I’m so pleased that this blog’s 1000th post coincides with the return of the wonderful Krispy 3, who released We Don’t Go Pop Like Bubble Gum as a precursor to their second album, Can’t Melt the Wax.
Krispy 3 were always at their most entertaining when they were singing about the music industry and their own quest for artistic purity inside a business which either failed to recognise their genius or tried to persuade them to peddle pap for profit. Inevitably, they would stick to their principles and then bemoan the fact that lesser acts - both in terms of talent and integrity - were cleaning up financially or being promoted as cultural game changers, when they were doing nothing more than maintaining the status quo. The Can’t Melt the Wax album features a brilliant track called Who Ya Know, which rages against the fact that, in the music industry, contacts trump talent 9 times out of 10. I’m surprised that Peel never played it, especially given that his name comes up in the track.
What makes We Don’t Go Pop Like Bubble Gum so interesting is the conflict that runs throughout it. Krispy 3 always seemed keen to emphasise that, as far as they were concerned, rap music lived over here and pop music lived over there, and never the twain shall meet. Take the dripping disgust with which they read the headline Pop king is king of rap at the start of Don’t Be Misled as an example. Even though their own material was quite clean and positive by the standards of what rap music was considered to be i.e materialistic, violent, defiant etc, they were adamant that just because they used humour in their lyrics, they were first and foremost, a rap group - not a pop-rap confection. And yet, listening to the names and scenes dropped into the track by the Finlayson brothers and George Gueye, it ends up coming across as a bit of a love letter to pop music. Although the cover photo to the Can’t Melt the Wax LP featured a generic photo of the three of them, they could have used the cast list they assemble in We Don’t Go Pop Like Bubble Gum to make their own version of the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band instead.
Based on what I can hear, and I may well have missed some other references, the cover would have included:
Exactly a year after their first Peel Session was repeated, the Ween boys were back for their second and final Peel Session. Like the evening’s other Session guest, they used it as an opportunity to play songs which had not yet been issued on record. All instruments on the session were played by Dean Ween (Michael Melchiondo Jr.) and Gene Ween (Aaron Freeman), so the tracks have a slight element of works in progress about them; the entire session clocks in at less than 9 minutes. But, not a moment is wasted, and with one exception, they were fully in control of the material that they were playing.
After playing the first track, What Deaner Was Talkin’ About, Peel thought it sounded like a country song, and this inspired him to play a country music track by Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (Das Hab Ich Falsch Gemacht). I’d be more inclined to describe it as the session’s indie-folk tune. Sung by Gene, it describes his experience with anxiety attacks, which was something that Dean had apparently suffered from all his life. The line, If I was king, I’d wear a ring/And never hurt my people, suggests that the anxiety is caused by somebody rather than something. This could be a link to the third song in the session, the jazzy Take Me Away, where Gene sings about his struggle not to go crazy after being cheated on by a woman; a devastating experience for anyone, but something which should at least offer clarity. The woman took his love for granted and took him for a fool. The heartache has to be gone through, but there will be someone else out there who will help him to repair his broken heart and make him smile again. That’s the optimistic take, but the closing lines on What Deaner Was Talkin’ About, I don’t think I will ever return again, my friend, suggest that Gene currently finds the damage to be irreparable.
Both What Deaner Was Talkin’ About and Take Me Away were recorded for Ween’s 1994 album, Chocolate and Cheese.
The fourth track on the session, Buckingham Green, apparently takes its name from a shopping centre based in New Hope, Pennsylvania, close to where Ween were formed. Even in a stripped down form it promises a psychedelic epic in its brief running time with its lines about eyeless children, meetings with God and beings descending from the stratosphere, which was duly realised when the song was finally recorded for their 1997 album, The Mollusk.
Apologies for jumping about the running order in this session, but I was originally going to pass on the second track, Vallejo, because it didn’t have much to recommend it beyond the catchiness of its Latin rock stylings. I changed my mind because given how short the whole session is I didn’t think would be too much of an encumbrance to have it included if I was listening to it on the metaphorical mixtape. In the event, it’s the song in the session which has most intrigue about it, especially this version of it.
