The Comedy of Errors: Bang Bang Machine - Monkey/A Charmed Life [Peel Session] (2 May 1992)

In any cultural field it’s a brave person who declares in the opening week of the year that such and such a cultural artefact will be the best thing of that year.  John Peel didn’t quite go that far in his first Radio 1 show of 1992 but as he cued up Geek Love by Bang Bang Machine, he declared it “The first truly extraordinary record of 1992. Most of you are going to go mad for this.”  51 weeks later, Geek Love sat atop the 1992 Festive Fifty.  This strikes me as the Peel Show equivalent of the Michael McIntyre joke about lazy parental choice when it comes to naming a baby Aaron given that it’s the first name in the baby name book.  Due to file issues, I didn’t blog about or select anything from the 4/1/92 show.  Indeed, I didn’t hear Geek Love until I was listening to his 3/2/92 NachtExpress show for O3 Austria.  I really didn’t see what the fuss was about.  I found Elizabeth Freeth’s vocals exceptionally irritating to listen to while the rest was nothing but tedium.  In preparing this post, I listened to Geek Love again and nothing in it caused me to change my mind.  But what I would say is that although I didn’t like it, I could see why Peel and so many others went for it.  It had ambition and grandeur - especially for a self-financed debut single - it was trying to go that extra mile and it immediately sounded like no other band.  Original voices don’t always say things we want to hear though, and I think that was the case with how I responded to Geek Love.

With so much attention around that track, it was inevitable that they would record a Peel Session pretty quickly.  They duly did so on 28 January 1992 for broadcast on 15 February.  The session was repeated on the 2/5/92 show.  I only heard the two tracks included here, but the full session included other tracks called Justine, which I definitely would have included on a mixtape, and Say It Again,
Joe, which I wouldn’t have done.

Monkey starts out like a funk-rock workout, before going full shoegaze in its chorus.  Freeth’s voice, so teethgrindingly winsome to my ears in Geek Love, now bounces along while reeling off a lyric that appears to connect the ape of the title with working people who have been persuaded that the rat race and pursuit of status symbols is a good life to have, despite the contradiction of “Get a life/That’s no life” while the hair-raising “Oh”s sound like the trains and buses sending all us monkeys out to play at games and pull tricks like monkeys despite us being unable to win at the games that promise us its prizes.
A Charmed Life was more of a borderline inclusion.  It lacks the focussed intensity of Monkey, but stretches out into its spaces in interesting ways.  Around its watery, metronomic guitar patterns, Freeth sings of awakenings - potentially sexual ones - possibly political given the references to 1984, as well as the hunting of boar and other non-sequiturs.  But what comes over especially well is the sense of how youth can seem to be an eternal feeling of joy and optimism that can inoculate us to harsh realities.  Hopefully, we all experience moments in our youth where we feel amazing about life and sure that this feeling will last forever.  Once life intrudes though and pushes its clouds across our sunshine, all we can do is recall those better times and swear undying retrospective devotion to those we shared those times with.

And the ironic thing is that although I would prefer to listen to these tracks ahead of Geek Love any day of the week, neither of them sound anywhere near as original and definitively Bang Bang Machine as Geek Love does.  Which could be the reason why their other material never enjoyed the same level of posterity on Peel’s playlists as their Festive Fifty winner.  Even on the cutting edge of left-field music, there are acts destined to be remembered just for The Hit.

Videos courtesy of VibraCobra Redux