John Peel
Listeners got an extra hour of John Peel’s show tonight. With the clocks set to go forward an hour for the start of British Summer Time (1993) at 2am on the morning of Sunday 28 March, it was decided that Peel should do a 4 hour programme, rather than have Lynn Parsons come in to do a one hour show at 3am.
Peel had spent the previous afternoon watching The Boat Race in person for the first time in his life at the invitation of a record company whose offices overlooked the River Thames. Peel admitted that he tended to back Cambridge in the race, though he wasn’t really sure why as he had no link to the university. I suspect there may have been either unconscious geographical bias at play given the neighbouring proximity of Cambridgeshire to Suffolk, or he may have been rooting for the underdog given that between 1976 and 1992, Cambridge had won the race on only one occasion. In the event, Peel got the result he was hoping for with a first win for Cambridge since 1986. According to him, the race seemed to lack something in terms of spectacle: When it starts, you can see the boats - someone will say, ‘Look! They’re there, there they are.’ And you can’t tell which is which, but someone will say ‘That’s Cambridge in front’, because they’re listening to the commentary on the radio. And then they go past in front of you, and you don’t know who any of them are, and you don’t have any involvement with any of them. And then they go off out of sight, well good luck to them. What interested him most was seeing the Thames river fill up with water. He arrived at the venue about 2 hours before the start of the race to see a river that was only about a third full of water, but by the time the race had begun, the whole width of the river was covered in water. Having gone through a long winless period in the race, Cambridge subsequently went on to be unbeaten in it until 2000.
The postbag included a request from David and Dean Judd of Cumbria for a play of Emperor’s New Clothes by Kevin Coyne (see also 25/10/92) to celebrate, as they put it, “Our Lisa’s 23rd birthday.” Unfortunately, Peel couldn’t oblige them as he was currently reorganising his CD collection at home and wasn’t sure where it was. He did suggest that he may play it next year though. (He didn’t). Emperor’s New Clothes now being available for sharing, which it wasn’t when I covered Peel’s 25/10/92 show, 3 years ago reminds me that I’ll have to go sifting through YouTube to see if any Equus appendices turn up from the shows covered over the last 2 years between January-March 1993.
The Phantom Fifty had reached Number 27, Siva by Smashing Pumpkins. Elsewhere, Peel tried to play Bell by Swirlies on a cassette, only for the tape to stop on him prematurely.
The Little Richard cover search may have been resolved, but Peel wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to keep sifting through his singles to find forgotten gems. In this programme, he played Kua Sami Muzeda by The Kangondo Jazz Band. Looking ahead to the future, his programme also included Shine by David Gray, an artist who would enjoy huge success later in the decade. Peel said he was enjoying his work more and more, but to go by the John Peel wiki, tonight was the only occasion he included Gray on one of his playlists.
The recording I heard of this show missed the first 20 minutes. There’s was only one track that I had slated for inclusion which I couldn’t find a recording for, which was by Kalima called Stella Wande, dating from 1983 and recorded in Lusaka, Zambia. A little less frenetic than the Congolese soukous sound, but very soothing and pleasant to listen to, a little like Coupé Cloué. The track ends in an extended conversation between two of the musicians, which culminates in them striking up the music to the next track on the record. Peel tried to segue the opening notes of that into his next record, Marbles by Tindersticks, but he felt that he had botched this.
There were several tracks which fell from favour, most of them coming in the last half of the programme:
The Fall - Gut of the Quantifier [Peel Session] - When Strange Fruit put out their EP of Kimble, which had been recorded in a Peel Session, the previous year, they filled the EP out with 3 tracks from Fall Peel Sessions recorded in the 1980s. Gut of the Quantifier, which was recorded for their 1985 album, This Nation’s Saving Grace has plenty to recommend it with catchy riffs and Mark E. Smith starting off in chipper form, I rather felt it lost its way after the halfway point though. I always find The Fall an acquired taste and when Smith starts rambling between the Stick it in the mud/Stick it in the gut refrain, I found myself checking out. A borderline miss though and one I may recant in future.
Fun-Da-Mental - Wrath of the Black Man - This opens with one of the most arresting and powerful samples in the history of recorded sound, courtesy of Malcolm X. The moment I heard it, I was ready to put this track on the metaphorical mixtape and call it Sir while I did so. It was only when listening back to it a few times that I came to realise that all of the wrath on the track was being supplied by that one sample. The ferocity of Malcolm’s message seemed to cow Fun-Da-Mental into a rather listless performance. Things weren’t helped by a rather muted production which served only to obscure the points they were trying to make.
