Balle Balle Balle is a Punjabi phrase which translates as Hooray Hooray Hooray. The vibe of the track is celebratory and upbeat, though as ever I retain a trace of concern as I don’t know what it is the track is cheering about. We’ll have to take it on trust.
I think what I respond to in particular are the leaping passages first heard around the 55 second mark, which recur throughout the track. The interconnected nature of music shows itself as those tightly strung Easter. guitar lines sound surprisingly close to the Celtic jigs and reels of Matt Molloy.
Sky’s the Limit seems to have struck a chord with Peel as he played a number of tracks from the album up to June 1993. It remains to be seen whether any of them turn up here, but Balle Balle Balle makes me hopeful.
Video courtesy of Akash - Topic (so enjoy it while it’s here).
Given the name of the artists, both Peel and I missed a trick by not pairing this up with Dirty Robber by The Sonics from this same 16/4/93 programme.
Tommy McCook formed the Supersonics in 1965 after the dissolution of his previous band, The Skatalites. They would serve as the house band for Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle label. In general, Treasure Isle singles in the 1960s operated on a split single principle. They would feature the Supersonics backing a featured artist on one side of the disc, with a performance by McCook and the Supersonics on the other side. The title, Second Fiddle, potentially offers an insight into what McCook thought of this arrangement. However, it’s a jaunty, jazzy rocksteady instrumental which showcases McCook’s saxophone work and the skills of his flautist. It was issued in 1968 as the flip to I’ll Be Lonely by Jay and Joya (John Holt and Joya Landis).
I never went to a rave. I wasn’t well connected enough to know where any of them in Cornwall were taking place, and if I had known, I don’t think I’d have been too enthusiastic about trying to get out to a remote beach on the arse end of the coast, especially given that I would have been too nervous to do any drugs in order to make the long night pass by more beautifully.
I don’t tend to think of this as a major omission in my life experience until I hear a tune like Going All The Way by the free party collective, Spiral Tribe, and then I know that with its hypnotic, eddying runs of sound - I especially like the part around 1:37 which sounds like it’s remixing Tuesday by Milk Cult at 128bpm - and banging tribal drum beats, I’d have been set to dance way beyond dawn and all the way up to lunchtime.
Unfortunately though, if I’d wanted to do so in 1993, I’d have had to take a crossing to France given that Spiral Tribe moved their operations over there due to increasingly repressive UK legislation - sparked off by the vastly over attended Castlemorton Common Festival and culminating in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 - which sought to stamp out unlicensed raves and festivals. Once again, the UK’s loss would prove to be Europe’s gain. At least Spiral Tribe put out a steady stream of official and unofficial releases throughout the 90s in order to bring the raves to those who couldn’t get to them.
There was a strong sense of 21st Century influence over including this, not least because it’s nice to hear The Sonics performing something which doesn’t cause the listener to worry about whether their car insurance policy is in date.
It’s a coin flip as to whether The Sonics version of Dirty Robber, which they recorded for their 1965 debut album, is better than the original 1959 recording by The Wailers. What is beyond doubt is that there was clearly something in the water in Tacoma, Washington where both groups hailed from. The Sonics recording has the benefit that you clearly hear the lyrics, albeit garlanded throughout with singer Gerry Roslie’s trademark shrieks and screams. But, in The Wailers’ original, the deceitfulness of his lover has driven Kent Morrill to an almost incomprehensible babble, leaving him sounding like a hybrid of Elvis Presley and Gene Vincent, whilst poised on the brink of an orgasm, a heart attack or both.
Similarities between the two versions are probably deliberate given that Morrill and Wailers bassist, Buck Ormsby produced the Here Are The Sonics!!! LP.
Videos courtesy of garagefan66 (Sonics) and Mr RJDB1969 (Wailers)
*TLDR - The Sonics were producing explosive versions of Rock ‘n’Roll standards at a point (1965-67) where the market and the more go-ahead groups were seeking to expand their sounds beyond the standard rock band sound. In 65-67, The Sonics were an anachronism of sorts. By the time, music started looking back to its roots circa 1969 and groups like The Stooges were getting wider attention with The Sonics garage rock playbook, The Sonics had disbanded.
For the second Friday show running, we get an Eric’s Trip song which is open to two interpretations. Unlike last week’s where I thought it was about one thing when it was actually about another, I’m open to persuasion on both potential meanings for Haze.
1) Your music is better than mine: This is the meaning which I’m less enthusiastic about, mainly because I don’t really like songs which are about trying to write songs. The giveaway on that is lines such as I live within some stupid rhyme and So trapped within this useless rhyme, which both have the feel of placeholder lyrics which were subsequently never replaced. However, lines such as I saw the fire in your try (or tribe?) together with the I can’t be what I need refrain suggest some element of inspiration being taken from another source while our narrators struggle to get their own music off the ground due to a tendency to fall into writing lousy rhymes for lyrics.
