Having gently introduced himself to Jakki Brambles’ audience, yesterday , with a playlist that could be called a 50/50 split between John Peel’s Record Box and the Radio 1 Daytime Playlist, Peel spent his second day tilting the balance 60/40 in favour of his records. This was heralded by him opening the show with Teenage Kicks. There’s football on one of the monitors here in the 1FM studios and The Undertones in me ears. Can life possibly get any better? The bald facts say that was Number 31 in the charts in 1978, but it’s been Number 1 in my heart ever since. He was also starting to get sloppy when giving the titles of the daytime records i.e. Jump He Say (of which more in a moment), Ain’t No Fear (Ain’t No Use) etc.
He gave thanks for a number of complimentary faxes that he’d received from listeners, with a majority of them wanting to know more about Camille Howard. He programmed a track from each day, and today treated the audience to Miraculous Boogie.
In the interests of balance, he also read out what he described as the first grumpy fax that he had received. In it, the correspondent demanded that Peel play some “good music.” Peel told the audience about the times he would receive similar requests from people who had turned up to the John Peel Roadshow. The problem being that they never explained what they meant by “good music”. The grumpy faxer also wanted to know where Brambles was. I don’t know where Jakki is and you spell her name with two “k”s. This kind of dismissal of audience feedback was almost unheard of on daytime Radio 1, though in subsequent years, Chris Moyles thought nothing of replying rudely to critical messages from his listeners - though he had usually done something to deserve censure from his audience. What I want to know is, where were these critical listeners when Peel’s was interfering with dance music tracks on his evening shows, by dropping in sound effects of speeding motorcycles? This has been a particular bane of mine from the Peel shows I’ve been listening to from the summer of 1993, and I will learn to listen warily in future years to shows broadcast after he’d been to the TT Races. To mollify this particular grumpy listener, he played O Carolina by Shaggy.
A few minutes after that, he played Johan Cruyff’s recording of Oei Oei Oei (Dat Was Me Weer Ein Loei), as part of a daily spin of tunes from the Bend It series of football songs, issued by Exotica Records. However, after about a minute he took the record off claiming that the audience didn’t deserve to hear the rest of it. One can only imagine the number of radios being switched off at that point; being assailed by unfamiliar music is one thing, but being insulted by the DJ playing it is quite another. In Good Night and Good Riddance, David Cavanagh suspects that the premature ending was on the instructions of a Radio 1 executive, appalled that a Schlager song was going out on the BBC’s youth radio station at 1:30pm in the afternoon, where an Annie Lennox track should be. It did at least link to one of the correspondents who had faxed in to to say that they were listening while convalescing with a broken leg, which they’d suffered in a football match. In sympathy, Peel talked of the time that he’d had his wrist broken in a football match, courtesy of John Birt. Who’s to say what part of Peel the station managers may have wanted to break once Cruyff started honking away.
Football dominated the news and thinking of Peel today, somewhat. He sent his good wishes to Ipswich Town ahead of that evening’s game with Chelsea at Portman Road. The team had only taken 3 points from their last 10 games, with no wins since 30 January. It’s time to stop the slide, he declared. But the wait for a win went on as the game finished 1-1. Meanwhile, the news reported that the families of victims of the Hillsborough disaster had been given licence to change the wording on the verdict of the first inquiry from “accidental death” to “accidental death due to lack of care”. The news also featured the none more 1993 news story of Group 4 Security bungling a prisoner transfer, once again, and letting another prisoner escape.
As for what I’d have taken from the show and put on a mixtape, we start with a man who the 1993 me could easily be accused of getting wrong…
David Bowie - Jump They Say
Video courtesy of David Bowie VEVO
The news that David Bowie had a new album out would have been greeted with polite indifference by me at this time. I was absorbing 60s music, and Bowie was 70s & 80s as far as I was concerned, bar one notable exception. If you’d asked me on 6/4/93 to tell you which Bowie songs I knew, I’d probably have mentioned this track along with Space Oddity, China Girl - the video of which I remember watching with a babysitter on Top of the Pops, when I was 7 and both of us finding it absolutely hilarious for some reason - and the only other one I could comfortably name back then would have been er… Dancing in the Street. As I said, getting Bowie wrong.
To me at that time, he was just another rock star, albeit I was vaguely aware that he had gone through a number of different looks. I wasn’t one of those people who regarded 1987’s Never Let Me Down album or Tin Machine as some sort of personal affront, because I wasn’t aware of them. But I did recognise in Jump They Say’s compressed air of paranoia and mental overload that if I did want to get into Bowie, this might be a decent jumping on point. I still haven’t heard Black Tie, White Noise, in fact I haven’t heard any of Bowie’s studio albums in their entirety. The only thing I have is a mixtape with selections from Bowie at the Beeb - 1968-72, but I know differently now. And if I do binge his back catalogue, I may well start with any of Black Tie White Noise, Never Let Me Down or the Tin Machine albums. I think he’d approve of that.
Tiger - Chaos
Video courtesy of Danny Sinclair.
By playing this newish Tiger single, Peel may have been making a pitch towards all those who bought O Carolina, Informer and Mr. Loverman to see whether, if they liked those, they might be interested in something a little less polished, but no less exciting. I know that when I blogged about Tiger’s track, Beep Beep, I pined for a world where that could have been a hit, but I’m not surprised that neither that or Chaos caught on. Tiger is too much of a whirlwind, too…well chaotic, for easy consumption, and once he sets out his stall that he’s here to cause chaos either in a sound system battle or something more dangerous, he slips his bonds and is off and away. All that this listener can do is admire his artistry, and then, when it’s time, slip back to the Shaggy/Snow/Shabba singalongs, though I’d prefer this from the latter.
