Stockholm was the lead single from New Fast Automatic Daffodils’ second album, Body Exit Mind. It’s a rather curious song in that it appears to mix its wonderfully catchy refrains around the measures and worth of a man’s achievements and the quest for direction and purpose in life with an extract lifted, by the sound of it, from a tourist guide to the city of Stockholm itself.
Peel played the radio edit of Stockholm, which is about a minute shorter than the version in this video. He mentioned that a couple of reviews he’d read about the track were comparing New Fast Automatic Daffodils to Joy Division. Peel felt that it sounded something like what Joy Division might have done had they been able to continue for another 2 or 3 years. It’s not a bad analogy, maybe the New Pop era would have prompted Ian Curtis to look to Scandinavia for inspiration rather than the Eastern Bloc, and it may well have been good for them. I think Stockholm is much a better song than Joy Divsion’s own Warsaw for instance.
Peel admitted that he’d never been to Stockholm, and he wasn’t in a hurry to change that, suspecting as he did that the Swedish capital was a place of “unremitting tedium”. When this blog covers the Carnon Downs Drama Group’s October 1993 revue, Something Old, Something New, we’ll discover whether Peel’s instincts were justified as it was during the run of that show that he found himself hosting an edition of his Radio 1 show, live from Stockholm.
Video courtesy of MarkTurver1990.
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