Salt Chunk Mary - You Can’t Hang - A short lived noisecore trio, hailing from Pittsburgh, this track was taken from their second and final EP, Holiday Ham Tips. A feature of each of the tracks on that EP is that the songs are bookended by blasts of verite recordings from radio and TV and that might have been what initially made me slate it for inclusion. It was only when listened to subsequently that, as with Wrath of the Black Man, the gimmick ended up covering the thin pickings on offer from the track.
Pond - Grinned - This is the second week running that Pond were rejected on the listen back. Are they destined to join The Hair and Skin Trading Company as this blog’s nearly men?
Pitchshifter - N.I.B - Strictly speaking, this should have made the cut given that if I had heard it in 1993, I wouldn’t have been in a position to compare it to the Black Sabbath original. But once I heard the bounce and swing of the original - and I appreciate those are two words that aren’t usually associated with Brum heavy metal - it only showed me the redundancy of this cover, which was recorded alongside ten other bands for a tribute album called Masters of Misery -Black Sabbath: An Earache Tribute
Kanda Bongo Man - Sai - After discovering Kanda Bongo Man through Peel, I bought the album from which this version of Sai was recorded for, Soukous in Central Park, sometime in late 2000 when I was looking for happy music to help me through the breakup of my engagement. The concert took place in 1992, and according to Peel was originally broadcast by BBC Radio 5 in the period when it was far more eclectic than it became once it transformed into BBC Radio Five Live in 1994. Nevertheless, Sai was the penultimate track in the set, and despite running to over 9 minutes, it never quite shakes off that placeholder feel that penultimate tracks sometimes give off on albums/setlists. I say “sometimes give off” because my favourite song was the penultimate track on its album.
X-103 - Eruption/Interlude B/ Tephra/ 10,000 Chariots - To end his extended show, Peel decided to play a suite of tracks from the end of the Atlantis LP by X-103, a collaboration between DJs, Jeff Mills and Robert Hood. In order to ensure that he got to 10,000 Chariots, Peel intentionally increased the speed of his turntable. It all makes for a perfectly serviceable listen, but the issue is the same one as that suffered by Pitchshifter; subsequently gained knowledge has caused me to re-evaluate my original choices. Both Eruption and Tephra are available in longer, different and, in the case of Tephra, better versions elsewhere. The former on the Thera EP which was released in advance of the album; the latter as the title track on an EP released in 1995. I know that the 1993 me would have had to listen to these tracks in ignorance, but knowing these better versions are out there, I’d prefer to wait for the slight chance that they turn up on a future Peel playlist.
Me
This was as long a night for me as it had been for John Peel. After completing the second and final performance of Equus, myself, the cast and crew headed off to a nightclub to celebrate my birthday. The mood was celebratory, not just for myself, but the play had gone well, which was quite an achievement when it had looked during the course of the week leading up to it that it may not be staged at all.
Over the course of the Spring term, more and more people began to drop out of the course. Some of them were contemporaries of mine, who’d lost interest or had become aware of other opportunities; others were those in their 30s and 40s who had families to support or who needed to get back to work because they could no longer financially afford to be students on a course which couldn’t offer them what they needed. The course itself, still in its first year of operation, was still prone to teething problems and, depending on who you spoke to, there was a sense that the main administrator, David Gregg, was either spreading himself too thinly or not spreading himself at all and failing to provide leadership on the course. He looked to encourage independence and self-reliance among the group, especially when it split off into three groups to present two contemporary plays at Falmouth Poly during March 1993 and to research and write the community play which we were supposed to be staging in June ‘93. The intention was fine, but the execution of it was leaving some people - namely the cast and crew of Top Girls, which was staged in the week after Equus - very unhappy.
