A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Moonshake - Little Thing (22 November 1992)

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If you think there's a lack of nuance in discourse nowadays, then I have to ask you which side you picked during the Moonshake wars of 1992/93.  Did you identify more with David Callahan or Margaret Fiedler?  When Moonshake last appeared on this blog, it was with Callahan's angsty, sour rocker, Secondhand Clothes, a track which I liked enough to include on the  Oliver! mixtape.  However, this track, taken from  Moonshake's imminent Eva Luna LP was my first exposure to Fiedler's songwriting and I have to say that had I been keeping a scorecard at the time, Little Thing would have helped her steal ahead.

We like to believe that the spirit of healthy artistic competition within bands is as positive a thing for the bands themselves as it is for music fans. After all, it worked for The Beatles long enough didn't it? However, it's often a fallacy.  The history of rock music is littered with bands that tried to accommodate multiple creative visions and in doing so produced both musical eclecticism and fractured relationships; the dreaded "creative differences".  In Moonshake's case, this was still a year or so away at the time Peel played Little Thing on this show, but had they heard his summation of a recent gig he had seen them play in Cambridge which left him broadly unimpressed but by and large of the view that I liked her stuff  more than I liked his, then a further degree of erosion in the relationship between Fiedler and Callahan would have been quietly added.  All just artistic sport to us punters, but a tiny dagger to the heart of the artist.  You can accept being compared to contemporaries in other bands, but it’s much harder to accept comparison within your own band, especially when neither party is prepared to accept the role of junior partner.

Despite that, the recording of Little Thing feels like a genuinely collaborative effort.  My notes describe the track as “sounding like a Heath Robinson contraption” as Moonshake lift the bonnet to show the inner workings of the idea of a smooth, functioning band.  In the background we hear lounge-jazz basslines, Leslie speakered guitars and Fiedler’s huskily, sultry vocals with their arresting “Maybe I’ll start bleeding” refrain. But dominating the sound are cacophonous drums and samples which sound like relentless, grinding machinery.  It’s the sound of the blood, sweat, tears and conflict that make for great bands.  The moving parts straining on the production line to turn out beautiful, intricate music. The abrasive and the beautiful working in sync with each other to create exactly the kind of musical magic which made Moonshake so special.

Video courtesy of TommyGun Angel