John Peel’s programmes could get people to overcome all sorts of biases and ignorant attitudes towards music. Although there may be genres of music that one wouldn’t rush to embrace, Peel’s playlists invariably meant that there would always be something that would catch your attention and cause you to reassess your attitude towards the merits of that genre. Likewise, Peel shows could also help you to look more closely at artists and performers that you may previously have been dismissive of or inattentive towards. Such is the case here for me with John Parish and his band, Automatic Dlamini.
When I fell for the charms of PJ Harvey in 1995, John Parish was part of the picture and sound that helped sweep me along through the television appearances that Harvey made that year promoting tracks from her To Bring You My Love album, a record which Parish had co-produced with her. Standing to her left, in classic lead musician position and either playing the relentless, unstoppable riff on Meet Ze Monsta or playing the shaker on Working For the Man, he clearly played as much of a part in constructing the soundscapes and ambience of Harvey’s music in that period as she did herself. It shouldn’t be forgotten just how much of a stylistic shift To Bring You My Love was to those who remembered the PJ Harvey trio
sound of Dry and Rid of Me. But it paid off, critically and commercially, and this may have been what persuaded Island Records to sign off on their next PJ Harvey release being a collaboration between herself and Parish, in which he would set her lyrics to his music. It may also have been the label realising that this would probably be the only way in which they were liable to get any kind of timely follow up record from Harvey who had run herself into the ground during 1995 touring To Bring You My Love with the result that she ended up being signed off sick at the start of December 1995 and cancelling a string of live shows through that month, including the last show of the year in Bristol, which would have been the first ever “proper” gig that I was going to attend. In the circumstances, sharing the load on a new album seemed like a sensible idea.
When the album, Dance Hall at Louse Point was released in September 1996, I learnt a little more about the ties that had bound Harvey and Parish together and how Harvey had started her musical career by joining Parish’s band, Automatic Dlamini. He had clearly been a huge influence on her, yet if you had said to me then, “Would you like to listen to an Automatic Dlamini album so you can hear a bit more of John Parish’s music?” I’d have probably made my excuses that I had something more urgent to do. And this would have been purely down to snobbish incuriosity on my part. I didn't mind hearing him working behind PJ Harvey, but why would I have wanted to hear him on his own? She had the profile, he didn’t. And if he was so influential, why wasn’t his profile higher? Oh, such shallow thinking and as ever, thank God for John Peel providing an opportunity to learn some musical lessons which I would otherwise have been too ignorant to do.
Formed in 1982, Automatic Dlamini look to have been a frustrating band to have followed if you were hoping for regular material from them. Their first releases including debut album, The D is For Drum came out during 1986/87, but 5 years had passed by the time their second album, From a Diva to a Diver appeared. Not that they were inactive during that time. Harvey joined the band in 1988 and played on an unreleased album titled Here, Catch, Shouted His Father. But she left in early 1991 together with drummer, Rob Ellis, although she contributed to several tracks on From a Diva to Diver including Putty, which with its brushed drums, slide-acoustic guitar and dustbowl blues tone feels like a warm up for tracks on Dance Hall at Louse Point such as Rope Bridge Crossing. Lyrically, it has clear resonances towards the kind of music they were to make together on future projects with the sculptress of the song putting together the model of a feckless man and making cuts and slices into the clay like a voodoo sorceress. A role which Harvey seemed born to play on a future track. You can be sure that somewhere, some poor soul was experiencing a burning sensation somewhere painful as the sculptress uses fire to firm up the putty that she mutilates.
I had to take the opportunity to listen to other John Parish compositions on earlier Automatic Dlamini tracks and what struck me, from the admittedly limited sample I heard, was how Putty appeared to mark something of a departure for him from the predominant tone of Automatic Dlamini songs. In Putty, and through his future work with Harvey, he sounds like Nick Cave with songs which feel like they are set in small, dimly lit cabins in the middle of vast desert wildernesses. But with earlier tracks like Principles vs Feelings or Crazy Supper, he writes like Jarvis Cocker and sounds like Nick Heyward, by creating songs of intense but lyrical urban domestic disharmony. If ever you wanted to make a Spotify playlist titled YuppieKitchen Sink music, then Automatic Dlamini would need to feature on it. So, Putty represents quite a shift for Parish in the way that To Bring You My Love would be a shift for Harvey. Their artistic bond has lasted up to the present day, but ultimately, who influenced who?
This was a repeat of, what Peel described as, PJ Harvey’s third and a half session for his programme. It was first broadcast on Friday 12 March, 1993. It’s a fascinating session because it gives a suggestion of the kind of music Polly Jean might have made had she continued working with Rob Ellis and Steven Vaughan. Although the Rid Of Me album was set to be released at the end of April ‘93, this session showed Harvey and friends were already looking ahead to the future. Three of the tracks - the three going on to the metaphorical mixtape - were new original compositions. None of them were on Rid Of Me or would surface as b-sides on the album’s singles. Indeed, only one of the three was ever issued and fans had to wait a long time for it.
By a short head, I make Naked Cousin the best of the tracks. My theory about it is that it is another of Harvey’s songs in which she plays a relation of a figure from the Bible. In Missed, she sang as Mary, mother of Jesus and desperate to find out why her dead son’s body was missing from his tomb. In Naked Cousin, I think that Polly is singing as a cousin of Moses, and what’s more, she’s not a fan. The Moses link suggests itself most obviously through the line, He run from burning bushes…he runs from everything that upsets his masterplan. In this case, leading the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to find The Promised Land.
Polly is clearly unconvinced for reasons both familial - you can almost picture her telling people, “Moses will never pull this off, trust me, I’ve known him since he was a baby, he never sticks at anything”, though in the song she restricts herself to telling us that I hate his smell and/I hate his company but most of all/I hate that he looks just like me - and out of self preservation for what Moses’s uprising could mean for both the Israelites and herself, as a relation of his. It’s enough to have her wondering whether she will have the courage to join the Exodus, herself: He’s running naked through the trees/Scare the shit right out of me/Bought my ticket, take my ride/Take me to the sunny side.
Just like Missed, it’s a fascinating scenario, brilliantly brought to life by the whole trio.
