At the time Peel played this, Ari Peltonen aka Paska was in the middle of an eight year hiatus from recording. As a covers artist, this had less to do with creative drought, but more to do with physical exhaustion due to his style of performance - bellowed a capella versions of rock classics including both vocals and guitar sounds. Think a solo version of Pitch Perfect set in an an asylum. It could be that, as with The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, the concept is more appealing than the execution, but Paska keeps his cover of Motörhead’s Ace of Spades brief enough that the conceit remains exhilarating and entertaining.
The video is the full version of Paska’s 1989 EP Super Double Mega Maxi Hits!, which also includes his equally demented take on The End by The Doors. Go to 1:07 to hear Ace of Spades. In late 1992, this recording, together with others by different Finnish rock groups were gathered together on a compilation album, licensed by Sympathy for the Record Industry and called If It Ain’t the Snow, It’s the Mosquitoes. The liner notes revealed that Peltonen had effectively retired from recording, but was working as a talk show host. However, he returned in 1997 with Heterosapiens, showing he’d lost none of his discernment by covering tracks originally recorded by Led Zeppelin and Madonna. His radio shows appear to owe something to the spirit of Kenny Everett’s Bottom Thirty as he has specialised in playing records that people request because they hate them. Incidentally, Everett’s Bottom Thirty features both a Legendary Stardust Cowboy record which featured in the first ever Festive Fifty and I’m Going to Spain by Steve Bent which would be covered later in 1993 by The Fall.
Do betting companies still have extra-curricular singing groups? The Vernons Girls started out as a female choir formed out of women who worked for Vernons Football Pools. I had a friend who worked at a betting shop, and who has subsequently gone on to join a singing group in her local area, but I don’t remember her having the opportunity to get into singing through her work.
It was all very different in the late 1950s/early 1960s, and frankly, if Brexit is a mission to take the UK back to a perceived golden age, I hope that the chance for people to have a successful music career off the back of after-work activities becomes clear evidence of a Brexit benefit*
The Vernons Girls released an album in 1958 as a 16-piece ensemble but within a couple of years this had slimmed down to a trio of performers that released singles on a fairly regular basis up to late 1964 and nearly everyone associated with them went on to be a part of some fairly well known early 1960s girl singing group such as The Carefrees who released their own Beatle-centred novelty single and got into the US Top 40 with it, or The Ladybirds who provided backing vocals to many acts on Top of the Pops. Given that Vernons Pools were based in Liverpool, it was perhaps inevitable that the success of The Beatles would see The Vernons Girls chosen to sing a song eulogising them and the drawled Scouse accents as the girls compare the fanciable merits of the Fab Four sound like they could have been written down verbatim from overheard conversations at The Cavern Club.
The group’s connection to a football pools company was enough to get the track on to Bend It ‘92 and into Peel’s playlist for this show. Musically, the song presents a whistle stop tour through the sights and sounds of 1963 Beatledom as the Girls crowbar in the “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”s from She Loves You, which it took me until hearing this track to realise is a repackaging of the opening riff on Please Please Me, there’s also the brief “Ooh” refrain from From Me to You and the ascending “Aah”s from Twist and Shout. There are references to their haircuts and clothes, which inspired the boys and excited the girls of the time, but the standout to me are the closing lines which reflect the sense that Beatlemania wasn’t a passing fad but something which was upending perceived norms and the established order of things. It might have been only rock ‘n’ roll, but We Love the Beatles captures the force of the earthquake, as it was happening, and predicts the aftershocks to come:
We’ve never felt like this before, so let’s explain to ya/We’ve simply got Beatlemania!
On a personal note, 1993 was the year I finally started to “get” the Beatles and fully comprehend the journey they went on and their significance to pop music. It was a mixture of things that did it, there was a stunning essay in The Guinness Who’s Who of Sixties Music, that I used to crib whenever I went into WH Smith, but the thing that really opened my eyes was when I saw a girl on my BTEC course reading a book of their lyrics. I asked if I could have a look and was astonished to discover that tunes like Yesterday, Michelle and Drive My Car were Beatles songs. And just how the hell did Why Don’t We Do It In The Road go? By the end of the year, I had copies of A Collection of Beatles Oldies and The Blue Album in my possession, while I’d mentally cast myself as the bass player together with four of my friends as a 90s version of The Beatles called The Creed and spent time dividing up authorship of the songs among us. By the following year, I’d started to work through some of the albums themselves just at the point they were starting work on the Anthology project and with Britpop starting to gain traction and their influence being cited by many of the bands I liked, the timing could not have been better to really get into them.
