Oliver: Catherine Wheel - Let Me Down Again (1 December 1991)

If the raison d'être of shoegazing music was to allow quiet lads the chance to be noisy, then no band better exemplified that than the Great Yarmouth four-piece, Catherine Wheel.  Taken from their major label debut EP, Black Metallic, Let Me Down Again is a relentless wash of noise through which voices strain to be heard, breaking through the film of sound with the standard shoegazing vocal trope of "Ah-ahh-ahh-ah".  It's all very well done, but given the monolithic brilliance of the EP's title track (soon to be heard on this blog), it's very much the after dinner mint in the Catherine Wheel banquet.

Video courtesy of Constipateduck.

Oliver: Zentropa - Ecstatic (1 December 1991)

This is one of those tracks which should be buried in a time capsule with a note attached saying, "This is what an early 90s techno record sounded like".  It's got the lot: sirens/klaxons, that S-Express inspired bassline, squelches aplenty, a side order of sexualised female moaning, some stabbing keyboards... all rolled together to create an irresistible piece of club heaven.



The inspiration for so much 90s techno?

Oliver: Midi Rain - Always [Club Instrumental mix] (1 December 1991)

I started this blog by listening to the Peel recordings on an iPad.  However, when I did a settings update, a compatibility issue meant I could no longer access the server I'd been listening to shows, up to 7 December 1991, on.  It wasn't till today that I had a chance to listen to the whole show again for the first time in 3 months and while all my original selections, bar 1, survived the initial impressions test, this club land techno beauty from John Rocca aka Midi Rain slipped through the cracks.  It could be because Peel, by his own admission, only played "some of it".  Or the fact it was the penultimate track in a three hour show, but that theory doesn't hold water either.  All I can say is that I'm glad I was listening with fresher ears today than I had been 3 months ago.

Peel played the club instrumental mix and I love that, but the vocal mix is worth a listen as well.



With vocals!

Oliver: Th' Faith Healers - Reptile Smile (1 December 1991)

In Love version - definitive for me.


Well, first things first.  What chutzpah to dispense with the letter e from their name, obviously not caring a fig about the charges of pretension that would come thundering down on their heads.  The Beatles, The Sex Pistols et al may have tried to shake things up musically, but on the name issue they were crushingly conservative in comparison to Th' Faith Healers.  Did anyone make the joke at the time that had they been a Northern band, it would have been T' Faith Healers?  No?  Well, that's what I'm here for.  Maybe they just really liked sixteenth century poetry.

Having given the public such an open target, Th' Faith Healers did at least provide themselves with a useful shield with tunes like Reptile Smile.  It's a bit of a shoegazer stew but that howling riff, coming on like a cat bellowing into a vocoder helps lift it up.  The lyrics seem disappointingly banal compared to something like Bleach's  Wipe it Away but that playground singalong verse gets into your brain.

There are a couple of different versions available.  This version comes from the picture disc 12" only release of Th' Faith Healers second single, In Love.  There's another version released through the Mr. Litnanski EP from 1992.  I'm not entirely sure which version Peel played, so have gone for the one which appears to be on the EP compilation L', put out by Too Pure Records in 1995.  The Mr Litnanski version has a longer opening before the vocal, mixes the vocals right down in the sound and almost completely ignores the "cat on a vocoder" riff.

Update from 4/3/15 - Peel played the In Love version.




Mr Litnanski version - holding back the best bit.

Videos courtesy of MarkTurver1990 and diuriox.

Oliver: The Orb - Little Fluffy Clouds [Cumulo Nimbus mix] (1 December 1991)

"Welcome to MTV's Unplugged. A show in which some of the world's top bands perform acoustic sets, entirely unaccompanied without any electronic instruments.  Tonight, on MTV Unplugged, will you please welcome, The Orb."  (Newman and Baddiel in Pieces, 1993)

Three sentences which served for many years to reduce The Orb, and Utah Saints who were spoofed in the same programme, into figures of incompetent fun.  Totally unfair of course given the pioneering work the former had done in ambient dance.  No Orb = no Roykssop, no Lemon Jelly, no Sigur Ros etc.  You can't blame them for Chillout Vol 4 accompanying a million dinner parties.  

Although I knew of Little Fluffy Clouds, I didn't actually KNOW it until hearing this recording.  The Cumulo Nimbus mix of this track was taken from a remix album, Aubrey Mixes - The Ultraworld Excursions, which in a marketing strategy which sounds like an Eric Idle joke, was released and deleted on the same day.  However, this rarity is still available at a decent price on Discogs.

