I spent some time last week listening again to this blog’s Festive Fifty for 1992. As always when you come to look over a cultural list that you made, I spent time picking it apart and asking myself the usual questions: why did I include that? Why did I rank that so high? etc etc. One track, though, which never loses its power or lustre is the hip-hop track, A Minute to Pray and a Second to Die by Scarface (Number 11) which provides a hard-hitting but lyrical tour through the pointless cycle of violence perpetuated by young black men drawn into gang lifestyles and how this leaves dead men being mourned by abused women, holding babies that their fathers will never see because they pissed off the wrong people.
Leave Out the Badness is the PG certificate, PIF, Dancehall equivalent. It tries to ape the documentary realism of Scarface’s tune by providing a case study of two, out of control brothers, Johnny and Charlie, whose propensity for gunplay and robbery leaves one of them dead and the other on the road towards it, but not before they’ve made other people’s lives a misery first. Yami Bolo’s concern is that these people will be seen as role models to be followed into lives of crime - albeit he recognises that many in the ghettos may see it as their only option due to the poverty that they live in, Where is shoots and rice… etc.
Leave Out the Badness is a poor relation in comparison to A Minute to Pray and a Second to Die. The whole badness/madness/sadness rhyming scheme is pretty anodyne and Bolo conjures a picture of such hopelessness that his imploring of young people to turn away from violence and crime seems unlikely to have much of an impact on the people it is trying to reach. But, its sincerity is genuine enough and acts as a reminder that if we regard goodness as the weaker of two impulses, then we are lost.
This was another borderline inclusion. It was the final track on the Eat Static album, Abduction. I was torn between liking its gentle, soothing, though brisk, tone and finding it too skittish to really enjoy. There are some moments where this trance track introduces surprising elements such as the uilleann pipes between 1:26-1:55, but it never seemed to commit to anything long enough to fully draw the listener in.
Ultimately though, I included it because I liked the samba elements in it and once they started to coalesce around the synths and reverb beats - that four note synth riff that occurs throughout the track becomes especially beguiling after a while - I started to get into a headspace where I could appreciate it both as music to listen and dance to.
At times, Inner Peace reminded me of the much superior Music by The Safehouse. This morning, when the YouTube algorithm cued Music up after I gave a final listen to Inner Peace to decide whether to include it on the metaphorical mixtape, that sealed the deal for me. It seemed like confirmation that both tracks came from the same family, and even if Inner Peace was the runt of that family, there was no reason to not show it some love.
This has ended up being a borderline inclusion. I’ve listened to it so many times over the last couple of days that it has ended up becoming dangerously close to losing all meaning. But I’ve stuck with it because the fault has mainly been mine given that my work is in a particularly intense phase at the moment, and that can make the notion of trying to relax (ha!) by writing a blog/listening to music seem ridiculous when balancing it alongside stuff that means less emotionally, but is more important in a real-world sense.
So distracted have I been that I ended up having to look at the the lyrics, at which point I became possibly the last person in the Western world to realise that Sister is about incest between siblings. The song positively drips with self recrimination, regret, lust and love; both lyrically and in its churned up, propulsive music.
In contemporary culture terms, its author Jason Loewenstein may have been influenced by Stephen Poliakoff’s 1991 film, Close My Eyes, which details the incestuous affair between a brother and sister played by Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves. Alan Rickman played Reeves’s husband in the film, and it’s regrettable that it was made a couple of years before he started to regularly keep a diary again. Indeed, the first entry in the Rickman Diaries book, was made three weeks after this Peel show was broadcast, on 13 June 1993.
If we’re talking about further cultural influences on Sister, then Loewenstein might have felt he needed a palate cleanser after watching the subject matter in Close My Eyes, and so decided to unwind by watching some cartoons instead. That’s the only way I can explain the guitar riff - at the 8 second mark, and especially between 1:38 and 2:01 - that appears to be modelled on the laugh of Woody Woodpecker.
*I suspect the prize may have been this version which included a limited edition 7-inch single.
** This was Vale’s first game at Wembley in their then 117 year history. But like buses, they were due to go back there again the following week for the Division Two promotion play off final. However, that did not go so well for them.