The Ween wiki states that Vallejo was written and first performed during 1992. Its role in live performance was to provide the music to a lengthy piece of performance art whereby the Ween boys would stack up instruments, amplifiers, drinks and many other things on top of their touring drummer, Claude Coleman Jr.’s drum kit, so as to form some kind of impromptu sculpture which could then be played to produce noise and feedback. This could take up to half-an-hour of time in the concert. One YouTube commenter I saw mentioned that they saw Ween do this in a live show once, and they decided to go and play a game of pool in another part of the venue. When they went back after their game, the song was still going and the sculpture was still being built.
All that would be lost on record though, so, by the time Ween put Vallejo out as a b-side on their 1994 single, Voodoo Lady, it stood as a song about the life and wild times of the painter, Boris Vallejo. None of this features in the Peel Session version. I wondered whether the BBC quailed at lines that feature in the studio version version such as, I lick your pussy and then cum inside. Considering that this would have been going out long after the 9pm watershed, I can’t see why it would have been a problem. But nevertheless, Vallejo was presented as a short instrumental which tonally sounded closer to another version of the track called Vallejo Pt. 2.
If there were censorship issues - and I’m only conjecturing about that - it might explain why Ween never recorded another Peel Session. However, this was not the last time that Ween’s music featured on a Peel Session, given that Tim Wheeler and Charlotte Hatherley of Ash included a cover of What Deaner Was Talkin’ About on their acoustic Peel Session at Peel Acres on 15 April 1999.
This was a repeat of, what Peel described as, PJ Harvey’s third and a half session for his programme. It was first broadcast on Friday 12 March, 1993. It’s a fascinating session because it gives a suggestion of the kind of music Polly Jean might have made had she continued working with Rob Ellis and Steven Vaughan. Although the Rid Of Me album was set to be released at the end of April ‘93, this session showed Harvey and friends were already looking ahead to the future. Three of the tracks - the three going on to the metaphorical mixtape - were new original compositions. None of them were on Rid Of Me or would surface as b-sides on the album’s singles. Indeed, only one of the three was ever issued and fans had to wait a long time for it.
By a short head, I make Naked Cousin the best of the tracks. My theory about it is that it is another of Harvey’s songs in which she plays a relation of a figure from the Bible. In Missed, she sang as Mary, mother of Jesus and desperate to find out why her dead son’s body was missing from his tomb. In Naked Cousin, I think that Polly is singing as a cousin of Moses, and what’s more, she’s not a fan. The Moses link suggests itself most obviously through the line, He run from burning bushes…he runs from everything that upsets his masterplan. In this case, leading the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to find The Promised Land.
Polly is clearly unconvinced for reasons both familial - you can almost picture her telling people, “Moses will never pull this off, trust me, I’ve known him since he was a baby, he never sticks at anything”, though in the song she restricts herself to telling us that I hate his smell and/I hate his company but most of all/I hate that he looks just like me - and out of self preservation for what Moses’s uprising could mean for both the Israelites and herself, as a relation of his. It’s enough to have her wondering whether she will have the courage to join the Exodus, herself: He’s running naked through the trees/Scare the shit right out of me/Bought my ticket, take my ride/Take me to the sunny side.
Just like Missed, it’s a fascinating scenario, brilliantly brought to life by the whole trio.
Primed and Ticking and Claudine, the Inflatable One are more thematically straightforward. They are both, especially Primed and Ticking, aggressive love songs, heavy on sexual suggestion. With her squealing guitar and the dissonant brass - provided by Mike Smith and Dennis Rollins - the implication is that the sex will be utter carnage, and that Polly will absolutely tear her prospective lover to shreds. So certain does she sound about her place in the lover’s life and future that the shrieking chorus of I believe my days will end with you starts to take on an air of obsessive control rather than one of heartfelt devotion.
