Guys and Dolls: Leatherface - Books (14 May 1993)

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I’ve been off work this week and have been enjoying and enduring record breaking temperatures for May in the United Kingdom. What I discovered in the early part of the week, when temperatures were at their hottest, is that they are not good conditions for listening to anything by Leatherface.  Each time I tried to start listening to Books, which was recorded for their fourth album, Minx, I found myself skipping on elsewhere after 30 seconds, “I’m too tired for you today” was my general attitude.  And if thrashy guitar noise was all that Leatherface had to offer, I may still be sitting here, necking cloudy lemonade and putting them off until the drizzle returns next week. But I persevered and in doing so found I was reminded of something I wrote about when they last featured on this blog - you really have to listen to the words. They may have looked like they were all you ever need to meet your bricklaying needs, but they were virtuoso musicians and romantic poets, in a way that contrasted with their sound. They had you cherishing beauty and melancholy, even while you moshed as though your life depended on it.

Books is another example of the music of aggressive reflection which appears to characterise many of Leatherface’s songs. Here, author Frankie Stubbs examines a relationship between a brother and a sister which has seen both of them become paralysed with inertia. It’s not explained whether one is caring for the other, or if both of them have seen their lives shrink due to uncontrolled circumstances. Throughout the song, there are references to things and objects from another time, which have stayed in place through habit for so long that the house they share seems to be physically crying out for change:

A house full of things some of which they hadn’t seen

Since they bought the sodding things in 1980-something.

And if only their place 

Had a little more space

And a little less waste

That would be something.

Stubbs is an observer to this unchanging picture, chafing at the bit to get out and get away:

I don’t wanna be, bound up like books.

I don’t wanna be a sad ornament of a place.

However, the cracked vocal note on which he ends the song implies a moment of doubt as to whether he will avoid the same fate.

As the year progressed, Leatherface moved towards a split. They recorded a third session for Peel on 23 December, which was broadcast in February ‘94, by which time Stubbs announced their dissolution, onstage, during a gig at The Garage, Islington. They reformed again, 5 years later and released four further studio albums between 1999 and 2010. 

Apart from their final session, Peel never played anything else by them after this programme, though he had been reading up on the band through an article in a magazine called Paint It Red, which focussed on the music scene in the North East. He was particularly taken by a photo in it of PJ Harvey, who were about to play a gig in Newcastle, which he thought was the best one he’d ever seen of her/them. That evening, the band* had played at the University of East Anglia, with Sheila and William in attendance.

While researching this article, I discovered just how highly rated and influential Leatherface were, with some describing them as the best UK punk band of the 90s, and their third album, Mush, venerated as one of the best guitar records of the decade. So, why did they not reach wider acclaim? Some answers may be found in this article/interview with Laurence Bell who had the group signed to his Roughneck Recording Company label and also put out a posthumous album after Leatherface’s first split, on Domino.  

Video courtesy of Leatherface - Topic

*I can’t wait till we get to the To Bring You My Love phase and know conclusively that all references to PJ Harvey refer to a person rather than a group.

Guys and Dolls - Gunshot - Bombing in 5 Minutes (14 May 1993)

 

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NOTE - On this video, Bombing in 5 Minutes begins at 20:00.

To celebrate the release of their debut album, Patriot Games, the Leytonstone rap trio, Gunshot’s label, Vinyl Solution also commissioned a limited edition (1000 copies) of instrumental mixes from the album.

Bombing in 5 Minutes takes its title from a hot-mic joke made by Ronald Reagan before recording his live weekly radio address to the American people on 11 August, 1984. Reagan intended to use that week’s recording to announce legislation which would allow student religious groups to meet on school premises outside school hours. During a soundcheck ahead of the broadcast, Reagan spoofed his announcement by saying:

My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes. 

How we laughed back in the day - John Peel after playing Bombing in 5 Minutes on this 14/5/93 show.

Although always intended as a joke, in the Two Tribes-esque atmosphere that still characterised the Cold War at the time, it wouldn’t have done much to reassure a scared world that any of these people had the slightest clue about what they were doing*.

