A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Sebadoh - Vampire (22 November 1992)

Buy this at Discogs

Coming off the previous year’s double-album III, Sebadoh contented themselves in 1992 with the release of two mini-albums, Rocking the Forest and the confusingly titled Sebadoh vs Helmet, which is neither a shared LP with the New York band of the same name or tribute album to them, but rather a series of re-recordings of earlier material.  Because this was the American Underground music scene, both records were inevitably packaged together and, just in time for Christmas, sold as a bumper compilation album called Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock. 

Vampire was originally recorded for Rocking the Forest. I really like it though I could be guilty of reading the song literally as the feelings and thoughts of an actual vampire at the moment when his mark dies and becomes a vampire themself - thus breaking the ties of lust and hunger that bind them while the new vampire makes their own visits and prefacing an endless and loveless union as another vampire walks the earth looking for others to feed on.  It’s like any long-term romantic union; Dracula always appears the suave, sexy suitor when scratching at the window and (love)biting the neck of some buxom, dark-eyed, virginal innocent in her bed, but the moment they become one of his brides, he’s being heavy-handed and moaning at them to leave his things alone.  

Without lapsing into gothic melodrama, Sebadoh include some clever twists on the vampire legend by referencing shadows and reflections, neither of which a vampire can cast.  However, the more likely reading of the song is the recognition that the man is guilty of trapping his partner into an abusive relationship and an acknowledgement of the ways in which his behaviour and suffocating love have caused his partner to become submissive and trapped within the confines of the relationship. It’s quite a depressing picture that is painted in that while reflecting that he should let his lover go free to rediscover herself, he cannot commit to letting it happen due to the sad truth that he rises by her falling: 

My life cuts her up/An evil way to build me strong.

The power he holds over her is his lifeblood and for all the recognition that he is destroying her, he cannot let it go, at least not until his lover finds her own resolution either to board up the doors against him or fashion a stake to his heart. And just like the fate of thousands-year old vampires in fiction, one feels that death would be a release for all parties.

Video courtesy of toiletfromhell

Lyrics copyright of Lou Barlow

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Les Etoiles du Zaire - Pembe (22 November 1992)

Buy this at Discogs

Many, many years ago I was listening to Ken Bruce on Radio 2 talking about broadcasts he’d been involved in which had included features which were unsuitable for radio. Not unsuitable in the sense of being in poor taste, but rather content which was entirely visual in nature and so would lose its impact when put on radio.  Examples included breaking off from one programme to cover a fireworks display - turn your radios up to hear several minutes of explosions - and most farcical of all, a display by a team of jugglers. Question: if you juggle on the radio and no one sees you drop a ball or club, did it really happen?

In recorded music terms, the equivalent is the crediting of dancers on live albums.  It’s fair enough given that they put in the time in rehearsal and on the day of the show, but unless they’re on a percentage of the royalties, I can’t see the point.  But as curious as the process may seem, there are scenes where the presence of the dancer is as important to the musical ambience as as with any musician.  No soukous gig is complete without the presence of dancers, who will invariably spend the whole show shadowing the vocalist.  The dancers were mainly female, but not exclusively and in 1992, a group of celebrated soukous musicians including Pepe Kalle, Nyboma Mwan’Dido Danos Canta and Bopol Mansiamina came together to record a tribute album to midget dancer, Emoro, who had worked with Kalle and was clearly considered to be a major part of Kalle’s shows that he received front cover co-credits on a couple of Kalle’s mid-1980s albums.  Pembe was written by Nyboma and provoked one of Peel’s familiar complaints about keyboard players on soukous records building up their roles more than desired.  The one on the Hommage a Emoro album is credited merely as Tony, like he’s sitting in with The Fall for a week. On the whole though, I don’t think it’ll spoil the enjoyment too much.

Video courtesy of Bopol - Topic

Oliver! appendix: New Mind - White Star Falling (7 December 1991)

Buy this at Discogs

Before we move forward, let’s take a step back. I always think I’m done with including appendices to shows that I did where a track I wanted from a John Peel show wasn’t available at the time I was covering it, only for it to come to light a few years later.  However, I’m deluding myself clearly because the moment that Twitter user @johnpeel3904 uploaded White Star Falling by New Mind, which I had originally hoped to share when Peel played (and misidentified it) on his 07/12/91, I knew I had to have it here. 

