“In the last 10 minutes I’ve transmuted rather horribly from Andy Kershaw to John Peel.” 24 hours after their “fantastically amusing” trail for it, Abana Ba Nasery played a live session which straddled the end of Kershaw’s programme and the start of Peel’s. On the 3 hour recording of this show that I heard, they played four tracks - none of which I can share with you beyond the link to the show, though the tracks on the Kershaw show have turned up on YouTube.
Peel had had a trying day. Nerves over the live session, even though, “I’ve been doing live radio programmes since Queen Anne - God bless her”, allied to his continued grumbles about having been unable to either go to that day’s FA Cup final or watch the Eurovision Song Contest. But all had ended well. Liverpool had won the cup, Abana Ba Nasery had delighted him and Eurovision was due
to return to Ireland next year after Linda Martin’s victory. Over 20 years later, Ipswich Town fans would be sitting open-mouthed in amazement when her 1991 duet with Mick McCarthy was brought to our attention.
The incursion of the Abana Ba Nasery session into his airtime led Peel to warn that his show was even more under-rehearsed than usual. The reorganisation of the show meant that Peel had to drop his plan to draw winners from a competition he had set the previous week in which entrants had to send him something interesting in an envelope. However, he did draw winners for a competition in which entrants had to draw a Werefrog. Apparently Peel’s wife, Sheila, always warned him against setting competitions in which he had make judgements over winning entries, because he would be so racked with guilt about those entries he hadn’t picked, he would end up taking them home with him where they would be left hanging around the house for months while Peel tried to think what to do with them, mainly because he couldn’t bear to throw any of them away.
Away from my selections and near misses, of which more in a moment, Peel continued in his mission to drive Sonic Youth completists to madness by playing Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon’s contribution to a Bob Dylan covers album on Imaginary Records called Outlaw Blues. He recommended The Dead Shall Inherit, a new album by US death metal band Baphomet on the grounds that the cover of the album would appeal to people, even if they had no intention of playing the record.
Regular visitors to this blog (hi Webbie) will know that I always mention tracks that either I wanted to share here but couldn’t or ones which I had originally slated for inclusion only to go off them when I returned to listen to them. This show brings me a potential new sub-category namely, tracks I was never going to include, but which may be of interest to others. Towards the end of this programme Peel played Factory by Sonic Violence, a slice of sonic-metal with dancey overtones. It almost persuaded me, but not quite despite the fact that it sounded like a union meeting of zombies in a post Dawn of the Dead world.The hit rate on this show was pretty high for me. Only one initial selection fell from favour with me:
Booker T and the MGs - Can’t Be Still - I know it’s against the law to go off a Stax record, but I’m afraid that this 1964 single got in on reputation only to be shunned when I found that was all it had.
There were three tracks I would have liked to share but couldn’t:
The Last Peach - String-like - Catchy Stereo MC’s influenced guitar pop, leading Peel to wryly comment about “The unwholesome stench of melody creeping into the programme”.
The Werefrogs - Don’t Slip Away - the single version of a track which the group had played in a Peel Session 8 days previously. Copies in blue coloured vinyl were to be sent to the winners of the “Draw a Werefrog” competition.
Gut Logic - Undecided - coming out of Texas, this was one of Gut Logic’s contributions to an album
on Anomie Records called Manifestation. A lo-fi industrial-electronica-death metal hybrid which put me in mind of the kind of content that Load Records would start to put out from the following year onwards. The Manifestation album featured a number of hilariously named bands such as Pain Teens, Jesus Penis and Turmoil in the Toybox named after a Christian TV show of the same name which looked at how children’s toys were becoming corrupted by ungodly and satanic forces.
LATE NEWSFLASH
I had thought that I was going to have to add the Japanese/Mancunian stylings of White Kam Kam (or White Come Come according to some sources) when I was unable to locate a solo video of their swirling, stratospheric track, Rise. Despite sounding similar to any number of bands that Peel would have played in the preceding 2 or 3 years, I thought Rise put many UK bands’ efforts to shame.
However, the band’s sole release, the Skin EP can be shared. Go to 18:24 to hear Rise in all its splendid glory.
You can access the Abana Ba Nasery tracks that they played for Peel by clicking on the link to his show further up the page. To whet your appetite, enjoy the tracks they played on 9/5/92 for Andy Kershaw.
Videos courtesy of Asian Shoegaze (White Kam Kam) and Fruitier Than Thou (Abana Ba Nasery)
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