There is a little bit of confusion over who to credit this track to. It was released as a single on Merge Records and credited to Alf Danielson. However, the recording of Mary Had a Steamboat was done, not as a solo effort, but by Danielson’s former band, Stephen - in the days when you could call something that without thinking of Adam Buxton & Joe Cornish. In the interests of consistency, I’m going to credit it to Danielson here, just as Peel did on the 2/1/93 programme.
Although the track is not an inversion of Mary Had a Little Lamb, it does have its roots in children songs, namely a hand-clapping song called Miss Susie Had a Steamboat. Both tracks share the same opening verse, but whereas the rhyme has gone on in some versions I saw for a further 9 stanzas, Danielson contents himself with one further verse about the steamboat’s journey into Hell, conjuring visions of the Styx, while also suggesting that he was influenced by Gene Wilder’s performance in the paddle steamer scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Given the way that Danielson seems to lose interest as the track goes on, it’s a shame that the budget didn’t extend to licensing Wilder’s performance into the recording, which could have elevated this from a quite interesting piece of noise rock into something truly special.
Castaway Theatre Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream didn’t come to a final stop on 12 December 1992. We gave two further performances of the play in January 1993 to drama students at Cornish schools, but we were a changed company as several of the students on the course dropped out of the course before the start of the spring term. Among them were the girl who played Puck and the bloke who was responsible for my incredible make-up job as Oberon. Even now, nearly 30 years after the event I have nothing but the most sympathetic and sincere apologies to the learners at, I think it was Penair School in Truro, who had to sit through an excruciating scene in which the girl who played Puck in the school shows suffered a dry that destroyed her concentration so utterly that she suffered further dries and couldn’t pick up on any of the prompts. I was onstage with her at the time - the scene was a duologue between our characters but I could do very little to help her out - and as I watched her come very close to dissolving into tears on the stage, I very nearly turned to the audience to apologise for her and explain that she had had to learn the part at very short notice. But then, I looked a dreadful sight myself. I’d tried to recreate the makeup job myself and made an abysmal job of it. I looked ill rather than intimidating and all told, I don’t think our work in the schools did a good job of advancing an understanding of Shakespeare.
Once A Midsummer Night’s Dream was finally laid to rest we started work on our spring production which under the terms of the BTEC curriculum meant staging a contemporary drama. It was at this point that, outside of our collective sessions together that the BTEC group began to fragment. Although some members had left, we still had over 25 learners on the course which was far too many to offer opportunities for everyone in one contemporary play. As a result, the group split into three parts: two of the groups worked on separate plays which would be staged on consecutive weeks in March/April 1993 with the casts of one play acting as crew on the other play and vice versa. A third, smaller group started working on writing the group’s summer production which was supposed to be a self-written group created play.
The two plays that we presented in the spring were Top Girls by Caryl Churchill which offered lots of great roles for the women on the course and Equus by Peter Shaffer which had a greater blend of male/female roles. Shaffer’s play concerns a psychiatrist treating a teenager who has been committed to his care after blinding six horses with a spike. During the course of his investigation, he discovers how the boy’s love of horses grew into a quasi-religious/sexual obsession caused in part by the boy’s reaction to a conflict riven home life and the increasing hold that Equus, a self-created horse God within the boy’s sub-conscious took on him. The blinding takes place when the boy tries (and fails) to lose his virginity with a girl he works with at a local stables; foolishly but unknowingly the girl tries to get them to have sex actually in the stables where the boy has been taking the horses out at night and riding them to his own masturbatory climaxes. The guilt and fear that the boy feels leads to him becoming paranoid that the horse God is watching them and mocking him, causing an emotional overload which causes him to attack the horses. The play is part thriller, part psychological exploration on the nature of religious ecstasy/obsession as well as spiritual emptiness (the psychiatrist promises to treat and “cure”the boy but envies him his obsession in contrast to his own loveless, staid marriage/life and fears that he’ll damage the boy by making him like his fellow man).
I auditioned both for Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist and Alan Strang, the boy, but not unexpectedly, I wasn’t cast in either role. I say not unexpectedly because there was a conscious decision that the major roles in both Equus and Top Girls should be weighted towards those who had either played smaller roles or not acted at all in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Furthermore, Tim Rolfe, who was probably the man with whom I developed the closest social friendship on the course, had set his heart and mind on playing Alan with the same determination that I had done to play Oberon. He was duly rewarded with the role after the auditions and would play opposite N, who was cast as the psychiatrist, though there were concerns about N given that he had been missing from so many of the rehearsals for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where he had been supposed to be directing the scenes with the fairies. The concerns would prove to be borne out in the long run. I was cast as Harry Dalton, the stable owner where the blindings take place. It was a small role, but I had no problem with that given what I’d just done in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was also getting involved in a production of Guys and Dolls with local youth company, The Young Generation which was set to be staged in August, so I had plenty to keep me occupied through early 1993.
