Guys and Dolls: John Peel Show - Friday 14 May 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

My notes describe this show as being …at times, like a Peel Show version of Junior Choice. This is because at least two of the records played on the show were inspired by children. He played Open the Door, Richard! by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, originally recorded in 1947, in response to a fax he had received from James Turner, aged 6, from Cardiff. James wrote to say that he liked Peel’s show, that he had a tape of Jordan’s music and wanted to know whether Peel liked him too. Peel dedicated Open the Door, Richard! to James, claiming that this, and Silver Dollar, were the first songs in his life that he had learned the words to.

Meanwhile, Peel’s son, Tom, was away on a school trip to Normandy, so he dedicated 33% Free by Ford to him, just in case he was able to hear the programme on a long wave frequency. According to the John Peel wiki though, Peel ended up playing the other side, Friendly, which ended up delaying the 11:30pm news by an extra minute.

Other dedications included Enna Garrib by Harram, which went out to the taxi driver who had taken Peel from Stowmarket to Colchester earlier in the week. This was the longest journey he had ever done by cab, though he didn’t specify which roads he’d been taken on. 

A14/A12 covers 28.6 miles, A14/A12/A134 would have been 28.7 miles, with the A14 alone offering the longest journey of all at 30.2 miles.  If he was using “Stowmarket” to encompass a pick up from Peel Acres, then the distances increase to 31.2 miles via A14/A12, 31.4 miles if using Combs Lane before the A14/A12, but the quickest journey of the lot - in terms of distance - would have been via the B1115, which was only 26.2 miles, though it was the longest journey in terms of time, at 48 minutes.

Perhaps Peel had needed to use the taxi in order to take him to see The Fall, who he had seen in Cambridge, earlier in the week, and whose performance he described as at their most non-commital. He opened the show by playing Everything Hurtz, which would have made a nice partner to a similarly named REM hit which was clogging up the airwaves around April/May 1993.

This show was also to have featured the naming of winners for a competition relating to Sebadoh, but he had received no entries for it. Peel blamed himself for this as he had given out what he termed a silly address for the entries to be sent to and realised in retrospect that this may have put people off.

The show was notable for Peel being thrown into a state of alarm when he realised, halfway through the programme, that he had mistimed the music he was going to play through the various hours of his show. One hour had 75 minutes’ worth of music programmed in, while another hour only had 45 minutes’ worth. This was problematic because he also had to ensure that the news bulletins came in at the right time.

One record which was unaffected by all this was Ritmista! by Astrospider, which was the first fruit of Peel’s hookup with the Belgian label, Wonka Beats. Peel had made contact with them during his Grand Tour of Europe, the previous autumn, and they had promised to send him all of their future releases.

The selections from this show were taken from a full 3 hour programme. Everything which made my initial list of selections was available, but five choices fell from favour on relistening:

Blade - Keep It Goin’ On - UK rapper, Blade, made history in June 1993 when he released the double-album, The Lion Goes From Strength to Strength. This was one of the first albums ever to be released via crowdfunding:

The original crowd funded album, just goes to show how far ahead of the game Blade was. I sent off my cheque (for £25 from memory) to Blade months before the album was released and my name is in the album. Every mail order piece of vinyl I bought from Blade had a hand written note from him included. Absolute legend of the UK rap scene. (A messageboard comment by sskelly on Discogs, 13 August, 2021).

Keep It Goin’ On was the opening track on The Lion Goes From Strength to Strength. It always had a question mark against it, because it was OK, but not OK enough to make me want to keep it. I then did that thing I occasionally do where I listen to an album that a track has been taken off to see whether it would ultimately make my mind up for me - see Gallon Drunk on the previous Friday’s Peel Show. I need to stop doing this, because, apart from setting it in context, it really isn’t a particularly relevant method of choosing whether to include a single piece of music by comparing it to potentially better pieces of music by the same artist. Make no mistake, some of the tracks I heard from The Lion Goes From Strength to Strength (I didn’t listen to the whole album) were very good indeed. For instance, Gripper the Pitbull (The Approach) would have got on without any problems at all. But ultimately, doing this only caused me to wish that Peel had been playing that instead of this. As I listened to the other tracks I became quite beaten down by the aggression and attack, it all seemed to become rather one note. Hence, why my summary of  For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hyper, which I listened to after some prolonged exposure to Blade, was so succinct. After all the moaning, it was a necessary blast of effervescence. Still, I have a Blade track down on my list of selections from Friday 28 May 1993, so maybe he will end up in the mixtape after all.

