A Midsummer Night’s Dream: John Peel Show - BBC Radio 1 (Saturday 12 December 1992)

 John Peel

For the first time in the Midsummer Night’s Dream period, selections were taken from one of Peel’s Radio  1 shows.  The file I heard was only 52 minutes long, so apart from the selections that have already been uploaded, I don’t have much to tell you about this show.  One record which didn't make my list of selections was Lickin’ Chicken by Jackknife which featured on their San Francisco Beauty Queen double 7-inch EP released through Sympathy For the Record Industry. The notes that came with the record said that San Francisco Beauty Queen was the 187th release on Sympathy For the Record Industry, a fact which delighted Peel who remembered them when they started in 1988 and doubted that they would get past 5 releases.

It wasn’t on the recording I heard, but ahead of this show, Peel appears to have got his hands on a reissue of The Transformed Man, the infamous 1968 album recorded by William Shatner from which he played Captain Kirk’s version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.  I didn’t hear it on Peel’s show, but have a distinct memory from that time of hearing both that and his version of Mr. Tambourine Man on Radio 2’s Sounds of the Sixties.

Apologies are due again to Superchunk, who once again made the shortlist for inclusion here, but their Peel Session track, Let It Go failed the longevity test. It was the only track from my initial list of selections from this show, which failed to make it on to the metaphorical mixtape.

Full tracklisting

Me

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was staged at Falmouth Poly (then known as Falmouth Arts Centre) over 9-12 December 1992.  Unlike The Comedy of Errors  which my school had staged as a “traditional” Shakespeare play, the action in this production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was updated to 1930s New York, a task which was made much easier once we discovered that there was an Athens in New York state.  Duke Theseus became a Mafia don, Demetrius was a Mafia soldier, the mechanicals who stage the play as part of Theseus’s wedding revels and are tradespeople in the original text were the heavies etc. It was an idea which crossed over very effectively, though it gave the actors the dual problem of trying to interpret Shakespeare with American accents.  I was playing Oberon, the Fairy King (stop sniggering). Given that fairies were seen as universal beings, we were allowed to play the roles in our normal accents, which helped us a lot once the play got to the stage.

In rehearsal, the cast was split into three groups: The lovers/Mafia court, the mechanicals and the fairies.  Each group had a separate director working on their content, which was fairly easy to do as, for the majority of the play, the three groups play out their actions separate from another. The course administrator, David Gregg, only came in to oversee the parts of the play where the groups overlap such as   Bottom’s discovery by Titania after he has had his head changed into that of a donkey by Puck or the final  scene of the play in which the mechanicals perform Pyramus and Thisbe at the wedding revels and the fairies end the play by blessing the proceedings.  Unfortunately, the fairies were pretty much left to their own devices as our director only ever seemed to turn up 2 days out of every 5, and when he did take a rehearsal with us he always seemed to be getting into confrontations with the actresses who were part of Titania’s entourage.  I was beguiled by K, the girl who played opposite me as Titania, though she had fairly quickly gotten into a relationship with one of the mechanicals, and I recognised that it was better to leave my admiration for her unspoken. Some other members of the group were not so circumspect and it came back to bite them.  Nevertheless, I still remember the surge of surprise and adrenalin when during one of the rehearsals, one of the course tutors suggested that I, as Oberon, try and seduce K, as Titania, in order to try and (unsuccessfully) gain the upper hand in an argument that the two characters had over who got custody over a young Indian boy. And as I kissed her neck and felt her start to yield into me, I clearly remember thinking, “I love drama.  I wouldn't be getting to do this if I was doing any other type of course.”

