Guys and Dolls: Pitchshifter - Peel Session (1 May 1993)

 

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Well, I don’t know, children. My Christmas break starts on Saturday 20 December, and it’s not inconceivable that I’ll get another blogpost in before Christmas Day, but if I don’t, I hope you’ll embrace the spirit of the season, crack open a bottle of Baileys and round off your festive preparations to the growling, grand sound of Pitchshifter with their second and final Peel Session. The band recorded three tracks for the session, which are presented here in the order that they appeared on the 1/5/93 show.

Although Pitchshifter have featured on this blog before - more on that in a moment - I’ve always been rather dismissive of them. I didn’t even know who they were until 2002 when I saw a tour dates advert for them in one of the music monthlies and thought they looked like just another emo band.  But this session has shown me how good they were and why they have lasted to the present day. I know that their style has changed and they’ve incorporated many new influences over the years, but this session catches them firmly in their Industrial metal pomp - which appears to have been when Peel was most enthused by them - and demonstrates that if the world had been brave enough to embrace them, they could have been a genuine cultural phenomenon. The songs here manage to be both extreme and accessible.  Two years after this Peel Session, the band became the first in the history of the Phoenix Festival to have to finish a set early due to a stage invasion. Had someone given them a genuine push, the quality of the music should have merited nothing less than full-on Beatlemania.

If we stretch that theory to its fullest point, does that make session opener (A Higher Form of) Killing stand as Pitchshifter’s version of Revolution 9? Or maybe it’s their Give Peace a Chance… 

The title phrase was coined by a German chemist called Fritz Haber, who was a leading figure in the development of early chemical weapons as used in World War I. It’s one of those bizarre ironies that a man who played a prominent role in developing a creeping killer (poison gas) on the battlefield would end up being awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in the final year of the war - although this was not for his work with weapons but rather the development of a process which assisted global food production. 

In the context of Pitchshifter’s song, the phrase Never look back, never look back speaks of the way in which use of these forms of weapon almost seems to liberate the soldiers themselves from being active participants in the killing of others. I’ve never had to do it myself of course but firing a shell from a distance, which is loaded  with poisonous gas and which you know will cause death/severe harm to those it detonates close to, has to be less psychologically confronting than looking someone in the eye and mowing them down with a gun. As with drone warfare nowadays, when you’re watching someone get killed through a laptop screen, perhaps it stings a little less to be ending a life when you’re two miles away from the killing. And as a result, you try and use the equipment more strategically and in areas where it can cause maximum casualties. On with the spree, indeed. The piledriving drumming brings the feel of heavy artillery and the stretched guitar notes sound like White phosphorus bombs being blasted out across the skies. It’s the sound of a war spread across 4 minutes and 56 seconds: Terrifying, destructive, relentless and awesome.

Ironically, the band’s timing was off given that in January 1993, the Chemical Weapons Convention was signed off by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It came into effect in April 1997 and prohibited the development, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. Currently, 193 countries remain signed up to this treaty.

The second track, Diable, moves the topic from killing to living. Starting out like an industrial metal cover of  Welcome to the Pleasuredome by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the track is built around a sample in which we’re reminded of how transient life is. The metaphor switches from a drop in a bucket to a light in the universe to a temporary vapour. Our lives may be full of meaning and hope to us, but they will come and go in line with most organic phenomena. However, our souls are what will endure and JS Clayden’s vocal makes clear that the devil holds more of them than God does. In lines like:

Sit back, relax. Forget it.

Can’t hate me like I do.

I know me better.

Sit back, relax, don’t sweat it. Forget it.

the implication is that what we do in our lives is an irrelevance. Any attempt to lead a good and just life is doomed to fail, because somewhere along the line, we’ll slip up and find ourselves one of the Devil’s converts. So, relax, accept your fate and don’t let it upset you. It’s the kind of tempting line of thought that could persuade someone to give their lives over to a more persuasive force. 

Pitchshifter subtitled this version of Diable as the Wayco Survival Mix. They recorded the session on 30 March, 1993, about three weeks before the fiery end of the Waco siege and it’s entirely possible that the band had David Koresh in mind as the central figure of the song. Koresh believed himself to be a reincarnation of the Lamb of God, and what was the devil but a formerly beloved angel. Any religious cult relies on building its numbers by reaching out to the demotivated and disappointed, by encouraging them to believe that they’ll be on the winning side when the apocalypse comes, and to put their trust in someone who knows what’s best for them. The achievement of Diable is the way it manages to combine both fire and brimstone with a certain air of Bacchanalia.

The first two tracks previewed content which would feature on Pitchshifter’s next album, “desensitized”, released in December 1993. They closed the session with an oldie, Deconstruction (Reconstruction), taken from their Submit EP.  It’s already been covered on this blog when Peel played the studio version, 51 weeks earlier. Back then, it was only known as Deconstruction.  It’s included here for the sake of completeness and it’s great to hear it, but if you’re looking at the appended Reconstruction subtitle and expecting some kind of reimagining of the original, you’ll be disappointed. The session version is a minute longer than that on Submit, but the additions amount to little more than some backwards hi-hat tapes and an echoing descending guitar line through the final 25 seconds. I haven’t felt so ripped off since I heard the Tee Hee Hee Dub Mix of Teethgrinder by Therapy?

Videos courtesy of Eye.

Guys and Dolls: Razorblade Smile - Red Sleeping Beauty (1 May 1993)

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A word of advice to anyone feeling depressed about the current state of UK and world politics, you may like to pass on listening either to this cover of, or the original version of Red Sleeping Beauty; originally recorded by McCarthy in 1986 and here revived by Newcastle band, Razorblade Smile on their EP, Fastest Wide-Eyed Implement.  The guitars may try and kick things along, but what sticks in the mind and tickles the tear ducts is the She/He won’t wake me refrain, which in the context of the song, I think, is about the respective efforts of both Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock to kill off or dilute socialism as a means of waking the majority from their conditioning/slumber. In 2025, that line hits less because of its allusions to socialist/collectivist rhetoric, but more because it seems nobody is capable of turning back or repelling the forces of nationalism, far-right politics and creeping totalitarianism which too many “healthy” democracies seem to be sliding towards. The nightmare is playing out in front of us, but too many of the gatekeepers that were supposed to stop it from happening appear too lethargic to do anything, all while a jaded populace is shepherded towards being trained to accept ideologies which were once thought to be completely beyond the pale.

