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