Although the fairies didn’t have to cope with playing Shakespeare in an American accent, we did have to endure body paint to an almost ridiculous degree.  David Gregg had initially suggested that the fairies should be almost nude and body-painted in order to distinguish us from the mortal characters.  But this was deemed impractical and none of us particularly fancied standing around for long stretches in virtually no clothes at the start of December.  Eventually, we were all given distinctive costumes. Mine may well be the best I’ve ever worn in a show: A long leather coat with tails cut into it, a leather string vest and leather trousers over black boots and purple spats. K’s boyfriend, Martin, gave me a remarkable make up job to go with it: white base and black streaks which made me look like a monochrome Green Man. I looked and felt amazing. Martin left the course in the new year, just before we took the play out to be performed to drama students at a couple of local schools.  As a result, I had to do my own makeup and Oberon looked as though he was in the process of recovering from a nervous breakdown.  Every other spare bit of skin had to be covered with body paint and they also sprayed black hair dye into my brown hair.  The girls had it worse than me, but for the whole of the production week, I was taking baths at 11pm and sleeping with a towel on my pillow to protect the pillowcases. 

The production was well supported and the feeling among the company was positive at the end of the run. But the feedback we received suggested that the production was a slight failure. I remember a lot of complaints about the American accents, which several people felt obscured the text. For myself, I felt the show was too long, despite the fact that cuts had been made to the script, it felt a like a long night. I didn’t help with this given that I decided to sing Oberon’s last speech, which I wouldn’t repeat if I ever played the part again.  There was a lot of good stuff in the production, many good performances, great production values which captured the Mafia vibe and innovative use of a scaffold and dry ice helped to conjure up the magic of the forest into which the lovers, mechanicals and fairies combine to such wonderful effect.

On a personal level, I felt I’d taken a step forward as an actor. I felt my performance was less “stagey” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream than I had been in The Comedy of Errors. The size of the role helped, with so much more to work with, I was able to trust the text without feeling the need to impose any “Shakespearean” tones at inappropriate moments.  I enjoyed the challenge as well and combining that with the wonderful look of the costume/makeup, I felt for the first time that I was fully absorbing a role on stage.  I looked forward to more such challenges in 1993, both onstage and off. By the end of 1992, I was relishing how I spent my time, enjoying the people I was spending that time with and gradually, gently starting to embrace life and this would continue on into the next 12 months.

Coming next - the definitive John Peel mixtape for A Midsummer Night’s Dream followed by my Festive Fifty for 1992.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Red House Painters - Uncle Joe (12 December 1992)

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I’ve had to rewrite this post having published it a day or so ago. It's my own fault because I had assumed that the version of Uncle Joe which Peel played on 12/12/92 was the same version which Red House Painters had recorded for their second eponymous album release of 1993.

I loved that recording. I loved it so much I had it down as my 6th favourite Peel Show record of 1992.  But I've now discovered that the version Peel played in this show was a demo recording released as part of the fifth volume of the indie compilation series, Volume.

What's interesting about this, apart from my appalling slackness in not checking the source material, is that all the elements which make the track stand out: the musical elegance, the unvarnished emotion and humour i.e. It was unacceptable when I spit in your beer/I’m over-influenced by movies etc are all present and correct, but there's no way that I could creditably claim that this recording was the sixth best recording Peel played on his programmes in 1992.  The performance in the final album cut feels fully realised and matches the sentiments of the track; in this version all the sentiments are there, but they haven’t been fully matched up to a performance which can wring full value from them.  It goes to demonstrate just why the final cut will always endure more than the earlier draft.

Three instances where the sketch outshone the masterwork:

The Beatles - Norwegian Wood & I’m Looking Through You.  Now, although Rubber Soul is commonly regarded as the album where it all changed for The Beatles, I can think of nothing more conclusive in support of the argument that it may also be their best album than the fact that both of these alternate versions could have gone on the final album without weakening it at all.  In the case of Norwegian Wood, they appear to have felt that the sitar was too prevalent given that it can also be heard in the verses and this may have over-egged the gimmick as far as they were concerned. As for I’m Looking Through You, this should have been the final version compared to what they finally used.  If their two biggest influences in late 1965 were Bob Dylan and Otis Redding, then they never achieved a better fusion of those two than they did with the rejected version of that track.

