, “They may have been releasing records all the time of course and I just haven’t known about them.”

Blumfeld continued to release records up to 2006. They also recorded a track with one of the best titles in all 1990s music, perhaps one of my favourite titles in the history of recorded sound.  It’s an MOR toe-tapper called Status Quo Vadis.  Who said Germans had no sense of humour?

Video courtesy of TheCousin666

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Bugjuice - Just Comes Out That Way (1 November 1992)

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If you play this loudly, I wonder what the odds are that someone passing by hears the opening thud of the drums and thinks it’s going to lead into In the Morning by The Coral?  And certainly, the hard driving acoustics that form the basis of Just Comes Out That Way point ahead to the soft/hard sound that seemed to dominate British rock music in the early part of the 21st Century.  But the Lemonheads-like title and especially the abrasive guitars that come into shake up things up end up carbon-dating this to early 90s American-alt rock.  

The band do most of the heavy lifting in this miniature of a relationship reaching a tipping point given that the turmoil is reflected more through those moments of abrasiveness than it is through the vocals which are equally pushed to the edge but sound ready to give out at any moment.  Circus Lupus do a better job than Bugjuice of marrying musical and vocal angst at the point where relationships start to curdle but no matter though.  Peel described this track as his then favourite example of what he called “Swirling music...the sound of two records playing at once.”  And he’s right. This is no world-beater, but it is a great example of the classic musical oxymoron: a tuneful racket.

Video courtesy of John Peel (Taken from Peel’s Radio 1 show broadcast on 14 November 1992)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Foreheads in a Fishtank - Handbag (1 November 1992)

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This blog is now into its seventh year of existence, though in terms of the chronology of Peel shows, this 1/11/92  BFBS show brings up 1 year of shows - albeit with a short gap due to my not having done any shows during the period July to September 1992.  Seven years of blogging to cover 1 year of broadcasting.  If nothing else it shows me that this blog will outlive me.  If I live to the same age as Peel, I’ll be somewhere around 1995.  My father turns 80 this year.  If I’m still doing this blog by then, I’ll be into 1997.  Maybe by then you’ll get to hear about how I lost my virginity.  Put it in the calendar for 36 years from now.

For this first anniversary, it’s appropriate that we can enjoy a track by Foreheads in a Fishtank.  On the first show I blogged about, broadcast on 2 November 1991, there was a repeat of a Peel Session which they had recorded over the summer of 1991.  I made the selections for that show, and I only included four selections from the 94 minutes I heard, without for some reason including their splendid track, Happy Shopper, though I think this may have been because the recording I heard had edited it out.  I hope that was the reason why it wasn’t included, because if I willingly chose to leave it out, someone should have taken the iPad out of my hands and told me not to waste everybody’s time.

But there was no danger of Handbag missing out.  It’s funny, ferocious, bangin’ and compelling in equal measure. This is what you get when you sonically base yourself on a marriage of Happy Flowers, 70 Gwen Party and Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

In keeping with the general vibe in the Foreheads in a Fishtank tracks that I’ve heard, the prevailing mood is “Everything is shit”. It opens with a wailing female chorus born along on the winds that buffer the “tacky Southend nightclub” mentioned in the opening verse, though I love the way in which goblinesque vocalist, Jeff Leahy emphasises that they’re at “a rave not a disco” which was an important distinction in the early 90s.  It’s clearly a homemade rave given that the beat appears to be thundering down via a steel barrel.  Long before Damon Albarn starting sneering about the things which made him queasy about Essex, Foreheads in a Fishtank take the listener right there at the peak of “Essex Girl/Man” ubiquity so that you can virtually smell the “disinfectant and rush of menthalypus”.  I can’t be sure but the second verse appears to spread the invective away from the nightclub and take in the view of those who saw Britain as greater than it otherwise felt to be in 1992. There’s a potential political point being made here given how Essex seaside towns have often been fertile ground for right-wing political parties. 

Lyrical inspiration audibly dries up during a brief third verse which criticises the narrow range of topics used by rappers, but in true Foreheads fashion, they substitute “bullets, bitches and bling” for sniping at graffiti, environmentalism and “bottom jokes”.

Having given up on vocals, the band fall back on the two elements that really lift Handbag up into the stratosphere. Namely that relentless, driving, rusty beat, which carries all before it mixed with inspired use of the most famous line from  The Importance of Being Earnest.  From Oscar Wilde’s pen, it conveyed disgust and shock at the fact that it once served as the cot for a gentleman attempting to marry into high society.  Such was the low regard that Essex girls were held in circa 1992, that from the pen of Foreheads in a Fishtank, the handbag could very well have served both as a totem to dance around and as somewhere to keep their own bastard children if they couldn’t get a babysitter. 

A dastardly intelligence is at work here.  Even though Lady Bracknell, the character who delivers the “A handbag???!!!” refrain to her daughter’s prospective husband’s story about being found abandoned as a baby in the cloakroom of Victoria Station has been held up as a prime example of Victorian upper class matriarchy at its most formidable, a number of recent productions over the last half-century at least have presented Lady Bracknell as a character not without evidence of passion lurking beneath the apparently Boudica-like exterior.  Judi Dench’s performance in Peter Hall’s 1982 production is cited as an early example of showing the more red-blooded side of one of theatre’s great comic monsters.  However, by dint of the way in which they managed to line up the beat with the opening syllable of the “A handbag” line, Foreheads in a Fishtank manage to make Edith Evans sound sexy. The grand matriarch for all those bodies twisting and gyrating in that sweaty, disinfected Southend nightclub.

Video courtesy of lovecraftseye.