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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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.