In common with many actors - both professional and amateur - if you gave me the choice of doing a play in front of an audience in which I had to spend the whole time naked, or write and deliver a speech on a topic while fully clothed, it’s likely that I would choose to do the naked play. I may not be wearing a stitch of clothing, but I would have the armour of a character to hide behind and a script to stop me sounding foolish - and if I did sound foolish, I could always blame the script. But to be up in front of people, as myself, and have to entertain or inform them? I can think of nothing more nerve racking. I have given a few speeches in my life, such as my groom’s speech at my wedding or reports to amateur dramatic society AGMs. Also, I work as a teacher delivering content that I've created and know, so I’m not un-used to public speaking but in each of those contexts I’m delivering to people I know. When I’m doing a play, the vast majority of the audience are strangers but I don’t feel any nervousness about being in front of them because, with the exception of the curtain call, I’m not presenting myself to them, but rather a character/persona. So it was for John Peel, who for over 40 years could talk into a microphone on live broadcasts to millions of people, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Furthermore, he could make mistakes in front of those millions of listeners contrary to the ethos that live radio shows should be smooth, well oiled operations, and yet he could laugh them off and subsume them into his radio personality without wanting to hide in a dark room, never to emerge and sit behind a microphone again. Yet, in the week ahead of this edition of John Peel’s Music, he found himself having to make a speech to the Radio Academy. According to Peel it was only the third time in his life that he had ever had to make a speech and he described it as an embarrassing experience, though this appears to have been because of the isolating nature of speech making rather than because of anything he said or did. For him, the most difficult thing about making a speech of the kind that he had had to deliver was knowing how to end it, especially as he wanted to end on an upbeat note. Clearly the speech made some kind of impact though, because the following year, at the Academy’s National Radio Awards Ceremony, he won the National Broadcaster of the Year Award. In 2008, for their 25th anniversary, he was posthumously awarded the Broadcasters’ Broadcaster Award.
If making a speech caused him stress, the best way to assuage it was to go to a gig. That week saw Peel at the Powerhouse to watch Codeine and Love Child. Codeine’s set was blighted by one berk down the front, with his mates, who kept talking loudly through all the quieter pieces. He kept shouting, because he obviously thought this was hilarious,‘Faster! Faster!’ You’d have thought after he’d done it once or twice and there hadn’t been much of a reaction to this witty sally that he’d have stopped doing it, but no, he kept doing it all night. Codeine weren’t having a particularly happy time in the UK. During December, they recorded a Peel Session, as did Love Child, though Codeine’s was the only one of the two to be broadcast. However, the session proved to be an unhappy experience for them, apparently because engineer Dale Griffin was drunk.
The postbag brought letters asking why Peel wasn’t playing as much rap music now as he had once been. He attributed this to the increasingly sexist content which was characterising many of the rap records he’d heard recently. As a married man with two daughters, he didn’t feel comfortable playing such content on the radio. He acknowledged that this point of view sounded very close to censorship, but he had no intention of changing his mind on the issue.
Sexism may have been beyond the pale, but psychosis was still acceptable given that his playlist for this show featured a track called Vile by Melvins which had appeared on a compilation album called Mesomorph Enduros, the Latin name for an active chemical found in the neck gland of all known serial killers. I passed on that one, as well as a couple of other tracks which I had originally slated for inclusion:
The Edsel Auctioneer - Monuments - one of those tracks which probably should have been included but sounded like it was trying too hard and so ended up turning me off it. Had I been listening to this show in 1992, I may have included it as a gesture of support towards the band, who were going through a tough time. Peel had had a chat with one of them at the Codeine gig and had been moved by just how distressing their tale of the previous 18 months spent trying to record for independent music labels had been. Their Wikipedia page shows just how sluggishly they progressed over a seven year stint, mainly because of things beyond their control.
Phleg Camp - Twilight Pink - Apparently big things were predicted of this band and Peel felt that this slice of funky-metal was a good start for them. They made my shortlist for this show but it didn’t bear repeat listening.
Lisanga - Melina - a case of “it’s not you, it’s me” in this rejection. It’s a perfectly pleasant, if unremarkable, piece of Soukous, but while blogging about this show, I’ve also been putting together my own Festive Fifty for 1992, which will be going up here in about 10 posts time. No spoilers, but a soukous record is currently sitting at Number 4 in my provisional standings and while I was listening to Melina, I kept thinking of that Number 4 tune and it meant that what stood out for me about Melina was its unremarkableness rather than its pleasantness.
Bivouac - Two Sticks - another track which failed on the longevity test, which is a bit of a shame given that my notes describe it as what Sting would sound like if he specialised in Murder ballads. I’m not imagining it, am I? I mean that riff on the verses of Two Sticks, from around the 22 second mark does sound like the piano part on Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, doesn’t it?
Full tracklisting
