Equus: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 14 February 1993 (BFBS)

Going by his comments, it doesn’t seem that John Peel would have been rushing to add this edition of his BFBS programme to his showreel. At the end of it, he apologised to listeners for a rather untidy programme. It’ll all be different next week, loads of your requests. I promise this every week and always fail to deliver. It’s poignant to consider that he was still promising to come back and play listeners’ requests when he broadcast his final show 11 years later.  Personally, I think Peel was being too critical of himself as I don’t remember too many mistakes or incoherence.

If we’re looking for reasons why Peel may have felt that the show had been under par, then Dave Lee Travis has to be held partially accountable.  Travis was six months away from resigning on air in protest at the changes Matthew Bannister was implementing at Radio 1, but in early 1993 he was still a fixture of the station’s daytime weekend schedule - playing Lucien Bokilo records as well - so his and Peel’s paths were likely to cross if Peel went into Broadcasting House early enough on a Saturday. Although Peel acknowledged that he and Travis’s attitudes towards life were very different from one another, he got on well with DLT, feeling that, in a previous life I must have pulled a thorn out of his paw, because he’s always very amiable towards me whenever we meet. But when Peel was working in the Radio 1 offices, the previous day, he found himself in close proximity to an editing suite where a pre-recorded show hosted by Travis was being prepared for broadcast.  One thing which irritated Peel about Travis was his tendency to “hilariously” bastardise words, phrases and names. Hence Kylie Minogue became Killie Minnogoo and the BBC World Service, for which both men recorded programmes, would be referred to as the BBC Wild Service and so on. Peel takes up the story…

He’ll call people things like Olivia Neutron Bomb and Dusty Springboard, you know, things which people haven’t said for 20 years…Somebody was playing this pre-record in the corridor, very, very loudly and very, very often. And he kept saying - and I knew he was going to say it - he was talking about some event which had happened to a listener. And he said, “She said, that her parents walked in, and her boyfriend was standing there,” and I thought to meself , he’s going to say “In the nuddy.”And he did! He said “In the nuddy”. And I spent the rest of the day - well, about an hour to be honest - hearing this over and over again. And by the end of  the hour, I was fit for hospitalisation, frankly.

There’s always something to put trivial irritations into perspective, and the news bulletin duly provided it with news that the body of toddler James Bulger (Caution advised - article contains distressing content), who had been missing for two days, had been discovered in Liverpool.

Only one track that made my selections list from this show fell out of favour with me.

Tsunami - Sometimes a Notion: Coming out of Arlington, Virginia, Tsunami were a bit of a fancy of Peel’s around this time, perhaps due to a similarity of sound with PJ Harvey.  I only came into this show halfway through his playing of this track, and my interest was piqued, so I put it down with a question mark next to it. Ultimately, it sounded a little too middle of the road for me.  Sometimes a Notion featured on a three-track single called Souvenir Folder of Beautiful Arlington, VA which was distributed by an Australian label called IV Recordings. Peel’s copy was Number 88 in a limited edition White label of 100 copies. It’s possible that the title of the track was inspired by Ken Kesey’s 1964 book, Sometimes a Great Notion which was adapted into a 1971 film directed by and starring Paul Newman.

John Peel’s Valentine’s Day tracklisting.

Equus: The Moog ‎– Live Forever [Mercy Remix] (14 February 1993)

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Details were a bit thin on the ground about this enjoyable piece of techno music.  All John Peel had to go on was a note…written at the bottom - in pen - that says “A massive European club hit” but then I suppose they would say that. My own notes recommend its inclusion here because I like the beeping beats (which start around the 49 second mark) and the “I want to live forever!” sample in which what sounds like a downtrodden middle manager suddenly gets a taste for life.

