Equus: John Peel Show - BBC Radio 1 (Friday 29 January 1993)

As this edition of Kat’s Karavan tipped over from Friday night to the morning of Saturday 30 January 1993, John Peel took the opportunity to wish his in-laws, Dennis and Eileen Gilhooly a happy 50th wedding anniversary. I have been very lucky in knowing and loving them as I have been in marrying their daughter.  My notes for the show don’t reveal whether he dedicated any of the records he played on this edition of the show to Dennis and Eileen. Certainly it wasn’t any of the, quite large, number of tracks that I had initially included but went cold on - more on them, shortly.  It may have been that he sought to take Dennis and Eileen back to their courting days of the early 1940s by playing something by Spaelimenninir I Hoydolum, whose eponymous 1977 album of waltzes and polkas had been a staple of his playlists ever since then.  

Maybe he chose to celebrate the Golden Wedding anniversary by dedicating the Number 44 track in the Phantom Fifty to them.  I think that some of the sentiments of Gorgeous Blue Flower in my Garden by Th’ Faith Healers would have appealed to lifelong lovers.  Given the tortured journey Peel had gone through to get the 1991 Festive Fifty played on the radio, I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when Peel discovered that he’d been mis-numbering the entries and originally had Gorgeous Blue Flower in my Garden up at 42 in the list. 

Peel also gave a shoutout to John C Donelkevic, who was currently visiting the UK from Connecticut. He had passed onto Peel a copy of Boot by Freak Baby.  Peel played the b-side of the record, which was called Peel, strangely enough, specifically so Donelkevic could hear his copy of the record played on the radio.

The selections from this episode were taken from a full 3 hour show. It feels like I’ve been working through 29/1/93 forever and it would have taken a lot longer had there not been 5 tracks which fell from favour when I listened back to them:

Steakdaddy Six - Rubber Pants: Released via the Twelve Inch Records label from Urbana Illinois. Peel paired it with another Twelve Inch release by Dis called Ed Was Solace, which was on my list but not shareable.

Eddie Fowlkes - I Wanna Know [Bandulu mix] - Should have been a no-brainer given that I liked what I’d heard of Bandulu, but it didn’t stand up at the time - listening to it again as I type this I think I may have been wrong to discount it. Peel was agonising over the correct pronunciation for Fowlkes’s surname. “Folks?” “Foulks?”  The Infonet label had sent him a note on this, but he’d lost it. Perhaps it was this uncertainty which caused him to play the record at the wrong speed at the start. In the end, he plumped for “Foulks”.

 Little Walter - Sad Hours: One of the world’s first amplified harmonica players, apparently. A fact which gives me an excuse to post my favourite amplified harmonica track, Goddamn by Son of Dave.

The Jesus Lizard - Puss/Gladiator [Peel Session]: Early 1993 was turning into a busy period for The Jesus Lizard. Puss was due to go out as one half of a split single with Nirvana.  Drummer Mac McNeilly was about to become a father. Bassist David Wm. Sims was about to set up a record label called Torsion Music and to Peel’s great delight, they looked set to sign the Northern Irish band, In Dust, though this did not subsequently happen.

Pepe Kalle and Rochereau - Forgive Me: A soukous miss. Despite featuring Popolipo on guitar, this is pretty forgettable stuff until it reaches the playout. When I first heard it, I thought the playout, from 2:43, was stratospherically impressive. Peel himself described it as sounding like he’s about to take off for somewhere really spectacular.  But on second listen, it didn’t really hit the heights which the radio waves suggested it did.

There was one track, I would have liked to include but couldn’t:

Tse Tse Fly - Bus Window: You can access that track on YouTube, but every time I went to play it, the video stalled and I’m talking about every time over several days. So, you know…ya snooze, ya lose.  The band came from Leeds and the track was on a 10-inch album called Duckweed Smuggled Home. The sound was more late-70s New Wave than reflective of the early 90s music sound.

