A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Fruitcake - Creeping and Peeping (6 December 1992)

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Peel played this track cautiously on the show feeling that it was a record which may require a couple of listens before people would enjoy it.  It hit the mark straight away for me, but I can see how the deliberately juddery production on the whole track could put some people off.  If you had told me that it was recorded in Los Angeles in 1966, I would have believed you, seeming as it does to catch the vogue from that time for angular, disquieting yet enjoyable songs about mental disintegration but filtered through a stridently, catchy guitar sound and an almost militaristic beat.  It sounds like an outtake from an album by Napoleon XIV of They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haa fame or an attempt to stretch the vibe of the coda to Disturbance by The Move into a full length song.  However, it was recorded in 1991, possibly in Missouri where Fruitcake were based.

Due to effects on the vocals, I had initially regarded the track as being almost Wraith-like and in another era, it could have made for a novelty hit for the Halloween market as a ditty about a ghost finding its way round a home and planning exactly how it’s going to make its haunting presence felt.  However, considering that it was issued as the A-side track of a 7-inch called Welcome to Saint Anthony’s Psychiatric Center, I have to lean towards the theory that what we may be hearing are the voices inside the head which drive people to creep and peep where they shouldn’t, leading them to end up in said psychiatric centre - or center if you insist.  With its poppy but off-kilter atmosphere and the rising mania on the line, I’m gonna crawl beneath the wall, Creeping and Peeping ultimately feels less like a bubblegum take on a theme tune for the Ghostly Trio from Casper the Friendly Ghost, but rather more like one for Bob from Twin Peaks.

Video courtesy of FEBear1

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Family Cat - River of Diamonds (6 December 1992)

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River of Diamonds is a good example of musical disconnect whereby the sentiment of the lyrics is at odds with the arrangement of the music.  Here, the folksy lyrics about returning to a place of comfort and looking for a home are fascinatingly juxtaposed with a typically rocking performance by the ever under-rated The Family Cat.  One possible reading of the song is that it concerns someone pining for a lost love and that the search for “hay” as opposed to “hey” shows a desperate need to find someone with whom to make hay with.  The question is though, has our protagonist exhausted all their options or can they simply not find anyone whose haymaking skills match up to their former lover?  The line, I’m crazy and you know it, as I walk this final mile suggests that if the search has proved fruitless, our protagonist may be about to throw himself into the river and die.

If this should be so then it explains just why the band got PJ Harvey in to guest on the track, one of two which she contributed backing vocals to on the Furthest From the Sun album.  Maybe Polly Jean had this track, indirectly, in mind when she recorded Down By the Water a few years later.  As good a job as she does both here and on Colour Me Grey, it feels a bit of a waste just having her in on backing vocals only instead of giving her a verse or having her duet with Paul Frederick.  I know her profile was still relatively low-key when the album was recorded, but it does feel a little bit like the musical equivalent of inviting a fascinating guest to a party and then making them sit in the meter cupboard all night.  

Video courtesy of keef punk

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Aphex Twin - Green Calx (6 December 1992)

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Calx is a form of powdery metallic oxide which is formed when an ore is heated. There are four types: red, blue, yellow and green.  Over the course of his career, Richard D.James has created a track for each different variety.  In my opinion, Green Calx is marginally ahead of Yellow Calx as the best of them and is by some considerable distance, the most interesting of the Calx tracks; not least because it takes the listener to several different places during its six-minute run-time, whereas the others remain locked in one tempo throughout (fast and urgent for Yellow Calx, slow and mournful for both Red and Blue).

What also distinguishes Green Calx from its partners is that it feels like a track which reflects its creator’s roots.  James’s father was a former tin miner and having grown up in Lanner, close to the Redruth mining district, Green Calx has the sound of mining imbued into its very being and pulls off a neat piece of historical and contemporary evocation. The heavily industrial feel of its opening movement places the listener directly into a 19th Century mining environment as the digging/drilling takes place and the mine shafts resonate with excited conversation, banter and grumbling, as only the Cornish can do.  Here and there (1:48 and 3:48 particularly), you’ll hear what sounds like a foghorn blasting out to signify breaks for lunch or the end of the working day.  Interestingly those blasts appear to have been sampled from some of the adverts in RoboCop which if you’re trying to create a chronology for the recording of tracks on Selected Ambient Works 85-92 places it after 1987/88.

