A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Helivator - Speed Your Trip (22 November 1992)

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‘That doesn’t go anywhere very much,’ you might be saying, but that’s kind of what I like about it.  John Peel after playing Speed Your Trip on 22/11/92.

If, as seems possible to judge from its title and the sonic atmosphere of the recording, Speed Your Trip by New York based noisecore band, Helivator is about drugs then all I can say is that their dealers are sadists.

This is an ultimate bad-trip instrumental which manages to make the elements audible as the guitars, predominantly played by Mark Laramie, seem to conjure up both scorching fire and rushes of air. The repetitive ascending scale, which caught Peel’s attention, acts as a foundation around which the music swoops and soars.  From 2:22, we get signs of the body consciousness trying to break through in the form of feedback as the track gets dangerously close to ripping the sky open. But having flown so high, the track eventually deposits the listener back to ground again by the end.  And in a track in which so much mental feeling is made manifest, the final crashing guitar note encapsulates the immense exhaustion felt at the end of this particular trip.

Video courtesy of Various Artists - Topic

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Georgie Best’s Dreamhome (22 November 1992)

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By November, the football season was in full swing and that invariably meant that Exotica Records would have their latest volume of football related songs and spoken word curios out.  Over the coming weeks, Peel would play several selections from Bend It! 92, most of which have made it onto my lists of future selections. Providing I don’t go cold on them, I can promise you calypsos, The Nolans and a paean of love to The Beatles courtesy of a football pools company.

For now, sit back and listen to George Best talk about the problems of building his own home - one of the great examples of the brilliance/awfulness of late 1960s modernist design - and having to contend with the dual issue of protecting his privacy at the point where he was one of the most famous men in Europe as well as the more prosaic problem of trying to turn his television set on.

Video courtesy of Classic Man Utd Videos and Clips

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Scaremonger - Soon We All Will Have Special Names (22 November 1992)

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Scaremonger was a one-time only alias used by Christoph Fringeli as a launchpad for the debut release on his own Praxis label.  I’m assuming that he must have had his mind on start-up administration matters for the label as a reason to why the title of this track and the verbal sample that runs through it: Soon, all of us will have special names are different from each other - boy, I really hope someone got fired for that blunder.

However, that discrepancy apart, this is a fascinating and near flawless piece of industrial techno, which after taking the time to lay down an exciting beats ‘n’ tempo foundation starts to crank up the sense of dystopian dread from around the 1 minute mark onwards.  Fringeli creates sounds which evoke giant metallic kookaburras pecking at the surface of a membrane, while the drill-like inserts, which crop up throughout the track from around 58 seconds in, put me in mind of the noisy industrial hellholes that populate George Lucas’s debut feature film, THX 1138.  Fringeli manages to walk the tightrope between evocation and danceability without losing his footing once.  A year later, Praxis released a 12-inch set of remixes of this track. For me, the best of them was by friend of this blog*, Andrew Lagowski

Video courtesy of piteronio

*He left a brief comment on one of the posts.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Phil Phillips - Stormy Weather (22 November 1992)

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This was a borderline inclusion.  Stormy Weather, one of the great standards, has been running around my head as an unconscious musical memory for most of my life, probably because it featured in a TV commercial when I was a kid, I expect but whatever form it’s had, it’s generally been sung better in my head than Phil Phillips manages on this recording.  It all sounds so white bread bland, it could be me singing it. There’s definite elements of Don ‘No Soul’ Simmons about the vocal here.  But some songs are genuinely indestructible and if ever there was a case of content rescuing form then this is Exhibit A.

Stormy Weather also serves as a potential example of a track for the Alternative John Peel Obituary Jukebox. When he played the record on this show, Peel admitted that the song was a big favourite of his.  So much so that he could regularly be found whistling it to himself, when I should have been whistling  something hipper.  Again, had Teenage Kicks not come into his life, it’s entirely possible that Phil Phillips may have been piped over Radio 1 as a tribute to Peel when news came through of his death.

Video courtesy of DangerousDaveRR

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Moonshake - Little Thing (22 November 1992)

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If you think there's a lack of nuance in discourse nowadays, then I have to ask you which side you picked during the Moonshake wars of 1992/93.  Did you identify more with David Callahan or Margaret Fiedler?  When Moonshake last appeared on this blog, it was with Callahan's angsty, sour rocker, Secondhand Clothes, a track which I liked enough to include on the  Oliver! mixtape.  However, this track, taken from  Moonshake's imminent Eva Luna LP was my first exposure to Fiedler's songwriting and I have to say that had I been keeping a scorecard at the time, Little Thing would have helped her steal ahead.

We like to believe that the spirit of healthy artistic competition within bands is as positive a thing for the bands themselves as it is for music fans. After all, it worked for The Beatles long enough didn't it? However, it's often a fallacy.  The history of rock music is littered with bands that tried to accommodate multiple creative visions and in doing so produced both musical eclecticism and fractured relationships; the dreaded "creative differences".  In Moonshake's case, this was still a year or so away at the time Peel played Little Thing on this show, but had they heard his summation of a recent gig he had seen them play in Cambridge which left him broadly unimpressed but by and large of the view that I liked her stuff  more than I liked his, then a further degree of erosion in the relationship between Fiedler and Callahan would have been quietly added.  All just artistic sport to us punters, but a tiny dagger to the heart of the artist.  You can accept being compared to contemporaries in other bands, but it’s much harder to accept comparison within your own band, especially when neither party is prepared to accept the role of junior partner.

Despite that, the recording of Little Thing feels like a genuinely collaborative effort.  My notes describe the track as “sounding like a Heath Robinson contraption” as Moonshake lift the bonnet to show the inner workings of the idea of a smooth, functioning band.  In the background we hear lounge-jazz basslines, Leslie speakered guitars and Fiedler’s huskily, sultry vocals with their arresting “Maybe I’ll start bleeding” refrain. But dominating the sound are cacophonous drums and samples which sound like relentless, grinding machinery.  It’s the sound of the blood, sweat, tears and conflict that make for great bands.  The moving parts straining on the production line to turn out beautiful, intricate music. The abrasive and the beautiful working in sync with each other to create exactly the kind of musical magic which made Moonshake so special.

Video courtesy of TommyGun Angel