29 May 1993 was a Saturday, so Peel’s show went out after Andy Kershaw’s world music show. However, Kershaw was away on 29/5/93, so was deputised by the musician, magazine editor and broadcaster, Ian A. Anderson. Before playing this opening track from Mav Cacharel’s eponymous 1991 album, Peel admonished himself for not taking the opportunity to ask Anderson whether he had any theories on why Cacharel had seemingly stopped releasing records.
Between 1987 and 1992, the former Loketo man released 5 albums, both under his own name and as part of a group called Kebo. But after 1992’s Triple Force, he only released one more solo album during the remainder of Peel’s lifetime, 2004’s Kebo na Brazzaville, which going by the John Peel wiki, Peel appears not to have played anything from, if he ever heard it.
Louzolo translates simply as “Love” in the Congolese language of Kikongo, and the track absolutely teems with it. I particularly love the little figure that is played after the end of each chorus refrain - first heard around 1:09, while the gorgeous little riff played for the first time at 1:30 sounds like the aural equivalent of skipping down a street high on life, love and elation. Louzolo is packed with such moments, it’s one of the best soukous tracks played on a Peel show in 1993. No wonder he was impatient for Cacharel to make a comeback.
When he back announced Ludiomil 75 on his 29/5/93 show, Peel remarked that it, Sounds like, and very probably is, something you’d prescribe. And it turns out, he was absolutely correct.
I haven’t found any evidence to suggest that Aad de Mooy, the man behind Paradise 3001, ever suffered from depression and managed it with Ludiomil. This track is very much at the downtempo end of his work, at least compared to some of his other material that Peel had previously played such as the Shake Inc. track, Adrenalin.
What it does particularly well is establish a tranquilised soundscape, with ambient watery synth sounds which evoke repetitive chemical emotions coursing around the depressed person’s mind and subconscious. It’s all underlaid by a dampened but insistent throbbing beat, like that of a heart in a state of drowsy inertia. Between 43 and 50 seconds in, we hear a set of tinkly sounds, as though the medication is entering the body. Once the last tinkle fades away, the battle is on as the heart rate starts to pick up speed; Van Mooy introduces distorted moans and growls, as though the black dog itself is becoming aware of something which is being smuggled in to subdue it.
There’s a series of “rat-a-tat” beats between 1:26 and 1:56, augmented by other slaps and hits as the cavalry of the medication fights it out with the ground defences of the depression. There are moments after this, where it seems as though the black dog is getting the upper hand, but from 2:25 to 2:37, a rising synth note suggests that the medication is winning out, and, for the next few hours at least, whoever took the Ludiomil will go from a patient to a person again.
However, Van Mooy and his co-creator, J.D. are aware that Ludiomil is an aid, rather than a cure, and as the track ends, we hear those growls and moans during the cut-off as the depression waits for its next opportunity to strike, and licks its wounds until the next battle with the medication.
The video for Travel Blind is taken directly from Peel’s 29/5/93 show, so I will let him tell you all about how he came by the track, while attending a Tsunami gig.
What strikes me about Travel Blind is the way it manages to combine the euphoric with the funereal. There’s some crisply exciting synth lines and a driving beat to get the Norfolk clubbers up and out onto the dancefloor, but a downbeat bassline and lyrics which - when they can be made out - seem fixated on notions of death and dying, conjure up something which sounds like it’s trying to put the rave into grave.
On the upside though, I don’t think the sentiments are especially morbid. Despite references in the first verse to The killing time, the track doesn’t feel as though it’s about death as an ending. Rather, it feels more like a walkthrough into the process of reincarnation. Musically, this is conveyed by the pan pipe samples - and if the lyrics are following Buddhist philosophy, then the instrument could well be a paixiao.
The third and fourth verses go particularly strong on this, as though the travelling soul has to go through the ritual of death before it can begin its next chapter:
It’s wonderful to be inside
Your body and your tortured mind
And I close my eyes and wait to die
And we’ll walk over the shining light.
In the fourth and final verse, the track moves from the spiritual to the human, with lyrics that sound like someone talking to a loved one in their final hours of life. It’s the hardest conversation that a person can have but the sentiments expressed sound like they offer mutual comfort both to the person going into the beyond and those being left behind:
And if you travel blind,
I won’t be so far behind,
And I’ll meet you in the sunshine,
And I’ll tell myself, I’m feeling fine
The implication being that whether death is followed by eternity in Heaven, or rebirth in a new body, eventually we will find our way back to our loved ones again; either when we are reunited in Heaven or through our souls leading us to meet up again in our new lives. We won’t remember our previous existences with them, but if you find yourself meeting or falling in love with someone and feeling like you’ve known them all your life, it may well be that you have done; only it was a previous life.
For myself, I already have Across The Universe by The Beatles and the Peel Session version of Quite Spectacular by Hint* earmarked as music to be played at my own funeral service. I think I may give instructions in my will for Travel Blind to be played at some point during it, as well.
