Tuesday 15 October 2024

Equus: The Best of John Peel (2 January - 27 March 1993)

 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.

Equus mixtape - 2 January - 27 March 1993












Velocity Girl - Copacetic (20 March 1993) (starts at 2:52 on the video).




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?

Photography by David Gregg.

Other show mixtapes
Oliver! (November 1991 - April 1992)

The Comedy of Errors (May - July 1992)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (October - December 1992)


Friday 11 October 2024

Equus appendices: Recovered tracks from January - March 1993

 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.

Free Kitten - Smack (2 January 1993)   Video courtesy of The Paradox King




F.I.A.F - Untitled (10 January 1993) Video courtesy of digitizedbyfulop94



Foreheads in a Fishtank bringing their warped aesthetic to dance music and doing it brilliantly, though I think this version was even better.


Tse Tse Fly - Bus Window (29 January 1993) Video courtesy of mezcalhead.




This STILL does not play in YouTube view, but can be downloaded and played as an MP4. My thanks to @johnb_rox on X for investigating this.

With thanks to all the uploaders.








Thursday 10 October 2024

Equus: John Peel Show - Saturday 27 March 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

 John Peel

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 CoupĂ© ClouĂ©. 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.

Pond - Grinned - This is the second week running that Pond were rejected on the listen back. Are they destined to join The Hair and Skin Trading Company as this blog’s nearly men?

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/ Tephra10,000 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.

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.



Thursday 3 October 2024

Equus: Mickey Lee Lane - Tutti Frutti (27 March 1993)



On the final Peel show to soundtrack Castaway Theatre Company’s production of Equus, he finally managed to track down the cover of a Little Richard song which he had spent so long working through his singles collection trying to find. Of course I had to keep that back as the final track for this production.

The first mention of the search on this blog dates back to a Peel show broadcast almost exactly one year earlier than this 27/3/93 show. In the course of that time, I, like many listeners back then I’m sure, had built up in their minds what the record was going to be and what it would be like. For myself, I suspected either some kind of Delta Blues freak out version or an immaculately performed Stax-style soul version, that Peel would have got hold of during his years living and working in the United States, and cut by someone who history had forgotten. I also suspected that Peel would have been one of only a handful of people to own the single.
Well, I was partially correct. The artist in question, Mickey Lee Lane, was never a household name and Peel wondered whether he had recorded any other records - just the ten or so, John.  But in every other respect, my assumptions were confounded. Lane was no grizzled blues man or ghetto soul man, he was a rock ‘n’ roller who wrote, recorded, toured and engineered obsessively from the mid 1950s onwards in numerous groups and often in tandem with family members either as a songwriter or a performer. Despite looking like British sports commentator, Alan Parry, Lane packed any release he put out under his name with as much berserk rock ‘n’ roll energy as he could. Examples include Shaggy Dog (1964)(They’re All in) The Senior Class (1964), The Zoo (1964) and Hey-Sah-Lo-Ney (1965), which sees Lane giving James Brown a run for his money.

All assumptions about Lane seemed to be wrong. Peel played his version of Tutti Frutti, and described it as having a “Fort Worth, Texas sound”. Maybe Lane was aiming for that, but considering he came from New York, I doubt it was something he automatically gravitated towards. I thought Peel had got the record during his years in the States, but it was released in 1967, by which time Peel was back in the UK and establishing himself as a darling of the UK underground scene through both The Perfumed Garden and his early appearances on Radio 1. Also, while it’s true that Lane’s version of Tutti Frutti languished in relative obscurity, it could have been a different story but for record company politics. The record was put out by Mala Records, but despite strong reviews it was under-promoted by them in favour of focussing on Neon Rainbow, the follow-up record by The Box Tops to their international smash hit, The Letter. Lane suspected that the record was sat on at the request of Kama Sutra, the label he was working with at the time, who didn’t want him to leave them in order to go out and promote Tutti Frutti.

If you’ve listened to any of the Lane recordings linked to above - and I hope that you will, because they’re fantastic - you’ll be able to hear his signature touches all over his recording of Tutti Frutti. There’s prominent tambourine and Danelectro guitar. Most interesting of all is the fact that Lane’s recording isn’t strictly speaking a straight cover of Little Richard’s original. He rewrites the lyrics, replacing the girls named Sue and Daisy with Cyn (I don’t know where she’s been), Marie (She looks so good to me), Jane (She dances in the rain) and Joan (I’d like to take her home). He shows due respect to Little Richard by not singing Awopboploobopalopbamboom, instead he scats it into something which fits his own creation. As the record progresses, we get the sense that Lane is trying to see how many different musical styles he can take this rock ‘n’ roll touchstone into within the space of the 140 seconds that the tape machines are running. The first 50 seconds match up rock ‘n’ roll with soul music. Then from 0:52 to 1:20, the song lurches into popsike-acid rock with piano and keyboard runs reminiscent of The Doors. The final minute takes on a positively gospel-like fervour with call and response vocals playing out in front of a musical background which gets progressively faster and more deliriously intense.  
It’s a staggeringly good recording and while we may like to think of Peel in late 1967 immersing himself in Donovan albums or promising unlimited studio sessions to Tyrannosaurus Rex, he hadn’t lost his love of a good rockin’ tune, no matter how much terrible poetry he was happy to read out, and it’s not hard to see why he loved it then and why he was prepared to go to such lengths to try and track it down.