Primed and Ticking and Claudine, the Inflatable One are more thematically straightforward. They are both, especially Primed and Ticking, aggressive love songs, heavy on sexual suggestion. With her squealing guitar and the dissonant brass - provided by Mike Smith and Dennis Rollins - the implication is that the sex will be utter carnage, and that Polly will absolutely tear her prospective lover to shreds. So certain does she sound about her place in the lover’s life and future that the shrieking chorus of I believe my days will end with you starts to take on an air of obsessive control rather than one of heartfelt devotion.
At least Prime and Ticking has a recognisable target for its lust/devotion; the protagonist of Claudine, the Inflatable One has to play out their sexual desire with a blow-up doll. Nevertheless, a good time is still promised for all: I’ll blow your mind…I’ll show you heaven…I’ll make sweet honey, I’ll treat you nice etc. I had briefly thought that Harvey was singing from the perspective of the doll itself, but I’ve come round to the orthodoxy that it’s sung from the perspective of Claudine’s owner, and that their need is just as ravenous as Polly’s was in Primed and Ticking: Want to get into your sack of skin. Furthermore, the Scream blue murder refrain in the playout ties into the notion that both songs have of using sex as a way to expel all negative emotions, energy and pain from oneself by giving yourself over utterly to another person. In body, soul, mind and heart in Primed and Ticking; in body only - at least as a start for practice - in Claudine, the Inflatable One.
The fourth track in the session was the only one that was going to be commercially available to people in 1993, namely the trio’s cover of Wang Dang Doodle, written by Willie Dixon, who had died in January 1992. This session version featured as a b-side on the Man-Size single, and Peel subsequently complained on air a couple of times that it wasn’t credited as having been recorded for his programme. I passed on it as I found it too irritatingly mannered. This has been a common complaint from me about her music from this period.
In considering the three songs included here, it suggests that the PJ Harvey trio would have streamlined the harder edged tone of Rid of Me into a funkier blues/rock sound that focussed on sex and humour, had they continued working together on another album. All three songs sound like they would have been perfect fits on an album made by Harvey, Ellis and Vaughan. They clearly had belief in the songs as Naked Cousin and Primed and Ticking were included in the trio’s live set over the summer of 1993, including on a Radio 1 concert, hosted by Peel, broadcast on Saturday 31 July 1993, starting at 7:30pm, just as the curtain was going up on the third night of my production of Guys and Dolls. But when the trio went their separate ways at the end of the year, the songs went into cold storage too. They wouldn’t have fitted on Harvey’s first solo album, To Bring You My Love, and although she started working with Ellis again from about 1998 onwards, the songs have never been recorded by her on any of her subsequent albums.
In the immediate term, the songs represented a last gasp of the early PJ Harvey. She would write and record many fine songs across the rest of the 1990s, but very few of them came at the listener with the same force and attack of these songs. Her work became more introspective, cinematic and warmer in tone. There was room for romance and love amidst the darker, serious material that she wrote through the rest of the decade, but no place for humour or wit. It would arguably take until 2000’s album, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea for Harvey to rediscover a sense of brashness in tracks like Big Exit or This is Love, which is to all intents and purposes, Primed and Ticking’s younger, prettier sister.
I had my doubts about including this, the second track on the PJ Harvey trio’s Rid of Me LP. My notes suggest that it’s the power of Missed’s closing minute which made it into a possible inclusion. It also helps that Harvey sounds recognisably like herself, rather than putting on the irritating faux-American drawl which served only to alienate me from some of her music in this period.
My problem with Missed when I first heard it was that the verses sounded rambly and unfocused. Harvey appears to be stating her love for someone in typically florid style: I put stars at your head/Put Mars at your feet. The mention of Mary felt creatively lazy, but I now see that the laziness was mine, and that Harvey has actually written something brilliantly poetic and evocative here. Once I looked at the lyrics it became clear to me that Missed is set during the period leading up to the resurrection of Jesus. The hesitant, wan feel of the opening minute reflects a mixture of feelings:
1) Unprocessed grief.
2) Anguish over the empty tomb and missing body (My son, where’s he been?/Don’t deny it and don’t you hide him.)
3) Sceptical astonishment at the prospect of the body being resurrected (Show yourself to me and I’d believe/I’d moan and I’d weep. Fall silent at your speak/I’d burst it, full to the brim.)
Harvey wisely decides that trying to write about the meeting between Mary and the resurrected Jesus might be a little too difficult to pull off, but the doubts and weariness of searching for the missing Saviour which are reflected in the final verse from 3:00 (No words, no sign etc) are underpinned by a whining guitar note which gives way to the final Ha! at 3:32, and as the band crash it in and full volume while Polly Jean repeatedly sings, Oh, I’ve missed him, it all comes together to sound like nothing less than Jesus descending to Earth in front of our eyes (or ears). A stunning piece of music and one of the highlights of the Rid of Me tracks which Peel had played to this point.
Peel was in a considerable state of anticipation in March 1992 as PJ Harvey prepared to release their (yes, you read that right) debut album, Dry. He played three tracks from it on this programme - the two included here and the slightly free-form jazz-like Fountain, which I couldn't get a comfortable handle on. Certainly not comfortable enough to imagine being happy about it turning up on a mixtape. But Joe and Plants and Rags are great. The fact that PJ Harvey were a band rather than a person at this point is important to make clear because these two tracks were the only ones not credited solely to Polly Jean Harvey; instead she co-wrote them with drummer and frequent collaborator, Rob Ellis.
I wasn't too sold on Joe when Peel played it as an acoustic b-side on the Sheela-Na-Gig single on his 16/2/92 show but beefed up with the full band behind it, then it becomes a different beast entirely. Plants and Rags is the better song out of the two, certainly more sonically interesting with the clashing string parts and discordant duel between the violins. What makes both tracks stand out though is the wide range of interpretations that can be applied to them.
Joe is a guardian angel figure clearly, but I've found myself split on whether he is
1) a truck-stop bodyguard in one of Harvey's Americana settings.
2) Jesus - admittedly this is based on a comment I saw on a message board about the song's meaning which supposed that the singer of the song was Mary Magdelene, on the basis that she would be washing the feet with her hair.
3) A figment of her schizophrenic imagination - although the track drives on at a fair old rate, it is riven with paranoia and a desire for vengeance against enemies both real and imaginary. There's illness trying to make its presence felt through the onslaught with talk of the "headache tree" and how Joe can be the only one to cut her free. But will he liberate her into this world or the next one?