When McCarthy recorded the song, its roots as a song lamenting the withering of socialism as a mainstream ideology were inspired by two incidents: the Conservative Government coming out on top at the end of the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike and Labour leader, Neil Kinnock’s incendiary speech at the 1985 Labour Party Conference in which he excoriated the far-left elements of the party for being more interested in doctrine than they were in delivery, and highlighted how this had impacted on communities whose local authorities were run by Labour councils such as Liverpool, which at the time had strong links to the Militant movement.  I saw Kinnock give that speech, I’d love to claim that it heralded a political awakening in me, but the truth is I was at home, sick from school, and it was something to watch on the telly. At 9 years old, it all flew over my head, but I remember feeling some kind of sympathy for Derek Hatton, because Kinnock and most of the rest of the conference hall seemed to be targeting him, which felt a little unfair to me. Of course, I wasn’t living under a Hatton controlled council, but I suppose you could say that those childlike instincts of compassion for an underdog were what led me to embrace Jeremy Corbyn 30 odd years later.

I can only speculate as to why Razorblade Smile chose to revive the song at this time. An attempt to cheer themselves up about the result of the 1992 UK General Election result?  Scepticism about John Smith’s socialist credentials? If it was the latter, they would have been better served to wait either until the New Labour project was up and running under Tony Blair, or for the post-Corbyn purges which Keir Starmer threw himself into after his bait and switch campaign to become Labour leader. We’ll never know whether Smith would have used an election campaign to present what he stood for, instead of using it to define what he wasn’t, but I think Razorblade Smile could see the direction of travel when they recorded this. Conviction on its own might only take you so far, but electability without conviction only ends up disappointing everybody.

Despite the melancholy alluded to earlier, and the vicissitudes of UK and world politics over the ensuing years; a period which has seen socialism wane, wax, wane again and currently find itself trying to negotiate a morass of its own making, Red Sleeping Beauty ends on a note of defiance, by expressing a sentiment, which anyone dedicating themself to a world of improved opportunity and social justice should have tattooed on their chest or hanging over their front door:

While there’s still a world to win.

My red dream is everything.

It’s difficult to remember it sometimes given the ongoing nastiness and depravity that the world inflicts on us in the 21st Century, but the world is always there to be won if we are prepared to fight for it. And hold on to your dreams, even if everything else is being torn away. You’re never truly without means if you still hold a dream.

Red Sleeping Beauty’s influence lived on. It was covered by Manic Street Preachers as a b-side to their 2007 single, Autumnsong, while the Swedish band of the same name continue to endure after 36 years. Razorblade Smile though, checked out after releasing Fastest Wide-Eyed Implement.

Excerpts from Neil Kinnock’s speech to the Labour Party Conference in 1985. Whether you agree with him or not, it remains one of the most important and influential political speeches of the last 40 years:

Video courtesy of Heinz Brossolat (Razorblade Smile) and valprogify (Kinnock).

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Psilocybin - Rip Off (1 May 1993)

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158 beats per minute? Well, if you insist. - John Peel after playing Rip Off on 1/5/93.

Peel may well have been making a virtue of the frantic bpm on this piece of acid techno, but I find myself drawn to its more orderly qualities. The squelches and burbles of the first two and a half minutes sound like things being picked apart and broken down. It’s not unpleasant to listen to particularly, but it is gnarly, and gives off a sense that your state of mind is kinked and warped. That the pressures and strains of everyday life will chip away at your composure. This is set in from the moment you wake up until you go to bed. 

But if that sounds depressing, it’s all put into glorious perspective by the recurring moment of pure synesthesia at 2:38, 3:33 and finally from 5:17 that sound like a broken universe, or a fractured state of mind urgently putting itself back together again. A jigsaw puzzle magically completing itself. Out of chaos, we get order again. 

It’s a banger, I grant you, and yet somehow also one of the most meditative tunes I’ve heard in a while. This could be deliberate on the part of Oliver Lieb and Jorg Henze, the men behind Psilocybin given that the other two tracks which made up the Sub-Level 6 EP alongside Rip Off contain 160 and 170 beats per minute, respectively. And should the onset of winter and the approach of Christmas have you wishing to get your mind completely blitzed, then please turn the title track up loud.

Video courtesy of GermsGems.

Guys and Dolls: Voodoo Queens - Peel Session (1 May 1993)

 

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A repeat of Voodoo Queens’ first Peel Session, which was originally broadcast on 22 January 1993.  The video captures the songs in the order they were first broadcast. On the file I heard from 1/5/93, the first three songs were broadcast as Kenuwee Head (Dude Idol), Princess of the Voodoo Beat and Supermodel - Superficial. Summer Sun wasn’t included on the file I’ve heard, but I would have definitely included it on the metaphorical mixtape, so I’ve stretched the rules a little and included the full session in this blogpost.

It’s an all-female British* band, playing in a sloppy, punky style and delivering four songs dripping with humour, attitude and power, so inevitably Peel found himself comparing the effect that the session had on him to the one recorded for him by The Slits in 1977. It doesn’t quite touch those heights for me, but I love this session for its range and scope. In a little under 12 minutes, Voodoo Queens touch on lust, self-confidence, sexual awareness and contemporary feminism, with four songs which sound to me indicative not just of attitudes and fashions in the early 90s, but of something closer to young adult experience.

Session opener, Kenuwee Head (Dude Idol) spends most of its time venerating Keanu Reeves. The sleeve notes of the single describe him as …at present (ruling) hornyville, hunksville & any other yummyville. And the lyrics lift references from some of his films with mentions of how bodacious he looks (Bill and Ted), as well as talk about how good he looks in a wetsuit (Point Break). However, he appears to have broken Anjali Bhatia’s heart by cutting his hair, presumably for his performance as Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. What really seems to mark Keanu out is that he wears his attractiveness so naturally. The sleevenotes for the Kenuwee Head single go on to attack men who wear their handsomeness  like a badge of honour, as if demanding instant respect and acclaim. I wonder if there’s a version of the song somewhere that marries the two viewpoints together.  Nevertheless, the Keanu, Kananoo, Kenuwee, Kanu-nu. How do you say your name? refrain serves to remind us that back in the day, Reeves was the original Tiffany Chevrolet….

