My notes for this track from Mabele’s Stop Arretez! album describe it as one of the best soukous tracks I’ve heard. Strong praise indeed, though subsequent listens have slightly talked the track down from the peaks scaled by the likes of Ngonda. Nevertheless, Evelyne does have a wonderful sense of completeness about it which I don’t often find in other soukous tracks. So many of them are all about the extended play out, which is fine given the ecstatic highs that the best of them reach. But Evelyne is that rarest of soukous creatures in that it leaves you straining to hear the words and soak up the sentiments. The mood appears to be lushly romantic with Mabele and his backing singers seeming to declare that Evelyne is the most beautiful woman in all of Burkina Faso. I say “appears to be romantic”, because my French isn’t good enough to be able to offer a full translation, so for all I know he could be leaving or killing her, despite some of the mon amours that pop up throughout the track.
However, the mood in this typically low budget video seems to be romantic and loving, despite the troubling moment where Mabele appears to be humping a boulder. It feels an appropriate tune for Valentine’s Day, which was when this edition of John Peel’s Music went out on BFBS. I may even try and adapt the tune and write suitable lyrics for my wife when this year’s Valentine’s Day rolls around. And even if I’m wrong, and the song is actually a break-up tune, the shift in the guitar playing over the last 40 seconds sounds like it was composed by Cupid himself.
Anybody reading this (anybody…?) who feels annoyed that I chose not to include a track by Madder Rose on the last Peel Show this blog covered due to my finding the vocal a bit annoying, may well find themselves calling for a stewards inquiry about my including this track. With Sisters, ZuZu’s Petals sound a little bit like what you would get if say, Lisa Loeb and Joan Osborne decided to form a duo. The voices would be bright and radio friendly, they’d sell plenty of records/tickets and alienate as many as they would charm, but the key would be to listen to what was being sung and find rewards that a seemingly flimsy set-up doesn’t initially promise.
Sisters is about two sisters who, over alternating lines, compare the direction that their lives have gone in and their thoughts on their family members. The sisters love each other, but it is clear that their ideas and feelings are divergent from one another to the extent that all of the things they sing in their respective lines could never be said to each other, or at the very least, are acknowledged as being in some way responsible for their separation from each other. The differences mount up line by line:
1. One sister has a car/The other sister has to make do with a bike.
2. One sister feels that their mother made a mistake marrying their father/The other sister defends their father.
3. One sister has married a man that the other sister was in love with/The other sister is in a consolation relationship.
4. One sister is expecting a child/Neither sister thinks that this is necessarily going to be a good idea.
As the song comes out of its instrumental break, it becomes clear that one of the sisters is in the midst of domestic problems, possibly caused by monetary issues at home. Although, one sister ponders whether this is down to the man her sister is with - a point of view which we can guess may have caused tension between them in the past - the song ends on an optimistic note. The sisters are separated and miss one another, but we are left to hope that their bond will cause one to contact the other before it’s too late.
The performance is light, delicate, slightly sugary…and utterly truthful.
I’m going to dedicate this track to the memory of Melanie Safka due to her link to ZuZu’s Petals as revealed by Peel on his 30/1/93 show.
Richard D. James’sPolygon Window project ought to be known as his “Qu…” phase. The tracklisting for Surfing on Sine Waves had brought us Quoth, which had been deservedly released as a single. The album’s final two tracks were Quixote and Quino - Phec. The former sounds like a dance party taking place in a gymnasium, with us almost able to feel the mental calculations made by the attendees as they weigh up who to make approaches to on the dancefloor, and then the beat picks up as people hit the floor and try to make eye contact or beguile others with their moves. Quino - Phec captures an after the party feeling as the gym echoes to the sound of the clearup, coupled with both the dashed hopes of those who didn’t manage to pull, and the dreamy vibes of those who are lost in the kisses of others. For them, tonight may herald either a memorable one-off or the beginnings of a life-long love affair. Quixote is the sound of the effort - unrequited or otherwise - being put in.
Given James’s love of unconventional track titles, I checked to see whether Quixote had any meaning as a word, given that I only knew it as the title of a book and always assumed that the lead character was called Mr. Quixote. I was today years old when I learned that Quixote means someone who is an idealist. If my gymnasium dance party reading of Quixote seems wide of the mark, then it could be that the meaning of the track is on a universal truth about the residents of Cornwall. Namely, that we don’t tilt at windmills, but an unholy number of us get upset about wind farms.
