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.
I got quite excited when I heard Peel say that this 28/5/93 show featured a session from Tindersticks. My over-riding feeling was “Good, now perhaps I’ll get to see what all the fuss is about.”
I’ve been aware of Tindersticks for over 30 years. They probably first entered my consciousness, when I was leafing through an issue of NME or Melody Maker and saw a photo of Stewart A. Staples framed over the shoulder of a string quartet in subdued lighting at somewhere like the Royal Festival Hall. In my mind, that photo - whether it existed or not - summed Tindersticks up. Concert hall rock, to be listened to, sitting down and inviting applause after each song, rather than cheers. And in the mid-1990s, I wasn’t really looking for that from the bands that I wanted to engage with.
This was entirely my own prejudice coming to the fore and it’s one that had remained with me given that, prior to hearing this session, I’d never knowingly listened to anything by Tindersticks. Well, that’s not entirely true. Their long collaboration with French film director, Claire Denis meant that I would have heard their soundtrack to her 2013 film, Bastards, but I can’t remember any of the music from it.
At time of writing, Tindersticks have released 25 albums (14 orthodox ones and 11 soundtracks), but when they went into Maida Vale to record this session on 27 April 1993, they were right at the beginning of their journey. Their debut album was six months away from being released - in fact, I’ve recently listened to some of the first John Peel show to be broadcast in the week of its release.
I’m rather jealous of Tindersticks fans. The band were always critically acclaimed, but that never seemed to translate into great commercial success. Their highest charting album in the UK, their eponymous second album, released in 1995, peaked at Number 13. Of the subsequent studio albums that charted, none went higher than Number 36.* Their highest charting UK single placing was Number 38 for 1997’s Bathtime. Even the aforementioned debut album got no higher in the UK than Number 56, but Tindersticks continued to put out music unabated. There was always a label somewhere willing to distribute them. Despite a brief hiatus between 2005 and 2008, they never lost track of one another, they endured and they worked.
They clearly mean a lot to some people, and I wish that certain bands and artists I’ve cherished over the years whose careers shrivelled up due to commercial indifference or their own bad choices had been similarly indulged. But, all that considered, the inescapable truth hit me as I listened to this first Peel Session. They were good enough to merit special treatment, and had I heard it in 1993, I’d probably have been hoping that someone had their back, because the talent shown in the three tracks I’ve highlighted here deserved to be nurtured and cared for.
The video features all of the songs from the session, taken directly from Peel’s 28/5/93 show. The only one I wouldn’t have included on the metaphorical mixtape was the second track, Tye Die (runs from 6:31 to 10:24). It’s a narrow miss because the band do a wonderful job of creating a spookily, malevolent atmosphere, but their work is undermined by Staples’s drawling, downbeat vocal which sounds like he’s trying to club sing an autopsy report. A look at the lyrics shows he’s only singing a rather dreary attempt at a Brothers Grimm style nursery rhyme.
Issues over vocal styling briefly put a question mark over the session’s opening track, Raindrops. Peel may have thought that Staples was trying to channel Leonard Cohen, but I heard Nick Cave, myself, which is a far riskier proposition when it comes to trying to keep a listener onside. However, it’s impossible not to take onboard the lessons that Raindrops imparts. It’s a story of a love gone stale, one where all the little quirks of the partner that were once thought endearing now only serve to alienate. This has gone both ways, leaving an atmosphere of sterility hanging over the household.
What’s worse is that both parties know that the relationship has died, and it’s implied that they could have walked away from each other long before this point, but they haven’t and now they can’t. The decision to end the track on a fade out is inspired, given that it suggests the crushing, ongoing ennui of a relationship that has desiccated itself into a mutual obligation instead of a joyous meeting of hearts.
It’s a reminder to couples everywhere that the biggest threat to a relationship is not adultery, but complacency. In fact, stop reading this for a few minutes if you can, go and find your partner, and shower them with enough affection for a few minutes until they give you a look of love rather than indulgence. And make time for it everyday.
Welcome back, lovers everywhere.
My favourite track of the session is the third one, Her. You’ll need to be a little patient with it, as the opening 45 seconds involve a touch of acoustic warm-up to set the mood, but once this turbo-charged cante flamenco** takes off, it’s a wonderful listen. It’s possible to see Her as linked to both Raindrops and the final track in the session, Drunk Tank. I mentioned how Raindrops suggested that the fossilised couple in it had, somewhere along the line, passed up on an earlier opportunity to end their relationship: With our only chance to jump/Neither of us had the guts., but Her catches Staples in a moment when he’s recognised that he has to make the jump away from something he can no longer support. He’s terrified, but cautiously resolute:
Feel like I’ve been dancing/The lights have finally come on.
