Equus: Toiling Midgets - Faux Pony (24 January 1993)

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You know you’re getting older when people who were sent down for committing front page news crimes when you were a child have been released on parole.

In 1981, I’d just celebrated my 5th birthday when John Hinckley Jr. wounded President Ronald Reagan in an assassination attempt.  I don’t remember being aware of it at the time, it wasn’t until the following year when The Falklands Conflict broke out that I starting taking the time to sit down and watch news coverage.  Once I did learn about the attempt on Reagan’s life, the more odd it all sounded. Someone attempted to kill the President of the United States because they were in love with someone who starred in Bugsy Malone? The daft twat…

Toiling Midgets began their sporadic career in 1979 as a collective of musicians from various post-punk groups such as The Sleepers and Negative Trend.  After recording 2 albums in the 1980s, the band returned in 1992 with an album, Son, which was trailed by Faux Pony.  At the time that I first heard it, my notes describe it simply as Nick Cave infused rock.  Initially, I had this down to the croon with which Mark Eitzel performs the song, but closer listening shows further similarities such as apocalyptic sentiments: America needs a hero/To put an end to its dying dream and especially, dark humour:

Me and Jodie Foster/We would have made a fine pair.

If my aim had been straighter/Maybe I could have got somewhere.

The song puts itself into the mind of Hinckley by reflecting on what he thinks might have happened had his fantasies been borne out.. It’s a catchily, chilling listen with its allusions to the recognition of perceived signals from Jodie Foster which Hinckley may have taken as a means by which to impress her (I understood) and the swirls of feedback denoting an unstable mind.

Faux Pony is, I feel, the best of the Hinckley focussed songs which crept out over the years after the shooting.  Others who covered the topic ahead of Toiling Midgets include such artiste-provocateurs as Devo - whose song, I Desire attracted controversy as it used lines from one of Hinckley’s poems to Foster - J.F.A. (Jodie Foster’s Army), Wall of Voodoo whose song Far Side of Crazy was a Top 30 hit in Australia - The Crucifucks, Carmaig de Forest, whose song, Hey Judas, believed that Hinckley would go to Hell for failing to kill Reagan, and er… Stephen Sondheim who included a duet featuring Hinckley in his 1990 musical, Assassins.

Hinckley never went to prison for the shooting. He was found not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity and instead spent 35 years in a psychiatric institution.  In 2016, he was released, with a string of conditions attached. He always had aspirations to be a musician and having had so many songs written about him over the years, has started to get in on the action himself by releasing a single on streaming services and running his own YouTube channel showcasing his songs.

This track was not the first time a John Peel playlist dealt with Presidential shootings.

Video courtesy of Thomas Mallon-McCorgray (who produced many of the Toiling Midgets recordings)

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Equus: Submarine - Dinosaurs (24 January 1993)

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On 8 May 1992, John Peel closed his Radio 1 programme by playing Blood Rush by Bark Psychosis, an austere, elegiac, delicately powerful piece of music built around crystalline guitar lines and sound loops (there’s that squeaky chair again) which built out of hushed beginnings into something which felt like dawn breaking into hazy sunshine.  It was a terrific piece of music: haunting, euphoric and very grown up. It made my Comedy of Errors mixtape though it was a bubbling under when it came to my 1992 Festive Fifty.  On 24 January 1993, nearly 9 months after playing Blood Rush, Peel closed this edition of his BFBS programme with a track that sounds to me like its excitable, younger brother. Dinosaurs, though, was not a Bark Psychosis song but was instead recorded by the short-lived Submarine.

With its opening flourish of music box, the younger brother metaphor is entirely appropriate for Dinosaurs given its child-eye centred lyrics, with its references to game playing, pretence, finding hideaways, escaping to under the sea and through it all, the key line Hope your mum doesn’t come.  Because when you’re a child and fully engaged in your game, the words you really don’t want to hear are “Dinner’s ready.” The other line of interest is the follow up to Hope your mum doesn’t come, namely Something good is going to happen soon, which could relate either to the nature of the game itself or further ahead to burgeoning puberty.

