A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Zimbabwe Cha Cha Cha Kings - Mudiwa Lucy (8 November 1992)

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The skittering guitar riff that forms the backbone to this track has been in my psyche for so long, I was convinced that Mudiwa Lucy had been covered here previously, but it seems not, and I’m appalled that on some of their previous mentions here, I appear to have taken a Cha off the Zimbabwe Cha Cha Cha Kings name.

According to Urban Dictionary, Mudiwa is a name heard in Shona Zimbabwe culture meaning “loved one” or “darling”. However, it is usually applied to male names.  While calling a song Darling Lucy makes it out to be - potentially, because I don’t have a translation of the lyrics - a love song to a woman, I did wonder whether in Shona culture, Lucy might be a name given to boys similar to Marion, Shirley or Beverly.  The high-pitched spoken word duologue at 3:41 could be between a woman and a man, but given that the high-pitched voice is being done by a man, I like to think it captures a young Shona boy complaining bitterly about being called Lucy while the soft spoken adult tries to console him with talk of the great achievements other men with female names have achieved.  

If this is true - and I’m aware that it probably isn’t but humour me for a moment - it’s a reflection of that period in a child’s life where every thing which has been given to them  that they didn’t ask for is wrong.  I hated my name for a spell when I was a child, fervently wishing that I’d been called Billy instead, after the comic strip character Billy Dane.  Still, it could have been worse - from a child’s viewpoint - my father wanted to call me Bradley which I would have found unendurable as a child.  Inevitably, I made peace with my name as I grew up and I hope Lucy grew into a strapping fine lad and did so too.

Video courtesy of salsomano.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: C.J. Bolland - Spring Yard (8 November 1992)

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So box-fresh is that, that I can’t even give you a title for it - John Peel after playing Spring Yard on 8/11/92.

It seems splendidly appropriate to be posting a track called Spring Yard today.  As I look outside my window, I can see one  of those gorgeously blue sunny skies which showcase April at its best and which offer hope that the winter may finally be over.  Being the UK, this can’t be taken as read.  Earlier this week it was snowing here in Orpington.  But nevertheless, it’s weather which seems to say, “Come outside and stay outside. Wash away the fog which has hung over you by staying inside and start making all those changes you promised you that you would make.”  Essentially, a blooming springtime offers the distilled message to us all: “Freshen up.”

That usually means spring cleaning and more work as we get into jobs around the house or garden. I feel this keenly at the moment because my wife and I are due to move house soon, so we'll be tidying and refreshing two houses - the one we’re leaving and the one we’re moving to.  Given that moving house was listed as one of the 5 most stressful experiences that a human being can go through*, it will be interesting to see how long any positive April vibes last for.  But if we have  C.J. Bolland as our soundtrack, we should make it through just fine.

Spring Yard is spring cleaning set to music.  The opening pounding beat, sounds either like a fast heartbeat as one contemplates the scale of tasks set in front of you, or the relentless sound of a saw being used to make things or break things up.  The tempo quickens as the work progresses, there are yelps of frustration and effort noises as things are pulled out of the corner of sheds and garages, either to be used or thrown out.  Bolland layers his instrumentation simultaneously evoking both the energy expended during working and the relentless onslaught of jobs and things waiting to be done, demanding the attention.

Then at 3:25, there is a period of euphoria when the tasks appear to be complete and the projects have come to fruition and the house/garden/shed is finally looking as we always wanted it to. But Bolland knows the eternal truth, that things become tidy and clean for one reason only - to become messy and dirty  again.  And so the euphoric synths start to be overladen with beats and that effect you hear in dance records which sounds like a symphony of tightly wound rubber bands being played en masse (a digeridoo perhaps?)  We end on a fade out with the euphoria replaced by the sound of new jobs to be done and the freshness overwhelmed by mundanity once again.

*The other four stressful things were listed as death of a spouse, divorce, Christmas Day and driving. This gave rise to Dave Allen’s immortal observation that the most stressful thing a person could do would be to drive your dead ex-spouse to have a look at a house you’re going to move into on Christmas Day.

Video courtesy of Underground Sounds M

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Disemboweled Corpse - Cesspool of Sorrow (8 November 1992)

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After about thirty seconds the adrenalin sets in; people are screaming and shaking their fists.  After a minute you wonder what’s going on.  Strobe lights are going mad and you begin to feel the throb in your chest.  After another minute, it’s total confusion.  People’s faces take on a look of bewilderment.  The noise starts hurting.  The noise continues. After three minutes you begin to take deep breaths.  Some people in the audience stoop down into the crowd and cover their ears and eyes.  Anger takes over.  A few people leave the room.  After about four minutes, a calm takes over.  The noise continues.  After five minutes, a feeling of utter piece takes over...

Mark Cox on the Apocalypse section of live performances of You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine.  Quote taken from The Creation Records Story - My Magpie Eyes are Hungry For The Prize by David Cavanagh Virgin Books, 2000. (Page 370)

You think I’m making all this up don’t you? - John Peel when cueing up Cesspool of Sorrow by Disemboweled Corpse on the 8/11/92 edition of John Peel’s Music.

