Guys and Dolls: PJ Harvey - Naked Cousin/Primed and Ticking/Claudine, the Inflatable One [Peel Session] (22 May 1993)

 

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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. 

Meanwhile, Primed and Ticking and Claudine, the Inflatable One remain locked away, unreleased and unknown outside of this Peel Session. They didn’t even get to join Naked Cousin either on the selection of session tracks which made up Island Records own The Peel Sessions 1991-2004 or the extensive 2022 release, B-Sides, Demos & Rarities, which has the studio version of Naked Cousin  - recorded by Harvey with John Parish - which turned up on the soundtrack album of the 1996 film, The Crow: City of Angels. 

Videos courtesy of stoner 7412 (NC) and Black Thyme Thames (P & T, CTIO)

All lyrics are copyright of Polly Jean Harvey.

Guys and Dolls: Further - Real Gone (22 May 1993)

 

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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.

Video courtesy of coldnebraskablue.

Guys and Dolls: Yami Bolo - Leave Out the Badness (22 May 1993)

 

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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.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Video courtesy of  TrailerMufflerCrew.

Guys and Dolls: Eat Static - Inner Peace (22 May 1993)

 

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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.

Video courtesy of Planet Dog Records.

Guys and Dolls: Sebadoh - Sister (22 May 1993)

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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.

Having sabotaged his Sebadoh competition, the previous week, Peel was relieved to be able to announce winners for it on this programme. Lynn Parsons drew four winners out of a hat which Peel had been given, earlier that day, by the editors of The Memoirs of Seth Bottomley, a Port Vale fanzine. Peel had been a guest of the Seth Bottomley team, cheering Vale on to a 2-1 win over Stockport County in the Autoglass Windscreens Trophy Final at Wembley.** Peel was surprised and gratified to see that none of the prizewinners came from London. Instead, copies of Sebadoh’s new album, Bubble and Scrape*, were sent to Gina Twarley from Galway, Jonathan Barnes from Whalley Range, Al Cook from Glasgow and Mark Waters from Hereford (apologies to any of them for misspelling their names, in the unlikely event of them reading this.)

*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.

Video courtesy of 

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Guys and Dolls: Lord Spoon & David - Woman A Love in the Night Time (22 May 1993)

 

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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.

Video courtesy of Mo-Fi.

Guys and Dolls: Mayaula Mayoni - Ko Tika Te (22 May 1993)

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If there’s a heatwave in the UK, you can usually depend on this blog to provide a soukous track from a John Peel playlist for you to dance along with.

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.