Equus: Directional Force - Planet 42 (7 February 1993)

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My notes describe this techno track as “meriting consideration purely for the force of its beats, over the last minute”. And there’s no question that they are mightily impressive and meaty, though having listened back to the track a couple of times, there’s a little more subtlety about the whole thing than I might have suggested in my initial notes.

What’s of greater interest and importance about Planet 42 is that it marks one of the earliest appearances on a John Peel running order of the man behind the Directional Force alias, Dave Clarke, who alongside Jeff Mills, could be considered to be one of Peel’s two favourite dance DJs of the 1990s.  Amongst other things, Clarke played at Peel’s 60th birthday party and saw his album Archive One included in Peel’s 1997 list of his 20 favourite albums. The two became friends and Clarke frequently recorded sessions and live sets for Peel, including one under the Directional Force name in May 1994.

Video courtesy of Juan Stein.

Equus: Hurl - Turnip (7 February 1993)

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I’m not going to try and convince you that Turnip, the lead track on the debut 7-inch by Pittsburgh band, Hurl, is a great piece of music. You can hear the whole of the EP in the video and I think it’s arguable that the other two tracks, Clutch and 12 Foot Drop are both better songs.  For Peel, the attraction of Turnip was its similarity to other bands, with him wondering aloud as to whether Codeine had been an influence. The vocal makes Stephen Immerwahr sound like Kurt Cobain and you may find your attention wandering before the band reach the end of the first or second lines, though Hurl have a neat trick of yo-yoing between somnambulant muttering, albeit backed by the beautiful arpeggio which roots the track, and urgent bursts of noise as they ponder the potential loss of a girl.  It has its moments certainly, but I would probably have ignored it had Peel not mentioned that all the tracks on the Turnip 7-inch had been recorded on June 30 1992.  So, while Hurl were recording Turnip, I was onstage at Pendennis Castle performing in The Comedy of Errors.

It always fascinates me to see what people were doing on dates which have particular significance for me. Being both a keen football fan and a performer, I can recall dates from the 1990s in particular with almost anally retentive accuracy. Part of that is down to the fact that I kept a daily journal from the beginning of 1995 up to mid 2002 - though I threw them out when I moved in with my wife; but it’s also because, during the 90s, I was involved in hobbies and interests which demanded attention to dates and times. Rehearsal dates, performance dates, cricket matches etc. It’s why whenever I read diaries of famous figures, I’m always excited to see what they were doing on dates that I have a clear memory of myself.  Inevitably, the dates either coincided with:

1) A show.

2) An Ipswich Town match of some significance.

3) A romantic engagement.

To see/hear about the actions of others on important dates in my life helps me to see my story as one of billions that we all play out each day.  I was 5 hours ahead of Hurl when they went into Sound Seven Studios on 30/6/92 in the small neighbourhood of Valencia, Pennsylvania. I have no idea which of their three tracks they would have been recording at the time that I was playing my scenes in The Comedy of Errors.  They wouldn’t have known it, but the Won’t she walk away lines they recorded that day for Turnip would hold significance for my family 24 hours later when my father’s aunt died after a tortuous couple of years. 

It is not a great song, but I will cherish it for providing evidence of a moment in my own life, where both of us tried on the same day to make a contribution to culture and art. The fact that I’m writing about them suggests that their effort was more successful than mine.

Video courtesy of caustic tune.

Lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Equus: Dennis Brown - Can't Take Another Day (7 February 1993)

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If I’d been smarter, I’d have paired this up with The Fall’s Pay Your Rates from this same 7/2/93 broadcast. If Mark E. Smith and company provided the cold water of reality, Dennis Brown offered a temporary warm bath of compassion for those struggling to pay their bills and feed their family.  As Peel put it, in response to the Poverty, poverty, poverty refrain: There’s a lot of it about, and going to be more, I suspect.

Across the 6 albums which Brown released across a variety of labels in 1992, he was unable to offer any solutions to the problems. The rest of Cosmic, the LP which contains Can’t Take Another Day, is given over to love songs. However, companion pieces to the issues raised here include Moving On from Blazing! and Rebel With a Cause from Beautiful Morning.

