Guys and Dolls: Cornel Campbell - Shotgun Wedding (10 April 1993)

 

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This week saw the release of Rod Stewart’s version of Shotgun Wedding. Originally recorded by Roy C Hammond in 1966, Stewart’s version was one of the new recordings which featured on a somewhat haphazard compilation album which Warner Bros had released to commemorate Stewart winning a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1993 Brit Awards.

The 12 track Lead Vocalist album opened with seven tracks taken variously from Stewart’s solo career, as well as performances with The Jeff Beck Group and Faces. However, the last five tracks were brand new recordings of cover songs. Over the previous 6 months, Stewart’s versions of Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda) [Tom Waits] and Ruby Tuesday [Jagger/Richards] had reached Number 6 & 11 on the UK Singles Chart. Now, Shotgun Wedding was being released as the third track taken from the album.

John Peel had a good relationship with Stewart, though they had long drifted apart musically. To prove the point, Peel steered clear of playing Stewart’s version of Shotgun Wedding during his week on the Jakki Brambles show. However, he played Cornel Campbell’s 1973 reggae version on this programme because he thought it was better than Stewart’s version. I’ve included it here as I think the 17 year old me would have responded well to this. But, I think now that I prefer the Stewart recording. Campbell has a more honeyed voice than Stewart, but, helped by the work of his brass section, Rod’s version does a better job of conveying the oppressive jollity of a forced marriage ceremony.

 It could be argued that no one’s managed to pull off a truly definitive version of Shotgun Wedding.  

Even Roy C’s original sounds half-arsed. But Stewart’s version did well enough to reach Number 21 in the UK charts. 

As for Campbell, while I may be ambivalent towards his version of this, I’m all over his recording of The Duke of Earl.

Video courtesy of Reggae2Reggae.

Guys and Dolls: John Peel Show - Friday 9 April 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

So, having spent the week caretaking Jakki Brambles’s lunchtime Radio 1 show, Peel cracked on with the day job - or rather night job - on Friday and Saturday. He wasn’t just dominating Radio 1’s schedules that week, he had extracurricular activities keeping him busy too. Thursday, 8 April had seen him acting as DJ at an event alongside sets from Huggy Bear, their offshoot, Blood Sausage as well as Cornershop and Mambo Taxi. Peel had enjoyed the evening immensely, not least because the booth he had been working from didn’t have a microphone, so all he had to do was play records.

One record he might not have had the opportunity to play at the event was The Fall’s new album, The Infotainment Scan, which he had mislaid somewhere in Broadcasting House. However, he may have played King Candy Cane from the album, Mustache Ride by Foreskin 500. It led him to ponder, How many people would be upset to hear the word “foreskin” coming out of the radio? I suspect most of you have one. I still have mine, in a rather stylish locket.

Selections from this show came from a 3 hour file. There was one track on my list, which I wasn’t able to share:

The Blue Up? - Discovery - one of the longer tracks on their album, Cake and Eat It. A female rock trio from Minneapolis-Saint Paul, who had been recording since 1984.  Discovery is a rocker in the vein of two favourites of mine from earlier this year, Sweet Revenge by Colour Noise and She Ran Away From the World by Big Red Ball.

One track fell from favour with me. There was to be no last minute Peyote-style reprieve for…

Hail/Snail - Thirsting for More - The link will take you to a video which has all of the tracks from their eponymous EP released through Funky Mushroom. Thirsting for More is the first track and I can only guess that when I first heard it, I was slightly beguiled by some of the dreamy guitar work on it. But subsequent listens serve only to obscure the occasional bursts of tunefulness with out of tune strumming, sub-beginner level violin scraping and vocals/lyrics which would empty the most sympathetic Open Mic night. 

The entire enterprise was a collaboration between Susanne Lewis of Hail and Azailia Snail. The vibe appears to be fractured adolescent cosmic folk, with each track walking the line between tunefulness and atonality. Some of them are genuinely compelling, but Peel made a duff choice here. The liner notes show that contributions on trumpet were made by Gary “Glitter” Olson. I’m assuming he dropped that nickname by the end of the decade.

Full tracklisting

Guys and Dolls: Peyote - Alcatraz (9 April 1993)

 

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This is the musical equivalent of me coming into your homes and rubbing soothing oils all over your body. If you’re driving at the moment, you’ll have to give that a miss, I’m afraid. - John Peel, cueing up Alcatraz on 9 April 1993.

