Guys and Dolls: Tindersticks - Raindrops/Her/Drunk Tank [Peel Session] (28 May 1993)

 

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I got quite excited when I heard Peel say that this 28/5/93 show featured a session from Tindersticks. My over-riding feeling was “Good, now perhaps I’ll get to see what all the fuss is about.” 

I’ve been aware of Tindersticks for over 30 years. They probably first entered my consciousness, when I was leafing through an issue of NME or Melody Maker and saw a photo of Stewart A. Staples framed over the shoulder of a string quartet in subdued lighting at somewhere like the Royal Festival Hall. In my mind, that photo - whether it existed or not - summed Tindersticks up. Concert hall rock, to be listened to, sitting down and inviting applause after each song, rather than cheers. And in the mid-1990s, I wasn’t really looking for that from the bands that I wanted to engage with. 

This was entirely my own prejudice coming to the fore and it’s one that had remained with me given that, prior to hearing this session, I’d never knowingly listened to anything by Tindersticks. Well, that’s not entirely true. Their long collaboration with French film director, Claire Denis meant that I would have heard their soundtrack to her 2013 film, Bastards, but I can’t remember any of the music from it.

At time of writing, Tindersticks have released 25 albums (14 orthodox ones and 11 soundtracks), but when they went into Maida Vale to record this session on 27 April 1993, they were right at the beginning of their journey. Their debut album was six months away from being released - in fact, I’ve recently listened to some of the first John Peel show to be broadcast in the week of its release.

I’m rather jealous of Tindersticks fans. The band were always critically acclaimed, but that never seemed to translate into great commercial success. Their highest charting album in the UK, their eponymous second album, released in 1995, peaked at Number 13. Of the subsequent studio albums that charted, none went higher than Number 36.* Their highest charting UK single placing was Number 38 for 1997’s Bathtime. Even the aforementioned debut album got no higher in the UK than Number 56, but Tindersticks continued to put out music unabated. There was always a label somewhere willing to distribute them. Despite a brief hiatus between 2005 and 2008, they never lost track of one another, they endured and they worked. 

They clearly mean a lot to some people, and I wish that certain bands and artists I’ve cherished over the years whose careers shrivelled up due to commercial indifference or their own bad choices had been similarly indulged. But, all that considered, the inescapable truth hit me as I listened to this first Peel Session. They were good enough to merit special treatment, and had I heard it in 1993, I’d probably have been hoping that someone had their back, because the talent shown in the three tracks I’ve highlighted here deserved to be nurtured and cared for.

The video features all of the songs from the session, taken directly from Peel’s 28/5/93 show. The only one I wouldn’t have included on the metaphorical mixtape was the second track, Tye Die (runs from 6:31 to 10:24). It’s a narrow miss because the band do a wonderful job of creating a spookily, malevolent atmosphere, but their work is undermined by Staples’s drawling, downbeat vocal which sounds like he’s trying to club sing an autopsy report. A look at the lyrics shows he’s only singing a rather dreary attempt at a Brothers Grimm style nursery rhyme.

Issues over vocal styling briefly put a question mark over the session’s opening track, Raindrops. Peel may have thought that Staples was trying to channel Leonard Cohen, but I heard Nick Cave, myself, which is a far riskier proposition when it comes to trying to keep a listener onside. However, it’s impossible not to take onboard the lessons that Raindrops imparts. It’s a story of a love gone stale, one where all the little quirks of the partner that were once thought endearing now only serve to alienate. This has gone both ways, leaving an atmosphere of sterility hanging over the household. 

What’s worse is that both parties know that the relationship has died, and it’s implied that they could have walked away from each other long before this point, but they haven’t and now they can’t. The decision to end the track on a fade out is inspired, given that it suggests the crushing, ongoing ennui of a relationship that has desiccated itself into a mutual obligation instead of a joyous meeting of hearts.

It’s a reminder to couples everywhere that the biggest threat to a relationship is not adultery, but complacency. In fact, stop reading this for a few minutes if you can, go and find your partner, and shower them with enough affection for a few minutes until they give you a look of love rather than indulgence. And make time for it everyday.

Welcome back, lovers everywhere.

My favourite track of the session is the third one, Her. You’ll need to be a little patient with it, as the opening 45 seconds involve a touch of acoustic warm-up to set the mood, but once this turbo-charged cante flamenco** takes off, it’s a wonderful listen. It’s possible to see Her as linked to both Raindrops and the final track in the session, Drunk Tank. I mentioned how Raindrops suggested that the fossilised couple in it had, somewhere along the line, passed up on an earlier opportunity to end their relationship: With our only chance to jump/Neither of us had the guts., but Her catches Staples in a moment when he’s recognised that he has to make the jump away from something he can no longer support. He’s terrified, but cautiously resolute:

Feel like I’ve been dancing/The lights have finally come on.

Just waiting for my eyes, adjusting/ See how ugly I’ve become.

She asked me for no promises/I made them to myself

I’ve given myself no choices now/It’s the only way out.

Nevertheless, he makes the choice, in spite of the short term pain and fury, it will release. Drunk Tank finds him still stuck in the aftermath of the break and having to manage the fallout. As the title suggests, he does this primarily by taking himself out at night and drinking to forget. The implications are that he’s walked away due to his own character deficiencies:

I was the one/I always stayed out so late.

Always forgiving my inconsideration

It’s a different story/When you can never go home again.

I’ve seen some theories floated that Drunk Tank concerns domestic violence, and lines like:

My hands came back today/Finally set themselves free.

No more fists on the end of my arms/Just these hands trembling.

give that theory credence. If it’s paired up with the feelings of self- disgust that Staples expressed in Her, maybe the break was forced by him being thrown out or forcibly removed from his former lover’s presence. What struck me though when listening to Drunk Tank is the sense that it’s a night time song playing out just as the dawn of a new day is starting to break through. And contrary to the common trope of a new day heralding rebirth and fresh chances, here the approaching sunrise is seen as something to be frightened of. In the cold light of day, your mistakes and failings show up far more clearly than they do when you can hide in darkened buildings, within the bottom of a glass, or under the covers at police accommodation. And through a combination of shrieking violin, spectral high piano notes and a relentless grinding guitar/bass riff, we’re thrown out in to a street as a new morning breaks, the raindrops start falling and every door to home is slammed shut.

