Peel Goes Pop: Jakki Brambles Show hosted by John Peel - Thursday 8 April 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

This was the last of the Jakki Brambles cover shows that I listened to. The show on Friday 9 April was split into a series of smaller, shorter files, and as I’d got the point by the Thursday, I was content to skip that one and go onto Peel’s Friday evening show, which will serve as the starting point to soundtrack my next production, Guys and Dolls.

Compared to shows from earlier in the week, there’s less records to get enthused about and little in the way of extraneous excitement too. I felt that this programme saw Peel lumbered with the worst record that he had to play from the daytime playlist, Still in Love by Go West, which didn’t do much with the record buying public either, as it stalled at Number 43 on the UK charts.

Peel’s selections for today included Split Personality by dc Basehead, which moved one of Brambles’s production team to note that it sounded like The Smurf Song, and I have to say, I think they were on to something there.

Selections I would have included on the metaphorical mixtape, would have been:

The Fall - Lost in Music

Video courtesy of The Fall

We live in challenging times. A couple of weeks ago, I heard people throwing around the threat of nuclear war because of the latest hardware use developments in the Ukraine War as casually as the threat to clamp a car which had parked in a residents only area. The potential saviour in all this is supposed to be Donald Trump, presumably once he’s finished being a dictator on day 1 of his return to the US presidency; a reminder that January really can suck. And to compound the feeling of depression and desolation, The Annotated Fall website has been deleted! A consolation is that the deletion has been a surprise to the person running it, so hopefully it will be back up and running again soon. I certainly hope so as the prospect of having to decipher Mark E. Smith’s lyrics, without assistance, fills me with gloom.

Thankfully, little verbal safecracking is required here in The Fall’s splendid cover of Lost in Music. Originally, a hit for Sister Sledge in 1979, it was recorded by The Fall for their new album, The Infotainment Scan.  This recording also features The Fall making use of an instrument which they seemed to utilise more effectively than any other artist: the answerphone.  In The Birmingham School of Business School, Smith used it demonstrate how underwhelmed he was by the performance of the band’s manager. Here, the answerphone is used to set the track up with Smith getting through to a French woman and leaving a typically cryptic message, partially in French but also noting that “The palace of excess is the palace of access.”  I had initially considered this version to be fairly faithful in spirit to the original, albeit with Smith’s brief digressions on refurbished pubs serving as a reminder that disco night in Prestwich was a million miles away in spirit from a night at Wigan Casino. But listening to it more closely, I think the key to this version is the cacophony of telephone voices chirping away in the background through the first half of the song. The music that Smith gets lost in is the symphony of voices and lives that he overhears while working at a telephone exchange. Or maybe he had an old TV set like I did in the late 1980s which if you hit the channel buttons incorrectly, would go to static, but be able to pick up on telephone conversations. I listened to some absolutely blazing rows and breakups on occasion. 

The track is bookended by an odd sound effect which sounds as though The Fall are being absorbed into the tripods from The War of the Worlds, but here reflects the way that the prattle of modern life can overwhelm us.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Day Tripper [Top Gear Session]

Video courtesy of belfastorbust.

Recorded by The Jimi Hendrix Experience for Top Gear on 15 December 1967, for broadcast on the Christmas Eve edition, which Peel co-hosted with Tommy Vance, this was played by Peel, 26 years later, as his segue out of a traffic bulletin. We actually get one and a quarter Beatles covers for our money here, as the opening seconds catch the band playing the riff from I Want to Tell You. Once Hendrix chocks into the  Day Tripper riff, the Experience make the track their own. It’s a genuine band performance as well given that large parts of the vocals are handled either by a double-tracked Noel Redding or with support from Mitch Mitchell.  Debate has always raged as to whether The Beatles original was written about weekend hippies or a sexual tease. The Experience make it into a full-on acid anthem, but bring it back to Earth within 3 and a half minutes. I’ve always been slightly ambivalent towards Hendrix as I think that his, and Eric Clapton’s virtuosity opened the door to a lot of self-indulgent guitar rock, but here he sounds just what he was in 1967 - the most exciting musician of the year.

Jamiroquai - Too Young to Die

Video courtesy of JamiroquaiVEVO

Hearing the opening string riff at the start of Too Young to Die engendered in me the same ecstatic reaction that I felt when hearing the opening scat vocals  on When I’m Good and Ready by Sybil. Indeed, the only thing to surpass that is the “doo doo do doo” chorus on this. I’d forgotten all about just how excited I was by Too Young to Die when it came out, and how intrigued I was by Jamiroquai when they first appeared. In fairness, they weren’t doing anything that the likes of  Back to the Planet or Levellers weren’t already covering in terms of issues and subject matter, but they sounded absolutely divine. 

Musically, Too Young to Die is packed with ideas that sweep you along. We’re greeted at the door by strings, a blast of slinky brass takes our coat, there are gorgeous keyboard lines spiralling down from the sky above you, funk basslines tracing every step you make across the floor, subtle wah-wah guitar kissing your ears. And enveloping the whole thing, the reincarnation of Stevie Wonder delivering an updated version of Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology). No wonder they stood out like a beacon of brilliance at the time.

All that being said, this track was as far as my admiration for them went. Something restrained me from buying the Emergency on Planet Earth album. I felt somehow that the sumptuous excess of Too Young to Die would pall if stretched to LP length. I was also looking for pop stars that I could relate to as well, and there was something about Jay Kay and those extraordinary hats of his which felt distancing.  Then Britpop happened and gave me what I was looking for both musically and socially, so Jamiroquai dropped off my radar. Not literally of course given some of the enormous hits they had in the second half of the 90s, but none of Cosmic Girl/Deeper Underground etc ever felt as involving as Too Young to Die.

Mica Paris - I Never Felt Like This Before

Video courtesy of CharmeMusicAmbire.

I was reading recently that a couple of pop stars who made their names in the mid to late Noughties, are now using OnlyFans accounts to top up their finances.  Kate Nash is using money raised from selling pictures of her bottom to subsidise costs for her next tour.  Meanwhile, Lily Allen is using it to sell pictures of her feet. It got me thinking that when times get hard for female pop stars, there’s always nudity to fall back on.  In Mica Paris’s case, she didn’t have the ease of access to an OnlyFans account, instead she had to take part in a television programme. Do you remember that she co-hosted What Not to Wear in its final two series? I think it was on that show that I saw her sit down to have lunch with the partner of one of the women that the show was helping. Nothing out of the ordinary about that, except for some reason Paris and the partner were lunching in the nude, albeit with tastefully arranged table settings preserving her modesty. 