Summer Sun is my favourite track from the session. Listening to it today, it sounds like a piece of enjoyable sunshine pop, but had I heard it in May 1993, it would have felt like something that was plugged directly into my psyche at the time. I was really enjoying life back then. Although my college course was seeing people drop out of it like tenpins, I was still happy to go in each day.  Joining The Young Generation had expanded my social life, and we were working on a wonderful show. I was still soaking up the first flush of being able to do things that had previously been out of bounds - and in legal terms, still should have been until March 1994 - like going to pubs and nightclubs. I’d even made peace with where my family was living. In short, I felt comfortable in my skin at this time and lines like:

Summer sun, look at me

I’ve got the world

Here I come.

Stars in the sky

You think you’re special,

Well, so am I.

really chimed with me. It’s a seize the day tune from a period of my life when I genuinely related to those sentiments. However, while they’re spreading these good vibes, Voodoo Queens are savvy enough to realise that this can be a transient state:  The world is waiting for me/Roll out the river carpet is a warning that the minute we start to think we’re able to walk on water is when we’ll end up plummeting underwater. I was a way off that in May 1993, but due to various incremental factors, I found myself desperately having to swim for around 18 months from September ‘93 onwards - which by strange coincidence is where my Peel listening is currently up to…. But that’s for another time. For now, as it was then, nothing can dilute the lifeforce which Summer Sun provides.

The good times keep coming in Princess of the Voodoo Beat, which sees Anjali Bhatia make a journey of sexual self discovery, as she realises that being a young woman she can exercise power over young men, hypnotised by the power of female voodoo. If I may be permitted a brief moment to speak on behalf of all heterosexual men, if the girls practice their enticements, the boys will fall into line, 9 times out of 10:

They call her the Princess of the Voodoo Beat.

She’ll lure you into her den of heat.

And all the boys in the world will cry…

Voodoo Princess, she’s a natural high.

You can just hear the brotherhood, bleating, “It’s not our fault, we simply couldn’t resist!”  While Anjali does seem quietly amused at being able to metaphorically, bang the drum to make the little boys run, there’s an undercurrent of Riot grrrl disdain just below the surface. The scowled You…in some of the lines suggesting that she’s responding to the role of sexual temptress because men are too blinkered to cast her and every other woman as anything other than a potential sexual conquest. Ultimately, the song is about sexual control, but with a mutually beneficial strain of desire running through it. Whereas a song like Blow Dry by Huggy Bear uses female sensuality as a means of trapping men in their lust and harming them, Princess of the Voodoo Beat makes it clear that the voodoo of female sensuality is something which can offer the high of sexual release to the men, but that will be subservient to the high of sexual control enjoyed by the women. 

The session finishes with a version of the recent single, Supermodel - Superficial, which was covered here in greater detail when Peel played it on 9/4/93. It’s bite and ire burns even hotter in live form.

A glorious session indeed, no wonder Peel had them back in again, later that summer.  Unfortunately, timing issues meant I had to skip the original broadcast, while the repeat went out between productions, so won’t be covered here.

*Including a British based American.

Video courtesy of VibraCobra23

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Simba Wanyika - Mwongele (1 May 1993)

 

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1991 marked the 20th anniversary of the formation of the Tanzanian/Kenyan band Simba Wanyika, led by the Kinyonga brothers, Wilson & George. To celebrate, the band embarked on a lengthy world tour, during which time they picked a series of their favourite compositions from their career to re-record for an album called Pepea, which means Fly Away in Swahili. 

Mwongele acted as an opening tune both for the album and their live sets. The title translates as Talk to Him and the performance reflects the impassioned nature of the title, with Wilson Kinyonga sounding as though he’s trying urge some stubborn people to put their pride aside and communicate. The music too, which is performed in the Congolese rumba style, is equally edgy, with sudden, stabby riffs that feel like an aggrieved person trying to angrily make their point. The rumba lacks the lightness of soukous, it has a more pronounced bottom end, and although it’s perfectly danceable, in this track it feels darker in tone and intensity.  Even the final clatter of drums seems to suggest that a breakthrough in the stalemate hasn’t been found.

The tour and the Pepea LP were valedictory affairs. The celebrations had been overshadowed by the progressive deterioration in George Kinyonga’s health, which had been undermined since the late 1980s by bouts of tuberculosis and pneumonia. This latter condition would eventually take his life on Christmas Eve, 1992, at the age of 42. Simba Wanyika would formally split in 1995, when Wilson Kinyonga also passed away, aged 48.

Video courtesy of Billy Shitcheese.

Guys and Dolls: John Peel Show - Friday 23 April 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

Listening to this show, one gets the sense of John Peel being beset by issues on all sides. Some of them were self inflicted, such as the moment when he realised, around halfway through the programme that his playlist for tonight’s show was about 15 minutes shorter than it should have been: I’m either going to have to talk for a quarter of an hour or get Lynn Parsons to start a quarter of an hour earlier, I guess. I suspect I shall dip into the records I had scheduled for tomorrow evening.

The timing issue may have been caused by issues at home, given that Peel told the audience early on: I’m trying to do some serious parenting while playing you records. The two really don’t go together, it has to be said.

Externally, things weren’t much better, though at least he could laugh about how an attempt to help The Fall’s new American record label* out had ended up going south:

I got a phone call from the new label to which they are affiliated….and he said, “Listen, John, we’d love to have a quote from you to use in the marketing here.” Normally, I don’t get involved with these things but I thought, well it is the Fall and I’d like them to sell some records over there..I’m sure they do already.  So, I sat down and wrote a really, like, heartfelt thing. Cause obviously I care about the band and I wrote this stuff and I sent it off to them. And he was on the phone, saying, “John, this is really beautiful, we loved it here in the office. We just wondered if you could say something more along the lines of…” and then proceeded to give me 2 or 3 things that he would have liked me to have said. And I said, “No, I’ve told you what I think.” And he was really quite astonished that I wouldn’t allow him to make up quotes from me for marketing purposes. Most odd.

Just to compound the annoyances, the weather had also turned bad. Peel had programmed The Sun is Shining as recorded by Elmore James….which it was when I programmed it, but I drove into town from Stowmarket today over about a foot of water the whole way.