Plants and Rags also seems to be narratively pulling in different directions. At different stages the song seems to come from the standpoint of variously:
1) A recent corpse - "Ease myself into a body bag" and the references to the sun not shining in the white and black shadows.
2) A famine victim - living among useless plants and in her rags, dreaming of the man who gave her fine food and shiny things. Maybe it was him that led her to 1). Either way, he stands as a symbol of a better time and a more promising environment. This is especially pertinent if the narrator is
3) A concentration camp victim - losing your home is one thing, but being led outside quietly afterwards is a chilling image. Is this narrator one of those poor souls who lose everything they have at the whim of another, only to be borne away into the "care" of a heartless state?
Whatever the answer, the track has a tragic grandeur which evokes a sense of a world going to hell and repercussions for one individual. Highly recommended listening.
"[Someone] of Leeds went so far as to send me an illustration of a Sheela-na-Gig, and frankly, I was appalled." - John Peel, 17 November 1991.
If Hole and Silverfish represent the blowtorch and pliers, then PJ Harvey is the salve to rub on the wounds. After all what does her opening delivery on Oh My Lover suggest, if not the image of her smoothing the fevered brow of someone who has been chased across hill and dale by an enraged Courtney Love and Lesley Rankine. I'm sure the little hiccup of uncertainty on her "all right" doesn't
portend anything to worry about, does it? Surely not, she's even giving licence for her lover to keep both her and her rival going at the same time. She'll always put herself out for the one she loves, will Polly Jean.
In trying to gather his early thoughts of Harvey together, Peel wrote perceptively of her that she seemed "crushed by the weight of her own songs and arrangements". Certainly Oh My Lover and Dress are bonded by the desperate need to pacify and interest others, either by dressing provocatively or by giving them total freedom to do what they want. It's a submissive stance which could have been horribly misjudged were it not for the fact that Harvey, even at her most pleading and desperate, had amidst her fragility, a sliver of steel running through her which meant that you could see her turning the tables on the faithless, feckless, lucky bastards that were playing her for a soft touch.
That is precisely what happens in the other two tracks I would have taped from this session. After lying prostate at her lover's whims in Oh My Lover, she's now mocking his prudishness when he refuses to be seduced by her "child-bearing hips" and "pillows" in Sheela-Na-Gig. The object of her affection/derision is repulsed by her naked body and efforts to seduce him, as though she shoved the most prominent feature of a Sheela-Na-Gig into the poor man's mouth. But it's his loss as she resolves to wash that man right out of her hair in an earthy update of the South Pacific standard. It would go on to be a single in 1992 and remains a signature tune of Polly Jean's.
My favourite of the three tracks here is Victory, a muscular rocker that could almost be set the morning after the night before the other two tracks. "Storm is gone and the temperature's high". There's a wonderful, celebratory atmosphere in this track as she starts partying with the angels, God and those men who want to get right into her Sheela-Na-Gig, before setting sail in Victory and conjuring an atmosphere every bit as raucous as that which Nelson would have indulged on his ship of the same name.
I only heard three of the four tracks on the recording, which suits me fine as the fourth, Water, would have been a borderline inclusion. Quite serviceable but sounding too much like a piece of tepid surf rock to my tin ears. No matter, I'm content to get high on the three pieces of "Grade A stuff" as Peel described the session which Harvey, Rob Ellis and Stephen Vaughan cooked up in Maida Vale. An
epoch defining set and Harvey included it in full when she curated the best of her Peel Sessions in 2006.
Although John Peel gave airtime to thousands of bands/artists during his career, only a miniscule fraction of them enjoyed what I would call a full-career relationship with him. What I mean by this is that Peel was with them when they started and they were still with him when he died. Leaving aside musicians whose careers predated Peel's, I can only come up with a handful of names: Captain Beefheart, Mark E.Smith, David Gedge, Billy Bragg perhaps. 1991 though saw another name join that tiny list, the incomparable Polly Jean Harvey, who burst out of the rock 'n' roll hotbed that is Yeovil to claim a place in Peel's affections for the rest of his life. Through several different stylistic shifts, he stayed true to her, though I suspect his preference was for the jumper and Doc Martens era Polly of Dry and Rid of Me, ahead of the False Eyelashes phase of To Bring You My Love, which was when I got into her.
Harvey's songs occupied some kind of long, desert road which when travelled would bring the listener into contact with murderesses, prostitutes, criminals, missing children, artists, lovers, religious maniacs, Adam and Eve, God and the Devil. No matter what guise she took on, whether she was storm tossed angel or painted vampire, she created sound pictures, often out of sketchy and raw instrumentation that were (are) compelling, dramatic, occasionally scary, often seductive and always fascinating to listen to. Couple such immense musical invention with her very singular look -dressed up or dressed down; with either a quizzical, teasing smile or a careworn, world-weary frown; that lean nose and face made her look quite unlike anyone else around, it all added up to one of the great British rock music talents of the last 25 years.
Dress was her calling card single, apparently played by Peel for the first time on 28 September 1991.
It owes the majority of its interest to this listener on its adherence to the whip crack drum beat and whip line tight guitar figure of its opening 30 seconds before rumbling into the warm bath of Polly's voice and the meaty guitar wash that propels the song forward. That opening verse, in which she talks about wearing the titular garment to go dancing and catch the eye of the object of her desire lays down one of Harvey's key lyrical themes of her work: the desire to please men. In the battle of the sexes, many of her heroines seemed in thrall to men who in songs like C'Mon Billy seem either to be dangerous or unworthy of her. But amid the glorious cliche trope of dressing up to go dancing, bedrock of hundreds of songs dating back to popular music's earliest days, she suddenly throws in the lyrical curveball about the dress causing her to spin over like "a heavy loaded fruit tree" - an image which may well be the best lyric I've heard in these 1991 recordings outside of The Field Mice summing up my unrequited love.
Straight out of the chorus and the muscular riff is supplemented by a Bernard Hermannesque violin,
played by Polly herself. It's touches such as these which suggested that she had a vision for her
music that transcended mere rock chickery: somehow American without being American and leading me to wonder what they put in the water in Yeovil and can more of us drink it? The PJ Harvey template continues to be sketched out as the song progresses: the increasing frustration/desperation at not being able to get what she wants; the attentions of a beer soaked/nicotine stained suitor reminding her of what he has already given her; finally the suggestion of violence and rape - "a fallen woman in a dancing costume". This last point is hammered home in the closing movement as drum, guitar and bass beat out the rhythm together, while the violin squeals away over the top like an ejaculatory burst at the end of a brutal, grinding encounter.
