A couple of blogposts over the course of the last year have mentioned the bizarre tale of the unscheduled extended stay in the UK which the Estonian band Roovel Oobik found themselves having to make when they came over to record a Peel Session on 20 March 1993. The session was finally broadcast on this 17/4/93 programme, and the full thing is worth listening to, not only to see whether it floats your boat musically, but because it contains details about how Peel first heard about the band, meetings with them which hatched the plan for them to do a session and details about how they became temporarily stranded in the UK after coming over.
For all that though, why have I only included one track from Roovel Oobik’s session? Well, I should say that it was touch and go that Betterlife [Recreation Version] made it on to the metaphorical mixtape at all, but having listened to the session again this morning, I did seriously consider including the whole session here. We’re back in Revolver territory again…
All of the songs in the session follow a pattern: strong, melodic starts which get undercut by weak vocals - albeit I need to make allowances that vocalist, Tonu Pedaru, was singing in a second language - and that ultimately lead onto slightly overindulgent playouts. I did nearly change my mind and include Masters of Day Dream Machinery here as well, but I think that Betterlife [Recreation Version] does all anyone really needs to be able to enjoy Roovel Oobik. For me, the gorgeousness of the wah-wah guitar work and the ska-dub playout counterbalance the gormless vocals. We can’t have one without the other, so let’s embrace the glorious and the grim here.
Peel hoped that Roovel Oobik would come back and do another session the following year, but in the event, he never played anything by them ever again after the session was repeated on 20 August 1993. He doesn’t appear to have played anything from their 1994 album, Psychikosmos, and it took him a decade to discover that from the mid-90s onwards, several members of the band had been recording and gigging as a dance act called Una Bomba.
He always spoke fondly of them though, remembering when, during their brief stay at Peel Acres, the band would always go outside to smoke on a grass verge opposite the house. During one smoking break, Peel went out to join them and told them to consider the verge as a part of Estonia, the band even made up a sign which they planted on the verge saying, Welcome to Estonia. In 2003, an Estonian TV crew interviewed Peel about the band and took footage of the verge. They also passed on to him a copy of the Una Bomba album, Aerosol and Peel played a track from it on 19 March 2003.
In 2005, Roovel Oobik reformed to release an album called Supersymmetry. Since then they’ve released two further albums, the most recent being 2024’s Transcent.
Video courtesy of VibraCobra23 Redux
Apologies for not being able to include the dots over the o in the band’s name.
No comments:
Post a Comment