The selections for the show came from a full-length recording, and there was only one track that made my list which I was unable to share:

The Strookas - Wish You Were Here: Hailing from Maidstone and bringing with them an album called Deaf By Dawn, Wish You Were Here was an enjoyably melodic piece of punk rock. The band had been getting played by Mark Radcliffe, which Peel felt was recommendation enough, though he was also drawn  towards them for less tangible reasons: Lead singer, John Edwards looks like he might be the type of bloke who’d buy you a drink in a pub. First impressions clearly mattered to Peel, who let himself down shortly after playing Wish You Were Here by going on a scathing rant about a family he’d witnessed parking in a disabled space earlier in the week, while he waited to pick up Sheila from a French lesson at the local adult education centre. The crux of Peel’s rant was that having parked in the disabled space, a seemingly able-bodied family got out of the car. This all pre-dates the “Not all disabilities are visible” awareness  campaign. Nevertheless, Peel blundered on: 

They were the kind of people you thought, I bet you never, for a moment, a single one of you have ever been plagued by self-doubt. I mean presumably father, mother and a rather loathsome looking ten-year old child…You thought I know what you’re going to be like when you’re 19 or 20. I mean a real monster and a horrendous child. I wished I was the kind of person to have the courage while they were in the school…to go up and, like, urinate, in the petrol tank of the car. In fact, I’ll give you the number and you can do it yourself if you see it. No, I’d better not because it’s probably against the law.…But my goodness me, I do dislike people like that a great deal. 

To 21st Century ears, although Peel’s ire sounds justified, it makes him sound like the petty one. As the man himself would say, Most odd.

The Strookas had been recording intermittently since the mid-80s, with albums appearing on a very occasional basis into the late Noughties. Peel’s assessment of them as fun types appears to be borne out by some of their track titles. The 2008 compilation album of their 80s demos, Summer to Fall,  includes track titles such as Chatham Pout, Bobby Crush is Innocent and Indigestion (But It Might Be Heartburn).

There was one track in my original list of selections which fell from favour:

 

Terror Fabulous featuring Wayne Wonder - Talk ‘Bout: One of the things I have to battle with when blogging is hearing a piece of music that I’m drawn towards while simultaneously worrying about whether I’m going to be able to actually write about what draws me towards that piece. I don’t simply want to say, “I like this”, but equally, I never want to pass on a borderline inclusion because I’m thinking, “I don’t know what to write about this.” Such justifications battled for my attention when it came to considering this dancehall collaboration between deejay Terror Fabulous and singer Wayne Wonder. 

Talk ‘Bout seems to be addressing rumours about the faithfulness of the singer’s girlfriend. On the streets of the Caribbean, it did no good to a man’s reputation if he was with a woman who slept around. And for the woman herself it could mean public shaming, physical violence or murder being visited upon her. I wondered whether Terror Fabulous was the man trying to process the rumours and decide what he would do, with Wonder acting as a voice of reason, trying to dissuade Fabulous from doing something he may regret. 

The problem was I couldn’t tell from Fabulous’s patois, whether he was playing the part I thought he was, or providing support to Wayne Wonder’s arguments. But, there was the rub - my objections were how they would impact on my writing ahead of whether I actually liked the piece. 

Ultimately, it came down to the Patience Test. If I heard Talk ‘Bout on a mixtape, would I be happy to hear it, or would I be impatient to get past it to listen to other things? By a very slim margin, it failed the test.

Full tracklisting

*Matador

Guys and Dolls: Apogee - Inside Above (23 April 1993)

 

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Inside Above was the first track I heard when I listened to the file for this 23/4/93 Peel Show, but it wasn’t the first record on that night’s programme, and I wish it had been. The file cuts in during the opening seconds of the track and I hope that Peel didn’t announce it before playing it, because the opening 40 seconds are by turns intriguing and bewildering. Just where was this going to go? As it transitions from an early ringtone through what sounds like machinery being cranked into life, it has the feel of some bizarre, unwieldy invention, like a home-made aeroplane, being taken through its start-up procedure. Tonally, it sounds like a close relation to  Cumulus by Pram, but once Dan Curtin, the man behind Apogee, gets his invention up into the air, it soars and swoops into some exciting destinations over its near six minute running time.

Unlike the other tracks on the Tales From the 2nd Moon EP, which I all found to be a bit one-note, Inside Above features plenty of light and shade contrasts throughout. The flight metaphor seems particularly appropriate during the opening 80 seconds as the ticking beats click away alongside synth notes that sound  like the murkiness inside rainclouds.  We’re waiting to get above the cloud-line and into open sky. 

Once we do at around 1:20, it sounds like the equivalent of flight-time rush hour, as the synths get more ominous and the squelches sound like the chatter of a persistent air-traffic controller trying to talk the unexpectedly airborne plane through the jams of the air.

At 2:45, we’re back to the start-up sequence, which suggests that space in the sky has been found, but this temporary respite leads into my favourite part of the track around 3:20, when underpinned by spooky  minimoogs, what sounds like the world’s smallest samba band heralds what sounds like the plane’s moment to show its tricks. The synth brass is cheap and tacky, yes, but the brio with which it comes in appears to soundtrack the plane doing loops and corkscrew twists in the sky. It’s a brief moment of liberation before the ominous sound of flight-time rush hour crashes in again and the plane begins its descent back to ground. Does it make it back safely? The final collection of squelches and sound oscillation is ambiguous, but it was a hell of a flight while it lasted.

Video courtesy of Jazzy Groove Channel.

Guys and Dolls: Submarine - Fading/Jnr. Elvis/Tugboat [Peel Session] (23 April 1993)

 

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Buy this at Discogs

NOTE - Submarine’s Peel Session has not been made available yet, so the videos of the tracks are all taken from studio versions.

There’s an old joke about a little boy who joins a marching band. One day, the band is part of a parade in their town and as they march through the main street, every member of the band is leading off on their right foot, except for the little boy, who is leading off on his left foot. As the band goes by, the little boy’s mother turns to the person standing next to her and says, Well look at that, my little boy is the only one marching in step.

I’m reminded of that joke as I consider the work of Submarine, whose work over the early to mid-1990s met with very little in the way of commercial success. Having already released one of the singles of the year in Dinosaurs, this three track Peel Session, which included two songs that would feature on their eponymous 1994 debut album, shows that they were marching in one direction, while we were all marching in a different one. Our failure as an audience to follow them is a greater indictment of us than it is of them.