2) An encounter with aliens: This is the meaning I’m more persuaded by, principally due to the atmosphere which permeates the recording and the transcendent harmony between Rick White and Julie Doiron, which manages to conjure up a romantic moment between a lost (in all senses of the word) human and a passing traveller from far, far away. The beauty of that scenario is that it’s impossible to definitively say which role was played by Rick and which was played by Julie. The vibe is closer to Starman* than Out of this World.
Alternatively, Haze could be like Listen, a love song, but in this case it’s one about being unable to see the love that’s in front of you due to the distractions and prevarications brought about by the haze of everyday life. It’s quite some achievement to be able to project so many different interpretations from such lo-fi material. While I don’t think I’m fully ready to passionately embrace Eric’s Trip, I can see myself starting to regard them as a more substantial band than I previously had. It just takes a little time and exposure, as Bone Rolling Reviews can testify.
With this show, Peel completed potentially his longest run of weekly airtime since the days of The Perfumed Garden. Between his time sitting in for Jakki Brambles and the two editions of his own show on Friday 9 April and tonight, he had accounted for just under 18 hours’ worth of Radio 1’s output for the week. His weekly two-hour BFBS programme had also gone out today, though this may have been a pre-record given that Peel had forsaken a Saturday morning lie-in so as to catch a train to Sheffield and take part in one of the panels at the Sound City ‘93 event.
On getting back to London that afternoon, Peel had been delighted to find waiting for him in the post a copy of In My World by High On Love. He was so pleased, he put it into that evening’s show. Less pleasing to him was the weekly letter that he had received from an anonymous correspondent whose letters contained instructions about things they wanted Peel to do for them regarding the football pools. However, Peel was never able to oblige because he didn’t understand the terminology. He asked if anyone knew the person that was sending him these letters, and if they did, to ask them to stop.
The selections from this programme were taken from a 90 minute file. My notes excitedly described the shortlist I’d made as With a handful of exceptions, all killer and no filler. That didn’t stand up to subsequent scrutiny given that 3 selections fell from favour:
Th’ Faith Healers - Sparklingly Chime [Peel Session] - I was quite excited to see these back on the Peel show, but despite a decent chorus, this was ultimately a bit too meh. The link has the whole session, including Peel’s intros, but the most interesting thing from an historical point of view is the brief news snippet before Sparklingly Chime which included the story about an off-guard John Major referring to three of his Eurosceptic Cabinet members as “bastards”. More innocent times of course, especially given that I’ve a feeling that some of Major’s successors would probably have used far stronger terms, 20-odd years later.*
Blast Off Country Style - Social Firefly - This is one of those tracks which charms you on first acquaintance and then repels you when you go back to meet again. What sounds light and charming on the first listen morphs into something feeble and annoying on subsequent hearings.
L’Empire Babuka and Pepe Kalle - Mabele Riche - my shortlist notes called this soukous track, magnificently smooth and I was looking forward to hearing it again, but having just derided Blast Off Country Style for being too feeble, my problem here was that the track sounded too slick. I really do seem to want the moon on a stick sometimes, don’t I?
There was one track I couldn’t get hold of:
Crane - Deconstruct [Peel Session] - This was from a repeat of their second Peel session and it would have been included as a piece of very enjoyable funk metal. After back announcing it, Peel reported that Crane had lived up to the track title and had disbanded. The wiki link talks about how, with the exception of Peel and the North East media, Crane struggled to get wider attention.
It may have helped if they had changed their name, given that they formed two years after the similarly named Cranes, another band who Peel briefly championed and who found something of a benefactor in Robert Smith of the Cure. While Crane toiled, Cranes supported The Cure on tours, a Smith remix of one of their songs gave them a Top 30 hit and when Smith hosted Peel’s show four days before Peel’s death, he included that very same Cranes hit on his playlist.
If a promoter booked a band expecting Cranes’s dream pop and instead got Crane’s catchy but abrasive funk metal, then I’m sure the blow back from the complaints and inquests from people who had hoped to hear Jewel rather than Asleep must have worn them down in the end.
*The dating on the link is quite strange. The “bastards” story broke over the weekend of 24 July 1993, though the John Peel wiki lists a repeat play of the session on 30 July 1993. For further confusion, the video has the tracks sequenced in the order that they went out on 10 April.
I very nearly missed out on including this. For legal reasons, the t:me label pressed up two versions of Disneyland (the later version changed the title to D*****land), with the same mixes on both discs but on the D*****land version the KKKings mix was called the Station K mix instead. And that was the mix title which was shareable. If I hadn’t seen the insert sheet on the promo version of Disneyland and which was the record played by Peel on this programme, I’d have been writing this up as “a record I’d have liked to share, but couldn’t…” on the notes page for this show.