However, the ambient synth sounds which underpin the track and give it a sense of musicality and poignancy, bring us into the late 20th Century and have us walking around the derelict mining sites, as captured in the Redruth mining district link above.  We hear the ghosts of one of Cornwall’s great, lost industries, preserved in aural sepia.  To have placed these side-by-side within the track allows us both to lament what has been lost, but also admire what was achieved: a world leading industry at the foot of the British Isles.

Video courtesy of eternius 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 29 November 1992 (BFBS)

 Throughout 1992, John Peel had been a staunch ally of The Wedding Present during their monthly campaign of releasing a new single for each month of the year. However, after playing The Queen of Outer Space on this show, he admitted that he had received a number of letters from listeners stating that they were looking forward to a period of silence from the band. As the old showbusiness adage should go, “You gotta let ‘em forget you before they want to hear you again.”

The playlist contained both the sickliest record I’ve heard Peel play and a recommendation to check out the Swingers EP by Los Angeles band Slug due to its cover art, however anyone rushing to buy a copy expecting something controversial or outrageous would instead find themselves subjected to something approaching mindless good taste.  He was also touched that Mercury Rev had included their Peel session on their latest release as well as the comment, Lord, protect John Peel in the sleevenote.

The recording was of the full 2 hour broadcast and included the news bulletin from BFBS. Highlights included the Queen returning to live at Windsor Castle a week after after the fire there. Meanwhile, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and post Black Wednesday punchbag, Norman Lamont was under fire for using Treasury money to evict a sex therapist from a flat they were renting from him. Just writing that down reminds me that Peel shows between 1992-97 went out against a backdrop of Tory Party sex/finance/ethics scandals. Watch out for more long forgotten names from the past as the years go by, though Lamont was never truly forgettable, not least for the extraordinary way his eyes and his eyebrows seemed to merge together whenever he smiled, making him look like a kind of mandarin, alien insect.

There were at least four tracks which I slated for inclusion, but which ultimately didn’t make the cut:

Drop Nineteen - Mandy  After opening the show with this, Peel remarked, I don’t remember Barry Manilow’s original version but I bet it was a corker.  Unfortunately, Drop Nineteens didn’t manage to repeat the oracle of their Madonna cover, much as I was open to them doing so.  On this one, I suggest sticking with Bazza.

The Irresistible Force - Spiritual High Peel revealed that the Irresistible Force was a pseudonym for My mate, Mixmaster Morris (Morris Gould).  Well, I carry his records around at Glastonbury.  This one should have stayed in the case.  I think it might have kept me onboard had the meditative, relaxation voiceover been used throughout the track, but once it is removed all we’re left with is a further 5 minutes of ambient tedium structured around a rhythm that sounds like a radio stuck between a pair of static medium-wave frequencies.  Relaxation ebbs into irritation, very quickly.

Pavement - Shoot the Singer By this point, I have to wonder whether I’m ever going to like anything by this band, apart from Two States.

Freefall - Mirror  This probably should have been included on the metaphorical mixtape because in common with other Freefall tracks that I’ve heard Peel play, parts of it are tremendous.  The music is epic and sweeping.  At times, Mirror succeeds in transporting the listener off into another world in the way that great music can do....and then - just as with other Freefall tracks that I’ve heard Peel play - those God-awful vocals come in and drain all the life out of the track.  Even when the music is soaring and bursting with life, you can’t fully feel it because you know that at any moment, their lousy singer is going to open his mouth and bring everything crashing down from the stratospheric to the mundane. It was a conundrum which Freefall could not solve adequately, and nothing more was heard from them beyond the Dehydrate E.P.

Full tracklisting

Merry Christmas everyone and here’s to happy and healthy new year.  In 2022, we will wrap up 1992 and then move into 1993, a year in which I was doing shows pretty much continuously, so we’ll get our first uninterrupted year of music from John Peel shows.  I can’t wait.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Nelories - Banana (29 November 1992)

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I know it’s tempting to take the lyrics of songs by Japanese girl groups at face value, and goodness knows the chorus of Banana is so sparklingly effervescent as to sound like it had been recorded specifically for a commercial promoting the importance of having your 5 a day, but I’m calling it here and now. This is an ode to fellatio.  The fruit of choice for the title clearly gives that away even before Jun Kurihara starts singing telltale lines about dreaming of bananas and eating them gently.  She even mentions a friend who she appears to be sharing the banana with, and how watching her eat the banana slowly and gently makes them “feel fine.” Yes, I bet it does...