It’s debatable though whether Submarine would have been comfortable with mass adulation.  Singer/guitarist Neil Haydock was once seen furiously berating a punter who told him that they had enjoyed a Submarine concert given to an unresponsive audience in Aberdeen.  I can also see how easy it would have been for people to fall into the mindset of thinking that the band were trying to rip off The Verve, whose work at the time also leant heavily into dream pop and atmospherics. But, Submarine appeal to me more - and would have done then, as well - because they’re both more concise in what they do and more emotionally direct.

Take session opener, Fading, which has me hoping that - at the time of writing - I continue in the happy state of not having suffered a direct family bereavement, until the addition of more posts to this blog causes me to forget about Fading (though I suspect it will be a contender for a place on my 1993 Festive Fifty, when the time comes.) Its elegiac and heart-rending guitar riff leads us into a place where Haydock has been dreaming about someone he loved. The intensity of the dream is so strong, that even after waking, he can feel their presence and see them in the stars. In the Peel Session, the line I couldn’t stop myself  is followed by the word, crying. But the problem with dreams and starry skies is that time causes them to fade. If the subject of the song has died, it feels like Haydock is going through the stage of grief where they are trying to keep the memory of that person alive; a process which, in the words of the actress Natascha McElhone, feels like …blowing air into a balloon that deflates faster and faster each time.* The louder moments in the track suggest precisely that struggle. The Peel Session version didn’t include the brass section, which on the studio recording did a good job of diluting the sadness and suggesting that it is worth keeping memories alive as a way of providing comfort and happiness, as opposed to it being simply a form of life support for the one left behind. 

Another reading of the song is that it’s inspired by The Man Who Fell to Earth, with Haydock singing from the perspective of the alien, Thomas Newton, abandoned on Earth and unable to rescue his family on their dying, drought-ridden planet. The cover of Submarine’s album, features a drawing of a family of aliens walking together hand in hand across a landscape with their heads starting to catch fire. At the end of both the book and the film, Newton has recorded a message (in the book) and an album (in the film) which he hopes to broadcast back to his home planet for his family to hear. Fading could easily stand as an example of what Newton would want to tell his family.

Let’s move to Junior Elvis and find a place to die: Well when you phrase it like that, how can I refuse. It’s not quite so easy to get a handle on Jnr. Elvis in either of its versions, though as Haydock makes clear I’m half awake, so it follows that he may be talking in the non-sequiturs that we do when talking in our sleep. The bicycle’s shining on me knees as Jasper Carrott once put it, so If it ever stops raining, let’s buy an old car makes perfect sense in that context. However, If the sun keeps on shining, let’s find a place to stay speaks a much more universal language of love and a need for somewhere to call home.

The final song of the session, Tugboat, was a cover of a song originally recorded by Galaxie 500 for their debut album, 1988’s Today. To my ears, Tugboat sounds like a preppy reworking of Bob Dylan’s, All I Really Want To Do, with Dylan’s original list of verbs replaced with a list of collegiate activities that the narrator would be happy to miss out on so that they can provide emotional support to their friend, just as real tugboats help move larger vessels in the right direction. For their performance of the song, Submarine were joined by their  Ultimate label mate, Claire Lemmon, who provided the female backing vocals, in the same manner as Naomi Yang had done on the original recording. Submarine’s studio recording of Tugboat wound up as a b-side on a live version of Jodie Foster, a song about obsession.**

*In 2008, McElhone’s husband, Martin, died suddenly from a heart attack. He was 43 years old. The quote comes from Elizabeth Day’s review of Natascha’s 2010 memoir, After You: Letters of Love and Loss to a Husband and Father.

**Rock bands can’t give that poor woman a moment’s peace, can they?

Videos courtesy of South Coast Shot, simonx49 & jtl25.

All lyrics copyright of Neil Haydock.

Guys and Dolls: Unsane - HLL/Broke/Black Book (Vol II) [Peel Session] (23 April 1993)

 

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My three favourite tracks taken from a repeat of a session recorded by Unsane on 26 November, 1992 and first broadcast by Peel on 15 January 1993. It was their second Peel Session and owes its place here in large part to residual goodwill towards the slew of Unsane tracks that Peel included in his shows throughout December 1991. Indeed, it was only its unavailability on YouTube back in June 2015, that meant I couldn’t include the studio version of HLL when Peel included it as part of a quartet of tracks from their debut album which he played as a suite on 14 December, 1991.

HLL was the nostalgia cut in the session; Broke,  Black Book  (Vol II) and Body Bomb previewed material that the group would record for their 1994 album, Total Destruction. While HLL was a shot of distilled nihilism, Broke, with its I feel good refrain sounds curiously optimistic, though being Unsane, it’s unclear whether that good feeling is due to falling in love or embracing death. Certainly the shout of Now piss off! that follows the I feel good lines suggests that they don’t trust the world not to mess up their good feeling.

Black Book (Vol II) and Body Bomb, which I didn’t like enough to include, appear to be companion pieces.  The eponymous black book found by Chris Spencer contains details on how to make an explosive device, and Body Bomb, which you can hear on the full session dramatises its use. Leaving aside the tastelessness of it, I left Body Bomb off mainly because it lacked the spark and energy of the other three tracks, it was a bit lumbering in comparison. 

As ever, history ended up making some parts of a band’s discography seem grimly prophetic. Unsane recorded these tracks for Peel a few months before the World Trade Centre bombing of February 1993, while Black Book (Vol II) served as a reminder that America had plenty of angry and deranged individuals who saw their calling as being bringers of death via ammonium nitrate and fertiliser.  This 23/4/93 Peel show went out four days after the fiery end of the Waco siege, an act which later motivated Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to perpetrate the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in American history.

Video courtesy of VibraCobra23.

Guys and Dolls: The Fall - Ladybird (Green Grass) (23 April 1993)

 

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Well, The Annotated Fall is currently accessible again, through The Internet Archive. It was gratifying to read that they weren’t able to put forward any evidence that I was barking up the wrong tree with my take on what Service was about. Indeed, their own article on it saw them get as close as I’ve ever read on that site to saying, “We haven’t a clue what any of this is about.”

