Equus: Little Walter - My Babe (20 March 1993)

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Alongside the laidback subtlety of the performance and vocal on Little Walter’s 1955 hit, My Babe, what stands out to me about it is that it’s a great example of what I think of as “good cop/bad cop” songwriting. There’s no chorus in the song, but the verses alternate between one about how loving and sweet Walter’s lady is and one about how strict and implacable she is at any hint of infidelity on his part. The concept of an open relationship clearly never gained much traction in the world of the blues.  Given that the ratio of loving to admonitory verses is 1:3, maybe Walter’s girlfriend has had plenty of practice at telling him what she will not accept. And yet, like a dope, she takes him back everytime…

This mixture of sweet and sour owes a lot to the source material that inspired My Babe. Its writer, Willie Dixon, conceived it as a secular reworking of a 1920s gospel blues song called This Train is Bound for Glory which spoke about the wonder of passing into Heaven, but in typical religious damp cloth style, the majority of the song is devoted to telling the listener which groups will not be allowed onboard.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe announces the next departure to Heaven from platform 666.

Video courtesy of Angel Neira (Little Walter) and Enzo GD - Music Videos (Sister Rosetta Tharpe)

Equus: Ragga Gabba Posse - Zap Machine Part 1 (20 March 1993)

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What do you get if you fuse together a guitar riff that half sounds like Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin, but taken at the tempo of the riff from Hush by Deep Purple?  The answer is something like Zap Machine Part 1 by the Ragga Gabba Posse, a one shot gathering of a group of Dutch DJs.  Were it not for that riff, I’d probably have passed on this, as we’d mostly be left with sub Traveller style noodling.  Part 2 is slightly more interesting, but as an example of meat and potatoes rock/dance fusion, Part 1 is a great workout tune if nothing else.

Video courtesy of Webbie, who has provided the recording directly from Peel’s 20/3/93 show.

Equus: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 21 February 1993 (BFBS)

 I’m as crisp as a dew picked lettuce - John Peel introducing this edition on 21/2/93.

It’s always nice to hear Peel with a spring in his step, and in this case it could possibly be down to a letter he had received from a listener called Michael, who had written to say how much he enjoyed hearing dance music on the show. Peel was touched by this as he reckoned that Michael was the first person to have said this to him since he started playing dance music on his BFBS programme. He played Home is Where the Hartcore Is by Loopzone in thanks to Michael.

Also getting a spin was a 1979 tune by Skids called TV Stars, which mentioned Peel’s name together with a host of soap opera characters from Coronation Street and Crossroads. Peel warned any listeners who felt this was self-indulgent that they hadn’t heard anything yet as he played a recording called Humbug 1 performed by Combs Middle School which featured his son, Tom, as the lead voice. The song was taken from a show that appeared to be an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, with the song being sung from the perspective of workers in the factory owned by Ebeneezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley; perhaps during a visit from The Ghost of Christmas Past.  Impressively, the show itself was written by two of the music teachers at Combs Middle School. If you haven’t clicked on the Humbug 1 link, I’d encourage you to do so, not least to hear Peel’s tale of his being ejected from the final of a national schools production competition for heckling the judges when Combs Middle School failed to win it.  It’ll also serve as a long distance taster for when this blog reaches late 1994 and soundtracks my participation in Carnon Downs Drama Group’s production of the musical, Scrooge.

When replying to listener correspondence, personally, Peel often wrote by postcard. If he wasn’t using a Radio 1 publicity card - either of himself or more often of a younger, better looking colleague - he would reply on postcards showing images of Stowmarket. However, the company that made these cards had gone bust, so Peel was making up his own cards using photos he had taken of the town. He hadn’t really mastered the picturesque style of postcard images given that his portfolio of shots so far included an Indian restaurant and a set of major roadworks. Stirring stuff….

I’ve already referenced three tracks from this show which I passed on including. Other rejections included one of the few House of Love songs that I don’t care for, namely Love in a Car from their 1988 debut album, which was requested by a listener. Another request was for a 1979 track called Window to the World by the Australian band Whirlywirld, about which and whom Peel had no recollection of having previously played. On this show, he also played Barriers by Northern Irish band, Repulse.  As he back announced it, he thought the next track on the Heads EP was playing. He liked what he heard and let it play on, only to discover it was just the ending for Barriers.

The selections from this show were taken from a full 2 hour show.  There were 3 tracks that I had earmarked for inclusion but was unable to share:

The Brady Bunch Lawnmower Massacre - I’m Gonna Drink Myself to Life - More Australian rock from a 7-inch single on Shagpile.

Tiger - Chaos [Jungle Mix] - As previous posts have shown, I was enjoying the Jungle music tracks on this show, and my notes say that it was the jungle vibe that would have put this up for consideration.

Culture Fire - No Existence - A track taken from their Release EP and requested by a listener called Sebastian, who was due to spend the next 4 months away in San Francisco.

