Monday 18 March 2024

Equus: The Moog - Jungle Muffin [Micky Finn Remix] (21 February 1993)



I’m really pleased that Peel played this track from The Moog Remix EP, because when I was prepping the blogpost on the Mercy remix of Live Forever from the same EP, I got the chance to listen to all four tracks that were on it, and the Micky Finn* remix of Jungle Muffin was by far and away my favourite track.  I was seduced by the jungle vibe to the mix and it’s caused me to look ahead with hope that as the early and mid 90s Peel shows get covered here, I’ll get to enjoy more jungle music and appreciate it more than I did 30 odd years ago.  If I had my record buying youth again, I’d have stocked up on more jungle and trip hop records alongside the Britpop I was gorging myself on at the time.  I’ve lamented my youthful tunnel vision on this previously, and happily my notes for this edition of John Peel’s Music promise some further potential jungle treats subject to availability and me not going off the track…**

Compared to the original mix, Finn’s mix works in a couple of dub interludes, ostensibly to give the track space to breathe. The Italo-piano break is still in both versions so as to firmly remind us that this was still 1992/93 and some of-their-time conventions still had to be acknowledged, but the persistent noise of the Star Wars blasters sounds like one of dance music’s new developments killing off a previously dominant form and announcing itself in thrilling style.

Video courtesy of NEINSHIT

*Not that one. Or this one.
** I think it’s available, but if it’s what I just heard, it may miss out.

Tuesday 12 March 2024

Equus: Admiral Bailey - Butterfly (21 February 1993)



I had hoped that this was a tune about sex and that the butterfly of the title referred to the sexual technique, the Venus Butterfly. Whenever I include a reggae/dancehall track on this blog, I always check West Indian patois dictionary sites to see whether words on the records have alternative meanings in Carribbean dialect. You can imagine how my spirits soared when the index for one dictionary had it spelled buttafly.  Here we go, I thought, confirmation that Admiral Bailey is singing about anal sex.  Giddy up, giddy up just seemed to offer further encouragement to that line of thinking.  New style come up (“He’s talking about his cock”), yes it was all becoming clear. 

And then I clicked on the link and discovered that buttafly is indeed patois for er…butterfly and I must reluctantly concede that it’s about a dance craze which was sweeping the clubs and if Bailey is to be believed, was conquering the world as well. 
Any disappointment about this banality is tempered by the fact that it’s a tremendous piece of music and in the reggae dominated singles charts of 1993-95, I’m surprised it never got picked up for wider release. It could have been a Loco-Motion for the 1990s.

Video courtesy of IrOnLiOnZiOn92
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Friday 8 March 2024

Equus: Headcleaner - Ace of Spades [Peel Session] (21 February 1993)



The Peel Session which Headcleaner recorded for Radio 1 on 14 June 1992 ended up falling between the cracks as far as this blog was concerned. I make selections from shows which John Peel hosted while I was rehearsing or performing in plays and shows. I don’t select from programmes that went out while I was taking any extended break from drama. I spent July to September 1992 not in rehearsals for anything, which is why nothing comes from any of Peel’s programmes in that period.  As a result, I missed both the original broadcast of Headcleaner’s session on 4 July 1992 and its repeat on 18 September 1992.  For anyone who had missed it, Strange Fruit put the session out before the end of the year.  

It may have been from this record that Peel played their version of Motorhead’s signature song, Ace of Spades at the request of a listener to his BFBS show who thought it would be funny to hear it again. Headcleaner’s version rocks as hard as the original, but is undercut by the vocalist singing it in the style of Fozzie Bear.   Singing in this style made their version stand out at least, though their own material from the session, such as Attitude, is a bit more of a coin-flip in terms of acceptance.  

Video courtesy of VibraCobra23 Redux.

Saturday 2 March 2024

Equus: Exquisite Corpse - What a Life (21 February 1993)



You are going to need some patience with this track given that it takes until around the 2:15 mark before someone turns off the alarm clock and starts dropping the beat. My apologies also to anyone who sees the artist name Exquisite Corpse and anticipates 40 seconds of artery shredding noisecore and instead gets 11 minutes of beautifully pleasant techno music.  The pleasantness clearly affected John Peel’s concentration when he programmed this into his playlist for 21/2/93 on BFBS, because having apologised at the end of the previous week’s programme for what he felt was a rather disorganised show, he put What a Life in as the programme’s closing track and found he’d mistimed it and still had a couple of minutes to go before the station’s next news bulletin. As a result, listeners were treated to a repeat sample of it to take them up to the news.

Exquisite Corpse started off as a side project for Dutch DJ Robbert Heynen and the Reassembling Reality EP, which featured What a Life as its lead track, was his last solo release under this name before he expanded the project to a duo with Debbie Jones.  I like to think that receiving angry letters from misled Disemboweled Corpse fans prompted their subsequent name change to XqST.

Video courtesy of x0rr07

Wednesday 28 February 2024

Equus: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 14 February 1993 (BFBS)

Going by his comments, it doesn’t seem that John Peel would have been rushing to add this edition of his BFBS programme to his showreel. At the end of it, he apologised to listeners for a rather untidy programme. It’ll all be different next week, loads of your requests. I promise this every week and always fail to deliver. It’s poignant to consider that he was still promising to come back and play listeners’ requests when he broadcast his final show 11 years later.  Personally, I think Peel was being too critical of himself as I don’t remember too many mistakes or incoherence.