The standout track of the 1991 Peelenium, if she had never recorded another note, Harvey would have secured a place in music history with this marvellous song, but there was more to come, much more and Peel took it with him, all the way to the end.
Me-Jane sounds like it shares its lead riff with 50Ft Queenie, which gave PJ Harvey her first Top 40 hit, but it’s much the better song.
I’ve got so used to hearing Harvey songs where she’s either prostrating herself to a lover (Oh My Lover), or trying to dominate them (Rid of Me) that’s it a bit of a shock to hear one where she’s so viciously giving up on her man. During 1992, Harvey went through a relationship breakdown, which appears to have provided inspiration for the lyrics to a number of the tracks on Rid of Me. In the case of Me-Jane, the contempt and hatred is on full display as Polly reaches the end of her tether with her brutish, alpha-male other half. She may have fallen for the John Greystoke figure of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels, but the song suggests that he has now morphed into the apeman figure of the films, but without any of his redeeming values.
We know that there’s trouble brewing thanks to both the riff and Rob Ellis’s drum pattern, which very effectively convey a sense of foreboding within the tribe, which can be heard from one side of the jungle to another. While Polly starts out by conveying her contempt in coldly, unemotional tones, things quickly start to build to a more violently upset conclusion.
It’s not just a break-up song though. There’s a thread of self-affirmation running through the track, highlighted by the reversal of the famous line, Me Tarzan, you Jane (though this apparently was a misquote), which now sees Tarzan left out entirely and Jane foregrounding herself around who she is and what she wants. If it inspired one other woman to get out of a similar situation, it will have justified its existence.
While preparing this blogpost, it became apparent to me that Man-Size is currently my least favourite PJ Harvey song. I’ve written previously about my dislike of a lot of the Rid of Me era tracks, and how what I struggled to engage with was the way in which they try to Americanize Polly’s style and vocals. This reaches its nadir in the closing lines of Man-Size when she sings the word gasoline with an American twang which makes me want to rip my ears off the side of my head, anytime I hear it.
But all was not lost for Man-Size, because she gave us a second version on Rid of Me consisting only of her voice, percussion and various string instruments, which I think she may have played herself.
Although the title Man-Size could be seen as a comment on Polly’s own sexual nature and awakening, the lyrics suggest she is playing the role of a man who is now sexually switched on and looking for something to do with his equipment: Good lord, I’m big/I’m heading on. Not to mention tangible excitement at having someone to use their equipment on: Got my girl and she’s a wow….My babe looking cool and neat/I’m pretty sure good enough to eat etc.
On Rid of Me, Man-Size Sextet is sequenced four tracks ahead of Man-Size. Stylistically, this makes sense because the vocal on Man-Size Sextet sounds far more uncertain than the one on Man-Size. Taken together with the stabbing, dissonant strings, it does an excellent job of conveying the chaos of puberty and sexual awakening. Polly wants to fuck in Man-Size Sextet, but despite the favourable conditions, s(he) is a bundle of nerves. Emotions are churning up all over the place, and although s(he) has the tools, it doesn’t sound as though s(he) knows what to do with them. I know how s(he) feels. I had my first passionate experiences with a woman in December 1993, but it took me another four years before I actually achieved anything. Nerves, excitement, tension, desire, delusion all played their part. As the strings scream out over the repeated refrain of Man size from 1:40 to 1:52, it sounds nothing less than someone desperately trying to cross the threshold into adulthood and leave both their and the girl’s pre-sex self behind. You almost feel the pelvic thrusts between two hot groins.
The closing note shows that, together, the boy and girl have become man and woman, but Polly nails the one-eyed nature of the conquering male. They’ve made a girl into a woman, now burn that childhood version with gasoline, so that the newly made woman can service the man again, and again. Notice how the man doesn’t burn their boyhood self. Presumably this is so they can have it both ways: be serviced like a man and waited on like a child, when the mood takes them.
If we take this idea on a stage, if Man-Size Sextet relates to the virgin trying to use their new sexual awareness for the first time within a fog of nerves, then the rock version of Man-Size finds the man several months on, bullishly confident in their sexual technique, in awe of their physical development and ready to rut.
I respond to Man-Size Sextet because it speaks to where I was at the time Peel played it - all tooled up, but with nowhere to go, no-one to play with and uncertain about what I would do if I found someone. I also like it because it sounds closer to what I want from a PJ Harvey song. It’s telling that this was the only song on Rid of Me that was not produced by Steve Albini and that’s probably why Harvey sounds, to my ears at least, closer to her real self than she does on other material from this period. It also points to where she would take her music next, once Steven Vaughan and Rob Ellis - who did the string arrangements on this track - had moved on.
When I first heard the show for 29/12/91, I was bowled over by 3 of the 4 sessions repeated on it. Three of them were broadcast a week apart from each other in November 1991. Nirvana and PJ Harvey found their way onto the metaphorical mixtape, though it was back to Sierra Leone for Dr. Oloh and his Milo Jazz Band. Peel castigated himself when playing Oloh's session originally on 09/11/91 for not following through on promises he made to go back to Sierra Leone to record more music by similar groups. His self reproach was striking to listen to, and the disappointment in himself for not carrying off what would have been a Herculean task of musical ethnography was palpable.
He could still offer support to bands closer to home though and Ipswich's Bleach found themselves sharing a programme with a band who in the wider public eye had more to do with Bleach's name
than the band themselves. I briefly convinced myself that this was the best session of the night but re-exposure to Nirvana and Harvey's sessions see Bleach in the bronze medal position for the night. I really like the tracks they did, but you can sense the Big Bad Wolves of Grunge clearing their throats to blow the shoegaze acts off the cultural map, while the wily PJ Harvey drives her chariot away from it all, set on her own course of action, defying categorisation but remaining utterly compelling. It's tempting to cast the shoegaze acts with their noisy but clean guitar lines and soft vocals as the equivalent of 90s prog rockers ready to have their thunder stolen by the punk-like authenticity of the grunge acts. It's also unfair but the moment when Salli Carson sings about threatening to "kick your feet from under you" or feeling "bittersweet and black and blue. I'm pleased and crushed that I think of you", how many of us believe that she could metaphorically do that? Kurt or Courtney? Yes, I could buy that totally, but I'm not so sure here.
