A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Goldtones - Gutterball (8 November 1992)

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Recorded in late-1963, Gutterball was, appropriately, the b-side to Strike, which served as the theme tune for the local California TV edition of Bowling for Money, a forerunner to the better known, Bowling for Dollars in which a good night’s ten-pin bowling could win lucky contestants prizes! prizes! prizes!  

This is one of the finest Surf music tracks I’ve ever heard, with a level of excitement and virtuosity on it which seems to jump past The Beach Boys and sound more like a forerunner to early Fleetwood Mac.  The guitarist on the track, Glenn Ross Campbell would, within a few years, end up in The Misunderstood playing a full part in their manager’s second favourite song of all time.

John Peel spent a lot of late 1992/early 1993 playing surf music both ancient and modern.  In this edition of John Peel’s Music, he played both sides of a single by The Phantom Surfers called Bikini Drag.  The b-side, Bonus Track, opened with a lengthy tutorial on how to play surf bass guitar, and in the spirit of public service broadcasting which Peel served so diligently, I am happy to present it for you to play along with.  Not least because it contains some very timely advice as we try to step out of the restraints of the Coronavirus pandemic again: Use no neckstrap, wear your mask and if you get lost, return to bliss.

Bonus Track starts at 2:21.

Video courtesy of bullslukaren (Goldtones) and W Discos (Phantom Surfers)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Golden Girls - Kinetic [Frank de Wulf mix] (8 November 1992)

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If you spent the 90s hanging around specialist record shops and raves, you were probably never more than 20 yards away from Kinetic.  Whether it was in its bedroom DJ original form or via one of its many remixes  courtesy of the likes of Orbital, the track took on a life of its own over the course of the decade.  You think The Cranberries had to play the long game?  They were overnight sensations compared to this track’s progression towards the Top 40.  

Written by Michael Hazell and Paul Hartnoll of the aforementioned Orbital, Kinetic first surfaced as a track by The Pied Piper on 1991’s Hooked on Hope EP. Then having put out a record of Orbital mixes of the tune,  Hazell and Hartnoll paired one of the Orbital mixes with the posted mix by Frank de Wulf, at which point, presumably because the record featured the vision of at least four people and maybe because they were watching Channel 4 one evening, they decided to put these mixes out under the moniker, Golden Girls.  De Wulf’s mix, which Peel described as a dance track you can whistle along to feels like a hit in waiting.  It strips out the intricately dissonant synths of the original cut and throws in catchy refrains which keep bringing the track back to base as well an earworm female vocal line and several opportunities where the beat drops so the floor can go wild.  I should have been seeing this performed on Top of the Pops by a group of dancers for hire and tutting to my 16 year old self about the paucity of “real music” on the programme.  It’s easily the equal of tracks from the same period like U Got 2 Know by Capella.   But the charts weren’t receptive to De Wulf’s mix and the record became a clubland classic.  

It clearly exerted some kind of hold on the collective memory of scenesters through the decade because in 1998,  Distinct’ive Records released another set of remixes of Kinetic, including an Orbital mix. The radio edit broke into the lower reaches of the UK Top 40 singles chart. A hit record, 7 years in the making.  It should have gone higher but the censor baiting video may have worked against it.  And still Kinetic worked its spell over listeners with further versions put out in 1999 and 2001.

Video courtesy of House and Techno (late 80s to mid 90s)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: John Peel’s Music - BFBS (Sunday 1 November 1992)

 Nobody, not even the great stand-up comedians, did a better job of talking about their ailments than John Peel:  If you were listening to last week’s edition of John Peel’s Music on BFBS, you’ll have heard me moaning on about damaging my back while playing tennis.  The night after the programme, I was in such pain, I actually phoned up a friend of mine, because I didn’t want to stay at my Mum’s house on my own, and said ‘Look, can I stay at yours?’ and she said, ‘Yeah, course you can’ .  So she put me in her spare room and at about - ooh, I don’t know - half past four in the morning, as we elderly men do from time to time, I needed to go to the loo.  And I simply couldn’t sit up at all.  So, I got my legs out of the bed and this didn’t work, so I thought ‘No, there must be another way of doing this’. I pulled my legs back in and tried to roll onto my stomach - and that took a bit of doing because I had to put my hands backwards, and I was in such pain that I couldn’t move from the waist down.  So, I had to put me hand underneath me bum and just tried to lift it up, just shift across the bed a bit at a time.  This took quite a long time until eventually I got to the edge of the bed and then rolled over onto my stomach and sort of fell onto the floor into a kind of praying position.  I put me hands on the bed, I couldn’t get upright at all, I was pushing up on the bed.  It really did hurt a lot but eventually I got into a kind of upright praying position and then tried to stand up and I couldn’t do it.  So, I made my way to the end of the bed and one hand onto the bed, and there was a piece of furniture that I could just reach.  So, I made a lunge at this furniture and pulled myself up so that I was in a kind of froglike position, a semi-upright position: stark naked of course and I got stuck in that position and just held on there for about seven or eight minutes. After a while, the absurdity of the situation came through to me and I started laughing.  I mean I was laughing and crying at the same time and eventually, all I could do was just collapse back down onto the bed again, which hurt a great deal. The operation, by the time I got to the loo, took me 40 minutes and...not a lot of laughs, although in retrospect it seemed quite entertaining. 

