Oliver!: Red Hour - All I Need/William Jailor [Peel Session] (8 March 1992)

"Inspiration. Inspiration. Inspiration. Inspiration."



"You fought with me and now you want to screw."

Peel's first new session of 1992 was provided by Barrow-in-Furness 5 piece, Red Hour and broadcast on 4 January 1992. The repeat in this programme may have been to publicise an EP release which, if you believe Red Hour's Discogs page never saw the light of day.  Indeed, as with my beloved Milk, the new year seemed set to call time on this band's commercial life.  Listening to them, Red Hour were proudly, stoically, old school indie-rock and they do it very well indeed, but perhaps assessing their prospects when set against the shoegazers and the oncoming grunge express, they were wise to quit while having achieved the Peel punk dream of releasing a record and doing a Peel session.

All I Need is a fast rocker which shows that Noel Gallagher wasn't the first Northern based songwriter to take the notion of escape from a town/situation that drags you back and run with it.  So
many of us are where this song is, metaphorically speaking.  The belief that escape to something more fulfilling is possible if only we trust what we have in our head.  Follow art not commerce - I still feel that at nearly 41 years of age.  And I'm still trapped, believing that things will be different if I believe in that inspiration, inspiration, inspiration, inspiration.
William Jailor is a more interesting track.  It sounds like Dave Canavan is calling a football hooligan out for a ruck, but the jailor angle suggests a shared history between the participants and a reckoning for past abuses being collected.  The allusions to needing the mountains and lakes imply that this will be a battle fought out in a wide open space with no witnesses.  And no protection for William Jailor, or "The men from the ministry".  With his stentorian vocal calling for the satisfaction of hand-to-hand combat against this figure of officialdom, Canavan comes on like Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights as reimagined by the righteous anger of Jimmy McGovern.  It presents tantalising possibilities over what Red Hour could have done had they kept going.  The other songs from the session were Free Fall which I thought sounded like a poor Catherine Wheel knock off, and Almost There which I didn't hear on the recording, but had I done so, I would probably have included it.

Videos courtesy of Richard Attwood.