Oliver!: Marina Van-Rooy [Peel Session] (10 April 1992)

I’m afraid that this session saw my critical faculties eclipsed by aural lust.  “She’s pure sex!” bellow my notes from when I first heard this show.  In my self-defence, I’m looking at it from the perspective of how my 16 year old self would have reacted to Van-Rooy’s breathy, faun-like cooing of lines like “Make your love, make your love HOT!” or “Sex with you, when we do what we do” in Honey Drip or the murmured, distinctly mid-coital exhortations to “Hold me...say you’ll stay with me” in Stay With Me.  I wouldn’t have been able to resist then.  I still can’t now.

It’s only when listening to the session again that I realise that Van-Rooy’s doing such sterling work amidst some pretty flimsy supporting material.  Nevertheless, there are compensations - a wonderful chorus on All Heaven’s Open for instance.  Honey Drip is the best track of the lot with it’s bass/synth synchronicity providing an urgent hormonal heartbeat rush behind Van-Rooy’s bedroom vocal.  And Stay With Me wraps the listener up in the gossamer sheets of Van-Rooy’s voice and sighs to create something that sounds like a Tantric sex riff on Madonna’s Justify My Love.

The recording comes direct from the Peel show of 10/4/92 and which shows Peel hoping to hear the session again in more pleasurable circumstances, Van-Rooy’s close attentions failing to alleviate him of the depression felt over the IRA marking a fourth term for the Conservatives with a pair of bombings in Central London.  However, he still had enough mischief in him to follow the end of the session with a letter from Felicity in Wood Green, London, “mainly on the subject of contraceptives” - and anyone taping Van Rooy’s session would surely have contributed to a spike in sales the next day.

Video courtesy of John Peel.