Lisanga, which translates as “meeting”, appears to have been something of an African supergroup (weren’t they all?) Alas, the Africa - Force Unie Vol 1 album has not to date been followed by further volumes, while the cast list of performers on the record includes many luminaries of the African music scene who have featured on Peel playlists throughout the year such as Lucien Bokilo, Mav Cacharel and inevitably, Diblo Dibala. But, as Peel pointed out, even the great Diblo found himself overshadowed on the sleeve credits for this record. For while Dibala was credited with lead/solo guitar, Africa - Force Unie Vol 1 also included contributions from N’Gouma Lokito and Miguel Yamba on “Magic Guitar”. I don’t know how that is differentiated on the recording beyond saying that they ALL provide magic guitar.
Groups start side projects for all sorts of reasons. It can while away time between album releases/tour schedules, allow for musical experimentation in areas that may alienate their core fans if done under their established brands or just give an opportunity for collaboration with other artists without risking those brands. But when the members of Sonic Youth hatched a plan for a side project in 1986, they weren’t doing it for any of the reasons stated above. Instead, they formed the side project to help a friend in need.
On 22 December 1985, D. Boon, guitarist and songwriter with Minutemen, died in a car crash, aged 27 years old. For his devastated bandmates, drummer George Hurley and bassist Mike Watt, Boon’s death not only spelt the end of Minutemen but also their participation in the music business. Watt fell into a deep depression, unable to contemplate making music without his friend.
Meanwhile, Sonic Youth, who had built up a friendship with Watt over the previous year after sharing several bills with Minutemen, offered him a shoulder to cry on while he processed his grief and managed to coax him into playing bass on a couple of tracks during sessions for their EVOL album. One of these tracks, a cover of Bubblegum by Kim Fowley, was to have something of an influence on their imminent side project given that the band recorded it by playing along to Fowley’s record then erasing everything but themselves from the recording. This would be repeated again during the EVOL sessions when Sonic Youth recorded a version of Madonna’s Into the Groove put through a mixture of stabbing discordant guitar, distant basslines, percussion, intermittent synth effects, a toneless Thurston Moore vocal and occasional snatches of the original Madonna recording being brought into the mix to harmonise with Moore. It wasn’t quite the “worlds in collision” stunt that it could have appeared at first glance.
Madonna and Sonic Youth were known to each other from Madonna’s pre-fame days fronting No Wave bands at Danceteria, “...sitting on Mike Gira’s lap...hanging out and smoking cigarettes” as Moore remembered it. Into the Groove(y) as the Sonic Youth cover became known was paired up with a one man recording by Watt of another Madonna song, Burning Up to create a 3 track 12-inch put out under the name, Ciccone Youth, a fusion of Madonna’s surname with the second part of Sonic Youth’s name.
Burnin’ Up sold particularly well in the UK, but in the main it achieved the purpose which Sonic Youth hoped it would and persuaded Mike Watt to stay in the music business. By the time 1987 rolled around, Watt and George Hurley were ready to get back on the horse again as fIREHOSE.
By 1988, Sonic Youth reactivated the Ciccone Youth name and used it to gather together both the material recorded with Watt in 1986 and several other tracks which didn’t fit the Sonic Youth mould. These included spoken word interludes on dying in a sinking boat such as Me and Jill or the business proposal floated during Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu!, a silent tribute to John Cage and a number of other offcuts and fragments heavily overladen with deconstruction, sampling, compression and other experimental tangents. They called it The Whitey Album though any similarities to The Beatles 1968 double-album are only to be found in tracks which recall the spirit of Helter Skelter, Revolution 9 and the unreleased What’s the New, Mary Jane?
But this is Sonic Youth we’re talking about and inevitably their love of straightforward pop would have to find expression in some form. On The Whitey Album, it came about through this version of one of the most iconic songs of the 1980s, Addicted to Love by Robert Palmer. It is arguable that Addicted to Love owes much of its iconic status to its striking music video in which Palmer was backed by a band comprised of identical female models, but it’s worth remembering that no less a figure than Noddy Holder regarded Addicted to Love as the song he would have most loved to have written. Ciccone Youth’s presentation of Addicted to Love is considerably less polished than Palmer’s original given that Kim Gordon is intoning over a karaoke backing track. No models in the video either, though Kim made the video herself using a film-your-own video booth at a branch of Macy’s and decided to go for a Vietnam War vibe. I’d spent many years regarding Addicted to Love as an 80s relic, I think I felt that even at the time that it came out, but this version of it has caused me to reassess my attitude towards it. The truth is that it’s been stuck in my head this last week both in its Ciccone Youth and Robert Palmer versions. Kim’s video may seem to give a subtle middle finger to the glossy decadence of the original video, but even reviewing that , I hadn’t realised just how tongue in cheek the Palmer video was. It’s a great, indestructible song and any way of performing it will ensure it remains an earworm regardless of whether you want decadence or grime.
Addicted to a good night’s sleep in my case...Peel was not so easily persuaded by itin either version.
‘That doesn’t go anywhere very much,’ you might be saying, but that’s kind of what I like about it. John Peel after playing Speed Your Trip on 22/11/92.
If, as seems possible to judge from its title and the sonic atmosphere of the recording, Speed Your Trip by New York based noisecore band, Helivator is about drugs then all I can say is that their dealers are sadists.
