OK, I’ll get the obvious joke out of the way first. So, just how many tunes out there are subtitled as the Paul Mix mix?
When he played this, John Peel referred to the look of the 12-inch as Blue vinyl, flecked with grey. Rather lovely. I think that sums this particular mix of New Millenium up quite well, actually. The Tranceatlantic Mix was put together by Damon Wild and Tommy Musto, who attempt to give a tribal slant to Paul Mix’s slightly intergalactic sounding original version. The keyboards on the original sound like frantic distress signals sent from a stricken space station, but Wild and Musto pull the track back down from the stratosphere and plant it in a rainforest, augmented with African drums, breathy chants and “pop” sounds like woodpeckers beating out messages to each other in response to Mix’s keyboard figure from the stars which bursts in at the 2:16 mark. They reappear over the final minute too giving the feel of Earth and the Solar System trying to talk to each other.
Many compilations give the spelling in this track as Nicodeemus, but I have gone with the spelling which the track was given when it was first issued as one side of a single in 1977. To get a more complete idea of what The Congos were doing while recording around this time, I would direct interested parties to the expanded versions of their album, Heart of the Congos.
The triumph of the first half of the track is the way that the Congos wring melodic gold out of phrases such as a yard and on edge. As well as references to theology, they also reaffirm their commitment to the ongoing wait for spiritual enlightenment:
Everything flows beautifully about both the performance and the production except for the clunky edit at around 3:35, where what would have been the dub version side on a conventional single release would have started. However, the Congos were so overflowing with music at this time, they put vocal and dub as a continuous piece on one side of the single, and backed it with the slightly dull, Solid Foundation.
Many, many years ago, I had a dream that I was in a casual relationship with an airhead, good-time girl. This wasn’t anyone I knew, they were quite literally a figure of fantasy conjured up in my dreams. They were friendly, sexy, ditzy and very much the helpless-female. I remember going through the dream feeling that I had the power in the relationship; I liked her and enjoyed being with her, but I knew that it wasn’t love. She was far too flighty to lose my heart to. We had various (innocent) adventures during the course of the dream and what I remember is that, somehow, she had got herself in some sort of trouble with the authorities. Just before I woke up, I remember she was pleading with me to stand by her while she was in trouble. As she showered me with kisses to persuade me, I remember feeling within the dream a mixture of concern for the predicament that she was in, lust in response to the kisses and irritation at the fact that the inevitable break in the relationship was going to have to wait until her situation was sorted out. I found myself thinking back on that dream the more times I listened to It’s a Wonderful Lie by Arcwelder.
It’s a Wonderful Lie was recorded for the Minnesota band’s third album, Pull. Listening to the record, the dominating theme is one of romantic disintegration. Five of the 13 tracks, including It’s a Wonderful Lie, are about relationships crumbling, while the remainder trade in notions of doubt and lamentations about the masks people wear in relationships and the pretences that are maintained long after a relationship has gone past its use-by date. Only the penultimate track, Finish My Song, admits to any need for love and comfort in the arms of another.
As the lyrics to It’s a Wonderful Lie make clear - and you’ll need to read them because Scott Macdonald’s vocal is indecipherable for large parts of the song - the protagonist is ready to quit a relationship which seems to be giving them diminishing returns of enjoyment. What’s interesting about this to me, and why I’ve been reminded about my dream of a relationship with a ditz, is that the lyrics play out like a line by line conversation between the dominant and the submissive halves in a relationship at the point where they are both facing up to the end of the relationship. There’s even the possibility that Macdonald represents the ditzy one in this couple, having to justify themself in the face of the other’s perceived superiority, while attempting to fire back a few home truths of their own and trying to leave with their dignity intact.
My belief that this was a relationship founded on physical attraction is because of the line, I admit that it’s lust - frees my mind from thinking. What I find fascinating about the lyrics is that so many of the lines could be interchangeable in terms of who is saying them. Examples include:
Why do I try fighting against your indifference? - You’ll never be bright enough to understand me, will you?/You’ll never think me worthy of true love, will you?
I always say it’s OK. I was only lying the last time - I can tolerate your foolishness most of the time, but I don’t think I can anymore/Your harshness doesn’t bother me, but I think you’re getting harsher more often.
I always know when to quit, when I’ve overstayed my welcome - I think I need to move on/Maybe, you should move on, I’ll be OK.
I’m not unbreakable, sorry if I gave that impression - I can’t be what you want me to be.
There’s plenty more in a similar vein that’s open for joint interpretation, but the line Time to move on to bigger and better disasters feels like the crux of the song for them both. There’s every possibility that a split will see them both end up in a similar situation with another person in a year’s time. This feels born out in the song’s coda from 3:48 during which Macdonald repeatedly sings A speeding train and as the brittle driving riff that the song was formed around builds to a crescendo at the 4 minute mark, I can see both myself and my ditz - or Macdonald and his alpha - all of us stood, paralysed in the door frame which could lead either to freedom or disaster and us reacting by clasping the other and collapsing to the floor in a welter of frenzied, desperate kisses. Needing to quit, but too dependent on the other to do so.
