Equus: Ray Tracing - The Internal Exterior (12 February 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

This almost qualified as something of an oldie, given that it was released as part of 3 12-inch releases put out by Akin Fernandez under the Ray Tracing alias across 1990/91. Discogs make a point about the central conceit of Ray Tracing being that the tracks were a mixture of tempos and textures, all distilled from a single sample recorded off-air from the legendary pirate radio station, Centreforce, which was the co-ordinating power around the rave scene circa 1989.

When I listened to the range of Ray Tracing material which is currently shareable, my untrained ear wasn’t able to pick out the re-used sample. I think it may be something quite subtle, such as one of the hi-hat shucks. The Ray Tracing tracks covered quite a few different audio bases. My favourite is the chillout funk hybrid of Slodato. Fernandez also put out ambient tracks under the Ray Tracing name such as JP-8.88

The Internal Exterior belongs to the catchier end of Ray Tracing’s oeuvre. It’s twinkly and fun with the electronics made to sound like birdsong on a perfect summer’s day. There’s also a Didgeridoo sound across the majority of the track which taps into the environmentalism vibe of the time. The second half of the track loses its way slightly, by trying and failing to take the music in more ominous directions. The final cry of Oh my God! perhaps reflects Fernandez’s own sense of exasperation at how the ball has been dropped in the second half.  A curate’s egg of a track, but the good is very good indeed.

Video courtesy of Top Shelf Audio.

Equus: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 7 February 1993 (BFBS)

As I write this, I feel very much in tune with how John Peel was feeling as he opened this edition of his BFBS show. He warned listeners that he was not in perfect working order due to a heavy head cold, but that he hoped the music would make up for it.  Both my wife and I have been flattened by the same cold*, a week out from Christmas. I thought I was getting over mine, but an attempt to untangle some Christmas tree lights has left me dizzy and craving the balm of this blog.

I think that the cold which has affected my wife and I may have had its roots in the fact that we just spent a week with our niece, culminating in her fifth birthday party and an army of infants invading my in-laws house. Peel’s cold may have been caused by the filthy weather in which he had watched Ipswich and Sheffield Wednesday play out a 1-1 draw in a League Cup quarter final, a few days previously. Perhaps, it was penitence for him having spotted himself, together with Sheila and Thomas, on the televised highlights, sitting behind John Wark as he took a throw-in. Regardless, he had a higher opinion of this piece of crowd work than he did of most of his TV work, as he explained: I’m always rather poor at it to be honest, because all I do is  flutter my eyelids in a rather nervous fashion like some gentle woodland creature and just wish that it was over.

Having criticised himself as a TV performer, he also held up his hands to being a lousy interviewer, but while playing tracks from the new Frank Black album, he acknowledged Black as being a nice man because he had made an interview that they did together a much easier experience than Peel had feared it was going to be. He was also sympathetic to Black’s reasons for ending Pixies, with Black having expressed the wish to get off the roundabout of playing the same songs over and over again.

The postbag included a letter from Addis Sharma, who explained that during a visit to a department store in Alma Ata- now called Almaty -, Kazakhstan, they had looked at the music section. It contained 5 albums, one of which was by Billy Bragg. As Addis put it, This is a place where people queue for everything except Billy Bragg records, it seems.  Peel received two letters of thanks from people that he had managed to turn on to African music, through consistent exposure to it on the show.  One of the correspondents admitted that their girlfriend hadn’t been converted and would punch them whenever they listened to it. Peel responded by playing Sana by Kanda Bongo Man and repeating his standard complaint about the presence of synthesiser players on soukous records.  Finally, a prisoner from Berlin called Steve had written to Peel to request some records. We didn’t learn what these were, but he promised to play them next week.

I was able to include all the selections I wanted to include from this show.  I did not include, as I frequently never do, the two tracks by Babes in Toyland which Peel played.  Both Blood and Jungle Train were taken from a live album, which had been sent to Peel by an American friend who liberated a copy of the album from a radio station in Georgia. A bit of a collectors item, but you’re not getting my copy. This though was in a pre-YouTube world. For those who enjoy them, consider this an early Christmas gift.

Full tracklisting

*Turned out to be Covid.

Equus: Huggy Bear - T-Shirt Tucked In/Blow Dry (7 February 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

Two of the three Huggy Bear tracks which John Peel played on this edition of John Peel’s Music on BFBS.  As with Moonshake, we get one of his and one of hers. “His” is obsessed with wanting sex and not getting it; “Hers” shows how to use sexuality to lure men in and then turn the tables on them in violent style.

My initial listen to T-Shirt Tucked In had me thinking that it was an attack on me, or people like me circa 1993.  The refrain of Ah, you’re so good/You got your T-shirt tucked in felt like a repudiation of those of us who could not bring themselves to rebel. After all, as the song seemed to sneer, I literally wore my conformity by having my T-shirt tucked in wherever I went. I also wore white socks until about 1998. I didn’t know any better, it felt smart and it kept draughts off my chest. I mean I’d made a stand in the late 80s when I refused (outgrew) wearing a vest. What did Huggy Bear want from me, for fucks sake!?  But it’s only in my dreams that they’re attacking me. 

On the surface, the song appears to be potentially targeting prick-teasing women who give off sexual vibes, but who wear clothes like armour. The tucked in t-shirts helping to accentuate curves of breasts and belly while remaining firmly locked away to lustful male eyes. A more likely reading may be that it’s a caricature of invasive male thinking, whereby Chris Rowley’s narrator sees sexual invitations in the woman’s dress and behaviour. It’s a curious and queasy mix which attempts to be sexy but makes Rowley’s character seem laughably pathetic with his second hand sex talk, Groovy little t-shirt thing etc. Given the full-on nature of the female backing vocals, I suspect that this was intentional.

Listening to the sass and swing of Blow Dry, I found myself thinking that someone really ought to make a musical out of the work of Huggy Bear. Both this and Her Jazz have the feel of big company production numbers. Pairing it up with T-Shirt Tucked In is interesting in that it switches the dynamics of the former track, so we get the female perspective and a concerted attempt to drive dumb men to distraction with shiny bouffant hair and swinging hips. And whereas Rowley is made to sound desperate, Jo Johnson sounds firmly in control of the scene that she’s setting and the game she is playing.  If you try to untuck her T-shirt and let down her hair, her reaction will be swift and devastating - I’ll blow you off the face of this earth/You’ll be as bloody as you were at birth. It’s those Abel Ferrara vibes again…  

In true Huggy Bear style, this kind of sexual honeytrap to violence could be sprung both in the meat markets of clubs and pubs as well as in more mundane settings. Johnson intends to make sure that every head turns when she next goes to the post office.