Just waiting for my eyes, adjusting/ See how ugly I’ve become.
She asked me for no promises/I made them to myself
I’ve given myself no choices now/It’s the only way out.
Nevertheless, he makes the choice, in spite of the short term pain and fury, it will release. Drunk Tank finds him still stuck in the aftermath of the break and having to manage the fallout. As the title suggests, he does this primarily by taking himself out at night and drinking to forget. The implications are that he’s walked away due to his own character deficiencies:
I was the one/I always stayed out so late.
Always forgiving my inconsideration
It’s a different story/When you can never go home again.
I’ve seen some theories floated that Drunk Tank concerns domestic violence, and lines like:
My hands came back today/Finally set themselves free.
No more fists on the end of my arms/Just these hands trembling.
give that theory credence. If it’s paired up with the feelings of self- disgust that Staples expressed in Her, maybe the break was forced by him being thrown out or forcibly removed from his former lover’s presence. What struck me though when listening to Drunk Tank is the sense that it’s a night time song playing out just as the dawn of a new day is starting to break through. And contrary to the common trope of a new day heralding rebirth and fresh chances, here the approaching sunrise is seen as something to be frightened of. In the cold light of day, your mistakes and failings show up far more clearly than they do when you can hide in darkened buildings, within the bottom of a glass, or under the covers at police accommodation. And through a combination of shrieking violin, spectral high piano notes and a relentless grinding guitar/bass riff, we’re thrown out in to a street as a new morning breaks, the raindrops start falling and every door to home is slammed shut.
The four tracks in this session would all feature on Tindersticks’s mammoth debut album, which was released in the UK in October 1993. As the band wrote to Peel after recording this session, they would start touring in September. The summer would be a gig-free time - violinist, Dickon Hinchcliffe was spending it in Mexico - but it would at least allow the band time to recharge their batteries as they headed out to take their songs of heartache and heartbreak out to the people as the nights drew in, the weather got colder and somewhere, they would be forcing someone to confront some kind of unpalatable truth about themselves.
Thank God that there is a dedicated Fall lyrics interpretation website up and running again to help clueless bloggers with providing some colour to Fall selections beyond what my notes record of this play of Mother-Sister!, which Peel described as a golden gasser featuring several Johnny Rottenisms. I initially felt that it was those that made the track interesting enough to include on the metaphorical mixtape. Whether Mark E. Smith would have liked it or not, if you were recording a vocal in December 1978 and you happened to lapse into a sneering tone or, as happens at the end of Mother-Sister!, you spit out the word Sad! in a manner that combines a shout, a scream and a retch, then comparisons to John Lydon would be inescapable.
Mother-Sister! was recorded for The Fall’s 1979 debut album, Live at the Witch Trials. The opening exchange between guitarist, Martin Bramah and Smith: Er, what’s this song about?/Er, nothing was, for several years, presented as the truth by Smith when talking about Mother-Sister! He just felt that the words went well with the tune - which keyboardist, Una Baines, is credited as the co-author of. But according to Bramah, the song is about his upbringing and the house he grew up in. Bramah didn’t know who his father was and, as a child, Bramah lived with his gran during the week, and with his mother at the weekends. Up to the age of seven, he believed that his gran was his mum and his mum was his sister. This was quite a common arrangement in fatherless households, and appears to be the inspiration behind the lines: Astray/Our friends/And the fathers/ Are underground.
The oddest line comes at the end when Smith sings, Mother, sister, mother, sister/ Why did you put your head in the pylon? Mother-Sister! was originally called The Pylon when The Fall started playing it in their live sets during March/April of 1978. Again, the source of this is the life of Martin Bramah. When he moved in with his mum in Prestwich, their house was near to both the M60 motorway and between two electricity pylons. But these oppressive surroundings at least meant that the house was exceptionally cheap to buy.
Bramah claimed credit for the arrangement of Una Baines’s melody on Mother-Sister!, which combines post-punk (the skeletal guitar, especially with its distress signal-like notes at the beginning. However, Bramah goes on to play a melody of great elegance as the foundation of the track), dub (the bass and keyboard motifs) and punk rock (the drum breaks leading into Smith’s spitting out of the track’s title).
Considering the apparent inspirations behind Mother-Sister!, I would make a case for it being something of the title track on Live at the Witch Trials. In another age, the fatherless Bramah could well have seen his mother/sister denounced as being something evil for having a child out of wedlock, and it would have been straight from the courthouse to the ducking stool. Happily, we’ve left that behind, but as The Fall progressed through the remainder of the 20th Century, it would not have escaped their notice that single mothers continued to be judged harshly, both behind closed doors and in newspaper editorials. The trials continued unabated, but nowadays, the mothers didn’t drown in water, but under the weight of confected, public scorn.
