Guys and Dolls: Roovel Oobik - Betterlife [Recreation Version] [Peel Session] (17 April 1993)

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A couple of blogposts over the course of the last year have mentioned the bizarre tale of the unscheduled extended stay in the UK which the Estonian band Roovel Oobik found themselves having to make when they came over to record a Peel Session on 20 March 1993. The session was finally broadcast on this 17/4/93 programme, and the full thing is worth listening to, not only to see whether it floats your boat musically, but because it contains details about how Peel first heard about the band, meetings with them which hatched the plan for them to do a session and details about how they became temporarily stranded in the UK after coming over.

For all that though, why have I only included one track from Roovel Oobik’s session?  Well, I should say that it was touch and go that Betterlife [Recreation Version] made it on to the metaphorical mixtape at all, but having listened to the session again this morning, I did seriously consider including the whole session here. We’re back in Revolver territory again…

All of the songs in the session follow a pattern: strong, melodic starts which get undercut by weak vocals - albeit I need to make allowances that vocalist, Tonu Pedaru, was singing in a second language - and that ultimately lead onto slightly overindulgent playouts.  I did nearly change my mind and include Masters of Day Dream Machinery here as well, but I think that Betterlife [Recreation Version] does all anyone really needs to be able to enjoy Roovel Oobik. For me, the gorgeousness of the wah-wah guitar work and the ska-dub playout counterbalance the gormless vocals. We can’t have one without the other, so let’s embrace  the glorious and the grim here.

Peel hoped that Roovel Oobik would come back and do another session the following year, but in the event, he never played anything by them ever again after the session was repeated on 20 August 1993. He doesn’t appear to have played anything from their 1994 album, Psychikosmos, and it took him a decade to discover that from the mid-90s onwards, several members of the band had been recording and gigging as a dance act called Una Bomba.

He always spoke fondly of them though, remembering when, during their brief stay at Peel Acres, the band would always go outside to smoke on a grass verge opposite the house. During one smoking break, Peel went out to join them and told them to consider the verge as a part of Estonia, the band even made up a sign which they planted on the verge saying, Welcome to Estonia. In 2003, an Estonian TV crew interviewed Peel about the band and took footage of the verge. They also passed on to him a copy of the Una Bomba album, Aerosol and Peel played a track from it on 19 March 2003.

In 2005, Roovel Oobik reformed to release an album called Supersymmetry. Since then they’ve released two further albums, the most recent being 2024’s Transcent. 

Video courtesy of VibraCobra23 Redux

Apologies for not being able to include the dots over the o in the band’s name.

Guys and Dolls: The Blue Up? - Come Alive (17 April 1993)

 

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The video is taken from Peel’s show on 17/4/93, and as you’ll hear him say, Come Alive is taken from the album, Cake and Eat It, but what he didn’t mention was the lengthy journey that The Blue Up? had gone through to get an album distributed.

Formed as an all-female quartet in 1984, the Minnesota outfit released two singles in the mid-80s on Susstones and by 1989 were set to record their first album. The album, called Introducing Sorrow, was due to be released by British label, Midnight Music, but it ultimately never saw the light of day due to Midnight Music going bust. By the time The Blue Up? recorded Cake and Eat It, they had reduced themselves to a trio and, clearly eager to make up for lost time, produced an album boasting 23 tracks, albeit half a dozen of them were snippets ranging between 7 & 23 seconds in length.

With its jittery time-signature verses and strident choruses,  Come Alive somehow marries together Eastern European folk with Goth rock. In the verses, singer Rachel Olson - now better known as Ana Voog - sounds as though she’s channeling the heroine of Another Day by Paul McCartney, a woman out of place in the modern world, simply trying to get through another day without being harmed or hurt. And yet lurking under the surface is a more confident, sensual figure waiting to burst forth when the time is right.  The cries of despair after each chorus showing how desperately the heroine wants to break free of the constraints placed upon her, constraints which in Voog’s case were later attributed to Post-traumatic stress disorder and agoraphobia.  These conditions foreshadowed Voog’s later work as a visual and internet artist, where she would garner notoriety with anacam, one of the earliest life-casts on the nascent internet, in which she set up a webcam to broadcast her life 24/7, and did so for 13 years.  This Vice article by Voog from 2018 gives more details of why she did it and what she learnt from it.

