Everything Turns was the final record that Peel played on the 10/1/93 edition of John Peel's Music on BFBS. He may have thought that the woozily, dreamy guitar work of its final 45 seconds would have made for a suitable sign off for the programme. Unfortunately, the intention was sabotaged by BFBS going to the news a few minutes into the track. All these years later, the squaddies’ loss is our gain.
Recorded by New York band, Cell for their debut album, Slo*Blo, Everything Turns starts and ends in contemplative mood and lyrically it maintains a philosophical stance by discussing the way that moods and ideas can change with the passing of time or be swept away like a tide. The way that revolutionary zeal can be dulled the passing of time and the gaining of experience, in this setting, feels like Bob Dylan’s My Back Pages as seen through the eyes of Dinosaur Jr.
If the song takes evolution of ideas as its main theme, it's likely that it does so from a political as well as personal viewpoint, especially given many of the political upheavals of recent years which were still settling down by 1992/93. However, at nearly 30 years remove, it's striking how ambiguous the song feels about the process of change and the latter section of the song seems incredibly far sighted about a lot of the discourse that has motivated many of the upheavals we have seen in the last decade. What music plays in the heads of Trumpists/Brexiteers/phobists? Could it be:
Ideas move, like they're on fire.
Everything turns.
Tell me why?
When you spark a town
Then you let it burn.
Everything returns back.
And when they've ranted themselves to a standstill, and you venture to ask why they were so angry, all they have is:
Everything changed so quick.
I got lost in it.
Oh Cell...how we could have done with you to act as a bridge these last 14 years.
It’s always interesting when acts that formed part of my musical diet in the mid-1990s start turning up on John Peel programmes in the early 1990s. This edition of Kat’s Karavan saw Peel give a play of Moonshine by Cornershop, taken from their debut EP, In the Days of the Ford Cortina. Peel played the track on the limited edition curry coloured 7-inch, though he didn’t remember ever having a curry which looked anything like the same colour as the vinyl. Moonshine missed out on a place on the metaphorical mixtape due to the crime of Excessive Feedback Wankery.
Although Peel got through what I heard of the show without making any mistakes such as playing records at the wrong speed, he did balls up some of his wider responsibilities towards Radio 1. A fax from A.C. Temple promoting a gig supporting The Edsel Auctioneer (more on them shortly) which was set for January 12 in Newcastle reminded Peel that he had left a load of promotional material for upcoming Radio 1 activities in the North East at home.
Selections from this show were taken from the first 2 hours of the programme. There were two tracks I would have liked to share but couldn’t - and as they didn’t have a note on them a la The Giant Mums, I haven’t gone back to check on them.
Calvin Party - Mass: Peel promised to stop mentioning that this was the new name for the band formerly known as Levellers 5. The track ended up as the finale to their debut album, Life and Other Sex Tragedies
Hula Hoop - Blues From a Vaseline Gun [Peel Session] : Purveyors of highly competent indie rock which on several occasions during this session fell into the same hole as The Hair and Skin Trading Company, where I find myself thinking, “It’s good. It’s good....I don’t like it.” This would have got in though it doesn’t appear to have any connection to the peerless Blues From a Gun by The Jesus and Mary Chain. The track was ultimately recorded alongside other exotically titled tracks for their debut album, My Sweet Amputee.
There were a couple of tracks which were slated for inclusion but which failed to stand the longevity test when they were returned to.
The Edsel Auctioneer - Stomachful : Maybe it sounded more impressive on the radio recording but with those whiny vocals and a guitar solo that sounds like it’s being played through a straw, I think I’d have spent January 12 going to the Bigg Market after A.C. Temple had finished their set.