I wonder whether, during a break in filming, Paris’s mind drifted back to memories of recording videos in the Caribbean, as was the case with I Never Felt Like This Before, instead of sitting, topless, in a semi-detached house in Bromsgrove, having lunch with the partner of a woman with terrible dress sense. The fall from the pop heights always seems to take female performers to less edifying new gigs than it does to the male ones, doesn’t it?

Let Loose - Crazy For You

Video courtesy of Mark Remington

The Man Ezeke had taken his Radio 1 Easter egg hunt to Luton today. Indeed, the one thing I regret about not listening to Peel’s final show covering for Brambles, is that I don’t know where Ezeke finished his Easter egg tour on Good Friday, or whether he went all the way through to Easter Monday.  This itinerary would have been possible surely:

Friday - Portsmouth

Saturday -  Bristol 

Sunday - Plymouth

Monday - Penzance

Any Cornish readers will, naturally be scoffing at that last destination. Radio 1 brought its roadshow to several Cornish towns, including my hometown on a couple of occasions, but they would never have bothered to pop down past the Tamar Bridge unless they were properly making a morning of it. The thought of, say Shampoo - shortly to feature on Peel’s night time playlists - hoicking themselves down to St Austell for Ezeke to ask them their names and what they did seems absurd.

Nevertheless, Let Loose dutifully trooped up to Luton in order to get their debut single, Crazy For You, played on the radio. This is the original version of it, which opens with a brief scat rap instead of the better known piano hook. The trip worked out slightly better for Let Loose than it had for Oui 3 the previous day, given that this version only just missed out on a Top 40 placing. Crazy For You was palpably the best record played in any of the Ezeke slots that I heard, and this was born out when a re-issue of it, with the piano more heavily prominent, got to Number 2 in the UK charts, a year later.  This would start Let Loose off on a brief, intense, but very successful career.

Had I been asked to contribute to any of the 30 year retrospectives on British pop music in 1994, I’d have used my 750 words to put forward my thesis that if Oasis represented the 1966 Beatles in ‘94, then Let Loose represented the 1964 Beatles in ‘94. After all, they were hailed as the teenypop band that played their own instruments - and watching the videos has given me bad flashbacks as to how much I used to get irritated by drummer Lee Murray’s right-hand drumstick twirl - and I could comfortably see Crazy For You nestling onto A Hard Day’s Night or Beatles For Sale. The theory falls down though when we consider that in 1994, Oasis were as much Beatles ‘63 as they were Beatles ‘66. After all, what was Live Forever but She Loves You for the 90s.

The success of the Crazy For You re-release propelled Let Loose into a two-year spell of success, which saw them enjoy six further Top 30 hits, with four of those getting into the Top 12. By 1996, they had split, but given that the identikit Australian act, Savage Garden appeared almost immediately after Let Loose went their separate ways, I’m convinced that all Savage Garden records were made by Let Loose and they sent Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones out as their public faces, almost like Gorillaz, but minus an animation budget.

Lovecraft - Medicine 

Video courtesy of staceyconer

I was tempted to hold this over till the new year as Peel played it on his evening show of 9/4/93, but it also served as an example of him trying to use the opportunity of a daytime stand-in slot to try and break an unknown band to the wider public.  He certainly believed in Medicine, telling his Friday night audience that he thought it had potential to break into the singles chart.  Unfortunately, he was wrong, and Lovecraft, which included Cleo Murray, a former member of The March Violets, didn’t release any more records after this.

It’s the mainstream’s loss because this is a terrific record, but I suspect that the heavily drug laden lyrics killed off any chance of getting much exposure outside of Peel’s play of it. The first half of the record alludes to marijuana (baby Jane), cocaine (sugar), acid (pink butterfly) and heroin (water drops and blank walls). The title alone gives the game away too as I suspect that the medicine in question isn’t Lemsip. And in case we aren’t getting the message, the She took it all/ She took everything/She took anything refrain batters the point home. But having gone on a drug tour in its first half, the second half of the track flips things around and sounds as though as it’s reflecting someone going through cold turkey:

She’s counting the cracks on the blank walls.

And she’s singing a song about Jesus.

Says he going to save our souls.

It’s an attempt at escaping the clutches of addiction, but as the song progresses, we are shown how difficult this is to do and the temptations that remain on offer. The spiralling guitar line over the last 30 seconds also shows how Gimme Shelter remained the go-to inspiration for conveying decadence and desperation in early 1993.

Peel might have been wrong in predicting that Medicine would take Lovecraft into the charts, but a year later, Primal Scream got to Number 7 in the charts with Rocks, which sounds very similar to Medicine and a little more cannily put together so as to ensure it got played across the whole of Radio 1’s schedule.  The Rolling Stones were clearly a big influence on Primal Scream, and they may well have provided inspiration for the title of Primal Scream’s biggest hit to that time, but inspiration for the melody of it may very well have come from Lovecraft.

Elmore James - Dust My Broom

Video courtesy of Vernons

The votes are in, and with the inclusion of this tune, originally recorded by Elmore James in 1951, I can now officially say that I am in James’s camp ahead of Jimmy Reed in the choice of Favourite Blues Guitarist Played Frequently by John Peel. This is the third James track that I’ve included here over the years, whereas I seem to be more content to talk about Peel’s love of Reed, rather than demonstrate it by including tracks from him - that will change when I reach any Peel show in which he plays Too Much.

Although Dust My Broom doesn’t quite hit the heights of Stranger Blues, it comes at the listener with such swagger, drive and bravado that you can’t do anything but be carried along by it. Based, as so many blues tunes are, on a Robert Johnson recording from 1936 called I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom, it bulks out the sound from Johnson’s original with James’s explosive slide guitar and the brass section putting across the grindingly relentless sound of a man on the move from one place to the next, searching for something he cannot seem to find. In fact, so good is the performance that it pulls off the accomplishment of distracting the audience from noticing that the lyrics make no sense.  He wants to move on in order to not break up his home? Oh, and down with prostitutes while we’re at it.  Maybe, the vote needs to go to a recount…but not today.