It's regrettable too that Bleach's best track of the night, Friends, hasn't surfaced on YouTube in any form as it's a perfect example of what I've always called the Bleach Wait. The way that in several of their songs, they make the listener wait for the burst of release that seems prevalent in much of the best shoegaze material. Wipe It Away did it through mixing thunderous drumming with feedback loops that seemed to be waiting to burst through the window to run down the street screaming. Friends used dampened guitar chords before finally bursting into spectacular Technicolour freedom.
Of the two tracks that I can share, albeit in their disc versions rather than the Peel Session ones, Decadence is a fabulously clattering tune propelled on by Steve Scott's superb drumming before exploding like a million fireworks in one of those rocket ship guitar frenzies (though that could just seem true because of the director of the video going all 2001: A Space Odyessy with the visuals at the end). Surround is a little more restrained though still with plenty of killer guitar work. The video is shoegaze in a visual nutshell: Psychedelic swirl background and all the focus on the girl. Note how in two years Salli cut her hair, lost the guitar and moved into a party dress. Even in shoegaze, the pressure to conform to industry perceptions was strong.
The session also included Headless which was the last track Peel played in 1991, fact fans.
We stand poised on the brink of 1992 in this blog, and even though other more forceful bands were poised to push Bleach and others like them to the sidelines, I have everything crossed that Peel stayed loyal to them and that a copy of Friends turns up soon.
Videos courtesy of EVEvideoproductions and everyheaven.
According to Sheila Ravenscroft, when it came to socialising with musicians Peel was always happier on home ground than he was on neutral or alien turf. Stories are legion, especially once bands/artists started playing live sets from Peel Acres of Peel hosting revelry with his guests almost until - and in all likelihood beyond - the break of dawn. However, away from home, Peel was liable to make a bit of a fool of himself. Mostly, this was down to nervous excitement. He memorably took Polly Jean Harvey out for lunch shortly after he had started playing her records on his show and was so nervous about it, he talked incessantly throughout the lunch and, by his own admission, barely let Harvey get a word in edgeways. In relating these stories at his own expense, Peel often feared that the subjects of them would come away from their meetings with him, doubting his sanity or unwilling to ever spend any time with him again in future.
Harvey gladly spent more time around Peel, but at time of writing it remains to be seen whether Peel regained the good graces of Mudhoney’s vocalist, Mark Arm after a disastrous meeting at the 1992 Reading Festival, just over a month before this edition of John Peel’s Music on BFBS went out. Peel accepted full responsibility for his meeting with Arm lapsing into something approaching mutual embarrassment. In trying to play it cool that he was talking to a musician he admired, “...You’re saying astonishingly stupid things and thinking, ‘I can’t believe it’s me that’s saying this.’ And he’s looking at you like, ‘You’re a real pillock!’, but you can’t stop yourself from doing it. It was really quite embarrassing and I kind of hope I never see him again, certainly not at close quarters.”
At the very least, Peel came away from the chat with Arm armed (sorry) with a cassette copy of Mudhoney’s new album, Piece of Cake. He had given the cassette to his eldest son, William, who had not passed comment on the record and this had set alarm bells ringing for Peel. Although he played Blinding Sun from the record, he confessed to finding the album a disappointment feeling there was a lot of filler in it, especially “...several kind of short tracks, which probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but which I doubt will stand the test of time.” Of those short pieces, I liked the house music pastiche which acts as an entracte to the opening track of the record, but given that one of these tracks is someone making fart noises over a drumbeat, Peel definitely had a point.
Blinding Sun is one of the stronger tracks on the album, which I have to say I preferred far more than the previous year’s Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. However, it would be hard to argue with William’s silence if it was due to him comparing the album unfavourably to the standout moments on Mudhoney’s eponymous debut album from 1989. Nevertheless, Blinding Sun is a good example of Mudhoney’s propensity to keep the listener grimly going through the filler in order to make their highpoints worth the wait.
There is already a version of the Peel Session version of PJ Harvey’s boat-party track on this blog, so taping the version from the Dry album, aired by Peel on 6/4/92, would have been a completist gesture but not an empty one given the brilliance of it.
When Peel was beguiled by a talent, he invariably fell hard for it. Nachtexpress listeners were left in no doubt of just how much of a gibbering idiot Polly Jean Harvey had made him into: “I had lunch with her recently and was so nervous that I talked throughout the entire meal and didn’t hear a word she said”.
1 April 1999 and I’ve just finished a rehearsal, quite early on in the schedule, for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest which will be staged at the Minack Theatre in 2 months time. Rehearsals are in a village called Madron, just past Penzance. It’s 45 minutes to get home to Falmouth and John Peel’s show is turned on the minute I start the drive back. Best of all, I’m leaving early enough to catch the very start of the show, although given that I won’t continue listening to it when I get into the house, I can’t think why it matters. Things are a little different tonight, the show is forming part of a four hour double bill with Lamacq Live as part of Radio 1’s week of Live in London shows - it’s nice to know the poor loves were being catered for.
Peel’s show, which is being broadcast from The Improv Theatre will later showcase a live set from Echo and the Bunnymen and Ian McCulloch and friends have their work cut out for themselves, because PJ Harvey is opening the show, accompanied by John Parish. I’m thrilled about this as I begin the drive back, but although Polly Jean announces her set as “wheeling out all the old faves tonight, in case you hadn’t noticed”, she’s caught out latecomers to her party like myself who only came in on To Bring You My Love by opening with a trio of songs from Dry and Rid of Me. I recover my bearings as she goes into Angelene and C’Mon Billy from Is This Desire? and To Bring You My Love. 50ft Queenie is a vague memory from when I had first heard her name, but hadn’t been interested enough to get involved in those scuzzy 1993 days. And then comes the standout performance of the night, the title track of Rid of Me which seems to pull all of Polly Jean’s personalities together at once: the needy pleader, unable let go of what she most desires, the dangerous hydra swooping down to suffocate her feckless love (“Don’t you wish you’d/never met her”) and then most staggeringly and frightening, the insatiable sex fiend - bellowing out in echo drenched ferocity to her paramour “Lick my legs and I’m on fire/Lick my legs and I’m desire” and on it goes until the music drops away and all that’s left is Polly Jean in full-on banshee mode demanding that the lover who struck for freedom get down on their knees and service her “injuries” and give thanks to his bad luck. When she stops singing, the audience reaction is an explosive release of delight, appreciation - all simultaneously shooting their loads like a football crowd celebrating a 96th minute winner. I know everything else that’s performed in the rest of the set, but that performance of Rid of Me overshadows it all. Peel, stuck in a radio van at the back of the venue references the astonishing audience reaction with pride and wonderment in his voice. He perceptively remarks that Polly Jean seems to be bringing multiple voices out of herself when she performs, and that this all serves to heighten her brilliance.
