Equus: 70 Gwen Party - Knee Deep in Evil (2 January 1993)

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Another slice of ear-shreddingly loud noisecore cum proto-drum’n’ bass from 70 Gwen Party. As always the abrasiveness is underpinned by delectable melodies and a sense of urgent excitability is a constant throughout, especially during the escalating guitar runs from 2:10 - 2:34. After which the music briefly seems to pause for breath before plunging the listener back into a sonic maelstrom.  It sounds exactly like every other 70 Gwen Party track I’ve ever heard, but their genius is to be able to mine the well of angry, intense soundtracks and keep producing a different band of gold each time.  And the more I hear them, the more I feel that they are what The Jesus and Mary Chain would have become had they branched out into dance music straight after releasing Upside Down.

Like The Jesus and Mary Chain, 70 Gwen Party had considerable bones to pick both with the music business and especially the music media.  They didn’t feature on any of the lists of bands/artists to watch in 1993, which Peel related that he had read in various music papers, on this show. Maybe the journalists and tastemakers were taking their revenge on them after reading the venomously critical sleevenotes of the Knee Deep in Evil 7-inch single, in which the music press were criticised for ignoring 70 Gwen Party’s music due to their obsession with pretty packaging on more vacuous material and how this would ultimately damage the music business and the art itself:

One day those same sad media people who ignore bands like ours might wake up to the fact that if a piece of music is crap, it doesn’t matter if it’s dressed up in a shiney sequined disc and played on the latest sound system with additional vibrator attachment, it will still be crap. Snape (Records) will continue to put out 7” mail-order vinyl because it is the only economically viable option, it they get ignored...cos we can’t afford all the promotional bollocks that seems to preside over this business, then so be it.  Perhaps those in media power,  who rely on music to be potent for their survival, might come to realise that by judging music on its technical attributes/format rather than the music itself, you will damage the “grass roots” who cannot compete on those terms, and by damaging the grass roots (who breathe life into this business unlike Major record label A&R depts who cream off the fat) they will ultimately be damaging themselves.

Video courtesy of Joe Morris

Equus: Bhundu Boys - Pombi (2 January 1993)

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This was the first time I’d heard the Bhundu Boys played on a Peel show.  If this blog was covering Peel shows from the previous decade, I would have probably had regular exposure to them already given how Peel was moved to tears of admiration when he first saw them play live in the mid-1980s.  However, the slight sense of guarded enthusiasm that he radiated when cueing up this track from the Friends on the Road album, which Cooking Vinyl had released towards the end of 1992, suggested that a lot of water had flowed under the bridge since then.  Indeed the band had gone from world music darlings supporting Madonna at Wembley Stadium in 1987 and finding themselves signed to WEA; to an outfit which was riven by acrimonious departures (not least of lead singer Biggie Tembo), critical & commercial indifference (their major label records sold poorly and were badly reviewed with critics feeling that their music had been made bland due to compromises designed to make them accessible to Western audiences) and the spectre of AIDS which would kill off three members of the band in successive years between 1991 and 1993.

Friends on the Road would turn out to be their penultimate album.  In an effort to potentially revitalise the band, they were involved in several collaborations with other artists on the record such as Hank Wangford and Latin Quarter.  Peel was more taken by the tracks which they worked on themselves of which Pombi is a beautifully engaging example.  The liner notes described the song as being about disease and economic awareness, while the title is based on an African proverb of typically nonsensical profundity: 

If you have a pump, then buy your own bicycle.

Video courtesy of Takari Ekwensi

Equus: Lagowski - Toxality (2 January 1993)

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Less a dance track and more an aural collage of top secret and classified sounds, I find myself broadly in agreement with what my original notes said after first hearing Toxality. It lacks the danceability of Andrew Lagowski’s Storms from the previous summer, but such is his skill at sonic world building that this mix of industrial-technological environmental overload - such as the persistent siren-like call hold signal or the recurring, ominous bubble of conveyor-belts -   with Area 51 infused paranoia would have been compelling enough to have secured Toxality a place on the metaphorical mixtape. It’s typical of Peel though to have plumped for the spikier pleasures of Toxality ahead of the slightly, but only just, more melodic tracks it shared space with on the Toxality/Time/Formant EP.

With thanks to the uploader.

Equus: Oneil Shines - A Lover's Question (2 January 1993)

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What's most striking about this song, which was originally written in 1958, is how much, to modern ears, it should be retitled as An Insecure Lover's Question.  I can't imagine how infuriating it must be for the subject of the track to find that, in their absence, their partner is in an endless stew of paranoia and developing jealousy about them.  I’d like to think that either of the song's authors, Brook Benton and Jimmy T. Williams had read or seen The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and based their protagonist on one of the characters in it, Faulkand, who spends the majority of the play professing reciprocated love to Julia, only to drive her to distraction with his constant need for reassurance that her feelings towards him are genuine.  Even the title sounds like an 18th Century poem.