The Moog was one of the aliases of DJ Andrew Wright. After issuing the Rush Hour 12-inch EP, Wright took 3 of the tracks from it, outsourced one to Micky Finn and took a contribution from his collaborator Anthony Bowes (working under the name Justice) to put out a 4-track remix record as The Moog.  As you can hopefully hear from Live Forever, which Wright remixed as Mercy, his work both on that and Rush Hour - remixed under his Rotor alias - makes for a pair of perfectly serviceable bangers. However, the more interesting stuff was happening elsewhere on the record. Both through Finn’s proto-Jungle sound on Jungle Muffin and Bowes’s D ‘n’ B stylings on Going Crazy. The Moog Remix EP showcased both the best of contemporary and future dance music sounds.

Video courtesy of UnoDat

Equus: The God Machine - I've Seen the Man (14 February 1993)

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Lyrically, the subject matter of [The God Machine’s debut album, Scenes From the Second Storey] is one of angst, anguish, a raging against a likely non-existent deity or a condemnation of those who claim to speak of such a being… Taken from The God Machine’s Scenes From the Second Storey Revisited 25 Years On by Ned Raggett, The Quietus, 26 February 2018.

Raggett’s article, which I first saw when The God Machine last featured on this blog, achieves what great music journalism should do, namely encourage the reader to seek out the music.  Having listened to Scenes From the Second Storey today, there are at least half a dozen tracks featuring either Robin Proper-Sheppard encouraging people to take responsibility for their decisions without passing the buck to God, or characters that he meets blaming their actions on God and absolving themselves because He orchestrated their lives. The album resounds with a broad conviction that God is illusory, and that those who do believe in Him are deluded at best and dangerous at worst.

In I’ve Seen the Man, it feels as though Proper-Sheppard, as an American transplanted to Britain, spent time wandering around Speakers’ Corner where he would have heard political, civic, scientific and religious points of view put forward to the passers-by.  On one side, he finds himself listening to a preacher proselytising for his God. On the other side, he hears the case being made for atheism.  But in this song, Proper-Sheppard finds himself confronting the void at the centre of his own spirit. He doesn’t believe in anything and this lack of belief compared to the contrasting convictions of the two speakers torments him. The twist is that Proper-Sheppard ends up following the lead of some of his characters and cursing God for the way that he feels.

I’m with Raggett on the merits of Scenes From the Second Storey. It’s a wonderful record, though its intensity and seriousness would have made it a hard sell to mainstream audiences. While researching this post, I discovered that Proper-Sheppard had subsequently formed the band, Sophia, whose 2006 song, Pace, stood out to me as one of the few decent tunes I heard Colin Murray play during his uninspiring late Noughties stint in the 10pm-midnight slot.

Video courtesy of tehf00n.

Equus: The Heptones - Sufferer’s Time (14 February 1993)

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Written by Lee Perry and recorded for The Heptones 1977 album, Party Time, Sufferer’s Time is nothing less than one of the greatest, most humane songs I have ever heard.  It breaks out of the dogma, which can attach itself to some reggae music and addresses the experiences of Rastafarians, as well as the poor and needy, by looking at how life is lived alongside the material aspirations that people may have.  The Second Coming and a return to The Promised Land will be great, but it’s been a long wait, with no imminent sign of happening, so in the meantime, can’t the lowly suffera get a slice of the action by driving a fancy car or partying? Especially given that four hundred years of colonialism was supposed to promise better things for the indigenous peoples.

It’s a deft trick to be able to write a political song which blends capitalism with apathy, but that’s exactly what we get here. Small goals and targets, a means of measuring progress by consumerism. And why not, given the hardships the target audience may have endured. I’m assuming that A so we say, a so we go is the Rasta version of Keep calm and carry on, though I suspect it probably isn’t.

Projecting the theme of the song more widely, more of us are sufferers than we would care to admit. And many of us have been seduced into striving for the consolation of a better car, against real, positive, long lasting change. And in large part, that has been because the sufferers have enthusiastically lapped up the ism and schism which has been used to get them to blame other sufferers for not reaching their consumerist dreams.

The current tragedy of our age is that, in an Election year, the Sufferer’s Time seems as far away from being realised as it has ever been.