The four tracks in this session would all feature on Tindersticks’s mammoth debut album, which was released in the UK in October 1993. As the band wrote to Peel after recording this session, they would start touring in September. The summer would be a gig-free time - violinist, Dickon Hinchcliffe was spending it in Mexico - but it would at least allow the band time to recharge their batteries as they headed out to take their songs of heartache and heartbreak out to the people as the nights drew in, the weather got colder and somewhere, they would be forcing someone to confront some kind of unpalatable truth about themselves.

*A live album, The Bloomsbury Theatre 12.3.95 peaked at Number 32 in the UK album charts. 

** A look at the cover art on their first album shows that flamenco culture was obsessing the band, somewhat, at the time.

Video courtesy of Vibracobra23 Ennui.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: The Fall - Mother-Sister! (28 May 1993)

 

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Thank God that there is a dedicated Fall lyrics interpretation website up and running again to help clueless bloggers with providing some colour to Fall selections beyond what my notes record of this play of Mother-Sister!, which Peel described as a golden gasser featuring several Johnny Rottenisms. I initially felt that it was those that made the track interesting enough to include on the metaphorical mixtape. Whether Mark E. Smith would have liked it or not, if you were recording a vocal in December 1978 and you happened to lapse into a sneering tone or, as happens at the end of Mother-Sister!, you spit out the word Sad! in a manner that combines a shout, a scream and a retch, then comparisons to John Lydon would be inescapable.

Mother-Sister! was recorded for The Fall’s 1979 debut album, Live at the Witch Trials. The opening exchange between guitarist, Martin Bramah and Smith: Er, what’s this song about?/Er, nothing was, for several years, presented as the truth by Smith when talking about Mother-Sister! He just felt that the words  went well with the tune - which keyboardist, Una Baines, is credited as the co-author of. But according to Bramah, the song is about his upbringing and the house he grew up in. Bramah didn’t know who his father was and, as a child, Bramah lived with his gran during the week, and with his mother at the weekends. Up to the age of seven, he believed that his gran was his mum and his mum was his sister. This was quite a common arrangement in fatherless households, and appears to be the inspiration behind the lines: Astray/Our friends/And the fathers/ Are underground.

The oddest line comes at the end when Smith sings, Mother, sister, mother, sister/ Why did you put your head in the pylon?  Mother-Sister! was originally called The Pylon when The Fall started playing it in their live sets during March/April of 1978.  Again, the source of this is the life of Martin Bramah. When he moved in with his mum in Prestwich, their house was near to both the M60 motorway and between two electricity pylons. But these oppressive surroundings at least meant that the house was exceptionally cheap to buy. 

Bramah claimed credit for the arrangement of Una Baines’s melody on Mother-Sister!, which combines post-punk (the skeletal guitar, especially with its distress signal-like notes at the beginning. However, Bramah goes on to play a melody of great elegance as the foundation of the track), dub (the bass and keyboard motifs) and punk rock (the drum breaks leading into Smith’s spitting out of the track’s title). 

Considering the apparent inspirations behind Mother-Sister!, I would make a case for it being something of the title track on Live at the Witch Trials. In another age, the fatherless Bramah could well have seen his mother/sister denounced as being something evil for having a child out of wedlock, and it would have been straight from the courthouse to the ducking stool. Happily, we’ve left that behind, but as The Fall progressed through the remainder of the 20th Century, it would not have escaped their notice that single mothers continued to be judged harshly, both behind closed doors and in newspaper editorials. The trials continued unabated, but nowadays, the mothers didn’t drown in water, but under the weight of confected, public scorn.

Mother-Sister broken down by Annotating The Fall

Video courtesy of NeonMeateDream99.

All lyrics are copyright of Mark E.Smith

Guys and Dolls: J Church - Good Judge of Character (28 May 1993)

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For some reason, I overlooked Good Judge of Character when Peel played it as part of a trio of tracks taken from San Francisco band, J Church’s debut album, Quetzalcoatl*, on his 22/5/93 show.  Indeed, none of the three made it on to the metaphorical mixtape, but here we are with Good Judge of Character now taking its place. There’s a lot about its general style and demeanour that doesn’t move me particularly, but it reaps the benefit of being a generic punk/metal tune that has had the sense to equip itself with a killer chorus line. 

Doesn’t it get cold out here? has been rattling around my brain for the last 48 hours. As the video demonstrates, it lodged in enough Peel Show listeners’ minds to propel it to Number 34 in the 1993 Festive Fifty. And with that sliver of catchiness hooking me in, I’ve gone back to the track again and again, which has enabled me to discover layers of interest that aren’t immediately obvious on the first listen.

The song’s about Lance Hahn’s interactions with the kind of local character that we all recognise within our towns, but were always warned against striking up conversation with. Hahn’s oddball is a recovering junkie, previously of wealthy standing from Austin, now reduced to living in her car, but still with an eye to be taken out if possible (She asks me on a date that I can’t afford) and who clearly has affection for him, with her ongoing entreaty to Take care, baby. 

Hahn’s reaction towards her is affectionate too, but as that chorus line suggests, he’s also amazed/revolted that the woman can live the way she does. The reason why I think she may be a former junkie is because of the line, She’s been to whores’ hell but still manages to smile, which leads me to wonder whether their relationship is quite as innocent as it appears. Perhaps the date that Hahn can’t afford is the woman’s asking price for sexual favours. If she can find enough of those, maybe that’s how she keeps out the cold.

At the very least, it offers the intriguing, though unlikely possibility of Alan Bennett, sitting up late at home on this night, hearing Good Judge of Character, and it giving him a push of inspiration to write a play about the female tramp who lived on his driveway for 15 years.