By 1999, Rid of Me was an acknowledged jewel in Harvey’s catalogue, but I’m pretty sure that its first radio performance comes seven years and, for me, umpteen shows earlier. Peel had spent most of his show on 1/5/92 trailing a mystery guest for that evening’s show and in the last hour, Polly Jean turned up, sans her band mates, to perform two tracks. Opening with a cover of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, she went at in the only way she knew how - full bore, but the end result left her glumly complaining that she couldn’t hear what she was singing. After a break for another record, she was back again to perform Rid of Me, which even in the embryonic form presented here demonstrated that whatever Polly Jean did next, it would be rawer and more jagged than anything done on Dry. The take is everything that Peel would have hoped for - teetering on the edge of collapse, slightly disjointed (not surprising given that it appears that the idea for her to come in was probably hatched earlier that evening). Although, we are treated to a quality display of domestic sound engineering from Peel’s engineer, Julie, who having obscured Polly Jean’s voice on the first track now reduces the guitar so it sounds like it’s playing in another room, but Peel didn’t mind. Neither did I and I hope you won’t too.
You’ll have to wait many years before I chronologically blog about this concert, so here’s the 1999 performance of Rid of Me to tide you over until then. Check out the crowd reaction - everyone there will still remember it to this day.
Videos courtesy of agile elefantus and stepintothegalaxy
Having reached the halfway point of his week covering for Jakki Brambles, Peel may well have been putting in a request for the BBC to carry out some professional audience research to truly establish whether he was flying or dying with the lunchtime audience after he opened this show with a message from Barry Warren, who wrote to say that he was enjoying Peel’s efforts, but…Big Dave behind the bar at the Railway Tavern in Barnet has bet me 50p that they won’t let you last the week. Whatever Peel’s own feelings on the week were by the time he signed off at 3:30pm on Friday 9 April, he could at least take heart in the fact that Barry had won his bet.
Most of my choices from this show, as you’ll see, come from the Peel record box, but he was still trying to reach out to any avowedly beige listeners by including today, 9 to 5 by Sheena Easton, a record which he classed as both a guilty pleasure and - to his ears at least - one of the greatest pop songs ever made. However, Peel was still trying to expose the listeners to music which would wrench them out of their comfort zone. This included a play for Machine Gun by Cybersonik, which my notes claim was the most confrontational record that Peel had played for Brambles’s listeners so far, and clearly too confrontational for me as well given that I didn’t include it as one of my selections.
As for tracks from today’s programme, which I would have wanted to keep, we start with one which was about to become very influential on the tone of British music over the next couple of years, even though no one seemed to admit it at the time:
A Number 12 hit in 1979, what distinguishes The Sound of the Suburbs from its 1990s reproductions is the undertone of menace which Blur and other 90s acts who used suburbia as their inspiration were unable to convey. There’s plenty of humour and satire in The Sound of the Suburbs, not least in the verse which takes the piss out of youth club punk bands, but it’s the references to jets from Heathrow flying over houses, the sirens at Broadmoor Hospital and the figure of Johnny, locked in his bedroom, alternately annoying the neighbours by playing loud punk rock or giving the thousand yard stare from his window - potentially looking all the way to Broadmoor - that provide an unsettling counterweight to the thrashy, Woolworths nihilism, which could be made into a palatable, recycled pastiche in the mid-90s, but which was very much the mood de jour of the late 1970s.
Jeff Mills - Phase 4
Video courtesy of Waveform Transmission Vol 1
Peel was certainly doing everything he could this week to showcase Jeff Mills to his temporary expanded audience. Having played a track from Mills's X-103 project on Tuesday, he now played this barnstorming cut from Mills's Waveform Transmission Vol 1 set of EPs.
This is every bit as uncompromising as the aforementioned Cybersonik track, showing that by this point in the week, Peel was done with trying to shield Brambles's audience from hearing stuff that might not be thought palatable for a lunchtime audience. It's also probably guilty of the same charges of repetition that I levelled at the X-103 track, Curse of the Gods on Tuesday 6 April, 1993. But I'm seduced by the transitions from the drum 'n' bass patterns that form the core of the track into the squealing, angry, painful bursts of noise that run over the top, like a dentist's drill touching a raw nerve. I know that doesn't sound particularly attractive and on another day, I'd probably have sidestepped it as well, but sometimes, I need my aural nerves pressed and I suspect I want to celebrate that this was played on Radio 1 at 1pm, and straight after Peel had had to play Whitney Houston's cover of I'm Every Woman. Although in fairness, he did praise Houston's singing voice when he did it, and we should never forget that she was responsible for one of his few outbreaks of public dancing.
Aerosmith - Livin’ On The Edge
Video courtesy of Aerosmith VEVO
Aerosmith became something of a guilty pleasure of mine in the mid-90s, when I worked at a cafe where the owner had their Big Ones compilation album playing on constant rotation. I regard Love in an Elevator as one of the greatest rock songs ever written, while my wife feels the same about Dude Looks Like a Lady. Livin’ on the Edge was always one that I could take or leave, though it’s caught me in a benevolent mood here. Possibly it’s because it remains a timely piece of music. Back then it was inspired by the Los Angeles riots, but also works in references to school shootings and The Greenhouse Effect as we used to refer to climate change in the analogue era. 30 plus years on, all the things mentioned in it remain a problem, while America itself has got sicker and more polarised. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination for the US Presidency in 2028 - assuming they’re still allowed to have elections then - could do worse than try and get the rights for this as a campaign song at their rallies.