Siouxsie and the Banshees - Hong Kong Garden/The Smiths - Reel Around The Fountain [Peel Sessions]
Videos courtesy of VibraCobra23 Redux and Scott Smith
I’ve paired these together as they are both a) Peel Session recordings and b) my first exposure to either track was due to clips of both songs (though not both versions) being included in Turn That Racket Down. Before doing any research, I had thought both songs may be about sex. I’m aware that Reel Around the Fountain has always had a sexual subtext around it, though no one is clear on whether that refers to loss of virginity, grooming or pedophilia. Given how exultant Morrissey sounds in the song, I don’t think there’s anything too troubling in the sentiments of the song. My own take is that it’s about sex between a younger man and an older lover, with Morrissey playing both participants, especially in the “15 minutes with you…” lines. His voice conjures such an air of decadence that transports us to the country house where this liaison is taking place. This is one of the Smiths drawing room songs - as per the sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart - you can imagine a Noel Coward or a Cole Porter sitting down at their piano, and in an unguarded moment, producing something like this for their guests’ amusement. In fact, it always baffled me that Johnny Marr quit the group over Morrissey’s wish to cover Cilla Black songs, given that he had spent 5 years or so acting as a kind of 1980s version of Donald Swann by providing music to the lyrics of a slightly more twisted, Mancunian Michael Flanders. The recording is from May 1983 and was subsequently issued on the sessions and b-sides compilation, Hatful of Hollow. Reel Around the Fountain would be the opening track on The Smiths eponymous debut album.
I thought Hong Kong Garden might be referring to a brothel, but according to Siouxsie Sioux, it referred to a Chinese restaurant of the same name in Chislehurst, where she and her friends had witnessed, and been disgusted by the racist behaviour of skinheads who had abused the people who worked there. The song was written in solidarity with the people who worked there, though I have to say that the lyrics don’t do a great job of conveying that. It would be easy for people to interpret the “Harmful elements in the air…” sentiments as being critical of Chinese immigrants, especially as the song sets up reasons for leaving Hong Kong - pollution, dodgy local customs - and posits that the most obvious thing to do on arriving in Britain is to open a takeaway. Also, I wonder if the line “A race of bodies small in size” might have inspired Eric Idle to write the song, I Like Chinese (“They only come up to your knees”).
The single was released in August 1978, six months after they recorded the session version, and reached Number 7 on the UK Singles chart. Had the owners been smart they could have offered a discount on meals to anyone who brought a copy to the restaurant. The queues might also have kept the skinheads at bay too. Disappointingly, 46 years on, people are still having to put up with this shit.
Hole - Beautiful Son
Video courtesy of youshotAndyWarhol.
I have a friend who believes that Kurt Cobain was a closeted trans woman. It’s inspired her to create a zine and a show called All Apologies which “…questions our desire for trans celebrities and what happens when they do not exist - delving deep into internet discourse, classical mythology and radically misremembering Nirvana’s iconic 1994 (sic) MTV Unplugged concert….it fights back against the pressure on trans people to mold (sic) ourselves into images that are acceptable to society and the danger that lies when we are not able to live as our full vibrant selves.” The show is touring in 2025.
2 years ago, I blogged about Been a Son after Peel played it on his BFBS show of 10/1/93. I was conscious of Emma Frankland’s supposition and bought the zine because I felt that there may have been a trans subtext to Been a Son. Unfortunately, none of the evidence around the inspirations for that song supported the trans theory, it was just a case of Kurt sniping at his father’s perceived disappointment at having a daughter for a second child instead of another son. On a superficial level, I could see where the argument was coming from. Look at any photo of Cobain in which he’s not either clowning around or looking palpably ill or fatigued, and you can’t help but be struck by how beautiful he is. Had word clouds been a thing when Nirvana were at their peak, it’s probable that androgynous would have featured in there alongside the more obvious words associated with Kurt Cobain’s public image and art.
However, the release of the Hole single, Beautiful Son, this week in 1993 offers some evidence to support the “Kurt was trans” theory. Courtney Love claims that the sentiments of the song were inspired by Kurt’s predilection for cross dressing when he was a child, but given how besotted Cobain was by Love, it’s easy to read into the song that the wearing of dresses and lipstick wasn’t just a childhood phase but the makings of an erotic night in at Chez Cobve. In Beautiful Son, we’re invited to see rock music’s most famous couple of the period channelling the romance of Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg, which also used to involve transvestism and gender swapping roles as part of their sexual routine.
Regardless of the truth, or how deeply one wants to delve into the gender issue, what shines through in the record is a strong sense of love from Courtney for Kurt because of how she saw him as a human being. In fact, this record sounds as close to giving off a feeling of contentment about life and love as any grunge era tune has. Beautiful Son gave Hole their first UK Singles Chart entry, peaking at Number 54.
The Cure - Friday I’m in Love
Video courtesy of The Cure VEVO
Including this on a metaphorical mixtape is a no brainer, surely.
Betty Boo - Hangover
Video courtesy of RHINO
Lack of brains also plays a part in including this, instead blame rampaging teenage lust. Hangover is a terrible record by any metric. It features a pedal steel guitar line which gives the lie to Peel’s assertion that any song or band is improved by having one , a dreary string section and lyrics/vocals from Betty herself that have to be among the least inspired she ever recorded. Nonetheless, I fancied her something rotten in the early 90s and the stylists on her music videos knew exactly how to push teenage boys’ buttons, whether it was by making her the school classmate of our dreams or or an alien overlord, all red blooded men would have been happy to serve, she looked amazing - and the tunes weren’t bad either.