*I really should have responded more warmly to them given that, with that album title, it was obvious they were fans of the movie, Q - The Winged Serpent

Video courtesy of June Grant.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Tsunami - Beauty Pt.II (28 May 1993)

 

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Distributed as part of a 4 track EP on Simple Machines called Inclined Plane, which showcased the label owners’ band, Tsunami alongside 3 other bands (Superchunk, Rodan and Unrest), Beauty Pt. II is another track from this 28/5/93 show which takes jealousy of a popular girl as its theme - we were here with Picasso Trigger’s song, Queenie, a few posts ago.  However, the reasons for the jealousy in Beauty Pt. II may be more related to bitterness towards a former lover/crush than because of the anger at being ghosted by a friend you helped raise up to alpha status, as was the case in Queenie.

I’m running with the bitter romance angle mainly because Beauty Pt. II was originally recorded by the male, New York band, Flower, for their 1990 album, Hologram Sky. Because the vocals, in both versions, are quite muted - at least until the final 30 seconds, it’s easy on initial listens to miss just how rancorous the singer(s) mood is:

I want to watch her fall/See her change, see her fall.

Furthermore, the following line - I touch a piece of her/Reminds me of what I’ve learnt - implies that the fallout from this relationship is going to be spread around, making Beauty Pt. II into one of those chain reaction heartache songs i.e. “they hurt me, so now I’m going to hurt others.” Had it been Reminds me of what I’ve lost that would transform the narrator from avenger to victim.

If there’s one thing sustaining our narrator though, it’s that ongoing trope of seeing someone getting swamped in attention and it causing them to unravel as they have to keep so many hearts on a string that eventually they start forgetting which lie they’ve told:

She is a superstar/Falling fast, falling hard.

She’s shooting through the sky/Cool and hot, she’s gonna die*.

There isn’t a great deal to choose between the two versions, Tsunami’s is moderately faster, though I’ve found myself listening to Flower’s version more, possibly because it might be being sung by Ian James, who would go on to be a founding member of Cell. Where they diverge is in the thrashy outro that forms the last movement of the track. On Flower’s version it sounds like they’re screaming, I’ve got a gun in the car on three of the four refrains, before ending with One, two, three four, which Tsunami use throughout the last 35 seconds - though one of the women eventually melds this into something I can’t quite make out in counterpoint to it. Regardless, it causes a song called Beauty Pt. II to end on a rather ugly note.

A look at the John Peel wiki suggests that Peel only played two of the tracks on Inclined Plane. Three weeks before playing Beauty Pt. II, he had included Darjeeling by Rodan. This blog didn’t cover that show, but I would have probably passed on it. Of the others, I would have very likely included Winona Ryder by Unrest, which was an updated reworking of Debbie Harry by Family Fodder. Superchunk’s tune, Baxter, would have been a borderline choice.

Tsunami possibly owed their place on this show’s playlist to Peel having seen them play in the week at The Wilde Club in Norwich. He had enjoyed both the music and their onstage manner, so much so that he had sent them a note inviting them to meet him for a lunchtime drink in Great Finborough, the following day. They hadn’t taken him up on the offer, and we don’t know whether they were as un-nerved at the prospect of having a drink with Peel as Mark Arm had been.

The original version of Beauty Pt.II by Flower.

*There is a potential drug subtext in these lyrics too, in which case the song could be read as relief at having escaped a damaging relationship.

Video courtesy of Brooks Wyrick (Tsunami) and Famous or Forgotten Music (Flower).

All lyrics are copyright of Flower.

Guys and Dolls: Leroy Smart - Poor Man Struggle (28 May 1993)

 

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For some reason, this track had a question mark against it on my list of selections. Maybe I was a bit put off by the crappy synth pan-pipe/trumpet sounds of the Resistance riddim which underpins the song or, more likely, I was irritated by the period between 2:33 and 2:43, where Leroy Smart tries to throw in some soulful vocalisations, but sounds less like someone wilting under the pressure of poverty and more like someone getting hit by an attack of acute appendicitis.

Ultimately, Poor Man Struggle is too well made to be ignored though. The lyrics are standard “the-rich-get-the-pleasure-and-the-poor-get-the-blame” fare, but it’s all put together by people who so clearly know what they’re doing that it sounds fresh and invigorating. 

The only change I would make, especially if the song was being recorded now, would be to insist on a verse about how the poor man’s struggle is often made worse by a tendency to act against their own interests if they think it will make other poor people’s lives worse. Until this mindset is altered, or even better, until governments stop using it as a fallback strategy to stop people forcing genuinely effective changes, then the struggle will never end, and the rich will continue walking on water while the rest of us frantically try and stay afloat.

Video courtesy of Reggae Nineties (And Early 2000s).

Guys and Dolls: Shiny Beast - Texasatan/Picasso Trigger - Queenie (28 May 1993)

 

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Two tracks out of three played by Peel on this show from Pyloric Waves*, a compilation album featuring bands from North Carolina, distributed on D-Tox.  Shiny Beast and Picasso Trigger represented some of the sounds of Raleigh. Current Peel obsession, Polvo, from Chapel Hill, also featured, but I passed on including their track, Wild Turkey.

Of the two of them, Texasatan is the more musically accomplished. In 99 seconds, it packs in orthodox rock, thrash and funk, all while working to the ethos that your lyrics can be as disturbing as you want them to be, providing that you make the music around it catchy and surprising. The blank voiced vocal, pondering aloud the likelihood of surviving a self-administered operation, takes on the quality of an exhausted Jesus, labouring in the wilderness - the inaudible, shredded vocal between 0:40 and 0:49 sounds like the Devil encouraging him to an act of self harm. The funk rock break over the last 30 seconds sounds like someone trying to clear a distracted mind, while the ripping sound effects either adds a further layer of metaphor to stripping away un-necessary thoughts or, more disturbingly, tries to convey the start of the self-operation.  

Or perhaps Jesus just ripped his trousers.

Picasso Trigger’s track, Queenie, may lack musical savvy, but it’s probably the one I’ll remember most when looking back over these tracks in a year’s time. It appears to be a great example of what I call Heathers-rock, in that it takes female conflict/envy as its theme, in particular the importance given to popularity and homage paid to girls at the top of the social pecking order. I’m guessing on this a bit, given that, again, the vocal isn’t always clear enough to make out what is being sung**. My supposition is that  singer, Kathy Poindexter is addressing the song to a popular girl that she helped to make:

When your name is in lights.