The Peel Show played its part in the 500th anniversary of America’s discovery by playing Happy Birthday, Captain Columbus by The Philistines Jr., a band whom Peel had recently shared a beer with in London. He hoped that a similar opportunity might come up with Grifters, whose track Love Explosion had him declaring them “a mighty band” and hoping they would come to the UK soon.

Going a little further back in musical history, Peel also played So What, a 1959 single by Johnny Duhon and the Yellow Jakets.  Its appearance on a CD compilation called, Eddie’s House of Hits - The Story of Goldband Records led him to declare that CDs justified their existence in allowing such tunes to be rediscovered.  

But it wasn’t all good news for Peel’s ears as he tested his audience with a track by Peter Blegvad called King Strut, which Peel introduced thus: When it first started, I thought, “That’s the kind of record I really hate.” However, it had grown on him while he listened to it.  At the end of its airing on this programme though, I think I may have been right the first time, but no matter....  Judge for yourself.

As ever, I had a few instances where I worked in reverse, lining a track up here for inclusion only to go cold on it when listening again.  Examples from this show included:

 3Ds - Fish Tails - The title track of the New Zealand band’s first EP from 1990. According to Peel, immersion in the New Zealand music scene tended to be an intermittent affair :Things come in, followed by nothing for a couple of years then suddenly a great deluge.

The Gladiators - Stick A Bush - Roots reggae from The Gladiators 1978 album, Proverbial Reggae.  Peel disliked the use of the synthesiser on the track which he felt....added nothing and took away a lot.  He would have preferred to play the non-synthesiser recording of Stick A Bush only to remember that he didn’t own a copy of it. 

 Bandulu - Internal Ocean - At some point in the next year, there is a very good chance that I will write a post on here celebrating the excellent Peel Session that Bandulu recorded for Peel’s second show of 1993 and with that in mind, I came hurtling back to Internal Ocean with pounding heart and rampant anticipation, only for it to fail to re-engage me.  There’s rhapsodies to be written about Bandulu, I swear. Providing time doesn’t continue to erode my ear heart.

Having talked about what fell from favour, there were a few selections which could not be shared.

The Gories - Hey Bo Diddley - The opening record of the show and described by Peel as sounding like it was recorded at the bottom of a well.  A cover of Diddley’s 1957 track with vocals which sounded like they were indeed being recorded underground. Being a Bo Diddley song, you can naturally sing Not Fade Away over the top of it, even though you have to remind yourself that he didn’t write it.

Glue - Dreading Every Day - Taken from their album, Gravel, this was a punky, thrash track with a touch of the Peter Blegvad about it, just so as to avoid complete predictability.  Listening to it on the tape of this programme, it might not have made the cut if it had had to be subjected to close consideration. They came from Glasgow which perhaps suggests why the sound of the record was closer to first-wave punk rock rather than grunge. 

 Full tracklisting

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Age of Chance - MotorCity (1 November 1992)

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One thing I will always find poignant about doing this blog are the instances where I listen to a Peel recording and discover a band I had not previously heard of due to him playing their latest record, only to subsequently discover that the band have split up around the same time.  Up to now, The Pixies have been the most pointed example of this, but off the back of this programme, Leeds-based outfit Age of Chance can join them.   

Had it been available to share, this post would also have been showcasing Age of Chance’s latest (for which read “final”) single She is Filled With Secrets, which my notes described as “a dance track which samples the Doctor Who theme”.  Peel also remarked on this, but having listened to it again, I think we may both have been overstating things somewhat.  Playing both the new single, and presumably so as to show the distance the group had travelled in seven years, their 1985 debut single, MotorCity, Peel reflected, We haven’t heard a great deal from Age of Chance recently.  They did have a rather dull LP on, I think it was Virgin Records, a year or so ago.  What really, I think, finished them off, or at least made them change their entire lives and sense of direction and everything was I once interviewed them for television, up in Yorkshire, and interviewed them in my father-in-law’s garden and things were never the same again for them.  Things were going pretty well up until then. I interviewed them in his garden and that was it, by and large.  But they’re bouncing back and that’s, I assume, doing pretty well and getting played in the dancehalls....