The Teardrop Explodes - Reward 

Video courtesy of whammo64

Just why were so many British pop groups spending their time in late 1980 recording songs for release in early 1981 with the intention of scaring the shit out of the infant me? If it wasn’t Ultravox seemingly trying to chide me for insisting that I would only go to bed if I was allowed to have a radio on in my room, then I also had to put up with Reward by The Teardrop Explodes, which got to Number 6 in early 1981, and despite being less austere and chilly than Vienna was, it continues to give me mild anxiety to this day. And when I was 5, it sounded like trouble was going to come bursting into the house at any minute. That iconic trumpet refrain that powers the song along sounds like a metropolis undergoing a collective panic attack. I’m always surprised to see that it was a winter release, it’s always sounded to me like the packed streets of Paris in the middle of a heatwave, with the brass echoing the blare of a thousand car horns, all desperate to get somewhere, but only able to travel perpetually around the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe, until by the end of the song, everyone simultaneously explodes into a mass pile up.

While the music may have been Parisian in flavour, the lyrics take on a decidedly early 80s British dystopian feel. It was never specified quite what the reward of the song’s title was, but considering that 1981 would see Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer,  Geoffrey Howe propose that The Teardrop Explodes home city of Liverpool should be taken into managed decline, it presents a disturbing image of a generation, and by extension, whole communities, being offered some form of numbing placebo as their lives are gently wound down into some form of aimless meaninglessness. In that context, the frantic, furious pace and tone of Reward suggests not just anxiety, but also fight and defiance.  And that, I think, was what contributed to it being the hit that it was.

Garnett Silk - Jah Jah is the Ruler

Video courtesy of Garnett Silk - Topic

This had a question mark against it when I first heard it. I think because its sound comes from the thinner, tinnier end of dancehall reggae. After the fortissimo brass in Reward, the synthesised equivalent on Jah Jah is the Ruler sounds like a wet fart in comparison. But, Garnett Silk’s voice shines through in any setting. With its sermonising and glorying of Jah, it has to count as perhaps the most religiously minded record played at circa 2pm in Radio 1’s history. There’s also a shout out to 2024 at 1:34 as Silk sings, Whether you are a black man or a Syrian/Whether you’re white, pink, yellow or blue/Jah rules over me and you.  Given its cheap sound and some lyrics which, when written down, look tremendously awkward to sing, Garnett really does carry this off so well, that I’m almost minded to agree with his thesis.

Almost…

DJ Dick - Silver Surfer

Video courtesy of freeze84

I left this until last, because I was initially going to list it as a track which fell from favour with me. But having just listened to it again so that I could articulate my reasons why I was going to reject it - the underwhelming first half of the track - I found that once Silver Surfer kicks into high gear at the 1:38 mark, it rewards the patience required to get there.  A borderline inclusion, but one I’m happy to have onboard.

And with that, we bid goodbye to John Peel’s dalliance with daytime radio. His next cover assignments would be for former Peel Session producer, Mark Radcliffe, though this would be in the familiar 10pm to midnight slot, which Peel would re-inherit in 1997 when Radcliffe was moved to the breakfast show.

I have to say I’m looking forward to getting back to blogging about 1 track per post. The blog will return in January, probably with a bluesky account to promote as well. Until then, my thanks to all those who put up the audio files and videos which allow me to do this blog, special thanks to ubermensch Webbie for coming through with requests, and thanks to any of you who read this.

Wishing you all a merry Christmas, and I’ll see you in the new year.

Full tracklisting

 

Peel Goes Pop: Jakki Brambles Show hosted by John Peel - Wednesday 7 April 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

 Having reached the halfway point of his week covering for Jakki Brambles, Peel may well have been putting in a request for the BBC to carry out some professional audience research to truly establish whether he was flying or dying with the lunchtime audience after he opened this show with a message from Barry Warren, who wrote to say that he was enjoying Peel’s efforts, but…Big Dave behind the bar at the Railway Tavern in Barnet has bet me 50p that they won’t let you last the week. Whatever Peel’s own feelings on the week were by the time he signed off at 3:30pm on Friday 9 April, he could at least take heart in the fact that Barry had won his bet.

Most of my choices from this show, as you’ll see, come from the Peel record box, but he was still trying to reach out to any avowedly beige listeners by including today, 9 to 5 by Sheena Easton, a record which he classed as both a guilty pleasure and - to his ears at least - one of the greatest pop songs ever made. However, Peel was still trying to expose the listeners to music which would wrench them out of their comfort zone. This included a play for Machine Gun by Cybersonik, which my notes claim was the most confrontational record that Peel had played for Brambles’s listeners so far, and clearly too confrontational for me as well given that I didn’t include it as one of my selections.

The recording I heard of this show included the first couple of records played by Gary Davies, who was also providing holiday cover that week, in his case for Steve Wright. Davies opened his show with Losing My Religion by R.E.M and followed it with Money’s Too Tight to Mention by Simply Red, presumably to chase Peel out of the studios.

As for tracks from today’s programme, which I would have wanted to keep, we start with one which was about to become very influential on the tone of British music over the next couple of years, even though no one seemed to admit it at the time:

The Members - The Sound of the Suburbs

Video courtesy of John Jurgens.

If I’m misremembering the era of Modern Life is Rubbish - Parklife - The Great Escape Blur then please feel free to correct me, but I don’t recall The Members getting mentioned as being an influence on those records in the same way that The Kinks, The Jam, XTC or The Specials were. But it’s impossible not to hear tracks like Sunday Sunday, Parklife, Bank Holiday or Globe Alone and not think that Blur didn’t have a copy of the Members compilation album, At the 1980 Chelsea Nightclub - The Choice is Yours playing in the background while they put their ideas together for those songs.

A Number 12 hit in 1979, what distinguishes The Sound of the Suburbs from its 1990s reproductions is the undertone of menace which Blur and other 90s acts who used suburbia as their inspiration were unable to convey. There’s plenty of humour and satire in The Sound of the Suburbs, not least in the verse which takes the piss out of youth club punk bands, but it’s the references to jets from Heathrow flying over houses, the sirens at Broadmoor Hospital and the figure of Johnny, locked in his bedroom, alternately annoying the neighbours by playing loud punk rock or giving the thousand yard stare from his window - potentially looking all the way to Broadmoor - that provide an unsettling counterweight to the thrashy, Woolworths nihilism, which could be made into a palatable, recycled pastiche in the mid-90s, but which was very much the mood de jour of the late 1970s.

Jeff Mills - Phase 4

Video courtesy of Waveform Transmission Vol 1

Peel was certainly doing everything he could this week to showcase Jeff Mills to his temporary expanded audience. Having played a track from Mills's  X-103 project on Tuesday, he now played this barnstorming cut from Mills's Waveform Transmission Vol 1 set of EPs.  