Will you remember me.

I’ll cross your stomping ground.

And touch your royalty.

What really comes across in this song is how poisonous these positions of social eminence are. Queenie drips with paranoia (Don’t hate me), threat (Try to tie my hair and I will trip you), mockery - in these types of songs, the word “pretty” always comes across as an insult. Most of all, Queenie emphasises the essential transient loneliness which comes with being a venerated figure, especially if you’re a girl:

When you sit on the throne.

You must feel very high.

You must feel like a queen.

Alone and left to dry.

*Sounds very grand but just another example of American rock label scatology, given that it’s taken from the word, pylorus, which is a small muscle/valve connecting the lower intestine to the duodenum. I suppose calling the album something like, Shitgate, would have put people off.

**The vocals didn’t get any easier to decipher when Picasso Trigger performed the song as part of their final gig on 16 June 1995 (starts at 4:10).

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Videos courtesy of Mars Sigler (Shiny Beast) and Dream of the 90s (Picasso Trigger).

Guys and Dolls: Magazine - The Light Pours Out of Me (28 May 1993)

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Recorded for Magazine’s 1978 debut album, Real Life, a few years before a later remixed version was released as a single, Peel’s reason for playing The Light Pours Out of Me was because it had been covered by Molly Half Head and issued as a b-side on their new single, Toe to Sand. This made my list of original inclusions, though it had a question mark against it, because my notes say that I wasn’t impressed by their singer. Unfortunately, Toe to Sand is not currently available for sharing. Peel had thought about playing Molly Half Head’s version of the song, but ultimately decided to go with the original version.

The Light Pours Out of Me belongs to the euphoric end of Post-punk, despite Howard Devoto’s deep, drawling vocal. I’m reminded of a comment Peel made in Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds, where he said that people had forgotten how funny a lot of Post-punk music was, and there is something very amusing about that singing voice going, The light pours out of me.

I’ve read some analyses of the song which suggest that it’s about death and the crossing over to the realm of the spirits. My own feeling is that it’s about living, growing and developing new feelings and experiences. Granted, I’d say that the first verse deals with some of the less desirable aspects of childhood, such as those horrible moments when you’re all played out and bored - especially at bedtime - and time hangs heavy. But subsequent verses seem to touch on the fascination of learning new things for yourself  (The conspiracy/Of silence/Ought to revolutionise/My thought) and falling in love (It jerks out of me/Like blood/In this still life/Heart beats up love). 

And if you are still sceptical from listening to the lyrics, then the wonderful guitar sounds from 2:54 and 4:09 onwards offer confirmation that this is a song about living and those wonderful periods where we’re firing on all cylinders, mentally and emotionally.

All lyrics are copyright of Howard Devoto.

Video courtesy of I.Zurutuza.

Guys and Dolls: Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 - Gentleman’s Lament (28 May 1993)

 

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Gentleman’s Lament was recorded by Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 for their fourth album, Mother of All Saints, which was released on Matador in 1992. Reflecting on the band’s career in a recent interview with the Quietus, Brian Hageman said of the time leading up to the recording of Mother of All Saints:

We were writing stuff on the road a lot, and there was just so much, that’s how it ended up being a double record. We were loud and chaotic live - we wanted it to be overwhelming. (Hageman, The Strange World of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 by Sean Kitching for The Quietus, published 1 April 2026).

Listening to Mother of All Saints is to be overwhelmed by a band, who over the first half of that record at least, simply refused to stand still within any of their songs. Gentleman’s Lament was the first full track on  the album and gives an indication of what to expect. Noisy, atonal, constantly shifting tempo, never allowing the song to settle into any predictable pattern. It’s a relentless attempt to bludgeon the listener with new things every 10 seconds. And for nearly half of Mother of All Saints, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 manage to keep that evolving smorgasbord of sounds coming, until, eventually, the tracks do start to fall into a tonally consistent pattern, and the record runs out of steam in its second half.  Trumans Water are an obvious comparison, though Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 had been going for several years prior to them.

What engages me with Gentleman’s Lament is how all the chaotic music within it is used as a setting for lyrics which sound like a letter from a wealthy industrialist intending to make an escape to the country in order to try and cleanse themselves of the pollution that is clogging up the air of the city.  The tone of the lyric is formal and archaic:

James, I must retire to the country.

Should I linger much longer,

I shall surely expire.

It’s as if The Rolling Stones had chosen to set the lyrics to Lady Jane to the music of Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In the Shadow. However, it’s not too long until Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 start adding their own demented touches to the lyrics:

James, all I want are some horsies.

A nice river with fishies.

And a cold place to die.

And suddenly it starts to become clear that it’s not only the body and skin of the narrator in Gentleman’s Lament that has become poisoned but their mind too. The bouncing, juddering music that reflected the sound of the cars and chimneys mentioned at the start of the song now seems to be reflecting the disturbed mental state of the letter writer.

The lyrics, which become harder to hear from 1:40 onwards when the band decide to sing them as a high choral harmony, confirm that the letter writer has indeed been packed off to the countryside - possibly forever - due to a mental breakdown:

Viscous thoughts slosh slowly on through cluttered mind.

Fishies figure eight and horsies butterfly.

Butler scratches chin and sighs, slowly wonders why.

It’s possible that the country retreat is an asylum and that the butler is Mark E. Smith.

Peel dedicated the track to the American band, Polvo, who had visited him at Radio 1 earlier that day, and whom he was going to see performing an in-store set at Rough Trade, the next day. Peel felt that whenever he met American bands, he came across badly to them, and he cited as evidence an awkward encounter with Mudhoney’s Mark Arm at the previous year’s Reading Festival. When Peel originally told that story, he hadn’t gone into detail, which led me to believe that he’d probably been guilty of overwhelming Arm with babble, born out of nerves and admiration. But, he revealed tonight that he had spooked Arm by suggesting they have a drink together after Mudhoney’s set. Maybe Arm had felt this was someone getting too over-familiar, or maybe he was just desperate not to have to prolong a social encounter where he felt that he may not have enough to say. If so, then Arm was probably guilty of behaving in a more British manner than Peel was, who by contrast would have come across - unintentionally, I’m sure - as acting like a pushy American.