Happy anniversary Mr. and Mrs. Gilhooly

Equus: Huggy Bear - Into The Mission (29 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

When this blog last covered content by Huggy Bear, I spent a lot of time writing about the political significance of Riot grrrl and how, by the mid 1990s, the music industry had managed to repackage the aims and theories behind the movement into phenomena like The Spice Girls, which while not lacking a degree of subversive intent, was carefully cultivated for mass-market consumption.  What I had forgotten about, having only been dimly aware of it at the time, was just how frightening Riot grrrl seemed to people at the time.  Not in a generationally threatening sense, the way early rock ‘n’ roll or mid 1970s punk rock was seen to be - no Riot grrrl affiliated act ever made the front pages of a national newspaper or provoked cries of moral panic - but the refusal to compromise or conform to industry expectations always meant that mainstream support from the music industry/press often seemed to be lukewarm at best.  I suspect out of fear that these male-dominated industries could find themselves over-run with opinionated women who might just have dragged the lead figures off on the tumbrils to a rock ‘n’ roll guillotine, there to lop off…not just their heads.  As subsequent posts will show, John Peel was providing support and approval to many of these revolutionaries at the time.

Such an atmosphere of queasy threat and mistrust  can be heard all over the opening movements of Into the Mission. Sometimes, I like to cast certain songs as rock ‘n’ roll crystallisations of certain films. The works of Abel Ferrara are my particular go-to on this. Into the Mission feels like the work of a band who had spent a lot of time watching Ferrara’s 1981 rape-revenge psychodrama, Ms.45, also known as Angel of Vengeance. In it, Thana, a mute seamstress working in the garment district of New York City, is raped twice in one day. Once in an alleyway on her way home from work, and the second time when she gets home and finds her house being robbed. She manages to fight off and kill the home invader and takes his 45 caliber pistol out onto the streets where she conducts a night-time vigilante campaign of shooting various pimps and ne’er do-wells who are threatening women.  So far-so Death Wish, but the movie raises the stakes by showing that the combination of the rapes that she suffered and the sense of liberation she feels in murdering street thugs have warped her mind to the extent that, in time, she sees ALL men as worthy of being murdered.  Soon, she’s stalking and trying to kill men who have done nothing more than have an argument with their partners.  The movie climaxes with her attending a fancy dress party with her work colleagues where she murders her own lecherous boss and then attempts to shoot as many men as possible. The lead up to the scene, where she is shown in her apartment, heavily made up but dressed as a nun and kissing the bullets she loads into the gun is one of the most memorable in exploitation cinema history. 

It’s this scene I have in mind, when I hear Jo Johnson’s semi-seductive/semi-threatening reveal that Baby’s on a mission/Baby’s not alone/Baby’s not in a trance/Baby’s coming home.   Whereas the sublime Her Jazz was a call to action, Into the Mission is the sound of that action taking place. The line, Baby’s not alone conjures the image of hundreds of women bursting forth and wasting the patriarchy.  The thrashy abandon with which the band deliver the chorus sounds like an audible grin of delight as they fire off their bullets and take down their targets. And is that throwaway comment at the very end of the track someone saying, “Blow him away”?  Perhaps…No wonder the industry was frightened, and tracks like Into the Mission perpetuated the myth, created by concerned members of the patriarchy that feminism didn’t mean equality, but rather subjugation of male identity. 

Although the track could be found on Huggy Bear’s side of their split album with Bikini Kill, they also chose it as one of the tracks to give away in a limited edition single, made available as a Valentine’s evening gift to attendees at their gig at the Richmond in Brighton on 14/2/93.

Video courtesy of random content.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors

Equus: Fly Ashtray - The Man Who Stayed In Bed All Day (29 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

Listening to the sound and feel of The Man Who Stayed in Bed All Day, one is tempted to think that said man is Blur guitarist, Graham Coxon having a wet dream over the direction he would try and push his band in, four years down the line from January 1993.  However, Fly Ashtray were not morose Essex boys, but morose New Yorkers instead and having spent a seven year apprenticeship honing their sound and firing out the occasional release through the late 1980s, they attacked the 1990s with a burst of releases, beginning with 1990’s cassette album, Nothing Left to Spill, with The Man Who Stayed in Bed All Day as track 1, side 1.

Anytime anyone writes a song about another person’s lethargy, it’s tempting to view the inspiration through three possibilities:

1) They’ve been reading Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov.

2) Drugs

3) Depression

In the main, I go with number 3 as the driving theme of the song, especially in relation to the way that the lead character has dreams about the world crumbling under his feet.  Combining that with the angular off-kilter riffs conjures the sense of a depression so thick and enveloping that even unconsciousness provides no respite.  However, another possibility comes to light in the last two lines:

And he can’t wake up/Can’t seem to make up his mind.

