This was the last of the Jakki Brambles cover shows that I listened to. The show on Friday 9 April was split into a series of smaller, shorter files, and as I’d got the point by the Thursday, I was content to skip that one and go onto Peel’s Friday evening show, which will serve as the starting point to soundtrack my next production, Guys and Dolls.
Compared to shows from earlier in the week, there’s less records to get enthused about and little in the way of extraneous excitement too. I felt that this programme saw Peel lumbered with the worst record that he had to play from the daytime playlist, Still in Love by Go West, which didn’t do much with the record buying public either, as it stalled at Number 43 on the UK charts.
Peel’s selections for today included Split Personality by dc Basehead, which moved one of Brambles’s production team to note that it sounded like The Smurf Song, and I have to say, I think they were on to something there.
Selections I would have included on the metaphorical mixtape, would have been:
The Fall - Lost in Music
Video courtesy of The Fall
We live in challenging times. A couple of weeks ago, I heard people throwing around the threat of nuclear war because of the latest hardware use developments in the Ukraine War as casually as the threat to clamp a car which had parked in a residents only area. The potential saviour in all this is supposed to be Donald Trump, presumably once he’s finished being a dictator on day 1 of his return to the US presidency; a reminder that January really can suck. And to compound the feeling of depression and desolation, The Annotated Fall website has been deleted! A consolation is that the deletion has been a surprise to the person running it, so hopefully it will be back up and running again soon. I certainly hope so as the prospect of having to decipher Mark E. Smith’s lyrics, without assistance, fills me with gloom.
Thankfully, little verbal safecracking is required here in The Fall’s splendid cover of Lost in Music. Originally, a hit for Sister Sledge in 1979, it was recorded by The Fall for their new album, The Infotainment Scan. This recording also features The Fall making use of an instrument which they seemed to utilise more effectively than any other artist: the answerphone. In The Birmingham School of Business School, Smith used it demonstrate how underwhelmed he was by the performance of the band’s manager. Here, the answerphone is used to set the track up with Smith getting through to a French woman and leaving a typically cryptic message, partially in French but also noting that “The palace of excess is the palace of access.” I had initially considered this version to be fairly faithful in spirit to the original, albeit with Smith’s brief digressions on refurbished pubs serving as a reminder that disco night in Prestwich was a million miles away in spirit from a night at Wigan Casino. But listening to it more closely, I think the key to this version is the cacophony of telephone voices chirping away in the background through the first half of the song. The music that Smith gets lost in is the symphony of voices and lives that he overhears while working at a telephone exchange. Or maybe he had an old TV set like I did in the late 1980s which if you hit the channel buttons incorrectly, would go to static, but be able to pick up on telephone conversations. I listened to some absolutely blazing rows and breakups on occasion.
The track is bookended by an odd sound effect which sounds as though The Fall are being absorbed into the tripods from The War of the Worlds, but here reflects the way that the prattle of modern life can overwhelm us.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Day Tripper [Top Gear Session]
Video courtesy of belfastorbust.
Recorded by The Jimi Hendrix Experience for Top Gear on 15 December 1967, for broadcast on the Christmas Eve edition, which Peel co-hosted with Tommy Vance, this was played by Peel, 26 years later, as his segue out of a traffic bulletin. We actually get one and a quarter Beatles covers for our money here, as the opening seconds catch the band playing the riff from I Want to Tell You. Once Hendrix chocks into the Day Tripper riff, the Experience make the track their own. It’s a genuine band performance as well given that large parts of the vocals are handled either by a double-tracked Noel Redding or with support from Mitch Mitchell. Debate has always raged as to whether The Beatles original was written about weekend hippies or a sexual tease. The Experience make it into a full-on acid anthem, but bring it back to Earth within 3 and a half minutes. I’ve always been slightly ambivalent towards Hendrix as I think that his, and Eric Clapton’s virtuosity opened the door to a lot of self-indulgent guitar rock, but here he sounds just what he was in 1967 - the most exciting musician of the year.
Jamiroquai - Too Young to Die
Video courtesy of JamiroquaiVEVO
Musically, Too Young to Die is packed with ideas that sweep you along. We’re greeted at the door by strings, a blast of slinky brass takes our coat, there are gorgeous keyboard lines spiralling down from the sky above you, funk basslines tracing every step you make across the floor, subtle wah-wah guitar kissing your ears. And enveloping the whole thing, the reincarnation of Stevie Wonder delivering an updated version of Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology). No wonder they stood out like a beacon of brilliance at the time.