At least Prime and Ticking has a recognisable target for its lust/devotion; the protagonist of Claudine, the Inflatable One has to play out their sexual desire with a blow-up doll. Nevertheless, a good time is still promised for all: I’ll blow your mind…I’ll show you heaven…I’ll make sweet honey, I’ll treat you nice etc. I had briefly thought that Harvey was singing from the perspective of the doll itself, but I’ve come round to the orthodoxy that it’s sung from the perspective of Claudine’s owner, and that their need is just as ravenous as Polly’s was in Primed and Ticking: Want to get into your sack of skin. Furthermore, the Scream blue murder refrain in the playout ties into the notion that both songs have of using sex as a way to expel all negative emotions, energy and pain from oneself by giving yourself over utterly to another person. In body, soul, mind and heart in Primed and Ticking; in body only - at least as a start for practice - in Claudine, the Inflatable One.
The fourth track in the session was the only one that was going to be commercially available to people in 1993, namely the trio’s cover of Wang Dang Doodle, written by Willie Dixon, who had died in January 1992. This session version featured as a b-side on the Man-Size single, and Peel subsequently complained on air a couple of times that it wasn’t credited as having been recorded for his programme. I passed on it as I found it too irritatingly mannered. This has been a common complaint from me about her music from this period.
In considering the three songs included here, it suggests that the PJ Harvey trio would have streamlined the harder edged tone of Rid of Me into a funkier blues/rock sound that focussed on sex and humour, had they continued working together on another album. All three songs sound like they would have been perfect fits on an album made by Harvey, Ellis and Vaughan. They clearly had belief in the songs as Naked Cousin and Primed and Ticking were included in the trio’s live set over the summer of 1993, including on a Radio 1 concert, hosted by Peel, broadcast on Saturday 31 July 1993, starting at 7:30pm, just as the curtain was going up on the third night of my production of Guys and Dolls. But when the trio went their separate ways at the end of the year, the songs went into cold storage too. They wouldn’t have fitted on Harvey’s first solo album, To Bring You My Love, and although she started working with Ellis again from about 1998 onwards, the songs have never been recorded by her on any of her subsequent albums.
In the immediate term, the songs represented a last gasp of the early PJ Harvey. She would write and record many fine songs across the rest of the 1990s, but very few of them came at the listener with the same force and attack of these songs. Her work became more introspective, cinematic and warmer in tone. There was room for romance and love amidst the darker, serious material that she wrote through the rest of the decade, but no place for humour or wit. It would arguably take until 2000’s album, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea for Harvey to rediscover a sense of brashness in tracks like Big Exit or This is Love, which is to all intents and purposes, Primed and Ticking’s younger, prettier sister.
Peel played Real Gone as part of a double bill of tracks from Further’s first album, Grip Tape L.P. It’s fairly standard “I-don’t-know-myself-and-I-think-I’m-going-crazy” hard rock/shoegaze stuff, albeit leavened with some great guitar work and a little boy lost vocal that you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be affected by. The chopped, crunchy riffs of its opening 80 seconds provide a perfect backdrop to the confessions about dark thoughts and feelings of being publicly misunderstood. Between 1:23 and 1:56, the music becomes clearer, less dense as the narrator strives for some kind of control over their darker impulses. They even end on a note of defiance, I am taking control. But the Dinosaur Jr. style guitar solo and that returning choppy riff guide us back into a sea of uncertainty and churned up emotions; the frustration of seeming to identify a way in which to live your life, only to find it’s illusory.
As previously mentioned, Dinosaur Jr. are clearly a huge influence on this track. Even the vocals sound like someone doing an impression of J Mascis stuck in a subterranean toilet.
I had originally included the second track, Gimme Indie Fox, for inclusion as well, though there was a question mark against it. It’s a rib on Gimme Indie Rock! by Sebadoh, but the vocals are so messily recorded that it’s not easy to tell what points they’re making. If they can’t be bothered about us hearing it, I can’t be bothered to keep it. A shame really, because the video is good fun.
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.