If I’d just heard Hangover on the radio, I’d probably have scrunched up my face, declared it a dud and moved on. But my first exposure to it was seeing the video on The Chart Show and gosh, darn it! They’d done it again! This ropey song about a cheating lover and the messiness of the breakup was being promoted by a video which had me prepared to overlook the source material’s flaws. Betty Boo as an Apache Indian squaw - or to be more accurate Betty as an actress playing an Apache Indian squaw. Where do I sign? With her too handsome boyfriend playing the cowboy hero - and winning the fury of every heterosexual man who saw the video by getting to snog Betty for 12 seconds (I just counted every single heartbreaking one of them) - and a scheming blonde supporting actress playing the cowgirl villain who uses her wiles to seduce him both onscreen and off it, the video director appears to be going for a Body of Evidence meets Gene Autry vibe. Only this time, the story is told with Betty in the Julianne Moore role, her boyfriend as Willem Dafoe and the cowgirl - who is so wonderfully archly played, she should be twirling a moustache - as Madonna.
I actually bought Hangover, mainly due to the fact that pictures from the video were included with the releases though, irritatingly, they seemed to give greater prominence to the cowboy than they did to Betty or the cowgirl. However, the combined efforts of me and my fellow pervs could get it no higher than Number 50 on the UK Charts. Shortly after this, Betty Boo had to be laid aside and Alison Clarkson had to take on bigger challenges than improving her chart placings. Her career was put on hold for a number of years, as she nursed her mother through terminal illness. Betty Boo never really came back into public consciousness as a performer, though as a writer, Clarkson hit the jackpot by co-writing Pure and Simple, which would go to Number 1 in 2001 when it was recorded by Hear’Say.
Linda Laine and the Sinners - Low Grades and High Fever
Video courtesy of The Age of Innocence
Originally released on the Tower label in 1964, and circulating again through the Girls in the Garage compilations issued by Romulan Records, this takes the rhythm of Shout and mixes in a bullfrog voiced low grader and a high-pitched, high fevered female singer to produce an enjoyable slice of school crush whimsy. I wish I could blame my own underwhelming GCSE results on some of the crushes I’d gone through during my GCSE year, but as it was probably down to spending too much time watching American wrestling, I’d better shut up and get to the next record.
New Order - Regret
Video courtesy of New Order.
They’re back and they’re still good, declared Peel after playing this first single from New Order’s imminent new album, Republic. Radio 1 considered this important enough to merit a New Order Day on the station, set for 23 April and going under the somewhat confusing title of New Order to Order. No, I don’t get the connection, either.
I remember seeing Regret when they performed it live via satellite on Top of the Pops, from a Los Angeles beach, accompanied by members of the cast of Baywatch. Despite the ludicrous set-up, I was very impressed by Regret and glad to be able to put faces to the name of a band I’d heard of, but not knowingly heard yet. I wanted to buy Regret, but struggled to track down a copy of what I later came to understand was the album edit. I didn’t have a CD player at the time, but nowhere in Falmouth seemed to stock the cassette version. Eventually, on a muggy, drizzly Monday morning in April, I ended up buying the 12-inch remix version, glumly sitting in the lounge at home and trying to convince myself that the Sabres Slow ‘n’ Lo mix was as good as having the “proper” version. At least I didn’t have to worry about that kind of bullshit when I bought Hangover.
Babe the Blue Ox - Gymkhana
Video courtesy of Babe the Blue Ox
Towards the end of each day’s programme, Peel presented a feature called The New Nirvana in which he would play a record by a band/act who Peel stressed… did not necessarily sound like Nirvana, but were being touted as being like them. On the Monday, he had played Congratulations by Motorolla, but today he played a track from the Brooklyn based trio, Babe the Blue Ox, whose album (Box) had been put out in the UK via Rough Trade. The guitars and drums sound as rough as Nirvana, but the overall effect is of a harder rocking B-52s. I liked Gymkhana a lot, although it isn’t a particularly profound song. Having listened to a small sample of other tracks by them, there’s a lot to enjoy in Babe the Blue Ox’s music and style. It’s always compelling to listen to, with plenty of surprises such as in tracks like Rube Goldberg and Beat You To It. They signed to RCA in the mid-90s, but they seemed to drop off Peel’s radar after Spring 1993. Nevertheless, if I put on a theme night and called it Loft Rock, promoting the best in upscale New York music of the early 90s, and formed the playlist around Babe the Blue Ox and Love Child, I’m sure that me and the four other people who attend it would have a wonderful time.
I had a couple of choices on my original list which fell from favour. Two I think were Peel choices and one may have been on the Brambles show playlist:
X-103 - Curse of the Gods - this wasn’t on the Atlantis album which Peel played a suite of tracks from to bring his 4-hour show to a close on 27/3/93. It had been released a few months earlier on an EP called Thera. For me the track was too repetitive to merit inclusion on the mixtape. Repetition’s not necessarily a disqualifying factor for me, but this didn’t quite cut deep enough to draw me back to it.
The Pooh Sticks - The World is Turning On - This is a perfectly acceptable and short indie rocker from the Swansea collective, but when I heard it again next to tracks like Beautiful Son and Gymkhana, I began to see the merit in Taylor Parkes’s line that Britpop was less of a reaction against grunge, and more a reaction against early 90s British guitar music. They’re just on different planets from each other, and The World is Turning On sounds like it’s on Pluto.
PM Dawn - Norwegian Wood - In the initial listen, I was seduced by the idea of this Beatles cover. When I came back to it, I was nauseated by how lacklustre it sounded.