As for Mickey Lee Lane, he would go on to release one more single after Tutti Frutti, before devoting his time to writing, performing and production work. On the strength of what I’ve heard so far, I’d be tempted to go to Discogs and pick-up a copy of a 1995 compilation of his recordings called Rockin’ On… Lane died in 2011, but more information about his life and career can be found in this Tony Wilkinson article from 2005.

Video courtesy of RoverTCB
All lyrics are copyright of Mickey Lee Lane.

Thursday 26 September 2024

Equus: LMNO Pelican - Spine (27 March 1993)


 

Buy this at Discogs

Spine is quite good, isn’t it?  I mean it would be even better if we could actually hear what was being sung, but what we’re presented with is perfectly acceptable, drone-rock. John Peel seemed to regard it as the best track on LMNO Pelican’s Boutros Boutros EP, given that all currently available tracklistings show he played it 4 times over March-May 1993, including for daytime audiences during his week sitting in for Jakki Brambles on Thursday 8 April.

Only one other track from the Boutros Boutros EP got played by Peel. Records currently show a single play on the night before this programme went out of the lead track on the EP, Call Yossarian. The recording I made my picks from for Peel’s 26/3/93 show missed the first 20 minutes or so and that’s why I never included Call Yossarian on the blog up to now. I only became aware of it when some research on LMNO Pelican led me to a site which contained 3 tracks from a 1991 session* which the band recorded for Dave Fanning on the Irish station RTE 2fm. Both in its session form and on the EP, it stood out loud and clear that Call Yossarian was their best track by a mile. It also becomes clear when listening to the four tracks on Boutros Boutros and the Fanning Sessions that Spine is something of an anomaly in LMNO Pelican’s back catalogue. Most of the music which I’ve heard from them has had a punk-New Wave edge to it which sounds like a faithful reproduction of underground rock circa 1979/80. Their music, most especially in Call Yossarian, fizzles and sparkles with energy and singable choruses.  I can imagine that their gigs must have descended into glorious mosh-fests within a minute of the opening notes being played out.

But Spine stands out because it sounds the most contemporary of their tracks at that time. The bassline smells of grunge, the guitar work channels the more assertive end of shoegaze, especially during its final 90 seconds, the drums hit a Baggy-cum hard rock groove, and the vocal?  Well, I know that Patrick Garrett can sing better, so I won’t say he’s channelling C86, but overall it feels to me as though LMNO Pelican were looking to channel Freefall or Catherine Wheel in Spine, and it is fair to say that Spine is the only track on the EP which doesn’t feel like it’s harking back to a sound from 13 years previously, and that may be why it caught Peel’s ear more than any of the other tracks. I’m bound by the rules I set myself here and am saddened that I didn’t catch Call Yossarian on the recording of 26/3/93. Had I done so, I’d likely be calling it as a potential Festive Fifty winner for 1993. But I’m happy to know it’s out there and happy to have it in my mental jukebox if not on my metaphorical mixtape. Instead, I will make do with Spine and consider it a case of Peel giving me what I didn’t know I needed, instead of giving me what I want.

At least when Bivouac recorded a song called Spine for a Peel Session, we could hear the words.

Coming next: Peel finds the record he’d been chasing after in the Little Richard Cover Search.

Video courtesy of 021snakey

*The date of the session is a guess by the uploader on The Fanning Sessions Archive

Saturday 21 September 2024

Equus: Hula Hoop - Oh Toby/Sometimes I Feel Just Alright/Blues From a Vaseline Gun [Peel Session]; Leo Kottke - Vaseline Machine Gun (27 March 1993)


 Hula Hoop - Oh Toby


Hula Hoop - Sometimes I Feel Just Alright


Hula Hoop - Blues From a Vaseline Gun


Leo Kottke - Vaseline Machine Gun 

This programme featured a repeat of Hula Hoop’s Peel Session, which was originally broadcast on 8 January 1993. When this blog covered that show, of the three tracks I heard, I was initially only interested in Blues From a Vaseline Gun, but the repeat has given me a chance to reassess the session, and I’m delighted to now have the opportunity to include three-quarters of it on the metaphorical mixtape.

