A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Manifesto - Sugar (6 December 1992)

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I’ve just started listening to Peel shows from April 1993 which soundtracked the rehearsals/performances of a production of the musical Guys and Dolls, which I appeared in in August 1993.  The first shows I’ve been making selections from are from the week of April 5-9 1993 when Peel, for reasons no one has ever quite managed to rationalise, was parachuted in to provide a week’s holiday cover for Jakki Brambles, the host of Radio 1’s daytime lunchtime show.  It will be a few years before I blog about those shows, so I would direct you to the John Peel wiki so that you can see exactly how The Fall and Madonna came to be on the same playlist.  For some commentators, it was a glorious week of worlds-in-collision brilliance that let some light in on the otherwise moribund state of daytime music playlists.  For others, notably David Cavanagh, it was a flawed idea due to Peel not recognising the different sensibilities of the daytime audience meaning that the music balance jarred against rather than complemented one another.

For all that Richard Evans played up the magnitude of it being 23 years since Peel broadcast in the daytime on Radio 1, a listen to tracks like Sugar by Manifesto, broadcast here 4 months before Peel’s daytime stint, shows that he should have been asked to do it much sooner and more often.  With its chiming, jangling guitars and gently catchy melody, this is prime daytime radio standard material being delightful to listen to without insulting the listener’s intelligence.  And Peel, if asked, could probably have come up with a playlist of similar material to last the whole week without anyone noticing the join.  The measure of the man is that he could have been put into any show on the Radio 1 schedule, be it day or nighttime based and brought the musical goods regardless of format, which is something very few other Radio 1 disc jockeys could have carried off as seamlessly*. I suspect he would have been all at sea though with trying to manage phone-ins or run a game/quiz within a programme.  But had he been paired up with Radio 1’s Greatest Ever covering disc jockey, Kevin Greening, a man to whom Scott Mills owes a considerable debt, then the John Peel Breakfast Show on Radio 1 may have been more than just a pipedream.  And Sugar would have been a deserved Single of the Week on it.

Video courtesy of bertq98

* Reflecting on it, I think that this assertion doesn’t entirely hold water and that I may have been guilty of making the assumption that what most Radio 1 DJs, especially the daytime ones, played on their shows reflected the sum total of their musical knowledge/interests. Something that was in many cases categorically untrue i.e. Tony Blackburn or Mark Radcliffe as soul and folk music devotees respectively.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Love Child - Stumbling Block (6 December 1992)

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The end of 1992 found Love Child touring an album, Witchcraft, which had received decent reviews in their native U.S. but which had, according to Peel received a slamming in Melody Maker, while he himself had found the album to be a touch flat.  I agree that it doesn’t hit the heights of the previous year’s double-length extravaganza, Okay? though as ever with Love Child, the high points are very high.

Stumbling Block is one those high points starting out as it does with a blast of guitar which sounds like someone chainsawing the sky wide open - an effect brought about by Alan Licht inserting a metal sheet between his guitar strings.  This is followed by an alternate guitar line which sounds like the entire population of Heaven parachuting en masse through the rip in the sky back down to earth.  From such stratospheric open dynamics, the track piles forward noisily and relentlessly with Love Child seeming to conjure both the Rapture and the Apocalypse simultaneously.

In counterpoint to this though are Rebecca Odes’s somewhat downbeat lyrics: 

Tie my shoes together and tie my hands behind my back....I dig myself into a hole....I’d rather shut the blinds so I can’t see the light at all and more in that vein, as though she was mindful of the fact that Love Child would end the year touring Europe with Codeine and needed a song to reflect their tour mates output.  Certainly, the track is sung from the perspective of someone who merely wants to hide away while the world achieves spiritual transcendence/oblivion outside.  With her vocals pushed low in the mix, Odes is no match for the guitar pyrotechnics which drive the song on.  This mixture of drowsy, somnambulant vocals pulling down the blinds and closing the shutters while a guitar razes everything to the ground formed the basis of one of my favourite early Britpop songs, Resigned by Blur, though it’s fair to say that that track sounds like the clear-up operation after the inferno that is Stumbling Block.

