Guys and Dolls: Hyper - For Whom the Bell Tolls (14 May 1993)

 

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I’ll elaborate more in the next post, but sometimes all a man needs is a trance techno record which sounds like Evelyn Glennie working in a studio after ingesting her own body weight in cocaine.

Video courtesy of onlyraretracks.

Guys and Dolls: Meat Beat Manifesto - Radio Babylon/Soul Driver/Fire Number 9 [Peel Session] (14 May 1993)

 

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Having failed to bill the first airing of Meat Beat Manifesto’s one and only Peel Session when it was broadcast on Saturday 6 February 1993, the Radio Times tried to make up for it when the repeat went out on this 14/5/93 show. Unfortunately, they spelled the band’s name as Meat Ball Manifesto, a mistake which Peel felt moved to apologise on air for. But, all things considered, the Radio Times error wasn’t so far off the mark because the quality of 3/4 of the tracks in this session really was different gravy…

Listeners were treated to past, present and future in this session. The three tracks that would have made it on to my mixtape all differ stylistically from one another, but contain little offcuts and sprinkles that offer moments of familiarity amid the strange melange of sounds and atmospheres in each track. 

Radio Babylon grabs me for slightly more synesthistic reasons than it might to do others. Primarily an exercise in breakbeat, what I like are the samples of Babylon that ring out throughout the track. I had initially thought it was taken from some high-minded, ecstatic reggae record, but why should Meat Beat Manifesto have to reach into the deepest corners of their record collection, when they can just lift the word straight out of the chorus of Rivers of Babylon by Boney M, drench it in reverb and in doing so, transport me back to a mental space where I’m watching exotically filmed adverts on sunny curtain drawn afternoons in the mid 1980s -  The Art of Noise did that to me once. To my ears, what Meat Beat Manifesto did with that sample moved it from the realm of drunken family parties and instead evoked sun blasted landscapes and the bleat of a car horn as a crowd of millions takes to the streets, chanting for something better than the wretched normality they’re served up with as their everyday existence and hissed at to be grateful for.  It’s retro, it’s the sound of Rastafarian New Yorkers playing their mixes on the ghetto blaster on a hot day in the West Side as the fire hydrant plumes its water upwards.  This isn’t bad going for two men - Jonny Stephens and Jack Dangers - from Swindon.

As it progresses though, it becomes slightly stranger, as though the radio is picking up subconscious thoughts and feelings on its frequencies. One of these appears to be a sample of the panicked cry of Oh no! which opens I Can’t Control Myself by The Troggs. It leads me to wonder whether, when Meat Beat Manifesto recorded the session on 13 December 1992, they were trying to warn the world that 18 months later, a cover of a Troggs song was going to be completely inescapable for the whole of a summer. By the end, the track has descended into something which sounds like it’s trying to fuse together the sentiments of Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft with the mood of the final 90 seconds of Bike by Pink Floyd. 

 If Radio Babylon represented the past - it had originally been released as a single in 1990  - then Soul Driver points to the immediate future. Starting out of a trip hop beat, we’re then taken into a lyric in which Dangers details various stages of paranoia, to which music seems to be the only cure:

Soul driver, the beat improviser.

Soul driver, the rhythm organiser.

Soul driver, the beat provider.

Soul driver,  can you turn the lights up on the rhythm.

Which it then does as Meat Beat Manifesto try to take us inside the rhythm, garlanding it with noodling guitar lines of such gentleness, that it feels like the music is trying to cocoon the listener from their troubles. Even the repeated verse of paranoia and worry finds itself being subsumed into the music as it tries to filter out the bad vibes. And from 2:33 onwards to the end of the track, Soul Driver plays out with a repeated Mellotron line which leads the listener down to Eden, to the accompaniment of an aural winding down, which encourages the listener to let go of all feelings of struggle and stress. In a year’s time, this would start to become a dominant sound in dance music, just within a brief window, but long enough and distinctly enough to mark it out as an original 90s scene.

The sense of something winding down also permeates the last 90 seconds of Fire Number 9, which was a remix of a track called #9 Bad Acid, that had originally been recorded by Dimensional Holofonic Sound on the original version of House of God. Jack Dangers’s remix was put out by DHS on a record called LSD3D Acid Mixes. The only real difference between the record mix and the Peel Session version is that the record opens with someone saying It only has to be heard to be absorbed rather than the more hypnotic refrain of You’ve eliminated any interruptions or distractions. For the rest, the track remains dominated by a driving drum beat waiting for Primal Scream to swoop in, take it away and titivate it up for use in Rocks, later that year. It also brings together two of the definitive found sounds of the year 1968:

1) Arthur Brown bellowing I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you at the top of his Number 1 hit, Fire.

2) The most famous use of the words Number 9 in Western culture; namely as part of the refrain heard at regular intervals throughout Revolution 9 by The Beatles. 

For me, it’s that juxtaposition that makes the track essential to keep. 30 years on from this session, Meat Beat Manifesto and DHS would come together again to collaborate on an EP called Man From Mantis.

The fourth track in the session was Drop, a discordant electronica track which had an additionally atonal vocal thrown in for added annoyance. But three out of four isn’t bad and in many ways Meat Beat Manifesto were only getting started. With Jack Dangers as the only constant member, they have continued to issue singles, albums and collaborations up to the present day. But Peel, whose support had only been occasional since they started issuing records in 1988, didn’t go with them. Barring a single play of one of their tracks on a 1997 compilation album called Sally’s Photographic Memory, they never featured on a Peel Show again after this session repeat.

 

Videos courtesy of Dub Records.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Turbulence - Whurlstorm (14 May 1993)

 

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I had a question mark next to this when I added it to the long list of selections from this show, but its place on the metaphorical mixtape was never in doubt once I established which version of Whurlstorm - out of four different mixes - Peel had played on 14/5/93.

Whurlstorm first surfaced as the flipside to the first Turbulence release, Whurlwind. Issued on Industrial Strength Records, it was essentially a slightly sped up version of the one that Peel played on this show, which was the lead version on a trio of mixes which were put out on Super Special Corp,  the label that put out the rest of Turbulence’s releases during the 90s.