Imagine the amount of onstage sexual tension that could be wrung out of a dance routine on either of these tracks.  It’s a choreographer’s wet dream! The campaign for the work of Huggy Bear to be the next 90s jukebox musical starts here.  If nothing else, it would have to be better than Viva Forever!

Videos courtesy of random content.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Equus: Aurlus Mabele - Stop, Arretez! (7 February 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

Looking back, I was surprised to see that this was the first Aurlus Mabele tune to feature here, in Peel show terms, since Boxing Day, 1991.  I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that if a soukous Mount Rushmore ever gets built, it should only include anyone who ever played as part of Mabele’s band, Loketo. For their admirable insistence on just getting to the sparkle - and for me, the sound of soukous guitar is the aural embodiment of that word - they stand at the peak of their field. For those with longer memories, the guitar work here is in the La Joie de Vivre category.

Video courtesy of skycoolguy

Equus: Holy Ghost Inc. ‎– Mad Monks On Zinc [The Warrior Monk Mix # 2] (7 February 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

In its original form, Mad Monks on Zinc sounds like “head music”. It’s slightly proggy, heavy on new age elements and built around a chilly, staccato, Germanic piano figure. It could have come out either in 1971 or 1981. Back in 1992, I wasn’t moving in the sort of circles which meant that Mad Monks on Zinc would have come into my consciousness, but it clearly made enough of an impact that Holy Ghost Inc. were able to commission a set of remixes. Most of them make regular use of the central piano riff, but this mix saves the piano for the last 30 seconds. Up to then, it moves the track from the head to the dancefloor with thrilling intensity. 

For all my talk in the past about dance music having an almost religious hold over its acolytes, this mix literally opens with 30+ seconds of the call to prayer. Then at the 34 second mark, the beat drops and the resulting explosion of energy feels genuinely close to ecstasy.  Aaaamen…

Video courtesy of Arseni.

Equus: The Pussycats - Dressed In Black (7 February 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

Originally recorded by The Shangri-Las as a b-side for their 1966 single, He Cried, Dressed in Black was offered, in the same month, to the female four-piece, The Pussycats, mainly because the people behind the original recording believed in its potential to be a big hit. It followed the same arrangement as the Shangri-Las version, which had languished at Number 65 on the back of He Cried on the US Hot 100 (and failed to chart at all in the UK), while Artie Butler again oversaw proceedings in the studio, just as he had done with the Shangri-Las. The Pussycats version is a bit more bombastic, though the mood of downbeat heartbreak is maintained throughout.  

The record buying public were immune to the song’s charms, perhaps considering it passé by 1966, or maybe they found the grandiose melodramas put out by the likes of The Walker Brothers to be a preferable update to the girl-group formula. The notes to Girls in the Garage, Vol 5 from which Peel played the track on this show mention that yet another version of Dressed in Black was also recorded at the same time, under the same arrangement team by The Nu-Luvs, but I haven’t been able to locate that, which may be for the best as you can get too much of a good thing.

Listened to with my 2023 ears, I’m not too keen on The Pussycats version of Dressed in Black, but I’m including it here as I suspect that my 1993 ears, which were grabbing 60s music wherever I could find it at the time, would probably have been obsessed with this for a few weeks at least.

Video courtesy of mix tape

Equus: Frank Black - Old Black Dawning (7 February 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

With Pixies having disbanded the previous year, their erstwhile frontman greeted 1993 with a utilitarian new name, swapping the mystical, guru-like Black Francis for Frank Black, the man you need for all your plumbing needs. He also had a new self-titled album, brimming with new songs.  At one point, Black had looked like dipping his toe into solo-dom with an album comprised entirely of cover songs, but in the event, he appears to have energised himself for the new challenge by following a trait from his Pixies days and giving most of the songs on his new album a space/sci-fi slant (cf Motorway to Roswell)

It’s not immediately obvious from the lyrics, but as Black admitted, the inspiration for Old Black Dawning came from a visit he made to the then recently completed Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona.  If humanity ever does colonise other planets, then structures like Biosphere 2 are what it’ll be living in. More likely, I suggest, will be the building of biospheres across this planet if/when Earth becomes uninhabitable due to climate change making it so.  

That’s for the future, back then and on into the mid 1990s, it’s wider cultural significance - outside of the Frank Black album - was for its association with the 1996 comedy, Bio-Dome, which was one of those movies alongside Joe’s Apartment,  Coneheads, California Man and Cool World which I perpetually used to linger over and then ignore on trips to the video rental store because I simply wasn’t ever going to be stoned enough to fully appreciate them.

Having been an enthusiastic supporter of Pixies during the late 80s/early 90s, Peel found himself caught between the past and the present now that Black had struck out with a solo album. His views at this point were mixed: Without wishing to get into a Morrissey vs The Smiths style debate, I do prefer the work of The Pixies in general. However, he did have reservations about his reservations and reckoned that he would listen to Black’s album a bit more closely before making judgements. I haven’t listened to enough of either to be able to make a considered preference, I just know that I like what I’ve heard of both so far. And had I heard Old Black Dawning back in ‘93, it would have most likely led me to feel reassured rather disappointed.

Video courtesy of CaptainSpankington.

Equus: Directional Force - Planet 42 (7 February 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

My notes describe this techno track as “meriting consideration purely for the force of its beats, over the last minute”. And there’s no question that they are mightily impressive and meaty, though having listened back to the track a couple of times, there’s a little more subtlety about the whole thing than I might have suggested in my initial notes.

What’s of greater interest and importance about Planet 42 is that it marks one of the earliest appearances on a John Peel running order of the man behind the Directional Force alias, Dave Clarke, who alongside Jeff Mills, could be considered to be one of Peel’s two favourite dance DJs of the 1990s.  Amongst other things, Clarke played at Peel’s 60th birthday party and saw his album Archive One included in Peel’s 1997 list of his 20 favourite albums. The two became friends and Clarke frequently recorded sessions and live sets for Peel, including one under the Directional Force name in May 1994.

Video courtesy of Juan Stein.