Video courtesy of Dennis Brown - Topic

Equus: The Fall - Pay Your Rates (7 February 1993)

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It’s 1980. The UK is in its first year of a Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher who is using this time to see who will be with her and who will be against her as she seeks to reshape Britain for a new decade. The UK music scene will use Thatcher’s government as an inspiration for possibly the most sustained burst of political songwriting over the last 60 years in Britain*.  Through the 1981 England riots, The Falklands War, The Greenham Common Campaigns and the 1984/85 Miners Strike, it all provided grist to the songwriting mill. It’s an era of protest, benefit concerts and Red Wedge. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie/Out! Out! Out!” and all that.

But any age of protest needs a contrarian - social media and Fox News/GB News means we’re swamped with the bastards now - and in 1980, that role was inevitably filled by Mark E. Smith, who kicked off The Fall’s album, Grotesque (After the Gramme) with Pay Your Rates, a non-ironic demand to pay your water and council rates.  I feel that Smith was broadly sympathetic to Thatcherism and as a compulsive workaholic himself, may have found Norman Tebbitt a like-minded individual, at least in terms of sharing a pulling yourself up by the bootstraps philosophy to get through hard times.  Smith’s politics were generally unsentimental. He acknowledged himself as both an artist and a businessman. The Fall was both his artistic outlet and a means not just of supporting himself but his band mates. Although he was not stingy in apportioning credits for songs and as a result, spreading the royalties, he was also a boss. Bills had to be paid and The Fall had to work both in terms of getting records out and playing live in order to ensure that they could meet the commitments that we all have to meet.  Smith never lost sight of the fact that The Fall was his job. It had perks that other jobs don’t have for sure, but it was still work and woe betide anyone who worked with him that forgot that.

There was though, a smidgin of altruism in Smith’s worldview on Pay Your Rates.  He refers throughout to being sent to Debtor’s retreat estates which reflects his loathing of both the idea and execution of council estates. The extract from the interview below, conducted in the mid-1980s highlights this further. As far as he was concerned, to be evicted from your home and to wind up on an estate was a fate worse than death and he had nothing but contempt for the way the estates had been implemented. Reading it, his thinking appears confused because it seems to suggest that the tenants who moved from the slums into the estates were suckered in by mod-cons like refrigerators and central-heating (I mean who wants them, right?) but he laments the loss of privacy, the concentration of crime and the conformity of the flats all looking the same, with people unable to impose their own personality on them. This isn’t capitalist thinking, but utopian, even vaguely hippyish.

In a sense, releasing a song which advocates following the law, especially in an art-form which lionises outlaw behaviour, is a pretty balls-out move. Tie it in to the dismissal which Smith had for a fundamentally socialist policy, and you have a style of song which isn’t immediately associated with The Fall’s oeuvre: an aspirational, motivational song.  Had Tory H.Q. been listening closer, I wonder if they would have dared make overtures to entice Smith to form Blue Wedge. What chaos it could have been…

Given the theme of the song, I did check to see whether John Peel gave it a cheeky airing in his first show after the Poll Tax riots of 31 March 1990, but he didn’t. Though he did play it a week after the 1997 General Election.

Mark E.Smith on council estates. Taken from The Annotated Fall

*I use “political” here to mean songs about the actions of government rather than in its wider, social terms.

Lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Video courtesy of The Fall - Topic

Equus: John Peel Show - Saturday 30 January 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

 If you’re a long-standing football fan, there are dates you can look at and identify as turning points in your team’s history which either led onto a period of achievement and glory, or a period of decline and failure. As an Ipswich Town fan, writing this blog has allowed me to relive the memories of the glorious period in the club’s history which began on Saturday 23 November 1991, when a 2-1 win over Wolverhampton Wanderers at Molineux heralded the start of a run of a form which would see Ipswich win the 1991/92 Second Division Championship and with it, promotion to become one of the founding teams in the FA Premier League. It was a journey which John Peel and various members of his family had witnessed at close quarters.  If I took my going from school to college as symbolic of a fresh start and exciting new surroundings, there is a parallel to be drawn with Ipswich’s early season form as they returned to the top-flight of English football after a gap of 6 years.  For the first two-thirds of the season, Town carried over the momentum gained from their promotion. They were fiercely hard to break down and gained a reputation as draw specialists, but crucially, on the weeks they didn’t draw, they won. By the time Saturday 30 January rolled around, Ipswich’s league record for the season looked like this: 

