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.
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