Oliver! Terry Edwards - 4our/Knife [Peel Session] (10 April 1992)

The mix of political and domestic news on 10/4/92 left Peel in a state where it wasn’t safe for him to be alone around sharp objects.  Fortunately, he had some company to distract him from his despondency, as session guest Terry Edwards joined him for a chat throughout the show.  Without the pressure of a schedule to keep to, the conversation was much more engaged than Peel’s car crash phone interview with Lesley Rankine of Silverfish had been three months previously.  Edwards, a personable chap with a disturbing laugh, revealed that his old band, Serious Drinking, were reforming to make an album.  Indeed, Edwards had spent the evening playing with them.  The album never saw the light of day, though an EP did.  Peel reminisced about Eugene McCarthy, guitarist with Serious Drinking, selling him some seriously large shirts.

This session proved to be very popular having initially been broadcast in February 1992, it would get three further airings through the course of the year.  The only tracks from the actual session that I’ve found were Edwards’s Napalm Death medley - death metal through the medium of saxophone, it doesn’t seem obvious until you’ve heard it.  Edwards was playing solo on this session, but the recordings presented here were taken from solo records and his work with The Scapegoats.  Four is a Miles Davis composition taken at, well, four times the tempo of Davis’s original.  Of greater interest was Knife, an Edwards composition which in the session concentrated on the descending saxophone phrase (transposed to the bassline in the recording) supported by shrieking horn embellishments. Given more life and support by The Scapegoats when recorded for My Wife Doesn’t Understand Me, it becomes a thrilling, noirish jazz/funk hybrid in search of a TV detective series to soundtrack.

Miles Davis and friends - four times slower than Terry Edwards:




Videos courtesy of Terry Edwards - Topic (so enjoy them while they last before the bots reset themselves) and jazzman2696 (Davis).