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.

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.

Guys and Dolls: Thule - Dynamo (22 May 1993)

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If you’ve ever thought that hard rock would be improved by the addition of party razzers* then this is the song for you.

That might sound like I’m trying to polish a novelty turd of a tune, but Dynamo, recorded by Thule for their second and final album, (321 Normal 2) has grown on me the more that I’ve heard it. If you read the Discogs or John Peel Wiki pages on them, they promise a banquet of eclecticism, with their music encompassing electronica, dub and ambient, while groups such as Kraftwerk, Tackhead and Chrome are all mentioned as influences. To my untrained ears, Dynamo owes more to Bauhaus and Joy Division - they even manage to rhyme the words control and dynamo for goodness sake!

It all starts out with a scratchy bassline followed by similarly scratchy guitar picking. I’ve always been a sucker for musical flourishes that sound like something eroding before your ears. And once the track gets started, it’s played in a key which dominates the environment so completely, it’s a struggle not to be drawn in. I’d rhapsodise even more about Dynamo if we could hear the lyrics more clearly. What I can make out from it makes the Joy Division comparisons even clearer given that they seem to be barking out a list of Ian Curtis approved bullet points: Obsession…isolation….etc. Alongside that is the post-punk ethos of embracing the mechanical/technical and working that into a crossover with the organic. I think Thule also managed to align this with early 1990s musical mores. For example, I originally heard the word, insulator - at 1:15 - as Catch you later, which given that it followed a line that sounded like it was saying, Young and tender had me wondering whether this was acting as some kind of deconstruction of Beverly Hills 90210 youth culture, but I’m more inclined to believe that, with a dynamo being something that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy, the song is instead targeting the slacker generations and by extension, it projects a frustration that the angst and fury in grunge music isn’t being converted into something more positive and constructive. The squealing party razzers evoke the sense of an attempt to summon up energy, which in keeping with the spirit of the time, eventually peters out in a fit of audiopique.

That’s what I believe anyway, but I can’t be sure, so in the final reckoning, Dynamo ends up as a half-masterpiece.

Video courtesy of subunitfour.

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*The party razzers are probably broken saxophone reeds.

Guys and Dolls: Jimmy Reed - Hush-Hush (22 May 1993)

 

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There’s already a blogpost featuring this song, dating from the very earliest days of the blog in which I included it in a post outlining my favourite tracks from Peel’s final Radio 1 show. I put that up at the time without comments to mark the tenth anniversary of Peel’s final Radio 1 broadcast, but back then I was still figuring out how this blog would work and I didn’t want to focus too much on the end of Peel’s career. But, 11 years before his death, Hush-Hush, originally recorded by his beloved Jimmy Reed in 1960, was cropping up on this 22/5/93 show, and in doing so, finally ensured Reed took his place on the metaphorical mixtape.

I still hold to my earlier contention that all Jimmy Reed songs sound the same. Indeed, one of the reasons why Hush-Hush has been included here is because I briefly thought it was actually Too Much*, my favourite Reed song. But, as overused as it is, the rolling blues scale which underpins Hush-Hush and most other Reed songs, sweeps the listener in to shoulder-rolling-head-bobbing submission. 

Peel spoke once about how, as a live performer, Reed tended to sing more slowly as his set progressed, and there are moments here where he sounds like he’s singing a song called Hughe-Hughe, but with his lyrical parries to the attacks of a nagging, suspicious partner, he also manages to provide inspiration to future songs as diverse as Rabbit by Chas and Dave and It Wasn’t Me by Shaggy.

Samey? Pretty much, yeah. Influential? Obviously!

*Apologies for not doing a link to Too Much, but I’m sure it’ll turn up on a Peel show I’m covering at some point in the future, and I’d like to hold it back as a treat.

Video courtesy of Carlos Rasool.

Guys and Dolls: Eric’s Trip - Hurt (22 May 1993)

 

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Fans of the Canadian band, Eric’s Trip, would have been in heaven during the Spring of 1993 given that two different labels released an EP and a mini-album by them in that period. Peel had already played tracks from the mini-album, Peter, released by Murderecords (though it was also issued by Sub Pop in Germany). Now Sub Pop was issuing an EP called Songs About Chris. If you bought the maxi-EP and paired it up with Peter, you had 12 new songs with only Listen appearing on both records.

Hurt does exactly what it says on the tin, the only question is whether the lyrics refer to it being felt after an argument, a break-up or a bereavement. I think it may be the latter given that there are references to the other person having a stupid mouth and being someone who complained a lot. Hurt me with the words/Scream ‘em in my ears/Cause it’s OK implies that this person was a drag to be around, but that never hearing from them again is too upsetting to contemplate.  

The moral appears to be love and cherish those around you; even the ones who bug the hell out of you, because when those annoyances have gone for good, you’re going to miss them.

Peel played Hurt together with another track from the EP called Sloansong. This may have been a tribute to the band, Sloan, who owned Murderecords. One of the lyrics even says Get that Sloan song zooming through my head/Do the words relate to me?  I wonder if this was the one they had in mind?

Video courtesy of contraflow.

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Guys and Dolls: The Glory Strummers - Neglected ‘N’ Blue (22 May 1993)

 

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This was the final record that Peel played on 22/5/93. He admitted that when he received a copy of The Glory Strummers EP, Retrograde Steps, he had been unenthusiastic about listening to it, because he found the band’s name off-putting. However, he really enjoyed the EP, of which Neglected ‘N’ Blue was the opening track.

If you’re cynical about bands trying to do the whole 70s punk sound a decade or more after the original scene had happened, you may find it difficult not to snigger at Neglected ‘N’ Blue. Listening to the drum roll that accompanies the opening riff, you may find yourself thinking, “I bet the singer’s going to shout Hey! any second….now!” and you’d be right to do so. I confess that I blew hot and cold on it when initially re-listening to it, but I was finally won over by The poor little rich kid refrain and a gradual understanding about what the song was about. I say gradual because while some parts of the lyric ring out loud and clear, other parts are too garbled to fully make out.

If punk rock’s principal lyrical qualities were anger and piss taking, then Neglected ‘N’ Blue mixes a smidgin of the former with a dollop of the latter.  The target of the song appears to be affluent students who are able to delay having to go out and work by taking a year out. The line You don’t care about people suggests that The Glory Strummers have particular contempt for those who use their time out to have an ongoing holiday, rather than use the time to help those less fortunate than themselves. I could be misinterpreting the song, and in a way I hope I am given that my reading of it suggests righteous anger on one hand and unattractive envy on the other. 

Ultimately, I think it takes a slightly superficial line of thinking that money should insulate you from unhappiness, which it can in terms of not needing to worry about paying your next bill, but it also labours under the misapprehension that mental health anxiety is a myth when applied to the well off. If it wasn’t for the fact that the performance is so electric, I might have left Neglected ‘N’ Blue off on the grounds of a shitty attitude. Emotional uncertainty is no respecter of bank balances after all.

Video courtesy of Release - Topic

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