The promo blurb seems as good a place as any to start when it comes to celebrating this mix. The tracks on the Disneyland 12-inch are described as Five concept mixes taken from one bassline. As for the KKKings mix…
Bhangrafalling upwards…Station K ready to blow. Radical Sista, Balwinder Safri, Mikha B and PalmDeep Chana give us the ultimate street sound of the East Midlands. This is the first recorded moment from Station K. Anything can happen in the next 6 months*. (Promo notes on the Disneyland EP, t:me/Hollywood Records, 30 March 1993).
Bhangra forms the basis of this mix, but KKKings keep things interesting with tuneful and intoxicating digressions along the way: Indian singing, woodwind, laser blasts, funky guitar, a thundering tabla beat that never lets up, and perhaps most interesting of all, a wah-wah riff that folds back in on itself from the moment it’s introduced at 1:20, but which sounds familiar. Listening to it, I found myself wondering if it hadn’t stuck with Fatboy Slim, when he was looking for a suitable refrain when remixing Wildchild’s Renegade Master, several years later. I’ll be astonished if at least one of you who plays the video on this post doesn’t find themself singing, With the ill behaviour over the final 80 seconds.
This seems to have been Peel’s favourite mix on the record as he played it again the following week. It’s my favourite too, though all the mixes are worthy of your attention. They run the gamut from clubland workouts to ambient space jazz and hypnotic past life regression. I regret that Peel didn’t appear moved to play the Nyman/Sisterlove mix, which I also love for the way that it fuses industrial samba with snatches of music that sound like it’s been taken from a 1970s Canadian TV Movie of the Week.
At the risk of repeating myself, I find myself once again forced to confront my teenaged complacency on issues which I remember thinking were on the wane at the time. A few weeks’ ago, Marxman reminded me that Neo-Nazis weren’t sitting it out in post Cold War Europe; now we have Cornershop popping up to show that, as far as they were concerned, racism wasn’t something which used to happen back in the 70s & 80s.
The genius of England’s Dreaming, which was the lead track on their Lock, Stock & Double~Barrel EP is how subtly it targets those it is most disappointed in. While it loudly and defiantly calls out racists, sexists, homophobics and urges others to join them in the fight against discrimination, the force of the song isn’t so much set at those who would taunt and attack people based on their skin colour, but rather it scolds those whose first reaction to seeing a non-white face is to retreat into suspicion, distrust and fear. It almost sounds as those Cornershop can deal with the prejudice of being hated, but can’t accept the prejudice of being feared. The late music journalist, Neil Kulkarni, summed up what it was like to be on the end of both expressions of this prejudice, and its corrosive effect on those who suffer under it:
The shout from a passing van window, the night at the bus stop or chippy where abuse and fists fly, the vaginal search your gran tells you of, the eyes on the street, the tight clutch of the handbag as you pass - all those moments are replayed and erase the months of tolerance that intersperse them, becoming a dirt mark on your memory that can never be removed.
That 8:04am train journey mentioned at 1:19 carries the ghosts of all those suspicious eyes and uncomfortable passengers. What’s even more upsetting is that there appears to be no source of support to call on, with even apparently sympathetic church figures unable to do much to turn the tide which the Singh boys feel is against them. The calls to fight are not only directed at other minorities, but also towards would-be allies.
It all coalesces in the track’s most audacious moment, as the singer sits talking to a nursing sister in hospital - potentially after being on the end of an assault - in which lyrics from Morrissey are set next to lyrics from Chuck D. The invitation to anyone listening in 1993 was clear - choose your fighter. And when Stephen Lawrence was murdered, less than a fortnight after this Peel show was broadcast, that ongoing call to join the fight was only going to get louder and more urgent.
A second Leo Kottke track on Kat’s Karavan in the space of a fortnight and, just like the previous one, it was dedicated to Peel’s youngest brother, Alan, who was probably enjoying the fact that he had been able to reclaim his house from its enforced period of hosting the Estonian band, Roovel Oobik - though it appears that they had also spent some time staying at Peel Acres before they were finally able to return home.
The Year of the Driving Nail was the opening track on Kottke’s 1969 album, 6- and 12-String Guitar. His liner notes refer to it as being From an old Etruscan drawing of a sperm cell. I initially thought this was him making a coded reference to the track being inspired by masturbation, but he was being completely serious. According to Joseph Campbell’s 1964 book, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, every year, during the annual meeting of representatives from the 12 cities that made up the region of Etruria, a nail would be driven into the wall of the sanctuary of the goddess, Nortia - though other sources suggest that it was done to mark the beginning of the Etruscan New Year, with the nail representing the fate of the civilisation. It was believed that when the wall was completely full of nails, the Etruscan race would die out. By 88BC, the Etruscan civilisation had been pretty much absorbed into the Roman kingdom.
The Driving of the Year Nail was immortalised on the rear of Etruscan bronze mirrors, with an image of the winged goddess Athrpa holding both the hammer and nail, along with a boar’s head and joined by Adonis, who was killed by a boar, his lover, Aphrodite; alongside another couple, Meleager (whose continued existence was dependent upon the preservation of a log in a fire that was burning when he was born) and Atalanta, whose brief but chaotic relationship during the Calydonian boar hunt has to be read to be believed.