This is every bit as uncompromising as the aforementioned Cybersonik track, showing that by this point in the week, Peel was done with trying to shield Brambles's audience from hearing stuff that might not be thought palatable for a lunchtime audience.  It's also probably guilty of the same charges of repetition that I levelled at the X-103 track, Curse of the Gods on Tuesday 6 April, 1993. But I'm seduced by the transitions from the drum 'n' bass patterns that form the core of the track into the squealing, angry, painful bursts of noise that run over the top, like a dentist's drill touching a raw nerve. I know that doesn't sound particularly attractive and on another day, I'd probably have sidestepped it as well, but sometimes, I need my aural nerves pressed and I suspect I want to celebrate that this was played on Radio 1 at 1pm, and straight after Peel had had to play Whitney Houston's cover of I'm Every Woman. Although in fairness, he did praise Houston's singing voice when he did it, and we should never forget that she was responsible for one of his few outbreaks of public dancing.

Aerosmith - Livin’ On The Edge

Video courtesy of Aerosmith VEVO

Aerosmith became something of a guilty pleasure of mine in the mid-90s, when I worked at a cafe where the owner had their Big Ones compilation album playing on constant rotation. I regard Love in an Elevator as one of the greatest rock songs ever written, while my wife feels the same about Dude Looks Like a Lady.  Livin’ on the Edge was always one that I could take or leave, though it’s caught me in a benevolent mood here. Possibly it’s because it remains a timely piece of music. Back then it was inspired by the Los Angeles riots, but also works in references to school shootings and The Greenhouse Effect as we used to refer to climate change in the analogue era. 30 plus years on, all the things mentioned in it remain a problem, while America itself has got sicker and more polarised. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination for the US Presidency in 2028 - assuming they’re still allowed to have elections then - could do worse than try and get the rights for this as a campaign song at their rallies.

Peel had occasionally included Aerosmith records on his playlists in the 70s, but they were long dead to him now, not least given that after playing this, he said that his favourite moment on the record was when they stopped playing in the middle.

PJ Harvey - Rid of Me

Video courtesy of  PJ Harvey

Included here for completeness. This blog has already included the live solo version that Harvey played for Peel, a year earlier.  Now, it was acting as the title track to the PJ Harvey trio’s imminent second album, due for release at the end of April.  

Ugly Kid Joe - Cats in the Cradle

Video courtesy of Ugly Kid Joe VEVO

This was a huge favourite of mine at the time and whether you talk about this version or the Harry Chapin original, I think that it’s one of the most emotionally devastating pop songs ever written. It plays out like a four act tragedy as we move from a father neglecting to play with a son who adores him, because he’s too busy, only to find the roles reversed as the son grows older and becomes too engrossed in his own life and family to be able to spend time with his father.  The idea could have led to an horrendously schmaltzy performance, but instead Cats in the Cradle brims with regret, melancholy and compassion and the closing  line, And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me, he’d grown up just like me/My boy was just like me is one of the greatest end lines in pop history. 

It’s so good in fact, that a friend of mine, who would usually never sing at a karaoke evening, even if you paid him, once made an exception for this song, simply so he could sing that line. And that line was the only one he sang, the rest of it was sung by my future best man, who also loves the lyrics in this, especially the third verse’s climax of What I’d really like, Dad is to borrow the car keys/See ya later, can I have them, please? Syd Barrett couldn’t have done it better. The record peaked at Number 7 on the UK charts, giving Ugly Kid Joe  their second and final Top 10 UK hit.  They seemed to be a band who people liked most when they were being gentle. In their native America, they had two big  Top 10 hits with this and Everything About You, but nothing else registered at all over there. In the UK, they had 5 Top 40 hits, but raunchier, rockier tunes like Neighbour tended to wash around in the lower reaches of the chart.

Sonic Youth - Sugar Kane

Video courtesy of  IZF

 

Peel dedicated this to John Elvidge who was organising a Gang show for Scouts and Guides in Thanet. He wished Elvidge luck with the show, perhaps suspecting that Elvidge would need some of the stimulants alluded to in Sugar Kane, in order to get everyone organised and get himself through the show.

Billy Bragg - A New England [Peel Session]

Video courtesy of TchikiSteph.

The second track from Billy Bragg’s first Peel Session, broadcast on 3 August 1983. I listen to Bragg so infrequently that it’s always a surprise to remember that he writes about love even more incisively than he writes about politics.  Here he plays the lovelorn friend/sometime lover who has so much love to give but is torn between waiting for his heart’s desire to commit to him, or whether to bite the bullet and try find someone new and - based on what we learn in A New England - someone more deserving of his affection. The chorus marks a moment to show that for all the dreams and hopes of achieving a fairer society, we’d all take the love of our lives ahead of that. The frustration being that what the heart wants often seems to be even more difficult to gain than what the head wants too. In that moment, Bragg speaks for all of us.

As one of his best known songs, it made perfect sense to play this to Brambles’s audience, who may well have remembered Kirsty MacColl’s version of it. Listening to the other tracks from the 1983 session, I’d have been equally pleased to have heard the mixed race romance tale of This Guitar Says Sorry or Bragg’s Essex coastal road travelogue, A13, Trunk Road to the Sea, which borrowed liberally enough from (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66 to merit a co-composer credit for Bobby Troup, when the session was given a release by Strange Fruit.

Marxman - Father Like Son

Video courtesy of MaroWon

Another track from one of the best albums of the period. Father Like Son works the same underlying theme that Marxman included in Do You Crave Mystique, which is of the sins of others being passed down onto their family. In Do You Crave Mystique, it was a younger brother worshipping his drug-dealing or taking older brother; here, the focus switches to how promiscuous fathers can pass those genes on to their sons. In the process, they leave behind children that they see twice a year and a string of young lives stunted by sudden responsibility. Age brings wisdom, but also a ton of regrets for careless behaviour. Meanwhile, our narrator, who recognises his Valentino father’s faults all while repeating them himself, has to contend with the potential spectre of AIDS, unless he’s careful. Indeed, the moral of the track is on the practising of safe sex, rather than committing yourself to one partner.  

As they proved in their Peel Session, when The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy tackle this kind of subject matter on a track like Positive, they grab you by the throat and emphasise the need to listen and learn in no uncertain terms. Marxman’s skill is to address these weighty topics with a lightness of touch, which Goldie Looking Chain subsequently ran with into even broader comedy.

The first verse of Father Like Son plays up Marxman’s choice of combining Celtic instruments with hip hop, which suggests that if they were singing from experience about their own fathers, then Matt Molloy’s inspirations must have been serious playas back in the day.

