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)

Buy this at Discogs

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)

Buy this at Discogs

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)

Buy this at Discogs

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.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Moonshake - Sweetheart (29 November 1992)

Buy this at Discogs

As with the previous Moonshake track to be played by Peel, Sweetheart was one of “hers”, so consequently it takes on strange, mysterious, disarming textures.  Just like Little Thing, it feels like what we’re hearing are the mechanics of music making - here evidenced both by Miguel Moreland’s clattering drumwork and kronky guitars which sound like they’re trying to hawk up a lungful of phlegm - while, tantalisingly heard in the background, we can make out the performance of Margaret Fiedler’s subdued vocal. Her performance walks the line between sex kitten and femme fatale, but it was too quiet for me to be able to make out whether her character was giving a come on or a kiss off. The high, fluting backing vocals suggest the former, but the stabs of acid jazz brass suggest the latter.  It may be hard to pin down but it all sounds seductively brilliant.  

Indeed, as the blog heads into the home strait of Peel’s 1992 shows, and I reflect on one of the long forgotten aims of this blog to buy as many of the records that caught my ear as possible, I find myself pondering that the Eva Luna album may be one of the few from Peel’s 1992 playlists that I would actually want to own.  Discogs UK dealers may be having turkey for Christmas after all.

Video courtesy of We Came to Dance

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Coupé Cloué - Souvenir D’Enfance (29 November 1992)

Buy this at Discogs

Having recently brought you tracks which deal with depression/isolation and suicide, it’s a relief to be able to lighten the mood with some Haitian party music courtesy of Coupé Cloue.  I don’t think the childhood memory of the song’s title suggests anything too traumatic, though full translations will be gratefully received.

Video courtesy of Bon Melomane

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Therapy? - Perversonality (29 November 1992)

Buy this at Discogs

After a couple of recent instances where my teenaged affection for Therapy? wan’t strong enough to include tracks of theirs played by John Peel across the autumn/winter of 1992 on this blog, it comes as something of a relief to be able to embrace Perversonality like a newly met, long-lost friend.  If that analogy sounds like an oxymoron, I should explain that I had never heard Perversonality before hearing it on this edition of John Peel’s Music but straightaway it reminded me  of exactly why I liked Therapy? back in the day. 

All the elements of classic Therapy? are there: strong opening guitar line, funky bass, drumming which feels like a character in its own right, Andy Cairns with another cosplaying serial killer style vocal, lyrical themes of emotional conflict Love you and I hate you in the same breath etc, only for a definitive verdict to be arrived at by the 2:10 mark and which heralds a rapidly building sense of anguish/mania; the aural equivalent of someone prepping themselves for a suicide attempt. This is followed by a burst of guitar which sounds like emergency room procedures desperately trying to bring the victim back to life, only to level off and guide the listener safely through to a sampled testimony from what sounds like a support group meeting for emotionally vulnerable people.  Therapy?’s use of samples was always one of their most fascinatingly striking qualities because, as is the case here, it helped to ground their songs into some kind of relatable reality.  The sample used here feels perfectly in sync with a track whose object of affection and disgust appears to be Cairns himself.  People often got hurt, rejected and damaged within the narrative of Therapy?’s songs, and that damage was often turned inward.  

It’s naughty of me to describe Cairns’s vocal style as cosplaying. Regardless of whether he sang from experience or as a persona, his voice was the sound of scars which were either inflicted on other people’s bodies or his own psyche. For a brief period, Therapy?’s music helped me to both land and absorb my own blows, trivial though they were. Perversonality is the first track of theirs that I’ve heard in a long time which reminds me of how valuable that was for me.

Video courtesy of Therapy?

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.