The band clearly had a high opinion of Come Alive as they re-recorded it for their only major label album, Spool Forka Dish, released on Columbia Records in 1995, but the snippet of that which I heard on genius.com suggests that, like Shonen Knife before them, The Blue Up? lost something of what made them so compelling once they stepped into bigger and shinier facilities. Stay in the Catacombs where The Blue Up? recorded this version and enjoy something both catchy, chilling and icily magnificent.

Video courtesy of John Peel.

Guys and Dolls: Swirlies - Pancake (17 April 1993)

 

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Back in the 60s and 70s, if John Peel was excited about the release of a new album, it was common practice for him to play the whole record on one of his shows. Examples include Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles* and  Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan** (as well as Desire by the same artist). In subsequent years, Peel would content himself by playing trios or quartets of tracks from new records that particularly excited him.

On 17/4/93, he dotted 4 tracks from Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, the debut album by Swirlies, throughout his programme. My notes show that only Pancake would have interested me enough to keep on a mixtape. I like the tension between the driving, grinding rock sound coming up against the woozy keyboards and off-key singsong vocals of Seana Carmody. The lyrics mentioned missed classes, and given that the album’s tracklisting featured titles such as Bell and His Life of Academic Freedom, I wondered whether the album might be a concept record about life in college. I listened to the record last night and soon discovered that it wasn’t. If the record has any kind of theme, it’s around those of regret and tough love, but most of the lyrics are too abstract to be definitively pinned down.

What I must say about Blonder Tongue Audio Baton is that it is very much a record of two halves, and as I waited for Pancake to roll around - it’s the sixth track out of eleven on the album - I found myself  wishing  that I hadn’t felt the need to satisfy my curiosity about whether the record was a concept album. I found the first five tracks a slog to listen to, mainly because Swirlies fell into the trap of layering them in all kinds of discordant sounds and weird modulations, while simultaneously failing to lift the tempo above meandering, and I discovered last night that I really cannot get on with meandering drone rock, no matter how scuzzed up the band make it. 

Then we reached Pancake, the halfway mark in the album and the first track that Carmody sings on. The first five tracks were sung by Damon Tuntunjian, which had me wondering whether Swirlies were in the same category as Moonshake and whether I would find myself leaning more towards “her over him”. Nevertheless, it was a welcome harbour to reach after 5 tracks of audio gristle. But then something rather wonderful happened. Over the second half of the record, Swirlies leave behind the sonic kinks and knots and let the material breathe a bit more. The album becomes progressively more “songy”, more involving and more exciting to listen to. I’m always happier to hear an album which has a stronger second half than first half, not least because it’s better to be looking at the time and thinking “How much more have I got left to enjoy?” instead of “How much more have I got to endure?”

But I only took one track out of the four that Peel played. A look at the tracklisting for this show reveals that, alongside Pancake, Peel played Bell, His Love Just Washed Away and His Life of Academic Freedom, which are…let’s see…tracks 2, 4 & 5 on Blonder Tongue Audio Baton. So, Peel was leaving us in no doubt which half of the album his preferences lay with. In fairness, he did play tracks from the second half of the record in subsequent programmes, ***but based on my experiences with it, I can’t help but wish that he’d gone back to his 1970s self and played the whole album, so as to give a fuller and truer picture of what it was like. Sometimes, John Walters’s attitude of We’re not here to give the public what they want, we’re here to give them what they didn’t know they needed could work against both audiences and artists, and that’s something which I feel happened in this programme.

Video courtesy of Swirlies - Topic

*Strictly speaking, the link doesn’t go to a Peel show. Radio London got an advance copy of Pepper about three weeks before it was released, and Ed Stewart was the first DJ to play it, albeit with a highly emotional Peel sitting in with him as he did so. I’d be surprised if Peel didn’t give the album a full play on The Perfumed Garden at some point.

 

**One track, Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts was held over to another programme due to time reasons.

*** On 1 May 1993, Peel played what I think may be the best track on the album, Jeremy Parker, but aggravatingly, the file of that show, which I made my selections from, missed the track off, so it won’t be blogged about here.

Guys and Dolls: John Peel Show - Friday 16 April 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

I was pretty fortunate with this full length show in that everything that I wanted to share from it was available, with the exception of two things:

1) © - Dream One [K. Moon.E & Flipper mix] K.Moon.E is Kevin Mooney, former bassist with Adam & the Ants.

2) 13 year old, Tom Ravenscroft’s apparently pitch perfect impression of PJ Harvey. His father was so impressed by it that he wanted to record it and play it on this programme, only for Tom to make himself scarce every time he tried to get it down on tape.