From left to right: Adonis, Aphrodite, Athrpa, Meleager and Atalanta.
Image taken from The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (Campbell, 1964, p.310, Secker & Warburg, London)
I spent part of Sunday, 1 June 2025 listening to 25 minutes of John Peel’s Radio 1 show from Saturday 10 July 1993.* One track which I heard from that show but haven’t slated for future inclusion here on the blog was Winter by Dave Clarke. In the unlikely event that he ever reads this, I hope Dave won’t take it too badly. After all, he was a big favourite of Peel’s, so there’s plenty of opportunity for other Clarke cuts to feature on this blog in future. Indeed, he’s already been covered here before under his Directional Force alias.
The reason why Winter missed out is that after a striking opening minute, which sounds like an Australian forest being ripped up to make way for the building of a new motorway, the track settles into the the repetitive sound of a high pitched note pounding into the listener’s skull for the next 5 minutes. Sometimes, the tempo varies, but in the main, the note is all that there is, save for the occasional clap of thunder and the sounds of the forest wildlife attempting to break through the squall.
Coming back three months from that show to the selections from 10/4/93, which we’ve been working through, I was aware that Electro-Static by Militia was another dance record characterised by high pitched notes and little else. If you played them back-to-back to a dance music sceptic, they’d very likely tell you never to waste their time again. So, why does Electro-Static make the cut, but Winter doesn’t?
Ultimately, it comes down to quantity and variety. Electro-Static isn’t a soothing listen by any respect, but its atonality never falls into a rut. It too has a strong opening with the first 45 seconds bringing together both a beat of pure groove and the beep of a life support machine. Things kick into a higher gear once the synth arrives, sounding like an incoherent, burbling robot, but the Militia crew match this perfectly with the earlier elements and if you fix on those then the additional synths wails, which come in from 1:09 onwards and which try to mimic the sounds of static picked up by high quality transmitters, won’t drive you off the dancefloor.
And I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s that fixing on an element which makes all the difference when it comes to appreciating one techno track over another, especially industrial techno, which is designed to aurally attack the listener before getting them to dance. Every techno track has something working as its hook, the ones we respond to are those with hooks that continue to call out regardless of how many layers of sound - atonal or otherwise - are placed on top of it.
Coming in at Number 23 on The Phantom Fifty, Good Morning, Captain was the closing track of Slint’s second and final album, Spiderland.
This is the first Slint track that I’ve heard, and I see now why Colin Murray cited them as an example of the music he might play when he took on the Peel slot in late 2006.* In the event, like Keir Starmer, he promised the faithful one thing, and then once he got his prize, he compromised everything to buggery. I’ve no idea whether Murray ever actually played anything by Slint in his 3 years hosting the 10pm show - I stopped listening to him after the first couple of weeks when it became clear that Peel show and OneMusic listeners were not the demographic he was targetting - but I’m sure that if he did, they were tucked well away after his plays of Snow Patrol, Elbow and his favourite Family Guy clips.
That being said, any of Slint’s tracks from Spiderland would have fitted well on Murray’s show as a lead in to the best part of it. In the final minute of his programmes, at 11:59pm, Murray would sign off with the line, In a minute from now, today will be over, and this would lead to a chopped-up, bitesized collage of clips from that day’s news stories. The tone was usually downbeat, faintly ambient, slightly trippy and gently haunting. Slint’s music would make a perfect match to this.
Good Morning, Captain is a ghost story. I’m not saying that because of Brian McMahan’s quietly spoken delivery, which is a feature of nearly every track on Spiderland, but rather, it’s the creepy bass riff that serves as the foundation of the song - and which is subsequently supported by some spidery guitar work - while McMahan tells the story of a shipwreck survivor haunted both by the memory of his lost colleagues but also by the child who arrives at 5:07.
I’ve seen a couple of theories floated about who the child is. The line, I want the police to be notified led one Reddit user to posit that the Captain was face-to-face with his childhood self and that the promises that I’ll make it up to you, were the adult self promising the child self, that he would make up for things suffered during childhood. It’s a persuasive thesis, especially if the shouts of I miss you! during the final minute are a lament for lost innocence.
For myself, I still go with the ghost theory, and I think that the shipwreck may not necessarily be set during the age of the galleon ship, but could be a family sailing trip gone wrong, with the Captain being the family patriarch, attempting to outrun his responsibilities only to find grief and guilt catching up to him, once he’s behind the door of his beach-house.
Video courtesy of rasalinga.
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
*I have a clear memory of seeing this quote on a brilliantly written article (which appears to be missing now) which lamented that this kind of promise wasn’t being delivered by Murray and that his 10pm show was a musical dead end for listeners who expected a broader range of music at that time of night. With the passing of time, I’ve come to see that the model for Murray’s 10pm show wasn’t really John Peel at all, but rather Mark Radcliffe’s Graveyard Shift from the previous decade. The principal difference being, as the list from Murray’s In the Company Of feature shows, he was a wretched starfucker in a way that Radcliffe wasn’t.