The selections I made from this show were taken from a recording which omitted the first 45 minutes of the programme.* My notes indicate that this this was, for me, one of those “difficult” Peel shows. I only selected 4 tracks from the last hour of the show, and most of those either fell from favour or were discovered to be tracks I’d already covered here.
The opening track on the file was The Fall’s Peel Session version of Kimble, which had been packaged with 3 other Fall session tracks from 1983 & 1985 and put out as an EP on Strange Fruit Records. Peel was pleased to see this happen and expressed a fervent, though forlorn, hope. that a complete set of all the sessions which The Fall had recorded for his programme would one day be released in a box set before I go to the great record fair in the sky. Whether it was a case of bad timing or someone trying to pay him some form of posthumous tribute, it took until April 2005 for a 6-CD set of their sessions to come out via Castle Music. I suppose at least Peel didn’t have to worry about updating the set to include new sessions.
Back in Great Finborough, the Ravenscroft family had a guest staying with them, called Josh. He had come all the way from Hamburg, though Peel wasn’t exactly sure why he was staying with them. He had been helping Peel to file records though, and to show his gratitude, Peel dedicated a play of New York 1954 by Chuck Willis to him. That was a record that I had slated for inclusion, but am unable to share. Others included:
Shrieking Violets - Do You Remember? - Peel was so tickled by the name of this all-female American group, he resolved to play a track from their eponymous EP regardless of the quality of the material. Fortunately, he liked this song very much.
There were three tracks I initially had down to include but which I went off when I returned to them. The first of which was by an act which Peel was to give a lot of airplay to over the course of the year.
Shalawambe - Twasanswa - I’m probably being a philistine here given that this is slightly rootsier African music than the type I usually include on the blog, but while it’s certainly evocative, it isn’t particularly engaging. It was played in the last hour of the show, so I may have been desperately grabbing for something I thought I might like or which I thought was breaking the monotony. That was certainly the case, I suspect, with me initially choosing…
Ninja Ford - Step Aside - which when listened back to in isolation, had me asking, “What on earth, are you going on about?” It’s easy in a stodgy Peel show to be seduced by the flow on a reggae record, but it’s only when you come back to it subsequently and realise that you’re no wiser at the end of the track than you were at the beginning, that you have to leave it off the metaphorical mixtape and hand it on to others who will appreciate whatever it is that I missed.
This was the second session that Come recorded for Peel in the space of 9 months. I heard their first session when it was repeated on his programme from 19 June 1992, but I didn’t include any of it here. I will always be eternally grateful for Peel playing Smile On Your Face by Dangerous Birds as a lead-in track to that session. The link being that the 1982 record had been his first exposure to Come’s lead singer, Thalia Zedek. However, I am all over this session, despite it seeming to mark a turning point in Peel’s support for the band.
The opening track, City of Fun is a cover of a track from the debut album by The Only Ones. Peel followed up Come’s version by playing a live version from The Only Ones Live in London album. Given how deliberate and specific Come’s playing tends to be, it’s nice to hear Zedek and Chris Brokaw, who takes the lead vocal here, cutting loose and letting their inner-Ramone out. A look at the lyrics shows why Come might have been moved to cover it. A theme of the material in this session is of people being overwhelmed and crushed by the big city, and City of Fun reflects that, though it does at least feature the narrator reaching out to help those who are losing their way - and finding themself taken advantage of in the process!
Wrong Side sees Come channelling Sticky Fingers-era Stones to superb effect. My own take is that the protagonist of the song moves from prostitution to drugs to illness to the hospice and finally back to prostitution over the course of four increasingly bleak minutes. All the way along, they’re accompanied by advice - Don’t you worry - which sounds increasingly hollow as the track progresses. The only escape from this hellhole is death - I don’t believe that heading south refers to going to Texas in this case, rather to someplace much hotter. The final image of saints getting under tables and opening their skirts shows things going full circle. Death may be approaching and this poor unfortunate, and all those on this side of town, will be fucked on the way out.