Like an excitable child, it starts massive and then gets bigger, the music finding seemingly inexhaustible supplies of fresh energy and ideas all of which eventually cohere into a mammoth locked groove which underpins the last 90 seconds of the track. I can’t help but wonder whether if singer Neil Haydock had had a stronger voice, it might have pushed Dinosaurs into a mainstream hit.  If it had come out circa 1997/98, it would have fit right in alongside hits of the period by the likes of Embrace or Hurricane No.1.

Looked at objectively, Dinosaurs isn’t as good as Blood Rush, but I find it much more enjoyable to listen to. I need to be in a particular state of mind or mood to listen to Blood Rush, whereas Dinosaurs can be listened to at any time and is always guaranteed to lift me out of despondency.

An Alienlanes blogpost about the occasional recording career of the men behind Submarine.

Video courtesy of JOSEPPPPHHHH

Equus: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 17 January 1993 (BFBS)

This was something of an error strewn edition of John Peel’s Music, as evidenced by, amongst other things, Peel messing up the beginning of a play of Mara by Soukous Stars. Peel acknowledged the chaos of the evening’s show but put it down to a lack of sleep from the night before. After finishing that night’s Radio 1 show, he had gone to spend the night at his late mother’s house, only to be startled to find a guest of his brother, Alan, who was identified only as Eric from the Yemen already staying there.

Not all of the mistakes in this programme were made by Peel. At Christmas, he had been sent a 5-disc Best of 1992 releases by R & S Records. Unfortunately, one of the discs was missing and two of the discs were the same. From it he played The Dream by Music of Life Orchestra, which made my initial list of selections for this show but fell from favour as I realised that its strong start gives way to a forgettable middle and ending.

The Frontier Trust EP, The Highway Miles which I’d been unable to share a track from on the 2/1/93 show had caused Peel some minor irritation as he had been sent a copy which had a wooden nickel included in it as a promotional gimmick. This affected the depth of the record when it was placed in a pile with other records and often caused piles to tip over. Peel was not impressed, Not to be repeated if you’re listening in Omaha.  In his good books though were Trumans Water and a play of Silver Tongue Please had him talking excitedly about the possibility of them touring the UK during the coming year. Of course if you’re listening to this in Belize this will be of very little consequence to you.  But then you probably aren’t listening,

Peel could always rely on his old friend, Bombardier Gerald T. Fox to write to him and this show duly included a postcard from him, but Peel was still desperate to hear from more of the BFBS audience and put out a plea to receive more letters in 1993.

Of my selections from this full two hour show there was one track I would have liked to share but couldn’t  and that was a reggae record, War and Crime by Mackie Ranks.

Apart from Music of Life Orchestra, one other track was slated for inclusion only to fall from favour:

Klute - Nothing to Hide - I was initially drawn to the relentless industrial drive of this rocker, but it didn’t bear out repeated listens. This is not the same Klute which was responsible for the last record Peel played on Radio 1.

Full tracklisting

Equus: Pram - Cumulus (17 January 1993)

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This literally got an 11th hour reprieve. I was writing up a Notes post on the edition of John Peel's Music from 17/1/93 and for several weeks this track by Birmingham group, Pram, was not going to be included. It made the initial shortlist of selections, but further listens showed the track to be impenetrable and I was all ready to mention it as a "Falling from favour..." case. And then I went back to listen to it again, just so I could get my facts straight about why I was going to reject it, only to find that in that listen, all of a sudden, Cumulus revealed its secrets to me. 

It was the final track of the 17/1/93 show and unlike some end of show tracks, which are put in purely to eat up time, this fits the final minutes like a glove. It's a beguilingly strange mix of math rock, folk, hard rock and psychedelic electronica. An intriguing but unfocused mish-mash I thought, at least until about 10 minutes ago, when I heard it as a successful fusion of what Pink Floyd would have sounded like had Syd Barrett been with them into 1969. Cumulus pulls off the trick of sounding both whimsical and futuristic. I give thanks that it showed itself to me, just as I was poised to deliver a rejection to it. I can't think of many songs which manage to conjure up the sense of Noddy in Toyland on an alien planet, but Cumulus manages it, and that is something worth celebrating.

Video courtesy of Fernando Meneses.

Equus: Soukous Stars - Mara (17 January 1993)

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When Peel cued up this track, he mistakenly played the start of Nirvana’s cover of Molly’s Lips instead.  At the end he said, If 1993 brings me vanloads of stuff like that, I shall be a very happy boy.

