Alongside the laidback subtlety of the performance and vocal on Little Walter’s 1955 hit, My Babe, what stands out to me about it is that it’s a great example of what I think of as “good cop/bad cop” songwriting. There’s no chorus in the song, but the verses alternate between one about how loving and sweet Walter’s lady is and one about how strict and implacable she is at any hint of infidelity on his part. The concept of an open relationship clearly never gained much traction in the world of the blues. Given that the ratio of loving to admonitory verses is 1:3, maybe Walter’s girlfriend has had plenty of practice at telling him what she will not accept. And yet, like a dope, she takes him back everytime…
This mixture of sweet and sour owes a lot to the source material that inspired My Babe. Its writer, Willie Dixon, conceived it as a secular reworking of a 1920s gospel blues song called This Train is Bound for Glory which spoke about the wonder of passing into Heaven, but in typical religious damp cloth style, the majority of the song is devoted to telling the listener which groups will not be allowed onboard.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe announces the next departure to Heaven from platform 666.
Video courtesy of Angel Neira (Little Walter) and Enzo GD - Music Videos (Sister Rosetta Tharpe)
What do you get if you fuse together a guitar riff that half sounds like Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin, but taken at the tempo of the riff from Hush by Deep Purple? The answer is something like Zap Machine Part 1 by the Ragga Gabba Posse, a one shot gathering of a group of Dutch DJs. Were it not for that riff, I’d probably have passed on this, as we’d mostly be left with sub Traveller style noodling. Part 2 is slightly more interesting, but as an example of meat and potatoes rock/dance fusion, Part 1 is a great workout tune if nothing else.
Video courtesy of Webbie, who has provided the recording directly from Peel’s 20/3/93 show.
I’m as crisp as a dew picked lettuce - John Peel introducing this edition on 21/2/93.
It’s always nice to hear Peel with a spring in his step, and in this case it could possibly be down to a letter he had received from a listener called Michael, who had written to say how much he enjoyed hearing dance music on the show. Peel was touched by this as he reckoned that Michael was the first person to have said this to him since he started playing dance music on his BFBS programme. He played Home is Where the Hartcore Is by Loopzone in thanks to Michael.
Also getting a spin was a 1979 tune by Skids called TV Stars, which mentioned Peel’s name together with a host of soap opera characters from Coronation Street and Crossroads. Peel warned any listeners who felt this was self-indulgent that they hadn’t heard anything yet as he played a recording called Humbug 1 performed by Combs Middle School which featured his son, Tom, as the lead voice. The song was taken from a show that appeared to be an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, with the song being sung from the perspective of workers in the factory owned by Ebeneezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley; perhaps during a visit from The Ghost of Christmas Past. Impressively, the show itself was written by two of the music teachers at Combs Middle School. If you haven’t clicked on the Humbug 1 link, I’d encourage you to do so, not least to hear Peel’s tale of his being ejected from the final of a national schools production competition for heckling the judges when Combs Middle School failed to win it. It’ll also serve as a long distance taster for when this blog reaches late 1994 and soundtracks my participation in Carnon Downs Drama Group’s production of the musical, Scrooge.
When replying to listener correspondence, personally, Peel often wrote by postcard. If he wasn’t using a Radio 1 publicity card - either of himself or more often of a younger, better looking colleague - he would reply on postcards showing images of Stowmarket. However, the company that made these cards had gone bust, so Peel was making up his own cards using photos he had taken of the town. He hadn’t really mastered the picturesque style of postcard images given that his portfolio of shots so far included an Indian restaurant and a set of major roadworks. Stirring stuff….
I’ve already referenced three tracks from this show which I passed on including. Other rejections included one of the few House of Love songs that I don’t care for, namely Love in a Car from their 1988 debut album, which was requested by a listener. Another request was for a 1979 track called Window to the World by the Australian band Whirlywirld, about which and whom Peel had no recollection of having previously played. On this show, he also played Barriers by Northern Irish band, Repulse. As he back announced it, he thought the next track on the Heads EP was playing. He liked what he heard and let it play on, only to discover it was just the ending for Barriers.
The selections from this show were taken from a full 2 hour show. There were 3 tracks that I had earmarked for inclusion but was unable to share:
Tiger - Chaos [Jungle Mix] - As previous posts have shown, I was enjoying the Jungle music tracks on this show, and my notes say that it was the jungle vibe that would have put this up for consideration.
Culture Fire - No Existence - A track taken from their Release EP and requested by a listener called Sebastian, who was due to spend the next 4 months away in San Francisco.
Three tracks fell from favour, having made my initial shortlist:
Nirvana - Oh The Guilt - I remember the excitement when this was released as part of a split single with Puss by Jesus Lizard and it reached Number 12 on the UK Singles Chart, so plenty of people were delighted to have it. But listening to it again for this blog, I have to confess that Nirvana philistinism raised itself within me again and my abiding instinct was to yell, “STOP FUCKING MOANING!”
Mudhoney - We Had Love - This was Mudhoney’s contribution to Set It Off, a compilation album of artists covering songs by The Scientists, whose work was unknown to me ahead of hearing Mudhoney’s version of We Had Love. I listened to about three-quarters of the performances on Set It Off, comparing each one to the original Scientists recordings, and it was certainly successful in terms of encouraging me to go and discover the work of The Scientists. However, this was mainly because of how poor virtually every cover was in comparison to the original track. I agonised over leaving We Had Love out, not least given the passion of Mark Arm’s vocal, but ultimately I decided that it was as guilty as all the other versions of not meeting The Scientists’ standards.
When this blog has finished working through selections from this edition of John Peel’s Music on BFBS, I’m intending to jump ahead to selections from Peel’s Radio 1 show from Saturday 20 March 1993. In terms of chronology, that show went out a week before I and my fellow Castaway Theatre Company members on the BTEC Performing Arts course performed Equus. It also went out 10 days after the death of Camille Howard, at the age of 78. I’ve had a look over at the John Peel wiki for March 1993, and it doesn’t appear as though news of her death was communicated on any of his programmes. This wouldn’t be altogether surprising given that Howard had quit the music business in the mid-1950s, and in those pre-Internet days of 1993, news of the death of an obscure boogie-woogie piano player would have taken a lot longer to make itself more widely known. Peel kept her work in the spotlight by intermittently playing her recordings up to late 2001.