What makes Whurlstorm essential is that it’s one of those techno tracks where its highpoints really stand out when they arrive. Dance music is built on mythology and hype, and for all the talk about laying down the groove or setting up the beat, so many dance tracks are a series of longueurs, interspersed with moments of extreme, ecstatic activity designed either to get you busting a move if you’re on the dancefloor or looking up in interest and exhilaration if you’re sat listening to it. Such is the case here, where after 35 seconds of low key beats and bleeps, we’re thrown into something which sounds like processed turn-table needle scratching fed through a wah pedal, but done at such speed and with such musicality, it makes you immediately want to start breakdancing to it. It crops up again at 1:34.

But as with a soukous track, it’s the final 2 and a half minutes that contains Whurlstorm’s true ace. You’ll hear throughout the track treated vocal cries of Whurlstorm and Yeah, mixed in such a way to make them sound like they are being growled by a subterranean monster. From around 3:34, that monster makes its presence known. Firstly, there’s a descending line of sound which sounds like power circuits running down. Then at 3:45, there’s a brief bit of white noise which evokes birds flying off into the distance, just the way that they do in nature when they become aware, often ahead of man, that a natural disaster is about to happen. 

And then, from 3:55, it strikes. Imagine if the pulverising, juggernaut bassline ripping through the earth in Humanoid by Skyflyer -  played by Peel almost a year before this programme - had laid an egg. Now, a year later, that egg hatches a full size monster, rearing up and destroying everything above it. The final two minutes encapsulate a sense of disorientation, destruction, panic (represented by a couple of returns for the breakdance music), before ultimately ending on a note of calm after everything has been razed to the ground.

This mix of Whurlstorm is known as A1. Of the other two mixes of Whurlstorm that came out alongside it, I’d recommend B2 on the grounds that if A1 deals in destruction, then B2 concerns itself with rebirth and reconstruction. Its relentless beat and throbbing synth-line evoking a community fixing its buildings and its spirit after the monster has gone.

Video courtesy of Les Enfants Terribles.

Guys and Dolls: Leatherface - Books (14 May 1993)

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I’ve been off work this week and have been enjoying and enduring record breaking temperatures for May in the United Kingdom. What I discovered in the early part of the week, when temperatures were at their hottest, is that they are not good conditions for listening to anything by Leatherface.  Each time I tried to start listening to Books, which was recorded for their fourth album, Minx, I found myself skipping on elsewhere after 30 seconds, “I’m too tired for you today” was my general attitude.  And if thrashy guitar noise was all that Leatherface had to offer, I may still be sitting here, necking cloudy lemonade and putting them off until the drizzle returns next week. But I persevered and in doing so found I was reminded of something I wrote about when they last featured on this blog - you really have to listen to the words. They may have looked like they were all you ever need to meet your bricklaying needs, but they were virtuoso musicians and romantic poets, in a way that contrasted with their sound. They had you cherishing beauty and melancholy, even while you moshed as though your life depended on it.

Books is another example of the music of aggressive reflection which appears to characterise many of Leatherface’s songs. Here, author Frankie Stubbs examines a relationship between a brother and a sister which has seen both of them become paralysed with inertia. It’s not explained whether one is caring for the other, or if both of them have seen their lives shrink due to uncontrolled circumstances. Throughout the song, there are references to things and objects from another time, which have stayed in place through habit for so long that the house they share seems to be physically crying out for change:

A house full of things some of which they hadn’t seen

Since they bought the sodding things in 1980-something.

And if only their place 

Had a little more space

And a little less waste

That would be something.

Stubbs is an observer to this unchanging picture, chafing at the bit to get out and get away:

I don’t wanna be, bound up like books.

I don’t wanna be a sad ornament of a place.

However, the cracked vocal note on which he ends the song implies a moment of doubt as to whether he will avoid the same fate.

As the year progressed, Leatherface moved towards a split. They recorded a third session for Peel on 23 December, which was broadcast in February ‘94, by which time Stubbs announced their dissolution, onstage, during a gig at The Garage, Islington. They reformed again, 5 years later and released four further studio albums between 1999 and 2010. 

Apart from their final session, Peel never played anything else by them after this programme, though he had been reading up on the band through an article in a magazine called Paint It Red, which focussed on the music scene in the North East. He was particularly taken by a photo in it of PJ Harvey, who were about to play a gig in Newcastle, which he thought was the best one he’d ever seen of her/them. That evening, the band* had played at the University of East Anglia, with Sheila and William in attendance.

While researching this article, I discovered just how highly rated and influential Leatherface were, with some describing them as the best UK punk band of the 90s, and their third album, Mush, venerated as one of the best guitar records of the decade. So, why did they not reach wider acclaim? Some answers may be found in this article/interview with Laurence Bell who had the group signed to his Roughneck Recording Company label and also put out a posthumous album after Leatherface’s first split, on Domino.  

Video courtesy of Leatherface - Topic

*I can’t wait till we get to the To Bring You My Love phase and know conclusively that all references to PJ Harvey refer to a person rather than a group.

Guys and Dolls - Gunshot - Bombing in 5 Minutes (14 May 1993)

 

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NOTE - On this video, Bombing in 5 Minutes begins at 20:00.

To celebrate the release of their debut album, Patriot Games, the Leytonstone rap trio, Gunshot’s label, Vinyl Solution also commissioned a limited edition (1000 copies) of instrumental mixes from the album.

Bombing in 5 Minutes takes its title from a hot-mic joke made by Ronald Reagan before recording his live weekly radio address to the American people on 11 August, 1984. Reagan intended to use that week’s recording to announce legislation which would allow student religious groups to meet on school premises outside school hours. During a soundcheck ahead of the broadcast, Reagan spoofed his announcement by saying:

My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes. 

How we laughed back in the day - John Peel after playing Bombing in 5 Minutes on this 14/5/93 show.