Three tracks fell from favour, having made my initial shortlist:

Nirvana - Oh The Guilt - I remember the excitement when this was released as part of a split single with Puss by Jesus Lizard and it reached Number 12 on the UK Singles Chart, so plenty of people were delighted to have it. But listening to it again for this blog, I have to confess that Nirvana philistinism raised itself within me again and my abiding instinct was to yell, “STOP FUCKING MOANING!”

Leatherface - Do the Right Thing - This is a band who have been appreciated here before for the emotional depth behind their hard rock clatter, but this ended up sounding far too by the numbers for permanent inclusion on the metaphorical mixtape.

Mudhoney - We Had Love - This was Mudhoney’s contribution to Set It Off, a compilation album of artists covering songs by The Scientists, whose work was unknown to me ahead of hearing Mudhoney’s version of We Had Love. I listened to about three-quarters of the performances on Set It Off, comparing each one to the original Scientists recordings, and it was certainly successful in terms of encouraging me to go and discover the work of The Scientists. However, this was mainly because of how poor virtually every cover was in comparison to the original track. I agonised over leaving We Had Love out, not least given the passion of Mark Arm’s vocal, but ultimately I decided that it was as guilty as all the other versions of not meeting The Scientists’ standards.

Full tracklisting

Equus: Camille Howard - Ferocious Boogie (21 February 1993)

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When this blog has finished working through selections from this edition of John Peel’s Music on BFBS, I’m intending to jump ahead to selections from Peel’s Radio 1 show from Saturday 20 March 1993. In terms of chronology, that show went out a week before I and my fellow Castaway Theatre Company members on the BTEC Performing Arts course performed Equus.  It also went out 10 days after the death of Camille Howard, at the age of 78.  I’ve had a look over at the John Peel wiki for March 1993, and it doesn’t appear as though news of her death was communicated on any of his programmes. This wouldn’t be altogether surprising given that Howard had quit the music business in the mid-1950s, and in those pre-Internet days of 1993, news of the death of an obscure boogie-woogie piano player would have taken a lot longer to make itself more widely known.  Peel kept her work in the spotlight by intermittently playing her recordings up to late 2001.

Ferocious Boogie was the b-side to Howard’s 1949 single, Maybe It’s Best After All, and is of a piece with many of the other Howard boogies that Peel played through early ‘93, not least in the way that it knocks its more conservative A-side partner into a cocked hat.  Peel wondered how different his life would have been had he actually heard the track when he was a boy in 1949, instead of the records he was actually listening to at the time which he remembered as being by artists such as Doris Day and Jo Stafford.

Video courtesy of Tim Gracyk.

Equus: Pulp - Razzmatazz (21 February 1993)

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Described in its sleevenotes as the bits that Hello! leaves out, Razzmatazz swaps the breathless, urgent, romanticism of O.U. (Gone, Gone) for contemptuous, derisive misogyny.

According to Jarvis Cocker, the lyrics of Razzmatazz are about a former college girlfriend of his. He described it at the time as the most bitter song Pulp had ever done, and he certainly goes in with both feet on the girl and those closest to her by throwing around accusations of incest, unplanned pregnancy, ignorance, stupidity, shallowness, mental instability and - most damning of all - getting fat while she goes out with someone uglier than him. 

It took me a couple of listens before I decided to include Razzmatazz here. I’ve had to confront a personal truth about Pulp that I’d only vaguely suspected back in the 90s, but which I have clarity on now.  Quite simply, they were too difficult for me to embrace as a favourite band.  There’s great humour in their music, and in my late teens, they seemed to be the only band I heard during the Britpop era, who acknowledged the desperate hunt for sex in a pre-internet world.  But there was always an underlying bitterness to their material which kept me at a distance from them. They could certainly do warm material, as O.U (Gone, Gone) and 1996’s Something Changed confirmed, but I’ve come to feel that the tone of Razzmatazz is far more indicative of the type of band that Pulp were, and that doesn’t make them an easy band to love, either then or now.

What’s undeniable about Razzmatazz though, is that it’s the sound of a band who were starting to find greater confidence in themselves and were turning more heads and minds towards them.  I suspect that this would have found its way on to the metaphorical mixtape in an attempt to, if not follow the herd, then at least trail along at a quizzically interested distance from it.

Cocker revealed in subsequent interviews that, to his embarrassment, he had bumped into his ex-girlfriend and that she had worked out that she was the subject of Razzmatazz.  Apparently, she had taken it in good humour, perhaps feeling, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, that when it’s the opinion of one of the most famous British men of the mid-1990s, it’s better to thought of as a twat than not to be thought of at all. I also like to think the female verses on Ciao! by Lush, which Cocker guested on two years after the release of Razzmatazz, offer his ex some form of right of reply.

Video courtesy of Pulp.