Ferocious Boogie was the b-side to Howard’s 1949 single, Maybe It’s Best After All, and is of a piece with many of the other Howard boogies that Peel played through early ‘93, not least in the way that it knocks its more conservative A-side partner into a cocked hat. Peel wondered how different his life would have been had he actually heard the track when he was a boy in 1949, instead of the records he was actually listening to at the time which he remembered as being by artists such as Doris Day and Jo Stafford.
Described in its sleevenotes as the bits that Hello! leaves out, Razzmatazz swaps the breathless, urgent, romanticism of O.U. (Gone, Gone) for contemptuous, derisive misogyny.
According to Jarvis Cocker, the lyrics of Razzmatazz are about a former college girlfriend of his. He described it at the time as the most bitter song Pulp had ever done, and he certainly goes in with both feet on the girl and those closest to her by throwing around accusations of incest, unplanned pregnancy, ignorance, stupidity, shallowness, mental instability and - most damning of all - getting fat while she goes out with someone uglier than him.
It took me a couple of listens before I decided to include Razzmatazz here. I’ve had to confront a personal truth about Pulp that I’d only vaguely suspected back in the 90s, but which I have clarity on now. Quite simply, they were too difficult for me to embrace as a favourite band. There’s great humour in their music, and in my late teens, they seemed to be the only band I heard during the Britpop era, who acknowledged the desperate hunt for sex in a pre-internet world. But there was always an underlying bitterness to their material which kept me at a distance from them. They could certainly do warm material, as O.U (Gone, Gone) and 1996’s Something Changed confirmed, but I’ve come to feel that the tone of Razzmatazz is far more indicative of the type of band that Pulp were, and that doesn’t make them an easy band to love, either then or now.
What’s undeniable about Razzmatazz though, is that it’s the sound of a band who were starting to find greater confidence in themselves and were turning more heads and minds towards them. I suspect that this would have found its way on to the metaphorical mixtape in an attempt to, if not follow the herd, then at least trail along at a quizzically interested distance from it.
Cocker revealed in subsequent interviews that, to his embarrassment, he had bumped into his ex-girlfriend and that she had worked out that she was the subject of Razzmatazz. Apparently, she had taken it in good humour, perhaps feeling, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, that when it’s the opinion of one of the most famous British men of the mid-1990s, it’s better to thought of as a twat than not to be thought of at all. I also like to think the female verses on Ciao! by Lush, which Cocker guested on two years after the release of Razzmatazz, offer his ex some form of right of reply.
When I started devouring 60s British pop music during 1992, I saw two tracks by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich on the BBC’s Sounds of the Sixties TV show: the clattering, unstoppable charge of Hold Tight (1966) and the tribal infused, lyrically opaque Zabadak (1967). I loved the former, as did Quentin Tarantino, who used it in the soundtrack to his 2007 film, Death Proof. Put Hold Tight up against any other piece of buzzsaw, freak beat pop from 1966 by The Who, The Yardbirds, Small Faces etc and it stands up well. There was a woman on my BTEC performing arts course called Jean, who 30 years earlier had gone out with Peter Noone, shortly before his band Herman’s Hermits became successful. Given that she had known an actual 60s popstar, Jean tended to be my go-to option to ask for an opinion on various bands I’d discovered. I asked her about Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich and she told me that the perception about them back in the 60s was that they were a bit of a novelty band. Zabadak was of a piece with the group’s singles moving away from the hard rock directness of Hold Tight towards quirkier records which saw the group adopt different musical styles for each release. This may have been because their A-sides were written for them by a songwriting team, Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, and the need to make each one sound ear-catching and different led them down various routes such as the Zorba the Greek rip-off of Bend It, the Latin American knees-up of Save Me or, as mentioned earlier, the African rhythms of Zabadak.
I swallowed the orthodoxy that Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich were no more than a party band, in it for a laugh and playing a game to see how many exotic sounds they could hit on to get on the radio, in lieu of having nothing interesting or profound to say. As I’m shortly about to celebrate my 48th birthday, I’m now able to be far less harsh than I was in my youth and can recognise that their records were, first and foremost, amazing productions as well as musically exciting, especially given that, as far as I can tell, they actually played those same exotic instruments on the recordings.
The Legend of Xanadu was their masterpiece. A dark tale of lost loves and haunting memories, set to a Mariachi feel, with Spanish guitar, bombastic brass and a whip crack effect which saw Dave Dee actually brandish a proper bullwhip whenever the group promoted the record.
The Fall’s version of it is taken at a faster pace, which I prefer to the original which is guilty of dragging a little in its final minute. Mark E. Smith opens with a clarion call of his own, but delivers the lyric in respectfully, deadpan style. There’s a synth effect to replicate the whip crack and they incorporate their own version of the brass figure in the playout. All in all, they do Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich proud.
Peel played the two versions back to back on Radio 1 on 23 October 1992, stating that if he was ever invited to appear a second time on Desert Island Discs, he would include The Fall’s version of The Legend of Xanadu among his 8 choices of record. Unfortunately, this had been but a glint in Mark E. Smith’s eye when Peel had appeared on the show in January 1990.
Videos courtesy of inviciblesticks (The Fall) and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich - Topic.
The Ticket does a wonderful job of both advertising 11:59’s skills to those who may not have previously heard of them, and promoting a sense of communal wellbeing between them and other like-minded bands and artists. If tonight were the last night of 11:59’s lives, the people mentioned in the coda are who they would want to spend that night with. The ticket could be entry to a private party, but I think it may well run a little deeper than that.
I’m currently reading The Custard Stops at Hatfield, the 1982 memoir by Peel’s former Radio 1 colleague, Kenny Everett. In the late 1960s, Peel used to say about the brilliantly creative Everett, Kenny knows. A statement which, at the time, meant everything and nothing. In 11:59’s view, those who hold the ticket also “know”, and with the confidence of youth and talent, they believe that allying with them will make them unstoppable. The confidence is infectious, contagious and irresistible.