All that being said, this track was as far as my admiration for them went. Something restrained me from buying the Emergency on Planet Earth album. I felt somehow that the sumptuous excess of Too Young to Die would pall if stretched to LP length. I was also looking for pop stars that I could relate to as well, and there was something about Jay Kay and those extraordinary hats of his which felt distancing. Then Britpop happened and gave me what I was looking for both musically and socially, so Jamiroquai dropped off my radar. Not literally of course given some of the enormous hits they had in the second half of the 90s, but none of Cosmic Girl/Deeper Underground etc ever felt as involving as Too Young to Die.
Mica Paris - I Never Felt Like This Before
Video courtesy of CharmeMusicAmbire.
I was reading recently that a couple of pop stars who made their names in the mid to late Noughties, are now using OnlyFans accounts to top up their finances. Kate Nash is using money raised from selling pictures of her bottom to subsidise costs for her next tour. Meanwhile, Lily Allen is using it to sell pictures of her feet. It got me thinking that when times get hard for female pop stars, there’s always nudity to fall back on. In Mica Paris’s case, she didn’t have the ease of access to an OnlyFans account, instead she had to take part in a television programme. Do you remember that she co-hosted What Not to Wear in its final two series? I think it was on that show that I saw her sit down to have lunch with the partner of one of the women that the show was helping. Nothing out of the ordinary about that, except for some reason Paris and the partner were lunching in the nude, albeit with tastefully arranged table settings preserving her modesty.
I wonder whether, during a break in filming, Paris’s mind drifted back to memories of recording videos in the Caribbean, as was the case with I Never Felt Like This Before, instead of sitting, topless, in a semi-detached house in Bromsgrove, having lunch with the partner of a woman with terrible dress sense. The fall from the pop heights always seems to take female performers to less edifying new gigs than it does to the male ones, doesn’t it?
Let Loose - Crazy For You
Video courtesy of Mark Remington
The Man Ezeke had taken his Radio 1 Easter egg hunt to Luton today. Indeed, the one thing I regret about not listening to Peel’s final show covering for Brambles, is that I don’t know where Ezeke finished his Easter egg tour on Good Friday, or whether he went all the way through to Easter Monday. This itinerary would have been possible surely:
Friday - Portsmouth
Saturday - Bristol
Sunday - Plymouth
Monday - Penzance
Any Cornish readers will, naturally be scoffing at that last destination. Radio 1 brought its roadshow to several Cornish towns, including my hometown on a couple of occasions, but they would never have bothered to pop down past the Tamar Bridge unless they were properly making a morning of it. The thought of, say Shampoo - shortly to feature on Peel’s night time playlists - hoicking themselves down to St Austell for Ezeke to ask them their names and what they did seems absurd.
Nevertheless, Let Loose dutifully trooped up to Luton in order to get their debut single, Crazy For You, played on the radio. This is the original version of it, which opens with a brief scat rap instead of the better known piano hook. The trip worked out slightly better for Let Loose than it had for Oui 3 the previous day, given that this version only just missed out on a Top 40 placing. Crazy For You was palpably the best record played in any of the Ezeke slots that I heard, and this was born out when a re-issue of it, with the piano more heavily prominent, got to Number 2 in the UK charts, a year later. This would start Let Loose off on a brief, intense, but very successful career.
Had I been asked to contribute to any of the 30 year retrospectives on British pop music in 1994, I’d have used my 750 words to put forward my thesis that if Oasis represented the 1966 Beatles in ‘94, then Let Loose represented the 1964 Beatles in ‘94. After all, they were hailed as the teenypop band that played their own instruments - and watching the videos has given me bad flashbacks as to how much I used to get irritated by drummer Lee Murray’s right-hand drumstick twirl - and I could comfortably see Crazy For You nestling onto A Hard Day’s Night or Beatles For Sale. The theory falls down though when we consider that in 1994, Oasis were as much Beatles ‘63 as they were Beatles ‘66. After all, what was Live Forever but She Loves You for the 90s.
The success of the Crazy For You re-release propelled Let Loose into a two-year spell of success, which saw them enjoy six further Top 30 hits, with four of those getting into the Top 12. By 1996, they had split, but given that the identikit Australian act, Savage Garden appeared almost immediately after Let Loose went their separate ways, I’m convinced that all Savage Garden records were made by Let Loose and they sent Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones out as their public faces, almost like Gorillaz, but minus an animation budget.
