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
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