Ohio Players - Walt’s First Trip - 1970s funk and a track recorded for their 1972 album, Pleasure, which appears to have been a companion album to another album they released the same year called Pain. A look at their album covers suggests that the team behind This is Spinal Tap may have had both them and Roxy Music in mind when it came to the idea around the Smell the Glove album cover.  I sometimes get blindsided with surprise when Peel plays a funk/soul track because of a misconception I have about him not being keen on the genre. This is palpably untrue and is most likely down to me constantly making the touristy mistake that because Peel preferred the output of labels like Stax over Motown, that any soul based record appearing on his show is a surprise. As a result it means that I’ll initially include pleasant if unremarkable instrumentals like this one. It’s only on re-listening that I find myself thinking less about how I would dance to the tune and more about what I would be ordering for a starter if it was playing in a restaurant. Pleasant but wholly unremarkable. Speaking of whom…

The Edsel Auctioneer - Philled/Summer Hit [Peel Session] - Oh lads, lads, lads….another name to add to the list alongside Stereolab and The Hair and Skin Trading Company of artists who regularly make my initial list of inclusions but who fall from favour at the moment that I would be pressing the record button on the metaphorical mixtape. This is the third occasion that I’ve left The Edsel Auctioneer out in the cold. I’m not going to lie, their name is a big turn-off for me, but ultimately they are far too bland for me to want to keep hold of. My notes say that I agreed with Peel that Summer Hit was the best track of the session.  

Both Philled and Summer Hit ended up on The Edsel Auctioneer’s second album, The Good Time Music Of…, released in 1995. Looking at the track titles, my interest was piqued by it including a track called 11th September ‘94*. Morbid curiosity provoked me to listen to it to see whether the band had any kind of foresight for the terrible events that would take place on that date, seven years later. But all I got was, what d’you know, a pleasant but inessential instrumental track, which is notable only for the fact that it has commentary from Leeds United’s 2-1 win over Manchester United, which was played on the same day, in the background.

The full session is available including two additional songs called Simple and State of Grace.

Candy Machine - The Merchant’s Square/Macrobot - Peel played three tracks from the Baltimore band’s eponymous debut album on this show. These two made my initial list, The Constant didn’t. Having listened back to the tracks, I see now that the only reason I chose them to start with is because I liked the band’s name. The Edsel Auctioneer were always up against it, and ultimately they missed out because the quality wasn’t good enough. Candy Machine’s name promised sweet treats, but the music was gnarlier and lumpier than I thought it would be or that I could stand it being. The Candy Machine album is available for listening. The Merchant’s Square and Macrobot are the first two tracks.

Admiral Bailey - Can’t Keep a Good Man Down - This started out quite promisingly, but I lost patience with it when halfway through, the Admiral abandoned what he was doing and started to perform Psalm 23 - The Lord Is My Shepherd instead.

Full tracklisting

*By curious quirk of fate, the Peel Show that I’ve just finished listening to for this blog was the one from exactly a year before The Edsel Auctioneer recorded that instrumental.

Guys and Dolls: Hyper - For Whom the Bell Tolls (14 May 1993)

 

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I’ll elaborate more in the next post, but sometimes all a man needs is a trance techno record which sounds like Evelyn Glennie working in a studio after ingesting her own body weight in cocaine.

Video courtesy of onlyraretracks.

Guys and Dolls: Meat Beat Manifesto - Radio Babylon/Soul Driver/Fire Number 9 [Peel Session] (14 May 1993)

 

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Having failed to bill the first airing of Meat Beat Manifesto’s one and only Peel Session when it was broadcast on Saturday 6 February 1993, the Radio Times tried to make up for it when the repeat went out on this 14/5/93 show. Unfortunately, they spelled the band’s name as Meat Ball Manifesto, a mistake which Peel felt moved to apologise on air for. But, all things considered, the Radio Times error wasn’t so far off the mark because the quality of 3/4 of the tracks in this session really was different gravy…

Listeners were treated to past, present and future in this session. The three tracks that would have made it on to my mixtape all differ stylistically from one another, but contain little offcuts and sprinkles that offer moments of familiarity amid the strange melange of sounds and atmospheres in each track. 