Lovecraft - Medicine
Video courtesy of staceyconer
It’s the mainstream’s loss because this is a terrific record, but I suspect that the heavily drug laden lyrics killed off any chance of getting much exposure outside of Peel’s play of it. The first half of the record alludes to marijuana (baby Jane), cocaine (sugar), acid (pink butterfly) and heroin (water drops and blank walls). The title alone gives the game away too as I suspect that the medicine in question isn’t Lemsip. And in case we aren’t getting the message, the She took it all/ She took everything/She took anything refrain batters the point home. But having gone on a drug tour in its first half, the second half of the track flips things around and sounds as though as it’s reflecting someone going through cold turkey:
She’s counting the cracks on the blank walls.
And she’s singing a song about Jesus.
Says he going to save our souls.
It’s an attempt at escaping the clutches of addiction, but as the song progresses, we are shown how difficult this is to do and the temptations that remain on offer. The spiralling guitar line over the last 30 seconds also shows how Gimme Shelter remained the go-to inspiration for conveying decadence and desperation in early 1993.
Peel might have been wrong in predicting that Medicine would take Lovecraft into the charts, but a year later, Primal Scream got to Number 7 in the charts with Rocks, which sounds very similar to Medicine and a little more cannily put together so as to ensure it got played across the whole of Radio 1’s schedule. The Rolling Stones were clearly a big influence on Primal Scream, and they may well have provided inspiration for the title of Primal Scream’s biggest hit to that time, but inspiration for the melody of it may very well have come from Lovecraft.
Elmore James - Dust My Broom
Video courtesy of Vernons
Although Dust My Broom doesn’t quite hit the heights of Stranger Blues, it comes at the listener with such swagger, drive and bravado that you can’t do anything but be carried along by it. Based, as so many blues tunes are, on a Robert Johnson recording from 1936 called I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom, it bulks out the sound from Johnson’s original with James’s explosive slide guitar and the brass section putting across the grindingly relentless sound of a man on the move from one place to the next, searching for something he cannot seem to find. In fact, so good is the performance that it pulls off the accomplishment of distracting the audience from noticing that the lyrics make no sense. He wants to move on in order to not break up his home? Oh, and down with prostitutes while we’re at it. Maybe, the vote needs to go to a recount…but not today.
The Teardrop Explodes - Reward
Video courtesy of whammo64
Just why were so many British pop groups spending their time in late 1980 recording songs for release in early 1981 with the intention of scaring the shit out of the infant me? If it wasn’t Ultravox seemingly trying to chide me for insisting that I would only go to bed if I was allowed to have a radio on in my room, then I also had to put up with Reward by The Teardrop Explodes, which got to Number 6 in early 1981, and despite being less austere and chilly than Vienna was, it continues to give me mild anxiety to this day. And when I was 5, it sounded like trouble was going to come bursting into the house at any minute. That iconic trumpet refrain that powers the song along sounds like a metropolis undergoing a collective panic attack. I’m always surprised to see that it was a winter release, it’s always sounded to me like the packed streets of Paris in the middle of a heatwave, with the brass echoing the blare of a thousand car horns, all desperate to get somewhere, but only able to travel perpetually around the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe, until by the end of the song, everyone simultaneously explodes into a mass pile up.
While the music may have been Parisian in flavour, the lyrics take on a decidedly early 80s British dystopian feel. It was never specified quite what the reward of the song’s title was, but considering that 1981 would see Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe propose that The Teardrop Explodes home city of Liverpool should be taken into managed decline, it presents a disturbing image of a generation, and by extension, whole communities, being offered some form of numbing placebo as their lives are gently wound down into some form of aimless meaninglessness. In that context, the frantic, furious pace and tone of Reward suggests not just anxiety, but also fight and defiance. And that, I think, was what contributed to it being the hit that it was.
Garnett Silk - Jah Jah is the Ruler
Video courtesy of Garnett Silk - Topic
Almost…
DJ Dick - Silver Surfer
Video courtesy of freeze84
I left this until last, because I was initially going to list it as a track which fell from favour with me. But having just listened to it again so that I could articulate my reasons why I was going to reject it - the underwhelming first half of the track - I found that once Silver Surfer kicks into high gear at the 1:38 mark, it rewards the patience required to get there. A borderline inclusion, but one I’m happy to have onboard.
And with that, we bid goodbye to John Peel’s dalliance with daytime radio. His next cover assignments would be for former Peel Session producer, Mark Radcliffe, though this would be in the familiar 10pm to midnight slot, which Peel would re-inherit in 1997 when Radcliffe was moved to the breakfast show.
I have to say I’m looking forward to getting back to blogging about 1 track per post. The blog will return in January, probably with a bluesky account to promote as well. Until then, my thanks to all those who put up the audio files and videos which allow me to do this blog, special thanks to ubermensch Webbie for coming through with requests, and thanks to any of you who read this.
Wishing you all a merry Christmas, and I’ll see you in the new year.