Nevertheless, as we shall discover when we get to the 29/5/93 show, Polvo were delighted to see Peel again, not least because they would both have a war story to share about spending that week performing to low numbers*

*More on that when we get to the Notes post on this show and the 29/5/93 one.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Video courtesy of lemminkainenn.

Guys and Dolls: King Short Shirt - Tyranny (28 May 1993)

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When it came to calypso music in Antigua, one man reigned supreme through the 60s, 70s and 80s. McLean Emanuel aka King Short Shirt, was the only performer - at least at the time that this article was written - to have won Antigua’s national calypso competition three times in a row, on three separate occasions.  Doing well in the competition opened up opportunities to record music, and Tyranny is taken from his fourth album, Illusion, released in 1977 by A & B Records.

In this frantic calypso - I hope that whoever was playing the cowbell was able to have a nice lie down after the session - King Short Shirt ponders the ongoing chain of unfairness that sees Africans move from slavery to living in countries run as dictatorships and totalitarian states. He namechecks apartheid

South Africa, Uganda (at that time still ruled by the despotic, Idi Amin), Rhodesia (like South Africa operating under white minority rule) and Chile (which was ruled by Augusto Pinochet). He notes too that the Caribbean has also known similar tyranny, such as that practised by the Duvaliers in Haiti, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and Rafael Calderón in Costa Rica.*. 

King Short Shirt believed that change could come in each of those countries if the people rose up, which is always easier said than done of course, though he was proven right in the end. Amin fled Uganda in 1979 after his attempt to invade Tanzania backfired. The same year, white minority rule ended in Rhodesia and the country was renamed Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, this also meant the world was lumbered with Robert Mugabe for 37 years. Chile and South Africa took a little longer, but in 1988 Pinochet held a referendum to see whether the country wanted him to continue as president, and stepped down after losing it so as to pave the way for democratic elections. Meanwhile, in South Africa, F.W. de Klerk released Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, dismantled the apartheid system and was succeeded as president by Mandela in 1994. 

The beauty of the sentiments expressed in Tyranny is that they are applicable to any country labouring under a dictatorship. And as White Afrikaners arrive in the United States under a refugee programme enthusiastically set up by the current president of the United States, we can only wonder how long it will take for Americans to follow King Short Shirt’s advice and cast their tyrant into the sea - preferably just off Mar-a-Lago.

*Not strictly speaking a dictator in the same mould as the others, but his refusal to accept the results of the 1948 General Election led to a civil war.

Video courtesy of Akla Tha First.

Guys and Dolls: Luscious Jackson - Daughters of the Kaos (28 May 1993)

 

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In the year of riot grrrl, New York four-piece Luscious Jackson carved out a fascinating niche for themselves which owed less to Bikini Kill and more to gangsta rap. Daughters of the Kaos is a work of subversive brilliance which manages to both demonstrate female power within a male dominated song subject (violence/crime) and show that you can get away with morally questionable sentiments in a song if you drape them in softly sung/spoken trimmings. Throw in the mariachi cum flamenco style guitar riffs, Lalo Schifrin style drum beats and the street flavour vibe that bubbles away underneath the track, and you get a song that has me offering up everything I own without any of the band needing to pull out the six-guns mentioned by Jill Cunniff.

Daughters of the Kaos hits a sweet spot in that it doesn’t glamorise the lifestyle it’s singing about, but it also makes clear that if you’re born into crime, it needs the guiding hand of a woman to both keep you alive and allow you to thrive in that environment: 

Never leave a child alone in a world like this.

He’ll play with bombs and always miss.

He’ll make a girl pick up a gun.

So she can show him how it’s done.

While not completely misandrist, the song makes clear that men are tolerated until a point that they’re no longer required:

Always give shelter to a man in need.

In the face of chaos I give up my greed.

Insane and unknown is my only creed.

Enjoy, destroy then set you free.

It’s wonderful, thrilling stuff - a product of its time and politics, yet set slightly apart from it. It shares riot grrrl’s female empowerment ethos, but acknowledges that they may need to fight dirty and with something stronger than an Andrea Dworkin paperback in their back pocket if they’re going to enjoy the spoils that men took as their right.

All lyrics are copyright of Jill Cunniff

Video courtesy of GR2 Records.

Guys and Dolls: Lonnie Johnson - Sam, You’re Just a Rat (28 May 1993)

 

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Recorded on 9 February, 1932, Sam, You’re Just a Rat subverts cliche by taking as its subject the rejection of an untrustworthy friend, rather than an untrustworthy lover. Whoever Sam is, they’ve been sniffing around not only Lonnie Johnson’s wife, but other men’s wives too, so the ostracisation is pretty damning: 

Sam, you’re not my friend and my home you’d better stop hanging round.

‘Cause I’ve paid for your coffin and I mean that you graveyard bound.

Mistrust and betrayal seemed to be on Johnson’s mind given that this song was recorded in the same session as Men, Get Wise To Yourself, a song in which Johnson considered infidelity to be so widespread among both sexes that humankind was beyond redemption. The two songs were coupled together in a release on Okeh, though Peel was playing Sam, You’re Just a Rat due to its inclusion on a reissue of the 1972 Yazoo compilation, Barrelhouse Blues 1927-1936.

Hilariously, this track about a friendship hitting the buffers was played immediately after Peel read out a fax from a listener called Mark Taylor, who asked him to dedicate a record to a friend of his who was celebrating their birthday, but had been taken ill on Friday 27 May and advised by doctors that they needed to cut out chocolate and beer. We can only hope that having had two avenues of pleasure closed off to them that Mark’s friend didn’t look to fill the gap with adultery instead.

Video courtesy of Lonnie Johnson - Topic.

Lyrics by Lonnie Johnson.

Guys and Dolls: Nigel Whitely Show - Saturday 22 May 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

 Although it didn’t make that week’s edition of the Radio Times, Peel had decided to rename this edition of his programme after Nigel Whitely, a listener who was celebrating their 40th birthday. Had I been a) listening to this programme when it was going out and b) had access to a fax machine, I would have faxed Peel to ask him to rebrand the programme as the Louise Gibson show in honour of my cousin, who had got married on Friday 21 May. 