The Noisebox EP that Peel was given was, at least going by this list, the first one that Noisebox Records put out. Despite his promise to play other tracks from this EP in the following week’s programme, a look at my notes and the John Peel wiki suggests that Travel Blind was the only track that Peel ever played from the EP. If whoever the person/people behind Resistance have themselves died, I hope that they used that memory as an example of a great thing that they achieved in this life, before going on to their next one.
Interestingly, Travel Blind was played on this programme after another airing for Box Hole by Jacob’s Mouse, another record which, when I previously blogged about it, convinced me that it was also about death.
I often talk on this blog about borderline inclusions and borderline misses. The former description covers tracks which would make it on to the metaphorical mixtape because they have something about them which I’d be happy to hear again, despite reservations over other aspects; the latter description covers tracks which have plenty to recommend them, but which I ultimately wouldn’t keep because the irritating or problematic part of them can’t be overcome.
On the recent Tindersticks session post, I talked about leaving one track - Tye Die - off the mixtape, because I was put off by the vocals, despite the fact that the band put in a terrific performance. In the case of Littlemeaner by Irish band, Pet Lamb, the reverse is true; it gets on the tape because I love the band’s performance enough to overlook my issues with the vocals. The difference between the two is that whereas I couldn’t get past the ludicrous club singing that Stuart A. Staples inflicted on Tye Die, I can be a little more forgiving of Pet Lamb for using distortion on their vocals, even though I feel it undercuts the song somewhat.
To be fair to them, I can clearly hear some of the lines that they’re singing i,e What are you going home for?/The grass is always greener and of course, Every time I see you, you get a little meaner. I just wish it was clear enough for me to get a better idea of what’s caused the increased levels of misanthropy from the person they’re addressing.
Ultimately though, it doesn’t matter, because this rocks like a motherfucker. The band’s advice, printed on the sleevenotes of the Paranoid From the Neck Down EP was Play this fucker loud! and they absolutely bring what’s needed to make doing so an exhilarating experience on Littlemeaner.
Pet Lamb stayed on Peel’s radar over the next couple of years, recording sessions for him in ‘94 and ‘95, so there will be other opportunities to hopefully hear what they have to say, alongside the wonderful noise they make.
Littlemeaner has popped up in two videos on YouTube, uploaded by Brendan Talbot. In both of them, he’s used the song over footage of the Dublin Zombie Walk, held in 2011. But in one of them, he’s slowed down both video and audio to stretch the film out to 21 minutes, and changed a charity cosplay into something far more unsettling (Suitable for all, though you do need patience with it.)
Although it would furnish him with some good stories in subsequent months and years, Thursday 27 & Friday 28 May 1993 were - on a professional level - extremely trying days for John Peel.
He opened this show by reporting that he was barely recovered from a sensational night in Sheffield. Unfortunately, he was being sarcastic. He had taken the John Peel Roadshow up to the Steel City and arrived to find that his show was the coldest ticket in town. As he explained:
It was in a hall where about 850 people can be gathered together. And there were three bands playing and they all did darned well under the circumstances. Sugar Drive, New Speak and The Love Birds. But there were only about mmmh well let’s say 80 people, 90, let’s go for 90, 90 people in the hall and it was all a bit embarrassing. The greatest number that was on the dancefloor at any one time was 19 when I played Teenage Kicksat the end of the evening. But some of the people that were there anyway will have enjoyed it or came up and said they had done. It was one of those evenings, which quite clearly, I shall be able to dine out on for quite a long time and I don’t doubt that they will as well.
The people who had organised it were very generous and spent most of the evening trying to think of excuses why there wasn’t anybody there. It was that kind of rather fixed and unnatural smile with which they greeted me at the door that told me that things were not going particularly well. I eventually ascribed the shortage of people there to spontaneous street parties that were going on as the result of the arrival of John Selwyn Gummer at the Department Of The Environment. That may have been the case it may not.
It was mentioned on Mark Goodier’s programme as well, during his sort of gig roundup and had been mentioned on local radio earlier in the week when I was interviewed by Tony Capstick. The reason I mention all this really is because it gives me the excuse to play a record that Tony Capstick made in 1974, as a feller who used to do sessions for this programme millions of years ago.’
And with that, Peel segued into Capstick’s recording of Laszlo Faher. So, a disappointing night for Peel, but perhaps he should have been expecting it given what had happened to him on previous visits to Sheffield.
If he thought that returning to the safety of the Radio 1 studios was going to offer him any protection from bad luck, he got a nasty surprise during the final hour of the programme when one of the turntables in the studio broke down. The situation was complicated by the third turntable, which acted as a back-up, being missing. The incident is referenced at the very end of the Tindersticks session video, where Peel threatens his own unique style of vengeance on whoever took the third turntable out of the studio.
Even with all the equipment being present, Peel was still capable of making mistakes, such as playing the wrong mix of a track called Time to Dream by Fortran 5. He stopped the version he was playing and replaced it with a mix called Up Your Bum With a Bicycle Pump. Personally, I would have preferred it if he’d just ploughed on with the original version.
The selections I took from this show were taken from a full length recording of it, which included the news bulletins. The most eyebrow raising story covered criticism by Labour’s Shadow Home Affairs Spokesman, a certain Tony Blair, of an anti-immigration speech made in Bolton by the Conservative MP, Winston Churchill (grandson of the better known one). When Peel was promoting a bhangra gig being held in Hammersmith to mark the end of the academic year, he felt that Churchill would be unlikely to attend.