I’m really pleased that Peel played this track from The Moog Remix EP, because when I was prepping the blogpost on the Mercy remix of Live Forever from the same EP, I got the chance to listen to all four tracks that were on it, and the Micky Finn* remix of Jungle Muffin was by far and away my favourite track. I was seduced by the jungle vibe to the mix and it’s caused me to look ahead with hope that as the early and mid 90s Peel shows get covered here, I’ll get to enjoy more jungle music and appreciate it more than I did 30 odd years ago. If I had my record buying youth again, I’d have stocked up on more jungle and trip hop records alongside the Britpop I was gorging myself on at the time. I’ve lamented my youthful tunnel vision on this previously, and happily my notes for this edition of John Peel’s Music promise some further potential jungle treats subject to availability and me not going off the track…**
Compared to the original mix, Finn’s mix works in a couple of dub interludes, ostensibly to give the track space to breathe. The Italo-piano break is still in both versions so as to firmly remind us that this was still 1992/93 and some of-their-time conventions still had to be acknowledged, but the persistent noise of the Star Wars blasters sounds like one of dance music’s new developments killing off a previously dominant form and announcing itself in thrilling style.
I had hoped that this was a tune about sex and that the butterfly of the title referred to the sexual technique, the Venus Butterfly. Whenever I include a reggae/dancehall track on this blog, I always check West Indian patois dictionary sites to see whether words on the records have alternative meanings in Carribbean dialect. You can imagine how my spirits soared when the index for one dictionary had it spelled buttafly. Here we go, I thought, confirmation that Admiral Bailey is singing about anal sex. Giddy up, giddy up just seemed to offer further encouragement to that line of thinking. New style come up (“He’s talking about his cock”), yes it was all becoming clear.
And then I clicked on the link and discovered that buttafly is indeed patois for er…butterfly and I must reluctantly concede that it’s about a dance craze which was sweeping the clubs and if Bailey is to be believed, was conquering the world as well.
Any disappointment about this banality is tempered by the fact that it’s a tremendous piece of music and in the reggae dominated singles charts of 1993-95, I’m surprised it never got picked up for wider release. It could have been a Loco-Motion for the 1990s.
The Peel Session which Headcleaner recorded for Radio 1 on 14 June 1992 ended up falling between the cracks as far as this blog was concerned. I make selections from shows which John Peel hosted while I was rehearsing or performing in plays and shows. I don’t select from programmes that went out while I was taking any extended break from drama. I spent July to September 1992 not in rehearsals for anything, which is why nothing comes from any of Peel’s programmes in that period. As a result, I missed both the original broadcast of Headcleaner’s session on 4 July 1992 and its repeat on 18 September 1992. For anyone who had missed it, Strange Fruit put the session out before the end of the year.
It may have been from this record that Peel played their version of Motorhead’s signature song, Ace of Spades at the request of a listener to his BFBS show who thought it would be funny to hear it again. Headcleaner’s version rocks as hard as the original, but is undercut by the vocalist singing it in the style of Fozzie Bear. Singing in this style made their version stand out at least, though their own material from the session, such as Attitude, is a bit more of a coin-flip in terms of acceptance.
You are going to need some patience with this track given that it takes until around the 2:15 mark before someone turns off the alarm clock and starts dropping the beat. My apologies also to anyone who sees the artist name Exquisite Corpse and anticipates 40 seconds of artery shredding noisecore and instead gets 11 minutes of beautifully pleasant techno music. The pleasantness clearly affected John Peel’s concentration when he programmed this into his playlist for 21/2/93 on BFBS, because having apologised at the end of the previous week’s programme for what he felt was a rather disorganised show, he put What a Life in as the programme’s closing track and found he’d mistimed it and still had a couple of minutes to go before the station’s next news bulletin. As a result, listeners were treated to a repeat sample of it to take them up to the news.
Exquisite Corpse started off as a side project for Dutch DJ Robbert Heynen and the Reassembling Reality EP, which featured What a Life as its lead track, was his last solo release under this name before he expanded the project to a duo with Debbie Jones. I like to think that receiving angry letters from misled Disemboweled Corpse fans prompted their subsequent name change to XqST.
Going by his comments, it doesn’t seem that John Peel would have been rushing to add this edition of his BFBS programme to his showreel. At the end of it, he apologised to listeners for a rather untidy programme. It’ll all be different next week, loads of your requests. I promise this every week and always fail to deliver. It’s poignant to consider that he was still promising to come back and play listeners’ requests when he broadcast his final show 11 years later. Personally, I think Peel was being too critical of himself as I don’t remember too many mistakes or incoherence.
If we’re looking for reasons why Peel may have felt that the show had been under par, then Dave Lee Travis has to be held partially accountable. Travis was six months away from resigning on air in protest at the changes Matthew Bannister was implementing at Radio 1, but in early 1993 he was still a fixture of the station’s daytime weekend schedule - playing Lucien Bokilo records as well - so his and Peel’s paths were likely to cross if Peel went into Broadcasting House early enough on a Saturday. Although Peel acknowledged that he and Travis’s attitudes towards life were very different from one another, he got on well with DLT, feeling that, in a previous life I must have pulled a thorn out of his paw, because he’s always very amiable towards me whenever we meet. But when Peel was working in the Radio 1 offices, the previous day, he found himself in close proximity to an editing suite where a pre-recorded show hosted by Travis was being prepared for broadcast. One thing which irritated Peel about Travis was his tendency to “hilariously” bastardise words, phrases and names. Hence Kylie Minogue became Killie Minnogoo and the BBC World Service, for which both men recorded programmes, would be referred to as the BBC Wild Service and so on. Peel takes up the story…
He’ll call people things like Olivia Neutron Bomb and Dusty Springboard, you know, things which people haven’t said for 20 years…Somebody was playing this pre-record in the corridor, very, very loudly and very, very often. And he kept saying - and I knew he was going to say it - he was talking about some event which had happened to a listener. And he said, “She said, that her parents walked in, and her boyfriend was standing there,” and I thought to meself , he’s going to say “In the nuddy.”And he did! He said “In the nuddy”. And I spent the rest of the day - well, about an hour to be honest - hearing this over and over again. And by the end of the hour, I was fit for hospitalisation, frankly.