It’s a relief to me to see that whatever fascinations it held when I first heard it are still in place.  Discogs describes the track as electro industrial which seems pretty on the nose to me.  This is not a piece of music for ‘avin it large to.  Indeed, it sounds like nothing less than the sound of war given its sampled shouts of phrases like Incoming and the various Mayday calls which crop up along the way.   The backing is equally intense with the beat sounding like the repetitive, dull thud of distant artillery fire. The first Gulf War was still fresh in the memory at the time that Jonathan Sharp, the man behind New Mind, recorded it. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that the track conjures up the aural equivalent of screaming aeroplanes from which white stars fell and blocked out the starlight in a haze of fire.  We could watch it on television overnight back then, a festival of ongoing news coverage that eventually brought us 24-hour rolling news, a development which should have seen Saddam Hussein put to death 15 years early.

Anyone who understands the vagaries of dance music will not be surprised to learn that the Body Politic EP which featured White Star Falling was the only EP that New Mind ever put out.  However, this was not due to Jonathan Sharp deciding to abandon the monicker for 20 other aliases, but instead because he decided to go down the  Pink Floyd/Moody Blues/Genesis route and make New Mind into an albums only act.  With 5 albums released between 1993 and 2001, there is every chance that New Mind will pop up on future Peel playlists, and if the results are as arresting as White Star Falling, we’ll see them posted here.

Housekeeping: I’m moving house next week which may mean a longer than usual gap to the next post.  Posts have become a little more irregular over the course of this year for which I can only blame pressure of work, but I still have plenty of Peel related music to share and I hope that you’ll continue to find things to enjoy over the coming months.

Video courtesy of John Peel and thanks to Vibracobra23 for recognising the title of the track.  Now, if either of them has the session by Krispy 3 that was broadcast on this programme, one really would have everything one could wish for from 7 December 1991.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 15 November 1992 (BFBS)

 Christmas preparations always start early, but for John Peel, the social whirl of the festive season went on all the way from the moment that the shops start playing Last Christmas to well beyond Twelfth Night.  It was an envious position to be in, there were simply so many friends and people wanting to catch up with him.  I wonder if he ever realised just how loved and liked he was?  This edition of John Peel’s Music brought an invitation for a New Year’s curry with listeners, Robert and Vivienne Lawson while they were visiting the UK during a visit from Macau.

The playlist saw him give a spin to Hard to Find by Codeine who he noted had been celebrated in the press as “Kings of Slowcore”. This led Peel to reminisce about the time he first saw slowcore pioneers, Swans at The Garage in Nottingham, a gig which may have provided one of the tracks on Swans’s 1986 live tour compilation album, Public Castration is a Good Idea.  It was a tiny room and they had everything turned up as loud as it would go.  I really thought I was going to die, it was tremendously exciting.

Another band trying to make a reputation were 8 Storey Window.  Peel played the title track of their 12-inch EP, I Thought You Told Me Everything.  8 Storey Window found themselves in the position of that week’s  British Rock Music’s New Great Hope in the eyes of the media with Melody Maker describing the record as “Exuberant, majestic and self-probing”. Are you allowed to do that sort of thing? wondered Peel before going on to say how destructive he felt the cycle of hyping and dropping bands was when done by the music media.  He felt that invariably the hyping was misplaced to begin with, as many of the bands which the music press talked up were, to his mind, nothing more than OK at best. He understood why it happened, but felt that ultimately, it did more harm than good to the bands themselves.

Unlike the previous week’s programme, I stayed much truer to my initial choices and instincts with only a small handful of selections failing to, in my view, stand the test of time.

Unsane - Breaththing Out Peel declared himself saddened but relieved that what had been his favourite band of late 1991 was going to continue working together despite the death of their drummer Charlie Ondras, a couple of months earlier.  Maybe my own residual relief caused me to wave through this cover of the Slug track Breathe the Thing Out.  It was released in a split single which saw Slug covering Unsane’s track, Streetsweeper, but ultimately it didn’t make me anxious to explore Slug’s discography so had to be considered something of a failure all things considered.

