This blog is now into its seventh year of existence, though in terms of the chronology of Peel shows, this 1/11/92 BFBS show brings up 1 year of shows - albeit with a short gap due to my not having done any shows during the period July to September 1992. Seven years of blogging to cover 1 year of broadcasting. If nothing else it shows me that this blog will outlive me. If I live to the same age as Peel, I’ll be somewhere around 1995. My father turns 80 this year. If I’m still doing this blog by then, I’ll be into 1997. Maybe by then you’ll get to hear about how I lost my virginity. Put it in the calendar for 36 years from now.
For this first anniversary, it’s appropriate that we can enjoy a track by Foreheads in a Fishtank. On the first show I blogged about, broadcast on 2 November 1991, there was a repeat of a Peel Session which they had recorded over the summer of 1991. I made the selections for that show, and I only included four selections from the 94 minutes I heard, without for some reason including their splendid track, Happy Shopper, though I think this may have been because the recording I heard had edited it out. I hope that was the reason why it wasn’t included, because if I willingly chose to leave it out, someone should have taken the iPad out of my hands and told me not to waste everybody’s time.
But there was no danger of Handbag missing out. It’s funny, ferocious, bangin’ and compelling in equal measure. This is what you get when you sonically base yourself on a marriage of Happy Flowers, 70 Gwen Party and Sensational Alex Harvey Band.
In keeping with the general vibe in the Foreheads in a Fishtank tracks that I’ve heard, the prevailing mood is “Everything is shit”. It opens with a wailing female chorus born along on the winds that buffer the “tacky Southend nightclub” mentioned in the opening verse, though I love the way in which goblinesque vocalist, Jeff Leahy emphasises that they’re at “a rave not a disco” which was an important distinction in the early 90s. It’s clearly a homemade rave given that the beat appears to be thundering down via a steel barrel. Long before Damon Albarn starting sneering about the things which made him queasy about Essex, Foreheads in a Fishtank take the listener right there at the peak of “Essex Girl/Man” ubiquity so that you can virtually smell the “disinfectant and rush of menthalypus”. I can’t be sure but the second verse appears to spread the invective away from the nightclub and take in the view of those who saw Britain as greater than it otherwise felt to be in 1992. There’s a potential political point being made here given how Essex seaside towns have often been fertile ground for right-wing political parties.
Lyrical inspiration audibly dries up during a brief third verse which criticises the narrow range of topics used by rappers, but in true Foreheads fashion, they substitute “bullets, bitches and bling” for sniping at graffiti, environmentalism and “bottom jokes”.
Having given up on vocals, the band fall back on the two elements that really lift Handbag up into the stratosphere. Namely that relentless, driving, rusty beat, which carries all before it mixed with inspired use of the most famous line from The Importance of Being Earnest. From Oscar Wilde’s pen, it conveyed disgust and shock at the fact that it once served as the cot for a gentleman attempting to marry into high society. Such was the low regard that Essex girls were held in circa 1992, that from the pen of Foreheads in a Fishtank, the handbag could very well have served both as a totem to dance around and as somewhere to keep their own bastard children if they couldn’t get a babysitter.
A dastardly intelligence is at work here. Even though Lady Bracknell, the character who delivers the “A handbag???!!!” refrain to her daughter’s prospective husband’s story about being found abandoned as a baby in the cloakroom of Victoria Station has been held up as a prime example of Victorian upper class matriarchy at its most formidable, a number of recent productions over the last half-century at least have presented Lady Bracknell as a character not without evidence of passion lurking beneath the apparently Boudica-like exterior. Judi Dench’s performance in Peter Hall’s 1982 production is cited as an early example of showing the more red-blooded side of one of theatre’s great comic monsters. However, by dint of the way in which they managed to line up the beat with the opening syllable of the “A handbag” line, Foreheads in a Fishtank manage to make Edith Evans sound sexy. The grand matriarch for all those bodies twisting and gyrating in that sweaty, disinfected Southend nightclub.
Video courtesy of lovecraftseye.
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