As a reflection that the world of 1993 was in a happier place than had been the case, nine years earlier, Peel played Bombing in 5 Minutes as a response to a story in one of the news bulletins, which punctuated his programme, that America was decommissioning its Strategic Defence Initiative, otherwise known as the Star Wars programme, which had been in operation for a decade and intended to protect America from missile attacks.

As to how the instrumental version of Bombing in 5 Minutes compared to Gunshot’s vocal performance on the original Patriot Games album, I have to say that it doesn’t sound to me like much was being missed by going with the instrumental version. The vocal is so muddily recorded that it’s difficult to really get an handle on what’s going on beyond them using it as a self-motivation talk to themselves ahead of future rap battles against other crews. They certainly seemed to see these contests in apocalyptic terms given that Patriot Games included tracks with titles like World War 3 and Reign of Terror.

A contemporaneous musical take on the story courtesy of Jerry Harrison and Bootsy Collins, released under the name, Bonzo Goes to Washington.

*Things have changed so much, haven’t they…

More on the background and fallout from Reagan’s gaffe.

Video courtesy of SteveWonda and Talking Heads.

Guys and Dolls: The Tribesmen - Hot & Horny (14 May 1993)

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Recommended to Peel by colleagues at Radio 5, Hot & Horny was the final release by The Tribesmen, a house music collective of which there isn’t much clear information available beyond the fact that, on this record, DJ Yomi contributed and that the guitar lines were played by Jez Ansell.

Listening to it, I find myself wondering whether Grant Buckerfield was a fan of it given that he appears to have used at least one of the drum breaks as a direct inspiration in his theme tune for I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!

Video courtesy of The Football Programme and taken directly from a John Peel show, but not from 14/5/93.

Guys and Dolls: Machine - Eighty-Nine (14 May 1993)

 

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Machine was a one-off release from long-time collaborators, Alan Sage and Luke Slater. Eighty-Nine was the third track on an EP called Integrated Harmony. It’s possible that I would have overlooked it entirely had I not initially been engaged by its high tempo opening…which came about because Peel played it at the wrong speed. My notes, though, state that the track was Not without its charms, and although I prefer the EP’s title track, I think that the sentiment holds true when listened to at the correct speed. 

To anyone unsure whether or not to click the Play icon, I would say that Eighty-Nine is a must listen if you prefer the burblier end of acid techno rather than the squelchy end. I hope that helps.

Video courtesy of Acidalia.

Guys and Dolls: Grotus - Good Evening/The Same Old Sauce (14 May 1993)

 

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The last time Grotus appeared on a John Peel show, it was with a cover of We’re An American Band by Grand Funk. Now, 18 months later, they were back with their second album, Slow Motion Apocalypse, a title which, with 33 years’ worth of hindsight, appears laughably self-indulgent now.

I’m not crazy about a lot of violence on the screen, unless it’s done with a certain amount of taste.

Well, there’s more violence on the TV news then there is in the movie….

Taken from an interaction between Michael Rupert and Joe Spinnell when they appeared on an episode of The Joe Franklin Show on 27 January 1981. Spinnell was appearing to promote the slasher movie, Maniac.

Spinnell slightly undercut his own argument in the show by warning people not to come to the movie if they didn’t like blood and gore, but his point about the evening news still stands and has been periodically explored by musicians through the years.

Whether it’s over breakfast, lunch, dinner, before we go to bed, or over the course of the last 40 years, on a 24 hour cycle, the news is always out there and ready to give us a daily diet of murder, mayhem, repression, crime and political chaos that would fill a hundred different films. Good Evening comes from a pre-internet world and through its rising collage of jump cuts, backed by an annoyingly chirpy piece of library music, it shows how, each evening, avuncular looking middle-aged men would sit behind a desk, give us a friendly greeting and then tell us all about the awful things going on nationally and internationally. Americans - or in the UK , anyone watching either ITV News or Channel 4 News - would find the catalogue of misery interrupted by commercial breaks selling products that were intended to help with physical ailments before being pitched back into the rundown of awfulness, that could be happening right outside the front door. 

