The Comedy of Errors: Mosquito - Down/The Bonzo Dog Band - Slush/Mighty Force - Dum Dum (1 May 1992)

Buy Mosquito at Discogs
Buy Bonzo Dog Band at Discogs
Buy Mighty Force at Discogs

A triple bill of tracks taken directly from Peel’s 1/5/92 show and each of which owe their place on the mixtape to their sense of atmosphere.  Two of them are instrumentals and a third features vocals mixed in such ultra lo-fi fashion as to be indecipherable.

Mosquito was a meeting of minds and talents that brought together Jad Fair (think a slinkier voiced Daniel Johnston), Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth and Tim Foljahn of Two Dollar Guitar, a group that Shelley would also play a part in.  Peel was playing Down, a track from their eponymous debut EP, and was particularly tickled by the fact that the track ended in a locked groove, “So you can play it as long as you like until the record wears out or you switch your radio off.”  Given that it was the first track on the EP, how many people took it back to the record store complaining that there was a scratch in the vinyl?*  Before the groove is reached at around 2:15 on the video, Mosquito serve up what sounds like busking performed by dancing skeletons.  The distortion on the vocal is so harsh that about the only words I can pick out sound like “cheap whores” and “cheap meals”.  Close miked blasts of harmonica ring out like a steam train passing directly over the listener’s head, but help to keep things bouncing along catchily amid the verbal incoherence.

Peel let the locked groove keep playing throughout the majority of the next track in an act of worlds-in-collision mixing by segueing into Slush by The Bonzo Dog Band.  With its gentle organ and string lines (possibly provided through a Mellotron), this appears to provide a calming contrast with the noise of Down.  But Peel may well have been indulging in a bit of creative sequencing here, because while the locked groove of Down continues to scream away in the background, Slush’s most distinguishing feature - a persistent, genuinely amused, maniacal laugh begins to fade in and overwhelm both its own sound and the locked groove.  Considering that Slush was the final track on a Bonzo Dog Band album, Let’s Make Up and Be Friendly, which was recorded as a contractual obligation in late 1971, nearly two years after the band had announced their break-up, its tempting to see the strings and organ as a final burial of the band while the use of the laughter reflects both the sensibility  of the band throughout its life or a comment by its composer, Neil Innes on the mental state of Vivian Stanshall.  The frontman of the Bonzos had in Innes’s words, “lost his nerve a bit” between two American tours in 1969.  Prescribed “life threatening” amounts of Valium and drinking heavily  by the turn of the decade, one of the 1960s sharpest, brightest and funniest intellects had seen his genuine eccentricity lead him into shithouse stunts like dressing up as a Nazi officer and joining Keith Moon on a pub-crawl around Golders Green.  Stanshall would later regard the 1970s as a lost decade despite the fact that during that time he recorded arguably his most famous musical creation, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End which he had devised out of sessions and shows covering for Peel while he was on holiday through the early to mid-70s.  The choice of laughter that Innes uses is very perceptive, sounding on one hand healthy, happy and alive; while on the other hand it sounds like the laugh of a maniac locked away in Stanshall’s head and ready to burst forward at any moment inflicting chaos on its owner.

As the laughter fades away, the trio completes with the enjoyably bouncy Dum Dum by Mighty Force
which despite sounding heavily imbued by the German industrial techno scene was recorded at Suite 16 Studios in Rochdale.

*Answer - no one, because the sleeve of the record warned of a “Pesky Locked Groove”.

Video courtesy of Webbie and my sincere thanks to them for their help in putting these tracks up for sharing.