DISCLAIMER - I make no bones about the fact that I regard Colin Murray as pretty much my least favourite DJ in the 20 odd years that I listened to Radio 1. However, on Five Live, I think he’s tremendous. As a speech radio host/interviewer, he’s one of the best around. It’s only when he has to play records, that I get impatient and unkind about him.
Hamp Jones was one of the many variations applied to the name of Harmon “Hump” Jones, who at some point in 1957, wrote and recorded three songs: Lookin’ for my Baby,You’re Not My Girl and Pack Your Clothes. Musically, all three sit at the point where rhythm and blues intersects with swing, but Jones was clearly influenced by rock ‘n’roll too. Listen to the melody of the verses on Pack Your Clothes and it’s apparent that once Jones’s dumped lover has packed their belongings, he fully intends on having them unpack them again at Heartbreak Hotel…
Peel had spent most of Saturday 10 April 1993 up in Sheffield. He’d travelled up there to take part in a panel discussion at one of the events being held for Sound City ‘93. He then returned to London to present his regular show. Waiting for him, in the Radio 1 office, was a 12 inch called In My World by High on Love, aka Chris Rushby and Roland Armstrong, two DJs otherwise known by the frankly superior name of Stoned Democracy. Armstrong would later go on to form Faithless. He’s also Dido’s brother, proving that John Peel shows are often little more than a variant on the six degrees of separation game.
Peel was so taken by In My World - which fuses together reggae, gospel and dance music - that he reworked the running order for that evening’s show so that he could play it, just hours after hearing it for the first time. Indeed, it featured fairly frequently over the coming weeks.
At 32 years’ distance, parts of In My World sound laughably dated now. I’m thinking particularly of the farting saxophone sounds which were ubiquitous at the time. But, its ambition can’t be faulted as it tries to create a late 20th Century Summer of Love vibe, with its references to where “Candlestick Park and Haight and Ashbury meet” combined with theories about God owning a pink umbrella and second hand shoes. Overall, what’s most remarkable about In My World is the way it manages to be simultaneously chill and aggressively humane. Some of the calls for racial tolerance in this sound like they’ve been learnt from the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprasy school of public speaking, but please don’t let that put you off.
20 Hz has three distinct movements and is, for the most part all about the beats, which hit home in a particularly European way.
The first movement puts me in mind of Date M by The Traveller, because it shares with it what I previously described as bicycle spoke percussion. Listening closely, I now recognise those struck bicycle spokes as probably being a glass bottle xylophone. Whatever it is, it makes for a wonderfully beguiling melody line to lead the listener into the centrepiece of the track.
For the second movement, at the 58 second mark, we get wind of something which initially sounds like radio interference but which builds over the next 75 seconds into a relentless onslaught of marching band drumming, all underpinned by an equally insistent throbbing bassline.
As the drummers fade out into the distance, around 2:15, we move to the third and best part of the track. The synths squelch and swell, the beats change from rhythmical to groovy and the whole thing starts to take off into the stratosphere. It’s almost a shame that everything loops around again over the final three minutes, given that the first 3 and a half minutes are so perfectly realised that if Weekhout had chosen to fade out at 3:30 then 20 Hz could be held up as having no flab or excess on it all. Just a perfectly realised jewel. At the very least, having displayed it’s brilliance through it’s first half, a repeat through the second half allows any waverers time to get to the dance floor.
24 hours earlier, John Peel played Potvan by The Werefrogs, a song which I described as evoking the sense of a stoned man driving at 5mph. I was reminded of it while listening to Bow Hitch-Hiker by the Dublin band, Rollerskate Skinny, which had just been released on their Trophy EP and would also feature on their debut album, Shoulder Voices.
Imagine if the toked driver of Potvan picked up a couple of hitchhikers, but they turned out to embody the spirit of the songs, Pacific Coast Highway by Sonic Youth and Cumulus by Pram. And I feel that way because with its multiple movements and styles, Bow Hitch-Hiker manages to convey the disturbing intensity of the former track and the unsettling oddness of the latter, all while mixing in their own brand of Celtic stoner rock. At times they sound like the disturbed older brother of The Thrills.
Wherever Rollerskate Skinny and their passengers are heading in this track, we’re left with a sense of people trying and failing to outrun their pasts. The swirl of sounds within this track, which run from the melodic to the abrasive suggest moments of psychological calm in constant battle with psychological turmoil. And what about lines like, It’s alright, all the girls are here now/All the girls are dead. Just what has singer Ken Griffin been doing? Whatever it is, lines like It’s like a million years of shame on my back and in my ears/But it’s alright, all the girls are gone suggest that he’s been carrying a heavy burden around. As the various crunchy riffs fade out through the last minute and a half of the song, we’re left with a circulating seven note riff running around the inside of the brain, like a guilt which can never sit still.