Equus: Hurl - Turnip (7 February 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

I’m not going to try and convince you that Turnip, the lead track on the debut 7-inch by Pittsburgh band, Hurl, is a great piece of music. You can hear the whole of the EP in the video and I think it’s arguable that the other two tracks, Clutch and 12 Foot Drop are both better songs.  For Peel, the attraction of Turnip was its similarity to other bands, with him wondering aloud as to whether Codeine had been an influence. The vocal makes Stephen Immerwahr sound like Kurt Cobain and you may find your attention wandering before the band reach the end of the first or second lines, though Hurl have a neat trick of yo-yoing between somnambulant muttering, albeit backed by the beautiful arpeggio which roots the track, and urgent bursts of noise as they ponder the potential loss of a girl.  It has its moments certainly, but I would probably have ignored it had Peel not mentioned that all the tracks on the Turnip 7-inch had been recorded on June 30 1992.  So, while Hurl were recording Turnip, I was onstage at Pendennis Castle performing in The Comedy of Errors.

It always fascinates me to see what people were doing on dates which have particular significance for me. Being both a keen football fan and a performer, I can recall dates from the 1990s in particular with almost anally retentive accuracy. Part of that is down to the fact that I kept a daily journal from the beginning of 1995 up to mid 2002 - though I threw them out when I moved in with my wife; but it’s also because, during the 90s, I was involved in hobbies and interests which demanded attention to dates and times. Rehearsal dates, performance dates, cricket matches etc. It’s why whenever I read diaries of famous figures, I’m always excited to see what they were doing on dates that I have a clear memory of myself.  Inevitably, the dates either coincided with:

1) A show.

2) An Ipswich Town match of some significance.

3) A romantic engagement.

To see/hear about the actions of others on important dates in my life helps me to see my story as one of billions that we all play out each day.  I was 5 hours ahead of Hurl when they went into Sound Seven Studios on 30/6/92 in the small neighbourhood of Valencia, Pennsylvania. I have no idea which of their three tracks they would have been recording at the time that I was playing my scenes in The Comedy of Errors.  They wouldn’t have known it, but the Won’t she walk away lines they recorded that day for Turnip would hold significance for my family 24 hours later when my father’s aunt died after a tortuous couple of years. 

It is not a great song, but I will cherish it for providing evidence of a moment in my own life, where both of us tried on the same day to make a contribution to culture and art. The fact that I’m writing about them suggests that their effort was more successful than mine.

Video courtesy of caustic tune.

Lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Equus: Dennis Brown - Can't Take Another Day (7 February 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

If I’d been smarter, I’d have paired this up with The Fall’s Pay Your Rates from this same 7/2/93 broadcast. If Mark E. Smith and company provided the cold water of reality, Dennis Brown offered a temporary warm bath of compassion for those struggling to pay their bills and feed their family.  As Peel put it, in response to the Poverty, poverty, poverty refrain: There’s a lot of it about, and going to be more, I suspect.

Across the 6 albums which Brown released across a variety of labels in 1992, he was unable to offer any solutions to the problems. The rest of Cosmic, the LP which contains Can’t Take Another Day, is given over to love songs. However, companion pieces to the issues raised here include Moving On from Blazing! and Rebel With a Cause from Beautiful Morning.

Video courtesy of Dennis Brown - Topic

Equus: The Fall - Pay Your Rates (7 February 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

It’s 1980. The UK is in its first year of a Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher who is using this time to see who will be with her and who will be against her as she seeks to reshape Britain for a new decade. The UK music scene will use Thatcher’s government as an inspiration for possibly the most sustained burst of political songwriting over the last 60 years in Britain*.  Through the 1981 England riots, The Falklands War, The Greenham Common Campaigns and the 1984/85 Miners Strike, it all provided grist to the songwriting mill. It’s an era of protest, benefit concerts and Red Wedge. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie/Out! Out! Out!” and all that.

But any age of protest needs a contrarian - social media and Fox News/GB News means we’re swamped with the bastards now - and in 1980, that role was inevitably filled by Mark E. Smith, who kicked off The Fall’s album, Grotesque (After the Gramme) with Pay Your Rates, a non-ironic demand to pay your water and council rates.  I feel that Smith was broadly sympathetic to Thatcherism and as a compulsive workaholic himself, may have found Norman Tebbitt a like-minded individual, at least in terms of sharing a pulling yourself up by the bootstraps philosophy to get through hard times.  Smith’s politics were generally unsentimental. He acknowledged himself as both an artist and a businessman. The Fall was both his artistic outlet and a means not just of supporting himself but his band mates. Although he was not stingy in apportioning credits for songs and as a result, spreading the royalties, he was also a boss. Bills had to be paid and The Fall had to work both in terms of getting records out and playing live in order to ensure that they could meet the commitments that we all have to meet.  Smith never lost sight of the fact that The Fall was his job. It had perks that other jobs don’t have for sure, but it was still work and woe betide anyone who worked with him that forgot that.

There was though, a smidgin of altruism in Smith’s worldview on Pay Your Rates.  He refers throughout to being sent to Debtor’s retreat estates which reflects his loathing of both the idea and execution of council estates. The extract from the interview below, conducted in the mid-1980s highlights this further. As far as he was concerned, to be evicted from your home and to wind up on an estate was a fate worse than death and he had nothing but contempt for the way the estates had been implemented. Reading it, his thinking appears confused because it seems to suggest that the tenants who moved from the slums into the estates were suckered in by mod-cons like refrigerators and central-heating (I mean who wants them, right?) but he laments the loss of privacy, the concentration of crime and the conformity of the flats all looking the same, with people unable to impose their own personality on them. This isn’t capitalist thinking, but utopian, even vaguely hippyish.

In a sense, releasing a song which advocates following the law, especially in an art-form which lionises outlaw behaviour, is a pretty balls-out move. Tie it in to the dismissal which Smith had for a fundamentally socialist policy, and you have a style of song which isn’t immediately associated with The Fall’s oeuvre: an aspirational, motivational song.  Had Tory H.Q. been listening closer, I wonder if they would have dared make overtures to entice Smith to form Blue Wedge. What chaos it could have been…

Given the theme of the song, I did check to see whether John Peel gave it a cheeky airing in his first show after the Poll Tax riots of 31 March 1990, but he didn’t. Though he did play it a week after the 1997 General Election.

Mark E.Smith on council estates. Taken from The Annotated Fall

*I use “political” here to mean songs about the actions of government rather than in its wider, social terms.

Lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Video courtesy of The Fall - Topic

Equus: John Peel Show - Saturday 30 January 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

 If you’re a long-standing football fan, there are dates you can look at and identify as turning points in your team’s history which either led onto a period of achievement and glory, or a period of decline and failure. As an Ipswich Town fan, writing this blog has allowed me to relive the memories of the glorious period in the club’s history which began on Saturday 23 November 1991, when a 2-1 win over Wolverhampton Wanderers at Molineux heralded the start of a run of a form which would see Ipswich win the 1991/92 Second Division Championship and with it, promotion to become one of the founding teams in the FA Premier League. It was a journey which John Peel and various members of his family had witnessed at close quarters.  If I took my going from school to college as symbolic of a fresh start and exciting new surroundings, there is a parallel to be drawn with Ipswich’s early season form as they returned to the top-flight of English football after a gap of 6 years.  For the first two-thirds of the season, Town carried over the momentum gained from their promotion. They were fiercely hard to break down and gained a reputation as draw specialists, but crucially, on the weeks they didn’t draw, they won. By the time Saturday 30 January rolled around, Ipswich’s league record for the season looked like this: 

Played 25

Won 9

Drawn 12

Lost 4

They were in the top 6 of the Premier League and in both domestic cup competitions. Life was like an ongoing happy dream if you were an Ipswich fan, and their fine form reflected my own happy stroll through life in the winter of 1992 as I made new friends and enjoyed new experiences. 

Contrast that with Peel’s beloved Liverpool, who had gone from perennial English champions to a fading force as many of those players whose success the club had been built on began to age out or were moved on as the club began the process of rebuilding. Always a tricky task and one which becomes much harder if your transfer business starts bringing in more flops than successes. Liverpool had struggled over the first two-thirds of the season and went into the weekend sitting 10 points behind Ipswich in the league table. On this show, Peel gloomily previewed their Sunday game at Arsenal by sarcastically warning any Arsenal fans who were listening that Liverpool haven’t lost for two weeks, you know.  In the event, a goal from John Barnes gained Liverpool a 1-0 win and topped off a happy footballing weekend for the Ravenscrofts and for me, as goals from Chris Kiwomya and Frank Yallop secured a 2-1 win for Ipswich over Manchester United at Portman Road. The win took Ipswich to 4th place in the table behind United, Aston Villa and Norwich City. I can’t remember if I thought that we had a chance of winning the league after that game, but I do know that I recognised it as the peak of the seven years I’d been following the club. I’m glad that I had that awareness, because the following week Ipswich lost 2-0 at Aston Villa and began a dreadful run which saw them lose 10 of the final 16 games, winning just two.  They plummeted down the table to finish 16th, seven points behind Liverpool who finished 6th.   And if we want to look at parallels, through the spring and early summer of 1993, I saw so many of the friends I’d made on my performing arts course drop out, until only a hardcore remained. It started to become less fun and the grind  had started to set in.

That Saturday at the end of January 1993 was both an apotheosis and the end of era. Over their next 100 league games, up to the end of the 1994/95 season, Ipswich registered only 18 wins over a 2 and a half year period.  The second half of the 90s would see the club rebuild in the second tier, but I must confess that listening to the selections from this 30/1/93 Peel show has brought memories of how unaware I, and all the other Ipswich fans probably were of the slow, curdling eclipse our club would suffer after reaching such a high.

Meanwhile, Datblygu continued with their attempt to get back into Peel’s good graces after their self-indulgently shoddy Peel Session of 6 months’ previous by writing to ask him for information on those who had tried to fix a place for Pop Peth on the 1992 Festive Fifty. Peel reassured David Edwards that the campaign wouldn’t have worked anyway given that Pop Peth was released in 1991, and anyway, he’d thrown the addresses away in a fit of pique.  The Phantom Fifty had reached Number 41, So What About It by The Fall.

 The other session guests on this programme were Dr. Oloh and his Milo Jazz Band, popping into Maida Vale from Sierra Leone. And of that sounds a flippant way of summing it up, well according to Peel, it wasn’t too far from the truth: I never know anything about Dr. Oloh. I mean, I know nothing at all actually. He just suddenly appears in the studio, records a session, and then just disappears again. Whether he’s doing gigs or not, nobody tells us and nobody warns us that he’s coming, except a couple of weeks in advance. I should like to have more information to pass onto you, but I do not.

The show featured a track from the Gallon Drunk album, From the Heart of Town. It didn’t do anything for me, but Peel really got it, feeling that, You know how sometimes there are tracks included on LPs just for you? That’s one of those. And it has to be said that Paying for Pleasure does feel like a perfect fit for John Peel’s ear-heart.

Peel also played Psycho Tavern by Zuzu’s Petals. The single included their cover of Brand New Key. Peel had been tempted to play this but demurred as he felt that most of his audience may not have heard of Melanie and that this was probably an instance where ignorance would be bliss.

The Little Richard Cover Search not only caused Peel to play Hell and Fire, but also Easier to Say Than Do by Charles Hodges - not that one.

The selections from this show were taken from a complete 3 hour recording. I was pretty fortunate in that virtually everything I wanted to share for my selections was available, though Mass by Calvin Party is still unavailable. Also missing was Source of Possible Ignition by Medicine Ball, the opening track from their LP, Sandwich Full of Lies.  Peel passed on his thanks to Rustic Rod, for sending him a copy.

There were two tracks which fell from favour:

Eggs - The Obliviist: I’ll always have time for this band after the brilliance of Ocelot, and my notes are quite positive about it, particularly “the jazzy trombone”, but I think it ended up being too impenetrable either to write about or ultimately enjoy.

Mambo Taxi - Prom Queen: On first hearing, there’s much to laugh about and enjoy here. But as I listened to it again, I began to see it as a record which the 17 year old me would like more than the 47 year old me. Which is fine, I’ve included tracks which would have charmed me 30 years ago, which I now can’t abide here before. But it dawned on me that, even 30 years ago, I would have recognised the shooting fish in a barrel limitations of Prom Queen soon enough, and passed on it.

Full tracklisting to celebrate the apex of the Lyall/McGiven era at ITFC.

 

Equus: Hell & Fire - Pointless Killing (30 January 1993)

Buy this record

Peel found this beautiful 1976 reggae record while trawling through his collection of singles as part of his ongoing search for the Little Richard cover.

Although written from the perspective of despair over the pointless killing driven by crime in the Caribbean, anyone who has watched on, appalled, at the atrocities committed in Israel and Gaza since October 7 will find much to agree with in the music here.

Video courtesy of Rufdymond.

Equus: Captain Beefheart - Click Clack (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

I must confess that when I first re-listened to this track from Beefheart’s 1972 album, The Spotlight Kid, I had severe doubts over whether to include it here. Click Clack is by no means an example of Difficult Beefheart, but I found the Howlin’ Wolf cosplay that Don Van Vliet engaged in here rather bothersome to deal with.  The theme of the track - no good man finds that his woman has finally had enough and is on her way to the railway station to make good on her threat to leave him, at which point, he’s desperate not to lose her - wouldn’t win any points for originality either.  

