I talk sometimes about tracks on this blog being borderline inclusions on my metaphorical mix tape. Girly Loop by Moonshake is so borderline that I can picture it diving under a descending doorway, Indiana Jones-style to take up its place here rather than being left out in the cold.
It owes its place here, mainly, due to pleasure in having new material from Moonshake and hearing them on a Peel show again. The material he had played from the Eva Luna album had been among some of the most consistently entertaining heard on a Peel show during late 1992. Now, the band were back with a mini-album called Big Good Angel, a record which functioned as something of a holding operation while the band toured extensively through the first half of 1993.
However, alarm bells have been ringing when I find myself admitting that it has taken me 3 or 4 listens to engage with Girly Loop, and even then I’d say that my enthusiasm for it is lukewarm at best. When I posted about their Peel Session from 29/1/93, I highlighted the band’s smorgasbord of styles and textures that they work into their songs as being what drew me towards them. But, curiously, it’s precisely that blending which works against the track here. The mood starts out nocturnal, spooky and primal as Margaret Fiedler McGinnis sings about trying to find crazy men and wild men, as a contrast to the passive partner that she has at home. The illicit thrill - albeit a dangerous one - of trying to find, what I presume are new sexual partners, that she tries to convey as she steps out into dangerous environments is telegraphed by bursts of noise which are trying to introduce notes of abrasiveness into a quiet basic track, but which just ending up sounding either like a flock of seagulls having an argument or an amplifier breaking wind.
For a change, the eclecticism sounds forced, they’re metaphorically throwing sounds out of the speakers to see what sticks, and at times you can see the beads of sweat on their foreheads with the desperate effort of it all.
It just gets by on the strength of who it is and Fiedler McGinnis’s vocal. Also, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see how the approach here may have inspired PJ Harvey’s music in her post-Rid of Me albums. Fiedler McGinnis would subsequently play as part of Harvey’s live band in the early 2000s, so I trust that Polly made her debt clear to Margaret.
Peel played this 1972 roots reggae track because he claimed that he was still going through his collection of singles even though he had now found the elusive record in the Little Richard cover search. I’m guessing that in the L section, Lee and The Clarendonians would have been positioned before Mickey Lee Lane.
If Discogs is to be believed, then Lee in this instance was Hubert Lee, and this was one of his earliest releases. Indeed, it may have been a conscious decision to pair Lee up with the more experienced vocal duo, The Clarendonians (Peter Austin and Ernest Wilson), to give things a more polished veneer. It continues the theme of records from this Peel show which deal with relationships collapsing, although in this case, it’s the man waiting up with a rolling pin to greet the late homecoming of his party-loving other half, and sending her to bed with a message that her behaviour has killed his love for her.
I’ve had to do a lot of driving recently, both for work and for the extended run of a play I’ve been in. This has led to me following Peel’s lead and re-listening to albums I haven’t heard for many years. The tone of this track came back to me when I was listening to Better Do Better from Stars of CCTV by Hard-Fi. 33 years separate Night Owl and Better Do Better, but the message is clear - whether you’re in Feltham or Jamaica - those women gonna drive you mad!
Still makes my head go all funny, that one. John Peel after playing Suzanne on 7/5/93.
The Phantom Fifty had got to Number 17 and presented a track which is the flip-side of Vi Ploriontos by Scrawl. Whereas that track was about someone choosing to end a relationship, Suzanne finds Russell Yates and Moose having to manage the pain of being dumped by the titular lover, who at least has the decency to look sad about it.
Musically, there’s a lot going on in Suzanne, which reflects the sense of emotional turmoil that it’s trying to chronicle. The chiming guitars that open it sound like choked breaths of disbelief that another day has come around and that the pain of this breakup has to be relieved again, a weary recognition that things haven’t got easier yet. We even have arpeggios that sound like falling tears cropping up at some points. Lyrically, the song touches on the pain of seeing the one who has let you go having the strength to work through their own guilt and make progress, all while Yates still finds himself looking longingly at photographs he’s not yet ready to throw out and recognising that, just by existing, Suzanne still has mastery over his emotions and heart: She walks all over me/I can’t take it from her.
And what complicates these feelings further is the fact that while Yates suffers, both Suzanne and the world at large keep going, oblivious to his pain: She goes where she wants to etc while the galloping, driving drum pattern sounds like the rest of the world clattering around our stricken, lovelorn hero. Moose up the ante on this from around 2:15 onwards by introducing a loud white noise effect through to the end of the song which does a brilliant job of evoking just how overwhelming it can be to try and pick your way through the everyday world when your heart is broken.