If we’re looking for reasons why Peel may have felt that the show had been under par, then Dave Lee Travis has to be held partially accountable.  Travis was six months away from resigning on air in protest at the changes Matthew Bannister was implementing at Radio 1, but in early 1993 he was still a fixture of the station’s daytime weekend schedule - playing Lucien Bokilo records as well - so his and Peel’s paths were likely to cross if Peel went into Broadcasting House early enough on a Saturday. Although Peel acknowledged that he and Travis’s attitudes towards life were very different from one another, he got on well with DLT, feeling that, in a previous life I must have pulled a thorn out of his paw, because he’s always very amiable towards me whenever we meet. But when Peel was working in the Radio 1 offices, the previous day, he found himself in close proximity to an editing suite where a pre-recorded show hosted by Travis was being prepared for broadcast.  One thing which irritated Peel about Travis was his tendency to “hilariously” bastardise words, phrases and names. Hence Kylie Minogue became Killie Minnogoo and the BBC World Service, for which both men recorded programmes, would be referred to as the BBC Wild Service and so on. Peel takes up the story…
He’ll call people things like Olivia Neutron Bomb and Dusty Springboard, you know, things which people haven’t said for 20 years…Somebody was playing this pre-record in the corridor, very, very loudly and very, very often. And he kept saying - and I knew he was going to say it - he was talking about some event which had happened to a listener. And he said, “She said, that her parents walked in, and her boyfriend was standing there,” and I thought to meself , he’s going to say “In the nuddy.”And he did! He said “In the nuddy”. And I spent the rest of the day - well, about an hour to be honest - hearing this over and over again. And by the end of  the hour, I was fit for hospitalisation, frankly.

There’s always something to put trivial irritations into perspective, and the news bulletin duly provided it with news that the body of toddler James Bulger (Caution advised - article contains distressing content), who had been missing for two days, had been discovered in Liverpool.

Only one track that made my selections list from this show fell out of favour with me.

Tsunami - Sometimes a Notion: Coming out of Arlington, VirginiaTsunami were a bit of a fancy of Peel’s around this time, perhaps due to a similarity of sound with PJ Harvey.  I only came into this show halfway through his playing of this track, and my interest was piqued, so I put it down with a question mark next to it. Ultimately, it sounded a little too middle of the road for me.  Sometimes a Notion featured on a three-track single called Souvenir Folder of Beautiful Arlington, VA which was distributed by an Australian label called IV Recordings. Peel’s copy was Number 88 in a limited edition White label of 100 copies. It’s possible that the title of the track was inspired by Ken Kesey’s 1964 book, Sometimes a Great Notion which was adapted into a 1971 film directed by and starring Paul Newman.


Tuesday 20 February 2024

Equus: The Moog ‎– Live Forever [Mercy Remix] (14 February 1993)



Details were a bit thin on the ground about this enjoyable piece of techno music.  All John Peel had to go on was a note…written at the bottom - in pen - that says “A massive European club hit” but then I suppose they would say that. My own notes recommend its inclusion here because I like the beeping beats (which start around the 49 second mark) and the “I want to live forever!” sample in which what sounds like a downtrodden middle manager suddenly gets a taste for life.

The Moog was one of the aliases of DJ Andrew Wright. After issuing the Rush Hour 12-inch EP, Wright took 3 of the tracks from it, outsourced one to Micky Finn and took a contribution from his collaborator Anthony Bowes (working under the name Justice) to put out a 4-track remix record as The Moog.  As you can hopefully hear from Live Forever, which Wright remixed as Mercy, his work both on that and Rush Hour - remixed under his Rotor alias - makes for a pair of perfectly serviceable bangers. However, the more interesting stuff was happening elsewhere on the record. Both through Finn’s proto-Jungle sound on Jungle Muffin and Bowes’s D ‘n’ B stylings on Going Crazy. The Moog Remix EP showcased both the best of contemporary and future dance music sounds.

Video courtesy of UnoDat

Sunday 18 February 2024

Equus: The God Machine - I've Seen the Man (14 February 1993)



Lyrically, the subject matter of [The God Machine’s debut album, Scenes From the Second Storey] is one of angst, anguish, a raging against a likely non-existent deity or a condemnation of those who claim to speak of such a being… Taken from The God Machine’s Scenes From the Second Storey Revisited 25 Years On by Ned Raggett, The Quietus, 26 February 2018.

Raggett’s article, which I first saw when The God Machine last featured on this blog, achieves what great music journalism should do, namely encourage the reader to seek out the music.  Having listened to Scenes From the Second Storey today, there are at least half a dozen tracks featuring either Robin Proper-Sheppard encouraging people to take responsibility for their decisions without passing the buck to God, or characters that he meets blaming their actions on God and absolving themselves because He orchestrated their lives. The album resounds with a broad conviction that God is illusory, and that those who do believe in Him are deluded at best and dangerous at worst.

In I’ve Seen the Man, it feels as though Proper-Sheppard, as an American transplanted to Britain, spent time wandering around Speakers’ Corner where he would have heard political, civic, scientific and religious points of view put forward to the passers-by.  On one side, he finds himself listening to a preacher proselytising for his God. On the other side, he hears the case being made for atheism.  But in this song, Proper-Sheppard finds himself confronting the void at the centre of his own spirit. He doesn’t believe in anything and this lack of belief compared to the contrasting convictions of the two speakers torments him. The twist is that Proper-Sheppard ends up following the lead of some of his characters and cursing God for the way that he feels.

I’m with Raggett on the merits of Scenes From the Second Storey. It’s a wonderful record, though its intensity and seriousness would have made it a hard sell to mainstream audiences. While researching this post, I discovered that Proper-Sheppard had subsequently formed the band, Sophia, whose 2006 song, Pace, stood out to me as one of the few decent tunes I heard Colin Murray play during his uninspiring late Noughties stint in the 10pm-midnight slot.

Video courtesy of tehf00n.