Although always intended as a joke, in the Two Tribes-esque atmosphere that still characterised the Cold War at the time, it wouldn’t have done much to reassure a scared world that any of these people had the slightest clue about what they were doing*.

As a reflection that the world of 1993 was in a happier place than had been the case, nine years earlier, Peel played Bombing in 5 Minutes as a response to a story in one of the news bulletins, which punctuated his programme, that America was decommissioning its Strategic Defence Initiative, otherwise known as the Star Wars programme, which had been in operation for a decade and intended to protect America from missile attacks.

As to how the instrumental version of Bombing in 5 Minutes compared to Gunshot’s vocal performance on the original Patriot Games album, I have to say that it doesn’t sound to me like much was being missed by going with the instrumental version. The vocal is so muddily recorded that it’s difficult to really get an handle on what’s going on beyond them using it as a self-motivation talk to themselves ahead of future rap battles against other crews. They certainly seemed to see these contests in apocalyptic terms given that Patriot Games included tracks with titles like World War 3 and Reign of Terror.

A contemporaneous musical take on the story courtesy of Jerry Harrison and Bootsy Collins, released under the name, Bonzo Goes to Washington.

*Things have changed so much, haven’t they…

More on the background and fallout from Reagan’s gaffe.

Video courtesy of SteveWonda and Talking Heads.

Guys and Dolls: The Tribesmen - Hot & Horny (14 May 1993)

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Recommended to Peel by colleagues at Radio 5, Hot & Horny was the final release by The Tribesmen, a house music collective of which there isn’t much clear information available beyond the fact that, on this record, DJ Yomi contributed and that the guitar lines were played by Jez Ansell.

Listening to it, I find myself wondering whether Grant Buckerfield was a fan of it given that he appears to have used at least one of the drum breaks as a direct inspiration in his theme tune for I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!

Video courtesy of The Football Programme and taken directly from a John Peel show, but not from 14/5/93.

Guys and Dolls: Machine - Eighty-Nine (14 May 1993)

 

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Machine was a one-off release from long-time collaborators, Alan Sage and Luke Slater. Eighty-Nine was the third track on an EP called Integrated Harmony. It’s possible that I would have overlooked it entirely had I not initially been engaged by its high tempo opening…which came about because Peel played it at the wrong speed. My notes, though, state that the track was Not without its charms, and although I prefer the EP’s title track, I think that the sentiment holds true when listened to at the correct speed. 

To anyone unsure whether or not to click the Play icon, I would say that Eighty-Nine is a must listen if you prefer the burblier end of acid techno rather than the squelchy end. I hope that helps.

Video courtesy of Acidalia.

Guys and Dolls: Grotus - Good Evening/The Same Old Sauce (14 May 1993)

 

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The last time Grotus appeared on a John Peel show, it was with a cover of We’re An American Band by Grand Funk. Now, 18 months later, they were back with their second album, Slow Motion Apocalypse, a title which, with 33 years’ worth of hindsight, appears laughably self-indulgent now.

I’m not crazy about a lot of violence on the screen, unless it’s done with a certain amount of taste.

Well, there’s more violence on the TV news then there is in the movie….

Taken from an interaction between Michael Rupert and Joe Spinnell when they appeared on an episode of The Joe Franklin Show on 27 January 1981. Spinnell was appearing to promote the slasher movie, Maniac.

Spinnell slightly undercut his own argument in the show by warning people not to come to the movie if they didn’t like blood and gore, but his point about the evening news still stands and has been periodically explored by musicians through the years.

Whether it’s over breakfast, lunch, dinner, before we go to bed, or over the course of the last 40 years, on a 24 hour cycle, the news is always out there and ready to give us a daily diet of murder, mayhem, repression, crime and political chaos that would fill a hundred different films. Good Evening comes from a pre-internet world and through its rising collage of jump cuts, backed by an annoyingly chirpy piece of library music, it shows how, each evening, avuncular looking middle-aged men would sit behind a desk, give us a friendly greeting and then tell us all about the awful things going on nationally and internationally. Americans - or in the UK , anyone watching either ITV News or Channel 4 News - would find the catalogue of misery interrupted by commercial breaks selling products that were intended to help with physical ailments before being pitched back into the rundown of awfulness, that could be happening right outside the front door. 

It’s pretty unsparing stuff. It doesn’t even include the more light-hearted “And finally…” news items that were designed to ensure that the news programmes always ended on an upbeat note. It’s not a new idea though, by any sense. 27 years earlier, Simon & Garfunkel closed their Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album with 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night in which they sang the Christmas carol in counterpoint to a news bulletin from Wednesday, 3 August 1966 which included brief summaries on disputes over the progress of the Civil Rights Act*, the death of comedian, Lenny Bruce, Martin Luther King preparing for a march due to take place in Chicago, disruption at HUAC’s hearings into anti-Vietnam War sentiment, and Richard Nixon calling for more funding for the war effort to prevent it stretching on for another five years, as well as labelling those against the war as a threat to American society. Which shows how intellectually barren MAGA’s appropriation of this crap has been.

Peel let Good Evening run on into The Same Old Sauce, which it was paired with on Slow Motion Apocalypse. I’m not crazy about it, but have kept it here for the sake of completeness and because it is an industrial metal take on the corrosive nature of television on the psyche and intellect. At the end, Lars Fox asks, There’s one thing that I want to know/Were people this stupid before there was TV? to which the only real answer is, well yes, but the population at large probably didn’t realise just how stupid everyone else was before it.

Video courtesy of IJWTHSTD Archives.

Lyrics are copyright of Lars Fox.

*60 years on, Republican Party legislatures seem to be doing everything they can to repeal this.

Guys and Dolls: John Peel Show - Friday 7 May 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

When I was acting in the play, Here Comes a Chopper, last year, I spent several happy hours talking about music with the director’s husband, Brian Harrington, who was playing the part of Death. During the rehearsal period, he was selling the majority of his extensive record collection, most of which made up the playlists for on his shows for Kennet Radio. One band he mentioned to me a couple of times was Stray, who having formed in 1966 are currently - as of 2023 - onto their fifth reformation. I listened to one of their tracks during the rehearsal period, and thought it was OK, but it turned out that I’d already heard them a couple of years previously, when Peel played Jericho from the 1971 album, Suicide. He was inspired to do this after playing a track called Stray by Heatmiser, which featured Elliott Smith. I wonder what Brian would have made of Peel summarising Stray as a good Second Division band from the era.