Around the second chorus the white noise guitar bursts through and takes over the song, swinging from side to side on the stereo spectrum, hitting a single note column of sound where a normal guitar solo might be, and the song just builds onwards, drums roll, guitars get more frantic, the noise increases like the blood boiling in your ears until the band crash to a halt. Still stunning now, and for me a high water mark for shoegazing. (Taken from We almost laughed, we almost cried, a 2014 retrospective article on the work of Moose, published on A Goldfish Called Regret).
My notes seem to suggest that I misinterpreted what In 2 Deep was about when I first heard it. I thought it was tremendous, but was perturbed by troubling sentiments. I was probably guilty of taking the title and the line at the 38 second mark about re-offending, as a sign that the track was about the narrator embracing crime, and accepting it as their way of life, because it was impossible to turn back from it.
However, it’s become clear to me on subsequent listens that it’s a repudiation both of a criminal life and living a conventional 9-to-5 existence. The NSO crew - Douglas Haywoode, Niles Hailstones and Ola The Soul Controller - have clear heads about both their purpose and the sacrifices they will have to make in order to be true to what they want to do. However, there’s no bravado on show here. The mood of the track is quite downbeat with its repeated wah-wah sample reflecting all the possibilities being gone over and rejected, and the jazz trumpet evoking the noirish sense of late nights and melancholia at the struggles which await them as they try both to develop as artists, and stay true to their cultural principles.
And make no mistake, “struggle” is the central theme of In 2 Deep. It’s the struggle not to work as a wage slave or puppet, so as to attain the dream of a place in Battersea, eating caviar and swine - now that’s what I call London weighting. It’s a struggle not to get embroiled in intra-racial conflicts with other black people and artists over trivialities - such as a brand of trainer - which can wind up leaving people dead. And it’s a struggle which has to be faced alone. I found the most affecting section of the track to be the run from 1:23 to 2:16, where the MC laments the way in which nobody impedes the progress of black people more than other black people, and in rap/hip-hop, you have to keep your aspirations quiet as you build them up, so as not to attract dangerous attention. Choose your time to flex, wisely, appears to be the message.
And then there’s the pressure to succeed before life either makes other choices for them, or the streets end up claiming them, one way or another. The closing refrain of Time is running out adds another layer of pressure to the NSO Force’s mission. The track carries the weight of mental agony and it transmits the harshness of urban London life. NSO Force certainly had to put up with their share of setbacks, including the disappointment of seeing their one and only Peel Session, recorded in November 1989, go unbroadcast due to excessive swearing.
But it’s not all grim stuff. If nothing else, this may be the only hip-hop track to ever feature the words dilly dally in it.
2) Like Vi Ploriontos, Slugger made my list of inclusions - albeit with a question mark next to it - then I was going to pass on it, only to reprieve it.
I don’t think Slugger is as good a track as Vi Ploriontos, but this could be down to it being harder to get a handle on. I think it’s about outsiders trying to break into a clique, but doing a bad job of it, though it’s not easy to decipher that from the vocals. I was helped by the fact that part of the lyrics are included in the liner notes for Deep End:
Fly in to town on a saucer of gold.
You wouldn’t know cool
If it crept up and slugged you in the nose.
I was probably guilty of giving up too easily, but I initially wrote the track off as being too insubstantial for inclusion. However, when I found myself thinking about Vi Ploriontos, I was convinced that the riff to Slugger was from Vi Ploriontos. The fact that that chugging riff had clamped itself to my brain convinced me to put it back on the metaphorical mixtape. Sometimes, you just have to go with the vibes.
Having recently written a post about what it felt like to be dumped after a long term relationship, it makes sense that within the same Peel show, we should also be able to enjoy a track written from the perspective of the one who has decided it’s time to pull the plug on a relationship. I think, in comparison to the subject of derision in Vi Ploriontos, I probably got off lightly as co-authors Marcy Mays and Sue Harshe firmly go in two-footed on their soon-to-be ex.
One thing I didn’t mention in my break up post was the way in which, when you’re dumped after a lengthy relationship, you find yourself wondering why you bothered putting in all the time and effort that you did. Once you get over the end of the relationship, all the good times and happy memories become a comfort to you, and something to remember with pride. But when you’re in the immediate aftermath of the break-up, then every kind word, every happy time, every penny spent feels like it was a waste of time, given that it ultimately led to heartbreak.
What’s interesting about the dynamic in Vi Ploriontos, is that Scrawl feel exactly the same sense of disappointment and let-down. They reflect back on the trinkets that were bought: fine wines, Megadeth concert tickets, trips away etc; though there is a note of ambiguity as to whether these were things bought by Scrawl or by their ex. Regardless, at this point, it only counts as wasted money and poor taste. The key line by which Scrawl announce their intention to end the relationship is You’re not worth all the space that I let you use up. So, a point of no return has clearly been passed.