Listening to the three tracks here, I’m struck by a couple of things:
a) They recorded the session in November 1992, before news of the dissolution of Pixies became widely known. I wonder if they got wind of the fact that Black Francis was getting ready to move on to new projects, because in this session, they sound like they’re auditioning to replace them.
b) When considering the content and themes of these tracks, I wonder whether the members of Hula Hoop had been spending a lot of time watching 1970s  New Hollywood movies. I say this because each of them puts me in mind of a film from that period,; one of them blatantly, the other two slightly more obliquely.

Oh Toby = Five Easy Pieces (1970) - Well this is a giveaway, most especially because the title of the film is bellowed several times over during the closing 15 seconds of the song. But the tale of the protagonist in Oh Toby is an updated version of what happens to Bobby Dupea in Bob Rafelson’s film.  One difference though is that I think Hula Hoop are taking a slightly more sympathetic line towards their protagonist than Rafelson, Carole Eastman and Jack Nicholson did with Dupea. Whereas Dupea willingly walked away from a wealthy lifestyle and a potential career as a classical musician in order to work in the oilfields and screw around with cafe waitresses, Toby’s friend saw his dreams crushed at school and by a world that wouldn’t offer him the opportunities he hoped for. Although he finds consolation in his factory worker girlfriend, his Billy Joel and Bruce Hornsby CDs and his night-time joint, it’s clear that regret bites hard. Perhaps he wanted to play rock ‘n’ roll piano, but the lessons and suit his mother got him when he was 9 meant he was forced into playing classical style and an inability to satisfy what he was expected to do and what he wanted to do caused him to retreat, wounded, into the underclass.

Sometimes I Feel Just Alright = Klute (1971) - Sometimes, when watching a film, we may find that our interest and focus switches from the main characters to a supporting or minor one.  Klute is named after a private investigator, played by Donald Sutherland, but I have seen it suggested that a more accurate title for the film would have been Bree, given that this is the character that the actions of the film revolve around and Jane Fonda dominates it. Her character is a freelance prostitute, looking to leave paid sex behind either to become an actress or a model. Although marketed as a thriller, the film is essentially a character study of Bree as she tries to cope with changing her life, her growing attraction to Klute and the danger she finds herself in as they try to discover what happened to Klute’s missing friend, who may have had links to Bree as an abusive client of hers. Along the way, Klute and ourselves meet some of the characters who populated Bree’s world when she was turning tricks. One of them is a prostitute turned drug addict called Arlyn Page, who Klute and Bree meet in a scene which shows that while Bree is struggling to keep her head above water, her life could have been considerably worse had she she gone the same way as Arlyn. We only meet her in one scene but it’s a memorable one, given the desperate edginess of a struggling addict conveyed by Dorothy Tristan.
I think Hula Hoop had Arlyn Page in mind when they wrote Sometimes I Feel Just Alright, which observes the inexorable descent of a woman into suicide in a devastatingly dispassionate way. The song refers to the way that girl frequently never sleeps alone, that she sleeps with lots of boys and, most memorably, kisses men with a duplex mouth/sucking in life through big blue lips. Perhaps, she is a prostitute, moving from client to client and losing her individuality with each encounter. After all, we’re told her eyes are jaundiced. From 2:30 onwards, the song takes us on the journey to death, with her sedated by a combination of knife and pills. And as she slips below the water that feels like snow, she hears the title of the song bearing her on her way.  With its references to sleepless nights, and her being punished for crimes she doesn’t remember, I’ve concluded that the subject of this song is either dying or dead and that they are either a junkie or a vampire. If it’s the latter, then I propose the following:
The Addiction  (1995) = Sometimes I Feel Just Alright - Maybe this track was culturally paying forward to Abel Ferrara’s heroin metaphor vampire film. I can picture him and screenwriter, Nicholas St. John discussing the movie, with a copy of Hula Hoop’s album, My Sweet Amputee playing in the background. Also, the brittle, highly strung quality of the music sounds tailor made for the inside thoughts of The Addiction’s lead character, Kathleen, a quiet philosophy student turned vampire. As played by Lili Taylor, we see her hesitatingly drawn into life as a vampire, only to become consumed by it to an extent which has her finally craving death.