Oasis - Up in the Sky (acoustic version) - On Definitely Maybe, the full band version of Up in the Sky is, like the rest of the album, an overpowering, irresistible monolith of focussed sound and impact, but no recording from Oasis’s early period gives stronger credence to an assertion occasionally made during their barre chords & 4/4 beat heyday that Noel Gallagher could have had success without his brother and the Burnage rhythm section.  Here, armed with a couple of acoustic guitars and a slide acoustic, as well as a roomful of echo, Noel makes Up in the Sky soar in a way which in some respects outdoes its electric brother.

Coldplay - Don’t Panic (The Blue Room version) - I got Parachutes for Christmas 2000. I was battling family tension and romantic agonies at the time, so it was arguably the worst Christmas of my life up to that point.  Parachutes, bought off the back of repeated plays of that summer’s best single, Yellow, was not a nice record to have at that time.  In my miserable state of mind, the opening piano riff to Trouble sounded like someone taking a hammer to a pair of massive tear ducts. But dotted along the way were tracks which pointed the way to brighter times, if I could hold on: the Yellow b-side Help is Around the Corner, album closer Everything’s Not Lost and album opener Don’t Panic, which felt like a warm hug of a song. By the following summer, I was in a much better place emotionally and I happened to hear The Blue Room version of Don’t Panic, which took the clipped pep talk that it eventually became on the album and presented it instead as a more languid, enigmatic and atmospheric track. Whether this hushed and shimmering version would have frightened record buyers off going beyond track 1had it turned up on Parachutes is a question we will never know, but given that Coldplay took more musical risks than their critics generally acknowledge, it feels like a missed opportunity not to have opened their debut album with this version of the track.

Lyrics copyright of Mark Kozelek

Video courtesy of Red House Painters - Topic

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Mint 400 - Thruster [Peel Session] (12 December 1992)

There’s a pleasing circularity to the fact that a track by Mint 400 was included in the selections from the first Peel show to soundtrack A Midsummer Night’s Dream and now one by them features among the selections from the final Peel show of the Midsummer Night’s Dream period.  Last time out, I banged on about the way I used to confuse Mint 400 with other similarly named bands such as Mint Royale and Galaxie 500, it’s taken me until now to discover that the band were named after an off road race in Las Vegas and despite loving the book, I’d forgotten all about the fact that it was Hunter S. Thompson’s reason  for going to Vegas when he wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Despite some slightly metaphysical lyrics i.e. What makes a scene a scene?/What makes a sun a sun?, I think Thruster deals primarily in the swirl of emotions felt by love and desire.  When first hit by those feelings, humans will call into question the nature of the world around them and even their own identity, just as happens here: What makes a man a man?  The first half of the song captures that rush of emotion, confusion and exhilaration. The switch to spacier atmospherics around 1:45 feels like the protagonist trying to regain their equilibrium and moving from abstract thoughts to more earthbound ones. Around the 2:05 mark, we’re offered a snapshot of the protagonist and the girl consummating their passion. Who cares about male-self identity when you’re getting to make out with a girl in a sexy dress.  Ultimately, the meaning of the track comes back to that recurring line, Faster inside which covers both the beating of a heart and sexual rhythm - the title may give us an indication of which one it means.  But regardless, it feels so good.

The video features the version of Thruster as recorded by Mint 400 for a single.  At least two tracks that Mint 400 recorded for this Peel Session are available. They are Sew My Eyes and Snakes Like Fish.

Video courtesy of Mint 400 - Topic

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Mutabaruka/Freddie McGregor/Dennis Brown/Cocoa Tea - Bone Lies (12 December 1992)

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If you take a cursory listen to this track, you may well feel that it’s standard reggae fare - praise be to Haile Selassie and hang in there, Africa, Rastafari dem come to revitalise you one day etc.  However, Bone Lies was a topical record about a major news story, one that was fully worth bringing together four such stalwarts as Mutabaruka, Freddie McGregor, Dennis Brown and Cocoa Tea.