This charming, if slightly repetitive, lo-fi calypso tune was released on Escort in 1970. Lord Spoon appears to be an alias of Shirley ‘Calypso’ Williams, who also worked under the name of Mix Flour & Sugar. It was under that name that he recorded one of the great double-entendre titles, Screw the Cock Tight in 1978.
Given it’s a calypso tune, my mind inevitably turns to the Caribbean, so I’m dedicating this post to a couple of people, such as the two different women that my wife and I met while we were holidaying in Saint Lucia, last year, who asked us whether we were on our honeymoon simply because they saw us either sharing some kisses in the hotel pool or cuddling up and sharing the occasional kiss while on a boat trip out to the Pitons. In reality, the holiday was an advanced tenth wedding anniversary gift to ourselves. We were both flattered and slightly deflated by these assumptions. Flattered because it was nice to see people were moved by our affection for one another to assume that we were newly-weds, but at the same time it left us both wondering just what sort of state their relationships must be in if a couple showing each other some affection in public could only be down to them honeymooning.
How would they have coped had they been sitting behind the young couple that I was sat behind on a bus journey that I took between Truro and Falmouth on Wednesday 3 September 2008. On that day, I witnessed one of the most staggering and passionate displays of mutual public affection that I’ve ever seen.
The reason why I can be so specific about the date and the memory of it is down to two things:
1) It was the day before I was due to move to Ireland to join my future wife and to take a Masters degree at the University of Limerick.
2) I was convinced that I actually knew one of the couple, and spent the whole journey trying to establish whether it was them.
I can’t remember whether I got on the bus before them or not, but I was sat behind them, until they got off (the bus), halfway through. For the vast majority of the journey, they were kissing. And these weren’t mere pecks at each other but lengthy, languorous, romantic kisses. If the bus had crashed and exploded, they wouldn’t have noticed. On the contrary, they would have died exactly as they would have wished - in one another’s arms and locked into each other’s kiss. They went on so long, that eventually, I stopped looking out of the window, and just watched them. They clearly didn’t give a damn, so why not.
In the brief moments they weren’t tongue wrestling, they sat staring into each other’s eyes. I saw that the girl in particular was completely oblivious to anything other than her man’s face. And it was that moment that I started to wonder about her. She looked the spitting image of Sarah-Jane Davies, a girl I had been on the BTEC Diploma in Performing Arts course with between 1992-94. Was it her? She looked exactly as she had done at college, but this didn’t seem to tally with the last time I had seen her, which was when I was working in a sports shop in Truro, circa 1998/99. Back then, she’d grown her hair long, dyed it blonde and introduced me to an older man, who was her husband. If this was Sarah-Jane, she’d reverted back to the brunette bob that she had in college, and the husband was long gone judging by the look of the man she was with on the bus.
Alas, I never found out if it was Sarah-Jane. She never looked anywhere else but at her man, and in no time at all, they were kissing the faces off one another again. In the circumstances, I felt that my gently calling her name might look a bit weird. There was also an element of thinking that there was no point making even casual acquaintanceship given that I was off to make a new life the following day. So, I told myself that it was her and sat back to watch them kiss, while I ran a few lewd thoughts through my mind about the show I was being given.
All I can tell you is that whether the girl on the bus was Sarah-Jane or not, her lucky partner found himself sharing the journey with a girl who, on that day, looked ready to love in the nighttime, morning time, afternoon time, weekend, bank holidays….. And if the cock didn’t get screwed tight that evening, I’d be amazed.
This one had a question mark against it, because it’s a bit of a slow starter, and its opening minutes are dominated by the synthesisers which Peel so loathed hearing on African music. But once Mayaula Mayoni and friends have spent the opening two and a quarter minutes imploring his loved one, Do not leave or Don’t Give Up - both of which are potential translations of Ko Tika Te - the guitars kick in and the dancing can start. My wife heard and liked this, last night, so that confirms its place on the metaphorical mixtape.
