Equus: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 7 February 1993 (BFBS)

As I write this, I feel very much in tune with how John Peel was feeling as he opened this edition of his BFBS show. He warned listeners that he was not in perfect working order due to a heavy head cold, but that he hoped the music would make up for it.  Both my wife and I have been flattened by the same cold*, a week out from Christmas. I thought I was getting over mine, but an attempt to untangle some Christmas tree lights has left me dizzy and craving the balm of this blog.

I think that the cold which has affected my wife and I may have had its roots in the fact that we just spent a week with our niece, culminating in her fifth birthday party and an army of infants invading my in-laws house. Peel’s cold may have been caused by the filthy weather in which he had watched Ipswich and Sheffield Wednesday play out a 1-1 draw in a League Cup quarter final, a few days previously. Perhaps, it was penitence for him having spotted himself, together with Sheila and Thomas, on the televised highlights, sitting behind John Wark as he took a throw-in. Regardless, he had a higher opinion of this piece of crowd work than he did of most of his TV work, as he explained: I’m always rather poor at it to be honest, because all I do is  flutter my eyelids in a rather nervous fashion like some gentle woodland creature and just wish that it was over.

Having criticised himself as a TV performer, he also held up his hands to being a lousy interviewer, but while playing tracks from the new Frank Black album, he acknowledged Black as being a nice man because he had made an interview that they did together a much easier experience than Peel had feared it was going to be. He was also sympathetic to Black’s reasons for ending Pixies, with Black having expressed the wish to get off the roundabout of playing the same songs over and over again.

The postbag included a letter from Addis Sharma, who explained that during a visit to a department store in Alma Ata- now called Almaty -, Kazakhstan, they had looked at the music section. It contained 5 albums, one of which was by Billy Bragg. As Addis put it, This is a place where people queue for everything except Billy Bragg records, it seems.  Peel received two letters of thanks from people that he had managed to turn on to African music, through consistent exposure to it on the show.  One of the correspondents admitted that their girlfriend hadn’t been converted and would punch them whenever they listened to it. Peel responded by playing Sana by Kanda Bongo Man and repeating his standard complaint about the presence of synthesiser players on soukous records.  Finally, a prisoner from Berlin called Steve had written to Peel to request some records. We didn’t learn what these were, but he promised to play them next week.

I was able to include all the selections I wanted to include from this show.  I did not include, as I frequently never do, the two tracks by Babes in Toyland which Peel played.  Both Blood and Jungle Train were taken from a live album, which had been sent to Peel by an American friend who liberated a copy of the album from a radio station in Georgia. A bit of a collectors item, but you’re not getting my copy. This though was in a pre-YouTube world. For those who enjoy them, consider this an early Christmas gift.

Full tracklisting

*Turned out to be Covid.

Equus: Huggy Bear - T-Shirt Tucked In/Blow Dry (7 February 1993)

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Two of the three Huggy Bear tracks which John Peel played on this edition of John Peel’s Music on BFBS.  As with Moonshake, we get one of his and one of hers. “His” is obsessed with wanting sex and not getting it; “Hers” shows how to use sexuality to lure men in and then turn the tables on them in violent style.

My initial listen to T-Shirt Tucked In had me thinking that it was an attack on me, or people like me circa 1993.  The refrain of Ah, you’re so good/You got your T-shirt tucked in felt like a repudiation of those of us who could not bring themselves to rebel. After all, as the song seemed to sneer, I literally wore my conformity by having my T-shirt tucked in wherever I went. I also wore white socks until about 1998. I didn’t know any better, it felt smart and it kept draughts off my chest. I mean I’d made a stand in the late 80s when I refused (outgrew) wearing a vest. What did Huggy Bear want from me, for fucks sake!?  But it’s only in my dreams that they’re attacking me. 

On the surface, the song appears to be potentially targeting prick-teasing women who give off sexual vibes, but who wear clothes like armour. The tucked in t-shirts helping to accentuate curves of breasts and belly while remaining firmly locked away to lustful male eyes. A more likely reading may be that it’s a caricature of invasive male thinking, whereby Chris Rowley’s narrator sees sexual invitations in the woman’s dress and behaviour. It’s a curious and queasy mix which attempts to be sexy but makes Rowley’s character seem laughably pathetic with his second hand sex talk, Groovy little t-shirt thing etc. Given the full-on nature of the female backing vocals, I suspect that this was intentional.

Listening to the sass and swing of Blow Dry, I found myself thinking that someone really ought to make a musical out of the work of Huggy Bear. Both this and Her Jazz have the feel of big company production numbers. Pairing it up with T-Shirt Tucked In is interesting in that it switches the dynamics of the former track, so we get the female perspective and a concerted attempt to drive dumb men to distraction with shiny bouffant hair and swinging hips. And whereas Rowley is made to sound desperate, Jo Johnson sounds firmly in control of the scene that she’s setting and the game she is playing.  If you try to untuck her T-shirt and let down her hair, her reaction will be swift and devastating - I’ll blow you off the face of this earth/You’ll be as bloody as you were at birth. It’s those Abel Ferrara vibes again…  

In true Huggy Bear style, this kind of sexual honeytrap to violence could be sprung both in the meat markets of clubs and pubs as well as in more mundane settings. Johnson intends to make sure that every head turns when she next goes to the post office.

