This blog took John Peel’s Radio 1 show from 2 November 1991 as its starting point. Ordinarily, the beginning of November was a time of great excitement on his show as it heralded the opening of voting for The Festive Fifty, whereby listeners could vote for their favourite 3 records played by Peel during the course of the year. 1991 should have been the 15th anniversary of the list, but due to a poor response from listeners, Peel decided not to proceed with one that year. According to Peel, voting had been so slow that any record receiving votes was likely to make into that year’s chart, which he felt rather defeated the point of the exercise. Indeed, it seemed likely from his demeanour when he announced the cancellation of voting that the Festive Fifty had run its course altogether.
However, it was back the following year and apart from a truncated chart in 1997, it retained its place in Peel’s schedule for the remainder of his life. At some point during 1992, while going through paperwork at home, he found the bundle of cards and correspondence that constituted the votes for the 1991 Festive Fifty. He didn’t have time to go through them and make them into a chart but offered any interested listener the opportunity to take the data and compile it into a chart. This was carried out by a listener in Sheffield, whose work was labelled The Phantom Fifty by Peel and which he broadcast, at a rate of one track per Radio 1 show, over the first half of 1993.
At Number 50, sat Nick Cave Dolls, a track from Bongwater’s 1990 album, The Power of Pussy. Sonically, the set up is close to the previous Bongwater song featured on this blog, once you get past the Boomhauer - like sampling at the start, the track starts with a halting, drone like guitar, damped down and struggling to assert itself. It needs something special to lift this track to our attention and thankfully, Ann Magnuson provides it with her dream-like narration, which may not be entirely coincidental given that she sometimes used to use a dream journal as a basis for lyrics on Bongwater content. However, this cannot be entirely taken for granted as she may well have had experience of the scene on Hollywood Boulevard that she describes.
The narrative feels Lynchian but Magnuson is setting out a path that would point the way to movies more than a decade away from realisation such as Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Here, the stars are all shrouded in red light and the only auditions are not for blockbusters and Oscar contenders, but nude/lingerie poseathons. It’s a good thing that Magnuson confesses to feeling horny enough to want to get involved, but her reference to murdered Playboy model/actress Dorothy Stratten shows that she’s not blind to the danger which presents itself as she gets talking to a freak attending the poseathon who talks about burying his toys so that no one else can use them. It’s at this point that the track starts to veer more towards the territory that Magnuson may have chronicled in her dream journal, albeit that the punchline feels like a cry from the subconscious which was too neat to go unused in the track.
The opening 85 seconds of Nick Cave Dolls may test many people’s patience, but the rest is pure Bongwater: skeletal, sensual, absurd, funny, brilliant - and Peel’s listeners only rated this at Number 50? No wonder he tried to abort the whole enterprise.
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