Video courtesy of Syllart Records.

Equus: Foreheads in a Fishtank - Mr. Whippy (17 January 1993)

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Although Foreheads in a Fishtank had started the new year with an unprepossessing rebrand as  F.I.A.F., their music remained as dementedly loopy and irresponsible as ever.  Mr. Whippy seems to suggest that they had looked at the attention and notoriety that The Shamen had had with Ebeneezer Goode and so decided to try and court chart success themselves with a poppier sound, but in typical Foreheads in a Fishtank style, they blew away any notions of subtlety about whether they were singing about drugs or not.

If you can make it through the opening 30 seconds, which sound like they were actually recorded inside an ice cream vending  machine, you'll find yourself treated to the sound of Foreheads in a Fishtank as the wedding band from Hell.  I say that, because I'm convinced that if a copy of the Mr. Whippy single, or the Yeah Baby Wow LP ever made it to a record shop or radio station in Miami, it clearly influenced The Mavericks when they were putting together the arrangement on their party staple, Dance the Night Away.

With singer, Jeff Leahy trying to charm grey record buyers by adopting a Morrissey croon, Mr Whippy reflects on the way that a life of shallow experience can still be a rewarding one before death comes along. It even provides a brief bit of advice on the best ways to enjoy this, but I would have been struggling to put any of this into effect in 1993. I didn’t drink gin then, and still don’t now, and while I was certainly on the lookout for sex, it wasn’t looking for me at that point. My naivety at the time would have also meant that any fun to be found with capsules would likely have led to me trying to get high by popping Anadin rather than recreational drugs.  

On a John Peel show, the chorus of a record in which a demonic goblin exhorts listeners to TAKE MORE/TAKE MORE/TAKE MORE DRUGS would pass off without anyone giving it a second thought, but it was never going to fly on any other Radio 1 show going out before 11pm.  Not least because of the uneasy suspicion that as far as Foreheads in….sorry…F.I.A.F would have been concerned, this was not a joke, but a design for life.

Video courtesy of KILLblinton

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Equus: Hum - Sundress (17 January 1993)

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I keep thinking I've heard that angry, squally, pressure-cooker style riff in the opening seconds of Sundress somewhere before. Was it repurposed by  Hum themselves or has it served as an inspiration to other rock bands since?

When I first heard Sundress, I regarded the "fast half" - up to around 2:23 - as superior to the slower second half. It was like Warm/Crawl by Velocity Girl all over again, but subsequent listens and the lyric video shown above have brought home to me how beautifully balanced and wonderful the whole song is. 

Publicity photos from the time that Sundress was recorded, don't appear to show Hum as a bunch of longhairs, but sonically they manage to weld together the thrash of grunge with the relentless attack of Big Black. What Hum achieve in Sundress is to place their audience - hormononal, angsty, sexually aware and emotionally turbulent - in a setting where what should be a romantic moment can descend into chaos due to the protagonist revealing that he struggles to express himself. The spectres of depression and unexplained violence hang at the edges as Matt Talbott reacts in an almost psychotic way to his lover showing them her new sundress.

It's the colour scheme of the dress that is the giveaway on this. I have to say that with the blend of yellow, red, black, white and grey, Talbott should have been telling his girl to ask for her money back given the unattractive mix of colours, but it feels as though the blend provokes in him a range of emotions which match the colours: rage, depression, sorrow all come across in the ferocity of the music and his rants about how unhappy he is about what she has to tell him. Maybe it's a break-up song and she's dressing up to show that she is moving on and looking to attract someone new. Either way, Talbott comes on like Dennis Hopper's PTSD Vietnam War returnee in Tracks (1976) and there seems a very real risk that he'll drive away the Taryn Power figure that is trying to help him.

However, the song appears to end on a note of reconciliation and calm, with the girl appearing to reflect the sunshine and light suggested by the yellow and white of her dress, by bringing Talbott down from his rage. It is a salvation which he is appreciative of, describing her as all he wants.  This feels like a scene that has been played out many times before and will be again.  We can relax for the moment, but the nagging sense of dread remains about what may happen when the girl can no longer pacify Talbott.  The opening lines Flowers flying everywhere/Dragon spruce is in your hair suggest that it will not be pretty.

Video courtesy of Sean Seagler

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.