David Bowie - Black Tie White Noise

Video courtesy of David Bowie

I’ve always felt that if Leonard Cohen represented the voice of God in popular music, David Bowie represented the voice of Jesus.  Both of them conveyed wisdom in their work, but while Cohen’s seemed to spring from what he saw and learned, Bowie’s sprang from how he lived. His chameleonic approach to his work inspired an underlying sense of how mankind could learn from its mistakes and improve, and he used himself as a conduit for how we could learn.  Our sins and errors metaphorically broke across his back and he reflected this every time he opened his mouth to sing. When I think about his voice, the word that comes to my mind is “plaintive”, he sounded simultaneously cool and waifish; a man both in control of things and swept along by them.

Such is the case in this song, which served as the title track to his latest album. The sense of pleading desperation that we learn - in this case from the circumstances that led to and exacerbated the Los Angeles riots - is heightened here by the fact that Bowie sings this song as a duet alongside the soulful voice of Al B. Sure! (and with a ridiculous alias like that, his voice better be “soulful” in order for any of his credibility to avoid evaporating when we see the exclamation mark in his name.). While the city burns, Bowie and Al consider how this seismic event could jolt both races out of their mutual suspicion of each other, Reach out over race and hold each other’s hands….I look into your eyes and I know you won’t kill me etc, but before anyone thinks that this is nothing more than a tastelessly atonal retread of Ebony and Ivory, set against the backdrop of a major civil disturbance, Bowie comes out with the line which gets to the crux of the issue then, and now: But I look into your eyes and I wonder sometimes. And until that temptation dies out, then the riots and the things which cause them will always be bubbling under the surface, waiting to erupt again.

Peel played Black Tie White Noise alongside Bowie’s 1975 US Number 1, Fame, co-written with Carlos Alomar and John Lennon. I originally included it on the metaphorical mixtape, almost as an automatic response, but after listening back to it a few times, I found myself thinking that it’s really nothing more than a halfway decent funk workout, which I appreciate was in keeping with the aesthetic of the record Bowie was making at the time, but in the final analysis, I found the Bowie of 1993 more compelling and vital than the Bowie of 1975. In a way, I think that’s something he would be happy about.

Queen and George Michael - Somebody to Love

Video courtesy of Queen Official

A year earlier, Bowie had been among the artists performing at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium. He performed Under Pressure, “Heroes” , All the Young Dudes and finished by reciting The Lord’s Prayer in tribute to all those who had either died from AIDS or were living with it. He then handed on to George Michael, whose short set won the greatest acclaim of all those that were performed at the show. So much so that his rendition, with the surviving members of Queen, of their 1976 song, Somebody to Love was chosen as the lead track on an EP credited to Michael and Queen called Five Live.  It was a Number 1 hit when it was released a couple of weeks after this programme went out. Even Peel was moved to say after playing it, Does make you wish you could have been there. 

I’d always assumed that the EP featured five tracks from the concert but, it only featured two. As well as Somebody to Love, it included Michael’s duet with Lisa Stansfield on These Are the Days of Our Lives. The other tracks were a short Queen demo from the 1970s and two Michael concert performances from a 1991 show at Wembley Arena, neither of which had any connection to Freddie Mercury. Five Live does what it says on the tin, but not entirely honestly.

Oui 3 - Arms of Solitude

Video courtesy of Nickee Nick

Peel wasn’t flying completely solo during this week. At around 2pm each day, he would link up with The Man Ezeke, Radio 1’s reggae specialist DJ, who was spending the week on a nationwide Easter egg hunt, and who would breeze on to the show for a couple of minutes to whip up the crowds he had attracted and carry out brief interviews with various bands/acts that he met along the way. I’m presuming the bands were performing showcase sets or doing meet & greets because otherwise they were going considerable distances simply to be asked by him, “What’s your name?” and “What do you do in the band?” 

Over the course of the week so far, Ezeke had travelled from Dumfries to Nottingham, via Huddersfield. Joining him today were two groups who both had a new record ready for release: acid jazz act, Perception and soul/hip hop combo, Oui 3. It was the latter who had their record played on the Brambles programme today, and their paean to the benefits of solitude makes for an attractive listen. They had me at the corner/Jack Horner rhyme, personally. Oui 3 were one of those acts who were perpetually to be found hanging around the lower reaches of the Top 40, especially in 1993, but never had that big hit to push them to greater attention. 

The Nottingham jaunt did neither band much good in terms of record sales. Arms of Solitude became the only Oui 3 single in 1993 to miss out on a place in the Top 40, peaking at Number 54. Perception’s cover of the Barbra Streisand/Barry Gibb song, Guilty failed to chart at all. As for Peel, he was so impressed at the way that Ezeke could get the crowd to say anything he wanted back to him, that he asked Ezeke to get the crowd to shout the word “polytechnic”.  Somewhat hesitantly, they obliged.

It’s Immaterial - A Gigantic Raft in the Philippines

Video courtesy of Mehefinheulog1

Released in 1981 and periodically reissued several times in subsequent years, my suspicions are that A Gigantic Raft in the Philippines is about the sinking of USS Indianapolis (CA-35), which was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in July 1945. The Indianapolis was en route to the Philippines having previously delivered supplies of uranium which were shortly to be used in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 1195 crew were aboard the ship of which just under 900 managed to evacuate before it sank. However, the vast majority of them found themselves in open water due to a shortage of lifeboats. Problems in getting SOS messages sent out before the ship sank meant that the crew spent 5 days out at sea before being rescued. In that time, many of them succumbed to dehydration, exposure, saltwater poisoning and, most notoriously, death by shark attack. Ultimately, 316 crew were rescued, but it remains the largest loss of life suffered by a vessel in the U.S. Navy.

After playing this, Peel uttered his customary line that In a better ordered society, that would have been a Number 1 record. With its rockabilly rhythm, vaguely tribal beats and echo drenched production, it certainly could have been a hit at the time. If only we could hear the words clearly, then who knows how big it could have been. Not hearing them clearly, matters here because we don’t know if we’re being invited to observe, sympathise, glorify or experience the predicament of the crew.  When It’s Immaterial did have a Top 20 hit in 1986, they made sure we could hear every word.

The Frank and Walters - Fashion Crisis Hits New York

Video courtesy of June Grant

The last time I mentioned The Frank and Walters on this blog, I described them as pointless and anodyne. To be fair, I was comparing their Peel Session version of Happy Busman to my second favourite track of 1992, so my patience for their brand of whimsy was not high. But having dismissed them in no uncertain terms seven years ago, it’s only fair to say openly that Fashion Crisis in New York is an absolute peach. 

