On his 8\1\93 show, John Peel made this confession:
Over the years, I’ve received quite a lot of records and CDs, mainly CDs, from Sweden. There was somebody who was sending them to me in batches of 20 and 25, and I listened to them very patiently because that’s the kind of twerp I am and I never found anything in them that particularly stimulated me. So when I got a couple more from Sweden, just before Christmas, I must admit they went to the back of the pile. But they made their way to the front during the course of the week...
He found Penny Century, the debut album by five-piece band The Bear Quartet to be a great surprise and a welcome one, though he thought their musical resemblance to Pavement was so close that he had briefly thought when listening to the album that it was an in-joke by Pavement themselves.
This was a borderline inclusion for me, I felt there was a great track in there somewhere, but was irritated that for a long time, I couldn’t make out much from the vocals except the headacher/heartbreaker rhyme which I thought was pretty neat. It was only after going back and listening to the recording of the show that I was able to catch the heartbroken sentiments that underpin the track and how the driving, relentless guitars convey the wish to escape the woman who is causing such pain to Mattias Alkberg.
The Bear Quartet had impressed Peel with Penny Century. It remains to be seen if he was taken by their subsequent work, but there was no shortage of material for them to tempt him with. Between 1992 and 2003, they released 11 albums with a further 4 released after Peel’s death, up to 2010.
Video courtesy of goldentony111
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