That was a long day for me and my parents, as we had left Falmouth at 4am in order to drive up to Hertfordshire to attend the wedding.  I had been asked to give one of the readings at the service, because I “did acting”. Although I was happy to do this, I remember feeling a little worried that if I kept attending family weddings, I’d be expected to do readings at all of them like some kind of performing dog. As I was the youngest child of my generation on my mum’s side of the family, I always felt a little defensive about this. I was worried that even though I was now 17 years old, my relatives would still regard me as the baby, and seeing me do readings would provoke an onslaught of well meant but patronising compliments. This was my paranoia at work rather than a result of any evidence of condescension from my relatives, but I sat out several family weddings over the next couple of years, though a few of them were easy to miss as they were held in the United States. 

My parents and I spent the best part of 22 hours awake that day, so spent the rest of the weekend recuperating, before returning home on Bank Holiday Monday. 

12 years later, we would go through the same kind of rigmarole again when I accompanied them to a family weekend at Center Parcs in Thetford. Another early start, a longer journey than May 1993, but with no pressure to read anything. It was a cracking weekend, which climaxed in a family singalong on the Sunday night with nearly everyone performing a song.  It was though a different age from May 1993: John Peel dead for nearly a year and Louise, whose husband didn’t accompany her, laid up in bed in her cabin all weekend with flu, with concerned whispers doing the rounds that it wasn’t just the flu that was depriving Louise of her natural vigour and spirit. They separated in 2012.  Had I been aware how things would play out for her, the request would have been to name the programme by her maiden name, the Louise Kinsella Show.  With her new partner, she now spends most of her weekends participating in historical re-enactments, dressed as a cross between Guinevere and Anne Bolelyn. It suits her wonderfully.

Catching my interest - though not strongly enough to merit inclusion on the metaphorical mixtape - from this edition of Kat’s Karavan was Peel’s inclusion of Paydirt by Shampoo. Just over a year later, they would become Top 20 chart stars, but here Peel was playing a track from their Blisters and Bruises EP, of which more, potentially, in a few weeks time.

Apart from the occasional, murmur of Fades in quietly, Peel was not known for talking over the beginning of tracks. He made a rare exception though when playing Bad Man by Shaggy Wonder. The track featured a short spoken word opening, which Peel disliked so he spoke over it before letting the record play on. He was not being censorious though, his objection was to the ‘intergalactic’ voice effect that had been applied to it. I had sympathy with him over this. After all, it had proven to be something of a deal breaker for me when he played Saucer Surfing by Steve Hillage, a few months previously.

The selections I made from this programme were from a virtually complete show. Everything I wanted to include was available. Only one track in my original list of selections fell from favour:

Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet - Spy School Graduation Theme - A track title which makes perfect sense when you consider how much of the sound on Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet records owe a debt to the guitar playing of Vic Flick, who played the guitar riff on The James Bond Theme. But I found it too slow to want to listen to again. At their best, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet are vibrant, exciting and thrilling. When the tempo drops though, they can cross the line into musical wallpaper.

When looking back over the list of selections I made from this show, I found I’d listed two tracks from previous programmes that I’d already blogged about. If Peel was repeating a play for a track, he clearly really liked it. You can enjoy the following again if you wish:

Rollerskate Skinny - Bow Hitch-Hiker

LMNO Pelican - Spine

Happy birthday, Nigel!

Guys and Dolls: Magic Sam - Look Whatcha Done (22 May 1993)

 

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Blues guitarist, Magic Sam Maghett got a lot of exposure on Peel’s playlists across 1993, mainly due to the release of a compilation called West Side Soul on Charly R & B, which gathered together most of Maghett’s A & B sides from the singles he released through the late 1950s/early 1960s, together with a few other tracks. Curiously, Maghett never had an original album issued under his own name in his lifetime, though he put out two albums as Magic Sam’s Blues Band in the year before he died of a heart attack on 1 December 1969. Indeed, the Charly compilation shares its name with the first Magic Sam’s Blues Band album.

Look Whatcha Done was issued as the b-side on Maghett’s 1958 single, Everything Gonna Be Alright. In keeping with many of Maghett’s b-sides, it offers a genre mashup in comparison to the pure blues sounds of his A-sides. In his home region of Grenada County, Mississippi, he grew up listening to as much bluegrass and country music as he did blues and this eclecticism distinguishes a number of his tracks such as the rockabilly blues of Love Me With a Feeling (b-side to All Your Love) or the rhythm & blues of 21 Days in Jail,** which demands a sacking if it was never dangled in front of Elvis Presley as a potential song for him to record.

Look Whatcha Done brings together blues and swing, though its centrepiece has to be the guitar solo from 1:01 to 1:26 in which Maghett picks out the notes with the precision of a sculptor cutting a piece of marble into the statue he wants to make.  Willie Dixon, who worked with Maghett as a musician, producer and writer* described Magic Sam’s use of harmonies in his playing as what marked him out as different from those who came before him. It certainly sounds as though multiple guitars are chocking that solo out, even though it is the work of one man.

*Going by the record labels on the original 45s, Dixon wrote a lot of Magic Sam’s songs; however, the credits on the West Side Soul compilation list only Maghett as the author of many of the same songs. Happily, both the original record and West Side Soul credit Maghett alone as the author of Look Whatcha Done.

** b-side to Easy Baby

Video courtesy of TheBluesfan12.

Guys and Dolls: Krispy 3 - We Don’t Go Pop Like Bubble Gum (22 May 1993)

 

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I’m so pleased that this blog’s 1000th post coincides with the return of the wonderful Krispy 3, who released We Don’t Go Pop Like Bubble Gum as a precursor to their second album, Can’t Melt the Wax.