There were two tracks that fell from favour on my original list of selections:

Trumans Water - Limbs - The Spasm Smashers etc are always an acquired taste, though up to now I’ve generally given them the benefit of the doubt. Limbs has elements in it which led me to think about including it, but it’s one of those tracks where, for too much of it, the dissonant elements conspire to drive the listener away, and the dynamics of the final minute couldn’t quite claw the deficit back.

Spine Wrench - Fleshstorm - I can only conclude that I felt that as there are very few tracks out of the 900+ on this blog that showcase the demonic growling vocals of say, Raw Noise or Disemboweled Corpse, that there was clearly an opening available for the Norwich industrial rockers, Spine Wrench, especially given that Fleshstorm told a bit of a story. But when I listened to it again, as part of a split LP they shared with Sin called No Rest For the Wicked, I was almost rendered unconscious by the sheer tedium of the whole enterprise.

Full tracklisting

Guys and Dolls: Jacob’s Mouse - Box Hole (16 April 1993)

 

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Our last post covered the future of car insurance, it makes sense to follow that with a track which appears to be encouraging listeners to get their funeral care sorted.

Throughout the previous year, Jacob’s Mouse had been a regular feature on Kat’s Karavan with tracks from their LP, No Fish Shop Parking. They had shown that they could rock out or hold down a groove as well as anyone. Now, they were back on a new label (Wiiija) and with a new album, I’m Scared. The previous year’s Peel Session gave everyone some indications of what to expect, featuring as it did an early versions of the LP track, It’s A Thin Sound.  Box Hole showed that while Jacob’s Mouse could still switch effortlessly from rock to funk, they were now throwing in both industrial metal and noise rock as well. Box Hole is one of those thrilling pieces of guitar music that comes along periodically, grabs the listener by the ear and shows us all just how fascinating and exciting rock music can be. There are at least three different cue points at which anyone listening to the track could find themselves leaping out of their chair to get to the dancefloor, and this serves to keep it a constant delight each time it’s played.

1) Acid heads will be able to attune themselves to the trebly dynamics of the track’s opening section as Hugo Boothby’s piercing yet melodic line intersects with his twin brother, Jebb’s contemplative bass line.

2) Dub freaks will find themselves honing in on the Butterfly suits they are watching, watching section.

3) Everybody gets to have a good old fashioned early 90s mosh around during the What am I s’posed to say?/What do I have to say? thrash section.

I had initially thought the theme of the song was about getting away from the world and hiding, with box hole being use as a variation on foxhole, but I now find myself agreeing with the consensus that the song is actually about death. This makes perfect sense if we regard:

a) a box hole to mean a resting place for a coffin.

b) the butterfly suits they are watching, watching to mean angels and spirits which walk alongside us, waiting to welcome us into their domain.

c) What am I s’posed to say?/What do I have to say? sounds like the desperate cry of someone trying and failing to find the words to comfort the bereaved.

If that all sounds a bit scattershot, then it’s at least of a piece with Jacob’s Mouse’s methods of working which were to pack in all the ideas that they could to a song and see what happened. I’ve written before about my theory that because their singer, Sam Marsh, was also the drummer, it made sense not to write reams and reams of lyrics.  Instead of writing lyrical epics, the band came up with single, repetitive lines which they could build the different stylistic sections of the song around.  One of the strengths of this approach, as recorded in this article from B-Side Magazine, reprinted through repeatfanzine.co.uk is that it allowed the group to be one of the most experimental rock bands of the period. 

Curiously though, Peel doesn’t appear to have embraced I’m Scared as much as No Fish Shop Parking. A look at the John Peel Wiki shows only 7 plays of I’m Scared material, against 11 plays from No Fish Shop Parking. Tellingly, Box Hole accounts for 3 of those plays.*

Video courtesy of June Grant

All lyrics are copyright of their authors

*I can’t point any fingers though. Peel’s first play of Box Hole was on 10/4/93. It was included in the 90 minutes’ worth of the show that I heard and I completely ignored it at the time.

Guys and Dolls: Link Wray and his Ray Men - Rumble (16 April 1993)

 

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If it wasn’t for the fact that my notes for this 16/4/93 show go over two pages and Link Wray is on one page, while The Sonics are on the other page, then I would have paired Rumble up in a post with Dirty Robber in a “future of car insurance advertising” mash-up.