Despite Peel’s warm words, my own initial reaction to this piece of chilled out trance from Dag Lerner and Rolf Ellmer aka Peyote was that it was a little bit more bombastic than I’d been expecting. An observation which leads me to wonder if I’m at all qualified to be passing any judgements on this blog. For all that, my notes did say that it would be worthy of a second listen though. And I listened to it several times before eventually deciding that I would pass on including it. But, when I was writing the summary post for this 9/4/93 show, I listened back to the tracks I was rejecting from my original list of selections, and it was at that last gasp moment that the beauty and wonder of Alcatraz made itself obvious to me.

To see the word Alcatraz is to think immediately of the prison that was on the island until 1963, and which was immortalised in the movie, Escape From Alcatraz. Certainly, the track features plenty of percussion which evokes the sound of people hammering away at steel and stone as if to try and break out and get closer to the muffled sounds of thunder which punctuate the opening stages of the track. And yet, I also captured a feeling of stifling humidity within the music too. Granted, this could be said to be conjured by the aural image of a crowded prison cell during a heatwave, but those thunderclaps and the percussive shakers which are used, also took me to the open plains of the desert and a feeling of desperately trying to find shelter from an approaching storm. I don’t know how it’s possible for a piece of music to suggest both confinement and open space, but Alcatraz does so.

And then at 3:27, we start to pick up the sounds of singing; faint and indistinct, but also hearty and celebratory. The lyrics are close to gibberish, but I can make out a refrain of “happy birthday to you” in there somewhere. The melody of the singing seems to predict Mumford and Sons, 20 years ahead of time, but I also hear elements of singing chain gangs and tribal songs. The latter of these makes particular sense when we learn that Alcatraz Island was occupied by a group of American Indians between November 1969 and June 1971, who took the island over believing that as it was no longer being used as the site of a penitentiary, it stood to be a piece of  land to be reclaimed by descendants of the original American settlers. 

Over all, I think that this period in the island’s history may be what is being immortalised here, with the thunder rumbles representing the mix of forces that saw the Indians leave the island over time. Either way, I’m ultimately very glad to include it on the metaphorical mixtape.

Video courtesy of Jean-Marc Dubois.

Guys and Dolls: Marxman - Dark Are The Days/The Fascist Boom (9 April 1993)

 

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WARNING - The video for The Fascist Boom contains disturbing images. It was uploaded in 2014/15.

Peel opened tonight’s programme with The Fascist Boom, Marxman’s contribution to a compilation album distributed by Youth Against Racism in Europe called By Any Means Necessary.  Listening back to the warnings given in it, I can only feel shamed by the complacency that I would surely have felt at the time. It wasn’t that I was oblivious to Neo-Nazism, but back then, they seemed like nothing more than a lunatic fringe. They could have their demonstrations and one could feel sorry for any poor unfortunate who got attacked by them, but I never saw them as a direct threat to the world order, because I couldn’t see how anyone could get taken in by it. But a combination of declining living standards and continent-wide NIMBYism has seen far-right political parties make sweeping gains across Europe over the last decade and a half. While in America, the political right has been become rancid and dangerous without anyone seemingly able to do anything about it. Marxman warned us - nothing was done - and now we find ourselves in a time where too many parties & politicians who should know better are trying to court that vote and present anything opposite to it as something to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. 

Exactly one year ago, Peel had greeted the results of the UK General Election with a weary cry of Do you ever have days where you feel you got out of bed on the wrong planet? In 2025, those days outnumber the good ones, I find.

There’s little to cheer us up in the other Marxman selection either. Dark Are the Days is a despondent screed on everything:

1) Capitalism winning out over socialism.

2) The media brainwashing the public.

3) Unions either being depowered or selling out to bosses.

4) Too many low-paid and dead end jobs.

It’s curious how the presence of a beat and some sprightly penny whistle can get you dancing away to such an onslaught of negativity. Had Peel not been distracted by having to be Jakki Brambles, I wonder whether he would have played Dark Are the Days back-to-back with Dollars by Bajja Jedd, which makes a case for how to survive and thrive in a capitalist society.

Videos courtesy of h2eire and blackiron60.