In August 1975, a year after he was deposed as the final Emperor of Ethiopia by The Derg, a military junta, and during which time he had been under virtual house arrest, Haile Selassie died at the age of 82. The official word was that he had died of a respiratory condition which had arisen as the result of complications from a medical procedure that had been carried out on his prostate. However, the wider belief was that he had been murdered through forced asphyxiation on the orders of President Mengistu Haile Mariam, who had succeeded Selassie.  The funeral was held in extreme secrecy and took place within 24 hours of Selassie’s death. Adding to the sense of suspicion about what had happened to Selassie was the fact that his burial place was not disclosed, only those who dug his grave and lowered his coffin knew where he was buried. 

Flash forward to 1992, a year after the Derg were overthrown and when Mengistu, whose disastrous policies had led to the famines so harrowingly chronicled by Michael Buerk in 1984, and who through a reign of terror which would have impressed Pol Pot had killed off thousands of people, went into exile in Zimbabwe.  Under a toilet in the grounds of the Imperial Palace, human remains were found which were believed to be those of Selassie.  However, there was widespread scepticism among the Rastafarian community that the body was that of their Chosen One and Bone Lies, initially issued as a single on Anchor Records but also recorded for the album, Legit, a three-way collaboration between McGregor, Brown and Cocoa, makes it quite clear that they don’t believe that the bones are those of Selassie.  Nevertheless, these were the bones which were finally given a public funeral in November 2000 despite the ongoing convictions of the Rastafarian movement that not only was the body in the coffin not that of Selassie, but that he had not actually died in the first place.

Video courtesy of Chiekh Tidiane NDAO

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Deuce Coupes - Gear Masher (12 December 1992)

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I have to confess to inwardly groaning everytime Peel announced that he was going to play a track from a compilation album like Boss Drag ‘64.  I generally found most of the hot rod/car song instrumentals that would pepper his playlists to be utterly forgettable, and when later in the decade, he used to take up time on his programme by playing field recordings taken from motor race tracks, I’d sometimes be screaming at the car radio for him to get on with it and play some music.  Gear Masher, which was originally recorded in 1963 for Hotrodders’ Choice, the sole album by The Deuce Coupes makes it onto my metaphorical mixtape mainly because it has the good sense to rip off Money (That’s What I Want) for its main riff, which no track can ever go wrong with.

There’s also an interesting sub-plot at the heart of Gear Masher and several other songs on Hotrodders’ Choice.  Although it uses the Money riff to wonderful effect, it is almost made unlistenable by the way in which the track is plastered with the sound effects of screaming brakes and roaring engines virtually all the way through.  Producer Bob Keane, who also owned Del-Fi Records, the label which put out The Deuce Coupes handful of releases, may have felt he had to do something to prevent the group from being sued for plagiarism but the fact that he repeated the trick on other tracks on the album such as Double-A Fueler or Smooth Stick must have driven the band mad, as they are having to battle the effects to be heard. While it’s tempting to consider that The Deuce Coupes failure to put out any material after 1963 was down to the end of the Surf music craze and the onset of The British Invasion, I think it’s just as likely due to be something like Keane having to go into hiding for his own safety from a very angry group.  At a push, one could make a case that the effects were a metaphor for back seat lovemaking and sexual activity - the car being one of the few places in early 1960s America where young couples could get physical with each other in relative privacy under the seemingly innocent pretext of just taking a drive.  But the witlessness and lack of subtlety in the use of the effects suggests Keane was trying to be a cut-price Phil Spector, without any sense of his musicality or idea for how his ideas would complement the artist.  In it, we can see early signs of the kind of philistinism which blighted folk records of the mid-60s where it was felt that Simon & Garfunkel or Richie Havens on their own weren’t strong enough, so full bands and additional instruments would be foisted on to their recordings, often without the artists’ knowledge or

consent.

NOTE - This post was one of those instances where I did a little more research after I’d published it, rather than before it.  Had I done so, I would have changed the notion of Bob Keane hiding from an angry group after the release of Hotrodders’ Choice to him having to hide from an angry duo. The Deuce Coupes  were a pair of brothers - Lolly and Pat Vegas - whose playing on the album was supplemented by session musicians.  Furthermore, another album was released in 1963, which was also credited to The Deuce Coupes.  However,  The Shut Downs was a hasty cash-in which featured neither of the Vegas brothers, who would go on to achieve greater commercial success in the 1970s as Redbone.