The Jittery White Guy Music blog included Bow Hitch-Hiker among their favourite 1000 songs, and also talked about what a noisy live act Rollerskate Skinny were. Something which Radio 1 listeners got to experience when the band recorded a Peel Session at the end of May, which included a live version of Bow Hitch-Hiker.
This week saw the release of Rod Stewart’s version of Shotgun Wedding. Originally recorded by Roy C Hammond in 1966, Stewart’s version was one of the new recordings which featured on a somewhat haphazard compilation album which Warner Bros had released to commemorate Stewart winning a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1993 Brit Awards.
The 12 track Lead Vocalist album opened with seven tracks taken variously from Stewart’s solo career, as well as performances with The Jeff Beck Group and Faces. However, the last five tracks were brand new recordings of cover songs. Over the previous 6 months, Stewart’s versions of Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda)[Tom Waits] and Ruby Tuesday [Jagger/Richards] had reached Number 6 & 11 on the UK Singles Chart. Now, Shotgun Wedding was being released as the third track taken from the album.
John Peel had a good relationship with Stewart, though they had long drifted apart musically. To prove the point, Peel steered clear of playing Stewart’s version of Shotgun Wedding during his week on the Jakki Brambles show. However, he played Cornel Campbell’s 1973 reggae version on this programme because he thought it was better than Stewart’s version. I’ve included it here as I think the 17 year old me would have responded well to this. But, I think now that I prefer the Stewart recording. Campbell has a more honeyed voice than Stewart, but, helped by the work of his brass section, Rod’s version does a better job of conveying the oppressive jollity of a forced marriage ceremony.
It could be argued that no one’s managed to pull off a truly definitive version of Shotgun Wedding.
Even Roy C’s original sounds half-arsed. But Stewart’s version did well enough to reach Number 21 in the UK charts.
So, having spent the week caretaking Jakki Brambles’s lunchtime Radio 1 show, Peel cracked on with the day job - or rather night job - on Friday and Saturday. He wasn’t just dominating Radio 1’s schedules that week, he had extracurricular activities keeping him busy too. Thursday, 8 April had seen him acting as DJ at an event alongside sets from Huggy Bear, their offshoot, Blood Sausage as well as Cornershop and Mambo Taxi. Peel had enjoyed the evening immensely, not least because the booth he had been working from didn’t have a microphone, so all he had to do was play records.
One record he might not have had the opportunity to play at the event was The Fall’s new album, The Infotainment Scan, which he had mislaid somewhere in Broadcasting House. However, he may have played King Candy Cane from the album, Mustache Ride by Foreskin 500. It led him to ponder, How many people would be upset to hear the word “foreskin” coming out of the radio? I suspect most of you have one. I still have mine, in a rather stylish locket.
Selections from this show came from a 3 hour file. There was one track on my list, which I wasn’t able to share:
One track fell from favour with me. There was to be no last minute Peyote-style reprieve for…
Hail/Snail - Thirsting for More - The link will take you to a video which has all of the tracks from their eponymous EP released through Funky Mushroom. Thirsting for More is the first track and I can only guess that when I first heard it, I was slightly beguiled by some of the dreamy guitar work on it. But subsequent listens serve only to obscure the occasional bursts of tunefulness with out of tune strumming, sub-beginner level violin scraping and vocals/lyrics which would empty the most sympathetic Open Mic night.
The entire enterprise was a collaboration between Susanne Lewis of Hail and Azailia Snail. The vibe appears to be fractured adolescent cosmic folk, with each track walking the line between tunefulness and atonality. Some of them are genuinely compelling, but Peel made a duff choice here. The liner notes show that contributions on trumpet were made by Gary “Glitter” Olson. I’m assuming he dropped that nickname by the end of the decade.
This is the musical equivalent of me coming into your homes and rubbing soothing oils all over your body. If you’re driving at the moment, you’ll have to give that a miss, I’m afraid. - John Peel, cueing up Alcatraz on 9 April 1993.
Despite Peel’s warm words, my own initial reaction to this piece of chilled out trance from Dag Lerner and Rolf Ellmer aka Peyote was that it was a little bit more bombastic than I’d been expecting. An observation which leads me to wonder if I’m at all qualified to be passing any judgements on this blog. For all that, my notes did say that it would be worthy of a second listen though. And I listened to it several times before eventually deciding that I would pass on including it. But, when I was writing the summary post for this 9/4/93 show, I listened back to the tracks I was rejecting from my original list of selections, and it was at that last gasp moment that the beauty and wonder of Alcatraz made itself obvious to me.