This is an ultimate bad-trip instrumental which manages to make the elements audible as the guitars, predominantly played by Mark Laramie, seem to conjure up both scorching fire and rushes of air. The repetitive ascending scale, which caught Peel’s attention, acts as a foundation around which the music swoops and soars. From 2:22, we get signs of the body consciousness trying to break through in the form of feedback as the track gets dangerously close to ripping the sky open. But having flown so high, the track eventually deposits the listener back to ground again by the end. And in a track in which so much mental feeling is made manifest, the final crashing guitar note encapsulates the immense exhaustion felt at the end of this particular trip.
By November, the football season was in full swing and that invariably meant that Exotica Records would have their latest volume of football related songs and spoken word curios out. Over the coming weeks, Peel would play several selections from Bend It! 92, most of which have made it onto my lists of future selections. Providing I don’t go cold on them, I can promise you calypsos, The Nolans and a paean of love to The Beatles courtesy of a football pools company.
For now, sit back and listen to George Best talk about the problems of building his own home - one of the great examples of the brilliance/awfulness of late 1960s modernist design - and having to contend with the dual issue of protecting his privacy at the point where he was one of the most famous men in Europe as well as the more prosaic problem of trying to turn his television set on.
Video courtesy of Classic Man Utd Videos and Clips
Scaremonger was a one-time only alias used by Christoph Fringeli as a launchpad for the debut release on his own Praxis label. I’m assuming that he must have had his mind on start-up administration matters for the label as a reason to why the title of this track and the verbal sample that runs through it: Soon, all of us will have special names are different from each other - boy, I really hope someone got fired for that blunder.
However, that discrepancy apart, this is a fascinating and near flawless piece of industrial techno, which after taking the time to lay down an exciting beats ‘n’ tempo foundation starts to crank up the sense of dystopian dread from around the 1 minute mark onwards. Fringeli creates sounds which evoke giant metallic kookaburras pecking at the surface of a membrane, while the drill-like inserts, which crop up throughout the track from around 58 seconds in, put me in mind of the noisy industrial hellholes that populate George Lucas’s debut feature film, THX 1138. Fringeli manages to walk the tightrope between evocation and danceability without losing his footing once. A year later, Praxis released a 12-inch set of remixes of this track. For me, the best of them was by friend of this blog*, Andrew Lagowski
This was a borderline inclusion. Stormy Weather, one of the great standards, has been running around my head as an unconscious musical memory for most of my life, probably because it featured in a TV commercial when I was a kid, I expect but whatever form it’s had, it’s generally been sung better in my head than Phil Phillips manages on this recording. It all sounds so white bread bland, it could be me singing it. There’s definite elements of Don ‘No Soul’ Simmons about the vocal here. But some songs are genuinely indestructible and if ever there was a case of content rescuing form then this is Exhibit A.
Stormy Weather also serves as a potential example of a track for the Alternative John Peel Obituary Jukebox. When he played the record on this show, Peel admitted that the song was a big favourite of his. So much so that he could regularly be found whistling it to himself, when I should have been whistlingsomething hipper. Again, had Teenage Kicks not come into his life, it’s entirely possible that Phil Phillips may have been piped over Radio 1 as a tribute to Peel when news came through of his death.
If you think there's a lack of nuance in discourse nowadays, then I have to ask you which side you picked during the Moonshake wars of 1992/93. Did you identify more with David Callahan or Margaret Fiedler? When Moonshake last appeared on this blog, it was with Callahan's angsty, sour rocker, Secondhand Clothes, a track which I liked enough to include on the Oliver! mixtape. However, this track, taken from Moonshake's imminent Eva Luna LP was my first exposure to Fiedler's songwriting and I have to say that had I been keeping a scorecard at the time, Little Thing would have helped her steal ahead.
We like to believe that the spirit of healthy artistic competition within bands is as positive a thing for the bands themselves as it is for music fans. After all, it worked for The Beatles long enough didn't it? However, it's often a fallacy. The history of rock music is littered with bands that tried to accommodate multiple creative visions and in doing so produced both musical eclecticism and fractured relationships; the dreaded "creative differences". In Moonshake's case, this was still a year or so away at the time Peel played Little Thing on this show, but had they heard his summation of a recent gig he had seen them play in Cambridge which left him broadly unimpressed but by and large of the view that I liked her stuff more than I liked his, then a further degree of erosion in the relationship between Fiedler and Callahan would have been quietly added. All just artistic sport to us punters, but a tiny dagger to the heart of the artist. You can accept being compared to contemporaries in other bands, but it’s much harder to accept comparison within your own band, especially when neither party is prepared to accept the role of junior partner.
Despite that, the recording of Little Thing feels like a genuinely collaborative effort. My notes describe the track as “sounding like a Heath Robinson contraption” as Moonshake lift the bonnet to show the inner workings of the idea of a smooth, functioning band. In the background we hear lounge-jazz basslines, Leslie speakered guitars and Fiedler’s huskily, sultry vocals with their arresting “Maybe I’ll start bleeding” refrain. But dominating the sound are cacophonous drums and samples which sound like relentless, grinding machinery. It’s the sound of the blood, sweat, tears and conflict that make for great bands. The moving parts straining on the production line to turn out beautiful, intricate music. The abrasive and the beautiful working in sync with each other to create exactly the kind of musical magic which made Moonshake so special.