Alongside Toe to Sand by Molly Half Head, there were two other selections from this programme which were not available for sharing:
Agony Polish with The Mighty Diamonds - Roof Over My Head: Dancehall rapper, Polish (as in Poland if we go by Peel’s pronunciation) speechifies over the top of The Mighty Diamonds utterly gorgeous 1975 tune, I Need a Roof. I suspect I was interested more for The Mighty Diamonds half of this track than for Agony Polish’s.
Sex Clark Five - Gothic Go Ahead - Enjoyably bouncy pop from their third album, Antedium, though Peel’s turntable issues meant he put it on with his fingers crossed and his heart pounding. The central beat on Gothic Go Ahead put me in mind of Tyrolean Knockabout by Half Man Biscuit, albeit without references to Paul Ross or any yodelling.
Three tracks in my original list fell from favour:
Blade - Hold Your Own - I feel a bit mean doing this down, because any research I’ve done on how early crowdfunding played its part in enabling Blade to record and release The Lion Goes From Strength to Strength always highlights how generous and grateful he was in acknowledging everyone who sent money in support of the project.* But Hold Your Own always had a question mark against it, and when I listened back to it, I got about two minutes in before turning it off, worn out by being bellowed at.
Boyracer - I’ve Got It and It’s Not Worth Having: The lead track on their B is for Boyracer EP. Great title** but a rather meh track on re-listening. Peel wondered whether the sleevenotes were playing a joke by claiming that the EP was recorded in Bristol, the vocals in Louisville, Kentucky and that the band’s PR were based in Spofforth, North Yorkshire. An unlikely mix, but probably true given that the EP was issued by the Bristol based label, Sarah Records. That Boyracer’s first album release was a split LP with the Louisville band, Hula Hoop*** and that Boyracer themselves came from North Yorkshire, though they would later relocate to America.
*Donors received personalised handmade thank you cards, their name in the album credits, and most distinctive of all, a free 12-inch record consisting of tracks that have never been issued on any other Blade releases.
**However, it’s not the best track title on the EP. I would award that honour to Jesus Suzanne Christ.
Fugazi became the second band in this programme to meet the “I finally get to hear a band that I’ve heard of but but not heard” test. Up until this 28/5/93 show, I only really knew about Fugazi through a record sleeve. Peel opened this show with a track from their third album, In On the Kill Taker. Smallpox Champion is a history lesson set to music as it accuses the United States of having engaged in surreptitious biological warfare against Native Americans using tactics such as distributing blankets infected with smallpox at various points in their history.
The disease was always a problem for Native Americans, from the time that they first came into contact with it after the arrival of European settlers in the late 15th Century. Indeed, there is a substantial body of evidence to suggest that if Fugazi were looking for a target to criticise about the spreading of smallpox, they should be blaming Europeans rather than U S of A.
One of the most notorious examples came in 1763 as a means of relieving a siege by Native Americans of a British Army base at Fort Pitt, Pennsylvania. During a round of negotiations, the British Army made a gift to the Natives’ representatives of a pair of blankets which had been exposed to doses of smallpox. This idea was given blessing by senior figures in the British Army, who were nowhere near Fort Pitt. This incident may be what inspires lines in Smallpox Champion such as:
Give natives some blankets warm like the grave.
This is the pattern cut from the cloth.
This is the pattern designed to take you right out.
Although these incidents were recorded, historians have been wary of accrediting them as wholly deliberate or effective mainly due to a mix of a lack of written historical record kept by Native American populations before the 19th Century and developing medical knowledge recognising that early stage smallpox spread through droplets in coughs and sneezes. Only in latter stage smallpox outbreaks did objects like blankets and bedding become a potential means of catching the disease.
Where Smallpox Champion may be reserving its fury towards America is in suppositions that smallpox outbreaks of the 1830s were deliberately used as a means to decimate Native American populations. Responsibility for the Great Plains outbreak of 1837 has been laid at the door of American Fur Company. Over 17,000 Native Americans died during that outbreak and some tribes were virtually wiped out. Fugazi clearly see it as all part of a plot by White settlers to take more land and plunder the resources found on them:
Greed informs action, when action makes bold
To take all the cotton that’s cut from the stalk…
You saw what you wanted.
You took what you saw.
We know how you got it,
Your method equals wipe out.
The end of the frontier,
And all that you own.
Under the blankets of all that you’ve done…
The song ends swearing that retribution will be delivered to those who’ve wronged the Native Americans, who really were treated abominably by White man. The only consolation now is that their descendants are probably one of the few non-white groups that can’t get rounded up by ICE.
Starting off like it’s trying to attract the attention of New Order with a pitch to provide a remix of World (The Price of Love), Eclipse develops into an enjoyable mixture of tribal beat, trance and techno. Peel was pleased to receive a copy of the Organized Noise album by Robert Leiner aka Source, not least because he felt that it showed he was back on R & S Records mailing list.