People make strange choices when they’re demob happy…
The received wisdom about the reason behind John Peel’s week long holiday cover stint for Jakki Brambles’s lunchtime Radio 1 show is that it was the result of a bet made to then Radio 1 controller, Johnny Beerling when he was attending a conference. I have also seen comments that Beerling arranged it as a way of trying to make a point to then BBC Director General John Birt about the qualities that distinguished Radio 1 from the commercial sector. Either way, Beerling was free to make the decision knowing that regardless of whether the week was a roaring success or a disastrous failure, any repercussions from it would not affect him given that he was due to take enforced retirement from his role in October 1993. “John Peel on a daytime broadcast for the first time in over 20 years? Sure, why not!”
On the face of it, the decision to use Peel as cover on a daytime show made sense. He was hardly a broadcasting novice after all, and while he may not have had the kind of slick, ultra-energetic presence associated with daytime radio presentation, he had wit, warmth and an ability to think on his feet. He was also, at least on his first couple of days, genuinely enthusiastic about it. Only, when he started having to deal with hostile fax messages from Brambles’ regular audience, did self-defence kick in and Peel retreated into a higher degree of sarcasm than he had done at the start of his stint. Though it should also be said, he received plenty of queries and interest for some of the lesser known tunes that he brought in to go alongside the daytime playlist.
For this first show, I’m going to concentrate mainly on the music that I would have put on the metaphorical mixtape. For me, the timing of Peel appearing on daytime radio is a happy accident, given that I spent a period of around 6 weeks through March to May of 1993 both transcribing the UK Top 40 Singles Chart and taking the time to watch Top of the Pops to see who from those lists would appear on the show. Eventually, I lost interest and just went back to watching TOTP, but in a sense the music from this period is what I think of if you ask me to recall chart hits from 1993.
The John Peel wiki not only contains links to recordings of the shows, but also a full transcript of Peel’s links for this 5/4/93 show. I will have more to share on Peel’s observations, problems and occasional triumphs on the Tuesday to Thursday shows. Timing issues meant that the only one I never heard was Peel’s final show on Friday 9 April, but I’d pretty much got the point by then, and anyway, I shall begin soundtracking my next production with Peel’s regular Friday night show, which was broadcast the same day. Selections from that show and others will be presented in the usual Greasepaint format on a track by track posting, but for these Jakki Brambles shows, selections will be presented as a group with comments on their reasons for inclusion. And we start in the most obvious place:
The Fall - Why Are People Grudgeful?/Sir Joe Gibbs - People Grudgeful
Videos courtesy of Renato Trap (Fall) and Ziggybollus (Gibbs)
Alongside their latest album, The Infotainment Scan, The Fall released a single which saw them mash up the 1968 reggae beef singles, People Funny Boy by Lee Perry and the reply record by Gibbs. Both Perry and Gibbs accuse each other of being both jealous of the others’ success/influence while also trying to claim credit as to why the other has become successful or influential. Such themes of resentment and a calling out of perceived ingratitude would have been right up Mark E. Smith’s street and God only knows which former (and present) members of The Fall, Smith would have had in mind while recording his vocal.
Snow - Informer
Video courtesy of RHINO
From memory, any discussion about this record at the time it came out boiled down to three topics of conversation:
1) “Did you know he’s white?”
2) “Did you know he’s from Canada?”
3) “Did you know ‘I-licky-boom-boom-down” refers to oral sex?”
Looking at number 3, I feel that we could potentially blame Snow for opening the door for The Outhere Brothers, but as he released the better tune, clemency has been earned.
Chris Isaak - Can’t Do a Thing (To Stop Me)
Video courtesy of Infinity.
Peel’s dismissal of this track, which was the first single released from Isaak’s new LP, San Francisco Days, has been held up as his greatest moment from his week sitting in for Brambles. In response to the title line, he faded the record down and retorted, That’s where you’re wrong, pal. I can take the CD off and throw it as far as I possibly can. That’s what happens when you get a computer to write your songs. My notes for the Brambles shows that I heard don’t have him talking this disrespectfully about any of the other daytime playlist records. I suspect this was because Brambles’ producer would have pointed out that while Peel was only there for the week, Brambles and her team needed to keep on the right side of major record labels, and it wasn’t going to be helpful to her if labels got queasy about letting Radio 1 play their records given that a DJ had pulled one out of the CD player, live on air, slagging it off as they did so.
For what it’s worth, I quite like this tune. Chris Isaak was only ever crashingly OK to my ears, but there’s a playful tone and spirit to Can’t Do a Thing (To Stop Me) that I find quite attractive and charming. Although Peel may have given it short shrift, I would imagine that other daytime Radio 1 DJs gave it a fuller airing. However, the British record buying public seemed to side with Peel, and hopes of a Wicked Game style success failed to materialise with the record stalling at Number 36 on the UK charts - in the US, it failed even to break the Top 100.
The Human League - Don’t You Want Me
Video courtesy The Human LeagueVEVO
The UK’s Christmas Number 1 single for 1981 and played by Peel after a trailer advertising shows Radio 1 were putting on around Sheffield Sound City ‘93, which started on this day. Peel was going up there to take part in one of the forums being held on Saturday 10 April. I remember reading very positive reviews in Melody Maker for the sets by Saint Etienne and World Party. Some of the other artists who played during the week can be found here.
Sunscreem - Pressure US
Video courtesy of Sunscreem.
