We’ve skipped on 8 days from the previous Peel Show that was covered here and we find our hero flushed with success and a man on everyone’s invite list…
Outside of a radio studio, the default image of how John Peel spent his time tends to be of him pottering around his music room or hanging out with his family at Peel Acres. But, although he tended to refer to himself in disparagingly tongue-in-cheek terms when it came to his place in the showbusiness/media world pecking order, Peel could often be relied upon to be a presence, or at least find himself on the invite list, to all manner of parties, ceremonies, receptions and launch events. Such was the case in this 1/5/93 show, in which Peel had 3 separate events to tell us about.
In general, I try to avoid speculating on what Peel felt or thought about things, if he himself didn’t express a direct opinion on something. However, I feel on fairly safe ground here by listing, in ascending order, the excitement and interest he would have felt on the 3 events he talked about on this show:
3 - Unidentified Women’s Sex Magazine Launch: I’ve just opened an envelope which contained an invitation to the launch for a new sex magazine for women. I’m not quite sure why I’ve been invited to this. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always yearned for the era of the pear-shaped man and perhaps it’s about to occur. I shall be extremely grateful, although I suspect that it’s really rather too late for me.
2 - The Sony Radio Academy Awards: the radio industry’s version of the BAFTA Awards. Peel had been asked to attend the ceremony mainly to act as a chaperone ensuring that an award winner would be present at the ceremony. He didn’t mention on air who it was that he had accompanied to the ceremony, but looking at the list of award winners for 1993, it may have been his former Radio 1 colleague/nemesis, Tony Blackburn, whose breakfast show on Capital Gold won the award for Best Breakfast Show -Contemporary Music. However, while Peel may have been pleased for whoever he was accompanying to the ceremony, a big surprise was waiting for him as he won the award for National Broadcaster of the Year. This was the second time he had won this award in seven years.
1 - The Infotainment Scan Reception: Peel had been playing tracks from The Fall’s new album for several weeks ahead of its release on 26 April 1993. The release was heralded by a reception, presumably thrown by the band’s record label, Permanent Records. Peel had met a lot of people at the reception, including several members of the band. However, Mark E.Smith had not attended, and we should probably have expected no less.
A few weeks ago, Peel got a chance to see the Boat Race, close up. With the football season about to finish, the summer sports started to line up to replace them including the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. Time will tell as to whether Peel ever got an invite, or even went as an ordinary punter to SW19, which is possible given that he had had a tennis court built at Peel Acres. However, he wasn’t impressed by the Today programme’s coverage of the stabbing of Monica Seles by a deranged Steffi Graf fan at a tournament in Hamburg, which he felt was less concerned with Seles’s well-being, and was more focussed on the potential effects on the Wimbledon tournament.*
The selections from this show were taken from a two and a quarter hour long file. Everything that I listed from it was available but there were three tracks which fell from favour:
C - He Was: I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t like this enough to include it on the metaphorical mixtape after subsequent hearings. When I started this blog, one of the things that most excited me about taking the 1990s as a starting point was anticipating hearing the emergence of trip hop. In Peel Show terms, we’re still a year or two away from it truly breaking through. Up to now, I can only remember Daughters of Darkness by Depth Charge featuring trip hop elements on a Peel Show across 1991-93, so when I heard the smoky spoken narration of Leslie Winer, the mournful jazz trumpet sample, brushed drums, dub basslines and echoing refrain of Born and raised in the heart of the city, yeah I instantly jotted it down for inclusion. But listening back to it again, I found it to be dull and insubstantial. I feel that this is more my failure than Winer’s, but each time I find myself listening to it, I find that I really don’t want to engage with Winer’s story, and that ultimately outdoes the fact that Born and raised…has been an undeniable earworm with me these last few weeks. A marginal miss and the wait for more trip hop on Peel Shows goes on.
Eric’s Trip - Happens All the Time: With their lo-fi angelic aesthetic, Eric’s Trip often walk a tightrope between the engaging and the ennui-inducing. Happens All the Time has plenty of fire in its performance, but I suspect that it lost me because it wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as previously heard tracks like Listen or Haze.
The Werefrogs - Lighthouse: And here’s another example of a track missing out because it doesn’t match a band’s earlier high standards. Lighthouse starts out quite well, but once Marc Wolf starts singing, it all starts to ebb away. The wah-wah pedals do a lot of work in the second half of the track to try and pull things back, but the dire chorus repels all efforts to revive the song.
*Peel may still have had a general downer on tennis after the back injury it caused him, the previous autumn.
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