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.
For some reason, I overlooked Good Judge of Character when Peel played it as part of a trio of tracks taken from San Francisco band, J Church’s debut album, Quetzalcoatl*, on his 22/5/93 show. Indeed, none of the three made it on to the metaphorical mixtape, but here we are with Good Judge of Character now taking its place. There’s a lot about its general style and demeanour that doesn’t move me particularly, but it reaps the benefit of being a generic punk/metal tune that has had the sense to equip itself with a killer chorus line.
Doesn’t it get cold out here? has been rattling around my brain for the last 48 hours. As the video demonstrates, it lodged in enough Peel Show listeners’ minds to propel it to Number 34 in the 1993 Festive Fifty. And with that sliver of catchiness hooking me in, I’ve gone back to the track again and again, which has enabled me to discover layers of interest that aren’t immediately obvious on the first listen.
The song’s about Lance Hahn’s interactions with the kind of local character that we all recognise within our towns, but were always warned against striking up conversation with. Hahn’s oddball is a recovering junkie, previously of wealthy standing from Austin, now reduced to living in her car, but still with an eye to be taken out if possible (She asks me on a date that I can’t afford) and who clearly has affection for him, with her ongoing entreaty to Take care, baby.
Hahn’s reaction towards her is affectionate too, but as that chorus line suggests, he’s also amazed/revolted that the woman can live the way she does. The reason why I think she may be a former junkie is because of the line, She’s been to whores’ hell but still manages to smile, which leads me to wonder whether their relationship is quite as innocent as it appears. Perhaps the date that Hahn can’t afford is the woman’s asking price for sexual favours. If she can find enough of those, maybe that’s how she keeps out the cold.
*I really should have responded more warmly to them given that, with that album title, it was obvious they were fans of the movie, Q - The Winged Serpent
Distributed as part of a 4 track EP on Simple Machines called Inclined Plane, which showcased the label owners’ band, Tsunami alongside 3 other bands (Superchunk, Rodan and Unrest), Beauty Pt. II is another track from this 28/5/93 show which takes jealousy of a popular girl as its theme - we were here with Picasso Trigger’s song, Queenie, a few posts ago. However, the reasons for the jealousy in Beauty Pt. II may be more related to bitterness towards a former lover/crush than because of the anger at being ghosted by a friend you helped raise up to alpha status, as was the case in Queenie.
I’m running with the bitter romance angle mainly because Beauty Pt. II was originally recorded by the male, New York band, Flower, for their 1990 album, Hologram Sky. Because the vocals, in both versions, are quite muted - at least until the final 30 seconds, it’s easy on initial listens to miss just how rancorous the singer(s) mood is:
I want to watch her fall/See her change, see her fall.
Furthermore, the following line - I touch a piece of her/Reminds me of what I’ve learnt - implies that the fallout from this relationship is going to be spread around, making Beauty Pt. II into one of those chain reaction heartache songs i.e. “they hurt me, so now I’m going to hurt others.” Had it been Reminds me of what I’ve lost that would transform the narrator from avenger to victim.
If there’s one thing sustaining our narrator though, it’s that ongoing trope of seeing someone getting swamped in attention and it causing them to unravel as they have to keep so many hearts on a string that eventually they start forgetting which lie they’ve told:
She is a superstar/Falling fast, falling hard.
She’s shooting through the sky/Cool and hot, she’s gonna die*.
There isn’t a great deal to choose between the two versions, Tsunami’s is moderately faster, though I’ve found myself listening to Flower’s version more, possibly because it might be being sung by Ian James, who would go on to be a founding member of Cell. Where they diverge is in the thrashy outro that forms the last movement of the track. On Flower’s version it sounds like they’re screaming, I’ve got a gun in the car on three of the four refrains, before ending with One, two, three four, which Tsunami use throughout the last 35 seconds - though one of the women eventually melds this into something I can’t quite make out in counterpoint to it. Regardless, it causes a song called Beauty Pt. II to end on a rather ugly note.
A look at the John Peel wiki suggests that Peel only played two of the tracks on Inclined Plane. Three weeks before playing Beauty Pt. II, he had included Darjeeling by Rodan. This blog didn’t cover that show, but I would have probably passed on it. Of the others, I would have very likely included Winona Ryder by Unrest, which was an updated reworking of Debbie Harry by Family Fodder. Superchunk’s tune, Baxter, would have been a borderline choice.
For some reason, this track had a question mark against it on my list of selections. Maybe I was a bit put off by the crappy synth pan-pipe/trumpet sounds of the Resistance riddim which underpins the song or, more likely, I was irritated by the period between 2:33 and 2:43, where Leroy Smart tries to throw in some soulful vocalisations, but sounds less like someone wilting under the pressure of poverty and more like someone getting hit by an attack of acute appendicitis.
Ultimately, Poor Man Struggle is too well made to be ignored though. The lyrics are standard “the-rich-get-the-pleasure-and-the-poor-get-the-blame” fare, but it’s all put together by people who so clearly know what they’re doing that it sounds fresh and invigorating.
The only change I would make, especially if the song was being recorded now, would be to insist on a verse about how the poor man’s struggle is often made worse by a tendency to act against their own interests if they think it will make other poor people’s lives worse. Until this mindset is altered, or even better, until governments stop using it as a fallback strategy to stop people forcing genuinely effective changes, then the struggle will never end, and the rich will continue walking on water while the rest of us frantically try and stay afloat.
Video courtesy of Reggae Nineties (And Early 2000s).