There’s always something to put trivial irritations into perspective, and the news bulletin duly provided it with news that the body of toddler James Bulger (Caution advised - article contains distressing content), who had been missing for two days, had been discovered in Liverpool.
Only one track that made my selections list from this show fell out of favour with me.
Tsunami - Sometimes a Notion: Coming out of Arlington, Virginia, Tsunami were a bit of a fancy of Peel’s around this time, perhaps due to a similarity of sound with PJ Harvey. I only came into this show halfway through his playing of this track, and my interest was piqued, so I put it down with a question mark next to it. Ultimately, it sounded a little too middle of the road for me. Sometimes a Notion featured on a three-track single called Souvenir Folder of Beautiful Arlington, VA which was distributed by an Australian label called IV Recordings. Peel’s copy was Number 88 in a limited edition White label of 100 copies. It’s possible that the title of the track was inspired by Ken Kesey’s 1964 book, Sometimes a Great Notion which was adapted into a 1971 film directed by and starring Paul Newman.
Details were a bit thin on the ground about this enjoyable piece of techno music. All John Peel had to go on was a note…written at the bottom - in pen - that says “A massive European club hit” but then I suppose they would say that. My own notes recommend its inclusion here because I like the beeping beats (which start around the 49 second mark) and the “I want to live forever!” sample in which what sounds like a downtrodden middle manager suddenly gets a taste for life.
The Moog was one of the aliases of DJ Andrew Wright. After issuing the Rush Hour 12-inch EP, Wright took 3 of the tracks from it, outsourced one to Micky Finn and took a contribution from his collaborator Anthony Bowes (working under the name Justice) to put out a 4-track remix record as The Moog. As you can hopefully hear from Live Forever, which Wright remixed as Mercy, his work both on that and Rush Hour - remixed under his Rotor alias - makes for a pair of perfectly serviceable bangers. However, the more interesting stuff was happening elsewhere on the record. Both through Finn’s proto-Jungle sound on Jungle Muffin and Bowes’s D ‘n’ B stylings on Going Crazy. The Moog Remix EP showcased both the best of contemporary and future dance music sounds.
Lyrically, the subject matter of [The God Machine’s debut album, Scenes From the Second Storey] is one of angst, anguish, a raging against a likely non-existent deity or a condemnation of those who claim to speak of such a being… Taken from The God Machine’s Scenes From the Second Storey Revisited 25 Years On by Ned Raggett, The Quietus, 26 February 2018.
Raggett’s article, which I first saw when The God Machine last featured on this blog, achieves what great music journalism should do, namely encourage the reader to seek out the music. Having listened to Scenes From the Second Storey today, there are at least half a dozen tracks featuring either Robin Proper-Sheppard encouraging people to take responsibility for their decisions without passing the buck to God, or characters that he meets blaming their actions on God and absolving themselves because He orchestrated their lives. The album resounds with a broad conviction that God is illusory, and that those who do believe in Him are deluded at best and dangerous at worst.
In I’ve Seen the Man, it feels as though Proper-Sheppard, as an American transplanted to Britain, spent time wandering around Speakers’ Corner where he would have heard political, civic, scientific and religious points of view put forward to the passers-by. On one side, he finds himself listening to a preacher proselytising for his God. On the other side, he hears the case being made for atheism. But in this song, Proper-Sheppard finds himself confronting the void at the centre of his own spirit. He doesn’t believe in anything and this lack of belief compared to the contrasting convictions of the two speakers torments him. The twist is that Proper-Sheppard ends up following the lead of some of his characters and cursing God for the way that he feels.
I’m with Raggett on the merits of Scenes From the Second Storey. It’s a wonderful record, though its intensity and seriousness would have made it a hard sell to mainstream audiences. While researching this post, I discovered that Proper-Sheppard had subsequently formed the band, Sophia, whose 2006 song, Pace, stood out to me as one of the few decent tunes I heard Colin Murray play during his uninspiring late Noughties stint in the 10pm-midnight slot.
Written by Lee Perry and recorded for The Heptones 1977 album, Party Time, Sufferer’s Time is nothing less than one of the greatest, most humane songs I have ever heard. It breaks out of the dogma, which can attach itself to some reggae music and addresses the experiences of Rastafarians, as well as the poor and needy, by looking at how life is lived alongside the material aspirations that people may have. The Second Coming and a return to The Promised Land will be great, but it’s been a long wait, with no imminent sign of happening, so in the meantime, can’t the lowly suffera get a slice of the action by driving a fancy car or partying? Especially given that four hundred years of colonialism was supposed to promise better things for the indigenous peoples.
It’s a deft trick to be able to write a political song which blends capitalism with apathy, but that’s exactly what we get here. Small goals and targets, a means of measuring progress by consumerism. And why not, given the hardships the target audience may have endured. I’m assuming that A so we say, a so we go is the Rasta version of Keep calm and carry on, though I suspect it probably isn’t.
Projecting the theme of the song more widely, more of us are sufferers than we would care to admit. And many of us have been seduced into striving for the consolation of a better car, against real, positive, long lasting change. And in large part, that has been because the sufferers have enthusiastically lapped up the ism and schism which has been used to get them to blame other sufferers for not reaching their consumerist dreams.
The current tragedy of our age is that, in an Election year, the Sufferer’s Time seems as far away from being realised as it has ever been.
The last dream I had before I woke up this morning, saw me helping John Peel file some records. We weren’t doing it at Peel Acres, but rather at a massive suite of warehouses that he had bought. Once you entered the warehouses, they were done up to look like a large country hotel with floor to ceiling shelf space for filing records. It’s nearly always impossible to get any practical work done in dreams and that was the case in this one. I could barely move through the warehouse due to a massive drinks party that was going on inside it. The vast crowds of people slowed me down terribly as I grimly attempted to complete my task of filing a cassette copy of Michael Caine’s 1992 memoir, What’s It All About?