Staggeringly good stuff and comfortably the best track on the Pull LP.
Music for night owls - John Peel after playing this on 27/3/93.
Featuring “live percussion & vibes”, I feel that Funk You Very Much, is an inaccurate title for what we get to hear on this track. I’d have gone with Sam-Bang, Thank You, Ma’am, given that the track sounds as close in style to fast paced Latin Music as it does to Funk, especially from around 1:48.
Funk You Very Much is not in and of itself, an original piece of music. Rather, it is a remix - by Jon Williams - of an Ultraviolet Catastrophe track called The Trip. Funk You Very Much found itself on a 12-inch of remixes of The Trip, all of which were given alternative titles. Of these, Funk You Very Much is the catchiest, Trip Harder is the most energetic and Twisted Twinkle is the most inventive. But it was Trip Harder which earned the men behind The Ultraviolet Catastrophe a windfall when The Chemical Brothers included it on their 1998 mix compilation album, Brothers Gonna Work It Out.
I’ve just finished listening to Peel’s Radio 1 show from 18 June 1993, which featured a second session from Huggy Bear. On this 26/3/93 show, Peel was sent a review of their show at the 1 in 12 Club, Bradford by listener, Mark Anthony. He called them “Gods of the stage.” I would have been in full agreement at the time, but I have to report that I found their second Peel Session less impressive than their other work. More on that in a year or two’s time….
During a phone call in the week to his friend, Hameesh, Peel had been asked if knew what had happened to the band, Slint. With exquisite timing, the following day’s post brought a record by The Palace Brothers which featured three members of Slint as part of its lineup. Peel duly played Ohio River Boat Song to celebrate.
The programme also featured a reminder of the days before mobile phones in that Peel had to read out a message on the off-chance that a listener called Nigel Stevens may be tuned in and would contact Hayes Police Station.
The selections were taken from a 90 minute section of the show. Two of my original choices fell from favour:
PJ Harvey - 50ft Queenie - I do have other selections from her Rid of Me period down for appraisal as we move through 1993, and I remember this track as the one which first gained her widespread exposure as it crept in the Top 30 of the UK Singles Chart. However, I have an uneasy feeling that most of those choices will go through the same second thoughts as this one. The problem for me is I dislike the way Polly Jean sounds in this era. Someone, maybe Steve Albini who produced Rid of Me, clearly told her, “Hey, you know Sheela-Na-Gig? Well, sing it like that but with a Somerset meets Louisiana vibe”. It sounds fake, grating and too much like the sound of people trying to fit a unique artist into the prevailing sound of the time. Once she dumped all of that, Harvey went back, at least to my ears, to being the compelling musical presence she had been two years earlier.
Long time readers of this blog will know what a John Peel/Me split in one of these posts means. I was back on stage. Tonight was the first of a two night run for Equus at Falmouth Poly. I will provide more details on this when we round up the 27/3/93 show.
In prepping this post, I’ve spent most of the morning listening to the music of Gosport band, Action Painting!, who put out 3 singles on Sarah Records between 1990 & 1993. By quite some distance, Sensation No.5 is the least distinguished and interesting of the tracks I heard. In it, Action Painting! replace their usual acerbic storytelling style, with a simple count-up of sensations from No. 1 to No. 10, before rounding the lists off with 2 separate tag-lines. It doesn’t seem as though the band rated the tune much either, given that they left it off their 2018 compilation, Trial Cuts (1989-95).
So why have I included it? In large part, down to assumptions that I made while browsing the photos on the Classical Music EP, which Sensation No.5 was part of.
To my eyes, the band all looked like they were barely out of school when they recorded it, with several of them parading ferocious early-90s fringes, which disprove the theory that nothing has changed in English grooming over the last 30 years. With these images in mind, I heard the count through the sensations ending in the respective taglines of All the girls around you scream to me and then All the boys around you smile at me suggesting one of two things for what the song was about:
a) A tour through a drug trip, with there being 10 levels of sensation/consciousness to go through. The girls can’t hack it; the boys just feel blissed throughout. The song ends on Sensation No.1, which suggests everyone has reached the comedown point.
b) The more interesting interpretation is that the sensations refer to burgeoning sexual experiences and the progression from kissing to touching and then the building senses of intimacy that end with sexual intercourse and orgasm. For the girls this leads to screams of pleasure (or pain), for the boys it leads to smiles of pleasure.
It’s also possible that the singer is supplying these sensations to both genders, thus lending the song a bisexual subtext, or it could be a treatise on puberty and the move from childhood to adulthood. For the girls, this includes menstruation with all its physical and psychological pains - hence why all the girls scream. For the boys, this leads to masturbation followed by more masturbation and for the lucky ones, sexual experience with another person. No wonder they’re smiling.