This was a huge favourite of mine at the time and whether you talk about this version or the Harry Chapin original, I think that it’s one of the most emotionally devastating pop songs ever written. It plays out like a four act tragedy as we move from a father neglecting to play with a son who adores him, because he’s too busy, only to find the roles reversed as the son grows older and becomes too engrossed in his own life and family to be able to spend time with his father. The idea could have led to an horrendously schmaltzy performance, but instead Cats in the Cradle brims with regret, melancholy and compassion and the closing line, And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me, he’d grown up just like me/My boy was just like me is one of the greatest end lines in pop history.
It’s so good in fact, that a friend of mine, who would usually never sing at a karaoke evening, even if you paid him, once made an exception for this song, simply so he could sing that line. And that line was the only one he sang, the rest of it was sung by my future best man, who also loves the lyrics in this, especially the third verse’s climax of What I’d really like, Dad is to borrow the car keys/See ya later, can I have them, please? Syd Barrettcouldn’t have done it better. The record peaked at Number 7 on the UK charts, giving Ugly Kid Joe their second and final Top 10 UK hit. They seemed to be a band who people liked most when they were being gentle. In their native America, they had two big Top 10 hits with this and Everything About You, but nothing else registered at all over there. In the UK, they had 5 Top 40 hits, but raunchier, rockier tunes like Neighbour tended to wash around in the lower reaches of the chart.
Sonic Youth - Sugar Kane
Video courtesy of IZF
Peel dedicated this to John Elvidge who was organising a Gang show for Scouts and Guides in Thanet. He wished Elvidge luck with the show, perhaps suspecting that Elvidge would need some of the stimulants alluded to in Sugar Kane, in order to get everyone organised and get himself through the show.
Billy Bragg - A New England [Peel Session]
Video courtesy of TchikiSteph.
The second track from Billy Bragg’s first Peel Session, broadcast on 3 August 1983. I listen to Bragg so infrequently that it’s always a surprise to remember that he writes about love even more incisively than he writes about politics. Here he plays the lovelorn friend/sometime lover who has so much love to give but is torn between waiting for his heart’s desire to commit to him, or whether to bite the bullet and try find someone new and - based on what we learn in A New England - someone more deserving of his affection. The chorus marks a moment to show that for all the dreams and hopes of achieving a fairer society, we’d all take the love of our lives ahead of that. The frustration being that what the heart wants often seems to be even more difficult to gain than what the head wants too. In that moment, Bragg speaks for all of us.
As one of his best known songs, it made perfect sense to play this to Brambles’s audience, who may well have remembered Kirsty MacColl’s version of it. Listening to the other tracks from the 1983 session, I’d have been equally pleased to have heard the mixed race romance tale of This Guitar Says Sorry or Bragg’s Essex coastal road travelogue, A13, Trunk Road to the Sea, which borrowed liberally enough from (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66 to merit a co-composer credit for Bobby Troup, when the session was given a release by Strange Fruit.
Marxman - Father Like Son
Video courtesy of MaroWon
Another track from one of the best albums of the period. Father Like Son works the same underlying theme that Marxman included in Do You Crave Mystique, which is of the sins of others being passed down onto their family. In Do You Crave Mystique, it was a younger brother worshipping his drug-dealing or taking older brother; here, the focus switches to how promiscuous fathers can pass those genes on to their sons. In the process, they leave behind children that they see twice a year and a string of young lives stunted by sudden responsibility. Age brings wisdom, but also a ton of regrets for careless behaviour. Meanwhile, our narrator, who recognises his Valentino father’s faults all while repeating them himself, has to contend with the potential spectre of AIDS, unless he’s careful. Indeed, the moral of the track is on the practising of safe sex, rather than committing yourself to one partner.
As they proved in their Peel Session, when The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy tackle this kind of subject matter on a track like Positive, they grab you by the throat and emphasise the need to listen and learn in no uncertain terms. Marxman’s skill is to address these weighty topics with a lightness of touch, which Goldie Looking Chain subsequently ran with into even broader comedy.
The first verse of Father Like Son plays up Marxman’s choice of combining Celtic instruments with hip hop, which suggests that if they were singing from experience about their own fathers, then Matt Molloy’s inspirations must have been serious playas back in the day.
David Bowie - Black Tie White Noise
Video courtesy of David Bowie
I’ve always felt that if Leonard Cohen represented the voice of God in popular music, David Bowie represented the voice of Jesus. Both of them conveyed wisdom in their work, but while Cohen’s seemed to spring from what he saw and learned, Bowie’s sprang from how he lived. His chameleonic approach to his work inspired an underlying sense of how mankind could learn from its mistakes and improve, and he used himself as a conduit for how we could learn. Our sins and errors metaphorically broke across his back and he reflected this every time he opened his mouth to sing. When I think about his voice, the word that comes to my mind is “plaintive”, he sounded simultaneously cool and waifish; a man both in control of things and swept along by them.
Such is the case in this song, which served as the title track to his latest album. The sense of pleading desperation that we learn - in this case from the circumstances that led to and exacerbated the Los Angeles riots - is heightened here by the fact that Bowie sings this song as a duet alongside the soulful voice of Al B. Sure! (and with a ridiculous alias like that, his voice better be “soulful” in order for any of his credibility to avoid evaporating when we see the exclamation mark in his name.). While the city burns, Bowie and Al consider how this seismic event could jolt both races out of their mutual suspicion of each other, Reach out over race and hold each other’s hands….I look into your eyes and I know you won’t kill me etc, but before anyone thinks that this is nothing more than a tastelessly atonal retread of Ebony and Ivory, set against the backdrop of a major civil disturbance, Bowie comes out with the line which gets to the crux of the issue then, and now: But I look into your eyes and I wonder sometimes. And until that temptation dies out, then the riots and the things which cause them will always be bubbling under the surface, waiting to erupt again.
Peel played Black Tie White Noise alongside Bowie’s 1975 US Number 1, Fame, co-written with Carlos Alomar and John Lennon. I originally included it on the metaphorical mixtape, almost as an automatic response, but after listening back to it a few times, I found myself thinking that it’s really nothing more than a halfway decent funk workout, which I appreciate was in keeping with the aesthetic of the record Bowie was making at the time, but in the final analysis, I found the Bowie of 1993 more compelling and vital than the Bowie of 1975. In a way, I think that’s something he would be happy about.