But what drew me back to the track was the way in which the performance served as a good example of what I call tactile audibility; the way that the musicality of certain tracks evokes an actual thing or experience.  One of the best examples of this is in the “Dogs begin to bark/Hounds begin to howl” section of The Rolling Stones recording of Little Red Rooster, where Brian Jones uses his slide guitar to evoke both the barks and howls.  In Click Clack, Beefheart and The Magic Band work the same trick using both a persistent three note piano figure and positively industrial rasps of harmonica to evoke the sound of the approaching train. I found that the effect of this wouldn’t leave my subconscious alone. And then as I listened to the song more and more times, I found myself being drawn into its groove and appreciating Beefheart’s vocal as more than just an imitation of Howlin’ Wolf, but a rawly, sincere moment of self-realisation about the consequences of treating your loved ones badly.

I found myself wondering whether the track had been any sort of influence on Jarvis Cocker when he was writing the lyrics for O.U. (Gone, Gone) some 20 years later.  But whereas Pulp’s song ended on a superficially optimistic note, Beefheart finds himself staring after his lover’s handkerchief as it waves goodbye from the departing train to “Nawlins”, where she intends to find herself, and his breaking heart finds itself beating in sync with the metal of the railroad line as she heads away.

No such sadness for Peel, who was always delighted for any opportunity to play Captain Beefheart on his show. The playing of Click Clack took him back 22 years to a gig at Newcastle City Hall where he saw Beefheart and The Magic Band play this very song.  He described it, as he was wont to do, as one of the great moments of his life.

 

Video courtesy of Revnalation.

Equus: Breed - Phantom Limb/Woah, Woah, Woah/Wonderful Blade [Peel Session] (30 January 1993)

 

Why aren’t Breed on the front of Melody Maker and NME rather than some of the posturing ninnies who are usually on there?  John Peel, 30/1/93.

If I was to try and make linked, curated compilation albums out of the tracks I’ve selected from John Peel shows over the last 9 years, I think I would have two themes from the early 90s that I could base them around so far:

1) Celtic techno dance music as exemplified by the likes of Bumble, Aphex Twin and Astralasia/Suns of Arqa

2) Northern drama music such as Red Hour, Wonky Alice and Some Paradise.

Just as I was reflecting that it had been some time since I had heard any of the latter genre on a Peel show - the three examples cited above were all posted during 2017 - I came upon a repeat of a Peel Session by Breed, the second of four which they recorded for him between 1991 & 1994.

If I was to try and summarise the mood of the three tracks selected here, it would be through the phrase A Storm is Coming. There are links running through each of them, binded together as they are by loss and death. Session opener, Phantom Limb audibly conjures the stormclouds into being as it reflects on wider themes of loss, while relating the dark deeds which took place “across the water” one terrible November 9th.  Frustratingly, it doesn’t go into great depth on either subject, but as Simon Breed admitted in this 2008 interview, he sometimes used narrative structures more as a way to try and get a song on to its feet rather than as wish to tell comprehensive stories through song.

However, the second track, the unpromisingly titled Woah, Woah, Woah takes Phantom Limb’s theme of loss and over 6 superb minutes spins a tale that shows the human face and cost of loss. Imagine if a remorseful Pied Piper, burnt by his demonic gift and lovesick, went back to Hamelin to throw himself on the mercy or otherwise of the mothers of the town. However, the townswomen want neither to kill him or forgive him, but instead have him drawn into the dance of grief and loss which they have gone through since he led their children away. As an example of a song in which someone has to confront the consequence of their actions for life, I can think of few better.

As suggested by its title, Wonderful Blade, is a song about a knife, which seems to be both literal and hallucinatory, a la Macbeth.  Lovers of McGonagall-esque writing will find much to enjoy with Simon Breed’s fruity delivery of an ongoing set of couplets which all end with different “-ust” rhymes, but what distinguishes Wonderful Blade from the intensity of the other two tracks is the delightfully decadent feel to the performance. Whether the knife is going to be used on himself or someone else, it conjures an inversion of similar debauchery from a scene in The Man Who Fell to Earth. There, David Bowie used a revolver; here I can picture Breed stirring his martini with a knife and then lasciviously sucking the blade dry of alcohol. So seductive is the vibe of Wonderful Blade, it feels positively irresponsible. Almost an erotic anthem for self-harmers.

There was a fourth track in Breed’s session, but while Shaking the Bone pulsed with a higher level of energy than the other tracks, it somehow felt inessential compared to them.

Videos courtesy of Vibracobra23 Redux.

Equus: Roy Head and the Traits - Treat Her Right (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

Politically incorrect to the nth degree. From 1965, before we knew any better. - John Peel after playing Treat Her Right on 30/1/93.

This is the second post in a row on this blog where a piece of music played on a John Peel show, 30 years ago, ends up having resonance in 2023.  

At various points, over the last year or so, on social media, I’ve seen people post a meme of Tom Jones, circa 1969, wigging out to a piece of brass music and driving his audience crazy.  The clip’s usually accompanied by someone posting something like, “Out of office on; let my holiday begin!”  I never knew what the music was that Jones was rocking out to, until my blog notes led me back to Treat Her Right, a 1965 hit for Roy Head and the Traits. 

Based on this record, Head was a difficult man to pin down musically. Born in Texas, and a future inductee into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, Treat Her Right was his signature song and is a million miles away from rockabilly. Simply put, it’s 2 minutes of sex talk soul which fused the phrasing of Elvis Presley with the energy of James Brown, though it has to be said that the iconic closing brass figure has me wondering whether Head and his co-writer, Tony Montalbano hadn’t been caning a copy of You Really Got Me by The Kinks given its resemblance to the central riff of that song. It may have been a canny attempt on Head’s part to try and woo lovers of rock ‘n’ roll, soul music and devotees of The British Invasion.  If so, it paid off big time as the song peaked at Number 2 on the US Billboard Single Chart, though it only reached Number 30 on the UK Singles Chart. It was kept off the top spot on the US chart by Yesterday by The Beatles. Both songs went on to be widely covered, including by Tom Jones on his This is Tom Jones TV show….where 50 odd years later, it would celebrate weekends and holidays the world over.

I’ve never kissed two sisters. Hmmm…I bet that probably wasn’t true back in the day, was it, Tom?

Videos courtesy of Roy Head and the Traits - Topic and  Tom Jones.

Equus: Growing Up Skipper - Abby (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

One of the best things about doing this blog is that I hear things from 30 years ago, which eventually end up having resonance in 2023.