Krispy 3 were always at their most entertaining when they were singing about the music industry and their own quest for artistic purity inside a business which either failed to recognise their genius or tried to persuade them to peddle pap for profit. Inevitably, they would stick to their principles and then bemoan the fact that lesser acts - both in terms of talent and integrity - were cleaning up financially or being promoted as cultural game changers, when they were doing nothing more than maintaining the status quo. The Can’t Melt the Wax album features a brilliant track called Who Ya Know, which rages against the fact that, in the music industry, contacts trump talent 9 times out of 10. I’m surprised that Peel never played it, especially given that his name comes up in the track.

What makes We Don’t Go Pop Like Bubble Gum so interesting is the conflict that runs throughout it. Krispy 3 always seemed keen to emphasise that, as far as they were concerned, rap music lived over here and pop music lived over there, and never the twain shall meet. Take the dripping disgust with which they read the headline Pop king is king of rap at the start of Don’t Be Misled as an example. Even though their own material was quite clean and positive by the standards of what rap music was considered to be i.e materialistic, violent, defiant etc, they were adamant that just because they used humour in their lyrics, they were first and foremost, a rap group - not a pop-rap confection. And yet, listening to the names and scenes dropped into the track by the Finlayson brothers and George Gueye, it ends up coming across as a bit of a love letter to pop music. Although the cover photo to the Can’t Melt the Wax LP featured a generic photo of the three of them, they could have used the cast list they assemble in We Don’t Go Pop Like Bubble Gum to make their own version of the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band instead.

Based on what I can hear, and I may well have missed some other references, the cover would have included:

Sounds of Blackness

Dionne Warwick -  Walk on by like Dionne. And they may very well have thrown in Dion, for good measure, too.

Meat Loaf - A dead ringer.

The Champs - Tequila

Rupert Holmes - Pina Colada

Tone Loc - Funky Cold Medina

Glynis Barber and Michael Brandon - I make peace like Dempsey* is one of the best lines in any track I’ve heard since I started doing this blog.

Pat Morita - I love you Sensei.

Lou Rawls - Your love is hard to find, like my man, Lou Rawls, so I keep my head high and my head on my balls.

Fred Williamson - Black Caesar

Lucille Ball - I Love Lucy

Judy Garland - Skip to my Lou

Vernon Buckley and Gladstone Anderson  - Little Boy Blue**

Wings - Mary Had a Little Lamb***

That would be a row or two or sorted out, I think. 

Here’s to the next 1000!

Video courtesy of zitterfinger.

*Given Dempsey often solved problems by pulling out a gun, this might be less peaceful than initially thought.

**Buckley and Anderson recorded as a duo, Verne and Son, releasing their version of the nursery rhyme in 1971.

***So, Paul & Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Henry McCullough and Denny Seiwell.

Guys and Dolls: Ween - Peel Session (22 May 1993)

Exactly a year after their first Peel Session was repeated, the Ween boys were back for their second and final Peel Session. Like the evening’s other Session guest, they used it as an opportunity to play songs which had not yet been issued on record. All instruments on the session were played by Dean Ween (Michael Melchiondo Jr.) and Gene Ween (Aaron Freeman), so the tracks have a slight element of works in progress about them; the entire session clocks in at less than 9 minutes. But, not a moment is wasted, and with one exception, they were fully in control of the material that they were playing.

After playing the first track, What Deaner Was Talkin’ About, Peel thought it sounded like a country song, and this inspired him to play a country music track by Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (Das Hab Ich Falsch Gemacht). I’d be more inclined to describe it as the session’s indie-folk tune. Sung by Gene, it describes his experience with anxiety attacks, which was something that Dean had apparently suffered from all his life. The line, If I was king, I’d wear a ring/And never hurt my people, suggests that the anxiety is caused by somebody rather than something. This could be a link to the third song in the session, the jazzy Take Me Away, where Gene sings about his struggle not to go crazy after being cheated on by a woman; a devastating experience for anyone, but something which should at least offer clarity. The woman took his love for granted and took him for a fool. The heartache has to be gone through, but there will be someone else out there who will help him to repair his broken heart and make him smile again. That’s the optimistic take, but the closing lines on What Deaner Was Talkin’ About, I don’t think I will ever return again, my friend, suggest that Gene currently finds the damage to be irreparable.

Both What Deaner Was Talkin’ About and Take Me Away were recorded for Ween’s 1994 album, Chocolate and Cheese. 

The fourth track on the session, Buckingham Green, apparently takes its name from a shopping centre based in New Hope, Pennsylvania, close to where Ween were formed.  Even in a stripped down form it promises a psychedelic epic in its brief running time with its lines about eyeless children, meetings with God and beings descending from the stratosphere, which was duly realised when the song was finally recorded for their 1997 album, The Mollusk.

Apologies for jumping about the running order in this session, but I was originally going to pass on the second track, Vallejo, because it didn’t have much to recommend it beyond the catchiness of its Latin rock stylings. I changed my mind because given how short the whole session is I didn’t think would be too much of an encumbrance to have it included if I was listening to it on the metaphorical mixtape. In the event, it’s the song in the session which has most intrigue about it, especially this version of it.

The Ween wiki states that Vallejo was written and first performed during 1992.  Its role in live performance was to provide the music to a lengthy piece of performance art whereby the Ween boys would stack up instruments, amplifiers, drinks and many other things on top of their touring drummer, Claude Coleman Jr.’s drum kit, so as to form some kind of impromptu sculpture which could then be played to produce noise and feedback. This could take up to half-an-hour of time in the concert. One YouTube commenter I saw mentioned that they saw Ween do this in a live show once, and they decided to go and play a game of pool in another part of the venue. When they went back after their game, the song was still going and the sculpture was still being built.  

All that would be lost on record though, so, by the time Ween put Vallejo out as a b-side on their 1994 single, Voodoo Lady, it stood as a song about the life and wild times of the painter, Boris Vallejo. None of this features in the Peel Session version. I wondered whether the BBC quailed at lines that feature in the studio version version such as, I lick your pussy and then cum inside. Considering that this would have been going out long after the 9pm watershed, I can’t see why it would have been a problem. But nevertheless, Vallejo was presented as a short instrumental which tonally sounded closer to another version of the track called Vallejo Pt. 2.