Now, although 10 years of work on this blog may lead you to think otherwise, I hardly ever have dreams featuring John Peel. What I suspect happened is that my subconscious was urging me to set down the thoughts and feelings I’ve spent the last week percolating in my mind about this particular track and the circumstances by which it came to be played by Peel.
When considering the vast size of Peel’s record collection, it’s worth considering just how much its numbers were swelled by giveaway compilation records that came with the various music papers and magazines that Peel got each week/month. He was never shy about including tracks from free compilations in his programmes, and I’d be fairly confident that most of them were kept by him. In the case of Five Alive, a compilation of 5 tracks given away as a cassette with a late January 1993 edition of Melody Maker, and featuring live performances from bands that had played on Mark Goodier’s Evening Session programme over the previous year, the incentive to keep the record was down to the fact that, whereas the average punter who bought the magazine had to make do with a tape, Peel had received a limited edition CD. Only 100 copies were made of this, leading Peel to conclude that If I live to be 110 years old that should be worth, ooh.. 5 or 6 quid I expect. If he had made it to 84 years old, Discogs shows that he’d be around £5 ahead of his estimate.
As for the track which Peel played, Nausea, the opening track on Nurse, was recorded by Therapy? for the BBC on 21 November 1992. It’s a standard Therapy? tale of alienation and disconnection, which I’d have been all over as a Therapy? convert in early 1993. That being said, I could probably have made do with the live version recorded at CBGBs in New York and included on the Opal Mantra EP. The version recorded for the BBC opens with a more pre-watershed friendly audio sample, but is otherwise unchanged from the other versions out there. Further BBC session tracks, including their two Peel Sessions can be found on the Mercury release, Music Through a Cheap Transistor.
Having listened to the other tracks on Five Alive, I’d rate Therapy?’s performance as the second best on it. The other tracks veered through the predictable (Step It Up by Stereo MCs), the underwhelming (Time of Her Time by Ride), the unfamiliar (White Belly by Belly) and the exceptional (Moving by Suede, the first thing I’ve heard from them in that period to make me think the buzz around them was in way justified.)
On 3 August 1979, The Police completed work on their second album, Regatta de Blanc. It would include their first Number One single, Message in a Bottle, and a 7 month tour to support the album would begin on September 1, 1979. Travel, promotion, concerts, tv appearances & video filming all stretched out ahead of the band. How would they spend August 1979, enjoying their downtime before their lives became dominated by tour itineraries?
Guitarist, Andy Summers may have chosen to spend time going to the cinema. What might he have been able to go and see? If he wanted escapism, then there was the 11th James Bond film, Moonraker. Perhaps, he would have wanted to see Woody Allen’s continued progression into sophisticated romantic comedy with Manhattan.
But there was a double-bill showing in UK cinemas over that month, which would have brought him face to face with musical spirits from both his present and his past…
13 years earlier, Summers had been the guitarist with one of the UK’s leading soul bands, Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band. Zoot Money himself was a classic musical contradiction. Sat behind his Hammond organ, he looked like a medieval dung seller, but was blessed with a voice that sounded like he’d been one of the original children birthed by Rhythm & Blues. Money and his band are spoken about as one of THE “you had to be there” live attractions of the early to mid-1960s. In 1966, they broke into the UK Top 30 with their single, Big Time Operator, at which point the Mods washed their hands of them. However, Money was unconcerned. He could see which way the musical winds were blowing and as 1966 rolled into 1967, he slimmed the Big Roll Band down to a quartet of himself, Summers, drummer Colin Allen and bassist, Pat Donaldson. The Big Roll Band name was changed to the more psychedelically infused, Dantalian’s Chariot. The band started writing their own material, incorporating light shows into their gigs and established a striking visual look so as to get full value out of lights by not only all dressing in white robes and kaftans but by painting their equipment white as well. As he related on this show, John Peel was among the beguiled spectators when Dantalian’s Chariot played The Festival of the Flower Children at Woburn Abbey over the 1967 August bank holiday.
The following month, Dantalian’s Chariot released their first - and only - single. Co-written by Money and Summers, The Madman Running Through the Fields is essentially Tomorrow Never Knows on a budget, though if there was any justice it would be just as well known and as widely celebrated as an example of acid trip evocation. A little bit like ZuZu’s Petals Sisters, the track uses a dual perspective, with the vast majority of it being sung from the perspective of the tripper. Money claimed that the song was autobiographical in that it was an amalgam of his and the other band members’ drug experiences. The first verse seems to be written from the perspective of someone who has become burned out by the world and the expectations placed on them:
World at my feet/Life seemed to be sweet.
I was admired, but I was so tired.
It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see the tone of the song as being one where Money draws a line under the years of slog he went through with the Big Roll Band, and looks ahead to the utopia which the leaders of the psychedelic revolution promised would come to those who turned on, tuned in and dropped out. Money seems to suggest that he has crossed a threshold from which he seems to be unwilling to return from:
I’ve seen the crack/I cannot come back.
The other perspective that is briefly glimpsed in the song - on the Isn’t that the madman… lines - is that, according to Money, of those who had not yet taken LSD, but who were watching someone who had done so. There’s an air of wistfulness to the Wonder how he feels? line, which from a 2024 perspective seems irresponsible, but in 1967 it reflected a vibe among the counterculture that widespread use of the drug would cause a spiritual and mental awakening, leading to a gentler, peaceful society. For its detractors, LSD represented a threat to sanity, and there would be plenty of acid casualties over the subsequent years, who would lend credence to the theory that hallucinogenics were a path to madness. The counterculture embraced the theory by working off the principle of the wise fool, with the tarot symbol of the same name holding particular significance. Some tarot cards show the Fool with a small bundle of possessions, supposedly representing untapped knowledge, something which LSD would supposedly help the user to access.