I would have liked to do the Barbenheimer double feature this summer, but my wife had no interest in seeing either Barbie or Oppenheimer. And I only really wanted to see Oppenheimer providing I could see Barbie as the second part of the feature. Furthermore, I was adamant that I wanted to do it at the Ultimate Picture Palace, near Oxford, so I could support an arthouse venue rather than a multiplex. But the days when they showed Oppenheimer first and Barbie second always clashed with other things, so in the event, I ended up seeing  only Barbie down at The Poly in Falmouth, so that I could support one of my old venues.  The venue where Equus was staged, no less. 

I enjoyed Barbie, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s screenplay managed to effortlessly sidestep every potential criticism that the movie could have been accused of falling into (too frothy, too woke, too sexist, promoting unrealistic body expectations etc), while also managing to tweak the nose of everyone who could have found something to get upset about over the principle of a Barbie film by acknowledging the problems without allowing any of them to capsize the film. The problem was that because I could see their skill in managing to keep all of the balls in the air, I ended up admiring their technique rather than fully falling in love with the movie. But, that’s nit-picking on my part, as there was a lot to enjoy about it.

If you had told me in 1993, that when I was 47, I’d be going to see a movie about Barbie on my own at the  cinema, I would have a) told you, you were lying and b) panicked about my future middle age. I went into the Barbie movie with no real frames of reference beyond Barbie herself and Ken, who I’d blithely assumed was her boyfriend, only to find out that this isn’t the case. The end credits play out over a montage of different Barbie and Ken lines which Mattel had brought out over the years. It was during this sequence that I discovered that the character of Allan, Ken’s friend, was a real doll, as were most of the other non-Barbie dolls that popped up during the film.  Among them was Barbie’s younger sister, Skipper, who in 1975 was given a line called Growing Up Skipper, whereby she could go from a pre-pubescent doll to a teenaged one. All you had to do was rotate her arm and she would both grow taller and grow breasts.  The concept of this is somewhere between mildly icky and impressively progressive and it clearly stayed with a trio of American female musicians when they came together to record a one-off 7-inch single in the early 1990s….

Signed to God is My Co-Pilot’s label, The Making of Americans, the Growing Up Skipper band released one 3 track single under the catchall title, Use Only as Directed.  As the video thumbnail shows, the sleeve design acknowledged the doll origins in typical punk style.

Abby is quite a pleasant song, albeit with a melancholic feel to it. We’re told that Abby is expecting a baby and that the narrator, Kate Kindlon, would like to write a song both for Abby and her baby. While Kindlon reflects that she’ll write a lullaby for the baby when it arrives, she inadvertently ends up doing something similar for Abby.  It’s a supportive song which looks both at Abby’s short-term future (becoming a mother) and encourages her to think long term (going back to engineering school in the future). 

The 3 tracks from Use Only as Directed are all on YouTube and listening to them, I couldn’t help but think that Peel missed a trick by not having Teenage Boyfriend lead into Abby, as they seem to be both thematically linked and stylistically different. The former being an explosively, angry broadside against sex obsessed boys who force their girlfriends into sex regardless of safety or consideration of the girl’s feelings and end up leaving them pregnant and alone; while the latter is a gently supportive hug of a song as the reluctant mother prepares for the change to her life while being reminded that her own life and future is not necessarily over.  In the sleeve notes to the record, Growing Up Skipper also took the opportunity to include a short essay on their own thoughts on the matter, and their words resonate as powerfully now as then. It’s in this context that their choice of name makes perfect sense. They weren’t just talking to the Abbys, but also to the Skippers who were growing up and finding that by doing so, there was a whole new world of complications and expectations to try and manage.

Video courtesy of Simon Williams.

Equus: Boomshanka - Do You Have The Power? [That Side Mix] (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

One of the problems I have with playing exclusively British dance music is that I’ll usually get Pete Tong’s producer on the phone saying, “Oh, Pete played that back in October.” So, I’d just like to say that I first played this back in 1948. (John Peel before playing Do You Have the Power? on 30/1/93.) 

As for Boomshanka themselves, I suspect that they may have been wearing out their VHS copies of The Young Ones when it came to coming up with their name. After busting your moves to this prime slice of nightclub techno, I hope that every heterosexual man looking in on this post will have enough energy to make the seed of their loin fruitful in the belly of their woman.

Video courtesy of TheMadFerret.

For comparison, here’s the slightly longer This Side Mix.

Equus: Bumble - West In Motion [Weatherall Drum/Fire Mix] (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

Bumble were a dance collective, based in Ireland and signed to U2’s Mother Records label. This may have been the cause of Peel’s description of this Andrew Weatherall mix as Weatherall goes to Dublin, though I suspect it has more to do with the prevalence of bodhrans and penny whistles throughout the track.  In fairness, Peel could have described it as Weatherall goes to Lausanne given that what I keep hearing is the sound of a cuckoo clock from about 1:45. 

If the mention of Gaelic instruments and Andrew Weatherall has you picturing some kind of ghastly fusion of Matt Molloy with Loaded era Primal Scream, then relax. What we have here is something far more stylish and haunting. The female harmonies that dovetail through the track conjure images of selkies trying to capture the hearts of fishermen.  The beats are propulsive, but the call is entrancing.   

There is an even longer Weatherall mix of West in Motion which slightly dilutes the Splash in County Kerry vibe by plastering Robert Miles style piano work throughout it.

Video courtesy of TheMadFerret.

Equus: Polygon Window - Quoth (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

I felt that Quoth was the standout track on the Surfing on Sine Waves album, and it seems that the decision makers at Warp Records agreed given that it was released as a single.  It’s undeniably repetitive but the depth of the beats which Richard D. James gets here makes them strangely hypnotic to listen to.

Peel had received a letter from Chris Williams of Tickton, who had been blown away by James’s live set at the Warp Records party held on 8 January. Williams described it as a stone in the eye to those who say that electronic music requires no skill.  Yeah, take that, Tommy Saxondale!

Video courtesy of Hi, I’m Ben.

Equus: Last Party - Barbecued (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

Despite going for over 35 years, first as Last Party and since 1996 as The Bitter Springs, I was completely unaware of any of this band’s work until hearing Barbecued on this 30/1/93 Peel show. If it’s in any way representative of their output, I have a lot of catching up to do.

Barbecued is a fascinating track which manages to somehow combine emotional honesty with moral ambiguity and personal melancholy with unfettered expression as the protagonist runs the gamut of committing himself to cleaning up his act while making open threats against a society which he feels has sucked him into damaging cycles of behaviour by seducing him with empty promises and treats.  To listen to Simon Rivers’s hectoringly weary vocal is to hear someone who had what he thought he wanted, namely status and status symbols, but who now sees the dinner party drinks set as a straitjacket that he’s ready to burn down and walk away from.  