Blues From a Vaseline Gun = Tracks (1976) - Hula Hoop have covered drifters, drug addicts/vampires and now they round off the set with the viewpoint of a psycho.  If Blues From a Vaseline Gun had been written from the perspective of the lead character in Tracks, I’m guessing that they’ve picked up from the final 15 minutes of the film, whereby Dennis Hopper, on a day off from escorting the coffin of a fellow serviceman killed in Vietnam on a train journey across America, ends up sabotaging a romantic afternoon in the park with Taryn Power, due to a series of PTSD induced hallucinations/flashbacks which have been building up inside him over the course of his journey. These eventually lead to him conducting an assault on the small town where his colleague is buried in a funeral where he is the only attendee. 
The mood in Blues From a Vaseline Gun captures this spirit of romance, sensuality, mental disorientation and violence as the protagonist in it goes from an open-air session of foreplay into some kind of breakdown leading to violence. The difference being that they recognise what they’ve done, whereas by the end of Tracks, Hopper is fully committed to bringing the hell of a Vietnamese foxhole to a seemingly indifferent small town America. 
Tables lifting.
The hammer’s clicking and the match is struck.
Another line from the song which leads me to think that it’s inspired by Tracks is because during the film, Hopper’s main companion is a small hand held radio from which provides the pretext for the film’s soundtrack of 1930s/40s songs to be heard. And in Blues From a Vaseline Gun, in the aftermath of whatever rampage the protagonist has gone on, they go back to their car, tormented by visions of red and find that your face is bleeding from the radio dial. But there’s no consolation in this, as they will just take up the gun again and try to blast the memory away.

The skill of Hula Hoop’s set is how they fit such intense and distressing themes into such joyous music. However, I was not persuaded either from January or March 1993 by the fourth song of the session, Leave Time to Go. Whichever movie inspired that track is not one I’m in a hurry to see.

John Peel would have been failing in his duties as a public service broadcaster if he had not followed Blues From a Vaseline Gun with a play of Vaseline Machine Gun by the acoustic guitar player, Leo Kottke. Originally recorded for Kottke’s 1969 album 6 - and 12-String Guitar, the inspiration for the track came from Kottke being woken from an open-air sleep by the noise from a nearby game of volleyball.
Peel dedicated it to his brother, Alan, who was hosting the Estonian group, Roovel Oobik, who had come over to the UK to record a Peel Session on March 20, but found to their horror, that the earliest they could return to Estonia was April 4. Peel had offered the band a chance to stay at Peel Acres, but the band had declined as they felt there was not going to be enough for them to do in Stowmarket compared to London.

Some links

Hula Hoop have put most of their output, including both their Peel Sessions on their Bandcamp page.

Tracks has been uploaded to YouTube, albeit in a version which sounds like it’s suffering from low-grade tinnitus. If you can’t face the prospect of sitting through Hopper, Dean Stockwell and others improvising on a train, then watch from 1:16 to the end to see where I think Hula Hoop may have been getting inspiration from.
Or maybe Tracks is inspiring me since I made similar associations around the relationship between Dennis Hopper and Taryn Power’s characters when blogging about Sundress by Hum, last year.

Klute, Five Easy Pieces and The Addiction are all on streaming services.

Lyrics copyright of their authors.
Videos courtesy of Distrokid (Hula Hoop) and Dan Phillips (Kottke).


Sunday 15 September 2024

Equus: Prince Far I - The Right Way (27 March 1993)


 

Buy this at Discogs


We like to imagine John Peel, sitting in his office at Peel Acres or snowed under at Room 318 in Broadcasting House listening to music and making considered choices about what would feature on his playlists. In the 1999 documentary about him, Turn That Racket Down, we witnessed him putting together running orders while listening to an album and noting down both timings and any tracks on the record which he may have wanted to play in a programme. The reality is that, given the amount of music both new and reissued that was sent for him to listen to, some records only received snatched, momentary listens; either to be returned to at another time or getting lost under the piles of vinyl and CDs fighting for space around him.

Such was the case with a compilation album issued by ROIR Europe called Dub or Die featuring artists like Niney the Observer and Lee “Scratch” Perry. The album opened with The Right Way by Prince Far I and The Arabs, from their 1978 album Crytuff Dub Encounter Chapter 1. Peel admitted that of the 13 tracks on the album, it was the only one he had heard so far. I suspect his thinking being that the reissued material wasn’t as pressing as the need to listen to newly released content.

Originally, I was going to say that references to Prince Far I will always be poignant for admirers of John Peel given that one of his last recorded statements on his final Radio 1 show, broadcast 11 days before his death included a mention of him in the belief that Far I had been sampled on Time 4 Change by Klute. But then I noticed that today - 15 September 2024 - marks the 41st anniversary of Far I’s death, at the age of only 38, after he was attacked and shot in his home. With that in mind, I give thanks for the happy coincidence of this blog arriving at Peel playing a Prince Far I track, so that I can pay tribute to him by including his work here. No poignancy, just pure dub brilliance.

Video courtesy of Mystic Revelation.