While preparing this blogpost, it became apparent to me that Man-Size is currently my least favourite PJ Harvey song. I’ve written previously about my dislike of a lot of the Rid of Me era tracks, and how what I struggled to engage with was the way in which they try to Americanize Polly’s style and vocals. This reaches its nadir in the closing lines of Man-Size when she sings the word gasoline with an American twang which makes me want to rip my ears off the side of my head, anytime I hear it.
But all was not lost for Man-Size, because she gave us a second version on Rid of Me consisting only of her voice, percussion and various string instruments, which I think she may have played herself.
Although the title Man-Size could be seen as a comment on Polly’s own sexual nature and awakening, the lyrics suggest she is playing the role of a man who is now sexually switched on and looking for something to do with his equipment: Good lord, I’m big/I’m heading on. Not to mention tangible excitement at having someone to use their equipment on: Got my girl and she’s a wow….My babe looking cool and neat/I’m pretty sure good enough to eat etc.
On Rid of Me, Man-Size Sextet is sequenced four tracks ahead of Man-Size. Stylistically, this makes sense because the vocal on Man-Size Sextet sounds far more uncertain than the one on Man-Size. Taken together with the stabbing, dissonant strings, it does an excellent job of conveying the chaos of puberty and sexual awakening. Polly wants to fuck in Man-Size Sextet, but despite the favourable conditions, s(he) is a bundle of nerves. Emotions are churning up all over the place, and although s(he) has the tools, it doesn’t sound as though s(he) knows what to do with them. I know how s(he) feels. I had my first passionate experiences with a woman in December 1993, but it took me another four years before I actually achieved anything. Nerves, excitement, tension, desire, delusion all played their part. As the strings scream out over the repeated refrain of Man size from 1:40 to 1:52, it sounds nothing less than someone desperately trying to cross the threshold into adulthood and leave both their and the girl’s pre-sex self behind. You almost feel the pelvic thrusts between two hot groins.
The closing note shows that, together, the boy and girl have become man and woman, but Polly nails the one-eyed nature of the conquering male. They’ve made a girl into a woman, now burn that childhood version with gasoline, so that the newly made woman can service the man again, and again. Notice how the man doesn’t burn their boyhood self. Presumably this is so they can have it both ways: be serviced like a man and waited on like a child, when the mood takes them.
If we take this idea on a stage, if Man-Size Sextet relates to the virgin trying to use their new sexual awareness for the first time within a fog of nerves, then the rock version of Man-Size finds the man several months on, bullishly confident in their sexual technique, in awe of their physical development and ready to rut.
I respond to Man-Size Sextet because it speaks to where I was at the time Peel played it - all tooled up, but with nowhere to go, no-one to play with and uncertain about what I would do if I found someone. I also like it because it sounds closer to what I want from a PJ Harvey song. It’s telling that this was the only song on Rid of Me that was not produced by Steve Albini and that’s probably why Harvey sounds, to my ears at least, closer to her real self than she does on other material from this period. It also points to where she would take her music next, once Steven Vaughan and Rob Ellis - who did the string arrangements on this track - had moved on.
This session was originally broadcast on Saturday 13 February 1993, at a time when Cell were enjoying some decent exposure on Kat’s Karavan. However, this repeat marked their final appearance on a Peel show playlist.
The studio version of the third track, Everything Turns (from 7:37) has already been featured here and I’d have possibly included it on the metaphorical mixtape for reasons of completeness. Remembering how much I’d enjoyed some of Cell’s music from late ‘92/early ‘93, I was a little surprised to see that it was only the session opener, Halo, that made my list of inclusions, but having listened to the full session here, I don’t feel that I was wrong. It’s the only one of the tracks which has any kind of life and spark to it, as, in keeping with the theme of so many inclusions from this show, our narrator comes back from a period of self-reflection and decides to end a relationship that’s been causing him problems. He suspects that his lover has been cheating on him, and the projection of goodness that they show to him and the world is a false impression.
There is a second reading about Halo, which is that it’s told from the perspective of Death itself, swooping down to take away some unsuspecting person, who has been wasting their life doing nothing and in its closing lines: Get off my face/Baby, I’m not dead being utterly indifferent to protest or pleading. Whichever interpretation is true though, Halo rocks in a way that the other tracks don’t get near. It’s not that any of them are bad per se, but they don’t really engage me.
The second track, Camera is too whiny, the final track, Stratosphere (from 11:50) tries to reach for the skies but ends up leaving the listener behind, and even Everything Turns runs the risk of being left off giving the strained vocals on it.
As the full session is available, you’ll be able to make your own decision, but for me it’s Track 1 and done.
But, as far as I can tell Drop It Cool appears to stay clear of controversy and frames its message around how people approach each brand new day. In Terror Fabulous’s view, the world is split between those who shine and those who glisten. The former dedicate their day to doing right by their fellow man and living a virtuous life; the latter only see the new day as a chance to feather their nest with money. I don’t think he’s being especially critical of people working for a living to put food on the table or a roof over their heads, but the use of the word, glisten, implies an attack on those who earn money purely for status. He also includes a swipe at those who chase money through crime, the ones with an angle of essentially living through wasted days, because they’re only interested in the false prophets of mammon.
If we assume that the Drop in the title refers to the patois meaning die as in drop out, then this song implies that those who dedicate their days to clean living and looking after others will receive their reward in death compared to those who grind themselves into the dirt as part of the rat race or those who may find themselves murdered by rude boys. If you shine, you’re an angel and will soar on into Heaven; if you glisten, then you’ll be marked by a gravestone that will only degrade and wear away over time.
On the evidence of these two songs, which made up both sides of a single released through Sub Pop, if you take a sprinkling of early 1970s Rolling Stones guitar riffs and season with Sonic Youth-style vocals, you get Royal Trux.
In keeping with those two other bands, on both of these tracks, Royal Trux manage to combine a musically sexy but unromantic sound with lyrically striking junkie poetry. The creative force behind the band was a couple, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema. On Steal Yr Face, Hagerty - who had already acknowledged a debt to the Stones when his previous band, Pussy Galore (featuring Jon Spencer) had recorded a cassette only cover album of Exile on Main St. - takes on a hybrid Jagger cum Thurston Moore role, warning of dire consequences at losing oneself to narcotic excess. Meanwhile, Herrema dusts down her Kim Gordon cosplay act on Gett Off, barking out unintelligible orders over a clipped guitar sound, which sounds like Brown Sugar’s autistic, younger brother, before becoming overwhelmed by spooky harmonica playing, as though the solo in Little Red Rooster was having a stroke.
It’s difficult to pick a favourite here, as they both have lots to cause fascination and enthralment. It’s not fair of me either to talk about Royal Trux sounding like other bands, especially given their influence on Sonic Youth - Kim Gordon’s side project duo Free Kitten took inspiration from the Royal Trux sound, for example.
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).