Oliver - Freezing Cold Like an Iceberg: In 1974, farm worker Oliver Chaplin recorded an album at his parents’ farm in Wales.  He called the LP, Standing Stone, pressed up 250 copies and sent them out to DJs, although not alas to Peel.  It became a cult classic and rightly so. 1992 saw it reissued, this time in a limited edition of 500 copies.  With just an acoustic guitar, a handful of overdubbed electric ones and some basic phasing effects, Chaplin produced a record which sounded like something you might get if you locked John Fahey, Captain Beefheart, David Bowie and Marc Bolan in a remote cabin in the woods with a batch of guitars and one bottle of whisky between them. The songs are also distinguished by moments of audio verite, often while they were being played and Peel was particularly tickled by the shout of, "What's this chicken doing in my way?" during Freezing Cold Like an Iceberg. To which one is tempted to say to Chaplin, "It's the chicken's home too, you know, Oliver."  I have a feeling that Standing Stone may have been one of the last physical albums I bought - during a day trip to Exeter in 2017. This probably explains why I included it here in the initial selections from the show.  But unfortunately, the shout at the chicken proves to be the most interesting thing about it. And the album sits, neglected, in the side well of my car.

Loop Guru - Mrabet From their debut EP, I was initially taken in by the Eastern ambience which rose like incense smoke across the early stages of this track. Unfortunately, repeat listens showed that by the end, the track had traded incense for stale pot pourri.

There were a couple of tracks I would have liked to share here which are currently unavailable, such as:

Conrad Crystal and Sheriff - Waan More.  Well, my notes were very excited about this, describing it as a “stunning reggae track”.  Unfortunately, I can’t elaborate on that because the file containing the 15/11/92 show has been taken down recently.

Strangelove - Front.  It was quite interesting to hear something from the early days of this band, who seemed to spend most of the rest of of the decade poised to make a big breakthrough without fully realising it, and enjoying plenty of goodwill and some chart success even when their own personal issues were speeding them towards break-up. That was all way ahead of them when Peel played this track from their Visionary EP.  He was giving them a lot of support having been impressed by their set at the Glastonbury Festival and they had also recorded a session for his Radio 1 programme which had gone down well.

Full tracklisting

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Gunshot - Nobody Move! (15 November 1992)

Buy this at Discogs   

We’ve already heard a little bit of Leyton based hip-hop crew, Gunshot on this programme through their participation in the B.R.O.T.H.E.R Movement’s GhettoGeddon single, but Peel gave them the floor by programming Nobody Move!, the b-side to their new single, as the opening track of this edition of John Peel’s Music.

 I can’t get into specifics over the pluses of this track because it’s an example of hardcore hip-hop and so leaves me, a white 45 year old, in its slipstream as the flow speeds past me, but the feel of the thing is irresistible.  Using the refrain from Yellowman’s 1984 album opener, Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt as its foundation, Nobody Move! appears to be set at a funeral if we take the opening oration at face-value, but further listening and the bits of MC Alkaline’s rap that I was able to make out have led me to think that the funeral is purely symbolic with Alkaline replacing Soundboy as the fastest, hottest lip on the mic.  We aren’t here to bury Soundboy but witness Alkaline’s coronation and his own speech lays out just what he did to get to the top and what he’ll do to stay there, namely be the best and stay the best - Ah...the confidence of youth.  And if we all stay still and pay homage, no-one will be killed - literally or linguistically.

Peel loved Nobody Move! but admitted that he thought the A-side of the single, Killing Season was even better. Unfortunately, he couldn’t play it on the radio due to a number of profanities that were in it.  I find it amazing that British Forces Broadcasting Service would have been so squeamish about bad language given the demographic that Peel was broadcasting to - though admittedly, it wasn’t just people serving in the Armed Forces that would have heard BFBS’s output.  Maybe they feared that a battalion hearing the word “shit” on a record would lead to anarchy on the parade ground.

Video courtesy of Tyron88N

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Brighter - Killjoy (15 November 1992)

Buy this at Discogs or Bandcamp

Twee Pop - The Art of Taking Difficult Decisions 

With its near minute long arpeggio-laden overture, Killjoy is a jangle-pop classic. But what makes it stand out for me is the way that it’s another example of the way in which supposedly drippy Twee Pop could so brilliantly and honestly reflect the most painful moments of romantic relationships with a force and directness that other more muscular styles of music weren’t able to match.  Oh sure, there were louder scenes with singers who could do heartbroken and wracked, but their pain and emotional upset never sounded as comparable to mine or yours as it did when vocalised by people like Keris Howard of Brighter.