Although Money’s vocal and the lyrics offer a friendly and supportive ambience, the final 30 seconds of the track evoke the onset of an LSD trip with discordant guitar, shrill organ notes, a gasp and other audible indicators of altered perception. It’s dark, slightly scary and, from my perspective, doesn’t work as an incentive to start taking LSD.
The Madman Running Through the Fields is a great song, but it wasn’t a hit. EMI, which had released numerous Big Roll Band records, dropped Dantalian’s Chariot after the single missed the charts. The band were signed by Direction Records, but were again quickly dropped before any music was released. Peel hoped that, one day, their unreleased recordings would see the light of day. He didn’t have long to wait as in 1995, a compilation called Chariot Rising was released by Tenth Planet.
Dantalian’s Chariot disbanded in April 1968. Money and Summers moved to the United States and joined Eric Burdon and the Animals, playing on the band’s final 60s album, Love Is. The closing track of the album saw a new version of the song, retitled The Madman, paired up with Gemini.
Warning! - Contains copious amounts of late-1960s musical self indulgence.
Video courtesy of Acid Revolver (DC) and astrom53 (Animals)
All lyrics are copyright of Zoot Money & Andy Summers.
My notes for this track from Mabele’s Stop Arretez! album describe it as one of the best soukous tracks I’ve heard. Strong praise indeed, though subsequent listens have slightly talked the track down from the peaks scaled by the likes of Ngonda. Nevertheless, Evelyne does have a wonderful sense of completeness about it which I don’t often find in other soukous tracks. So many of them are all about the extended play out, which is fine given the ecstatic highs that the best of them reach. But Evelyne is that rarest of soukous creatures in that it leaves you straining to hear the words and soak up the sentiments. The mood appears to be lushly romantic with Mabele and his backing singers seeming to declare that Evelyne is the most beautiful woman in all of Burkina Faso. I say “appears to be romantic”, because my French isn’t good enough to be able to offer a full translation, so for all I know he could be leaving or killing her, despite some of the mon amours that pop up throughout the track.
However, the mood in this typically low budget video seems to be romantic and loving, despite the troubling moment where Mabele appears to be humping a boulder. It feels an appropriate tune for Valentine’s Day, which was when this edition of John Peel’s Music went out on BFBS. I may even try and adapt the tune and write suitable lyrics for my wife when this year’s Valentine’s Day rolls around. And even if I’m wrong, and the song is actually a break-up tune, the shift in the guitar playing over the last 40 seconds sounds like it was composed by Cupid himself.
Anybody reading this (anybody…?) who feels annoyed that I chose not to include a track by Madder Rose on the last Peel Show this blog covered due to my finding the vocal a bit annoying, may well find themselves calling for a stewards inquiry about my including this track. With Sisters, ZuZu’s Petals sound a little bit like what you would get if say, Lisa Loeb and Joan Osborne decided to form a duo. The voices would be bright and radio friendly, they’d sell plenty of records/tickets and alienate as many as they would charm, but the key would be to listen to what was being sung and find rewards that a seemingly flimsy set-up doesn’t initially promise.
Sisters is about two sisters who, over alternating lines, compare the direction that their lives have gone in and their thoughts on their family members. The sisters love each other, but it is clear that their ideas and feelings are divergent from one another to the extent that all of the things they sing in their respective lines could never be said to each other, or at the very least, are acknowledged as being in some way responsible for their separation from each other. The differences mount up line by line:
1. One sister has a car/The other sister has to make do with a bike.
2. One sister feels that their mother made a mistake marrying their father/The other sister defends their father.
3. One sister has married a man that the other sister was in love with/The other sister is in a consolation relationship.
4. One sister is expecting a child/Neither sister thinks that this is necessarily going to be a good idea.
As the song comes out of its instrumental break, it becomes clear that one of the sisters is in the midst of domestic problems, possibly caused by monetary issues at home. Although, one sister ponders whether this is down to the man her sister is with - a point of view which we can guess may have caused tension between them in the past - the song ends on an optimistic note. The sisters are separated and miss one another, but we are left to hope that their bond will cause one to contact the other before it’s too late.
The performance is light, delicate, slightly sugary…and utterly truthful.
I’m going to dedicate this track to the memory of Melanie Safka due to her link to ZuZu’s Petals as revealed by Peel on his 30/1/93 show.
Richard D. James’sPolygon Window project ought to be known as his “Qu…” phase. The tracklisting for Surfing on Sine Waves had brought us Quoth, which had been deservedly released as a single. The album’s final two tracks were Quixote and Quino - Phec. The former sounds like a dance party taking place in a gymnasium, with us almost able to feel the mental calculations made by the attendees as they weigh up who to make approaches to on the dancefloor, and then the beat picks up as people hit the floor and try to make eye contact or beguile others with their moves. Quino - Phec captures an after the party feeling as the gym echoes to the sound of the clearup, coupled with both the dashed hopes of those who didn’t manage to pull, and the dreamy vibes of those who are lost in the kisses of others. For them, tonight may herald either a memorable one-off or the beginnings of a life-long love affair. Quixote is the sound of the effort - unrequited or otherwise - being put in.
Given James’s love of unconventional track titles, I checked to see whether Quixote had any meaning as a word, given that I only knew it as the title of a book and always assumed that the lead character was called Mr. Quixote. I was today years old when I learned that Quixote means someone who is an idealist. If my gymnasium dance party reading of Quixote seems wide of the mark, then it could be that the meaning of the track is on a universal truth about the residents of Cornwall. Namely, that we don’t tilt at windmills, but an unholy number of us get upset about wind farms.
The selections I made from this show were taken from a recording which omitted the first 45 minutes of the programme.* My notes indicate that this this was, for me, one of those “difficult” Peel shows. I only selected 4 tracks from the last hour of the show, and most of those either fell from favour or were discovered to be tracks I’d already covered here.