To see the word Alcatraz is to think immediately of the prison that was on the island until 1963, and which was immortalised in the movie, Escape From Alcatraz. Certainly, the track features plenty of percussion which evokes the sound of people hammering away at steel and stone as if to try and break out and get closer to the muffled sounds of thunder which punctuate the opening stages of the track. And yet, I also captured a feeling of stifling humidity within the music too. Granted, this could be said to be conjured by the aural image of a crowded prison cell during a heatwave, but those thunderclaps and the percussive shakers which are used, also took me to the open plains of the desert and a feeling of desperately trying to find shelter from an approaching storm. I don’t know how it’s possible for a piece of music to suggest both confinement and open space, but Alcatraz does so.
And then at 3:27, we start to pick up the sounds of singing; faint and indistinct, but also hearty and celebratory. The lyrics are close to gibberish, but I can make out a refrain of “happy birthday to you” in there somewhere. The melody of the singing seems to predict Mumford and Sons, 20 years ahead of time, but I also hear elements of singing chain gangs and tribal songs. The latter of these makes particular sense when we learn that Alcatraz Island was occupied by a group of American Indians between November 1969 and June 1971, who took the island over believing that as it was no longer being used as the site of a penitentiary, it stood to be a piece of land to be reclaimed by descendants of the original American settlers.
Over all, I think that this period in the island’s history may be what is being immortalised here, with the thunder rumbles representing the mix of forces that saw the Indians leave the island over time. Either way, I’m ultimately very glad to include it on the metaphorical mixtape.
WARNING - The video for The Fascist Boom contains disturbing images. It was uploaded in 2014/15.
Peel opened tonight’s programme with The Fascist Boom, Marxman’s contribution to a compilation album distributed by Youth Against Racism in Europe called By Any Means Necessary. Listening back to the warnings given in it, I can only feel shamed by the complacency that I would surely have felt at the time. It wasn’t that I was oblivious to Neo-Nazism, but back then, they seemed like nothing more than a lunatic fringe. They could have their demonstrations and one could feel sorry for any poor unfortunate who got attacked by them, but I never saw them as a direct threat to the world order, because I couldn’t see how anyone could get taken in by it. But a combination of declining living standards and continent-wide NIMBYism has seen far-right political parties make sweeping gains across Europe over the last decade and a half. While in America, the political right has been become rancid and dangerous without anyone seemingly able to do anything about it. Marxman warned us - nothing was done - and now we find ourselves in a time where too many parties & politicians who should know better are trying to court that vote and present anything opposite to it as something to be ashamed of or embarrassed about.
Exactly one year ago, Peel had greeted the results of the UK General Election with a weary cry of Do you ever have days where you feel you got out of bed on the wrong planet? In 2025, those days outnumber the good ones, I find.
There’s little to cheer us up in the other Marxman selection either. Dark Are the Days is a despondent screed on everything:
1) Capitalism winning out over socialism.
2) The media brainwashing the public.
3) Unions either being depowered or selling out to bosses.
4) Too many low-paid and dead end jobs.
It’s curious how the presence of a beat and some sprightly penny whistle can get you dancing away to such an onslaught of negativity. Had Peel not been distracted by having to be Jakki Brambles, I wonder whether he would have played Dark Are the Days back-to-back with Dollars by Bajja Jedd, which makes a case for how to survive and thrive in a capitalist society.
Looking at the lyrics to Sun Go Out - and if I hadn’t done so, this post would be even shorter than it is - they appear to be a continuation of the theme of alienation/disenchantment with authority figures that was evidenced in Speeds Exceeding. But where that song felt like a debate between the generations, here the malaise is more deeply set and implacable. Sun Go Out takes swipes at “stars” and politicians for being all surface and no feeling, but does with a shrug of the shoulders and an internalising of the contempt and disgust that they feel. Early 90s ennui drips all over lines like:
We know there’s channels where we could register our comments and complaints.
But it’s just as fun to fall back laugh the thing to scorn.
And hey presto! Trumans Water invented social media.
As the song progresses, it starts to make uneasier listening to 21st Century ears. In 1993, the sentiments expressed sounded like classic slacker talk. Even the title of the song sounds like a pun on exhortations made by stressed dads to their surly, couch potato offspring. But in subsequent verses, the vibe sounds, in 2025, less slacker and more MAGA. This is especially true once the kids do get off the couch:
…we’re just violent, not angry.
And we’d sooner tip things over as watch them topple by themselves.
You aspiring public servants are long on vision and short on spine.
Here’s to spewing thicker drivel and digging deeper graves.
After a final verse which declares that anyone trying to have an original thought should keep it to themselves, the song ends with eight guitar notes which toll like a bell declaring the death of…. hope? Idealism? Public spiritedness? Any number of optimistic qualities that one used to be able to attribute to the United States of America with a semi-straight face. And a look down the list of titles on Spasm Smash XXXOXoX Ox & Ass reads like a MAGA checklist of grievances against authority or their supposed betters: Bludgeon Elites & Stagger, Lo Priest, Our Doctors Think We’re Blind etc.
This was a borderline inclusion, because it piles by in a bit of a rush, and I’ve had to take a number of listens to it in order to find any kind of angle that would make it worth keeping. But what’s ultimately retained it is a mixture of what it’s trying to be, and my belief that it’s a lot more optimistic and innocent than I initially thought it was.