It’s pretty unsparing stuff. It doesn’t even include the more light-hearted “And finally…” news items that were designed to ensure that the news programmes always ended on an upbeat note. It’s not a new idea though, by any sense. 27 years earlier, Simon & Garfunkel closed their Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album with 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night in which they sang the Christmas carol in counterpoint to a news bulletin from Wednesday, 3 August 1966 which included brief summaries on disputes over the progress of the Civil Rights Act*, the death of comedian, Lenny Bruce, Martin Luther King preparing for a march due to take place in Chicago, disruption at HUAC’s hearings into anti-Vietnam War sentiment, and Richard Nixon calling for more funding for the war effort to prevent it stretching on for another five years, as well as labelling those against the war as a threat to American society. Which shows how intellectually barren MAGA’s appropriation of this crap has been.

Peel let Good Evening run on into The Same Old Sauce, which it was paired with on Slow Motion Apocalypse. I’m not crazy about it, but have kept it here for the sake of completeness and because it is an industrial metal take on the corrosive nature of television on the psyche and intellect. At the end, Lars Fox asks, There’s one thing that I want to know/Were people this stupid before there was TV? to which the only real answer is, well yes, but the population at large probably didn’t realise just how stupid everyone else was before it.

Video courtesy of IJWTHSTD Archives.

Lyrics are copyright of Lars Fox.

*60 years on, Republican Party legislatures seem to be doing everything they can to repeal this.

Guys and Dolls: John Peel Show - Friday 7 May 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

When I was acting in the play, Here Comes a Chopper, last year, I spent several happy hours talking about music with the director’s husband, Brian Harrington, who was playing the part of Death. During the rehearsal period, he was selling the majority of his extensive record collection, most of which made up the playlists for on his shows for Kennet Radio. One band he mentioned to me a couple of times was Stray, who having formed in 1966 are currently - as of 2023 - onto their fifth reformation. I listened to one of their tracks during the rehearsal period, and thought it was OK, but it turned out that I’d already heard them a couple of years previously, when Peel played Jericho from the 1971 album, Suicide. He was inspired to do this after playing a track called Stray by Heatmiser, which featured Elliott Smith. I wonder what Brian would have made of Peel summarising Stray as a good Second Division band from the era.

Amongst all the usual letters and faxes, it was an answerphone message that had grabbed Peel’s attention during the week. An unidentified, distraught man had left a message on the office answerphone talking about the death of their mother. Given that he was still processing the death of his own mother, the year before, Peel reached out to the caller to get in touch again if they were listening.

This blog’s been covering the 7 May 1993 edition of Kat’s Karavan since 21 January, and it’s no surprise given how many good records were broadcast that night. It’s likely that we’d still have been on this show for another month if the following tracks hadn’t fell from favour with me:

Jerry Lee Lewis - Crazy Arms - When it comes to Jerry Lee Lewis, nothing else showed me how much I’ve been ruined by Great Balls of Fire than re-listening to Crazy Arms, which featured on his debut album, released in 1958. It’s only after hearing Lewis perform in slower, more contemplative mood that you realise just how much Great Balls of Fire casts such a shadow over everything else he recorded. Crazy Arms is pleasant, but pedestrian and, for the moment, if I want piano shuffle, I’ll stick with Fats Domino.

If I ‘d been feeling vindictive, I would have included Crazy Arms simply because the opening piano figure  on it reminded me of the opening to I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do by ABBA. I’ve spent most of early April walking around, either singing that song or with it stuck in my head, so I could have chosen to make all of you suffer as well. Have a care if you click on the link… It’s too late, isn’t it? You’re already singing along to it, aren’t you?…

The reason why Peel was playing Jerry Lee Lewis was due to him seeing the TV premiere of Great Balls of Fire, a 1989 biopic about Lewis, with Dennis Quaid in the lead role, broadcast on Bank Holiday Monday. He hadn’t thought much of the film, but had praise for Quaid’s performance, and conceded that the film had been successful in doing what any good music biopic should do, namely sending him back to listen to the records. Furthermore, he had a bit of a connection to Lewis, in that he reckoned he was the first person in Liverpool to own Lewis’s debut album as he had pre-ordered and pre-paid for a copy at his local record shop.

