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.
Video courtesy of Tim Gracyk.
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