Amongst all the usual letters and faxes, it was an answerphone message that had grabbed Peel’s attention during the week. An unidentified, distraught man had left a message on the office answerphone talking about the death of their mother. Given that he was still processing the death of his own mother, the year before, Peel reached out to the caller to get in touch again if they were listening.

This blog’s been covering the 7 May 1993 edition of Kat’s Karavan since 21 January, and it’s no surprise given how many good records were broadcast that night. It’s likely that we’d still have been on this show for another month if the following tracks hadn’t fell from favour with me:

Jerry Lee Lewis - Crazy Arms - When it comes to Jerry Lee Lewis, nothing else showed me how much I’ve been ruined by Great Balls of Fire than re-listening to Crazy Arms, which featured on his debut album, released in 1958. It’s only after hearing Lewis perform in slower, more contemplative mood that you realise just how much Great Balls of Fire casts such a shadow over everything else he recorded. Crazy Arms is pleasant, but pedestrian and, for the moment, if I want piano shuffle, I’ll stick with Fats Domino.

If I ‘d been feeling vindictive, I would have included Crazy Arms simply because the opening piano figure  on it reminded me of the opening to I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do by ABBA. I’ve spent most of early April walking around, either singing that song or with it stuck in my head, so I could have chosen to make all of you suffer as well. Have a care if you click on the link… It’s too late, isn’t it? You’re already singing along to it, aren’t you?…

The reason why Peel was playing Jerry Lee Lewis was due to him seeing the TV premiere of Great Balls of Fire, a 1989 biopic about Lewis, with Dennis Quaid in the lead role, broadcast on Bank Holiday Monday. He hadn’t thought much of the film, but had praise for Quaid’s performance, and conceded that the film had been successful in doing what any good music biopic should do, namely sending him back to listen to the records. Furthermore, he had a bit of a connection to Lewis, in that he reckoned he was the first person in Liverpool to own Lewis’s debut album as he had pre-ordered and pre-paid for a copy at his local record shop.

Captain Jesus and the Sunray Dream - I’m So Dead Bored - How to define the sound on this track, or indeed on its accompanying album, All Thanks to the Lord Jesus Christ Amen?  I’d say space rock meets punk rock; with the musical emphasis on the former and the lyrical emphasis on the latter. Take a future Hawkwind frontman on bass, write songs whose titles and melodies subvert Clash/Sex Pistols tunes i.e. the aforementioned I’m So Dead Bored and the now prescient, Anarchy in the USA. Record and issue it on your own label out of Armley, Leeds and you have an album which impressed Peel due to it trying to walk its own path instead of trying to hitch itself to a current guitar scene. It sounds something of a throwback to circa 1980. My notes say that It doesn’t break any new ground for me, but it has undeniable intensity. Which is true even though it hasn’t stood up to reappraisal. 

It’s not helped by the fact that the whole album is on YouTube, and when heard in full context, I’m So Dead Bored ends up sounding like one of the least interesting tracks on the record, albeit the second half of the album falls into space rock jam tedium. Had I been coming back to hear a track like the similarly titled I’m So Depressed, I Wanna Be Me or the album’s big production number, Starship, I’d probably have been persuaded. As I say, you can decide for yourself whether you would have become one of Captain Jesus’s disciples, I’m So Dead Bored starts at 9:36.

Mortal - Psycho (Logic) - How different would this blog look if I posted about tracks as soon as I heard them? I have to ensure that there’s a lag between the period I’m writing about (May 1993) and the period I’m currently listening to (September 1993) so that there is no massive gap between postings. But if I had acted the moment I heard, then Psycho (Logic) would be on the metaphorical mixtape given that my notes call it a terrific dance track. But when I listened back to it, I started to wonder whether I was responding more to the samples of Anthony Perkins being particularly mesmeric in Psycho, than I was to the music around it. 

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a dance track, specifically because of its samples - there’s one potentially coming up in a few shows time featuring an off-mic Ronald Reagan - but, with a tinge of regret, I eventually concluded that if the Perkins samples weren’t included, I may not have even noticed the track in the first place. If you are looking for further Hitchcock infused material, then you may enjoy the Bernard Hermann-esque sounds on PJ Harvey’s Man-Size Sextet, which was also broadcast on this show.

Gallon Drunk - You Should Be Ashamed - featuring Terry Edwards on saxophone. I think this probably made the initial list purely because there’s an instrumental refrain in it which reminded me of two tracks that were released after You Should Be Ashamed. Namely, If I Only Knew by Tom Jones (1994) and Amnesia by Chumbawamba (1998), both which I have a regard for which sees-saws between pleasurable amusement and outright derision. But the rest of it left me wondering what on Earth I’d seen in it given that it sounded like standard Gallon Drunk mumblerock. It struck me that You Should Be Ashamed might have sounded out of place when listened to away from its parent album, From the Heart of Town. I was able to listen the LP, which has the feel of a concept album given that the record feels like it’s set among drinkers, druggies and debauchers who are united by disgust at themselves and alienation from civilised society. However, this didn’t change my opinion on You Should Be Ashamed. The whole exercise was:

a) pointless, as I wouldn’t have had the album as a point of reference to use in 1993, and…

b) frustrating, as I finally came across some Gallon Drunk songs that I really liked*, but I won’t be able to write about them here as it doesn’t look as though Peel ever gave any of them an airing.

Full tracklisting

*The tracks were Keep Moving On, Push the Boat Out and Bedlam. Apart from a single play for the latter in September 1992, when it was released as a single, Peel passed on all three of them.