Queen and George Michael - Somebody to Love
Video courtesy of Queen Official
A year earlier, Bowie had been among the artists performing at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium. He performed Under Pressure, “Heroes” , All the Young Dudes and finished by reciting The Lord’s Prayer in tribute to all those who had either died from AIDS or were living with it. He then handed on to George Michael, whose short set won the greatest acclaim of all those that were performed at the show. So much so that his rendition, with the surviving members of Queen, of their 1976 song, Somebody to Love was chosen as the lead track on an EP credited to Michael and Queen called Five Live. It was a Number 1 hit when it was released a couple of weeks after this programme went out. Even Peel was moved to say after playing it, Does make you wish you could have been there.
I’d always assumed that the EP featured five tracks from the concert but, it only featured two. As well as Somebody to Love, it included Michael’s duet with Lisa Stansfield on These Are the Days of Our Lives. The other tracks were a short Queen demo from the 1970s and two Michael concert performances from a 1991 show at Wembley Arena, neither of which had any connection to Freddie Mercury. Five Live does what it says on the tin, but not entirely honestly.
Oui 3 - Arms of Solitude
Video courtesy of Nickee Nick
Peel wasn’t flying completely solo during this week. At around 2pm each day, he would link up with The Man Ezeke, Radio 1’s reggae specialist DJ, who was spending the week on a nationwide Easter egg hunt, and who would breeze on to the show for a couple of minutes to whip up the crowds he had attracted and carry out brief interviews with various bands/acts that he met along the way. I’m presuming the bands were performing showcase sets or doing meet & greets because otherwise they were going considerable distances simply to be asked by him, “What’s your name?” and “What do you do in the band?”
Over the course of the week so far, Ezeke had travelled from Dumfries to Nottingham, via Huddersfield. Joining him today were two groups who both had a new record ready for release: acid jazz act, Perception and soul/hip hop combo, Oui 3. It was the latter who had their record played on the Brambles programme today, and their paean to the benefits of solitude makes for an attractive listen. They had me at the corner/Jack Horner rhyme, personally. Oui 3 were one of those acts who were perpetually to be found hanging around the lower reaches of the Top 40, especially in 1993, but never had that big hit to push them to greater attention.
The Nottingham jaunt did neither band much good in terms of record sales. Arms of Solitude became the only Oui 3 single in 1993 to miss out on a place in the Top 40, peaking at Number 54. Perception’s cover of the Barbra Streisand/Barry Gibb song, Guilty failed to chart at all. As for Peel, he was so impressed at the way that Ezeke could get the crowd to say anything he wanted back to him, that he asked Ezeke to get the crowd to shout the word “polytechnic”. Somewhat hesitantly, they obliged.
It’s Immaterial - A Gigantic Raft in the Philippines
Video courtesy of Mehefinheulog1
Released in 1981 and periodically reissued several times in subsequent years, my suspicions are that A Gigantic Raft in the Philippines is about the sinking of USS Indianapolis (CA-35), which was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in July 1945. The Indianapolis was en route to the Philippines having previously delivered supplies of uranium which were shortly to be used in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 1195 crew were aboard the ship of which just under 900 managed to evacuate before it sank. However, the vast majority of them found themselves in open water due to a shortage of lifeboats. Problems in getting SOS messages sent out before the ship sank meant that the crew spent 5 days out at sea before being rescued. In that time, many of them succumbed to dehydration, exposure, saltwater poisoning and, most notoriously, death by shark attack. Ultimately, 316 crew were rescued, but it remains the largest loss of life suffered by a vessel in the U.S. Navy.
After playing this, Peel uttered his customary line that In a better ordered society, that would have been a Number 1 record. With its rockabilly rhythm, vaguely tribal beats and echo drenched production, it certainly could have been a hit at the time. If only we could hear the words clearly, then who knows how big it could have been. Not hearing them clearly, matters here because we don’t know if we’re being invited to observe, sympathise, glorify or experience the predicament of the crew. When It’s Immaterial did have a Top 20 hit in 1986, they made sure we could hear every word.
The Frank and Walters - Fashion Crisis Hits New York
Video courtesy of June Grant
The last time I mentioned The Frank and Walters on this blog, I described them as pointless and anodyne. To be fair, I was comparing their Peel Session version of Happy Busman to my second favourite track of 1992, so my patience for their brand of whimsy was not high. But having dismissed them in no uncertain terms seven years ago, it’s only fair to say openly that Fashion Crisis in New York is an absolute peach.
There’s whimsy in it, for sure, but somehow it’s less teethgrinding than usual with this band and they do make a serious point about the disproportionate attention given to high end fashion trends and fads considering that the vast majority of people can’t afford to buy the clothes being marketed as essential wear. What really makes this record cut through with me though is how wonderfully it rocks. They played a blinder in the recording of this and given that it was the follow up record to the band’s biggest hit, After All, which had reached Number 11 in December 1992, hopes must have high of another potential Top 20 hit. It would have been a deserved one, but disappointingly, the record stalled at Number 42.
This may have caused a loss of confidence or a concerted decision to step away from the limelight for a time given that, after releasing this, it took four years for The Frank and Walters to release further material. After Happy Busman, I wouldn’t have cared less if they’d taken forty years off, but Fashion Crisis in New York showed just how good they could be, and was a hell of a tune to sustain their fans with while they were away.
East 17 - Slow It Down
Video courtesy of London Records
I was originally going to pass on this as I don’t consider it to be one of East 17’s best tracks from their heyday, but I must confess a personal connection to them of sorts given that at various after show parties and house parties during 1995, I and a couple of my friends would usually get some laughs by miming along to various East 17 songs. The law of diminishing returns kicked in over the course of that year by the time we were doing it to songs like Hold My Body Tight, but the early renditions of It’s Alright and Deep brought the house down.
It’s a shame that East 17’s legacy appears to be either their dreary Christmas hit, Stay Another Day or jokes about Brian Harvey running over himself with his car while being sick. While Take That may have marginally had the edge in terms of good pop songs over 1993-95, I always thought East 17’s records were more interesting, and they seemed more willing to take risks with their music. I still remember listening to Dave Pearce, sitting in on Drivetime in late 1995 and him playing Looking For, a drum ‘n’ bass track written by Terry Coldwell, one of the arm wavers who stood in the background behind Harvey and principal songwriter, Tony Mortimer, from their Up All Night album. They’re also the only boyband from that mid 90s period who were booked to appear on Channel 4’s live music show, The White Room. Who knows what they might have gone on to achieve had they been able to stand being in the same room as each other.