The Eternals - Rockin’ in the Jungle : From 1959, this slice of novelty doo-wop presents Tarzan, Jane, Cheeta and Boy having a party in the jungle. It’s immaculately performed as you’d expect and Peel found himself wishing he could make the sounds in it which he thought sounded like Lenny Henry’s Katanga character. When I revisited the song though, I found that it made me uncomfortable for precisely those reasons. Political correctness hadn’t registered with me in early 1993, but in 2022 I am much more choosy. I love doo-wop, but I can live without this one. Had Peel wished to play a Tarzan themed record, I wish he’d gone with Paul Jones.
This was another track which nearly missed out on a place here. It was only after listening to it, loud, on headphones that I gave it the nod for inclusion. To be fair, the opening 90 seconds of Dark Side of the Moon are not especially promising given that it starts out as sludgecore, then transitions to a fairly by-the-numbers industrial trance beat suggesting some gloomy dystopia. But then at 1:28, in comes a synth line of such infectious danceability that the doubts are blown aside. If Love Inc. - one of a number of aliases for Wolfgang Voight - intended to use the opening to create a mood of dystopian dread, it’s to be welcomed that he had a sense of humour to use as the track’s principal hook something which sounds like a Breakdancingflash mob gatecrashing a fascist rally. The light and colour of that synth line does battle throughout the track with more ominous sonic opponents, and by the end, like a real life flash mob, it disperses into the shadows again, leaving the status quo disrupted but in those piercing shards of sound, trying to reassert itself again.
This track from The Giant Mums debut EP, Eyedropper, should have turned up here a couple of weeks ago when I reached it while working through the notes of selections made from this 8/1/93 show. Its absence is even more inexplicable when you consider that my notes say This may be worth requesting, which I would have to do from my benefactor, Webbie, who has come up trumps for me with uploads any time a track heard on a Peel show has not been available on YouTube. Webbie's generosity and support has been invaluable to this blog. They have provided two requested uploads for 1993 already. I can count on their support totally, but I only go to them when it’s a track I really, really want to include because I don’t want to be a nuisance or have them feel I’m taking them for granted. I also like the random element of not being able to include tracks if circumstances dictate it. Generally, I only ask for tracks if it’s an earworm that stayed with me from the moment I heard it. Sometimes, there can be a gap of two years between hearing a track on an audio file and blogging about it, but if I can still sing or hum it to you having maybe only heard it once before, I will ask for it. But despite what my notes said, I couldn’t remember a blessed thing about I Wove Myself In. It wasn’t like the choruses and playout of Sweet Revenge by ColourNoise, the atmosphere and grandeur of She Ran Away From the World by Big Red Ball or the gloriously cheap, homespun charm of guitar and tambourine led No Hippy by Bello, all of which told me from the moment that I heard them that I would need to ask Webbie to make sharing these possible for me to enjoy and by definition, put them out there for everyone else to enjoy as well. It made me happy and hopefully made others happy too to expose these unseen, unheard gems after nearly 30 years.
But with I Wove Myself In, all I drew was a brick wall blank, no recollection whatsoever. And no one else had uploaded it, so it clearly didn’t deserve to be heard despite what I had written in my notes
sometime in 2020. In a fit of fatigue and with other tracks from 8/1/93 waiting to be blogged about, I pushed on and was all set to ignore it until I realised that as I was poised to write a Notes post and then move on to another Peel show and other records, I owed it to myself, to you and to The Giant Mums to go back and listen to the track to see whether I should ask Webbie for it.
I can’t pretend that the memories came piling back to me as I listened to it play on the recording of the show, but I was initially taken by the muscular, angular riffs that came in at the end of each verse. However, it was the last 2 minutes, from around 1:56 onwards that told me that, yes, this would have gone on the metaphorical mixtape and although I don’t rate it as essential as some of the tracks I’ve previously asked for, it was worth asking Webbie whether they could help. Typically, the upload was made within an hour or so of my asking. I run out of superlatives to describe Webbie but I mean every one of them.