Guys and Dolls: Fishmonkeyman - What’s the World Coming To? (7 May 1993)

 

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A word of heartfelt thanks to my benefactor, Webbie, for providing an upload for this track, which out of 24 tracks from this 7/5/93 show that made my initial list of inclusions, was the only one that wasn’t shareable. He may well have provided the very best from this show at the very last.

So, it’s late Spring/early summer 1993. And if you’re of a certain age, like me, that period of time means the first stirrings of Britpop. It was a phenomenon that was going to be the making of some bands, the destruction of others and the revitalisation of a couple of bands who were either perceived as having blown a big chance (Blur) or had been quietly toiling away for years and were finally about to be noticed (Pulp). If there had been any justice, it should have worked its restorative powers on Fishmonkeyman too.

Their story is closer to Blur’s than Pulp’s given they had spent 1990 into ‘91 attracting considerable interest and radio-play with their first two singles: If I’ve Told You Once and Breathing. After signing to Warner Music UK, they recorded an album called Gryst, only to suffer an almighty slap in the face when Warners chose not to release it. After an intense year of recording, gigging and writing, this decision knocked the stuffing out of the band. Three-quarters of the personnel left and guitarist and songwriter Paul Den Heyer spent 1992 writing new material and looking for new colleagues to play with.

With a new band around him, Den Heyer and Fishmonkeyman returned with a four-track EP, Seven Monkeys Sitting in a Tree, which they released through own label, Groovey Cardboard. After the trauma of late 1991, Den Heyer was determined to just have fun on this release and the lack of pressure appears to have contributed to him writing one of the earliest unknown Britpop songs. What’s the World Coming To? features a lyric about a character, a singable chorus line, tunefully noisy guitars and, in keeping with the period 1993-95, a tremendously carefree spirit to it. 

The target of the song is a faceless government bureaucrat, but this isn’t an Ernold Same-type sneer at boring people doing boring jobs. Instead, it looks at the notion that if governments bring forward legislation that harms people, the effects of those policies are enacted by people like the subject of What’s the World Coming To?. Your mortgage has to go up? Council tax on the rise? Cuts to services? Losing your benefits?  You could be living next door to someone who has had to ensure those measures are implemented. And, depressingly, the song suggests that not only do these people not feel conflicted by it (The man with no conscience has plenty to do), but that there are more of them willing to do this than we realise (He works in your office, he lives in your street/He’s everyone that you are likely to meet.)

The song briefly tries to offer some element of McCartney-esque sympathy towards its lead character by implying that they lost something of themselves when a love affair broke up, but it doesn’t dwell on this, especially once it tells that the man is a tyrant towards his current wife and children, and that, come rain or shine, they’ll be out there waiting for the train that takes them to the job which sees them wield power over people and communities. 

If we’re looking for contemporary parallels (in 1993), while lines like He’ll stop at nothing, to get his own way/Never stops talking, has nothing to say suggest that he would have found plenty in common with Blur’s hyper efficient Colin Zeal*, the later lines in the song such as When there’s a war, he’ll be first in the line/Cutting off ears with his Swiss Army Knife suggest that their bureaucrat may have found more common cause with someone like the bigot sampled on Countryman by that evening’s Peel Session guests, Fun-Da-Mental. After all, a phrase like What’s the World Coming To? can sound like a lament in anyone’s mouth, but what they may be lamenting could have different connotations depending on who says it.

Whether they intended to or not, Fishmonkeyman caught an early whiff of the British guitar zeitgeist in this track, but it did them no good commercially, albeit Den Heyer might not have been too keen to jump back into a major label’s arms again so soon after the Gryst fiasco. This interview on Cloudberry Cake Proselytism V.3 suggests that the experience left scars he wasn’t in a hurry to expose to the music business again. The band instead signed to Copasetic Records…where history repeated itself! After releasing a couple of singles, Fishmonkeyman had an album, This Is Where You Are, recorded and set for release, but Copasetic Records couldn’t put it out due to financial problems, at which point Fishmonkeyman disbanded.

*Blur released Modern Life is Rubbish, 3 days after this Peel Show was broadcast.

Video courtesy of Webbie.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Oil Seed Rape - Rib Donor (7 May 1993)

 

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Rib Donor was the first track Peel played on this 7/5/93 show and, as was generally his style, he went straight into the record without any mention of who it was by. So, as I listened to the brewing atmosphere of malevolence and the full-blooded shouts of someone haranguing an undesirable neighbour with implications that they are either a murderer or a pedophile, I found myself thinking that it sounded a little like Therapy? in one of their murder metal tracks. But it was actually the work of Gloucestershire’s Wayne Travis, aka Oil Seed Rape, who had started the project as a one-man outfit, before expanding it into a quartet.

 In this live video from November 1992, Travis introduces Rib Donor as being a song about a sweet old lady who makes us scones. A throwaway line maybe, but it conjures the image of an angry woodcutter, leading a group of forest folk to harangue the witch’s house in the weeks before Hansel and Gretel go there. (Song starts at 2:55).

Despite the thrashing and the shouting, I’ll happily concede that Rib Donor is quite a slight track to put on to the metaphorical mixtape. Ultimately, as with Slugger by Tsunami from the same show, it owes its place here to me thinking that it was someone else. There’s a case to be made that in Rib Donor, Oil Seed Rape sounded more like Therapy? than Therapy? did themselves at this time. At least, that was what I would have been feeling…

Video courtesy of planetfurball.

Guys and Dolls: Therapy? - Speedball (7 May 1993)

 

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So, having declared myself a fan of Therapy? around the time of my 17th birthday, I did what any good bandwagon jumper would and immediately went cold on the new material, because it didn’t sound like what had grabbed my attention in the first place.  

I’d been hooked by Screamager from the Shortsharpshock EP, and I was excited to see a new EP, Face the Strange, following hard on its heels. Hell..there was even a chance that I’d actually buy this one. But when I saw them perform the lead track, Turn on Top of the Pops, I felt quite disappointed. It was a bit of a drag, which wasn’t a description I generally associated with Therapy? (from my one experience of hearing them). A recent re-listen to it showed me the error of my ways, but in the early summer of 1993, the damage was done, and I didn’t end up buying Face the Strange, because its public face wasn’t giving me what I wanted.