It doesn't sound massively different from the original release: a slight change in tempo, less pronounced beats, some cuts to the spoken word samples, the replacement of the Ennio Morricone sample at the start with something which sounds like the beginning of Reflections by The Supremes.  But, that beguiling, hippy girl voice recounting memories of sunsets in Arizona remains front and centre.  She sounds like the dreamier sister of Phoebe Buffay from Friends, and you can imagine her sitting in a coffee shop with an acoustic guitar over her shoulder, relating tales of her childhood between songs.  Get MTV on the line now, and get The Orb for me, tell them I've got some good news for them.




The original version - "What were the skies like when you were young?"

Oliver: Loketo - Mondo Ry (1 December 1991)

This track, briefly, found itself in danger of being left off the blog when I listened to it before going to work on Monday morning.  Maybe it was because it was Monday morning when not even soukous music can hope to triumph over the slough of despond unleashed between 7 and 8am once a week.  Or perhaps it was because those dreadful low-fi synthesisers that plague so much soukous music seemed more prevalent than usual.  Whatever the reason, I couldn't have been wrong about the quality of this stuff, could I?

Not to fear, I usually listen to tracks several times through before putting them up, and a listen on Monday evening, by which time the rhythm of the working week is established, quashed any wavering.  The synths still sound desperate but those glorious guitar lines win the day.

Peel revealed that he had put the track into the programme because, for reasons he couldn't fathom, he'd given his copy of the Extra Ball album away to someone and hadn't got it back.  This lead to him spending the afternoon out shopping in London and buying a replacement copy on CD for £13.  A price which flabbergasted him both before and after playing the track.
"Thirteen quid...I mean it is a lot to pay for a CD, isn't it?  I know I'm fighting a losing battle on this whole CD/vinyl thing, but you're being taken to the cleaners and so am I."

Oliver: Magic Mushroom Band - Pictures in my Mind (1 December 1991)

No doubt people who went more often than I did will deny it, but if ever you wanted an example of the age old Cornish complaint, "The rest of country thinks Britain stops at Plymouth" it would be in the pathetic state of live music in Cornwall when I was a teenager.  Don't get me wrong, there was plenty of live music made up of covers bands and some local bands trying to build up a following, but when it came to bands who actually released records or got played on Radio 1, forget it.
It hadn't always been so.  The Flamingo Club in Redruth hosted many of the leading bands of the 60s.  The Sex Pistols came to Penzance in the 70s as part of the impromptu SPOTS tour in late 1977.  And I met numerous people who went to the Cornwall Coliseum in Carlyon Bay near St Austell in the 80s to see no less than Paul McCartney play there.  But by the early 90s, most of those venues had closed or become such shitholes, no one would play there.
Nevertheless, occasionally the county could surprise you and when I heard Peel play this on the 1/12/91 recording, my mind flashed forward 2 years to seeing promotion for a gig at Truro City Hall - Ozric Tentacles supported by Magic Mushroom Band.  Now there's a couple of names to take you back to the days when there were crusties on every street, aren't they. Being a censorious teenager, I had no interest in going to that gig which threatened, in my mind, to be nothing more than a stream of Grateful Dead-esque droning.  And that name, Magic Mushroom Band - you're not even trying.

Well it turned out to be my loss.  For while a listen to Magic Mushroom Band's 1991 album, Spaced Out, features a few long, meandering Eastern tinged instrumentals, there are some cracking pop songs on there as well.  Sometimes, tracks get selected because a band sound like someone else.  That could be the case here, because while there's evidence that when left unchecked, Magic Mushroom Band tried to be Quintessence, when they applied pop smarts to what they did they came on like an updated version of The Move and any band that invokes Birmingham's finest, whether by intent or accident is alright by me.

As for bands coming to Cornwall, progress was painfully slow.  Radiohead came to Truro City Hall just before they released The Bends (and who wanted to go and see a bunch of one hit wonders....).  I did see my favourite 90s band, Marion, at the Pirate in Falmouth but they had cancelled on at least 2 separate occasions prior to that.  Truro City Hall was eventually refurbished and renamed the Hall for Cornwall.  One of their first events was a concert from the Bluetones, the enormity of which was marked by Select magazine doing a feature.  Mark Morriss noted how grateful the fans seemed to them for coming down and remarked that it was preferable to being ignored at a more blasé venue like the Hammersmith Apollo.  But the Bluetones were only followed sporadically to Cornwall by the odd band/performer until 2002 when a double whammy of Coldplay coming to the Hall for Cornwall shortly before the release of A Rush of Blood to the Head and the first set of Eden Sessions in front of the biomes at the Eden Project started to effect a gradual improvement in the number of bands coming to Cornwall.

But Magic Mushroom Band were there first and on the evidence of Pictures in my Mind, I'm grateful.



The Sex Pistols in Penzance, 1 September 1977.  Thanks for making the drive down, fellas.