What his girlfriend said/About him, getting out of bed.

Which had me wondering whether the theme of the song was about fear of commitment or making hard decisions.  In which case, Oblomov could be seen as the principal inspiration.

Video courtesy of Augusto Fabio Cerqua

Lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Equus: The Breakers - Surf-Breaker/DiY - Hothead (29 January 1993)

Buy Surfbreaker at Discogs

Buy Hothead at Discogs

Two records, released 30 years apart, both in their different styles showcasing what their respective generations understood to mean by contemporary, throwaway, dance music and both of them making a virtue of repetition.

Surf-Breaker was a b-side to an August 1963 single by The Breakers called Kami-Kaze. If you’re reading this before listening to the video and I tell you that it’s a surf-rock instrumental, I bet your imagination is already defaulting to the Wipeout  guitar pattern as a sort of mental shorthand for surf rock.  Trust me, when you start listening to the main riff on Surf-Breaker, not only will you be singing along to it, but you’ll be singing ahead of it too because the track goes exactly where you’d expect it to, even incorporating a ragged saxophone solo and a ritardando ending.  While Surf-Breaker’s debt to Wipeout is clear, their principal influence appears to be Paul Johnson, guitarist with The Bel-Airs and author of of Kami-Kaze.  Surf-Breaker was written by The Breakers own Joe Kertes and the Kami-Kaze single was their only release. It was put out on Brana Records as a one-off release and my favourite theory that I’ve seen while carrying out my research is the one put forward by Mickey Rat on 45Cat that the label was named after the surname of a record promoter’s daughter.  The Breakers owed their appearance on this edition of Peel’s show to the fact that both sides of their single had been included on a Romulan Records compilation album called Surfers Mood Volume 2, the sleevenotes of which declare the Kami-Kaze/Surf-Breaker combo as one of the greatest double-siders in rock ‘n’ roll history.

As for Nottingham’s DiY Sound System, having spent 3 years staging club nights and free parties, the collective now started to look at releasing their own music.  Hothead was their first release and would be followed by others over the next 10 years including a collaboration with Chumbawamba. Hothead is hypnotically repetitive and if the surf guitar licks make Surf-Breaker a charming period piece, then the “Baby!…Breathe.” vocal samples on Hothead do the same service.  

Videos courtesy of Surf Music Madrid (Breakers) and Scubadevils (DiY)

Equus: Moonshake - Peel Session (29 January 1993)

Moonshake are my favourite discovery from this period of John Peel’s shows (late 1992/early 1993). Had I known them at the time, I would have been a dedicated fan, and with my usual flair for timing, I’d have been pledging my devotion to a band that were on the brink of falling apart. Unlike with Marion, 3 or 4 years on from here, I wouldn’t have seen Moonshake dissolve yet, but at the time this show was broadcast, they were on the way towards fracturing, as musical tensions became personal ones and Margaret Fiedler, who takes vocals on the first and third tracks of this video, would leave to form Laika, and leave David Callahan, who sings on the second and fourth tracks to continue with Moonshake for a further four years. So this session is a prized artefact, capturing the original lineup of Moonshake, live and experimental.

What draws me to Moonshake is the smorgasbord of styles and textures that they work into their songs. They make eclecticism sound effortless, and their unwillingness to stand still, pulls the listener with them in whatever direction the band go.  The experimentation in this session saw Moonshake gender swap on two of their tracks - Mugshot Heroine and Sweetheart - which have already had their studio versions included on this blog.  My take on this can  be found here and nothing has changed my opinion that Callahan benefitted from this more than Fiedler did.

Indeed, my overall feelings on the session is that the material recorded for it showcased Callahan better than Fiedler. Both of the other tracks in the session play off ideas of interdependence.  In Beautiful Pigeon, an album track which had been released as the lead track on an EP, this takes the form of sexual desire. However, it works the trick less convincingly than on some of Fiedler’s other Moonshake tracks such as the original version of Sweetheart. Meanwhile, Coming, which was one for anyone listening in who had been following Moonshake since it was recorded for their debut EP, First, two years earlier, focuses on a meeting of minds while teasing the prospect of reconciliation.  It’s an unusually cordial track from Callahan helped along by a parachuting guitar line which, with its choppy, squally riffs suggests the feel of conversation and fierce debate before eventually talking itself out and arriving at a place of accord, if not outright peace.

Video courtesy of FruiterThanThou.