Imagine the amount of onstage sexual tension that could be wrung out of a dance routine on either of these tracks.  It’s a choreographer’s wet dream! The campaign for the work of Huggy Bear to be the next 90s jukebox musical starts here.  If nothing else, it would have to be better than Viva Forever!

Videos courtesy of random content.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Equus: Aurlus Mabele - Stop, Arretez! (7 February 1993)

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Looking back, I was surprised to see that this was the first Aurlus Mabele tune to feature here, in Peel show terms, since Boxing Day, 1991.  I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that if a soukous Mount Rushmore ever gets built, it should only include anyone who ever played as part of Mabele’s band, Loketo. For their admirable insistence on just getting to the sparkle - and for me, the sound of soukous guitar is the aural embodiment of that word - they stand at the peak of their field. For those with longer memories, the guitar work here is in the La Joie de Vivre category.

Video courtesy of skycoolguy

Equus: Holy Ghost Inc. ‎– Mad Monks On Zinc [The Warrior Monk Mix # 2] (7 February 1993)

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In its original form, Mad Monks on Zinc sounds like “head music”. It’s slightly proggy, heavy on new age elements and built around a chilly, staccato, Germanic piano figure. It could have come out either in 1971 or 1981. Back in 1992, I wasn’t moving in the sort of circles which meant that Mad Monks on Zinc would have come into my consciousness, but it clearly made enough of an impact that Holy Ghost Inc. were able to commission a set of remixes. Most of them make regular use of the central piano riff, but this mix saves the piano for the last 30 seconds. Up to then, it moves the track from the head to the dancefloor with thrilling intensity. 

For all my talk in the past about dance music having an almost religious hold over its acolytes, this mix literally opens with 30+ seconds of the call to prayer. Then at the 34 second mark, the beat drops and the resulting explosion of energy feels genuinely close to ecstasy.  Aaaamen…

Video courtesy of Arseni.

Equus: The Pussycats - Dressed In Black (7 February 1993)

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Originally recorded by The Shangri-Las as a b-side for their 1966 single, He Cried, Dressed in Black was offered, in the same month, to the female four-piece, The Pussycats, mainly because the people behind the original recording believed in its potential to be a big hit. It followed the same arrangement as the Shangri-Las version, which had languished at Number 65 on the back of He Cried on the US Hot 100 (and failed to chart at all in the UK), while Artie Butler again oversaw proceedings in the studio, just as he had done with the Shangri-Las. The Pussycats version is a bit more bombastic, though the mood of downbeat heartbreak is maintained throughout.  

The record buying public were immune to the song’s charms, perhaps considering it passé by 1966, or maybe they found the grandiose melodramas put out by the likes of The Walker Brothers to be a preferable update to the girl-group formula. The notes to Girls in the Garage, Vol 5 from which Peel played the track on this show mention that yet another version of Dressed in Black was also recorded at the same time, under the same arrangement team by The Nu-Luvs, but I haven’t been able to locate that, which may be for the best as you can get too much of a good thing.

Listened to with my 2023 ears, I’m not too keen on The Pussycats version of Dressed in Black, but I’m including it here as I suspect that my 1993 ears, which were grabbing 60s music wherever I could find it at the time, would probably have been obsessed with this for a few weeks at least.

Video courtesy of mix tape

Equus: Frank Black - Old Black Dawning (7 February 1993)

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With Pixies having disbanded the previous year, their erstwhile frontman greeted 1993 with a utilitarian new name, swapping the mystical, guru-like Black Francis for Frank Black, the man you need for all your plumbing needs. He also had a new self-titled album, brimming with new songs.  At one point, Black had looked like dipping his toe into solo-dom with an album comprised entirely of cover songs, but in the event, he appears to have energised himself for the new challenge by following a trait from his Pixies days and giving most of the songs on his new album a space/sci-fi slant (cf Motorway to Roswell)

It’s not immediately obvious from the lyrics, but as Black admitted, the inspiration for Old Black Dawning came from a visit he made to the then recently completed Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona.  If humanity ever does colonise other planets, then structures like Biosphere 2 are what it’ll be living in. More likely, I suggest, will be the building of biospheres across this planet if/when Earth becomes uninhabitable due to climate change making it so.  

That’s for the future, back then and on into the mid 1990s, it’s wider cultural significance - outside of the Frank Black album - was for its association with the 1996 comedy, Bio-Dome, which was one of those movies alongside Joe’s Apartment,  Coneheads, California Man and Cool World which I perpetually used to linger over and then ignore on trips to the video rental store because I simply wasn’t ever going to be stoned enough to fully appreciate them.

Having been an enthusiastic supporter of Pixies during the late 80s/early 90s, Peel found himself caught between the past and the present now that Black had struck out with a solo album. His views at this point were mixed: Without wishing to get into a Morrissey vs The Smiths style debate, I do prefer the work of The Pixies in general. However, he did have reservations about his reservations and reckoned that he would listen to Black’s album a bit more closely before making judgements. I haven’t listened to enough of either to be able to make a considered preference, I just know that I like what I’ve heard of both so far. And had I heard Old Black Dawning back in ‘93, it would have most likely led me to feel reassured rather disappointed.

Video courtesy of CaptainSpankington.

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.