The opening track on the file was The Fall’s Peel Session version of Kimble, which had been packaged with 3 other Fall session tracks from 1983 & 1985 and put out as an EP on Strange Fruit Records. Peel was pleased to see this happen and expressed a fervent, though forlorn, hope. that a complete set of all the sessions which The Fall had recorded for his programme would one day be released in a box set before I go to the great record fair in the sky. Whether it was a case of bad timing or someone trying to pay him some form of posthumous tribute, it took until April 2005 for a 6-CD set of their sessions to come out via Castle Music. I suppose at least Peel didn’t have to worry about updating the set to include new sessions.
Back in Great Finborough, the Ravenscroft family had a guest staying with them, called Josh. He had come all the way from Hamburg, though Peel wasn’t exactly sure why he was staying with them. He had been helping Peel to file records though, and to show his gratitude, Peel dedicated a play of New York 1954 by Chuck Willis to him. That was a record that I had slated for inclusion, but am unable to share. Others included:
Shrieking Violets - Do You Remember? - Peel was so tickled by the name of this all-female American group, he resolved to play a track from their eponymous EP regardless of the quality of the material. Fortunately, he liked this song very much.
There were three tracks I initially had down to include but which I went off when I returned to them. The first of which was by an act which Peel was to give a lot of airplay to over the course of the year.
Shalawambe - Twasanswa - I’m probably being a philistine here given that this is slightly rootsier African music than the type I usually include on the blog, but while it’s certainly evocative, it isn’t particularly engaging. It was played in the last hour of the show, so I may have been desperately grabbing for something I thought I might like or which I thought was breaking the monotony. That was certainly the case, I suspect, with me initially choosing…
Ninja Ford - Step Aside - which when listened back to in isolation, had me asking, “What on earth, are you going on about?” It’s easy in a stodgy Peel show to be seduced by the flow on a reggae record, but it’s only when you come back to it subsequently and realise that you’re no wiser at the end of the track than you were at the beginning, that you have to leave it off the metaphorical mixtape and hand it on to others who will appreciate whatever it is that I missed.
This was the second session that Come recorded for Peel in the space of 9 months. I heard their first session when it was repeated on his programme from 19 June 1992, but I didn’t include any of it here. I will always be eternally grateful for Peel playing Smile On Your Face by Dangerous Birds as a lead-in track to that session. The link being that the 1982 record had been his first exposure to Come’s lead singer, Thalia Zedek. However, I am all over this session, despite it seeming to mark a turning point in Peel’s support for the band.
The opening track, City of Fun is a cover of a track from the debut album by The Only Ones. Peel followed up Come’s version by playing a live version from The Only Ones Live in London album. Given how deliberate and specific Come’s playing tends to be, it’s nice to hear Zedek and Chris Brokaw, who takes the lead vocal here, cutting loose and letting their inner-Ramone out. A look at the lyrics shows why Come might have been moved to cover it. A theme of the material in this session is of people being overwhelmed and crushed by the big city, and City of Fun reflects that, though it does at least feature the narrator reaching out to help those who are losing their way - and finding themself taken advantage of in the process!
Wrong Side sees Come channelling Sticky Fingers-era Stones to superb effect. My own take is that the protagonist of the song moves from prostitution to drugs to illness to the hospice and finally back to prostitution over the course of four increasingly bleak minutes. All the way along, they’re accompanied by advice - Don’t you worry - which sounds increasingly hollow as the track progresses. The only escape from this hellhole is death - I don’t believe that heading south refers to going to Texas in this case, rather to someplace much hotter. The final image of saints getting under tables and opening their skirts shows things going full circle. Death may be approaching and this poor unfortunate, and all those on this side of town, will be fucked on the way out.
The mood doesn’t get any brighter on Mercury Falls, which starts big with allusions to the end of the world - the taping up of windows implies preparations for a nuclear winter - before narrowing its focus to consider all those who are isolated and alone at winter time. There are references to friends and acquaintances disappearing and dying off, both in an actual and literal sense as relationships wither and die as people lose touch. For some reason, this always feels more devastating during the winter time and the song particularly conveys those left feeling alone, sick and disassociated from others during Christmas time. This was a new Come song, perhaps they had gone through a particularly lousy Christmas in 1992? Whether it’s personal or universal, it nails the mood perfectly.
The only track from the session which I didn’t particularly care for was Sharon Vs. Karen, which in 2024 could be retitled Democrats Vs. Republicans, but back then was little more than a simple everyday tale of schizophrenia and suicide.
This is an interesting Peel Session in that it saw Come use it to do all of the things that Peel most enjoyed seeing artists do in a session; namely using it to showcase new or unexpected material. Unlike the previous session, which had seen Come play material exclusively from their Eleven : Eleven album, this session saw them showcase three new songs, at least a year in advance of anyone hearing them on a record , and a cover. So why did it mark a turning point in John Peel’s relationship with them? Well, according to the John Peel wiki, when this session was repeated on 28 May 1993 (a show I’ve just listened to as it happens), it marked the last time any content by Come featured on his programme. Now, if that’s true, it’s quite the cold shoulder considering that they released three further albums and several singles between 1994 & 1998. It could be that their label, Matador Records, didn’t send them on. Perhaps, there was some perceived slight or awkward interaction at a festival which irritated Peel into striking them from his playlists. Or maybe by the time Come released Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in ‘94, things had moved on to the extent that there just wasn’t a place for them on the Peel Show anymore. It’s John’s show and John’s rules, but on the evidence of this session, his listeners were the ones missing out.
I don’t remember seeing [In Dust] in anyone’s lists of tips for ‘93, but they certainly should have been. - John Peel during their session, 12/2/93.
In fairness to the tastemakers of the time, it would have been a brave soul to state that everyone would have been listening to the pile-driving techno metal of In Dust by the end of 1993. Their high points are very high indeed, but it’s music for Hulking out to rather than party music. And that’s never an easy sell.
The Peel Show got In Dust to do a session for them during a brief window when the trio were releasing records, namely the Bewildermental EP and an album called Nosebleed, which will give you some idea of what to expect when you press the play button. The band were still playing live in the mid-90s, but released no further records.