I wasn’t alone in this given that, after receiving an acetate of the EP, John Peel bypassed Turn and went straight to the second track, Speedball. This would have been much more like it from my point of view; full of skittering Fyfe Ewing drum patterns, thorny guitar storms and a wonderfully singable chorus line, You make me sick etc.  But, I suspect for the band, they may have regarded it as being too much like a Screamager retread, while their label would have faced pushback from radio stations who would have blanched at giving daytime radio play to a track named after a drug cocktail. Such were the compromises of major label life.

I went on telling anyone who was interested* that I was a Therapy? fan, though shamefully, I only bought one album, Semi-Detached (1998) and that was a good 20 years after it came out.  Meanwhile, Peel, after several years of airplay, bade them farewell at this point.

Video courtesy of balbees.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

*Nobody. However, given that Therapy?’s former producer, Al Clay, went onto to produce the debut album by my favourite band of the 1990s, it feels to me that, my initial dalliance with Therapy? essentially served as the preparation for my love affair with Marion.

Guys and Dolls: PJ Harvey - Man-Size Sextet (7 May 1993)

 

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While preparing this blogpost, it became apparent to me that Man-Size is currently my least favourite PJ Harvey song. I’ve written previously about my dislike of a lot of the Rid of Me era tracks, and how what I struggled to engage with was the way in which they try to Americanize Polly’s style and vocals. This reaches its nadir in the closing lines of Man-Size when she sings the word gasoline with an American twang which makes me want to rip my ears off the side of my head, anytime I hear it.   

But all was not lost for Man-Size, because she gave us a second version on Rid of Me consisting only of her voice, percussion and various string instruments, which I think she may have played herself.  

Although the title Man-Size could be seen as a comment on Polly’s own sexual nature and awakening, the lyrics suggest she is playing the role of a man who is now sexually switched on and looking for something to do with his equipment: Good lord, I’m big/I’m heading on. Not to mention tangible excitement at having someone to use their equipment on: Got my girl and she’s a wow….My babe looking cool and neat/I’m pretty sure good enough to eat etc.

On Rid of Me, Man-Size Sextet is sequenced four tracks ahead of Man-Size. Stylistically, this makes sense because the vocal on Man-Size Sextet sounds far more uncertain than the one on Man-Size. Taken together with the stabbing, dissonant strings, it does an excellent job of conveying the chaos of puberty and sexual awakening. Polly wants to fuck in Man-Size Sextet, but despite the favourable conditions, s(he) is a bundle of nerves. Emotions are churning up all over the place, and although s(he) has the tools, it doesn’t sound as though s(he) knows what to do with them. I know how s(he) feels. I had my first passionate experiences with a woman in December 1993, but it took me another four years before I actually achieved anything. Nerves, excitement, tension, desire, delusion all played their part.  As the strings scream out over the repeated refrain of Man size from 1:40 to 1:52, it sounds nothing less than someone desperately trying to cross the threshold into adulthood and leave both their and the girl’s pre-sex self behind. You almost feel the pelvic thrusts between two hot groins.

The closing note shows that, together, the boy and girl have become man and woman, but Polly nails the one-eyed nature of the conquering male. They’ve made a girl into a woman, now burn that childhood version with gasoline, so that the newly made woman can service the man again, and again. Notice how the man doesn’t burn their boyhood self. Presumably this is so they can have it both ways: be serviced like a man and waited on like a child, when the mood takes them.

If we take this idea on a stage, if Man-Size Sextet relates to the virgin trying to use their new sexual awareness for the first time within a fog of nerves, then the rock version of Man-Size finds the man several months on, bullishly confident in their sexual technique, in awe of their physical development and ready to rut.

I respond to Man-Size Sextet because it speaks to where I was at the time Peel played it - all tooled up, but with nowhere to go, no-one to play with and uncertain about what I would do if I found someone. I also like it because it sounds closer to what I want from a PJ Harvey song. It’s telling that this was the only song on Rid of Me that was not produced by Steve Albini and that’s probably why Harvey sounds, to my ears at least, closer to her real self than she does on other material from this period. It also points to where she would take her music next, once Steven Vaughan and Rob Ellis - who did the string arrangements on this track - had moved on.

Video courtesy of zararity.

All lyrics are copyright of Polly Jean Harvey.

Guys and Dolls: Cell - Halo [Peel Session] (7 May 1993)

 

This session was originally broadcast on Saturday 13 February 1993, at a time when Cell were enjoying some decent exposure on Kat’s Karavan. However, this repeat marked their final appearance on a Peel show playlist.

The studio version of the third track, Everything Turns (from 7:37) has already been featured here and I’d have possibly included it on the metaphorical mixtape for reasons of completeness. Remembering how much I’d enjoyed some of Cell’s music from late ‘92/early ‘93, I was a little surprised to see that it was only the session opener, Halo, that made my list of inclusions, but having listened to the full session here, I don’t feel that I was wrong. It’s the only one of the tracks which has any kind of life and spark to it, as, in keeping with the theme of so many inclusions from this show, our narrator comes back from a period of self-reflection and decides to end a relationship that’s been causing him problems. He suspects that his lover has been cheating on him, and the projection of goodness that they show to him and the world is a false impression.

There is a second reading about Halo, which is that it’s told from the perspective of Death itself, swooping down to take away some unsuspecting person, who has been wasting their life doing nothing and in its closing lines: Get off my face/Baby, I’m not dead being utterly indifferent to protest or pleading.  Whichever interpretation is true though, Halo rocks in a way that the other tracks don’t get near. It’s not that any of them are bad per se, but they don’t really engage me.

The second track, Camera is too whiny, the final track, Stratosphere (from 11:50) tries to reach for the skies but ends up leaving the listener behind, and even Everything Turns runs the risk of being left off giving the strained vocals on it.

As the full session is available, you’ll be able to make your own decision, but for me it’s Track 1 and done.