However, on Ladybird (Green Grass), the opening track of The Infotainment Scan, they and some of their contributors have been in accord with some of my opinions about the track. The title suggests a nursery rhyme, perhaps attaching itself to the 18th Century American rhyme Ladybird, Ladybird Fly Away Home, which implores the titular ladybird to fly back to its burning home to try and rescue its children.  But the main focus of the song appears to be about the Bosnian War, which had just passed its 1 year anniversary when this programme was broadcast. 

The references are both overt:

Green grass was purple black and speckled all around.

Round the ring, this Croat town

The gas was obnoxious

and more subtle, especially with the ongoing mentions of Pomerania - a region in the Baltic Sea, which splits between Germany and Poland.  The European version of Ladybird, Ladybird Fly Away Home replaces the burning home with something far more apocalyptic:

Cockchafer fly

Father is at war

Mother is in Pomerania

Pomerania is burnt down

Cockchafer fly

The war in question is the Thirty Years’ War which raged through Central Europe from 1618 to 1648. Of more recent relevance to The Fall would have been parallels between the war in Bosnia and Second World War atrocities such as the Wawer Massacre over Christmas 1939, which took place in the Polish side of Pomerania. To read about that makes The Fall lounging around in SS uniforms when recording a video for High Tension Line seem even more reprehensible. But, two years on from that, a European war was now being beamed directly into our homes. The Fall also had a seat in the bleachers to witness the spectacle of war while they toured Europe during the autumn of 1992. While touring in Greece, Mark E. Smith claimed that the band could see jets carrying out bombing raids on the former Yugoslavia, though how the band were able to see that from Greece, given that Albania sits between Greece and the Slavic countries was never elaborated on.  In interviews ahead of the release of The Infotainment Scan, Smith talked about his belief that Europe had become dangerously unstable after the end of the Cold War, and he considered Government cuts to the armed forces and the coal mines to be acts of outright negligence.

The war motif continues into the performance of the track with the opening burst of reversed hi-hat beats sounding like a salvo of missiles being unleashed, while Simon Wolstencroft’s drumming maintains the barrage of rockets landing and explosions detonating all the way through. Perhaps, most heart-rending of all are the lyrics in which Smith implores the ladybird to take flight and concentrate, not on repelling the enemy, but on getting themselves to safety, away from a home which has nothing to offer them now that their family have all been killed. The message seems to be that it’s not too late for the ladybird, but will they ever return?

The Annotated Fall notes on Ladybird (Green Grass)

Video courtesy of Glaullian.

Guys and Dolls: Ortanique - Nomadic (23 April 1993)

 

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Ortanique was a one-off alias for Dave Clarke - aka Directional Force - which he paired up with another alias, Fly By Wire on the creatively named Untitled 12-inch, released through Magnetic North. While the Fly By Wire track, Alkaline 3dH is abrasive and jagged, the Ortanique tracks are mellow and restful.

Nomadic is a borderline inclusion here. There’s nothing especially groundbreaking or game changing about it, and it’s arguably less impressive than the other Ortanique track, People of the Seven Moons, which was the only track on Untitled that Peel appears to have never played. But I found that I couldn’t shake its tribal rhythms from my brain. In their own way, they seemed to suggest settlements beating out the call to nomadic travellers crossing deserts and mountain ranges, to come and join them and share a little time together.

Only an aural palette cleanser maybe, but a very evocative one nevertheless.

Video courtesy of onlyraretracks

Guys and Dolls: Polvo - Lazy Comet (23 April 1993)

 

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On tonight’s programme, Peel played a run of three tracks from Today’s Active Lifestyles, the second album by Polvo. And just as he had done the previous week with Swirlies, he picked three tracks which were unlikely to make any of his listeners into converts for the band in question. To be fair to him, I don’t think he had a great deal of choice given that none of the tracks on the album really stand out as worthy of love. There’s a couple of tracks over 7 minutes long as well, which would have given Peel time to have a cup of tea and a comfy sit on the toilet, but would have seriously tested the listeners’ patience.  Too much of the album sounds like a band in the rehearsal room, with the music constantly shifting in tone and tune, but hardly ever taking time to really engage the listener.  If I was to be generous, I’d say that the constant shifts are reflective of the hyperactivity suggested by the album’s title, but it’s not an album that really deserves having excuses being made for it.

Lazy Comet gets on to the metaphorical mixtape because it was the only one of the three tracks which Peel played which had me straining to hear more, I’m thinking particularly of the gorgeous section of music between 0:55 and 3:20. Alongside it, he played an instrumental called My Kimono and Sure Shot, two tracks which if I called them nondescript, would make them both sound better than they are.

Video courtesy of Polvo.

Guys and Dolls: Escape - Escape From Neptune (23 April 1993)

 

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Over the course of 1992/93, Amir Abadi and Peter Kuhlmann, working together under the name, Escape, released four 12-inch singles which combined trance and ambient music. Thematically, the records were linked by being set on different planets: Earth, Mars, Neptune, with their final record set on the star, Polaris.  There would always be two trance tracks on each release, which would be titled Escape to… and Escape from… the respective planets/stars which were the subject of the release. The ambient tracks on each release would be titled Trip to… although the Mars release also included Trip from Mars.

Escape from Neptune was on the third Escape 12-inch, which to my ears was the most enjoyable of the Escape releases. It’s fast, frenetic and melodic stuff compared to some of the troughs and irritating sonic cul-de-sacs which some of the other releases contained. Escape 3 also contains the best ambient track of the set, and the only one which doesn’t follow the titling sequences of the other Escape records.  The 17 and a half minute, Atmosphere Processor is the undisputed triumph of the Escape discography.

It appears that when they were putting Escape 3 together, Abadi and Kuhlmann were using the film, Aliens as an inspiration given that all of the tracks on it contain quotes from the film. However, when you think of how quotable Aliens is, the lines they lifted are disappointingly bland. I mean if you’re going to quote Aliens, go big or go home.

Video courtesy of Lucas Wave.

Guys and Dolls: Foreheads in a Fishtank - Happy Shopper (23 April 1993)

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NOTE - The video is taken from a Peel Session broadcast on 24 August 1991 rather than the record released through the band’s Stuff Records label.

Happy Shopper was Number 21* on the Phantom Fifty, and it is the first tune out of any of the ones I’ve blogged about from the Phantom Fifty that I feel would have been a deserving candidate as a Number 1 in that chart. More pertinently though, it is unquestionably the finest Foreheads in a Fishtank tune that I’ve heard.