Despite the loudness and attack of the music, I Wove Myself In is, like Headacher by The Bear Quartet from the same show, quite a sweet song. It holds great resonance for me given that the emotions it describes seem to chime perfectly with those of someone looking to enter into a relationship, which I had spent most of the previous year aching to do, though I looked for a calmer take on things as 1993 dawned. It’s a love song of great directness and awareness of the emotional disturbance which falling for someone can cause, though the lyrics also point towards singer, Dave Roby having to process the feelings that someone else appears to have towards them and being unsure how to react to this. But what makes the track are those final 2 minutes with guitar work which spends a minute or so suggesting quiet reflection on whether to commit to the relationship. There is in those almost arpeggio like figures that run through the third minute of the track, a feeling of inner contemplation and talking through the night to gain a better understanding of each other. The music suggests two hearts moving closer to each other, losing one another in the pools of each other eyes. And then at the 3:00 minute mark, the pace picks up again with the feel of Roby and his prospective partner falling into each other’s arms and kissing passionately at the moments where the band come in together and languorously in those guitar windmill like interludes that punctuate the last 30 seconds of the track. Although, it appears to end emphatically, those tinkly chiming sounds which carry on under Peel’s voice at the end of the track seem to suggest the start of the stopwatch which commences anytime two lovers come together. Will they last forever or are the sands already starting to run towards their inevitable break-up? I Wove Myself In manages to project all of this in a little over 3 and a half minutes. Maybe it was more essential than I gave it credit for.
The idea of an album which fused Jamaican roots reggae and Polish folk music seemed so incomprehensible to John Peel that when he found himself holding a copy of just such an album he laughed out loud because he felt that the conceit could not possibly work. However, Higher Heights Twinkle Inna Polish Style - a collaboration between veteran reggae group Twinkle Brothers and the Polish family folk group Trebunie-Tutki - worked its magic and Peel admitted, before playing it on this show, that he had been humming Skanking on the Grass all week.
Looking over Twinkle Brothers’ discography, they were no strangers to Poland. This may have been facilitated by Norman Grant’s 1980s move to the United Kingdom which opened up Europe as a consistent venue for touring. In 1988, they recorded Twinkle in Poland and the following year saw the release of a live album recorded in Warsaw. Grant’s exposure to the music of Eastern Europe, especially in the Tatra Mountains area inspired and excited him, eventually leading him to seek out a musical collaboration.
The historic meeting took place in the autumn of 1991 when the snowfall had already started dressing the mountains in white sparkles and Norman Grant accompanied by Dub Judah entered the mountain hut of the Trebunia “Tutka” family. The family have lived in their house for as long as the memory can stretch. For generations they have played their music with its roots right where the mountain stream of Bialy Dunajec springs out. The family opened their doors wide with the old Polish saying, “The guest brings God into your home.” and Madam Zosia greeted everybody with all the warmth of her heart. - From the sleevenotes of Higher Heights Twinkle Inna Polish Style.
Between 1992 and 1994, the two groups released four collaborative albums. If we accept the chronology on Discogs, Higher Heights Twinkle Inna Polish Style was the third of these releases. There are shared tropes between the two styles of music which, on this record, form the basis of a loose concept album about (SPOILERS) an outlaw called Johnny (referred to as Janosik in the sections sung by Trebunie-Tutki) who returns to his village after hiding out in the mountains so that he can enjoy a reunion with his wife. But trouble is never far away and he gets into a fight with someone which leads to him getting killed towards the end of the second side of the record.
I heard every track on the album apart from the last one, so don't know how it ends.
In keeping with most concept albums, the plotting is quite vague and repetitive, but the two sound styles meld together well enough to avoid sounding jarring or a novelty. In choosing to play Skanking on the Grass, Peel steered clear of any of the tracks which are integral to the story. But the track is still one which takes elements of storytelling and setting from both the reggae and European folk traditions: trying to smile through poverty by enjoying simple pleasures of dancing while mothers fret about the children ruining their nice shoes, an important status symbol as the first visible sign of progress out of barefoot poverty. Next, will come a bicycle and then the ultimate symbol of progress, a car.*