There’s whimsy in it, for sure, but somehow it’s less teethgrinding than usual with this band and they do make a serious point about the disproportionate attention given to high end fashion trends and fads considering that the vast majority of people can’t afford to buy the clothes being marketed as essential wear. What really makes this record cut through with me though is how wonderfully it rocks. They played a blinder in the recording of this and given that it was the follow up record to the band’s biggest hit, After All, which had reached Number 11 in December 1992, hopes must have high of another potential Top 20 hit. It would have been a deserved one, but disappointingly, the record stalled at Number 42. 

This may have caused a loss of confidence or a concerted decision to step away from the limelight for a time given that, after releasing this, it took four years for The Frank and Walters to release further material. After Happy Busman, I wouldn’t have cared less if they’d taken forty years off, but Fashion Crisis in New York showed just how good they could be, and was a hell of a tune to sustain their fans with while they were away.

East 17 - Slow It Down

Video courtesy of London Records

I was originally going to pass on this as I don’t consider it to be one of East 17’s best tracks from their heyday, but I must confess a personal connection to them of sorts given that at various after show parties and house parties during 1995, I and a couple of my friends would usually get some laughs by miming along to various East 17 songs. The law of diminishing returns kicked in over the course of that year by the time we were doing it to songs like Hold My Body Tight, but the early renditions of It’s Alright and Deep brought the house down.

It’s a shame that East 17’s legacy appears to be either their dreary Christmas hit, Stay Another Day or jokes about Brian Harvey running over himself with his car while being sick.  While Take That may have marginally had the edge in terms of good pop songs over 1993-95, I always thought East 17’s records were more interesting, and they seemed more willing to take risks with their music. I still remember listening to Dave Pearce, sitting in on Drivetime in late 1995 and him playing Looking For, a drum ‘n’ bass track written by Terry Coldwell, one of the arm wavers who stood in the background behind Harvey and principal songwriter, Tony Mortimer, from their Up All Night album. They’re also the only boyband from that mid 90s period who were booked to appear on Channel 4’s live music show, The White Room. Who knows what they might have gone on to achieve had they been able to stand being in the same room as each other.

Full tracklisting

Peel Goes Pop: Jakki Brambles Show hosted by John Peel - Tuesday 6 April 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

 Having gently introduced himself to Jakki Brambles’ audience, yesterday , with a playlist that could be called a 50/50 split between John Peel’s Record Box and the Radio 1 Daytime Playlist, Peel spent his second day tilting the balance 60/40 in favour of his records.  This was heralded by him opening the show with Teenage Kicks. There’s football on one of the monitors here in the 1FM studios and The Undertones in me ears. Can life possibly get any better? The bald facts say that was Number 31 in the charts in 1978, but it’s been Number 1 in my heart ever since. He was also starting to get sloppy when giving the titles of the daytime records i.e. Jump He Say (of which more in a moment), Ain’t No Fear (Ain’t No Use) etc.

He gave thanks for a number of complimentary faxes that he’d received from listeners, with a majority of them wanting to know more about Camille Howard. He programmed a track from each day, and today treated the audience to Miraculous Boogie. 

In the interests of balance, he also read out what he described as the first grumpy fax that he had received. In it, the correspondent demanded that Peel play some “good music.” Peel told the audience about the times he would receive similar requests from people who had turned up to the John Peel Roadshow. The problem being that they never explained what they meant by “good music”. The grumpy faxer also wanted to know where Brambles was. I don’t know where Jakki is and you spell her name with two “k”s. This kind of dismissal of audience feedback was almost unheard of on daytime Radio 1, though in subsequent years, Chris Moyles thought nothing of replying rudely to critical messages from his listeners - though he had usually done something to deserve censure from his audience. What I want to know is, where were these critical listeners when Peel’s was interfering with dance music tracks on his evening shows, by dropping in sound effects of speeding motorcycles?  This has been a particular bane of mine from the Peel shows I’ve been listening to from the summer of 1993, and I will learn to listen warily in future years to shows broadcast after he’d been to the TT Races. To mollify this particular grumpy listener, he played O Carolina by Shaggy.  

A few minutes after that, he played Johan Cruyff’s recording of Oei Oei Oei (Dat Was Me Weer Ein Loei), as part of a daily spin of tunes from the Bend It series of football songs, issued by Exotica Records. However, after about a minute he took the record off claiming that the audience didn’t deserve to hear the rest of it. One can only imagine the number of radios being switched off at that point; being assailed by unfamiliar music is one thing, but being insulted by the DJ playing it is quite another. In Good Night and Good Riddance, David Cavanagh suspects that the premature ending was on the instructions of a Radio 1 executive, appalled that a Schlager song was going out on the BBC’s youth radio station at 1:30pm in the afternoon, where an Annie Lennox track should be.  It did at least link to one of the correspondents who had faxed in to to say that they were listening while convalescing with a broken leg, which they’d suffered in a football match. In sympathy, Peel talked of the time that he’d had his wrist broken in a football match, courtesy of John Birt. Who’s to say what part of Peel the station managers may have wanted to break once Cruyff started honking away.

Football dominated the news and thinking of Peel today, somewhat. He sent his good wishes to Ipswich Town ahead of that evening’s game with Chelsea at Portman Road. The team had only taken 3 points from their last 10 games, with no wins since 30 January. It’s time to stop the slide, he declared. But the wait for a win went on as the game finished 1-1. Meanwhile, the news reported that the families of victims of the Hillsborough disaster had been given licence to change the wording on the verdict of the first inquiry from  “accidental death” to “accidental death due to lack of care”. The news also featured the none more 1993 news story of Group 4 Security bungling a prisoner transfer, once again, and letting another prisoner escape.

As for what I’d have taken from the show and put on a mixtape, we start with a man who the 1993 me could easily be accused of getting wrong…

David Bowie - Jump They Say

Video courtesy of David Bowie VEVO

The news that David Bowie had a new album out would have been greeted with polite indifference by me at this time. I was absorbing 60s music, and Bowie was 70s & 80s as far as I was concerned, bar one notable exception. If you’d asked me on 6/4/93 to tell you which Bowie songs I knew, I’d probably have mentioned this track along with Space Oddity, China Girl - the video of which I remember watching with a babysitter on Top of the Pops, when I was 7 and both of us finding it absolutely hilarious for some reason - and the only other one I could comfortably name back then would have been er… Dancing in the Street. As I said, getting Bowie wrong.