I think there are two major themes which Happy Shopper is based around:

1) Personal disenchantment - There are certain metaphorical signposts which show us that our lives are not moving in the direction that we would have hoped. One of the most dispiriting is when our food and everyday household items come exclusively from own brand sources. It’s pure snobbery, of course, but if you’ve been used to Fox’s Biscuits and Twinings Tea, you may consider McVitie’s and Tetley to be something of a comedown. But there is further to fall, if you’re not careful. And this song plunges into that poverty with its screams of OH CHRIST! WHO BOUGHT THESE TEABAGS/BISCUITS!, delivered with the absolute disgust of someone who has taken said biscuits and teabags out of the cupboard only to discover the Happy Shopper logo on the packaging. 

It may be that they taste perfectly acceptable - for instance, my wife loves Sainsbury’s own brand of tortilla chips ahead of Doritos - but that garish orange and yellow logo, as was, shines out one message loud and clear: this is your failure. You can’t even afford “proper” biscuits and teabags. You might as well be supping water straight from the tap while chewing a slice of mouldy bread for all the nutritional satisfaction you’ll get from this. You thought you deserved Fortnum’s and yet here you are, scrabbling around with stuff that Spar would look down their noses at. You need better. You deserve better. Why haven’t you been able to enjoy better? Something….or someone…has led you to this crappy state of life….

Which leads us on to the second major theme of Happy Shopper:

2) Domestic discord - the song makes no bones about the fact that domestic relationships can easily sour once you get enmeshed in the tediousness of household chores. The ongoing relentlessness of keeping a house clean ends up meaning that intimacy and romance ends up as a clumsy fumble over the kitchen table. 

As I write this, I’m thinking of my dirty bath upstairs, which needs cleaning. The eight stroke guitar riff that opens and underpins the song sounds like the circling motion of tired arms, windmilling to try and wash away stains that will refuse to shift. That eighth beat is the brief moment of respite before restarting the seemingly endless scrub. And in the back of your mind is the dull, draining thought that once this piece of drudgery is finished, there’s a whole list of other chores to work through. And in a few weeks’ time, you’ll be back scrubbing away another set of stains from this same spot and rotating your way through the same set of chores again.

The regular, metallic clattering which pops up throughout the track sounds like an amalgamation of endless bins needing to be put out with the pots and pans being pulled out of drawers and thrown to all corners of the kitchen. Once you throw children into the mix, and the day starts to become centred around ensuring that you’re in time to relieve the babysitter of their duties, so that you can make dinner with your groceries bought from Happy Shopper, then it’s hardly surprising that the facade cracks and the concept of domestic bliss and the nuclear family becomes something to be hated in as violent way as possible. 

As the shout becomes Domestic, domestic, domestic bliss/Oh God, I hate it!, the answer to theme 1 starts to come into sharper focus. You’re not having the better life you deserve because of your responsibilities to others. All the rushing around to pick people up/drop them off, the cooking, the cleaning, the looking after the kids - that’s why your life is a misery. It’s their fault!  

And as the track plunges into its final 20 seconds, with Jeff Leahy’s hatred of the crappy teabags being underscored by the clatter and bang of the drums, it sounds disconcertingly like the pots and pans are being used to bludgeon his partner to death - a man finally pushed over his limit by own brand produce, and changing his life in the most terrible way.

Jauntily psychotic, Happy Shopper is Foreheads in a Fishtank’s masterpiece, and I’m only sad that when the time comes for me to do this blog’s version of a Festive Fifty for 1993, I won’t be able to include it. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a bath to scrub.

*Peel had meant to play Happy Shopper on the previous Saturday, but had left the record at home. He was apologetic that this meant that it had thrown the schedule out by a week and meant that the eventual reveal of the Number 1 record on the Phantom Fifty would end up taking place a week later than planned - People have had to reorganise their summer holidays and everything.

Video courtesy of Worried Tunes 2.

Guys and Dolls: K-Tel Wet Dream - Sissy Bar (23 April 1993)

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The video is taken from Peel’s Radio 1 show on Friday 5 March 1993. By the time he came to re-broadcast Sissy Bar, seven weeks later, he had a clearer idea over what The Peter Fonda Album was all about.  It was released by a collective that called itself Peter the Man Eeter and comprised six different artists, some of whom never released anything other than the track that they recorded for this album. I suspect that the artists involved all knew each other to some degree, not least because a couple of them appeared on a follow up album which was dedicated to Night of the Living Dead. One of the artists who appeared on both records, an underground film maker called Jon Moritsugu recorded a tune for the Living Dead record called The Death of Peter Fonda.

The Peter Fonda Album appears to have been inspired by a group of people who hero worshipped Fonda. I’ve not heard the album in full, and some of the tracks listed on it leave me wondering what they have to do with Peter Fonda. Zip Code Rapists for instance offer up a cover of Her Majesty, the shortest Beatles song, but surely She Said She Said would be a better choice given that Fonda inspired John Lennon to write it in the first place.  Sissy Bar, though, offers a direct and obvious link to Fonda, being as it is a complete deconstruction of Born to be Wild by Steppenwolf, one of the key tracks on the soundtrack to Easy Rider, a film which Fonda co-wrote. As you’ll hear in the video, Peel was absolutely knocked out by what K-Tel Wet Dream had done and rightly so. There appear to be four different versions going on throughout the track, including snippets of the original recording, but interspersed with wild percussion, oriental guitar, funk freak outs, a refrain of the chorus which sounds like it’s been cribbed from a Liverpool rehearsal room space, a Woodstock-style ending, and at regular intervals throughout, Born to Be Wild’s iconic riff - albeit presented in thunderously compressed form.

K-Tel Wet Dream are smart enough to present all this in a little over 3 minutes and they keep the changes in mood and volume coming at regular intervals so nothing ever gets boring or irritating. I think that Sissy Bar nods to Fonda in a couple of other respects. The track as a whole could be taken as an attempt to set the acid trip scene in Easy Rider to music, but the use of compression in it makes me wonder whether they were inspired by Fonda’s cover of  Donovan’s Catch the Wind. In late 1967, Fonda released a single, November Night, which he backed with Catch the Wind.  Although Fonda sings it with a light sweetness of tone, the backing is considerably heavier than Donovan’s original with producer Hugh Masekela providing piercingly mournful washes of brass and a bassline that sits down heavily on the recording as though the wind that Fonda is trying to catch is less a breeze and more a mistral.