Guys and Dolls: Trumans Water - Sun Go Out (9 April 1993)

 

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Looking at the lyrics to Sun Go Out - and if I hadn’t done so, this post would be even shorter than it is - they appear to be a continuation of the theme of alienation/disenchantment with authority figures that was evidenced in Speeds Exceeding. But where that song felt like a debate between the generations, here the malaise is more deeply set and implacable. Sun Go Out takes swipes at “stars” and politicians for being all surface and no feeling, but does with a shrug of the shoulders and an internalising of the contempt and disgust that they feel.  Early 90s ennui drips all over lines like: 

We know there’s channels where we could register our comments and complaints.

But it’s just as fun to fall back laugh the thing to scorn.

And hey presto! Trumans Water invented social media.

As the song progresses, it starts to make uneasier listening to 21st Century ears. In 1993, the sentiments expressed sounded like classic slacker talk. Even the title of the song sounds like a pun on exhortations made by stressed dads to their surly, couch potato offspring.  But in subsequent verses, the vibe sounds, in 2025, less slacker and more MAGA. This is especially true once the kids do get off the couch:

…we’re just violent, not angry.

And we’d sooner tip things over as watch them topple by themselves.

You aspiring public servants are long on vision and short on spine.

Here’s to spewing thicker drivel and digging deeper graves.

After a final verse which declares that anyone trying to have an original thought should keep it to themselves, the song ends with eight guitar notes which toll like a bell declaring the death of…. hope? Idealism? Public spiritedness? Any number of optimistic qualities that one used to be able to attribute to the United States of America with a semi-straight face. And a look down the list of titles on Spasm Smash XXXOXoX Ox & Ass reads like a MAGA checklist of grievances against authority or their supposed betters: Bludgeon Elites & Stagger, Lo Priest, Our Doctors Think We’re Blind etc.

Scarily prescient, as they say….

Video courtesy of Trumans Water Topic

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Eric’s Trip - Listen (9 April 1993)

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This was a borderline inclusion, because it piles by in a bit of a rush, and I’ve had to take a number of listens to it in order to find any kind of angle that would make it worth keeping. But what’s ultimately retained it is a mixture of what it’s trying to be, and my belief that it’s a lot more optimistic and innocent than I initially thought it was.

Sonically, Listen comes across as a kiddie-pop take on the verses in You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine, albeit that it tempers this with quieter moments between the noise squalls. 

Lyrically, I initially thought that the song was about someone preparing to kill themself. This was because of the chorus refrains of Soon I’ll be gone. But repeat listens and further scans of the lyrics have now led me to believe that this is actually a love song, and that the title, Listen, refers to that nascent moment in love affairs when emotions burst forward, the internal editor checks out and we blurt forward to the object of our affection both our most profound and trivial thoughts, simply because this is the moment when we can be sure that they will really listen to and value what we’re saying.

Stick around, for a while.

Listen to my thoughts.

It makes you smile.

Hold my hand, my life.

Thinking quiet down, make me right.

It’s a plea for love which really could save the singer’s life.

I have the film critic, Antonia Quirke, to thank for this insight. I’ve just given up on her 2007 memoir, Choking on Marlon Brando. The book combines Quirke’s portraits on various actors alongside the highs and lows of her love life through the 1990s. Quirke writes brilliantly about movies, she occasionally writes brilliantly about love, but by the time I reached page 150, I realised the problem with reading about real people’s love lives - the emotional highs are too difficult to read about without cynicism and misanthropy crowding in and willing on the fall. And that’s no way to live life or experience culture.

Also, just as when confronted by a social media picture of someone’s delicious looking pub lunch, the elation of an individual’s love affair is precisely too individual for anyone else to really care about, especially when it’s spread over 310 pages of a book.* Eric’s Trip manage to convey these sensations in two and a half minutes, so they trump Quirke’s ability to get them across, albeit I’m grateful to her for making me look at Listen in a way that I might otherwise have missed.

The upshot of all this is that I’m setting up the first giveaway in the history of The Smell of the Greasepaint and the Sound of John Peel. If you would like a copy of Choking on Marlon Brando before it goes either to my local second hand bookshop or the charity bookshelf at Chieveley Services, please send me a DM on bluesky  (greasepaint.bsky.social) by April 30. First come, first served.

*I know that I’m guilty of writing about my romantic elations on this blog every so often - and when we get to the show week of Guys and Dolls in the first week of August ‘93, you’d better be ready to see me go full-on Quirke - but at least I try and attach them to a beautiful piece of music.

Video courtesy of mynameisasuka

Lyrics are copyright of their authors.

My thanks to the John Peel wiki for identifying the title of the track, which Peel did not give on the 9/4/93 show.