Video courtesy of The Sidefish Report.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Terror Fabulous - Drop It Cool (7 May 1993)

 

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So, after a couple of false starts, Cecil Campbell aka Terror Fabulous takes his place on the metaphorical mixtape. We’ve already had Peel warning listeners about “sexist claptrap” on Terror Fabulous records; while, a few weeks before this programme went out, I left a Terror Fabulous tune out because I was undecided on whether it was slut shaming or slut protecting.

But, as far as I can tell Drop It Cool appears to stay clear of controversy and frames its message around how people approach each brand new day. In Terror Fabulous’s view, the world is split between those who shine and those who glisten. The former dedicate their day to doing right by their fellow man and living a virtuous life; the latter only see the new day as a chance to feather their nest with money. I don’t think he’s being especially critical of people working for a living to put food on the table or a roof over their heads, but the use of the word, glisten, implies an attack on those who earn money purely for status. He also includes a swipe at those who chase money through crime, the ones with an angle of essentially living through wasted days, because they’re only interested in the false prophets of mammon.

If we assume that the Drop in the title refers to the patois meaning die as in drop out, then this song implies that those who dedicate their days to clean living and looking after others will receive their reward in death compared to those who grind themselves into the dirt as part of the rat race or those who may find themselves murdered by rude boys. If you shine, you’re an angel and will soar on into Heaven; if you glisten, then you’ll be marked by a gravestone that will only degrade and wear away over time.

Video courtesy of K Gold

Guys and Dolls: Royal Trux - Steal Yr Face/Gett Off (7 May 1993)

 

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On the evidence of these two songs, which made up both sides of a single released through Sub Pop, if you take a sprinkling of early 1970s Rolling Stones guitar riffs and season with Sonic Youth-style vocals, you get Royal Trux.

In keeping with those two other bands, on both of these tracks, Royal Trux manage to combine a musically sexy but unromantic sound with lyrically striking junkie poetry. The creative force behind the band was a couple, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema. On Steal Yr Face, Hagerty - who had already acknowledged a debt to the Stones when his previous band, Pussy Galore (featuring Jon Spencer) had recorded a cassette only cover album of Exile on Main St. - takes on a hybrid Jagger cum Thurston Moore role, warning of dire consequences at losing oneself to narcotic excess. Meanwhile, Herrema dusts down her Kim Gordon cosplay act on Gett Off, barking out unintelligible orders over a clipped guitar sound, which sounds like Brown Sugar’s autistic, younger brother, before becoming overwhelmed by spooky harmonica playing, as though the solo in Little Red Rooster was having a stroke.

It’s difficult to pick a favourite here, as they both have lots to cause fascination and enthralment. It’s not fair of me either to talk about Royal Trux sounding like other bands, especially given their influence on Sonic Youth - Kim Gordon’s side project duo Free Kitten took inspiration from the Royal Trux sound, for example.

Videos courtesy of Rich Neil and myaimistrue.

Guys and Dolls: Moonshake - Girly Loop (7 May 1993)

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I talk sometimes about tracks on this blog being borderline inclusions on my metaphorical mix tape. Girly Loop by Moonshake is so borderline that I can picture it diving under a descending doorway, Indiana Jones-style to take up its place here rather than being left out in the cold.

It owes its place here, mainly, due to pleasure in having new material from Moonshake and hearing them on a Peel show again. The material he had played from the Eva Luna album had been among some of the most consistently entertaining heard on a Peel show during late 1992. Now, the band were back with a mini-album called Big Good Angel, a record which functioned as something of a holding operation while the band toured extensively through the first half of 1993.

However, alarm bells have been ringing when I find myself admitting that it has taken me 3 or 4 listens to engage with Girly Loop, and even then I’d say that my enthusiasm for it is lukewarm at best. When I posted about their Peel Session from 29/1/93, I highlighted the band’s smorgasbord of styles and textures that they work into their songs as being what drew me towards them. But, curiously, it’s precisely that blending which works against the track here. The mood starts out nocturnal, spooky and primal as Margaret Fiedler McGinnis sings about trying to find crazy men and wild men, as a contrast to the passive partner that she has at home. The illicit thrill - albeit a dangerous one - of trying to find, what I presume are new sexual partners, that she tries to convey as she steps out into dangerous environments is telegraphed by bursts of noise which are trying to introduce notes of abrasiveness into a quiet basic track, but which just ending up sounding either like a flock of seagulls having an argument or an amplifier breaking wind. 

For a change, the eclecticism sounds forced, they’re metaphorically throwing sounds out of the speakers to see what sticks, and at times you can see the beads of sweat on their foreheads with the desperate effort of it all.

It just gets by on the strength of who it is and Fiedler McGinnis’s vocal. Also, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see how the approach here may have inspired PJ Harvey’s music in her post-Rid of Me albums. Fiedler McGinnis would subsequently play as part of Harvey’s live band in the early 2000s, so I trust that Polly made her debt clear to Margaret.

Video courtesy of TheMelcene.

Guys and Dolls: Lee and the Clarendonians - Night Owl (7 May 1993)

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Peel played this 1972 roots reggae track because he claimed that he was still going through his collection of singles even though he had now found the elusive record in the Little Richard cover search. I’m guessing that in the L section, Lee and The Clarendonians would have been positioned before Mickey Lee Lane.

If Discogs is to be believed, then Lee in this instance was Hubert Lee, and this was one of his earliest releases. Indeed, it may have been a conscious decision to pair Lee up with the more experienced vocal duo, The Clarendonians (Peter Austin and Ernest Wilson), to give things a more polished veneer. It continues the theme of records from this Peel show which deal with relationships collapsing, although in this case, it’s the man waiting up with a rolling pin to greet the late homecoming of his party-loving other half, and sending her to bed with a message that her behaviour has killed his love for her.

I’ve had to do a lot of driving recently, both for work and for the extended run of a play I’ve been in. This has led to me following Peel’s lead and re-listening to albums I haven’t heard for many years. The tone of this track came back to me when I was listening to Better Do Better from Stars of CCTV by Hard-Fi. 33 years separate Night Owl and Better Do Better, but the message is clear - whether you’re in Feltham or Jamaica - those women gonna drive you mad!

