The Comedy of Errors: Bello - No Hippy (28 June 1992)

Thanks to the wonderful Webbie for providing this track directly from John Peel’s Music on BFBS on 28/6/92.

I am a bit of a sucker for what I call “simple flimsy sound” tracks which would turn up on Peel playlists from time to time.  I don’t mean flimsy in a fey C86 kind of way, but tracks like Music by The Safehouse, which would be easy to bypass were not for an indefinable quality which seeps in and steals your heart.  They don’t draw attention to themselves, generally lack bombast or wide appeal, but somehow seem tooled to snare in those listeners dotted around the millions who the track seems to be specifically for.  It’s even more exclusive than cult music, rather it’s like finding one blade of grass on a lawn somehow more fascinating and engaging than it should be, but for you (or me), is.
So it is with No Hippy.  The setup is very simple: one electric guitar which plays the same melody throughout , a tambourine (a tambourine FFS...), a little bit of harmonica over the final 40 seconds, two vocalists - or possibly one doubletracking both parts.  It sounds like a Stands demo.  Meanwhile, Webbie’s choice of accompanying photo is doubly perfect not just in relation to the title, but the lyrics, which chronicle a sense of deflated boredom about people, television and music radio, sound precisely like a musical collaboration between Rik and Neil from The Young Ones.  Apologies, I’ve made it sound dire, haven’t I?  And yet, the “No inspiration” refrain and the repeated guitar melody has been stuck in my head ever since I first heard the track sometime last year.  And given the “certain rough hewn charm” alluded to by Peel after he’d finished playing it, I think it will soon be stuck in your head too, given half a chance.

The fascination with the track has become more pronounced for me given that I could find no further information about Bello.  Not even a Discogs page, while this blogpost, may in time, join Webbie’s YouTube video and their place on the tracklisting for this show at the John Peel wiki as the only results returned in a search engine request for “Bello No Hippy”.  What I do know is that on the following week’s BFBS show, Peel played another track from Bello’s album called Cynical, another good track with a much fuller “band” sound.  Peel liked the album, “Usually when you get sent a record limited to [200] copies, it’s usually pretty terrible, this one certainly isn’t”.  Apart from mentioning that it was recorded in Berlin during 1991, Peel gave no further details about the LP’s name and the only way to have found more details at the time would have been to write to Peel via BFBS.  He promised that he would reply to any correspondence, “sooner or later.”  I would definitely include Cynical if I was going to blog about Peel’s 5/7/92 show, but The Comedy of Errors had finished its run on 1 July 1992, and once I’ve rounded up everything from the play and any outstanding tracks from the last couple of years of trawling, the blog will jump forward to October 1992 and Bello have yet to resurface.  I would urge you to click on the link and listen to that 5 July 1992 show though because it’s a cracker.

Video courtesy of Webbie