No-one can feel shortchanged by just having MotorCity to enjoy though.  Driven along by Steve Elvidge’s strident, nasal vocals, a pounding, insistent drum beat which sounds like a piston on a production line and an urgent, staccato guitar line, MotorCity presents a rather queasy vision of mid-1980s life.  Its automobile aesthetic is much closer to Leeds or Dagenham rather than Detroit.  Any futurism suggested by the title is presented as a dystopia rather than utopia through Age of Chance’s eyes as Steve E sings in a simultaneously defeated and accepting way about the violence of capitalism (In this business, you’ve got to be ruthless....they’ll steal your shirt), age divides (Some people don’t mind being old, just sign here cos you’re young and stupid), self absorption (There’s nothing worse than being understood...If you can break through my wall of sound...I’ll marry you), urban boredom (In MotorCity there’s nothing to do but work and buy) and casual sex (In MotorCity there’s nothing to do but call each other “baby”).   

Listening to it I can hear a country’s youth curdling as they’re forced into  job training schemes designed not to replace lost industries but to shift them around into new statistical pools of undefinable “output”.  But by the same token, it feels like a rejection both of aimless dole-culture and of the window dressing which Government indulged in to try and make it look like people weren’t being softened up to go from “citizens” to “service users”.  Why isn’t this record better known?  Why wasn’t it a sensation at the time?  It’s nothing less than 1985’s own Subterranean Homesick Blues, and I can confer no higher praise than that.

Video courtesy of Cherry Red Records 

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Cranberries - Dreams (1 November 1992)

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You clear your lungs, girl. You’ll feel better for it. - John Peel after playing Dreams on this edition of John Peel’s Music.

My intricate plans for this blogpost all came crashing down around my ears once I started doing the research on it.  I had assumed that Peel playing one of the Cranberries best known hit singles was one of those examples in which he held hands with mainstream opinion and skipped gaily across an open field with it while acknowledging, “They’re good these, aren’t they?” But I found that I’d misremembered the chronology of the Cranberries story.  I was sure that they had arrived, pretty much as overnight smashes through late 1992/early 1993 with Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? sitting astride the top of the album charts for 2 years, top 10 hit singles all over the world and huge crowds attending their gigs in next to no time.  But the reality was that the huge success that the band enjoyed was a much more slow burning affair and rather than running hand in hand with mainstream opinion, Peel was, once again, metaphorically waving to it from a distance and pointing it towards the band, who would find it eventually catching up with them within a year.  He had, lest we forget, been playing tracks from their earliest EP and had them in for a Peel Session, making him possibly one of the first DJs outside of Ireland to play them.

The jigs and the reels of it are that Dreams was released in September 1992 and entered the charts with a bullet at...(checks notes)... did not chart.  That was followed by Linger, which just sneaked into the Top 75 UK hit singles chart.  The Everybody Else...LP was released in March 1993 and did respectable business until MTV started playing the videos for Dreams and Linger on heavy rotation, at which point sales went into the stratosphere, especially in the United States.  Dreams and Linger were both reissued in early 1994, though, again contrary to memory, neither broke the Top 10 in the UK.  Indeed, no Cranberries single ever did.  Dreams peaked at Number 27, which may be one of the reasons why for a long time I regarded it as good, but inferior to Linger which topped out at Number 14.  Over a year after it was released, Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? topped the UK album chart, just in time for the band to release their second album, No Need to Argue.  In 1994, they were probably the most exposed “new” band in the world.  But in late 1992, they were preaching to a small congregation outside of Ireland, and John Peel was one of them.

In a sense, Dreams is a song we’ve grown up with over the last 25 years or so.  It’s opening guitar washes and circling riff were a staple of “Coming up on Grandstand...” musical beds for many, many years. Listening back to it again over these last few days, I’ve been reminded of just how good a song it was in a way which its ubiquity at the time didn’t allow me to fully acknowledge.  I don’t consider it as Linger’s pretty but lesser talented sister anymore.  Dolores O’Riordan described it as being about the first time she fell in love.  If we consider Dreams as being about the thrill of falling in love and Linger about dealing with the messiness of love turning sour but keeping you bound to it, then I now see both tracks as equals and a smart piece of sequencing.

Video courtesy of TheCranberriesTV