Looking back, I was surprised to see that this was the first Aurlus Mabele tune to feature here, in Peel show terms, since Boxing Day, 1991. I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that if a soukous Mount Rushmore ever gets built, it should only include anyone who ever played as part of Mabele’s band, Loketo. For their admirable insistence on just getting to the sparkle - and for me, the sound of soukous guitar is the aural embodiment of that word - they stand at the peak of their field. For those with longer memories, the guitar work here is in the La Joie de Vivre category.
In its original form, Mad Monks on Zinc sounds like “head music”. It’s slightly proggy, heavy on new age elements and built around a chilly, staccato, Germanic piano figure. It could have come out either in 1971 or 1981. Back in 1992, I wasn’t moving in the sort of circles which meant that Mad Monks on Zinc would have come into my consciousness, but it clearly made enough of an impact that Holy Ghost Inc. were able to commission a set of remixes. Most of them make regular use of the central piano riff, but this mix saves the piano for the last 30 seconds. Up to then, it moves the track from the head to the dancefloor with thrilling intensity.
For all my talk in the past about dance music having an almost religious hold over its acolytes, this mix literally opens with 30+ seconds of the call to prayer. Then at the 34 second mark, the beat drops and the resulting explosion of energy feels genuinely close to ecstasy. Aaaamen…
Originally recorded by The Shangri-Las as a b-side for their 1966 single, He Cried, Dressed in Black was offered, in the same month, to the female four-piece, The Pussycats, mainly because the people behind the original recording believed in its potential to be a big hit. It followed the same arrangement as the Shangri-Las version, which had languished at Number 65 on the back of He Cried on the US Hot 100 (and failed to chart at all in the UK), while Artie Butler again oversaw proceedings in the studio, just as he had done with the Shangri-Las. The Pussycats version is a bit more bombastic, though the mood of downbeat heartbreak is maintained throughout.
The record buying public were immune to the song’s charms, perhaps considering it passé by 1966, or maybe they found the grandiose melodramas put out by the likes of The Walker Brothers to be a preferable update to the girl-group formula. The notes to Girls in the Garage, Vol 5 from which Peel played the track on this show mention that yet another version of Dressed in Black was also recorded at the same time, under the same arrangement team by The Nu-Luvs, but I haven’t been able to locate that, which may be for the best as you can get too much of a good thing.
Listened to with my 2023 ears, I’m not too keen on The Pussycats version of Dressed in Black, but I’m including it here as I suspect that my 1993 ears, which were grabbing 60s music wherever I could find it at the time, would probably have been obsessed with this for a few weeks at least.
With Pixies having disbanded the previous year, their erstwhile frontman greeted 1993 with a utilitarian new name, swapping the mystical, guru-like Black Francis for Frank Black, the man you need for all your plumbing needs. He also had a new self-titled album, brimming with new songs. At one point, Black had looked like dipping his toe into solo-dom with an album comprised entirely of cover songs, but in the event, he appears to have energised himself for the new challenge by following a trait from his Pixies days and giving most of the songs on his new album a space/sci-fi slant (cf Motorway to Roswell)
It’s not immediately obvious from the lyrics, but as Black admitted, the inspiration for Old Black Dawning came from a visit he made to the then recently completed Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. If humanity ever does colonise other planets, then structures like Biosphere 2 are what it’ll be living in. More likely, I suggest, will be the building of biospheres across this planet if/when Earth becomes uninhabitable due to climate change making it so.
That’s for the future, back then and on into the mid 1990s, it’s wider cultural significance - outside of the Frank Black album - was for its association with the 1996 comedy, Bio-Dome, which was one of those movies alongside Joe’s Apartment, Coneheads, California Man and Cool World which I perpetually used to linger over and then ignore on trips to the video rental store because I simply wasn’t ever going to be stoned enough to fully appreciate them.
Having been an enthusiastic supporter of Pixies during the late 80s/early 90s, Peel found himself caught between the past and the present now that Black had struck out with a solo album. His views at this point were mixed: Without wishing to get into a Morrissey vs The Smiths style debate, I do prefer the work of The Pixies in general. However, he did have reservations about his reservations and reckoned that he would listen to Black’s album a bit more closely before making judgements. I haven’t listened to enough of either to be able to make a considered preference, I just know that I like what I’ve heard of both so far. And had I heard Old Black Dawning back in ‘93, it would have most likely led me to feel reassured rather disappointed.