To me at that time, he was just another rock star, albeit I was vaguely aware that he had gone through a number of different looks. I wasn’t one of those people who regarded 1987’s Never Let Me Down album or Tin Machine as some sort of personal affront, because I wasn’t aware of them. But I did recognise in Jump They Say’s compressed air of paranoia and mental overload that if I did want to get into Bowie, this might be a decent jumping on point. I still haven’t heard Black Tie, White Noise, in fact I haven’t heard any of Bowie’s studio albums in their entirety.  The only thing I have is a mixtape with selections from Bowie at the Beeb - 1968-72, but I know differently now. And if I do binge his back catalogue, I may well start with any of Black Tie White Noise, Never Let Me Down or the Tin Machine albums. I think he’d approve of that.

Tiger - Chaos

Video courtesy of Danny Sinclair.

By playing this newish Tiger single, Peel may have been making a pitch towards all those who bought O Carolina, Informer and Mr. Loverman to see whether, if they liked those, they might be interested in something a little less polished, but no less exciting.  I know that when I blogged about Tiger’s track, Beep Beep, I pined for a world where that could have been a hit, but I’m not surprised that neither that or Chaos caught on. Tiger is too much of a whirlwind, too…well chaotic, for easy consumption, and once he sets out his stall that he’s here to cause chaos either in a sound system battle or something more dangerous, he slips his bonds and is off and away. All that this listener can do is admire his artistry, and then, when it’s time, slip back to the Shaggy/Snow/Shabba singalongs, though I’d prefer this from the latter.

Siouxsie and the Banshees - Hong Kong Garden/The Smiths - Reel Around The Fountain [Peel Sessions]

Videos courtesy of VibraCobra23 Redux and Scott Smith

I’ve paired these together as they are both a) Peel Session recordings and b) my first exposure to either track was due to clips of both songs (though not both versions) being included in Turn That Racket Down. Before doing any research, I had thought both songs may be about sex. I’m aware that Reel Around the Fountain has always had a sexual subtext around it, though no one is clear on whether that refers to loss of virginity, grooming or pedophilia. Given how exultant Morrissey sounds in the song, I don’t think there’s anything too troubling in the sentiments of the song. My own take is that it’s about sex between a younger man and an older lover, with Morrissey playing both participants, especially in the “15 minutes with you…” lines. His voice conjures such an air of decadence that transports us to the country house where this liaison is taking place. This is one of the Smiths drawing room songs - as per the sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart - you can imagine a Noel Coward or a Cole Porter sitting down at their piano, and in an unguarded moment, producing something like this for their guests’ amusement. In fact, it always baffled me that Johnny Marr quit the group over Morrissey’s wish to cover Cilla Black songs, given that he had spent 5 years or so acting as a kind of 1980s version of Donald Swann by providing music to the lyrics of a slightly more twisted, Mancunian Michael Flanders. The recording is from May 1983 and was subsequently issued on the sessions and b-sides compilation, Hatful of Hollow.  Reel Around the Fountain would be the opening track on The Smiths eponymous debut album.

I thought Hong Kong Garden might be referring to a brothel, but according to Siouxsie Sioux, it referred to a Chinese restaurant of the same name in Chislehurst, where she and her friends had witnessed, and been disgusted by the racist behaviour of skinheads who had abused the people who worked there. The song was written in solidarity with the people who worked there, though I have to say that the lyrics don’t do a great job of conveying that. It would be easy for people to interpret the “Harmful elements in the air…” sentiments as being critical of Chinese immigrants, especially as the song sets up reasons for leaving Hong Kong - pollution, dodgy local customs - and posits that the most obvious thing to do on arriving in Britain is to open a takeaway.  Also, I wonder if the line “A race of bodies small in size” might have inspired Eric Idle to write the song, I Like Chinese (“They only come up to your knees”). 

The single was released in August 1978, six months after they recorded the session version, and reached Number 7 on the UK Singles chart.  Had the owners been smart they could have offered a discount on meals to anyone who brought a copy to the restaurant. The queues might also have kept the skinheads at bay too. Disappointingly, 46 years on, people are still having to put up with this shit.

Hole - Beautiful Son

Video courtesy of youshotAndyWarhol.

I have a friend who believes that Kurt Cobain was a closeted trans woman. It’s inspired her to create a zine and a show called All Apologies which  “…questions our desire for trans celebrities and what happens when they do not exist - delving deep into internet discourse, classical mythology and radically misremembering Nirvana’s iconic 1994 (sic) MTV Unplugged concert….it fights back against the pressure on trans people to mold (sic) ourselves into images that are acceptable to society and the danger that lies when we are not able to live as our full vibrant selves.”  The show is touring in 2025.

2 years ago, I blogged about Been a Son after Peel played it on his BFBS show of 10/1/93. I was conscious of Emma Frankland’s supposition and bought the zine because I felt that there may have been a trans subtext to Been a Son. Unfortunately, none of the evidence around the inspirations for that song supported the trans theory, it was just a case of Kurt sniping at his father’s perceived disappointment at having a daughter for a second child instead of another son. On a superficial level, I could see where the argument was coming from. Look at any photo of Cobain in which he’s not either clowning around or looking palpably ill or fatigued, and you can’t help but be struck by how beautiful he is. Had word clouds been a thing when Nirvana were at their peak, it’s probable that androgynous would have featured in there alongside the more obvious words associated with Kurt Cobain’s public image and art. 

However, the release of the Hole single, Beautiful Son, this week in 1993 offers some evidence to support the “Kurt was trans” theory.  Courtney Love claims that the sentiments of the song were inspired by Kurt’s predilection for cross dressing when he was a child, but given how besotted Cobain was by Love, it’s easy to read into the song that the wearing of dresses and lipstick wasn’t just a childhood phase but the makings of an erotic night in at Chez Cobve.  In Beautiful Son, we’re invited to see rock music’s most famous couple of the period channelling the romance of Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg, which also used to involve transvestism and gender swapping roles as part of their sexual routine.  

Regardless of the truth, or how deeply one wants to delve into the gender issue, what shines through in the record is a strong sense of love from Courtney for Kurt because of how she saw him as a human being. In fact, this record sounds as close to giving off a feeling of contentment about life and love as any grunge era tune has. Beautiful Son gave Hole their first UK Singles Chart entry, peaking at Number 54.

The Cure - Friday I’m in Love

Video courtesy of The Cure VEVO

Including this on a metaphorical mixtape is a no brainer, surely.