The rehearsals for Equus had been, for the most part, rather lop-sided affairs. There are two main characters in the play: Alan Strang, a young man being given psychiatric analysis after blinding 6 horses and the psychiatrist treating him, Martin Dysart. Their sessions form the majority of the play, with most of the action leading up to the blinding told in flashback scenes. Everyone’s onstage for the whole of the play, with the other characters also acting as chorus and at times, sound effects to indicate Alan’s state of mind at various points in the play. Alan and Dysart are integral to the success of the piece, they play off each other and the remaining characters: Alan’s parents, Dysart’s colleagues, the stables staff (of which I played the stable owner) and the horses themselves, play off them. Having worked so hard to get the role of Alan, Tim Rolfe was a dream in the rehearsals: committed, inventive, hard-working and happy to throw himself into whatever the role required of him - although he didn’t go nude, as happens to the character at the end of the play. Unfortunately, the actor playing Dysart, didn’t match up. He could have been excellent , had he bothered to turn up to more than an occasional rehearsal. His girlfriend, who was also in the play, was at a loss as to why he wasn’t bothering to engage with the show despite her encouraging him. We potentially got our answer when he dumped her, a shock that was so bad, she took to her bed for a week. Eventually, the role of Dysart was offered to RH, one of the people working on the community play who had read in the part as a favour to the director, who had played Titania opposite my Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. RH had played Flute, one of the Mechanicals.
All progressed smoothly, until about a week before the play when RH suddenly doubted whether he was going to be able to play the part. At this stage, I was being sounded out about trying to learn the part at short notice, I had a great ability back then to not only know my lines, but other people’s as well. Fortunately, RH came back, but it was obvious that he would not be on the course much longer. He looked terrible, like a man who had undergone some form of nervous shock and gradually it emerged that he had worked himself into some form of infatuation towards the director of the show. She had worked extra rehearsals with just Tim and RH and clearly the regular proximity to her had built something up inside him. I’ve no idea whether he asked her out and she rebuffed him, but the first sign I had that his feelings for her might have crossed into unhealthy ones were when we were changing into costumes for the play and I noticed that he had carved her name across the skin of his chest.
Being English and wanting to ensure that the play got on without any more hold-ups, everyone kept quiet about the fact that we had someone showing potential signs of mental illness in the cast to go alongside that which was being played on the stage, but once we returned to college in April, RH was asked to leave the course, which he did without fuss. Several years later, when attending a Christmas morning mass at All Saints Church, Falmouth, I saw RH handing out orders of service and hymn books. He saw me, I opened my mouth to say hello, and he quickly looked away from me again. Perhaps, I was a memory of something he wanted to forget.
My own challenges within the show were relatively benign, apart from the fact that I could never say the line, “Very, if he didn’t.” in response to a question from Dysart, to the satisfaction of the director. If you’ve ever seen Hail, Caesar! then try to imagine the “Would that it were so simple” scene but with a lot more teenage angst, swearing and resentment. Even now, 31 years later, I don’t think I’d be entirely sure about how to approach the line.
The main thing I took out of Equus was an appreciation and interest in the work of its author, Peter Shaffer. My first read of the Equus script was in a collection of three of his plays, with an introduction that mentioned some of his other plays and made him seem, even now, quite unlike any other 20th Century playwright in terms of the sweep and scale of his plots and stories. He could move from brittle domestic chamber pieces (Five Finger Exercise -1958) to uproarious farce (Black Comedy -1965) while also creating plays about the conquest of Peru by the Spanish (The Royal Hunt of the Sun -1964) which apparently contains one of the greatest stage directions in all theatre: They cross the Andes, not forgetting his great culturally historical what-if, Amadeus (1979), which imagines a scenario where the reason for Mozart dying in poverty was because his contemporary, Antonio Salieri manipulated it into happening due to his disgust that such exquisite music could be produced by such a boorishly uncouth man. Barely a word of it was historically accurate, but it played for thousands of performances on Broadway and the 1984 film took 90 million dollars at the box office (from an 18 million dollar budget) and won 8 Oscars including the trinity of Best Film, Director and Actor. Shaffer also won for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Whole countries and downstairs flats; the profound and the trivial; the shocking and the hilarious - Shaffer’s work inhabits all of these places and has drawn me in since I first clapped eyes on his writing. After Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn (4 productions), Shaffer is the playwright whose work I’ve done most. 10 years after Equus, I appeared in Black Comedy on John Peel’s 64th birthday, as it happens. While in 2011, I played Mr Bardolph in Lettice and Lovage (1987). One day, I intend either to act or direct in Shaffer’s late 60s play about the nature of pacifism against direct action, Shrivings. Peter Hall considered his failure to mount the production he felt the script deserved to be one of his greatest professional regrets. I don’t intend to make the same mistake.
There’s only 1 month currently left on this, but this 1976 episode of Arena focuses on Equus and contains a lengthy interview with Shaffer.
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