In a sense, Barbecued shows Rivers at the end of a journey which Jarvis Cocker was in the early stages of in the thematically similar Pulp song, I Spy, recorded 3 years after Barbecued. A society interloper, drinking heavily, screwing indiscriminately behind the net curtains and trimmed hedges of suburbia. Cocker wanted to dominate that landscape, not only to supplant the husbands whose wives he was shagging, but to let the golf sweater wearing husbands find out what he had taken from them.  

By contrast, Rivers’s eyes are red-rimmed and his mind is heavy with regret at how he has wasted his life in this environment. He’s cleaning up his act and moving on, but the final verse, underscored by a bassline which bespeaks the swirling sense of resentment and disgust that churn in Rivers’s heart suggest that he is going to walk away leaving many shattered lives behind him.  That all sounds heavy when written down, but it is part of the song’s triumph that having touched rock bottom, it ends with a euphoric flourish.

Video courtesy of indiepop88.

Equus: Huggy Bear - Hopscorch (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

The Peel Session version of this track has already been covered here and I’m including the studio version for reasons of completeness on the metaphorical mixtape.  The bookending of the song with a clip from The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show with Linus rebuffing the advances of an obliviously smitten, Sally Brown and a short playlet in which a tongue-tied young man attempts to express his love towards a girl are of a piece with Hopscorch’s themes of moving from an unsatisfying relationship to pastures new with someone else and the traducing of love and relationships to a game in which we can jump from one prospective partner to another as though playing the game from which Hopscorch derives its title.  Until we reach emotional maturity - and that varies from person to person - love remains a childhood game in which people can be replaced on a moment’s notice if someone else’s face fits better.

There remains some disagreement over the spelling of the track title. On the sleeve of Our Troubled Youth, Discogs list it as Hopscotch, but the Peel Session called it Hopscorch and Chris Rowley is clearly singing “…scorch” on the second beat of the word. Huggy Bear were also notable for their Slade-like misspelling of song titles such as Carnt Kiss, so with that in mind, I will stick with Hopscorch.

Though I see Wikipedia spell it Hopscortch.  Oh bugger….

Video courtesy of smallerdrums.

Equus: Randy & the Rainbows - Why Do Kids Grow Up? (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

In 1963, doo-wop group, Randy and the Rainbows, enjoyed a Number 10 hit on the US Billboard Singles Chart with Denise. It failed to chart in the UK, though 15 years later, Blondie flipped the genders and scored a Number 2 hit on the UK Singles Chart with Denis, which in a neat reversal failed to chart in the US.

Having enjoyed a hit just at the point when doo-wop was beginning to shift from commercial hot-property to a nostalgia fad, Randy and the Rainbows were faced with tricky decisions over what to do with the follow-up single. In the event, they took the most sensible course of action and reused the Denise melody with fresh lyrics. The result was Why Do Kids Grow Up? Unfortunately, the record buyers of America weren’t interested in buying the same record twice and it stalled at Number 97.  The tune is reused, though the lyrics explore one of the obsessions of late 1950s/early 1960s US pop - what could best be described as Wow! That Little Girl I Remember Is All Grown Up Now and How! - in a slightly more philosophical vein than other examples like Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen did.  Here, the rite of childhood is seen as a preparation for falling in love with all the attendant thrills and upheavals that that brings.  In the wrong hands, this could end up sounding like a Giles Coren article set to music, but in the event it manages to be a successful riff on the notion of  childhood relationships, puberty and as a doo-wop version of Circle of Life, 30 years in advance.

Video courtesy of ELTOHOF.

Equus: Skullflower - Black Rabbit (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

The first time I saw this CD, my rheumy old eyes told me it was called Third Goalkeeper. In fact, it’s not called that at all, it’s called Third Gatekeeper.  (John Peel on the album which Black Rabbit came from.)

What Peel didn’t mention is that Skullflower spelt “Third” as “IIIrd”, an act of pretension which should have seen the album cast into the bin. Having listened to the album in full, while prepping this post, I have to say that had Peel played any track other than Black Rabbit - other than perhaps, Saturnalia - from it, then I would have passed. Unlike many of the tracks on the album, which dicker around inconclusively, but at great volume, Black Rabbit does have some momentum about it, which makes it a slightly compelling listen.  It’s characterised as noise rock, though I found myself recalling it sounding a little like what I remembered as “satanic” or Occult Rock.   During its best moments, Black Rabbit has that feel of demonism and sulphur in the air, whereas most of the rest of IIIrd Gatekeeper swaps sulphur for ear-splitting farts instead.  It was also a reminder that while he may not have been curing cancer or splitting the atom, Peel was worth the money he was paid, having to listen to albums like IIIrd Gatekeeper. I’ve ended up having to do it for love.

Video courtesy of Antro Nero.

Equus: System 7 - 7:7 Expansion [Nutritious Mix] (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

Two posts ago, I wrote about an 80s post-punker who briefly got bitten by the possibilities of dance music. Now, it’s time to enjoy the work of a pair of 70s prog-rockers who have enjoyed an ongoing 30 year love affair with the genre.  Former Gong members, Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy had already experimented with making ambient music long before they set up System 7.  Music from Hillage's 1979 album, Rainbow Dome Musick had been played by Alex Paterson of The Orb in DJ sets during the late 80s and this appears to have opened the idea for Hillage and Giraudy to form System 7 in 1989.

Had 7:7 Expansion sounded anything like the music on Rainbow Dome Musick, I would have passed on it, but this is a 100% stone-cold classic banger. Unlike some of the other mixes of this track, the Nutritious Mix dials down the Aboriginal Outback feel in place of a slightly more cosmic, spacey vibe albeit one garnished with synths/guitar sounds that mix gristle with liquidity. But it’s the build to total dancefloor euphoria at 6:02 that makes the track.  It was enough to sneak 7:7 Expansion into the UK Top 40 Singles Chart.

Alongside this, Peel played a track from Hillage’s 1977 LP, Motivation Radio called Saucer Surfing, which I would have probably included here had it not featured those awful, processed, metallic voice effects of the late 70s, which were used to denote intergalactic speech, and which go through me like nails down a blackboard.

Video courtesy of Confusion in Motion.