Played 25

Won 9

Drawn 12

Lost 4

They were in the top 6 of the Premier League and in both domestic cup competitions. Life was like an ongoing happy dream if you were an Ipswich fan, and their fine form reflected my own happy stroll through life in the winter of 1992 as I made new friends and enjoyed new experiences. 

Contrast that with Peel’s beloved Liverpool, who had gone from perennial English champions to a fading force as many of those players whose success the club had been built on began to age out or were moved on as the club began the process of rebuilding. Always a tricky task and one which becomes much harder if your transfer business starts bringing in more flops than successes. Liverpool had struggled over the first two-thirds of the season and went into the weekend sitting 10 points behind Ipswich in the league table. On this show, Peel gloomily previewed their Sunday game at Arsenal by sarcastically warning any Arsenal fans who were listening that Liverpool haven’t lost for two weeks, you know.  In the event, a goal from John Barnes gained Liverpool a 1-0 win and topped off a happy footballing weekend for the Ravenscrofts and for me, as goals from Chris Kiwomya and Frank Yallop secured a 2-1 win for Ipswich over Manchester United at Portman Road. The win took Ipswich to 4th place in the table behind United, Aston Villa and Norwich City. I can’t remember if I thought that we had a chance of winning the league after that game, but I do know that I recognised it as the peak of the seven years I’d been following the club. I’m glad that I had that awareness, because the following week Ipswich lost 2-0 at Aston Villa and began a dreadful run which saw them lose 10 of the final 16 games, winning just two.  They plummeted down the table to finish 16th, seven points behind Liverpool who finished 6th.   And if we want to look at parallels, through the spring and early summer of 1993, I saw so many of the friends I’d made on my performing arts course drop out, until only a hardcore remained. It started to become less fun and the grind  had started to set in.

That Saturday at the end of January 1993 was both an apotheosis and the end of era. Over their next 100 league games, up to the end of the 1994/95 season, Ipswich registered only 18 wins over a 2 and a half year period.  The second half of the 90s would see the club rebuild in the second tier, but I must confess that listening to the selections from this 30/1/93 Peel show has brought memories of how unaware I, and all the other Ipswich fans probably were of the slow, curdling eclipse our club would suffer after reaching such a high.

Meanwhile, Datblygu continued with their attempt to get back into Peel’s good graces after their self-indulgently shoddy Peel Session of 6 months’ previous by writing to ask him for information on those who had tried to fix a place for Pop Peth on the 1992 Festive Fifty. Peel reassured David Edwards that the campaign wouldn’t have worked anyway given that Pop Peth was released in 1991, and anyway, he’d thrown the addresses away in a fit of pique.  The Phantom Fifty had reached Number 41, So What About It by The Fall.

 The other session guests on this programme were Dr. Oloh and his Milo Jazz Band, popping into Maida Vale from Sierra Leone. And of that sounds a flippant way of summing it up, well according to Peel, it wasn’t too far from the truth: I never know anything about Dr. Oloh. I mean, I know nothing at all actually. He just suddenly appears in the studio, records a session, and then just disappears again. Whether he’s doing gigs or not, nobody tells us and nobody warns us that he’s coming, except a couple of weeks in advance. I should like to have more information to pass onto you, but I do not.

The show featured a track from the Gallon Drunk album, From the Heart of Town. It didn’t do anything for me, but Peel really got it, feeling that, You know how sometimes there are tracks included on LPs just for you? That’s one of those. And it has to be said that Paying for Pleasure does feel like a perfect fit for John Peel’s ear-heart.