It’s taken me till I wrote this post to learn that this track is titled Pressure US - as in United States - rather than Pressure Us. This was a re-release of their 1991 single called Pressure, which broke into the Top 60. The difference between the two versions is that Pressure only features the chorus and includes two comedown sections, suggesting that it was recorded with the clubs in mind. Pressure US loses the comedown parts and adds verses to its structure, suggesting that it was written with gig venues in mind. Over the previous year, Sunscreem’s trajectory had been moving upwards and Pressure US was their third consecutive Top 20 hit. But after taking a two year break to record new material, they came back to find that M People - who had enjoyed 4 Top 10 hits in 1993 alone - were so firmly ensconced in the public’s hearts as their pop-dance band of choice, that their subsequent releases struggled to get much of a look in. A real shame, but a delight to hear this again.
The Jam - Down in the Tube Station at Midnight
Video courtesy of The Jam VEVO
When Peel played this 1978 Jam setting of a mugging to music, he expressed a hope, based on articles he had seen, that The Jam were going to reform. He hoped that they would. We’re still waiting…
Sybil - When I’m Good and Ready
Video courtesy of PWL
I can’t adequately describe how broad my smile was when I was listening to the file that contained this show, and the “When I’m….When..When I’m…When..When I’m…When… When I’m Good and Ready” opening filled the air. Hearing that again really did transport me back to my bedroom in the Spring of 1993, listening to Bruno Brookes on the UK Top 40. At the time, in terms of favourability, I ranked this just behind Show Me Love by Robin S. marking as it did a culmination of a period in the early 90s - started by CeCe Peniston - when the charts were awash with big voiced African-American women singing club-land hits. Then from 1994 to 1996, the pendulum swung the other way and the charts filled with hits for Sheryl Crow, Lisa Loeb, Meredith Brooks, Joan Osbourne and Alanis Morissette. Whether your preference was for Sybil ‘n’ CeCe or Sheryl ‘n’ Alanis, they were all singers who put themselves at the service of the song. Unfortunately, as the decade ended, producers, writers and artists seemed to decide that the template they wanted to work off was Whitney Houston’s performance of I Will Always Love You from late ‘92, and with that Celine Dion and Mariah Carey lost all restraint, while Christina Aguilera arrived fully formed to usher in the age of Female Vocal Masturbation. No wonder I was so pleased to hear Sybil again after all those years.
Sub Sub featuring Melanie Williams - Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)
Video courtesy of Edward George.
I reckon this was the best track inside the Top 40 in this period. The public liked it enough to get it to Number 3 on the chart. My abiding memory of it was seeing them perform it on Top of the Pops and my eye being drawn more towards bassist Jimi Goodwin than towards Melanie Williams, I think through a mixture of his endearingly naff dancing and the clumsiness of how he held his bass guitar. Nine years later, on the same programme and with a record at the same chart position as Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use) had been, I’d watch Goodwin and his Sub Sub colleagues, now working under the name of Doves, produce a performance of such emotionally intense ferocity that it produced a genuine ovation from the TOTP crowd instead of the all purpose cheer that went up 90% of the time. As for Sub Sub, they spent the next 5 years trying to replicate the success of Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use); this included collaborations with Tricky and Bernard Sumner, before switching to Doves, an act which at their best include enough of their dance roots alongside the rockist elements to produce some of the best tracks of the early 21st century.
Sam & Dave - Soul Man
Video courtesy of RHINO
Always a pleasure to hear this 60s classic of course, though it serves as a reminder of how stretched the music policy still was on what was regarded as the BBC’s radio station for young people, after 26 years. I have memories of catching an edition of Steve Wright in the Afternoon around this time, when someone put Radio 1 on at college and him opening the programme with a play of the Rolling Stones 1967 hit, Let’s Spend the Night Together and trailing an interview with The Hollies, who were releasing a new single to mark 30 years since their first hit. By the time I started listening to Radio 1 in 1995, the New Music First policy was firmly in place on the daytime programmes and the only place you’d have heard something like this would either have been on The Gold Hour portion of Simon Mayo’s mid morning show or Mark and Lard’s Graveyard Shift. It was an arrangement which worked perfectly for me.
At the start of this programme, Peel tried to reassure listeners that he would be playing plenty of pop music to go alongside the stuff he was bringing in himself, though he was categorical that he would not be playing anything by Simply Red. This was as much due to his personal antipathy towards Mick Hucknall as it was towards their music. I can only imagine how pained he would have been if, while this was playing, someone from the future crept into the studio and told him that Faces would reform in 16 years time, but with Hucknall on lead vocals instead of Rod Stewart. “But you won’t need to worry about that, John…” said the visitor, sadly, as they dematerialised.
Shinehead - Jamaican in New York
Video courtesy of Mark Seliger.
Given the ubiquity of reggae-pop in the UK Charts at this time, I was a little surprised to see that this reggaefied update of Sting’s Englishman in New York got no higher than Number 30 in the Top 40. I suspect that a credibility gap stopped most reggae-lovers from adding this to their collections, while any hopes Shinehead and company may have had of getting a sales boost from Sting’s fans was over-ridden by them saving their money to buy singles released off Sting’s new album, Ten Summoner’s Tales. I liked Jamaican in New York a lot at the time, but it’s hanging on by its fingertips now. The record’s underperformance didn’t stop Shinehead from trying to have a hit with another artist whose standing was in a low spot in 1993, as he followed this with a cover of Paul McCartney’s Wings hit, Let Em’ In, which just crept inside the Top 75. It’s probably better to go back to his earliest release, a 1984 version of Billie Jean by Michael Jackson and…well! Look who it is!…
Michael Jackson - Give Into Me
Video courtesy of Michael Jackson VEVO
Although I liked his music, I never owned any Michael Jackson albums. There didn’t seem to be any point given that most of the record would be put out as singles. Give Into Me was the seventh of NINE singles released from Dangerous. If you bought any of those singles, you basically got a stack of remixes, the occasional live track and in the case of the Heal the World single, you had another track from Dangerous, She Drives Me Wild crowbarred on as a b-side. I couldn’t trust anybody who never bothered with putting a distinct b-side on at least one of their formats. No wonder the grunge and Britpop groups found an audience.
