The Comedy of Errors: Grenadine - Fillings (9 May 1992)

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“...that was called Fillings.  I didn’t quite understand the message behind it, but a nice little record anyway...patronising git.” John Peel (9/5/92)

I fell in love with Fillings from the moment I heard it, which was when I was listening to the file of this show on an iPad while sitting in a car waiting to collect my wife from Orpington Train Station.  The circular guitar patterns and Jenny Toomey’s beautiful voice stayed with me, perhaps, because as Peel admitted before playing it, “This is a rather more tranquil piece than we’ve been experiencing over the last half hour”.
When it came to revisiting the track, I initially found myself getting what Peel had clearly missed when listening to the lyrics:  Toomey had recently been to the dentist, possibly to have a wisdom tooth removed and had had some form of hallucinatory experience which she strove to write about.  Being the early 90s, she didn’t have to suffer the indignity of having her post extraction comedown uploaded to YouTube and we should be grateful that she managed to be more lucid than most people are in a similar situation....and then I listened again and realised it was about sex.  Dentistry as a metaphor for sex.  The song drips with it given the lines about fillings in the mouth, objects that protect (contraceptives) while shining while the lights are out, “kisses that are always promises” while the final quartet of couplets get progressively more explicit:

Drill until I feel the humming running through the chair.
Clutching on the bannister, the creaking dark upstairs.
Lean back, open wide, a pressure on my jaw.
I am filled with stars.
(Copyright of Jenny Toomey and Mark Robinson)

Even those circular guitar patterns give off the feeling of foreplay before the more urgent playout, tracked by dampened vocal harmonies, like angels blessing a quickie, sounds like the thrilling stampede towards climax, with the faded jangles at the very end coming on like post-coital kisses. Even the packaging for the record, a 7” single called Triology, which backed Fillings with a track called Gillian, was described by Peel as being, “like a cake wrapper - it takes you a minute to get the record out and two minutes to get it back in again”.  Anyone who has struggled with bra clips and fly buttons in the height of passion will know the feeling.

Grenadine were a supergroup bringing together the aforementioned Jenny Toomey, who issued their records on her Simple Machines label, with Rob Christiansen of the brilliant Eggs and Mark Robinson who at this particular time was riding high in his day job with Unrest whose latest (1992) album Imperial f.f.r.r was enjoying major critical acclaim.

The video features a re-recording of the song for Grenadine’s first album, Goya, though the main difference between that and the Triology version is that Toomey’s voice was single tracked on the original recording.

Video courtesy of purplepapers