Furthermore, as with Look For the Holes by Po!, the track brings the audience in just at the point where decisive action is being taken and it’s that tension between the steely sentiments and the gentle, almost timid delivery that I find so interesting.  These bands dealt in a romantic landscape where hearts were broken and relationships ended with regret, but also with a clear sense that this had to be done for everyone’s sake because to go on would only bring greater pain and eventually outright hatred on both sides. At their core, these bands and that scene recognised that love and relationships were hard work and that more often than not, especially in the late teens/early 20s phase of life, unpleasant conversations would need to be had and unpopular decisions made.  Short-term heartbreak and contempt for long-term peace of mind and serenity of spirit.

Killjoy seems to be taking place during the calmer phase of a breakup discussion.  It’s open to a couple of different interpretations and I lean towards one side coming out towards the other about their true sexual/romantic orientation: I can’t bear to deceive you any longer/Cos this is me/You always were my friend/So how come you pretend?  It certainly gives the feelings around the breakup greater potency than they míght have had if it was just a case of Howard meeting someone else. 

Although one other spin is that Killjoy represents the feelings of someone breaking someone else’s heart for the first time, bringing together the blend of guilt and self-justification that such an unpleasant duty often engenders, especially if you’re not natural heartbreaker material. I wish I’d been aware of it during   my own brief stint as one during spring/summer 1994.  Either way, it’s a little gem of a song, beautifully written and performed.

Alas, it also signalled a break-up within Brighter themselves, with the Disney EP serving as their swansong release.  Their page on the carefully curated Sarah Records webpage is a nice guide to the journey they went on.

Video courtesy of hernaniexchange

Lyrics copyright of their authors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: J. - Born on the Wrong Side of Town (15 November 1992)

Buy this at Discogs

I know what he’s singing and I know why he’s singing it but I wish he didn’t sound so much like Marc Bolan at times. - John Peel after playing Born on the Wrong Side of Town on 15/11/92.

I think that when I first heard this, I included it because I was drawn in by the catchiness of the chorus, despite the mannered vocals, which considering that J. was singing in a second language, I think we can forgive him for.  However, once I started to listening to the track again, in-depth, for this blogpost, I was astonished to discover that what was coming out of that wannabe Anthony Kiedis-mouth was a political song, the contents of which sound predictable after 29 years, but which could have been an incredible shock to anyone tuning in on 15/11/92 who was still enjoying the long political laze that the early 1990s seemed to promise would last indefinitely.

Jaye Muller was born and raised in East Berlin, but moved to Paris between the time of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification.  Just over two years to the day since West Germany and East 

Germany came together with the West using free enterprise, market forces and greater individual freedoms to absorb and dissipate the socialism of the East, Muller provides an update on just what the benefits of capitalism have brought to his family, friends and neighbours in the former DDR and  the answer appears to be poverty, loss of security, loss of dignity and self direction albeit with the positive that East Germans can travel anywhere they like without having to ensure they have their papers, but as J. remarks even this freedom proves to be a pyrrhic one if you haven’t got enough money to travel anywhere.

It’s always shocking to hear sentiments like these because they not only confront us with the news that “our values” for want of a better word haven’t worked out well for those who it’s claimed will benefit from them, but also they feel pretty irrefutable.  Simply saying, “Well, do you want to go back to how it was before?” feels as though it will just invite the answer, “Yes, please.”  However, it’s worth remembering that even those of us born and brought up in capitalist societies our whole lives have many of the complaints about the system that J. expresses.  The search goes on for a middle way which can bring together the best of both systems, though you won’t find any suggestions of that in Born on the Wrong Side of Town. There’s only a sense of profound disappointment and ice cold fury.  Nevertheless, for Müller, capitalism eventually brought its rewards as he co-founded the communications firm, J2 Global in 1995, which allowed users to access fax and voicemail through their email accounts.  He has continued to enjoy success both as a musician and an entrepreneur over the last 25 years.

Video courtesy of kittypawn