My notes describe this techno track as “meriting consideration purely for the force of its beats, over the last minute”. And there’s no question that they are mightily impressive and meaty, though having listened back to the track a couple of times, there’s a little more subtlety about the whole thing than I might have suggested in my initial notes.
What’s of greater interest and importance about Planet 42 is that it marks one of the earliest appearances on a John Peel running order of the man behind the Directional Force alias, Dave Clarke, who alongside Jeff Mills, could be considered to be one of Peel’s two favourite dance DJs of the 1990s. Amongst other things, Clarke played at Peel’s 60th birthday party and saw his album Archive One included in Peel’s 1997 list of his 20 favourite albums. The two became friends and Clarke frequently recorded sessions and live sets for Peel, including one under the Directional Force name in May 1994.
I’m not going to try and convince you that Turnip, the lead track on the debut 7-inch by Pittsburgh band, Hurl, is a great piece of music. You can hear the whole of the EP in the video and I think it’s arguable that the other two tracks, Clutch and 12 Foot Drop are both better songs. For Peel, the attraction of Turnip was its similarity to other bands, with him wondering aloud as to whether Codeine had been an influence. The vocal makes Stephen Immerwahr sound like Kurt Cobain and you may find your attention wandering before the band reach the end of the first or second lines, though Hurl have a neat trick of yo-yoing between somnambulant muttering, albeit backed by the beautiful arpeggio which roots the track, and urgent bursts of noise as they ponder the potential loss of a girl. It has its moments certainly, but I would probably have ignored it had Peel not mentioned that all the tracks on the Turnip 7-inch had been recorded on June 30 1992. So, while Hurl were recording Turnip, I was onstage at Pendennis Castle performing in The Comedy of Errors.
It always fascinates me to see what people were doing on dates which have particular significance for me. Being both a keen football fan and a performer, I can recall dates from the 1990s in particular with almost anally retentive accuracy. Part of that is down to the fact that I kept a daily journal from the beginning of 1995 up to mid 2002 - though I threw them out when I moved in with my wife; but it’s also because, during the 90s, I was involved in hobbies and interests which demanded attention to dates and times. Rehearsal dates, performance dates, cricket matches etc. It’s why whenever I read diaries of famous figures, I’m always excited to see what they were doing on dates that I have a clear memory of myself. Inevitably, the dates either coincided with:
1) A show.
2) An Ipswich Town match of some significance.
3) A romantic engagement.
To see/hear about the actions of others on important dates in my life helps me to see my story as one of billions that we all play out each day. I was 5 hours ahead of Hurl when they went into Sound Seven Studios on 30/6/92 in the small neighbourhood of Valencia, Pennsylvania. I have no idea which of their three tracks they would have been recording at the time that I was playing my scenes in The Comedy of Errors. They wouldn’t have known it, but the Won’t she walk away lines they recorded that day for Turnip would hold significance for my family 24 hours later when my father’s aunt died after a tortuous couple of years.
It is not a great song, but I will cherish it for providing evidence of a moment in my own life, where both of us tried on the same day to make a contribution to culture and art. The fact that I’m writing about them suggests that their effort was more successful than mine.
If I’d been smarter, I’d have paired this up with The Fall’s Pay Your Rates from this same 7/2/93 broadcast. If Mark E. Smith and company provided the cold water of reality, Dennis Brown offered a temporary warm bath of compassion for those struggling to pay their bills and feed their family. As Peel put it, in response to the Poverty, poverty, poverty refrain: There’s a lot of it about, and going to be more, I suspect.
Across the 6 albums which Brown released across a variety of labels in 1992, he was unable to offer any solutions to the problems. The rest of Cosmic, the LP which contains Can’t Take Another Day, is given over to love songs. However, companion pieces to the issues raised here include Moving On from Blazing! and Rebel With a Cause from Beautiful Morning.
