I appreciate that the first 80 seconds of Eject may leave you wondering where I’ve got the “stunning” adjective from. There’s nothing especially outstanding suggested by them, coming across as they do as by-the-numbers, smash-the-system rap-rock. Although, it does at least suggest that the monoliths of capitalism and whatever else is responsible for the conditioning which Heitham Al-Sayed mentions throughout the track are flimsier than they appear to be; a suggestion which subsequent history through financial crashes, a global pandemic and turbulent politics has shown to be true. Eject starts to hit its stride at the point that Senser realise that they need something more striking to get their message across. As a result, they start to follow the Sex Sells mantra, and co-vocalist, Kerstin Haigh, enters the track with a set of positively carnal vocalisations which would definitely have broken the 17 year old me from my conditioning.
Haigh’s role is to carry the main chorus of the song:
Eject the program(me)
Eject the power.
Let the nature flow,
Let the colour flower.
Her presence seems to inspire Al-Sayed, who gets more specific in his targeting of some of the signifiers of our perceived cultural imprisonment. There’s a rhyme of Whopper with happy shopper (though not that one), which almost had me applauding when I first heard it. The song ploughs on inexorably, and really takes off in its final 80 seconds as Haigh vocalises into the heavens, but manages to do so without sounding overbearing. The guitars soar underneath her, before Al-Sayed makes a sprint for the finish line with more impassioned railing against the cultural conformity he sees around him; a rap soaked version of Kevin McCarthy at the end of the original Invasion of the Bodysnatchers . At least, the final cymbal crash sounds like someone managing to eject the disc/cassette that’s been implanted into them.
This will be the last post before Christmas, so compliments of the season to all readers, video uploaders, Peel show uploaders and, of course, Webbie.
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?
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).
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.
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? refrainserves 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.