For a very long time, I associated Give Into Me with the worst elements of my brief spell of writing down the weekly Top 40 singles charts. When I was listening, it was on the slide down the chart - after peaking at Number 2 - but I seemed to remember it going on, seemingly forever, and holding the rest of the chart up from being played. But listening to it again this time, that drawn out ending and Jackson’s controlled exhortations seemed to take on a kind of weary grandeur, which even the guitar wankery of guest contributor, Slash couldn’t undermine.
Peel brought a couple of tunes in that would more usually be associated with his regular programmes, such as Feel Your Need by L-Dopa, which made my list, but I’m going to hold off on it until it’s played on Peel’s show a couple of weeks on from this. He also played Wrath of the Black Man by Fun-Da-Mental
One track which I had on the list but went cool on was Animal Nitrate by Suede, who had just seen their debut album enter the charts at Number 1. Listening back to it, I was reminded of the way in which I wanted to like it more, back then, but I could find no point of entry into the song which would allow me to embrace either the song or the band. As the years rolled on, I became more of a Suede-sceptic and I held most of their output in a sort of amused contempt which remains my default feeling about them now, but for three exceptions: She’s in Fashion (1999), which I regard as one of the best songs of that year; Electricity (1999), which I regard as one of the best songs of that decade and The Wild Ones (1994), which I regard as one the best songs of that century.
I really should have posted this yesterday, given that 14 October is the anniversary of John Peel’s final show on Radio 1 and this year marks 20 years since then. But my wife had spent the weekend away in Amsterdam with friends and I wanted to get the house looking nice for her return. I’m also loath to tie myself to that particular anniversary given the poignancy of what it means.
Nevertheless, by the time Castaway Theatre Company had wrapped up its production of Equus, there were still well over a thousand Peel shows to go, and having reached the end of another play soundtracked by John Peel playlists, it’s time to look back over the last two years’ worth of posts and pick out the tracks that would make up the Equus mixtape, which I would have given to cast and crew, back in the day, as a memento. The rules as ever are that there would be just one track selected from each of the shows covered between 2 January - 27 March 1993, albeit with the caveat that timing issues on files meant that three weeks of programmes were skipped between late February and mid-March ‘93. I have also included a bonus track from the run of shows for reasons which will be obvious when you read the blogpost.
Dedicated to the cast and crew of Equus and Top Girls presented by Castaway Theatre Company on 26/27 March and 31 March/1 April 1993.
Coming next: A short diversion before we start soundtracking my next production. Peel Goes Pop looks at the extraordinary week of 5-9 April 1993 when Peel found himself hosting a Radio 1 daytime show. Would the daytime playlist survive? And what leftfield tunes was Peel going to be able expose his temporary new audience to? Brickbats and bouquets flew in both directions, but which ones would have made a mixtape?
Before I write up the Equus mixtape post, I’m using this post to trawl back and present the tracks that I was not able to share in previous posts which have now become available. The links will take you to the shows that they came from and provide my reasons as to why they may have ended up on the metaphorical mixtape.
Listeners got an extra hour of John Peel’s show tonight. With the clocks set to go forward an hour for the start of British Summer Time (1993) at 2am on the morning of Sunday 28 March, it was decided that Peel should do a 4 hour programme, rather than have Lynn Parsons come in to do a one hour show at 3am.
Peel had spent the previous afternoon watching The Boat Race in person for the first time in his life at the invitation of a record company whose offices overlooked the River Thames. Peel admitted that he tended to back Cambridge in the race, though he wasn’t really sure why as he had no link to the university. I suspect there may have been either unconscious geographical bias at play given the neighbouring proximity of Cambridgeshire to Suffolk, or he may have been rooting for the underdog given that between 1976 and 1992, Cambridge had won the race on only one occasion. In the event, Peel got the result he was hoping for with a first win for Cambridge since 1986. According to him, the race seemed to lack something in terms of spectacle: When it starts, you can see the boats - someone will say, ‘Look! They’re there, there they are.’ And you can’t tell which is which, but someone will say ‘That’s Cambridge in front’, because they’re listening to the commentary on the radio. And then they go past in front of you, and you don’t know who any of them are, and you don’t have any involvement with any of them. And then they go off out of sight, well good luck to them. What interested him most was seeing the Thames river fill up with water. He arrived at the venue about 2 hours before the start of the race to see a river that was only about a third full of water, but by the time the race had begun, the whole width of the river was covered in water. Having gone through a long winless period in the race, Cambridge subsequently went on to be unbeaten in it until 2000.
The postbag included a request from David and Dean Judd of Cumbria for a play of Emperor’s New Clothes by Kevin Coyne (see also 25/10/92) to celebrate, as they put it, “Our Lisa’s 23rd birthday.” Unfortunately, Peel couldn’t oblige them as he was currently reorganising his CD collection at home and wasn’t sure where it was. He did suggest that he may play it next year though. (He didn’t). Emperor’s New Clothes now being available for sharing, which it wasn’t when I covered Peel’s 25/10/92 show, 3 years ago reminds me that I’ll have to go sifting through YouTube to see if any Equus appendices turn up from the shows covered over the last 2 years between January-March 1993.
The Phantom Fifty had reached Number 27, Siva by Smashing Pumpkins. Elsewhere, Peel tried to play Bell by Swirlies on a cassette, only for the tape to stop on him prematurely.