If there were censorship issues  - and I’m only conjecturing about that - it might explain why Ween never recorded another Peel Session. However, this was not the last time that Ween’s music featured on a Peel Session, given that Tim Wheeler and Charlotte Hatherley of Ash included a cover of What Deaner Was Talkin’ About on their acoustic Peel Session at Peel Acres on 15 April 1999.

Video courtesy of VibraCobra23 Ennui.

All lyrics are copyright of Dean and Gene Ween.

Guys and Dolls: PJ Harvey - Naked Cousin/Primed and Ticking/Claudine, the Inflatable One [Peel Session] (22 May 1993)

 

Buy this at…well, it’s complicated. Read below.

This was a repeat of, what Peel described as, PJ Harvey’s third and a half session for his programme. It was first broadcast on Friday 12 March, 1993. It’s a fascinating session because it gives a suggestion of the kind of music Polly Jean might have made had she continued working with Rob Ellis and Steven Vaughan. Although the Rid Of Me album was set to be released at the end of April ‘93, this session showed Harvey and friends were already looking ahead to the future. Three of the tracks - the three going on to the metaphorical mixtape - were new original compositions. None of them were on Rid Of Me or would surface as b-sides on the album’s singles. Indeed, only one of the three was ever issued and fans had to wait a long time for it.

By a short head, I make Naked Cousin the best of the tracks. My theory about it is that it is another of Harvey’s songs in which she plays a relation of a figure from the Bible. In Missed, she sang as Mary, mother of Jesus and desperate to find out why her dead son’s body was missing from his tomb. In Naked Cousin, I think that Polly is singing as a cousin of Moses, and what’s more, she’s not a fan. The Moses link suggests itself most obviously through the line, He run from burning bushes…he runs from everything that upsets his masterplan.  In this case, leading the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to find The Promised Land.

Polly is clearly unconvinced for reasons both familial - you can almost picture her telling people, “Moses will never pull this off, trust me, I’ve known him since he was a baby, he never sticks at anything”, though in the song she restricts herself to telling us that I hate his smell and/I hate his company but most of all/I hate that he looks just like me - and out of self preservation for what Moses’s uprising could mean for both the Israelites and herself, as a relation of his. It’s enough to have her wondering whether she will have the courage to join the Exodus, herself: He’s running naked through the trees/Scare the shit right out of me/Bought my ticket, take my ride/Take me to the sunny side.

Just like Missed, it’s a fascinating scenario, brilliantly brought to life by the whole trio.

Primed and Ticking and Claudine, the Inflatable One are more thematically straightforward. They are both, especially Primed and Ticking, aggressive love songs, heavy on sexual suggestion. With her squealing guitar and the dissonant brass - provided by Mike Smith and Dennis Rollins -  the implication is that the sex will be utter carnage, and that Polly will absolutely tear her prospective lover to shreds. So certain does she sound about her place in the lover’s life and future that the shrieking chorus of I believe my days will end with you starts to take on an air of obsessive control rather than one of heartfelt devotion.

At least Prime and Ticking has a recognisable target for its lust/devotion; the protagonist of Claudine, the Inflatable One has to play out their sexual desire with a blow-up doll. Nevertheless, a good time is still promised for all: I’ll blow your mind…I’ll show you heaven…I’ll make sweet honey, I’ll treat you nice etc. I had briefly thought that Harvey was singing from the perspective of the doll itself, but I’ve come round to the orthodoxy that it’s sung from the perspective of Claudine’s owner, and that their need is just as ravenous as Polly’s was in Primed and Ticking: Want to get into your sack of skin. Furthermore, the Scream blue murder refrain in the playout ties into the notion that both songs have of using sex as a way to  expel all negative emotions, energy and pain from oneself by giving yourself over utterly to another person. In body, soul, mind and heart in Primed and Ticking; in body only - at least as a start for practice -  in Claudine, the Inflatable One.

The fourth track in the session was the only one that was going to be commercially available to people in 1993, namely the trio’s cover of Wang Dang Doodle, written by Willie Dixon, who had died in January 1992. This session version featured as a b-side on the Man-Size single, and Peel subsequently complained on air a couple of times that it wasn’t credited as having been recorded for his programme. I passed on it as I found it too irritatingly mannered. This has been a common complaint from me about her music from this period.

In considering the three songs included here, it suggests that the PJ Harvey trio would have streamlined the harder edged tone of Rid of Me into a funkier blues/rock sound that focussed on sex and humour, had they continued working together on another album. All three songs sound like they would have been perfect fits on an album made by Harvey, Ellis and Vaughan. They clearly had belief in the songs as Naked Cousin and Primed and Ticking were included in the trio’s live set over the summer of 1993, including on a Radio 1 concert, hosted by Peel, broadcast on Saturday 31 July 1993, starting at 7:30pm, just as the curtain was going up on the third night of my production of Guys and Dolls. But when the trio went their separate ways at the end of the year, the songs went into cold storage too. They wouldn’t have fitted on Harvey’s first solo album, To Bring You My Love, and although she started working with Ellis again from about 1998 onwards, the songs have never been recorded by her on any of her subsequent albums. 

In the immediate term, the songs represented a last gasp of the early PJ Harvey. She would write and record many fine songs across the rest of the 1990s, but very few of them came at the listener with the same force and attack of these songs. Her work became more introspective, cinematic and warmer in tone. There was room for romance and love amidst the darker, serious material that she wrote through the rest of the decade, but no place for humour or wit. It would arguably take until 2000’s album, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea for Harvey to rediscover a sense of brashness in tracks like Big Exit or This is Love, which is to all intents and purposes, Primed and Ticking’s younger, prettier sister. 

Meanwhile, Primed and Ticking and Claudine, the Inflatable One remain locked away, unreleased and unknown outside of this Peel Session. They didn’t even get to join Naked Cousin either on the selection of session tracks which made up Island Records own The Peel Sessions 1991-2004 or the extensive 2022 release, B-Sides, Demos & Rarities, which has the studio version of Naked Cousin  - recorded by Harvey with John Parish - which turned up on the soundtrack album of the 1996 film, The Crow: City of Angels. 

Videos courtesy of stoner 7412 (NC) and Black Thyme Thames (P & T, CTIO)

All lyrics are copyright of Polly Jean Harvey.