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.
Madder Rose - Madder Rose - There is some great slide guitar going on here, but Mary Lorson’s voice would have irritated even at the time, let alone now when to hear it is to think of Phoebe Buffay in Friends.
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.
*I’ve cheated slightly in terms of including Hyperdeemic Nerdle from the In Dust Peel Session, which wasn’t on the recording I heard.
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