Radio Babylon grabs me for slightly more synesthistic reasons than it might to do others. Primarily an exercise in breakbeat, what I like are the samples of Babylon that ring out throughout the track. I had initially thought it was taken from some high-minded, ecstatic reggae record, but why should Meat Beat Manifesto have to reach into the deepest corners of their record collection, when they can just lift the word straight out of the chorus of Rivers of Babylon by Boney M, drench it in reverb and in doing so, transport me back to a mental space where I’m watching exotically filmed adverts on sunny curtain drawn afternoons in the mid 1980s -  The Art of Noise did that to me once. To my ears, what Meat Beat Manifesto did with that sample moved it from the realm of drunken family parties and instead evoked sun blasted landscapes and the bleat of a car horn as a crowd of millions takes to the streets, chanting for something better than the wretched normality they’re served up with as their everyday existence and hissed at to be grateful for.  It’s retro, it’s the sound of Rastafarian New Yorkers playing their mixes on the ghetto blaster on a hot day in the West Side as the fire hydrant plumes its water upwards.  This isn’t bad going for two men - Jonny Stephens and Jack Dangers - from Swindon.

As it progresses though, it becomes slightly stranger, as though the radio is picking up subconscious thoughts and feelings on its frequencies. One of these appears to be a sample of the panicked cry of Oh no! which opens I Can’t Control Myself by The Troggs. It leads me to wonder whether, when Meat Beat Manifesto recorded the session on 13 December 1992, they were trying to warn the world that 18 months later, a cover of a Troggs song was going to be completely inescapable for the whole of a summer. By the end, the track has descended into something which sounds like it’s trying to fuse together the sentiments of Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft with the mood of the final 90 seconds of Bike by Pink Floyd. 

 If Radio Babylon represented the past - it had originally been released as a single in 1990  - then Soul Driver points to the immediate future. Starting out of a trip hop beat, we’re then taken into a lyric in which Dangers details various stages of paranoia, to which music seems to be the only cure:

Soul driver, the beat improviser.

Soul driver, the rhythm organiser.

Soul driver, the beat provider.

Soul driver,  can you turn the lights up on the rhythm.

Which it then does as Meat Beat Manifesto try to take us inside the rhythm, garlanding it with noodling guitar lines of such gentleness, that it feels like the music is trying to cocoon the listener from their troubles. Even the repeated verse of paranoia and worry finds itself being subsumed into the music as it tries to filter out the bad vibes. And from 2:33 onwards to the end of the track, Soul Driver plays out with a repeated Mellotron line which leads the listener down to Eden, to the accompaniment of an aural winding down, which encourages the listener to let go of all feelings of struggle and stress. In a year’s time, this would start to become a dominant sound in dance music, just within a brief window, but long enough and distinctly enough to mark it out as an original 90s scene.

The sense of something winding down also permeates the last 90 seconds of Fire Number 9, which was a remix of a track called #9 Bad Acid, that had originally been recorded by Dimensional Holofonic Sound on the original version of House of God. Jack Dangers’s remix was put out by DHS on a record called LSD3D Acid Mixes. The only real difference between the record mix and the Peel Session version is that the record opens with someone saying It only has to be heard to be absorbed rather than the more hypnotic refrain of You’ve eliminated any interruptions or distractions. For the rest, the track remains dominated by a driving drum beat waiting for Primal Scream to swoop in, take it away and titivate it up for use in Rocks, later that year. It also brings together two of the definitive found sounds of the year 1968:

1) Arthur Brown bellowing I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you at the top of his Number 1 hit, Fire.

2) The most famous use of the words Number 9 in Western culture; namely as part of the refrain heard at regular intervals throughout Revolution 9 by The Beatles. 

For me, it’s that juxtaposition that makes the track essential to keep. 30 years on from this session, Meat Beat Manifesto and DHS would come together again to collaborate on an EP called Man From Mantis.

The fourth track in the session was Drop, a discordant electronica track which had an additionally atonal vocal thrown in for added annoyance. But three out of four isn’t bad and in many ways Meat Beat Manifesto were only getting started. With Jack Dangers as the only constant member, they have continued to issue singles, albums and collaborations up to the present day. But Peel, whose support had only been occasional since they started issuing records in 1988, didn’t go with them. Barring a single play of one of their tracks on a 1997 compilation album called Sally’s Photographic Memory, they never featured on a Peel Show again after this session repeat.

