This edition of John Peel’s Music was the first one that Peel had recorded in the UK since 4/10/92. His tour of Europe had seen him record his Radio 1 show in Berlin and Budapest as part of a Radio 1 campaign to raise awareness over opportunities to work in Europe due to the imminent formation of something called The European Single Market, an idea which promoted free movement of goods, services and labour across Europe. Sounds very useful, but for some reason, it never caught on in the United Kingdom....
Previous posts have mentioned aspects of this trip, which despite its length and scale, was effectively a busman’s holiday for Peel, denying him the opportunity to socialise with various friends and correspondents around the continent. As always when he got away from the UK, he looked forward to buying music from the various countries he visited. However, his time in Hungary proved musically unrewarding for a couple of reasons.
1) The hip-hop/schlager duo, Attwenger recorded a session for Peel in Budapest. He’d been an enthusiastic fan of theirs over the previous year, playing a number of their tracks on his programmes. However, in person, he found Attwenger to be a “somewhat supercilious pair” meaning that he turned down a listener request to play something by them on this programme. Maybe Attwenger were just having a bad day when they met him, but it must have been a spectacularly bad one given that Peel confessed in a subsequent Radio Times article that one of the first things he did on his return from this trip was to remove their records from his collection and throw them out.
2) Then there was the problem of locating good contemporary music in Hungary: I always complain that Eastern European music - by and large - and these are gross generalisations, but it always seemed to owe more to the Arts Laboratory Movement of the late 1960s than to anything else. You get bands wearing funny hats, which is always a bad sign and one of them will dress up either as a monk or a clown, which is an even worse sign. And they always have APPALLING saxophone players and this remains true in Hungary, though in Czechoslovakia things are slightly better ordered. And I know this because I bought a huge number of cassettes and records in Hungary and listened to them avidly, and they were all, actually, between you and me, terrible.
Peel may have managed a fortnight driving around Europe without any problems, but an afternoon on a tennis court, possibly the one he built at Peel Acres, had left him in agony with a sore back: I tend to enter into these things in a rather wholehearted way, unsuitable for a chap with my degree of fitness which is virtually nil, and age as well. And I did the most beautiful cross-court backhand that I’ve ever done in my life - it may be the only one that I’ve ever done in my life. Which would explain why, in the act of doing it, I pulled some nerve or did something to something in my back with the result that I now hobble around. In fact I did actually wish for a Zimmer frame during the day because I thought it would make life easier for me in terms of getting about. Nevertheless, I’m in a lot of pain, I want you to know that, but nevertheless I’m as chirpy as a cricket. Goodness me, what a wonderful guy, I am.
The postbag brought a couple of gifts for Peel. One of them was a condom, I don’t have much use for it these days, but thanks for the thought. He was also able to play the first record he’d ever received from Belize. It was called Narugudu - Badibu by Andy Palacio - Well, I expect you all know that off by heart in Belize.
From my initial list of selections, there were two tracks I would have liked to share but couldn’t:
Kevin Coyne - Emperor’s New Clothes - Acoustic blues track taken from Coyne’s latest album, Burning Head. Peel had been sent a number of copies of the record by the Edition Multiart label which had original works of cover art by Coyne. Peel really liked the album, but Emperor’s New Clothes reminded him of the style of music which Coyne had recorded with Siren for Peel’s Dandelion Records in the early 70s.
Fruits of the Paradise - A Man Like You - a techno, dance track played as the final record of the show. Sounds in parts like the little brother of Digeridoo by Aphex Twin, which is always good news.
Three tracks were on my original list of inclusions, only to fall from favour:
Bivouac - Slack - Peel played this in combination with the Kevin Coyne track because they were both artists who hailed from Derby. He wondered whether he was the first ever DJ to play two records after a news bulletin by artists from Derby.
Surge - Hear - this space-rock track was a near miss from the Hebden Bridge band, but it was ultimately a victim of its own tendency to meander.
Pavement - Texas Never Whispers: Volume warning for headphone wearers. This track which came from Pavement’s Watery, Domestic EP was only ever really in contention for a place on this blog due to the extraordinary guitar noise which began the track. I was sure I’d heard that riff before in a track that I liked. I racked my brains and then realised that it had been sampled by Placebo on one of the few Placebo songs I actually like. And I really couldn’t face writing a post which had to praise Placebo, whose records I always found to be appallingly mannered. And as I write that, I’ve got a horrible premonition that when this blog reaches the mid-1990s, Peel will have their records all over his playlists and I’ll have to eat humble pie. We will see...
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