Peel also played Psycho Tavern by Zuzu’s Petals. The single included their cover of Brand New Key. Peel had been tempted to play this but demurred as he felt that most of his audience may not have heard of Melanie and that this was probably an instance where ignorance would be bliss.

The Little Richard Cover Search not only caused Peel to play Hell and Fire, but also Easier to Say Than Do by Charles Hodges - not that one.

The selections from this show were taken from a complete 3 hour recording. I was pretty fortunate in that virtually everything I wanted to share for my selections was available, though Mass by Calvin Party is still unavailable. Also missing was Source of Possible Ignition by Medicine Ball, the opening track from their LP, Sandwich Full of Lies.  Peel passed on his thanks to Rustic Rod, for sending him a copy.

There were two tracks which fell from favour:

Eggs - The Obliviist: I’ll always have time for this band after the brilliance of Ocelot, and my notes are quite positive about it, particularly “the jazzy trombone”, but I think it ended up being too impenetrable either to write about or ultimately enjoy.

Mambo Taxi - Prom Queen: On first hearing, there’s much to laugh about and enjoy here. But as I listened to it again, I began to see it as a record which the 17 year old me would like more than the 47 year old me. Which is fine, I’ve included tracks which would have charmed me 30 years ago, which I now can’t abide here before. But it dawned on me that, even 30 years ago, I would have recognised the shooting fish in a barrel limitations of Prom Queen soon enough, and passed on it.

Full tracklisting to celebrate the apex of the Lyall/McGiven era at ITFC.

 

Equus: Hell & Fire - Pointless Killing (30 January 1993)

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Peel found this beautiful 1976 reggae record while trawling through his collection of singles as part of his ongoing search for the Little Richard cover.

Although written from the perspective of despair over the pointless killing driven by crime in the Caribbean, anyone who has watched on, appalled, at the atrocities committed in Israel and Gaza since October 7 will find much to agree with in the music here.

Video courtesy of Rufdymond.

Equus: Captain Beefheart - Click Clack (30 January 1993)

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I must confess that when I first re-listened to this track from Beefheart’s 1972 album, The Spotlight Kid, I had severe doubts over whether to include it here. Click Clack is by no means an example of Difficult Beefheart, but I found the Howlin’ Wolf cosplay that Don Van Vliet engaged in here rather bothersome to deal with.  The theme of the track - no good man finds that his woman has finally had enough and is on her way to the railway station to make good on her threat to leave him, at which point, he’s desperate not to lose her - wouldn’t win any points for originality either.  

But what drew me back to the track was the way in which the performance served as a good example of what I call tactile audibility; the way that the musicality of certain tracks evokes an actual thing or experience.  One of the best examples of this is in the “Dogs begin to bark/Hounds begin to howl” section of The Rolling Stones recording of Little Red Rooster, where Brian Jones uses his slide guitar to evoke both the barks and howls.  In Click Clack, Beefheart and The Magic Band work the same trick using both a persistent three note piano figure and positively industrial rasps of harmonica to evoke the sound of the approaching train. I found that the effect of this wouldn’t leave my subconscious alone. And then as I listened to the song more and more times, I found myself being drawn into its groove and appreciating Beefheart’s vocal as more than just an imitation of Howlin’ Wolf, but a rawly, sincere moment of self-realisation about the consequences of treating your loved ones badly.

I found myself wondering whether the track had been any sort of influence on Jarvis Cocker when he was writing the lyrics for O.U. (Gone, Gone) some 20 years later.  But whereas Pulp’s song ended on a superficially optimistic note, Beefheart finds himself staring after his lover’s handkerchief as it waves goodbye from the departing train to “Nawlins”, where she intends to find herself, and his breaking heart finds itself beating in sync with the metal of the railroad line as she heads away.

No such sadness for Peel, who was always delighted for any opportunity to play Captain Beefheart on his show. The playing of Click Clack took him back 22 years to a gig at Newcastle City Hall where he saw Beefheart and The Magic Band play this very song.  He described it, as he was wont to do, as one of the great moments of his life.

 

Video courtesy of Revnalation.