 

Videos courtesy of Dub Records.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Turbulence - Whurlstorm (14 May 1993)

 

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I had a question mark next to this when I added it to the long list of selections from this show, but its place on the metaphorical mixtape was never in doubt once I established which version of Whurlstorm - out of four different mixes - Peel had played on 14/5/93.

Whurlstorm first surfaced as the flipside to the first Turbulence release, Whurlwind. Issued on Industrial Strength Records, it was essentially a slightly sped up version of the one that Peel played on this show, which was the lead version on a trio of mixes which were put out on Super Special Corp,  the label that put out the rest of Turbulence’s releases during the 90s.

What makes Whurlstorm essential is that it’s one of those techno tracks where its highpoints really stand out when they arrive. Dance music is built on mythology and hype, and for all the talk about laying down the groove or setting up the beat, so many dance tracks are a series of longueurs, interspersed with moments of extreme, ecstatic activity designed either to get you busting a move if you’re on the dancefloor or looking up in interest and exhilaration if you’re sat listening to it. Such is the case here, where after 35 seconds of low key beats and bleeps, we’re thrown into something which sounds like processed turn-table needle scratching fed through a wah pedal, but done at such speed and with such musicality, it makes you immediately want to start breakdancing to it. It crops up again at 1:34.

But as with a soukous track, it’s the final 2 and a half minutes that contains Whurlstorm’s true ace. You’ll hear throughout the track treated vocal cries of Whurlstorm and Yeah, mixed in such a way to make them sound like they are being growled by a subterranean monster. From around 3:34, that monster makes its presence known. Firstly, there’s a descending line of sound which sounds like power circuits running down. Then at 3:45, there’s a brief bit of white noise which evokes birds flying off into the distance, just the way that they do in nature when they become aware, often ahead of man, that a natural disaster is about to happen. 

And then, from 3:55, it strikes. Imagine if the pulverising, juggernaut bassline ripping through the earth in Humanoid by Skyflyer -  played by Peel almost a year before this programme - had laid an egg. Now, a year later, that egg hatches a full size monster, rearing up and destroying everything above it. The final two minutes encapsulate a sense of disorientation, destruction, panic (represented by a couple of returns for the breakdance music), before ultimately ending on a note of calm after everything has been razed to the ground.

This mix of Whurlstorm is known as A1. Of the other two mixes of Whurlstorm that came out alongside it, I’d recommend B2 on the grounds that if A1 deals in destruction, then B2 concerns itself with rebirth and reconstruction. Its relentless beat and throbbing synth-line evoking a community fixing its buildings and its spirit after the monster has gone.

Video courtesy of Les Enfants Terribles.

Guys and Dolls: Leatherface - Books (14 May 1993)

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I’ve been off work this week and have been enjoying and enduring record breaking temperatures for May in the United Kingdom. What I discovered in the early part of the week, when temperatures were at their hottest, is that they are not good conditions for listening to anything by Leatherface.  Each time I tried to start listening to Books, which was recorded for their fourth album, Minx, I found myself skipping on elsewhere after 30 seconds, “I’m too tired for you today” was my general attitude.  And if thrashy guitar noise was all that Leatherface had to offer, I may still be sitting here, necking cloudy lemonade and putting them off until the drizzle returns next week. But I persevered and in doing so found I was reminded of something I wrote about when they last featured on this blog - you really have to listen to the words. They may have looked like they were all you ever need to meet your bricklaying needs, but they were virtuoso musicians and romantic poets, in a way that contrasted with their sound. They had you cherishing beauty and melancholy, even while you moshed as though your life depended on it.

Books is another example of the music of aggressive reflection which appears to characterise many of Leatherface’s songs. Here, author Frankie Stubbs examines a relationship between a brother and a sister which has seen both of them become paralysed with inertia. It’s not explained whether one is caring for the other, or if both of them have seen their lives shrink due to uncontrolled circumstances. Throughout the song, there are references to things and objects from another time, which have stayed in place through habit for so long that the house they share seems to be physically crying out for change:

A house full of things some of which they hadn’t seen

Since they bought the sodding things in 1980-something.