The mood doesn’t get any brighter on Mercury Falls, which starts big with allusions to the end of the world - the taping up of windows implies preparations for a nuclear winter - before narrowing its focus to consider all those who are isolated and alone at winter time. There are references to friends and acquaintances disappearing and dying off, both in an actual and literal sense as relationships wither and die as people lose touch. For some reason, this always feels more devastating during the winter time and the song particularly conveys those left feeling alone, sick and disassociated from others during Christmas time. This was a new Come song, perhaps they had gone through a particularly lousy Christmas in 1992? Whether it’s personal or universal, it nails the mood perfectly.
The only track from the session which I didn’t particularly care for was Sharon Vs. Karen, which in 2024 could be retitled Democrats Vs. Republicans, but back then was little more than a simple everyday tale of schizophrenia and suicide.
This is an interesting Peel Session in that it saw Come use it to do all of the things that Peel most enjoyed seeing artists do in a session; namely using it to showcase new or unexpected material. Unlike the previous session, which had seen Come play material exclusively from their Eleven : Eleven album, this session saw them showcase three new songs, at least a year in advance of anyone hearing them on a record , and a cover. So why did it mark a turning point in John Peel’s relationship with them? Well, according to the John Peel wiki, when this session was repeated on 28 May 1993 (a show I’ve just listened to as it happens), it marked the last time any content by Come featured on his programme. Now, if that’s true, it’s quite the cold shoulder considering that they released three further albums and several singles between 1994 & 1998. It could be that their label, Matador Records, didn’t send them on. Perhaps, there was some perceived slight or awkward interaction at a festival which irritated Peel into striking them from his playlists. Or maybe by the time Come released Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in ‘94, things had moved on to the extent that there just wasn’t a place for them on the Peel Show anymore. It’s John’s show and John’s rules, but on the evidence of this session, his listeners were the ones missing out.
I don’t remember seeing [In Dust] in anyone’s lists of tips for ‘93, but they certainly should have been. - John Peel during their session, 12/2/93.
In fairness to the tastemakers of the time, it would have been a brave soul to state that everyone would have been listening to the pile-driving techno metal of In Dust by the end of 1993. Their high points are very high indeed, but it’s music for Hulking out to rather than party music. And that’s never an easy sell.
The Peel Show got In Dust to do a session for them during a brief window when the trio were releasing records, namely the Bewildermental EP and an album called Nosebleed, which will give you some idea of what to expect when you press the play button. The band were still playing live in the mid-90s, but released no further records.
Magnet Womb is the stand out track for me. It fuses together the clatter and bang of Foreheads in a Fishtank with the audio vitriol of 70 Gwen Party from what appears to be the perspective of a particularly malignant form of incubus, whose progeny sits in the womb and appears to devour the vital organs of its carrier. As the lyrics state:
Your brain is now mine/ Your mind is now my lungs.
Tap into your knowledge/Eat it from the inside.
Swallow your intelligence/Use it as my own.
Written down, it reads as utterly grotesque, but set to music, it’s brilliant.
Hyperdeemic Nerdle is slightly harder to get a handle on given that the lyrics at times veer close to gibberish, but I also think it passes for what In Dust might put forward as a a particularly twisted love song. I’m probably projecting that take on it after the lines about having a talk by the wall, just as all coy teenaged couples seemed to do when feeling each other’s interest out. The track rocks as hard, maybe even harder, as In Dust’s fellow Ulstermen, Therapy?, and like them, In Dust use audio sampling of what sounds like police radio to fairly chilling effect.
As for the two tracks which I passed on, Boredom Result rocks away like Hyperdeemic Nerdle and was on the list for inclusion, but it seemed slightly less compelling to me, albeit that it had me wishing I could be at a Boredoms show. Meanwhile, Auntie Christ deserves a prize for its title, but should have that prize rescinded for being the only one of In Dust’s session tracks that bored me.
Who’s the dybbuk? - Boris Grushenko meets Anton Ivanovich Lebedokov in Love and Death. (Allen, 1975).