Video courtesy of Cheikh Tidiane NDAO

Equus: Therapy? - Nausea [Evening Session version] (14 February 1993)

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The last dream I had before I woke up this morning, saw me helping John Peel file some records.  We weren’t doing it at Peel Acres, but rather at a massive suite of warehouses that he had bought. Once you entered the warehouses, they were done up to look like a large country hotel with floor to ceiling shelf space for filing records. It’s nearly always impossible to get any practical work done in dreams and that was the case in this one. I could barely move through the warehouse due to a massive drinks party that was going on inside it. The vast crowds of people slowed me down terribly as I grimly attempted to complete my task of filing a cassette copy of Michael Caine’s 1992 memoir, What’s It All About?  

Now, although 10 years of work on this blog may lead you to think otherwise, I hardly ever have dreams featuring John Peel. What I suspect happened is that my subconscious was urging me to set down the thoughts and feelings I’ve spent the last week percolating in my mind about this particular track and the circumstances by which it came to be played by Peel.

When considering the vast size of Peel’s record collection, it’s worth considering just how much its numbers were swelled by giveaway compilation records that came with the various music papers and magazines that Peel got each week/month. He was never shy about including tracks from free compilations in his programmes, and I’d be fairly confident that most of them were kept by him.  In the case of Five Alive, a compilation of 5 tracks given away as a cassette with a late January 1993 edition of Melody Maker, and featuring live performances from bands that had played on Mark Goodier’s Evening Session programme over the previous year, the incentive to keep the record was down to the fact that, whereas the average punter who bought the magazine had to make do with a tape, Peel had received a limited edition CD. Only 100 copies were made of this, leading Peel to conclude that If I live to be 110 years old that should be worth, ooh.. 5 or 6 quid I expect.  If he had made it to 84 years old, Discogs shows that he’d be around £5 ahead of his estimate.

As for the track which Peel played, Nausea, the opening track on Nurse, was recorded by Therapy? for the BBC on 21 November 1992.  It’s a standard Therapy? tale of alienation and disconnection, which I’d have been all over as a Therapy? convert in early 1993. That being said, I could probably have made do with the live version recorded at CBGBs in New York and included on the Opal Mantra EP. The version recorded for the BBC opens with a more pre-watershed friendly audio sample, but is otherwise unchanged from the other versions out there. Further BBC session tracks, including their two Peel Sessions can be found on the Mercury release, Music Through a Cheap Transistor.

Having listened to the other tracks on Five Alive, I’d rate Therapy?’s performance as the second best on it. The other tracks veered through the predictable (Step It Up by Stereo MCs), the underwhelming (Time of Her Time by Ride), the unfamiliar (White Belly by Belly) and the exceptional (Moving by Suede, the first thing I’ve heard from them in that period to make me think the buzz around them was in way justified.)

Video courtesy of zararity.

Equus: Dantalian’s Chariot - The Madman Running Through the Fields (14 February 1993)

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On 3 August 1979, The Police completed work on their second album, Regatta de Blanc. It would include their first Number One single, Message in a Bottle, and a 7 month tour to support the album would begin on September 1, 1979. Travel, promotion, concerts, tv appearances & video filming all stretched out ahead of the band. How would they spend August 1979, enjoying their downtime before their lives became dominated by tour itineraries?  

Guitarist, Andy Summers may have chosen to spend time going to the cinema.  What might he have been able to go and see? If he wanted escapism, then there was the 11th James Bond film, Moonraker. Perhaps, he would have wanted to see Woody Allen’s continued progression into sophisticated romantic comedy with Manhattan.

But there was a double-bill showing in UK cinemas over that month, which would have brought him face to face with musical spirits from both his present and his past…

He would have known all about what to expect from the movie version of The Who’s Quadrophenia, not least because his Police bandmate, Sting, had a small but memorable role in it.  But, what would his reaction have been if he gone to see the movie version of BBC sitcom, Porridge, only to find his first major bandleader causing havoc in the prison kitchen with his pepper measures in the curry, “I said a dash, Lotterby!”