Captain Jesus and the Sunray Dream - I’m So Dead Bored - How to define the sound on this track, or indeed on its accompanying album, All Thanks to the Lord Jesus Christ Amen?  I’d say space rock meets punk rock; with the musical emphasis on the former and the lyrical emphasis on the latter. Take a future Hawkwind frontman on bass, write songs whose titles and melodies subvert Clash/Sex Pistols tunes i.e. the aforementioned I’m So Dead Bored and the now prescient, Anarchy in the USA. Record and issue it on your own label out of Armley, Leeds and you have an album which impressed Peel due to it trying to walk its own path instead of trying to hitch itself to a current guitar scene. It sounds something of a throwback to circa 1980. My notes say that It doesn’t break any new ground for me, but it has undeniable intensity. Which is true even though it hasn’t stood up to reappraisal. 

It’s not helped by the fact that the whole album is on YouTube, and when heard in full context, I’m So Dead Bored ends up sounding like one of the least interesting tracks on the record, albeit the second half of the album falls into space rock jam tedium. Had I been coming back to hear a track like the similarly titled I’m So Depressed, I Wanna Be Me or the album’s big production number, Starship, I’d probably have been persuaded. As I say, you can decide for yourself whether you would have become one of Captain Jesus’s disciples, I’m So Dead Bored starts at 9:36.

Mortal - Psycho (Logic) - How different would this blog look if I posted about tracks as soon as I heard them? I have to ensure that there’s a lag between the period I’m writing about (May 1993) and the period I’m currently listening to (September 1993) so that there is no massive gap between postings. But if I had acted the moment I heard, then Psycho (Logic) would be on the metaphorical mixtape given that my notes call it a terrific dance track. But when I listened back to it, I started to wonder whether I was responding more to the samples of Anthony Perkins being particularly mesmeric in Psycho, than I was to the music around it. 

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a dance track, specifically because of its samples - there’s one potentially coming up in a few shows time featuring an off-mic Ronald Reagan - but, with a tinge of regret, I eventually concluded that if the Perkins samples weren’t included, I may not have even noticed the track in the first place. If you are looking for further Hitchcock infused material, then you may enjoy the Bernard Hermann-esque sounds on PJ Harvey’s Man-Size Sextet, which was also broadcast on this show.

Gallon Drunk - You Should Be Ashamed - featuring Terry Edwards on saxophone. I think this probably made the initial list purely because there’s an instrumental refrain in it which reminded me of two tracks that were released after You Should Be Ashamed. Namely, If I Only Knew by Tom Jones (1994) and Amnesia by Chumbawamba (1998), both which I have a regard for which sees-saws between pleasurable amusement and outright derision. But the rest of it left me wondering what on Earth I’d seen in it given that it sounded like standard Gallon Drunk mumblerock. It struck me that You Should Be Ashamed might have sounded out of place when listened to away from its parent album, From the Heart of Town. I was able to listen the LP, which has the feel of a concept album given that the record feels like it’s set among drinkers, druggies and debauchers who are united by disgust at themselves and alienation from civilised society. However, this didn’t change my opinion on You Should Be Ashamed. The whole exercise was:

a) pointless, as I wouldn’t have had the album as a point of reference to use in 1993, and…

b) frustrating, as I finally came across some Gallon Drunk songs that I really liked*, but I won’t be able to write about them here as it doesn’t look as though Peel ever gave any of them an airing.

Full tracklisting

*The tracks were Keep Moving On, Push the Boat Out and Bedlam. Apart from a single play for the latter in September 1992, when it was released as a single, Peel passed on all three of them.