At the 4:20 mark the track begins to burn itself out and it literally ends in a splutter as the energy is finally expended, but it certainly doesn’t sound like a band in its death throes.  The night before recording this edition of John Peel’s Music, he had seen a Love Child/Codeine gig and had been so impressed by Love Child’s set and especially Licht’s guitar work that he planned to go back and re-listen to Witchcraft and see whether he had misjudged it.  But ultimately, it appears that he didn’t feel that he had.  Love Child recorded a Peel Session while they were in the UK in December 1992. Alan Licht spoke positively about it in a 2018 interview with Tone Glow, but it was never broadcast, apparently because no-one remembered that the session had been recorded, least of all Peel.  By the new year, Love Child disbanded though Odes and Licht did reunite via Zoom a year or so back to record a cover of  The Modern Lovers song, Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste.

Lyrics copyright of Rebecca Odes.

Videos courtesy of Thebeardsuk and Persona Non Grata Records.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Leroy Van Dyke - Auctioneer (6 December 1992)

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I always hated that record and I still do, but if I can make one listener happy here on BFBS, then I’m prepared to sacrifice almost anything. (John Peel, 6 December 1992)

In 1992, the world of the auctioneer was a closely guarded, elitist world. They only came to widespread attention when a piece of art was sold at Christie’s or Sotheby’s for a world record fee. Over the last 20 odd years though, thanks to the likes of Bargain Hunt, Cash in the Attic, Flog It! and The Great Antiques Hunt, their work is now the fodder of daytime television.  By contrast, the work of the agricultural auctioneer, with their impenetrable jargon and machine gun patter remains a world of mystery.  Though there was a time when the media would have been far more likely to provide coverage of cattle auctioneering than art/antiques auctioneering.  Growing up in the early 1980s, television on Sunday mornings basically meant three topics: religious broadcasting, specialist broadcasting (usually shows for people with disabilities such as See Hear or the Brian Rix  hosted Let’s Go, foreign language programming, Open University  or magazine shows for ethnic minorities) or farming programmes.  If I felt in the mood for a bit of farming on a Sunday morning, I’d usually tune to TSW and watch Ron Bendell invariably end up most weeks at a cattle auction where he would cover issues that were affecting the farming industry in the Westcountry, and end most weeks with the cattle auctioneer jabbering his (and it nearly always was a he) incomprehensible yet mesmeric sales patter.  They could be speaking in tongues for all I knew.  When TSW lost its franchise to ITV Westcountry, Bendell swapped the cattle markets for the weather map becoming lead weather forecaster on the evening news bulletins. While researching this post, I learnt that Bendell had died, just before Christmas 2021, at the age of 67. I don’t usually do this kind of thing here, but I’d like to dedicate this selection to him.

Released on Dot Records in 1956, Auctioneer tells the tale of a young boy who spends his free time mimicking the rhythms and cadences of cattle auctioneers to the detriment of his schoolwork.  However, encouraged by his father the boy goes on to live out his dream and become an auctioneer.  Leroy Van Dyke, who co-wrote the song with Buddy Black, wasn’t just picking a random subject here, but based it on the early life and career of his cousin, Ray Sims, who is credited with introducing the fast paced, patter style mode of delivery at cattle auctions and in so doing, revolutionised the way in which cattle auctions were run.  Sims’s method allowed for higher numbers of lots to be bought and sold and also made auctions run more quickly.  As the link shows though, Sims’s influence and accomplishments in his field went way beyond just how auctions were run, though it will be what he’s always going to be remembered for in the wider world.  Patter songs are, by their nature always going to divide taste between those who find them catchy and those who find them irritating. If you’re in the former camp, we have the benefit of a lyrics video allowing us to try and sing along with Van Dyke on the chorus.

Despite his dislike for Auctioneer, Peel included it on the playlist for this show as it was requested by regular correspondent, Lance Bombardier Gerald T. Fox, who had seen a number of requests ignored by Peel over recent weeks. Although Peel didn’t have a copy of it himself, the BFBS record library had the track on an album called Country and Western Stars Sing Their Biggest Hits which featured several other titles which piqued Peel’s interest such as Can’t You Take It Back and Change It For a Boy by Rex Allen and I’ll Just Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) by Claude Gray.

Video courtesy of AMG Songs  

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Fruitcake - Creeping and Peeping (6 December 1992)

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Peel played this track cautiously on the show feeling that it was a record which may require a couple of listens before people would enjoy it.  It hit the mark straight away for me, but I can see how the deliberately juddery production on the whole track could put some people off.  If you had told me that it was recorded in Los Angeles in 1966, I would have believed you, seeming as it does to catch the vogue from that time for angular, disquieting yet enjoyable songs about mental disintegration but filtered through a stridently, catchy guitar sound and an almost militaristic beat.  It sounds like an outtake from an album by Napoleon XIV of They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haa fame or an attempt to stretch the vibe of the coda to Disturbance by The Move into a full length song.  However, it was recorded in 1991, possibly in Missouri where Fruitcake were based.

