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.
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