Rumble was Wray’s debut release in 1958, and it gave him both his biggest hit (Number 16 on the US charts) and his signature tune.  It is celebrated as one of the first rock ‘n’ roll records to make use of tremelo and distortion, and has in one sense or another influenced practically every electric guitarist since. When played next to its catchier, more conventional sounding b-side, The Swag, it sounds positively futuristic. 

Rumble was a hit despite concerns over its title’s link to gang violence, and its famous two note refrain certainly implies menace and malevolence. I’d imagine it would have been a popular record to play if you saw yourself as a street smart tough guy, and you needed a tune to get you in the mood for a night out.

It’s future use on the Confused.com insurance adverts was but a glint in an advertising executive’s eye when John Peel was including Rumble in his live sets, and some 35 years after its release, it was still entrancing young people who had grown up on music made by artists who had channelled Wray’s style. After playing Rumble on this show, Peel remarked I played that at The Powerhaus last week and lots of interesting young people with skin conditions came up and wanted to know what it was.

Dedicated to my wife, Diana, who used Rumble to brilliant effect as music to end the first half of a production of Much Ado About Nothing, which she directed in 2018.

Video courtesy of n3v05h.

Guys and Dolls: The Electric Prunes - Get Me to the World on Time (16 April 1993)

 

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Peel was still receiving correspondence about his week covering for Jakki Brambles and on this show he read a letter from Barry Warren congratulating him on his stint.* Warren said that he had last written to Peel back in the days of The Perfumed Garden to request a play of Get Me to the World on Time by The Electric Prunes. Peel hadn’t played it for Warren in 1967, and he wasn’t holding his breath in 1993, to which Peel could only reply, Better late than never, Barry….

A US top 30 hit - and only 2 places away from breaking into the UK Top 40 - in March/April 1967, Get Me to the World On Time does an excellent job of reworking the trick of a song like Got To Get You Into My Life in that every line of its lyrics could be interpreted either as a love song or a drug song. 

The love song angle leans more towards the sexual than the hand holding, and it’s supported by the music which sounds at times like it’s evoking heavy breathing, throbbing heartbeats and the surge towards an orgasm. The world in this case means the sweet spot inside James Lowe’s lover, rather than Planet Earth. 

If Get Me to the World on Time was a drug song, the songwriters Annette Tucker and Jill Jones chose to hide in plain sight by referencing chemical reactions, disturbed minds and shaken hormones, in a trip to the world on the other side of perception. But, so skilful is the writing that the song could be performed either at the church disco or during a full-on, freak-out orgy and would fit in either setting.

I can find no evidence of Get Me to the World on Time being hit by airplay bans or censorship, but it’s possible that the ambiguity of the lyric stopped it going as high as it should have. If so, it would be another example of the way in which the acts of others conspired to make life difficult for The Electric Prunes. Nobody seems to have been content to let them do their own thing. Although they wrote songs for their first two albums, their producer, David Hassinger, encouraged them to record original material by other writers alongside their own content. This gave them their chart hits but in December 1967, it led to the band going into the studio to record an album which would be written, arranged and produced by David Axelrod. Mass in F Minor yanked The Electric Prunes from Bo Diddley-style psychedelia to religious music, sung in Latin and Greek, albeit fed through a psychedelic pop-rock filter.**  The classically trained Axelrod’s compositions were more complicated than The Electric Prunes were able to cope with, but instead of changing course, the Electric Prunes found themselves being sidelined - only 3/5 of the band played on the record; session musicians taking up the brunt of the work. 

After some poorly received attempts to play tracks from the album on tour in early 1968, the original Electric Prunes lineup disbanded, but as the rights to the name were held by Hassinger, he put together a new lineup and set them up to record another album with Axelrod, Release of an Oath, which was released in November ‘68.  

The Electric Prunes name was finally laid to rest in 1969 after the release of Just Good Old Rock and Roll.

30 years later, the original line-up reformed to play live and record again, releasing three albums since the turn of the Millennium. The band has continued to the present day, but in a case of history repeating itself, none of the original members are with the band anymore following James Lowe’s death in May 2025.  

Video courtesy of Duophonic for Stereo Phonographs ll

*Barry had already been in touch with Peel on Wednesday 7 April.

**I listened to a bit of Mass in F Minor while writing this post, and “awkward” doesn’t even begin to describe the stylistic fit. Take your Prunes from either 1966/67 or 21st Century and it’ll keep you regular. Anything else will go right through you.