Now, at this point, I’m sure regular readers (evening, Webbie) may be saying, “For God’s sake, David! In recent posts, your thought processes and selections have taken us from exhibitionism to masturbation and now you’re forcing fellatio down our throats. You’re in danger of getting a one track mind about this kind of thing. Don’t you have any other observations?”  Well, if you don’t agree that it’s a sex song, I maintain that this is a knowingly, subversive song because it may also be related to drugs.  Either through the urban myth about being able to get high from smoking banana peels or via the reference to mellow yellow banana in the choruses, which suggests that the Nelorie girls may have been fans of hippy par excellence, Donovan and wasn’t Mellow Yellow about getting high from smoking banana skins?  Well, no, it was actually about a vibrator, according to Donovan, so subversion begat subversion and Banana remains a sex song, as charged.

Whatever the track was about, it clearly excited the band who put in a performance of such spirit and energy that the accordion solo mentioned by Peel as he read the notes provided by Nelories’s UK label, Sugarfrost doesn’t sound like a novelty instrument, but instead fizzes and sparkles with the suggestion of lust and rampant hormones running wild.  It all builds up to a suitably thrilled climax which sounds as though Nelories had been listening to some of Pulp’s recent songs.  It’s a most heady brew and arguably the second best track by a Japanese band that I heard Peel play in these 1992 recordings after White Kam Kam, who were also distributed through Sugarfost.

Video courtesy of Webbie who I am most grateful to for providing the track directly from Peel’s BFBS show as broadcast on 29/11/92.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Nirvana - Spank Thru (29 November 1992)

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I’m grateful to Charles R. Cross for pointing out in Heavier Than Heaven, his wonderful biography of Kurt Cobain, that Spank Thru is a song about masturbation. I’d been too distracted to make the link with spanking the monkey and also missed the fact that Cobain uses the word “masturbate” in the song, albeit in an exaggeratedly, slurred drawl which makes it difficult to catch. This may have been a deliberate obscuring of the word, so as not to affect the already slim chances of the record receiving airplay on American daytime radio channels.

Spank Thru was one of Nirvana’s earliest issued songs and was chosen as their contribution to the compilation EP, Sub Pop 200, released over Christmas 1988.  

Listening to it, one is initially struck by how funny the first verse is.  Singing in a lower register, Cobain sounds like an old style balladeer conveying a mood of romanticism, almost like he’s taking his love out for a picnic in the countryside. It quickly becomes apparent though that the relationship has been long dead and that Cobain still yearns for it both in his heart, but more especially in his loins. Thank God, that we still have that as a means to relive (and relieve) emotions for past love affairs.  The song is refreshingly free of feelings of guilt or self-disgust and its closing lines suggest that Cobain has got VERY good at it, while the end squall of feedback does indeed dribble out like an aural suggestion of the song’s subject matter. Definitely one to file under ‘Music as Lived Experience’ I think.

Video courtesy of Incesticide23

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Dave Gray and the Graytones - The Weird One (29 November 1992)

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Well, this will make you smile. The Peel show that I’m currently making selections from included Shine by David Gray, released well in advance of his success with White Ladder.  I haven’t included Shine among my selections and it remains to be seen whether David Gray ever appears here.  However, what I can offer you today is Dave Gray, lead guitarist with the Graytones, who released a solitary 45 in 1959 called You’re the One, and pretty execrable it was too.  However, the B-side, a slinky, stylish instrumental called The Weird One was a different beast entirely.  Peel was often apt to play records which sounded like things he would have played at home while getting ready for a night out during his early years in America, and there’s a swagger to The Weird One which evokes walking down boulevards past all-night diners, bars and clubs, while young people talk to each other from open-top cars while pulled up to the sidewalk.  

It’s a wonderfully evocative record, given a potential new audience through its appearance on a 1986 compilation album called Strummin’ Mental! Volume One.  The only false note is struck by the scream/depraved laugh towards the end of the track which suggests that The Weird One of the title is a flasher.  I think this may have been a deliberate intention, if only to contrast with its insipid A-side.

Video courtesy of Bob Bradley.