Given that Vi Ploriontos translates from Latin as “I forced them to cry” and with its ongoing refrain of You’re gonna cry, I suspect that the break up has come about because the ex has done something unforgivable rather than because they’ve simply drifted apart.
Despite it making my list, I had originally thought that I was going to pass on Vi Ploriontos, but what reprieved it was hearing some more of Scrawl’s music from Peel shows broadcast later in 1993, in particular a track called Your Mother Wants to Know, which showed me that Scrawl had a very nice line in tracks about romantic and interpersonal dysfunction. I want to enjoy them while I can because Peel stopped playing them after ‘93, though this wasn’t helped by them signing to Elektra and a three year delay between albums.
Video courtesy of Scrawl -Topic.
Lyrics are copyright of Sue Harshe and Marcy Mays.
This was the second of three sessions which Fun-Da-Mental recorded for John Peel, so there’s time for me to revise my opinion, I’m sure, but listening to this three track session, all of which is included in the video above, I found myself having to confront an uncomfortable personal reaction to Fun-Da-Mental’s music. What they sing about is important, necessary and vital….but on the evidence of this session, they’re also very boring to listen to. It’s a tightrope that a lot of socially conscious groups have to walk. Music with a message that needs to be heard, but which can end up being an aural slog.
Fun-Da-Mental don’t help themselves given the stature of some of those that they sample. And when they work in blasts of oratory from figures like Malcolm X, Mahatma Gandhi and Louis Farrakhan, they inevitably end up sounding weedy in comparison once they start rapping themselves. Even worse in tracks like Front Line and Tribal Revolution, which made my initial list of selections, they become so overwhelmed by the noise that they make, that the listener becomes passive; hit by a wall of samples and sloganeering, but utterly unengaged by either the content or form. You may feel differently, and for all my carping, I’m glad that the session is out there in full for you to listen and decide for yourself. But it begs the question, has anyone ever listened to a Fun-Da-Mental track for pleasure? Is such a thing possible or desirable with their music?
I don’t think it is, but one thing which links Fun-Da-Mental with the other bands listed above is that when they do come up with something which hits the mark, they really make it count, and Countryman - which is the opening track on the video, but was their session closer on the 7/5/93 show - is a magnificent piece of music, which has stayed with me ever since I heard it again for the first time in several years, when I was prepping this post.
Several things are striking about Countryman, but the thing that stands out to me is that regardless of the anger which features in the track either from the sampled Midlands bigot or the contemptuous laugh that Aki Nawaz gives after he reveals the ratio of Victoria Crosses awarded against the number of Indian born servicemen who served in the British Army during the Second World War (25:2,000,000), it’s all undercut by the mood of sadness that runs throughout the track. It’s there in the string sample that opens the track and recurs throughout (dilruba?, esraj?, Tar shehnai?, taus?); it’s in Bad-Sha Lallaman’s baffled vocal, wherein he wonders why Asian men would give up the comforts of family love and village peace to travel to a promised land that only offers them poor housing, jobs that are only fit for animals and an expectation that they turn their back on their cultural roots in order to follow…what exactly?
….they bring their ways, but they don’t want our ways. And yet nobody ever asks the bigots, what ways immigrants are expected to follow. Change religion? OK, but how many BNP members attend church every Sunday? Show deference to the British? In other words, transpose Empire mentality within our own streets and communities? How would that work? Must they work only as our inferiors? Bow to us in the street? What is it that you want? Can you explain it in any way that makes sense? And they can’t.
That undertone of sadness in Countryman even extends to the bigot, whose ignorance seems rooted in bewilderment as much as anything else.
Mind you, Fun-Da-Mental give him and his brethren cause for concern as they announce at 6:20 that they can build a new society alongside their countrymen, and given that this will be done to white man’s surprise, it implies that they are done with trying to meet the likes of the bigot halfway, they will do it themselves and try to make it work. The inference is clear: if you want separation, we’ll give it to you. And we will flourish.
Flash forward 33 years, and we find ourselves in a country where the political landscape currently sees the children of immigrants all chasing the vote of the bigot by emphasising just how much they’ve followed our ways and that they too see those that bring their ways as the problem that over-rides all others. Meanwhile those of us who would prefer it if we all just work together to make the greatest country on Earth, into a place where we can all prosper are patronised and told that we don’t understand the concerns of people in this country. If the direction of travel continues in the way that the lamp post flaggers and vast sections of the media are trying to move it, then maybe the time will have come for the ideas Fun-Da-Mental floated in Countryman to be put into practice. And it won’t be a moment too soon.
Fun-Da-Mental put out Countryman as a single, later in ‘93. The order of the verses is different from that in the Peel Session.
Videos courtesy of FruitierThanThou and NationRecordsLabel.
Lyrics are copyright of Amir Ali and Inder Matharu.