And if only their place 

Had a little more space

And a little less waste

That would be something.

Stubbs is an observer to this unchanging picture, chafing at the bit to get out and get away:

I don’t wanna be, bound up like books.

I don’t wanna be a sad ornament of a place.

However, the cracked vocal note on which he ends the song implies a moment of doubt as to whether he will avoid the same fate.

As the year progressed, Leatherface moved towards a split. They recorded a third session for Peel on 23 December, which was broadcast in February ‘94, by which time Stubbs announced their dissolution, onstage, during a gig at The Garage, Islington. They reformed again, 5 years later and released four further studio albums between 1999 and 2010. 

Apart from their final session, Peel never played anything else by them after this programme, though he had been reading up on the band through an article in a magazine called Paint It Red, which focussed on the music scene in the North East. He was particularly taken by a photo in it of PJ Harvey, who were about to play a gig in Newcastle, which he thought was the best one he’d ever seen of her/them. That evening, the band* had played at the University of East Anglia, with Sheila and William in attendance.

While researching this article, I discovered just how highly rated and influential Leatherface were, with some describing them as the best UK punk band of the 90s, and their third album, Mush, venerated as one of the best guitar records of the decade. So, why did they not reach wider acclaim? Some answers may be found in this article/interview with Laurence Bell who had the group signed to his Roughneck Recording Company label and also put out a posthumous album after Leatherface’s first split, on Domino.  

Video courtesy of Leatherface - Topic

*I can’t wait till we get to the To Bring You My Love phase and know conclusively that all references to PJ Harvey refer to a person rather than a group.

Guys and Dolls - Gunshot - Bombing in 5 Minutes (14 May 1993)

 

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NOTE - On this video, Bombing in 5 Minutes begins at 20:00.

To celebrate the release of their debut album, Patriot Games, the Leytonstone rap trio, Gunshot’s label, Vinyl Solution also commissioned a limited edition (1000 copies) of instrumental mixes from the album.

Bombing in 5 Minutes takes its title from a hot-mic joke made by Ronald Reagan before recording his live weekly radio address to the American people on 11 August, 1984. Reagan intended to use that week’s recording to announce legislation which would allow student religious groups to meet on school premises outside school hours. During a soundcheck ahead of the broadcast, Reagan spoofed his announcement by saying:

My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes. 

How we laughed back in the day - John Peel after playing Bombing in 5 Minutes on this 14/5/93 show.

Although always intended as a joke, in the Two Tribes-esque atmosphere that still characterised the Cold War at the time, it wouldn’t have done much to reassure a scared world that any of these people had the slightest clue about what they were doing*.

As a reflection that the world of 1993 was in a happier place than had been the case, nine years earlier, Peel played Bombing in 5 Minutes as a response to a story in one of the news bulletins, which punctuated his programme, that America was decommissioning its Strategic Defence Initiative, otherwise known as the Star Wars programme, which had been in operation for a decade and intended to protect America from missile attacks.

As to how the instrumental version of Bombing in 5 Minutes compared to Gunshot’s vocal performance on the original Patriot Games album, I have to say that it doesn’t sound to me like much was being missed by going with the instrumental version. The vocal is so muddily recorded that it’s difficult to really get an handle on what’s going on beyond them using it as a self-motivation talk to themselves ahead of future rap battles against other crews. They certainly seemed to see these contests in apocalyptic terms given that Patriot Games included tracks with titles like World War 3 and Reign of Terror.

A contemporaneous musical take on the story courtesy of Jerry Harrison and Bootsy Collins, released under the name, Bonzo Goes to Washington.

*Things have changed so much, haven’t they…

More on the background and fallout from Reagan’s gaffe.

Video courtesy of SteveWonda and Talking Heads.

Guys and Dolls: The Tribesmen - Hot & Horny (14 May 1993)

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Recommended to Peel by colleagues at Radio 5, Hot & Horny was the final release by The Tribesmen, a house music collective of which there isn’t much clear information available beyond the fact that, on this record, DJ Yomi contributed and that the guitar lines were played by Jez Ansell.

Listening to it, I find myself wondering whether Grant Buckerfield was a fan of it given that he appears to have used at least one of the drum breaks as a direct inspiration in his theme tune for I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!

Video courtesy of The Football Programme and taken directly from a John Peel show, but not from 14/5/93.