CAUTION - The uploader of this video not only shares his name with one of Ipswich Town’s greatest ever players (wouldn’t it be terrific if it was the man himself), but they have also bought into the doomy, ominous nature of Auto Killer UK itself by using it to soundtrack scenes from Kinji Fukasaku’s 2000 film, Battle Royale, which features a lot of explicit if muddily visible violence. So, you may prefer to start the video and then open a fresh tab to have it playing along in the background.
Peel played Auto Killer UK on this show because it had come in at Number 28 on The Phantom Fifty. It is presented here for reasons of completeness, not least because I had more to say about the track when 70 Gwen Party performed it as part of a Peel Session, broadcast on 20 June 1992.
A quick question for you before we go any further; on your first listen to Red Alert [2], do you think that the spoken word sample is saying “Where’s the money?” I did, and initially had plans to write about how this track seemed to combine techno tropes with a noir sensibility. But then I heard it again and realised that it said “Red alert” instead and that its sensibility was decidedly futuristic.
John + Julie was an alter-ego of the husband and wife team of Michael Wells and Lee Newman. Red Alert was the final record they put out under that monicker and contained three different versions. Red Alert [1] and [2] are very similar to one another, albeit [2] is taken at a faster pace while [1] flirts with trance music.
Red Alert [3] is the least commercial sounding of the 3 and has a more hardcore, tribal edge to it.
Wells and Newman may have finished with John + Julie, but as was their way, they went on to many other projects and aliases, the best known of which was probably Technohead who enjoyed a Top 10 hit with a remixed version of I Wanna Be a Hippy in early 1996. Discogs lists at least 11 separate projects that they worked on, and who knows how many more there may have been but for Newman’s premature death from cancer in 1995.
Video courtesy of Webbie, taken directly from Peel’s 26/3/93 show.
This anti-drug screed from the Anglo/Irish hip hop crew, Marxman, is a beauty. I’ve been caning it since the weekend simply because it’s one of those instances where everything about it just seems right. From the brilliance of the arrangement through to the lyricism of the storytelling, whereby across four verses, we’re taken on the journey of:
1) Newly minted drug dealers who revel in the influence and contacts their new business brings them.
2) Feckless institutions, such as universities, which allow drugs to be bought and sold on their premises. Meanwhile, the rap community itself, despite its own entreaties to its audience to stay clear of drugs, has also allowed Crack to enter its bloodstream both as a recreation and a business opportunity.
3) Drug addicts who see their lives start to shrivel up in front of them as they damage themselves and alienate their families.
4) The concerned circle of friends who come to mourn their drug dealer/addict friend who has over-reached himself and ended up dead. The only thing worse than the death is the way in which the lifestyle has influenced their younger brother who wants to follow in big brother’s footsteps and perpetuate the cycle of bling, illegality, degradation and ultimately death.
They may be straying on to the turf of Scarface, but Marxman more than match him with Do You Crave Mystique. My only complaint is that all that proximity to drugs may have had something to do with them not including a question mark on the end of the title. Music can be such a force for good, but its sloppiness towards using accurate punctuation remains one of its principal blindspots.
I’m currently up to June 1993 in my Peel Show listening and one of my takeaways from the year so far is that the San Diego band, Trumans Water were possibly Peel’s favourite band of the period. He’d fallen hard for them the previous year and gave tracks from their album, Of Thick Tum, heavy exposure on his programmes through September 1992. I’ve missed all of that because I wasn’t involved in any shows at that time, so there was no opportunity to blog about them.
By March 1993, Peel was like an over-excited child waiting for Christmas morning. Coming into this 26/3/93 show, he had spent 3 weeks waiting for permission from Elemental Records to be able to play tracks from Trumans Water’s new album, Spasm Smash XXXOXoX Ox & Ass, only to hear nothing from the label. Tonight, he lost patience and played Speeds Exceeding and in the process introduced me to a band who when I’ve found them good, have been great; and when I’ve found them bad, have been unbearable.
Stylistically, Trumans Water put me in mind of a faster, punkier version of both The Happy Flowers and Wckr Spgt. Their songs are the sound of utter human desperation, pinning the listener against the wall and frantically screaming their sentiments into your face because if they don’t do it that way, you won’t get it. And if you don’t get it, then there’s a very real chance that the band will mentally collapse into a sobbing heap in your arms. It’s not surprising that as I’ve heard most of their music through the spring and early summer of Peel’s 1993 playlists, anything of theirs which has made my shortlists for inclusion here has usually had a question mark next to it. Speeds Exceeding didn’t though.
In large part, I think it’s because they chose to base the thrust of the song’s melody around one which sounds like a close cousin to You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine. That’s always a good start in terms of drawing people in to a song. Lyrically, Speeds Exceeding reads like a conversation between the philosophies of both the younger and older generation in America. The lines tumbling over each other like quick replies to the other’s assertions. The older generation believing that the country needs to be saved (where have we heard that before?) while the younger generation claim to be ignorant of the needs of the country and commit themselves to pleasure, mainly because the previous generation have left them nothing to build on. This could have been a reflection of the American political mindset in late 1992 as the 70 & 60 something presidencies of Reagan and Bush Mk I were succeeded by the youthful mid-40s new broom of Bill Clinton. Though it feels that the older generation felt it meant America was going to Hell in a handcart, while the younger generation felt that nothing would really change. That being said, the political subtext starts to get lost when the song reaches its slow movement at 1:38.
For John Peel, Trumans Water were not a passing fancy. They were astonishingly productive, with at least 5 albums coming out on a variety of labels across 1993 and into 1994. They have remained active well into the 21st Century and Peel was playing material by them up until the year before he died. They’re likely to have me putting question marks down against their name for a long while to come.
So much of what is going on with both this band and this track is guesswork. Although hailing from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, did 81 Mulberry name themselves after the Mulberry Island Plantation in Stoneville, NC? Has this track been called Ephedrine because its properties as a remedy for hay fever allow the band to link it to the track’s themes of urban suffocation? Or is it an allusion to its possible use as an amphetamine, which ties it to the line about killing at 2:10. They give so little away about themselves.
All of it is guesswork because the vocals have been mixed in such a way that even when the singer is screaming his head off, it’s a struggle to fully catch what’s being sung. Even when the band re-recorded Ephedrine in a less lo-fi manner for their 1995 album, Drive Shaft to Culdesac, it’s clear that getting a clean vocal wasn’t on anyone’s list of priorities. As a result, Ephedrine ends up being one of those most frustrating of things to blog about: a track I really like, but would struggle to explain why because of the lack of clarity in what the lyrics are telling us.
This post should have gone up earlier in the week, but I held off on putting it up after I saw that someone claiming to be 81 Mulberry’s drummer had popped up in the YouTube comments of C Geoffrey Taylor’s upload, albeit from 6 years ago. I asked them them whether the song touched on any of the following perspectives:
- Disenchantment with school. (missing class line at 0.22, and I think that the opening line complains about struggling with maths.)
- Someone feeling suffocated by their domestic environment. (The same streetlights on/First I’ve got to run between 0:31 and 0:38.)
- Whether the second half of the song was told from the point of view of a school shooter. (See first paragraph.)
I gave them until today to get back to me. I knew it was a long shot and indeed I found out that not everyone is Col from Mr. Ray’s Wig World, so it looks as though - until I hear differently - we can say that Ephedrine is about all the things I mentioned above.