I suspect it’s actually drug related, especially given that this 2018 Louder Than War Interview with frontman Andy Hitchcock suggests that the band members were well past puberty by the time they started their work as a band. Nevertheless, the fact that something which sounds like nothing more than a band-warmup could provoke so many theories in my mind as to what it was about suggests that there was genius at work, even in Action Painting!’s offcuts which would deserve to be preserved on any metaphorical mixtape.
When it comes to Guided by Voices, John Peel and I both have something in common. Namely, we discovered them a long time after everybody else. In my case, this ignorance was far longer than Peel’s had been. In the summer of 2001, during a spree of record buying, I bought a compilation CD called The Sound City Sessions, which had originally been given away in an October 1999 edition of Melody Maker. It showcased bands who had, at various times over the course of the 90s, played as part of Radio 1’s Sound City event, which was a precursor to their Big Weekend event.
Some of the performances on the CD were taken from the artists’ sets at Sound City gigs, including Oasis at Glasgow in 1994 and a performance of Supersonic, where the engineers put Noel Gallagher’s lead guitar so low in the mix that the whole performance is carried by Paul Arthurs’s rhythm guitar. We also got Garbage performing Dumb at Leeds in 1996, Reef performing End at Bristol in 1995, Travis performing Hazy Shades of Gold at Oxford in 1997 and future Peel favourites Ash performing Jack Names the Planets at Leeds in ‘96. As far as I’m concerned, the CD justifies its existence because its tracklisting includes Gangsters by Longpigs, but it also introduced me to Guided by Voices who were due to perform at the Sound City event being held in October ‘99 at Liverpool. The track they had on there was Teenage FBI, which I thought was OK, but didn’t really inspire me to go much further given that it appeared to be modelling itself on the work of The Supernaturals. In my ignorance, I assumed that Guided by Voices were a “new” late-90s band who hadn’t got further than the stereo in the Melody Maker office. It was only in subsequent years that I discovered just how far back they went - formed in 1983, first records released in the mid-80s - and, indeed, they had been so busy and productive that by the time Peel discovered them around February 1993, they had retired from live performances and were onto their fifth album, Propeller, from which Weedking was taken.
I was also to discover that the sound on Teenage FBI and its accompanying album, Do the Collapse, were considered to be unrepresentative of what a Guided by Voices record “should” sound like. If someone had played Weedking and Teenage FBI to me in 2001 and asked me to guess who they were by, I would have probably answered with two different bands. Teenage FBI sounds glossy, shiny and hopeful of getting the listener’s attention, but Weedking sounds monolithic, slightly prog and mythical. It’s quite the trick to go from sounding like grizzled rockers to preppy pop stars in 7 years, but having listened to both the Propeller and Do the Collapse LPs over the last two days, they both share what I consider to be core elements of Guided By Voices music:
1) Psychedelic poetry which tells the listener nothing specific, but somehow transports them to the place, time and emotion that their tracks are set in.
2) A sense that everything they put out is considered, solid and complete. Propeller features maybe half a dozen tracks that could have fit in next to the smoothly produced tracks on Do the Collapse. The rest of its content is lo-fi, sketchy and immediate. As if the band set their 4-track to record wherever they were, grabbed the instrument closet to them, and recorded the song. But although the recordings may feel haphazard, the songs themselves never seem unfinished or ill-fitting. It’s as if they instinctively know which tracks need extensive colouring/layering and which can be presented in a basic form. Regardless, the songs are ready for you to hear.*
As far as 1) goes, for me Weedking sounds as though it is a song about the thrill of discovering rock music and the even greater thrill of being able to play it. Robert Pollard spent part of his mid-1970s teens playing in a heavy metal covers band and going to concerts. The titans of heavy metal guitar playing, as referenced in the opening verse, appear to inspire Pollard - We conjure ghosts and then we feed them - and the remainder of the song sounds like a procession through the joy of making music, improving your ability, hanging out with friends and like-minded people, going to shows until the musicians reach their logical endpoint: lighting up a joint and using it to set a state of mind from which to create music and sing your songs.
For the dreams of the weedking, we all sing.
It’s also possible that the song was meant as a farewell to rock music. Over the course of a decade, Guided by Voices had struggled to attract much interest, and by the time they came to record the Propeller LP, they had quit live performance and were putting out Propeller as a farewell record. Just in time, the record picked up some attention and Guided by Voices carried on into the present day.
Video courtesy of stonedcomedianringo.
Lyrics are copyright of Robert Pollard.
*I appreciate that I’ve only heard 2 out of 40 studio albums that the band have put out, so if you do know of examples in their discography where they’ve succumbed to a “that’ll do” sensibility, please leave a comment.