The song has had many cover versions.  It first came to prominence as a doo-wop hit for Clyde McPhatter, while Otis Redding had a posthumous hit with it in 1969.  Oneil Shines reggae version was a Sly and Robbie production, the second one in that 2\1\93 programme and is as exquisitely tuneful as you might expect.  Indeed, A Lover's Question seems to be a song which inspires its arrangers and producers to go that extra mile. But regardless of the prettiness or funkyness of the arrangements, none of them are able to remove that canker of poison which sits at the centre of the song's heart.

Video courtesy of O'Neal Shines - Topic. (I've gone with the spelling on the Discogs page though)

Equus: Pachinko - Cecil/The Kickstands - Scrambler (2 January 1993)

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Recorded nearly 30 years apart, I decided to put these tracks together as a double bill because they are tangentially linked by motor bikes.

In the case of Pachinko’s fantastic mosh-out, Cecil, the motorbike association is a loose one, provided by the sample of Evel Knievel giving an anti-drug talk. I had hoped for one brief, glorious moment that Cecil might have been Knievel’s birth name and an inspiration for the song’s title, but that flight of fancy died out when I learned his real Christian name was Robert.

Scrambler was recorded for The Kickstands sole 1964 album, Black Boots and Bikes. It found its way onto Peel’s playlist for this programme due to its inclusion on the Boss Drag ‘64 compilation album. The Kickstands - who included future Beach Boys songwriter/Byrds producer Gary Usher among their number - avoid the terrible levels of over-production which marred Gear Masher by The Deuce Coupes from the same compilation.  Given space to play, they produce an enjoyably funky guitar-brass swing number, which was placed as the final track on their album, meaning that the recurring guitar slide note at the end of each verse sounds like a motorbike taking off into the distance.  Had the production staff on the BBC’s 1980s moto-cross show, Kick Start been a little more musically clued up, then Scrambler would have made a perfect alternative theme tune.

If you’ve enjoyed these two tracks, I’d encourage you to listen to Idaho Durt by Red Red Meat which opens with a short cover of Scrambler and features more of the wit and wisdom of Evel Knievel throughout.

Videos courtesy of The Kickstands - Topic and Irresponsableful

Equus: Colour Noise - Sweet Revenge (2 January 1993)

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Having just completed a Festive Fifty for 1992, I can content myself that it’ll be a long while before I have to do one for 1993.  That’s probably a good thing because while I have currently listened to Peel shows up to April 1993 and I have a lengthy list of selections for the year so far, only two tracks have really stood out as earworms for me up to now.  Sweet Revenge by Colour Noise is one of them.

I think what stands out for me, with the benefit of hindsight, is how out of place it sounds as a piece of female-fronted rock in 1992/93.  Not ethereal enough to be shoegaze, not savage enough to be grunge, not political enough to be considered British Riot grrl and as a portent to the future, you’d be hard pressed listening to it to imagine the world of Elasticas, Sleepers and Echobellys who would be dominating the spotlight in the coming years. If you squint, there’s a touch of Polly Jean Harvey at her most mannered and melodramatic about Sweet Revenge, but it seems to belong less to contemporary 90s rock music and instead feels like a bitter, tortured drinking blues/jazz song of the sort that Billie Holliday or Judy Garland might have performed to anxious cabaret audiences in their last, desperate years.  

In its verses, one can picture singer, Gena Dry, snarling her contempt at the target of the song while drawling her way through her sixth glass of whisky.  The alcohol and the spite drive her towards the transcendent chorus - but it’s the breakdown that Gena suffers and drives her way, almost incoherently and virtually unaccompanied, through from 2:50 to 3:40 that makes the song. The litany of promises about what she will and won’t do, the determination to be revenged on those who’ve wronged her, while at the same time still betraying feelings of love/desire for the target, until finally - like Billie and Judy - Gena strikes up the band and stops singing her intentions into her glass or her shattered self esteem, but instead projects them right to the back of the hall so that everyone can hear her and be left in no doubt that she’s back on her feet and fighting on.  

Despite the rockist trappings and Eastern tinged riffs, this is a showstopper of a tune and if it had a proper ending as opposed to a fadeout, it would bring audiences to their feet demanding a dozen encores.  It’s rock music as Broadway/West End theatre and that’s what would have made it stand out from the crowd in 1992/93.

I don’t think anyone knew quite what to do with Colour Noise back then. The positive music paper reviews for the Sweet Revenge EP, as mentioned by Peel at the end of the video, did nothing for the band’s immediate prospects and it would take until 1996 for them to release any follow-up material.  The following year, tracks from the 1996 EPs together with the material recorded for Sweet Revenge were put out by Lowspeak Records on an album called Exposed.  This also featured 4 previously unreleased tracks recorded live, almost on my doorstep, at Truro City Hall of all places.  The promotional notes attached to the record talk the band up with a handful of positive quotes from reviewers and magazines. Forget Echobelly E.P Magazine demanded, which is a bit of an irony considering that by 1997, Echobelly seemed to be going all out to try and sound like Colour Noise.  But they appear to have remained below the radar, only being referenced subsequently during news stories of Gena Dry’s suicide in 2010.

Video courtesy of Webbie who has very kindly also uploaded my other big ear worm from 1993 so far.  More on that in the coming weeks.