Magnet Womb is the stand out track for me. It fuses together the clatter and bang of Foreheads in a Fishtank with the audio vitriol of 70 Gwen Party from what appears to be the perspective of a particularly malignant form of incubus, whose progeny sits in the womb and appears to devour the vital organs of its carrier. As the lyrics state:
Your brain is now mine/ Your mind is now my lungs.
Tap into your knowledge/Eat it from the inside.
Swallow your intelligence/Use it as my own.
Written down, it reads as utterly grotesque, but set to music, it’s brilliant.
Hyperdeemic Nerdle is slightly harder to get a handle on given that the lyrics at times veer close to gibberish, but I also think it passes for what In Dust might put forward as a a particularly twisted love song. I’m probably projecting that take on it after the lines about having a talk by the wall, just as all coy teenaged couples seemed to do when feeling each other’s interest out. The track rocks as hard, maybe even harder, as In Dust’s fellow Ulstermen, Therapy?, and like them, In Dust use audio sampling of what sounds like police radio to fairly chilling effect.
As for the two tracks which I passed on, Boredom Result rocks away like Hyperdeemic Nerdle and was on the list for inclusion, but it seemed slightly less compelling to me, albeit that it had me wishing I could be at a Boredoms show. Meanwhile, Auntie Christ deserves a prize for its title, but should have that prize rescinded for being the only one of In Dust’s session tracks that bored me.
Who’s the dybbuk? - Boris Grushenko meets Anton Ivanovich Lebedokov in Love and Death. (Allen, 1975).
When said by Woody Allen, the word dybbuk automatically sounds funny even if you have no idea what it means. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a malevolent, wandering spirit which enters and possesses a living person until it is exorcised. It was also the name taken by an all-female noise group from Czechoslovakia, who John Peel admitted on this programme, he had spent most of the 1980s hearing about but failing to get hold of any of their records. Even when his European grand tour of October 1992 had taken him into the newly formed Czech Republic, he had been unable to find anything by them. However, just a few months later, he had received a copy of the group’s reunion album, Ale Cert to Vem and played the track, Dopis (A Letter) stating that the performance featured What sounds like me on the piano. And during a short but compelling track during which it sounds as though all manner of feelings are being poured out into the letter, the piano playing is hilariously awful. Certainly a long way from Camille Howard.
As a rock band living in a Soviet controlled Communist society, Dybbuk had found it difficult even to get opportunities to play live gigs, let alone release records during the 80s. The notes for Ale Cert to Vem revealed that the band had enjoyed the experience so much, they intended to continue working together. But they rebranded themselves as Zuby Nehty (Teeth Nails) , releasing 4 albums between 1993 and 1999, with further albums following in 2014 and 2021 - like a Czech version of The Monkeywrench, who should be due to put something out this year given their 21st Century eight-year cycle of releases.
I was originally going to save One For the Money as a “Track I would have liked to include but…” in the round-up post for this 12/2/93 show, in a few weeks’ time. The main reason being that the video for it cuts the track off after 2 minutes so as to try and fit the dub version in as well. I initially felt that this would be short changing anyone who wanted to hear it. However, I like the track and Junior Delgado’s vocal so much, I decided that even edited highlights would be preferable to leaving it off altogether. If this strikes you as a shoddy way to present his material, then all I can say is that shoddiness seemed to be the main characteristic around the release of One For the Money given that the label which put it out, Jammy’s Records, spelled his name as “Delgardo” on the record sleeve. And why wouldn’t they? I mean, he’d only been releasing records since 1975, after all….
Maybe, the pressers had a copy of that first single, Every Natty Wants to Go Home, early pressings of which credit it to Junior Delgao. So, there was clearly form for this.
Despite the title, One For the Money is not a Dancehall reworking of Blue Suede Shoes. It is though a wonderful example of love/lust on the dancefloor as Delgado sets his sights on a woman, who amidst the mix of neon lights in the club where they have met, he regards as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He may just be desperate to try and keep his weekend going, and I especially love the line about Sweet Sunday giving way to Blue Monday. That seems very apt now that the Christmas holidays are over and it’s time to go back to work.
To clarify, the first two minutes of the video are representative of what Peel played on 12/2/93; the final two minutes are an edit of the dub version b-side.
In the early to mid 1990s, there should have been a piece of safety advice passed to UK bands: Being the support act on a Radiohead tour will ultimately cause your band to implode due to your leader/focal point damaging their physical or mental health.
In early 1995, on their warmup tour ahead of the release of The Bends, Radiohead’s support act was my beloved Marion. Within 2 years of the tour, Marion’s career began to unravel as their lyricist/singer, Jaime Harding started to become addicted to heroin. By early 1999, the band had split.
Winding back to the summer of 1993, and Radiohead were touring in support of a single called Pop is Dead, their first post-Pablo Honey material. The support band on this tour were Strangelove. Within three years, Strangelove’s lyricist/singer, Patrick Duff, was in rehab due to drug/alcoholism issues and by 1998, Strangelove had disbanded.
Radiohead spoke warmly of both bands - not always a given in the bitchy environment of the 1990s UK music scene - but Strangelove were the ones cited as an inspiration to them. I think I can see why. For while Strangelove’s inspirations appear all over Hysteria Unknown - they sound as though they had been listening to a lot of Bauhaus and Joy Division at the time they recorded it - they also seem to be pointing the way for bands/artists who weren’t going to embrace Britpop-infused ideas over the next few years. Not only that, but in the immediate term (early 1993), they suggested a means by which British bands could play the Americans at their own game. Hysteria Unknown touches on themes of self-disgust, morbidity, despair and alienation which were seen as the component parts of the grunge scene, but it replaces the buzzsaw sound of the US artists with something warmer, communal and sonically interesting. Their sound is big, both in terms of their ideas and their spirit, despite the pain they communicate.
Radiohead took this energy and produced records that were both artistically compelling and resonant with the public. Strangelove, on the evidence of this track, should have benefitted from it too, especially given that Suede and Manic Street Preachers were also fans. I suspect that I would have been too had I heard Hysteria Unknown when it came out, and if that didn’t put the mockers on them, then nothing would.