We join John Peel in his first Radio 1 Saturday show of the new year. Now, I should warn you that 1993 was the year I got my first “proper” girlfriend, so you may have to wade through reminiscences of fraught evenings spent at The Twilight Zone club in Redruth, where between trying to soothe female neuroses, we danced to the big club floor fillers of the summer: What is Love by Haddaway, Mr. Vain by Culture Beat and Tease Me by Chaka Demus & Pliers. I liked all of those records, but can remember thinking, in my naivety, that Tease Me was an example of pop-reggae that seemed to dominate the charts through the first half of 1993 cf O Carolina, Mr. Loverman, Informer etc and that Demus and Pliers had been beneficiaries of cultural fashion more than anything else. I had no idea that their success was by no means an overnight thing, but rather the culmination of several years of graft and due paying. Mr. Mention was released just as they were on the cusp of their success and is very much a pre-mainstream reggae record in that this tale of a Jamaican ladies man is nigh on impossible to follow if you’re trying to catch up with Demus’s flow. But it is just as catchy as any of their mainstream hits with the sampled saxophone break providing a brief but delicious recurring motif. I think they would even have liked it at The Twilight Zone had it been given a spin. Peel only played part of the record, because he misread the clock and wanted to squeeze in a playof the PJ Harvey record Plants and Rags to finish the 2/1/93 show.
It’s been just over six years since I did one of these for 1991. That was made up of 2 months’ worth of selections, this 1992 list was comprised of 9 months’ worth. 1993 was the first year in which I did a full year’s worth of plays/shows, so at current rate of progress it could be 8 or 9 years before we get a Festive Fifty for that year. Before unveiling the list, a few personal observations:
Out of that 9 months’ worth of selections, 84 were in contention for a place in this Festive Fifty. I appreciate that it was a case of needs must for my 1991 list (which took 2 November 1991 as its starting point) but the fact that I had 54 potential tracks from that 2 month period suggests to me that 1992 wasn’t as good a year, musically, as the previous one had been.
Comparing it to the 1992 Festive Fifty which Peel’s listeners voted for, there are 14 tracks which turned up in my 1992 posts, but only 3 of which made it onto my 1992 Festive Fifty. Luck of the draw/timing quirks on the recordings I heard meant that there are plenty of tracks on that list I never heard, maybe they came out while I wasn’t doing any plays between July-September of 1992. For instance, Sugar have three entries on that list, but in all the years I listened across Peel shows from 1992, I don’t remember hearing anything by them.
Furthermore, when looking at his choices for the 1992 Peelenium, only Tempo [Fever Pitch Riddim] by Anthony Red Rose was included on this blog, and despite my raving about it, when it came to looking back over all the choices for the year to whittle down for our Festive Fifty, it didn’t register with me enough to make the longlist, let alone the final 50.
The final 50 are all personal choices with the top echelon of tracks being those that most stayed in my memory or which were cast-iron earworms for me.
As with the 1991 list, all the selections are tunes which were released in 1992 (although there may be a little elasticity on that with some of the soukous selections.) Had I included favourite tunes played by Peel, but not released in 1992, I’d have made space for Hot Burrito #2 by The Flying Burrito Bros. (1972), Smile on your Face by Dangerous Birds (1982) and MotorCity by Age of Chance (1985). So, with all that said, here is the Smell of the Greasepaint and the Sound of John Peel’s Festive Fifty for 1992:
So farewell to 1992. Coming soon: John Peel gets to indulge in some very odd horseplay as he soundtracks the first modern drama I ever performed in, Equus by Peter Shaffer (January - March 1993).
Every post which I put on here reflects a track that I would put on a mixtape if I had been taping John Peel programmes during the rehearsal period and production run of a show. Once we reach the end of each show, I go back through each programme to select one track from each of them which I would put on a definitive mixtape of the show to be given to cast and crew as a first or last night present.
Some of the tracks are among the best of the year, others might only have been the best played that week. For me, the sound of A Midsummer Night's Dream October -December 1992, would be as follows:
Dedicated to the cast and crew of Castaway Theatre Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream staged at Falmouth Arts Centre from 9-12 December 1992.
But how many of these will turn up in the next post, where we will present the Smell of the Greasepaint and the Sound of the Peel’s Alternative Festive Fifty for 1992.