Guys and Dolls: Fishmonkeyman - What’s the World Coming To? (7 May 1993)

 

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A word of heartfelt thanks to my benefactor, Webbie, for providing an upload for this track, which out of 24 tracks from this 7/5/93 show that made my initial list of inclusions, was the only one that wasn’t shareable. He may well have provided the very best from this show at the very last.

So, it’s late Spring/early summer 1993. And if you’re of a certain age, like me, that period of time means the first stirrings of Britpop. It was a phenomenon that was going to be the making of some bands, the destruction of others and the revitalisation of a couple of bands who were either perceived as having blown a big chance (Blur) or had been quietly toiling away for years and were finally about to be noticed (Pulp). If there had been any justice, it should have worked its restorative powers on Fishmonkeyman too.

Their story is closer to Blur’s than Pulp’s given they had spent 1990 into ‘91 attracting considerable interest and radio-play with their first two singles: If I’ve Told You Once and Breathing. After signing to Warner Music UK, they recorded an album called Gryst, only to suffer an almighty slap in the face when Warners chose not to release it. After an intense year of recording, gigging and writing, this decision knocked the stuffing out of the band. Three-quarters of the personnel left and guitarist and songwriter Paul Den Heyer spent 1992 writing new material and looking for new colleagues to play with.

With a new band around him, Den Heyer and Fishmonkeyman returned with a four-track EP, Seven Monkeys Sitting in a Tree, which they released through own label, Groovey Cardboard. After the trauma of late 1991, Den Heyer was determined to just have fun on this release and the lack of pressure appears to have contributed to him writing one of the earliest unknown Britpop songs. What’s the World Coming To? features a lyric about a character, a singable chorus line, tunefully noisy guitars and, in keeping with the period 1993-95, a tremendously carefree spirit to it. 

The target of the song is a faceless government bureaucrat, but this isn’t an Ernold Same-type sneer at boring people doing boring jobs. Instead, it looks at the notion that if governments bring forward legislation that harms people, the effects of those policies are enacted by people like the subject of What’s the World Coming To?. Your mortgage has to go up? Council tax on the rise? Cuts to services? Losing your benefits?  You could be living next door to someone who has had to ensure those measures are implemented. And, depressingly, the song suggests that not only do these people not feel conflicted by it (The man with no conscience has plenty to do), but that there are more of them willing to do this than we realise (He works in your office, he lives in your street/He’s everyone that you are likely to meet.)

The song briefly tries to offer some element of McCartney-esque sympathy towards its lead character by implying that they lost something of themselves when a love affair broke up, but it doesn’t dwell on this, especially once it tells that the man is a tyrant towards his current wife and children, and that, come rain or shine, they’ll be out there waiting for the train that takes them to the job which sees them wield power over people and communities. 

If we’re looking for contemporary parallels (in 1993), while lines like He’ll stop at nothing, to get his own way/Never stops talking, has nothing to say suggest that he would have found plenty in common with Blur’s hyper efficient Colin Zeal*, the later lines in the song such as When there’s a war, he’ll be first in the line/Cutting off ears with his Swiss Army Knife suggest that their bureaucrat may have found more common cause with someone like the bigot sampled on Countryman by that evening’s Peel Session guests, Fun-Da-Mental. After all, a phrase like What’s the World Coming To? can sound like a lament in anyone’s mouth, but what they may be lamenting could have different connotations depending on who says it.

Whether they intended to or not, Fishmonkeyman caught an early whiff of the British guitar zeitgeist in this track, but it did them no good commercially, albeit Den Heyer might not have been too keen to jump back into a major label’s arms again so soon after the Gryst fiasco. This interview on Cloudberry Cake Proselytism V.3 suggests that the experience left scars he wasn’t in a hurry to expose to the music business again. The band instead signed to Copasetic Records…where history repeated itself! After releasing a couple of singles, Fishmonkeyman had an album, This Is Where You Are, recorded and set for release, but Copasetic Records couldn’t put it out due to financial problems, at which point Fishmonkeyman disbanded.

*Blur released Modern Life is Rubbish, 3 days after this Peel Show was broadcast.

Video courtesy of Webbie.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.