Language issues mean that I’m not sure why Mayoni’s lover wanted to leave him, but it could be because Ko Tika Te is taken from an album call L’Amour au Kilo - or Love By the Kilo - which strikes me as an album title that even Barry White’s management team may have considered a little too on the nose, though I love the fact that on the album cover, the title is broken up by a little drawing of a market scale for measuring fruit and vegetables - lest we get too offended by the title’s connotations.
Mayoni turned to music after quitting professional football in the Congo at a relatively young age. His nearest UK equivalent is Gareth Ainsworth, who has combined a lengthy career in football playing and management with a music career fronting several different bands. His current band, The Cold Blooded Hearts, released their debut album in 2023. Mercifully, Ainsworth and friends refrained from offering us Love By the Kilo, plumping instead for the niftier title of The Cold Light of Day.
As things currently stand, we’re more likely to get a Gareth Ainsworth soukous album than we are a Mayaula Mayoni rock album. Not least because the latter died in 2010, six years after suffering a stroke.
Tell Me! - The closest thing that The Cold Blooded Hearts have to an out-and-out floor filler.
If you’ve ever thought that hard rock would be improved by the addition of party razzers* then this is the song for you.
That might sound like I’m trying to polish a novelty turd of a tune, but Dynamo, recorded by Thule for their second and final album, (321 Normal 2) has grown on me the more that I’ve heard it. If you read the Discogs or John Peel Wiki pages on them, they promise a banquet of eclecticism, with their music encompassing electronica, dub and ambient, while groups such as Kraftwerk, Tackhead and Chrome are all mentioned as influences. To my untrained ears, Dynamo owes more to Bauhaus and Joy Division - they even manage to rhyme the words control and dynamo for goodness sake!
It all starts out with a scratchy bassline followed by similarly scratchy guitar picking. I’ve always been a sucker for musical flourishes that sound like something eroding before your ears. And once the track gets started, it’s played in a key which dominates the environment so completely, it’s a struggle not to be drawn in. I’d rhapsodise even more about Dynamo if we could hear the lyrics more clearly. What I can make out from it makes the Joy Division comparisons even clearer given that they seem to be barking out a list of Ian Curtis approved bullet points: Obsession…isolation….etc. Alongside that is the post-punk ethos of embracing the mechanical/technical and working that into a crossover with the organic. I think Thule also managed to align this with early 1990s musical mores. For example, I originally heard the word, insulator - at 1:15 - as Catch you later, which given that it followed a line that sounded like it was saying, Young and tender had me wondering whether this was acting as some kind of deconstruction of Beverly Hills 90210 youth culture, but I’m more inclined to believe that, with a dynamo being something that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy, the song is instead targeting the slacker generations and by extension, it projects a frustration that the angst and fury in grunge music isn’t being converted into something more positive and constructive. The squealing party razzers evoke the sense of an attempt to summon up energy, which in keeping with the spirit of the time, eventually peters out in a fit of audiopique.
That’s what I believe anyway, but I can’t be sure, so in the final reckoning, Dynamo ends up as a half-masterpiece.
Video courtesy of subunitfour.
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
*The party razzers are probably broken saxophone reeds.
There’s already a blogpost featuring this song, dating from the very earliest days of the blog in which I included it in a post outlining my favourite tracks from Peel’s final Radio 1 show. I put that up at the time without comments to mark the tenth anniversary of Peel’s final Radio 1 broadcast, but back then I was still figuring out how this blog would work and I didn’t want to focus too much on the end of Peel’s career. But, 11 years before his death, Hush-Hush, originally recorded by his beloved Jimmy Reed in 1960, was cropping up on this 22/5/93 show, and in doing so, finally ensured Reed took his place on the metaphorical mixtape.
I still hold to my earlier contention that all Jimmy Reed songs sound the same. Indeed, one of the reasons why Hush-Hush has been included here is because I briefly thought it was actually Too Much*, my favourite Reed song. But, as overused as it is, the rolling blues scale which underpins Hush-Hush and most other Reed songs, sweeps the listener in to shoulder-rolling-head-bobbing submission.
*Apologies for not doing a link to Too Much, but I’m sure it’ll turn up on a Peel show I’m covering at some point in the future, and I’d like to hold it back as a treat.