The Little Richard cover search may have been resolved, but Peel wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to keep sifting through his singles to find forgotten gems. In this programme, he played Kua Sami Muzeda by The Kangondo Jazz Band. Looking ahead to the future, his programme also included Shine by David Gray, an artist who would enjoy huge success later in the decade. Peel said he was enjoying his work more and more, but to go by the John Peel wiki, tonight was the only occasion he included Gray on one of his playlists.
The recording I heard of this show missed the first 20 minutes. There’s was only one track that I had slated for inclusion which I couldn’t find a recording for, which was by Kalima called Stella Wande, dating from 1983 and recorded in Lusaka, Zambia. A little less frenetic than the Congolese soukous sound, but very soothing and pleasant to listen to, a little like Coupé Cloué. The track ends in an extended conversation between two of the musicians, which culminates in them striking up the music to the next track on the record. Peel tried to segue the opening notes of that into his next record, Marbles by Tindersticks, but he felt that he had botched this.
There were several tracks which fell from favour, most of them coming in the last half of the programme:
The Fall - Gut of the Quantifier [Peel Session] - When Strange Fruit put out their EP of Kimble, which had been recorded in a Peel Session, the previous year, they filled the EP out with 3 tracks from Fall Peel Sessions recorded in the 1980s. Gut of the Quantifier, which was recorded for their 1985 album, This Nation’s Saving Grace has plenty to recommend it with catchy riffs and Mark E. Smith starting off in chipper form, I rather felt it lost its way after the halfway point though. I always find The Fall an acquired taste and when Smith starts rambling between the Stick it in the mud/Stick it in the gut refrain, I found myself checking out. A borderline miss though and one I may recant in future.
Fun-Da-Mental - Wrath of the Black Man - This opens with one of the most arresting and powerful samples in the history of recorded sound, courtesy of Malcolm X. The moment I heard it, I was ready to put this track on the metaphorical mixtape and call it Sir while I did so. It was only when listening back to it a few times that I came to realise that all of the wrath on the track was being supplied by that one sample. The ferocity of Malcolm’s message seemed to cow Fun-Da-Mental into a rather listless performance. Things weren’t helped by a rather muted production which served only to obscure the points they were trying to make.
Salt Chunk Mary - You Can’t Hang - A short lived noisecore trio, hailing from Pittsburgh, this track was taken from their second and final EP, Holiday Ham Tips. A feature of each of the tracks on that EP is that the songs are bookended by blasts of verite recordings from radio and TV and that might have been what initially made me slate it for inclusion. It was only when listened to subsequently that, as with Wrath of the Black Man, the gimmick ended up covering the thin pickings on offer from the track.
Pitchshifter - N.I.B - Strictly speaking, this should have made the cut given that if I had heard it in 1993, I wouldn’t have been in a position to compare it to the Black Sabbath original. But once I heard the bounce and swing of the original - and I appreciate those are two words that aren’t usually associated with Brum heavy metal - it only showed me the redundancy of this cover, which was recorded alongside ten other bands for a tribute album called Masters of Misery -Black Sabbath: An Earache Tribute
Kanda Bongo Man - Sai - After discovering Kanda Bongo Man through Peel, I bought the album from which this version of Sai was recorded for, Soukous in Central Park, sometime in late 2000 when I was looking for happy music to help me through the breakup of my engagement. The concert took place in 1992, and according to Peel was originally broadcast by BBC Radio 5 in the period when it was far more eclectic than it became once it transformed into BBC Radio Five Live in 1994. Nevertheless, Sai was the penultimate track in the set, and despite running to over 9 minutes, it never quite shakes off that placeholder feel that penultimate tracks sometimes give off on albums/setlists. I say “sometimes give off” because my favourite song was the penultimate track on its album.
X-103 - Eruption/Interlude B/Tephra/ 10,000 Chariots - To end his extended show, Peel decided to play a suite of tracks from the end of the Atlantis LP by X-103, a collaboration between DJs, Jeff Mills and Robert Hood. In order to ensure that he got to 10,000 Chariots, Peel intentionally increased the speed of his turntable. It all makes for a perfectly serviceable listen, but the issue is the same one as that suffered by Pitchshifter; subsequently gained knowledge has caused me to re-evaluate my original choices. Both Eruption and Tephra are available in longer, different and, in the case of Tephra, better versions elsewhere. The former on the Thera EP which was released in advance of the album; the latter as the title track on an EP released in 1995. I know that the 1993 me would have had to listen to these tracks in ignorance, but knowing these better versions are out there, I’d prefer to wait for the slight chance that they turn up on a future Peel playlist.
Me
This was as long a night for me as it had been for John Peel. After completing the second and final performance of Equus, myself, the cast and crew headed off to a nightclub to celebrate my birthday. The mood was celebratory, not just for myself, but the play had gone well, which was quite an achievement when it had looked during the course of the week leading up to it that it may not be staged at all.
Over the course of the Spring term, more and more people began to drop out of the course. Some of them were contemporaries of mine, who’d lost interest or had become aware of other opportunities; others were those in their 30s and 40s who had families to support or who needed to get back to work because they could no longer financially afford to be students on a course which couldn’t offer them what they needed. The course itself, still in its first year of operation, was still prone to teething problems and, depending on who you spoke to, there was a sense that the main administrator, David Gregg, was either spreading himself too thinly or not spreading himself at all and failing to provide leadership on the course. He looked to encourage independence and self-reliance among the group, especially when it split off into three groups to present two contemporary plays at Falmouth Poly during March 1993 and to research and write the community play which we were supposed to be staging in June ‘93. The intention was fine, but the execution of it was leaving some people - namely the cast and crew of Top Girls, which was staged in the week after Equus - very unhappy.