Video courtesy of Mr Charlie Chalk.

Guys and Dolls: Moose - Suzanne (7 May 1993)

 

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Still makes my head go all funny, that one. John Peel after playing Suzanne on 7/5/93.

The Phantom Fifty had got to Number 17 and presented a track which is the flip-side of Vi Ploriontos by Scrawl. Whereas that track was about someone choosing to end a relationship, Suzanne finds Russell Yates and Moose having to manage the pain of being dumped by the titular lover, who at least has the decency to look sad about it.

Musically, there’s a lot going on in Suzanne, which reflects the sense of emotional turmoil that it’s trying to chronicle. The chiming guitars that open it sound like choked breaths of disbelief that another day has come around and that the pain of this breakup has to be relieved again, a weary recognition that things haven’t got easier yet. We even have arpeggios that sound like falling tears cropping up at some points. Lyrically, the song touches on the pain of seeing the one who has let you go having the strength to work through their own guilt and make progress, all while Yates still finds himself looking longingly at photographs he’s not yet ready to throw out and recognising that, just by existing, Suzanne still has mastery over his emotions and heart: She walks all over me/I can’t take it from her.

And what complicates these feelings further is the fact that while Yates suffers, both Suzanne and the world at large keep going, oblivious to his pain: She goes where she wants to etc while the galloping, driving drum pattern sounds like the rest of the world clattering around our stricken, lovelorn hero. Moose up the ante on this from around 2:15 onwards by introducing a loud white noise effect through to the end of the song which does a brilliant job of evoking just how overwhelming it can be to try and pick your way through the everyday world when your heart is broken.

Around the second chorus the white noise guitar bursts through and takes over the song, swinging from side to side on the stereo spectrum, hitting a single note column of sound where a normal guitar solo might be, and the song just builds onwards, drums roll, guitars get more frantic, the noise increases like the blood boiling in your ears until the band crash to a halt. Still stunning now, and for me a high water mark for shoegazing.  (Taken from We almost laughed, we almost cried, a 2014 retrospective article on the work of Moose, published on A Goldfish Called Regret).

 Moose talk about how they made the video to Suzanne.

Video courtesy of 9emmett9

Lyrics copyright of K.J. McKillop and Russell Yates.

Guys and Dolls: NSO Force - In 2 Deep (7 May 1993)

 

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NSO = No Sell Out

My notes seem to suggest that I misinterpreted what In 2 Deep was about when I first heard it. I thought it was tremendous, but was perturbed by troubling sentiments. I was probably guilty of taking the title and the line at the 38 second mark about re-offending, as a sign that the track was about the narrator embracing crime, and accepting it as their way of life, because it was impossible to turn back from it.

However, it’s become clear to me on subsequent listens that it’s a repudiation both of a criminal life and living a conventional 9-to-5 existence. The NSO crew - Douglas Haywoode, Niles Hailstones and Ola The Soul Controller - have clear heads about both their purpose and the sacrifices they will have to make in order to be true to what they want to do. However, there’s no bravado on show here. The mood of the track is quite downbeat with its  repeated wah-wah sample reflecting all the possibilities being gone over and rejected, and the jazz trumpet evoking the noirish sense of late nights and melancholia at the struggles which await them as they try both to develop as artists, and stay true to their cultural principles.

And make no mistake, “struggle” is the central theme of In 2 Deep. It’s the struggle not to work as a wage slave or puppet, so as to attain the dream of a place in Battersea, eating caviar and swine - now that’s what I call London weighting. It’s a struggle not to get embroiled in intra-racial conflicts with other black people and artists over trivialities - such as a brand of trainer - which can wind up leaving people dead.  And it’s a struggle which has to be faced alone. I found the most affecting section of the track to be the run  from 1:23 to 2:16, where the MC laments the way in which nobody impedes the progress of black people more than other black people, and in rap/hip-hop, you have to keep your aspirations quiet as you build them up, so as not to attract dangerous attention. Choose your time to flex, wisely, appears to be the message. 

And then there’s the pressure to succeed before life either makes other choices for them, or the streets end up claiming them, one way or another. The closing refrain of Time is running out adds another layer of pressure to the NSO Force’s mission. The track carries the weight of mental agony and it transmits the harshness of urban London life. NSO Force certainly had to put up with their share of setbacks, including the disappointment of seeing their one and only Peel Session, recorded in November 1989, go unbroadcast due to excessive swearing.

But it’s not all grim stuff. If nothing else, this may be the only hip-hop track to ever feature the words dilly dally in it.

Video courtesy of Sentinal One.

Guys and Dolls: Tsunami - Slugger (7 May 1993)

 

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Two tracks blogged about in a day! What madness is this? Well, they have a couple of things in common, such as:

1) Both Tsunami’s album, Deep End and Scrawl’s mini-album, Bloodsucker were issued by Simple Machines, out of Arlington County, Virginia.

2) Like Vi Ploriontos, Slugger made my list of inclusions - albeit with a question mark next to it - then I was going to pass on it, only to reprieve it.

I don’t think Slugger is as good a track as Vi Ploriontos, but this could be down to it being harder to get a handle on. I think it’s about outsiders trying to break into a clique, but doing a bad job of it, though it’s not easy to decipher that from the vocals. I was helped by the fact that part of the lyrics are included in the liner notes for Deep End:

Fly in to town on a saucer of gold.

You wouldn’t know cool 

If it crept up and slugged you in the nose.

I was probably guilty of giving up too easily, but I initially wrote the track off as being too insubstantial for inclusion. However, when I found myself thinking about Vi Ploriontos, I was convinced that the riff to Slugger was from Vi Ploriontos. The fact that that chugging riff had clamped itself to my brain convinced me to put it back on the metaphorical mixtape. Sometimes, you just have to go with the vibes.

Video courtesy of Brooks Wyrick.

Lyrics copyright of their authors.