Videos courtesy of John Peel and Billy.

Guys and Dolls: Super Morris - Cough & Spit Out (23 April 1993)

 

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This is a very appropriate track for me to be writing about at the moment, because my wife and I have both been under the weather this week with one of those irritating viruses that isn’t strong enough to send you to bed for a few days, but instead contents itself with making you go through the week coughing grizzling and feeling generally underpowered.

Cough & Spit Out is the name given to the dub flip side of Danger Zone by Super Morris. The cough in question comes from the chestier end of the spectrum. For some reason which I can’t fathom now, I originally had a question mark against including this, but it’s a concise and pleasant piece of dub music. I suspect it may have been because I was still reeling in shock and wonderment at the tune by K-Tel Wet Dream which Peel played directly before it - more on that in the next post.

Video courtesy of Puppa Channel.

Guys and Dolls: Tiger Trap - Supreme Nothing (23 April 1993)

 

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We’ve already heard Side 1, Track 2 from Stars Kill Rock on this blog; on tonight’s show, Peel played Side 1, Track 1 - Supreme Nothing by Tiger Trap.

Wikipedia describes Tiger Trap as being part of the twee pop scene. I think they sound a bit more muscular than that, but what they do have in common with some of the other twee pop exponents that we’ve heard previously (The Orchids, Brighter, Cub etc) is an ability to confront painful emotions head on and with strength. The Supreme Nothing of the title appears to be someone that the narrator had regarded as a friend, only to find themselves being snubbed, so rather than trying to keep them in their lives, they’re  rejecting them, without any sense of regret for what’s being lost. It all goes to prove the theory that a kind person is a vengeful person, and you cross them at your peril.

Peel played Supreme Nothing as part of a trio of tracks taken from Stars Kill Rock. The other tracks were Nights X 9 by Slant 6 and Fuck Kitty by The Frumpies.

Video courtesy of Stars Kill Rock.

Guys and Dolls: Brian Henneman - Indianapolis (23 April 1993)

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Life on the road in the music business is mythologised as one long round of alcohol, groupies, drugs, pranks and freedom. And for megastar bands, there’s probably enough of those distractions to alleviate the boredom of the travelling which takes up so much of the time on a tour. One other advantage that The Rolling Stones/U2/Guns ‘n’ Roses etc also enjoyed is that they were backed by enough money to overcome logistical setbacks and problems without too much difficulty. But for those further down the touring chain, the reality is very different, especially if you’re not travelling by plane, train or in a record-company backed Winnebago. And when things go wrong while you’re out on the road, then your future and your sanity is in the lap of the Gods - or at the very least the mechanics at Firestone.  Indianapolis is a tune for every musician who strikes out on their own in a van which has done more miles than it should have, and for whom every penny in the tour kitty has to be used for a specific purpose. At this level, unexpected overheads can be life-changing in the worst way possible.

The problem here stems from a broken fuel pump necessitating an expensive repair job and a prolonged stay in Indianapolis, Indiana, where the only sexual activity that Brian Henneman can access is the tow-truck driver’s story of his arrest for sexual misconduct.  Indianapolis serves as a reminder of how easy it was to be mired in boredom if you were stuck somewhere in the pre-Internet age. Phone calls had to be rationed to save money for instance, meaning that Henneman had to go 10 days before speaking to his girlfriend, doubtless while waiting for money to be sent through via Western Union. I’m guessing that a lack of available disposable income, after saving up for the repairs on their van, is why Henneman and friends find themselves stuck in a bar which has John Cougar playing on rotation on the jukebox. The only thing sustaining Henneman from killing himself or his bandmates is the thought of the road out of Indianapolis and how the sight of it will inspire him to greater musical heights in the future.

Henneman based the story of Indianapolis around a real life incident which befell him and members of the alt-country band, Uncle Tupelo, whose songwriters Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy, both play on the recording; Farrar provides the blistering harmonica solo. Henneman recorded it for a one-off single release after his previous band, Chicken Truck had dissolved. The record attracted enough attention for Henneman to win a new record contract, which he used to invite some of his colleagues in Chicken Truck to form a new band with him, The Bottle Rockets, which would last up to 2021. On their 1997 album, 24 Hours a Day, The Bottle Rockets would record a new version of Indianapolis.

Peel really liked Indianapolis, and was sure that Andy Kershaw would like it as well. However, the copy that Peel had got for him was faulty, so he ended up playing the second purchase of the record that he had made for Kershaw, on this programme.

Video courtesy of John Coulter.

Guys and Dolls: One Dove - Fallen [The Last Monday Morning at Bobby N’s Remix] (23 April 1993)

 

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Over the course of late 1991, the Scottish electronica group, One Dove, released two separate versions of Fallen.  The first version, released through Soma Recordings featured a mix which was played by Peel on Leap Day 1992. However, issues with sample clearances caused the record’s deletion and a batch of new mixes released through Boys’ Own Recordings. This included a mix by Andrew Weatherall, which became a big hit in clubland. The lyrical content varied between the two versions - albeit the chorus was shared in both. 

On the Soma recordings, Dot Allison sings of an angel which managed both to reanimate one of her former lovers and to possess her like an Incubus. On the Boys’ Own version, which this mix was originally released on, the angel is a contradictory mix of lover and master; it enslaves her because it wants to save her. Allison’s breathy Justify My Love style-storytelling reveals the potentially abusive nature of this relationship as she swears the listener to secrecy on other mixes, but this one takes time to describe how the attentions of the angel invigorate and revitalise her. If she is a captive, then she’s a willing one. 

The chorus, They say we‘re hard to please/They say we have too much/As if all this would do/When all we want to have is fun speaks for an entire generation, lost to convenience and trinkets, but aching for spiritual gratification of mind and body.

This mix featured on the compilation, Volume Six.  I think it may have been acting as a curtain raiser to listeners who would hear a lot from One Dove over the course of 1993. They released a debut album, which made the top 30 and two of their singles had also charted in the top 30 by the end of the year. That could have given them a platform to go on and enjoy further success over the coming years, but they had not enjoyed the compromises that their record label had forced them in to, and disbanded while writing material for a second album.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors

Video courtesy of FrankEB.