John Peel was in a good place on the 29th of May 1992. He had plenty to look forward to and had already spent the week indulging in things he enjoyed, such as drag racing at Santa Pod where he had seen one car reach a speed of 263 miles an hour! Andy Kershaw had done a field recording on a recent trip to the drag racing, which Peel used to cue up John Fahey.
He was in a good position to see two musical favourites at close quarters as well. He intended to watch Richard Thompson play a live set for Kershaw’s programme on Saturday evening and then hoped to shake Diblo Dibala’s hand as he was due in the UK that week, although no-one knew what his plans were.
Dibala featured on the first Kanda Bongo Man track that I’ve heard crop up in all the time that I’ve been doing this blog. Alas, Naloti from Kanda’s 1989 album, Kwassa Kwassa didn’t grab me enough to merit inclusion from this show. Neither was I receptive to a clatteringly ramshackle cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit by The Honeymoon Killers. “Is nothing sacred? I like to think not.”
In the wider world of Radio 1, the Peel show was contributing to a series of live sessions that the station was putting out under the banner of One World by offering up sessions from A House and Superchunk, which would be broadcast on his show for Saturday 30 May. Sam Johnstone of Aigburth, near Liverpool wanted to hear sessions of a more vintage era and wrote to ask whether the Peel sessions recorded by Nick Drake were likely to be released through Strange Fruit any time soon. Peel suspected that they wouldn’t and he was right, they never saw commercial release in his lifetime. In 2014, Antar Records released Drake’s 1969 Peel Session on a 10-inch LP as part of a package with a biography of him called Remembered for a While. Limited to 1000 copies, it is currently retailing for an absurd amount of money on Discogs.
The news bulletins included stories that South Africa would be allowed to field competitors in the Summer Olympics in Barcelona. It would be the country’s first participation since 1960.
I made my selections from a full 3 hour show and everything that you’ve seen posted from that show over the last couple of weeks stood up to scrutiny, I didn’t go off anything that initially grabbed my attention. There were two selections I was unable to share:
Dumpster Juice - End of Ages the second release on Spanish Fly Records, a US label which was part owned by Lori Barbero, drummer with Babes in Toyland. Somehow, Dumpster Juice manage to make a compelling sound out of their mixture of nu metal and Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Splintered - Judas Cradle/Kill the Body so the Head Will Die/Godsend [Peel Session] Three-quarters of the UK industrial-noise rock group’s repeated first session for Peel. My notes say that they sound like they should be soundtracking grindhouse films. Splintered pull off the difficult trick of making sure that their ideas, usually in the form of samples and counterpointing sung vocals with spoken word content, are always backed with music that rocks and elates the listener, even when it sounds like it’s disembowelling someone with a chainsaw, as is the case with Godsend.. Kill the Body so the Head Will Die sounds particularly compelling enough to make me wish I could have seen them live. I’ll take it as a belated 16th birthday present given that it was originally broadcast on that day.
Full tracklisting
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