When said by Woody Allen, the word dybbuk automatically sounds funny even if you have no idea what it means. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a malevolent, wandering spirit which enters and possesses a living person until it is exorcised. It was also the name taken by an all-female noise group from Czechoslovakia, who John Peel admitted on this programme, he had spent most of the 1980s hearing about but failing to get hold of any of their records. Even when his European grand tour of October 1992 had taken him into the newly formed Czech Republic, he had been unable to find anything by them. However, just a few months later, he had received a copy of the group’s reunion album, Ale Cert to Vem and played the track, Dopis (A Letter) stating that the performance featured What sounds like me on the piano. And during a short but compelling track during which it sounds as though all manner of feelings are being poured out into the letter, the piano playing is hilariously awful. Certainly a long way from Camille Howard.
As a rock band living in a Soviet controlled Communist society, Dybbuk had found it difficult even to get opportunities to play live gigs, let alone release records during the 80s. The notes for Ale Cert to Vem revealed that the band had enjoyed the experience so much, they intended to continue working together. But they rebranded themselves as Zuby Nehty (Teeth Nails) , releasing 4 albums between 1993 and 1999, with further albums following in 2014 and 2021 - like a Czech version of The Monkeywrench, who should be due to put something out this year given their 21st Century eight-year cycle of releases.
I was originally going to save One For the Money as a “Track I would have liked to include but…” in the round-up post for this 12/2/93 show, in a few weeks’ time. The main reason being that the video for it cuts the track off after 2 minutes so as to try and fit the dub version in as well. I initially felt that this would be short changing anyone who wanted to hear it. However, I like the track and Junior Delgado’s vocal so much, I decided that even edited highlights would be preferable to leaving it off altogether. If this strikes you as a shoddy way to present his material, then all I can say is that shoddiness seemed to be the main characteristic around the release of One For the Money given that the label which put it out, Jammy’s Records, spelled his name as “Delgardo” on the record sleeve. And why wouldn’t they? I mean, he’d only been releasing records since 1975, after all….
Maybe, the pressers had a copy of that first single, Every Natty Wants to Go Home, early pressings of which credit it to Junior Delgao. So, there was clearly form for this.
Despite the title, One For the Money is not a Dancehall reworking of Blue Suede Shoes. It is though a wonderful example of love/lust on the dancefloor as Delgado sets his sights on a woman, who amidst the mix of neon lights in the club where they have met, he regards as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He may just be desperate to try and keep his weekend going, and I especially love the line about Sweet Sunday giving way to Blue Monday. That seems very apt now that the Christmas holidays are over and it’s time to go back to work.
To clarify, the first two minutes of the video are representative of what Peel played on 12/2/93; the final two minutes are an edit of the dub version b-side.
In the early to mid 1990s, there should have been a piece of safety advice passed to UK bands: Being the support act on a Radiohead tour will ultimately cause your band to implode due to your leader/focal point damaging their physical or mental health.
In early 1995, on their warmup tour ahead of the release of The Bends, Radiohead’s support act was my beloved Marion. Within 2 years of the tour, Marion’s career began to unravel as their lyricist/singer, Jaime Harding started to become addicted to heroin. By early 1999, the band had split.
Winding back to the summer of 1993, and Radiohead were touring in support of a single called Pop is Dead, their first post-Pablo Honey material. The support band on this tour were Strangelove. Within three years, Strangelove’s lyricist/singer, Patrick Duff, was in rehab due to drug/alcoholism issues and by 1998, Strangelove had disbanded.
Radiohead spoke warmly of both bands - not always a given in the bitchy environment of the 1990s UK music scene - but Strangelove were the ones cited as an inspiration to them. I think I can see why. For while Strangelove’s inspirations appear all over Hysteria Unknown - they sound as though they had been listening to a lot of Bauhaus and Joy Division at the time they recorded it - they also seem to be pointing the way for bands/artists who weren’t going to embrace Britpop-infused ideas over the next few years. Not only that, but in the immediate term (early 1993), they suggested a means by which British bands could play the Americans at their own game. Hysteria Unknown touches on themes of self-disgust, morbidity, despair and alienation which were seen as the component parts of the grunge scene, but it replaces the buzzsaw sound of the US artists with something warmer, communal and sonically interesting. Their sound is big, both in terms of their ideas and their spirit, despite the pain they communicate.
Radiohead took this energy and produced records that were both artistically compelling and resonant with the public. Strangelove, on the evidence of this track, should have benefitted from it too, especially given that Suede and Manic Street Preachers were also fans. I suspect that I would have been too had I heard Hysteria Unknown when it came out, and if that didn’t put the mockers on them, then nothing would.