Due to effects on the vocals, I had initially regarded the track as being almost Wraith-like and in another era, it could have made for a novelty hit for the Halloween market as a ditty about a ghost finding its way round a home and planning exactly how it’s going to make its haunting presence felt.  However, considering that it was issued as the A-side track of a 7-inch called Welcome to Saint Anthony’s Psychiatric Center, I have to lean towards the theory that what we may be hearing are the voices inside the head which drive people to creep and peep where they shouldn’t, leading them to end up in said psychiatric centre - or center if you insist.  With its poppy but off-kilter atmosphere and the rising mania on the line, I’m gonna crawl beneath the wall, Creeping and Peeping ultimately feels less like a bubblegum take on a theme tune for the Ghostly Trio from Casper the Friendly Ghost, but rather more like one for Bob from Twin Peaks.

Video courtesy of FEBear1

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Family Cat - River of Diamonds (6 December 1992)

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River of Diamonds is a good example of musical disconnect whereby the sentiment of the lyrics is at odds with the arrangement of the music.  Here, the folksy lyrics about returning to a place of comfort and looking for a home are fascinatingly juxtaposed with a typically rocking performance by the ever under-rated The Family Cat.  One possible reading of the song is that it concerns someone pining for a lost love and that the search for “hay” as opposed to “hey” shows a desperate need to find someone with whom to make hay with.  The question is though, has our protagonist exhausted all their options or can they simply not find anyone whose haymaking skills match up to their former lover?  The line, I’m crazy and you know it, as I walk this final mile suggests that if the search has proved fruitless, our protagonist may be about to throw himself into the river and die.

If this should be so then it explains just why the band got PJ Harvey in to guest on the track, one of two which she contributed backing vocals to on the Furthest From the Sun album.  Maybe Polly Jean had this track, indirectly, in mind when she recorded Down By the Water a few years later.  As good a job as she does both here and on Colour Me Grey, it feels a bit of a waste just having her in on backing vocals only instead of giving her a verse or having her duet with Paul Frederick.  I know her profile was still relatively low-key when the album was recorded, but it does feel a little bit like the musical equivalent of inviting a fascinating guest to a party and then making them sit in the meter cupboard all night.  

Video courtesy of keef punk

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Aphex Twin - Green Calx (6 December 1992)

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Calx is a form of powdery metallic oxide which is formed when an ore is heated. There are four types: red, blue, yellow and green.  Over the course of his career, Richard D.James has created a track for each different variety.  In my opinion, Green Calx is marginally ahead of Yellow Calx as the best of them and is by some considerable distance, the most interesting of the Calx tracks; not least because it takes the listener to several different places during its six-minute run-time, whereas the others remain locked in one tempo throughout (fast and urgent for Yellow Calx, slow and mournful for both Red and Blue).

What also distinguishes Green Calx from its partners is that it feels like a track which reflects its creator’s roots.  James’s father was a former tin miner and having grown up in Lanner, close to the Redruth mining district, Green Calx has the sound of mining imbued into its very being and pulls off a neat piece of historical and contemporary evocation. The heavily industrial feel of its opening movement places the listener directly into a 19th Century mining environment as the digging/drilling takes place and the mine shafts resonate with excited conversation, banter and grumbling, as only the Cornish can do.  Here and there (1:48 and 3:48 particularly), you’ll hear what sounds like a foghorn blasting out to signify breaks for lunch or the end of the working day.  Interestingly those blasts appear to have been sampled from some of the adverts in RoboCop which if you’re trying to create a chronology for the recording of tracks on Selected Ambient Works 85-92 places it after 1987/88.

However, the ambient synth sounds which underpin the track and give it a sense of musicality and poignancy, bring us into the late 20th Century and have us walking around the derelict mining sites, as captured in the Redruth mining district link above.  We hear the ghosts of one of Cornwall’s great, lost industries, preserved in aural sepia.  To have placed these side-by-side within the track allows us both to lament what has been lost, but also admire what was achieved: a world leading industry at the foot of the British Isles.

Video courtesy of eternius