Video courtesy of Scott Johnson

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Sublove - Dark Side (12 December 1992)

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In my previous post, I guessed that one of the string samples used in it was from a John Williams movie score. Well, I’m a good deal more confident in suggesting that, with a verbal sample lifted from Return of the Jedi, Dark Side by techno trance duo, Sublove, definitely features a Williams string sample, possibly from the final lightsaber battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

John Peel was not much of a film buff, but the inclusion in this programme of Dark Side with its lift from Return of the Jedi may have held greater significance to him than simply liking the track.  Arguably both the title track of the Underground 12-inch and She Moves could be said to be “better” pieces of music than Dark Side, but neither had the same personal hook that a track quoting Return of the Jedi may have had for him, especially as 1992 came to a close.

During the summer of 1992, Peel’s mother, Harriet Ravenscroft (nee Swainson) died at the age of 77. After divorcing Peel’s father , around 1955, she never remarried but did spend several years in a relationship with the actor, Sebastian Shaw.  As he explained in his autobiography, Margrave of the Marshes, this relationship was somewhat unconventional:  

Throughout their relationship, Sebastian had maintained a parallel relationship with another woman who was the very antithesis of Hat.  Whereas my mother had never worked, was overweight, drank excessively and was content to live in what to the impartial observer might well be classed as squalor; the other woman had a highly responsible career in the twilight world of the opera, was trim, rarely drank and lived in some elegance.  Nevertheless it must be said that the days she spent with Sebastian - the rota worked on a strict four-days-on, four-days-off basis - were for her, happy days. If they hadn’t travelled to Stratford-on-Avon...they were in London, and my arrival at Jameson Street in the small hours wasn’t always treated with the unrestrained glee for which I might have hoped.  (P.117, Corgi Books)

Shaw was never a star but he worked extensively and frequently, including with  The Royal Shakespeare Company.  However, he gained movie immortality in 1983 when he was cast in Return of the Jedi as Anakin Skywalker, the man behind the mask of Darth Vader, who is briefly seen when making peace with his son, Luke Skywalker after sacrificing his own life to save him from the evil Emperor Palpatine at the end of the film.  Although virtually unrecognisable under makeup in this emotional scene, he subsequently reappears as a ghost in the final shots of the film, looking on happily at Luke together with his fellow Jedi spirits, Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi.  Being part of the Star Wars universe meant that Shaw’s action figure found itself in the toy collections of hundreds of thousands of children during 1983, including many of those who lived near Peel’s home in Great Finborough.  It was a form of celebrity which he would occasionally get to witness at close quarters: 

Sebastian/Darth did occasionally come with Hat to stay with Sheila and me and word would spread among William’s friends that The Dark Lord was in the house.  The normally quiet lane that runs past our house before coming to a halt over the top of the hill, would fill with puzzled parents indulging normally epically indolent children who had, against all expectations expressed enthusiasm for a walk, one that would take them past the Ravenscrofts’ house.  I expect these children, mainly boys, secretly hoped that as they dawdled past the house, Sebastian would leap through the front door brandishing his light sabre and challenge them. Instead an amiable old gent would invite them in, if the mood took him and would perform simple conjuring tricks for them - including the knocking - a - coin  - through - a - table trick.  Nowadays, such neighbourliness would be interpreted as ‘grooming’ and hordes of vigilantes would crowd into our narrow lane to burn crosses and grunt threats. For myself, I still don’t know how Sebastian did that coin-through-the-table business. (P118/19, Corgi Books)

Now, the pressure to entertain starstruck children with conjuring tricks has fallen on Hayden Christensen, who portrayed Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels of 1999-2005 and who was infamously CGI’d in place of Shaw when Return of the Jedi was released on Blu-Ray in 2011.

Video courtesy of secretsquizza