Oliver: The Farm - Love See No Colour [Peel Session] (10 November 1991)

Maybe because I'm a cynical Southerner, I've always found the community based, "We're all friends here" pop of The Farm to be too cloying for my tastes.  Nowhere is this saccharine sentimentality better exemplified than by their biggest hit, All Together Now, with its video of monochrome pensioners, singing along and bearing their cares nobly over dominoes in the social club, while Peter Hooton patronises them.
So when Peel announced they were repeating the band's session from 31 August 1991 on 10/11/91, I groaned.  And then he started playing Love See No Colour....

On the surface, this song is all the things that annoy me about The Farm.  It's blandly universal in its themes and deals mainly in cliches.  But, as a live version, it stood out as irresistible: working in a tangible sense of melancholy to an otherwise optimistic song. Somehow, all those details that make a Farm record usually so annoying come together in this tune to strike the kind of universal chord that they normally drive me mad with when they try to find them in everything else they recorded.
"Should make a dandy single" was Peel's verdict after playing the session version.  Unfortunately, it didn't strike that chord with the record buying public, stalling at number 58 in its first release run and then a year later, a remix peaked at number 35.

Several Farm sessions are available for sharing but regrettably the 1991 one isn't among them so it's the recorded version, which was the title track to The Farm's 1992 album that I am presenting here.

Video courtesy of MarkTurver1990.