I don’t want to mislead you. While I like and recommend Cesspool of Sorrow it isn’t in the same class as You Made Me Realise.  Stylistically the tracks are a million miles apart too, but I cited My Bloody Valentine here because Cesspool of Sorrow is perhaps the first example of a grindcore track which has afforded me a sense of peace and serenity while listening to it, similar to that which the Apocalypse section of You Made Me Realise tried to lull listeners into.  I put it all down to the work of the unidentified bassist because while the guitarist and their feedback are pushed back in the mix, the vocalist growls away to urgently comic effect and the drummer sounds like they’re soundchecking, the whole core of the track revolves around that repetitive, quickening bassline which sparks like synapses and burrows into the heart and brain while all else flails around it.  I often find grindcore pretty dreary or forgettable, it’s no surprise that it and death/speed metal have often been poorly represented on this blog despite Peel’s support for the genre.  A little bit of Happy Flowers and do Badgewearer count?  I hope so given that N’Alien Head is one of my favourite tunes of 1992.  But too often the lack of anything to hang on to means that I can pass on most of it.  But that bassline throbs away almost hypnotically.  Fix yourself on that, block out all else and surrender to some form of inner peace.

Video courtesy of John Peel.  Taken from Peel’s Radio 1 show on 14 November 1992 and leading on to...

Video courtesy of Underground Sounds M

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Wedding Present - The Queen of Outer Space (8 November 1992)

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I wasn’t to know it at the time, obviously, but one of the consequences of not being involved in any plays between June and October 1992 was that this blog was deprived of the opportunity to run the rule over The Wedding Present’s singles releases over the same period.  Considering that their last entry here was the majestic California, this could have been the cause of some regret.  So, it has been a slight personal relief to discover just how underwhelmed I’ve been by Boing!, Sticky and Love Slave.  Flying Saucer would have been a borderline miss, but the best of it has probably helped The Queen of Outer Space over the line and onto the metaphorical mixtape.

To be honest, I don’t think the song is anything particularly special. It’s a default piece of David Gedge romantic worship albeit with a slight trans/androgyny slant, When she began/She was a man etc which suggested that Gedge had been watching The Man Who Fell to Earth or something similar when writing the track.  What appeals to me about it is the vocal.  Forget about Anyone Can Play Guitar, Gedge’s strangulated attempt at a rawk vocal on the I feel beautiful beside her line would have, and still does, given heart to me that it doesn’t matter if you don’t sound like McCartney or Cobain when going for a throat shredder vocal line, just as long as you commit to it.  In fact, Gedge was probably being very shrewd just to go for it and damn the consequences.  For just as his writing, at its best, reflected the emotional and romantic concerns of The Wedding Present’s audience, so he correctly deduced that 98% of the audience which consumes rock music would sound closer to him rather than Robert Plant and in doing so furthered his claim to be the true voice (in both senses of the word) of the lives and emotions of the rock audience.

I don’t know if any of you reading this have a song which you sing along with in order to test your own “rawk” voice against.  For me, I tend to try my luck with the McCartney parts on I’ve Got a Feeling.

Video courtesy of FernCardenas

Lyrics copyright of David Gedge

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Sono Lakota - Ice & Acid (8 November 1992)

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One of my biggest regrets about the pandemic has been how unfit I’ve become.  Apart from occasional walks around the common at the back of my house, the part of me that’s got most exercise over the last year has been my right arm from shovelling junk food down my throat. I’ve not been helped by the manner in which my job has changed.  Working from home, but working long hours I’m closer to burnout than I am to any of my targets.  Late finishes, and having skipped dinner earlier, I’m either popping to the BP garage for groodles or if it’s a particularly noteworthy or stressful day getting takeaway delivered.  It’s a lamentable state of affairs and it’s weighed on my mind lately,  Another birthday has just rolled by; my 45th and although I understand I could be mis-understood, I’ve been using the line, “Uphill all the way” in order to try and emphasise that I see the future as one of mountains to climb and peaks to scale as I get older.  If I say it enough times, maybe I’ll convince myself even if I can’t convince anyone else, but nevertheless, if there are adventures to be had and heights to reach, getting fitter will have to be a key part of it.  But what to do?  

My passion has long been jogging.  My aim was always to reach parkrun standard, but I always end up hitting a hiatus just at the point where I was able to comfortably run close to those distances.  I’d like to restart but my shoes are a mess and at the moment, I fear that I could only comfortably commit to half a mile runs, which is at least 2 miles less than I run at my best.

My wife wants to join a cycling club and hopes I will do.  But the thought of saddle-soreness and shrivelled genitalia through cycling downhill into a strong breeze...well my genitalia are already shrivelling at the thought of it.  At the moment, I’d go for our exercise bike, but it’s never worked properly due to a fault on the tension control - there isn’t any - so it really just works as something to use when warming up for jogging rather than as a fitness tool in its own right.

My wife’s also excited because we’re due to move close to a leisure centre very soon. What could be better, she reasons, than being a stone’s throw away from a pool and badminton courts?  But we’ve spent 10 years living close to another leisure centre/swimming pool and we never set foot in it.

So at the moment, that really just leaves aerobics but I’m normally still finishing breakfast or starting work when Joe Wicks is doing his stuff, but I like his idea of short, sharp hits of exercise.  That could work well, especially if accompanied by some appropriate musical background....

If I was to look for something from John Peel’s playlists then Ice & Acid strikes me as an ideal track to use for nearly 8 minutes worth of aerobic activity.  The tribal samba drumming of the first 45 seconds serves as a good way to warm up, then the oppressive synths drop in to move the competitor from djembe workshop to Ministry of Sound (albeit before the bar has opened) and they serve to warn the competitor that physical labour is coming. The moan from 3 minutes in reminds you to breathe as you dance and then the exertions start, beckoned on by the Are you in love/Now rock your body refrain.  I still haven’t worked out the choreography yet, but it may just, yet tempt me off this sofa and the cool glass of white wine I’m currently eyeing up.

Video courtesy of yoshiochamaable