Equus: Shorty - Samtastic (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

Attempts to syndicate radio programmes in USA, initial enthusiasm of Yank entrepreneurs evaporates when they actually get to hear programmes. Present attempt which has at least got as far as programmes being circulated under sponsorship of Nana company.  Absurdly over-optimistic forecasts of  American publicity machine and general opportunity to snigger.  - John Peel in a letter to literary agent, Cat Ledger, circa 1992 in which he set out the structure of a proposed autobiography. (Republished in Margrave of the Marshes p.482, Corgi, London, 2005.)

1993 offered Peel the chance for his first broadcasts on American radio since he returned to the United Kingdom in 1967.  Under the frankly dreadful title, Peel Out in the States, he compiled 24 half-hour programmes which were distributed to 200 college and commercial radio stations throughout America. The playlists for the shows were mainly made up of British, European and African artists. American artists were restricted to one track per programme in a feature which Peel called the Yank Sizzler. Typically, the choices in the first and third programme were not Nirvana/Pearl Jam wannabes, but rather the hardcore stylings of Chicago band, Shorty.

For me, Samtastic is a borderline inclusion here, but the mix of hardcore vocals, catwail guitar riffs and jazz-funk basslines stays the right side of tolerable, and occasionally veers into the enjoyable. Peel loved it though, describing it as something in the nature of a treat.

Meanwhile, prospective advertisers/sponsors who could have got behind Peel Out in the States and given it nationwide reach, smiled politely, checked their watches and left.  It would take the arrival of the Internet and Radio 1’s early efforts at the Sounds/iPlayer model for Americans to be able hear Peel without the permission of sponsors.

Video courtesy of HydrogenMist

Equus: Influx - Deeva (30 January 1993)

Buy this at Discogs

You’re in your early thirties. You’ve spent the previous 16 years playing in bands that have embraced first wave punk rock (The Epileptics), anarcho-punk/dub (Flux of Pink Indians) and hip hop/electronica (Hotalacio). Now you put out a solo dance record called Deeva, which 30 years from now, a blogger will compare alongside other examples of the form such as Virtual Reality is Here by The Infinity Project. But in 1993, you’re at a crossroads. Do you continue down the dance music path, using the Influx name? Plenty of people still remember Flux of Pink Indians and your former bassist now manages Bjork’s record label.  What’s more, Deeva is a masterpiece, both in 2023 and in 1993, driven along by subtle basslines, euphoric synths, Bollywood inflected opera vocals and an Ennio Morricone brass sample, it should have been in every club and radio DJs’ record box/setlist. And who knows what may have come next.

However, Colin Latter, the musician in question, decided that Deeva would be his parting gift to the music scene. Deciding that the music business was a young person’s game, he changed careers and became a furniture maker. If his furniture’s anywhere near as good as his dance music skills, I’d give him a commission.

Video courtesy of bonbonfabrik

Equus: John Peel Show - BBC Radio 1 (Friday 29 January 1993)

As this edition of Kat’s Karavan tipped over from Friday night to the morning of Saturday 30 January 1993, John Peel took the opportunity to wish his in-laws, Dennis and Eileen Gilhooly a happy 50th wedding anniversary. I have been very lucky in knowing and loving them as I have been in marrying their daughter.  My notes for the show don’t reveal whether he dedicated any of the records he played on this edition of the show to Dennis and Eileen. Certainly it wasn’t any of the, quite large, number of tracks that I had initially included but went cold on - more on them, shortly.  It may have been that he sought to take Dennis and Eileen back to their courting days of the early 1940s by playing something by Spaelimenninir I Hoydolum, whose eponymous 1977 album of waltzes and polkas had been a staple of his playlists ever since then.  

Maybe he chose to celebrate the Golden Wedding anniversary by dedicating the Number 44 track in the Phantom Fifty to them.  I think that some of the sentiments of Gorgeous Blue Flower in my Garden by Th’ Faith Healers would have appealed to lifelong lovers.  Given the tortured journey Peel had gone through to get the 1991 Festive Fifty played on the radio, I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when Peel discovered that he’d been mis-numbering the entries and originally had Gorgeous Blue Flower in my Garden up at 42 in the list. 

Peel also gave a shoutout to John C Donelkevic, who was currently visiting the UK from Connecticut. He had passed onto Peel a copy of Boot by Freak Baby.  Peel played the b-side of the record, which was called Peel, strangely enough, specifically so Donelkevic could hear his copy of the record played on the radio.

The selections from this episode were taken from a full 3 hour show. It feels like I’ve been working through 29/1/93 forever and it would have taken a lot longer had there not been 5 tracks which fell from favour when I listened back to them:

Steakdaddy Six - Rubber Pants: Released via the Twelve Inch Records label from Urbana Illinois. Peel paired it with another Twelve Inch release by Dis called Ed Was Solace, which was on my list but not shareable.

Eddie Fowlkes - I Wanna Know [Bandulu mix] - Should have been a no-brainer given that I liked what I’d heard of Bandulu, but it didn’t stand up at the time - listening to it again as I type this I think I may have been wrong to discount it. Peel was agonising over the correct pronunciation for Fowlkes’s surname. “Folks?” “Foulks?”  The Infonet label had sent him a note on this, but he’d lost it. Perhaps it was this uncertainty which caused him to play the record at the wrong speed at the start. In the end, he plumped for “Foulks”.

 Little Walter - Sad Hours: One of the world’s first amplified harmonica players, apparently. A fact which gives me an excuse to post my favourite amplified harmonica track, Goddamn by Son of Dave.

The Jesus Lizard - Puss/Gladiator [Peel Session]: Early 1993 was turning into a busy period for The Jesus Lizard. Puss was due to go out as one half of a split single with Nirvana.  Drummer Mac McNeilly was about to become a father. Bassist David Wm. Sims was about to set up a record label called Torsion Music and to Peel’s great delight, they looked set to sign the Northern Irish band, In Dust, though this did not subsequently happen.

Pepe Kalle and Rochereau - Forgive Me: A soukous miss. Despite featuring Popolipo on guitar, this is pretty forgettable stuff until it reaches the playout. When I first heard it, I thought the playout, from 2:43, was stratospherically impressive. Peel himself described it as sounding like he’s about to take off for somewhere really spectacular.  But on second listen, it didn’t really hit the heights which the radio waves suggested it did.

There was one track, I would have liked to include but couldn’t:

Tse Tse Fly - Bus Window: You can access that track on YouTube, but every time I went to play it, the video stalled and I’m talking about every time over several days. So, you know…ya snooze, ya lose.  The band came from Leeds and the track was on a 10-inch album called Duckweed Smuggled Home. The sound was more late-70s New Wave than reflective of the early 90s music sound.

Happy anniversary Mr. and Mrs. Gilhooly