*Which it won’t be because there are no benefits to Brexit. Maybe the hedge fund choirs will do good numbers on Spotify though.
So, the mighty Kanda Bongo Man makes his first appearance on this blog. I have many reasons to be grateful to the existence of the John Peel wiki, it is after all the gateway to the recordings which allow me to make my selections for the metaphorical mixtapes. But one of the main things I’m indebted to it for is that it allows me to pinpoint certain “where were you when JFK was shot” moments on John Peel programmes, particularly in relation to the period when I was driving home from rehearsals listening to Peel on the drive back. Chronologically, we are still 4 or 5 years away from when I started to do that. But I never forgot the circumstances of when I first heard Peel play a Kanda Bongo Man record and thanks to the wiki, I now remember exactly when it happened. It was, in terms of musical taste, a defining date in my life.
Over the week of 7-11 June 1999, I was appearing in a production of One Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the open air Minack Theatre on the clifftops near Lands End. On Wednesday, 9 June we performed a matinee of the play. Towards the end of the performance, it started to rain, which is an occupational hazard when performing in the open air. We got to the end of the play, by which time the rain had got harder. The cast repaired to a nearby pub for a meal between performances, but the weather remained poor. We went back to the theatre to change for the evening performance, but the theatre management decided to cancel the performance for safety reasons. So, I got out of my costume and decided to drive over to Truro to visit my girlfriend for a surprise cup of tea. En route, I had John Peel’s Radio 1 show on. This was during the period when he was back on midweek evenings, but broadcasting between 8:30 and 10:20pm. So, there I was driving along and as always, making mental notes as to tunes that I would and wouldn’t record on a tape. Coming out of a play of Even by Yellow6, Peel made a dedication that would introduce a new favourite artist to me:
About two weeks ago, I was in Sheffield and went to this restaurant in, what I suppose you would have to describe as the student quarter, called UK mama and in addition to being an excellent restaurant, it’s the only restaurant I’ve ever been to in the whole of my life where they were playing a Kanda Bongo Man record over the PA system. So, this is for them really.
And then he played Monie from the LP Zing Zong, released in 1991, and from that point on, Kanda Bongo Man became my go-to name when it came to African music and I was hooked. Maybe it was his name, which brought peals of laughter from loved ones whenever I mentioned it in subsequent days, months and years (My wife still refers to him as Kando Bongo Man). It may have been the manner in which Peel brought him to my attention with the story of his visit to UK mama and his ears pricking up at the sound of them playing a Kanda Bongo Man record, one of those delightful miniature moments in Peel’s everyday life which brought such texture to his programmes..
After playing Monie, he encouraged anyone thinking of paying a visit to UK mama to request that they play their Kanda Bongo Man CDs. If they had a copy of the Le Rendez-Vous des Stades (Stadium Meetings) LP, then I would suggest trying to finish your meal by the time track 4, Bili rolls around, as it’s far too catchy and effervescent to stay seated through the dessert to.
*Buy this at Discogs (identifying versions which contain this mix isn’t easy. None of them on Discogs match the time on this video, which was the version played by Peel on 29/1/93.)
Peel played Mindstream to act as a taster for a Meat Beat Manifesto Peel Session which was due to be broadcast on the following Saturday. It worked out as a classic case of musical bait and switch as the seductive guitar riffs, dulcet vocals and gentle comedown lyrics of Mindstream seduced this listener into wishing I’d known about Meat Beat Manifesto at the time; I can promise that if I had heard this in 1993, I’d have bitched to anyone who would listen as to why they weren’t more widely known. However, the session shows that Meat Beat Manifesto were too confrontational for a mainstream dance scene that wanted its hits served happy, simple or novelty.
Mindstream was treated to remixes by Aphex Twin and Orbital. If you want a sign of how good the track was, Orbital were so happy with the work they did on it, that they mixed out Jack Danger’s vocals, added some extra synths and presented it as a track on their Brown album called Remind. Great art begetting great art.