The rehearsals for Equus had been, for the most part, rather lop-sided affairs. There are two main characters in the play: Alan Strang, a young man being given psychiatric analysis after blinding 6 horses and the psychiatrist treating him, Martin Dysart. Their sessions form the majority of the play, with most of the action leading up to the blinding told in flashback scenes. Everyone’s onstage for the whole of the play, with the other characters also acting as chorus and at times, sound effects to indicate Alan’s state of mind at various points in the play. Alan and Dysart are integral to the success of the piece, they play off each other and the remaining characters: Alan’s parents, Dysart’s colleagues, the stables staff (of which I played the stable owner) and the horses themselves, play off them. Having worked so hard to get the role of Alan, Tim Rolfe was a dream in the rehearsals: committed, inventive, hard-working and happy to throw himself into whatever the role required of him - although he didn’t go nude, as happens to the character at the end of the play. Unfortunately, the actor playing Dysart, didn’t match up. He could have been excellent , had he bothered to turn up to more than an occasional rehearsal. His girlfriend, who was also in the play, was at a loss as to why he wasn’t bothering to engage with the show despite her encouraging him. We potentially got our answer when he dumped her, a shock that was so bad, she took to her bed for a week. Eventually, the role of Dysart was offered to RH, one of the people working on the community play who had read in the part as a favour to the director, who had played Titania opposite my Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. RH had played Flute, one of the Mechanicals.
All progressed smoothly, until about a week before the play when RH suddenly doubted whether he was going to be able to play the part. At this stage, I was being sounded out about trying to learn the part at short notice, I had a great ability back then to not only know my lines, but other people’s as well. Fortunately, RH came back, but it was obvious that he would not be on the course much longer. He looked terrible, like a man who had undergone some form of nervous shock and gradually it emerged that he had worked himself into some form of infatuation towards the director of the show. She had worked extra rehearsals with just Tim and RH and clearly the regular proximity to her had built something up inside him. I’ve no idea whether he asked her out and she rebuffed him, but the first sign I had that his feelings for her might have crossed into unhealthy ones were when we were changing into costumes for the play and I noticed that he had carved her name across the skin of his chest.
Being English and wanting to ensure that the play got on without any more hold-ups, everyone kept quiet about the fact that we had someone showing potential signs of mental illness in the cast to go alongside that which was being played on the stage, but once we returned to college in April, RH was asked to leave the course, which he did without fuss. Several years later, when attending a Christmas morning mass at All Saints Church, Falmouth, I saw RH handing out orders of service and hymn books. He saw me, I opened my mouth to say hello, and he quickly looked away from me again. Perhaps, I was a memory of something he wanted to forget.
My own challenges within the show were relatively benign, apart from the fact that I could never say the line, “Very, if he didn’t.” in response to a question from Dysart, to the satisfaction of the director. If you’ve ever seen Hail, Caesar! then try to imagine the “Would that it were so simple” scene but with a lot more teenage angst, swearing and resentment. Even now, 31 years later, I don’t think I’d be entirely sure about how to approach the line.
I also began a ritual, which I have continued to do for every show I’ve acted in since Equus. On the first night of every show, the last thing I do before leaving home to set out for the venue is to lie on my bed and listen to Paul Jones’s 1966 hit, High Time. At the time, this was because of my interest in 60s music and Manfred Mann in particular. But although the song is about a burgeoning love affair, I saw in its lines about anticipatory excitement, something which reflected the nervous energy that goes into a first night. “Soon we’re going in be in big time,” made me think of curtain calls and applause. The links were tenuous, but they helped me harness frissons of energy on opening nights, and have done so on every first night over these last 31 years. Even now, my mother will ask me, “Did you do High Time before you left?”
The main thing I took out of Equus was an appreciation and interest in the work of its author, Peter Shaffer. My first read of the Equus script was in a collection of three of his plays, with an introduction that mentioned some of his other plays and made him seem, even now, quite unlike any other 20th Century playwright in terms of the sweep and scale of his plots and stories. He could move from brittle domestic chamber pieces (Five Finger Exercise -1958) to uproarious farce (Black Comedy -1965) while also creating plays about the conquest of Peru by the Spanish (The Royal Hunt of the Sun -1964) which apparently contains one of the greatest stage directions in all theatre: They cross the Andes, not forgetting his great culturally historical what-if, Amadeus (1979), which imagines a scenario where the reason for Mozart dying in poverty was because his contemporary, Antonio Salieri manipulated it into happening due to his disgust that such exquisite music could be produced by such a boorishly uncouth man. Barely a word of it was historically accurate, but it played for thousands of performances on Broadway and the 1984 film took 90 million dollars at the box office (from an 18 million dollar budget) and won 8 Oscars including the trinity of Best Film, Director and Actor. Shaffer also won for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Whole countries and downstairs flats; the profound and the trivial; the shocking and the hilarious - Shaffer’s work inhabits all of these places and has drawn me in since I first clapped eyes on his writing. After Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn (4 productions), Shaffer is the playwright whose work I’ve done most. 10 years after Equus, I appeared in Black Comedy on John Peel’s 64th birthday, as it happens. While in 2011, I played Mr Bardolph in Lettice and Lovage (1987). One day, I intend either to act or direct in Shaffer’s late 60s play about the nature of pacifism against direct action, Shrivings. Peter Hall considered his failure to mount the production he felt the script deserved to be one of his greatest professional regrets. I don’t intend to make the same mistake.
There’s only 1 month currently left on this, but this 1976 episode of Arena focuses on Equus and contains a lengthy interview with Shaffer.