13 years earlier, Summers had been the guitarist with one of the UK’s leading soul bands, Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band.  Zoot Money himself was a classic musical contradiction. Sat behind his Hammond organ, he looked like a medieval dung seller, but was blessed with a voice that sounded like he’d been one of the original children birthed by Rhythm & Blues.  Money and his band are spoken about as one of THE “you had to be there” live attractions of the early to mid-1960s. In 1966, they broke into the UK Top 30 with their single, Big Time Operator, at which point the Mods washed their hands of them.  However, Money was unconcerned. He could see which way the musical winds were blowing and as 1966 rolled into 1967, he slimmed the Big Roll Band down to a quartet of himself, Summers, drummer Colin Allen and bassist, Pat Donaldson. The Big Roll Band name was changed to the more psychedelically infused, Dantalian’s Chariot. The band started writing their own material, incorporating light shows into their gigs and established a striking visual look so as to get full value out of lights by not only all dressing in white robes and kaftans but by painting their equipment white as well. As he related on this show, John Peel was among the beguiled spectators when Dantalian’s Chariot played The Festival of the Flower Children at Woburn Abbey over the 1967 August bank holiday.

The following month, Dantalian’s Chariot released their first - and only - single. Co-written by Money and Summers, The Madman Running Through the Fields is essentially Tomorrow Never Knows on a budget, though if there was any justice it would be just as well known and as widely celebrated as an example of  acid trip evocation. A little bit like ZuZu’s Petals Sisters, the track uses a dual perspective, with the vast majority of it being sung from the perspective of the tripper.  Money claimed that the song was autobiographical in that it was an amalgam of his and the other band members’ drug experiences. The first verse seems to be written from the perspective of someone who has become burned out by the world and the expectations placed on them:

World at my feet/Life seemed to be sweet.

I was admired, but I was so tired.

It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see the tone of the song as being one where Money draws a line under the years of slog he went through with the Big Roll Band, and looks ahead to the utopia which the leaders of the psychedelic revolution promised would come to those who turned on, tuned in and dropped out. Money seems to suggest that he has crossed a threshold from which he seems to be unwilling to return from:

I’ve seen the crack/I cannot come back.

The other perspective that is briefly glimpsed in the song - on the Isn’t that the madman… lines - is that, according to Money, of those who had not yet taken LSD, but who were watching someone who had done so. There’s an air of wistfulness to the Wonder how he feels? line, which from a 2024 perspective seems irresponsible, but in 1967 it reflected a vibe among the counterculture that widespread use of the drug would cause a spiritual and mental awakening, leading to a gentler, peaceful society. For its detractors, LSD represented a threat to sanity, and there would be plenty of acid casualties over the subsequent years, who would lend credence to the theory that hallucinogenics were a path to madness. The counterculture embraced the theory by working off the principle of the wise fool, with the tarot symbol of the same name holding particular significance. Some tarot cards show the Fool with a small bundle of possessions, supposedly representing untapped knowledge, something which LSD would supposedly help the user to access.

Although Money’s vocal and the lyrics offer a friendly and supportive ambience, the final 30 seconds of the track evoke the onset of an LSD trip with discordant guitar, shrill organ notes, a gasp and other audible  indicators of altered perception. It’s dark, slightly scary and, from my perspective, doesn’t work as an incentive to start taking LSD.

The Madman Running Through the Fields is a great song, but it wasn’t a hit.  EMI, which had released numerous Big Roll Band records, dropped Dantalian’s Chariot after the single missed the charts. The band were signed by Direction Records, but were again quickly dropped before any music was released.  Peel hoped that, one day, their unreleased recordings would see the light of day. He didn’t have long to wait as in 1995, a compilation called Chariot Rising was released by Tenth Planet.

Dantalian’s Chariot disbanded in April 1968. Money and Summers moved to the United States and joined Eric Burdon and the Animals, playing on the band’s final 60s album, Love Is.  The closing track of the album saw a new version of the song, retitled The Madman, paired up with Gemini.

Warning! - Contains copious amounts of late-1960s musical self indulgence.

Video courtesy of Acid Revolver (DC) and astrom53 (Animals)

All lyrics are copyright of Zoot Money & Andy Summers.