Betty Boo - Hangover

Video courtesy of RHINO

Lack of brains also plays a part in including this, instead blame rampaging teenage lust.  Hangover is a terrible record by any metric. It features a pedal steel guitar line which gives the lie to Peel’s assertion that any song or band is improved by having one , a dreary string section and lyrics/vocals from Betty herself that have to be among the least inspired she ever recorded. Nonetheless, I fancied her something rotten in the early 90s and the stylists on her music videos knew exactly how to push teenage boys’ buttons, whether it was by making her the school classmate of our dreams or or an alien overlord, all red blooded men would have been happy to serve, she looked amazing - and the tunes weren’t bad either. 

If I’d just heard Hangover on the radio, I’d probably have scrunched up my face, declared it a dud and moved on. But my first exposure to it was seeing the video on The Chart Show and gosh, darn it! They’d done it again! This ropey song about a cheating lover and the messiness of the breakup was being promoted by a video which had me prepared to overlook the source material’s flaws. Betty Boo as an Apache Indian squaw - or to be more accurate Betty as an actress playing an Apache Indian squaw. Where do I sign? With her too handsome boyfriend playing the cowboy hero - and winning the fury of every heterosexual man who saw the video by getting to snog Betty for 12 seconds (I just counted every single heartbreaking one of them) - and a scheming blonde supporting actress playing the cowgirl villain who uses her wiles to seduce him both onscreen and off it, the video director appears to be going for a Body of Evidence meets Gene Autry vibe. Only this time, the story is told with Betty in the Julianne Moore role, her boyfriend as Willem Dafoe and the cowgirl - who is so wonderfully archly played, she should be twirling a moustache - as Madonna.

I actually bought Hangover, mainly due to the fact that pictures from the video were included with the releases though, irritatingly, they seemed to give greater prominence to the cowboy than they did to Betty or the cowgirl.  However, the combined efforts of me and my fellow pervs could get it no higher than Number 50 on the UK Charts. Shortly after this, Betty Boo had to be laid aside and Alison Clarkson had to take on bigger challenges than improving her chart placings. Her career was put on hold for a number of years, as she nursed her mother through terminal illness. Betty Boo never really came back into public consciousness as a performer, though as a writer, Clarkson hit the jackpot by co-writing Pure and Simple, which would go to Number 1 in 2001 when it was recorded by Hear’Say.

Linda Laine and the Sinners - Low Grades and High Fever

Video courtesy of The Age of Innocence

Originally released on the Tower label in 1964, and circulating again through the Girls in the Garage compilations issued by Romulan Records, this takes the rhythm of Shout and mixes in a bullfrog voiced low grader and a high-pitched, high fevered female singer to produce an enjoyable slice of school crush whimsy. I wish I could blame my own underwhelming GCSE results on some of the crushes I’d gone through during my GCSE year, but as it was probably down to spending too much time watching American wrestling, I’d better shut up and get to the next record.

New Order - Regret

Video courtesy of New Order.

They’re back and they’re still good, declared Peel after playing this first single from New Order’s imminent new album, Republic. Radio 1 considered this important enough to merit a New Order Day on the station, set for 23 April and going under the somewhat confusing title of New Order to Order. No, I don’t get the connection, either.

I remember seeing Regret when they performed it live via satellite on Top of the Pops, from a Los Angeles beach, accompanied by members of the cast of Baywatch. Despite the ludicrous set-up, I was very impressed by Regret and glad to be able to put faces to the name of a band I’d heard of, but not knowingly heard yet. I wanted to buy Regret, but struggled to track down a copy of what I later came to understand was the album edit. I didn’t have a CD player at the time, but nowhere in Falmouth seemed to stock the cassette version. Eventually, on a muggy, drizzly Monday morning in April, I ended up buying the 12-inch remix version, glumly sitting in the lounge at home and trying to convince myself that the Sabres Slow ‘n’ Lo mix was as good as having the “proper” version. At least I didn’t have to worry about that kind of bullshit when I bought Hangover.

Babe the Blue Ox - Gymkhana

Video courtesy of Babe the Blue Ox

Towards the end of each day’s programme, Peel presented a feature called The New Nirvana in which he would play a record by a band/act who Peel stressed… did not necessarily sound like Nirvana, but were being touted as being like them. On the Monday, he had played Congratulations by Motorolla, but today he played a track from the Brooklyn based trio, Babe the Blue Ox, whose album  (Box) had been put out in the UK via  Rough Trade. The guitars and drums sound as rough as Nirvana, but the overall effect is of a harder rocking B-52s.  I liked Gymkhana a lot, although it isn’t a particularly profound song. Having listened to a small sample of other tracks by them, there’s a lot to enjoy in Babe the Blue Ox’s music and style. It’s always compelling to listen to, with plenty of surprises such as in tracks like Rube Goldberg and  Beat You To It.  They signed to RCA in the mid-90s, but they seemed to drop off Peel’s radar after Spring 1993. Nevertheless, if I put on a theme night and called it Loft Rock, promoting the best in upscale New York music of the early 90s, and formed the playlist around Babe the Blue Ox and Love Child, I’m sure that me and the four other people who attend it would have a wonderful time.

Elsewhere on the playlist, Peel added to the glut of Gimme Shelter cover versions that were being put out at this time by playing one from a 1989 Inspiral Carpets Peel Session.  He also played Prom Queens by Mambo Taxi to mark the fact he was doing a gig with them on Thursday.

I had a couple of choices on my original list which fell from favour. Two I think were Peel choices and one may have been on the Brambles show playlist:

X-103 - Curse of the Gods - this wasn’t on the Atlantis album which Peel played a suite of tracks from to bring his 4-hour show to a close on 27/3/93. It had been released a few months earlier on an EP called Thera. For me the track was too repetitive to merit inclusion on the mixtape. Repetition’s not necessarily a disqualifying factor for me, but this didn’t quite cut deep enough to draw me back to it.

The Pooh Sticks - The World is Turning On - This is a perfectly acceptable and short indie rocker from the  Swansea collective, but when I heard it again next to tracks like Beautiful Son and Gymkhana, I began to see the merit in Taylor Parkes’s line that Britpop was less of a reaction against grunge, and more a reaction against early 90s British guitar music. They’re just on different planets from each other, and The World is Turning On sounds like it’s on Pluto.

PM Dawn - Norwegian Wood - In the initial listen, I was seduced by the idea of this Beatles cover. When I came back to it, I was nauseated by how lacklustre it sounded.  

Full tracklisting