Sonically, Listen comes across as a kiddie-pop take on the verses in You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine, albeit that it tempers this with quieter moments between the noise squalls.
Lyrically, I initially thought that the song was about someone preparing to kill themself. This was because of the chorus refrains of Soon I’ll be gone. But repeat listens and further scans of the lyrics have now led me to believe that this is actually a love song, and that the title, Listen, refers to that nascent moment in love affairs when emotions burst forward, the internal editor checks out and we blurt forward to the object of our affection both our most profound and trivial thoughts, simply because this is the moment when we can be sure that they will really listen to and value what we’re saying.
Stick around, for a while.
Listen to my thoughts.
It makes you smile.
Hold my hand, my life.
Thinking quiet down, make me right.
It’s a plea for love which really could save the singer’s life.
I have the film critic, Antonia Quirke, to thank for this insight. I’ve just given up on her 2007 memoir, Choking on Marlon Brando. The book combines Quirke’s portraits on various actors alongside the highs and lows of her love life through the 1990s. Quirke writes brilliantly about movies, she occasionally writes brilliantly about love, but by the time I reached page 150, I realised the problem with reading about real people’s love lives - the emotional highs are too difficult to read about without cynicism and misanthropy crowding in and willing on the fall. And that’s no way to live life or experience culture.
Also, just as when confronted by a social media picture of someone’s delicious looking pub lunch, the elation of an individual’s love affair is precisely too individual for anyone else to really care about, especially when it’s spread over 310 pages of a book.* Eric’s Trip manage to convey these sensations in two and a half minutes, so they trump Quirke’s ability to get them across, albeit I’m grateful to her for making me look at Listen in a way that I might otherwise have missed.
The upshot of all this is that I’m setting up the first giveaway in the history of The Smell of the Greasepaint and the Sound of John Peel. If you would like a copy of Choking on Marlon Brando before it goes either to my local second hand bookshop or the charity bookshelf at Chieveley Services, please send me a DM on bluesky (greasepaint.bsky.social) by April 30. First come, first served.
*I know that I’m guilty of writing about my romantic elations on this blog every so often - and when we get to the show week of Guys and Dolls in the first week of August ‘93, you’d better be ready to see me go full-on Quirke - but at least I try and attach them to a beautiful piece of music.
Video courtesy of mynameisasuka
Lyrics are copyright of their authors.
My thanks to the John Peel wiki for identifying the title of the track, which Peel did not give on the 9/4/93 show.
Hole, writing a song about Yoko Ono is one of the most brilliantly predictable things that could have happened in 90s rock. The parallels between Ono and herself would have been ringing out loud and clear to Courtney Love as her husband’s band grew to become a globally recognised name, and Love would almost certainly have slapped down anyone who addressed her as being “only” Kurt’s wife. Like Ono, she was an artist in her own right and was married to a man who, in the eyes of many, transcended the label of “musician” and her reward was vilification. Other similarities include drug use and the early deaths of their husbands - via different means - to firearms.
Ultimately, what links Love and Ono is a steel and toughness; quiet and playful in Ono’s case, belligerent and angry in Love’s. What she makes clear in 20 Years in the Dakota, both to herself and the “riot grrrls” trying to bring her down is that Ono is the patron saint of them all, and that none of them will ever truly be able to repay the debt they owe to her. I do find myself wondering who The Fabulous Four would have been in Love’s case: Kurt, Krist, Dave and…..Butch?
At 1:34, the focus of the song shifts from Yoko to Courtney, touching on - among other things - motherhood (My waters break like turpentine), but more pertinently, a recognition of her husband’s developing death wish: The pee girl burns to be a bride/Your ever lovely suicide. Cobain’s heroin usage was growing to the extent that overdoses were becoming an almost normal occurrence for him. In contrast, Love was trying to clean up her health, perhaps shaken by a lengthy and expensive battle the Cobains had gone through with The Department of Family Services, which had seen a very real risk of their daughter, Frances, being taken into care.
In late spring [1993], [Love] hired a psychic to help her kick drugs. Kurt balked at paying the bills from the psychic and laughed at her advice that the couple needed to reject “all toxins”. Courtney took it seriously however; she attempted to stop smoking, began drinking fresh-squeezed juice every day and attended Narcotics Anonymous. Kurt taunted his wife at first, but then encouraged her to attend N.A. meetings if only so he had more free time to get loaded. (Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven, page 276, Sceptre, 2001)
At its conclusion, 20 Years in the Dakota features one final audacious touch, with the band working in a tribute to the end of Hey Jude, but replacing its choral enormity with a droopier, hazier feel as the lines I don’t remember, I forget fall away like someone nodding off into a drug induced stupor.
In the event, Ono spent 50 years in the Dakota, finally selling her apartment in 2023.
Video courtesy of David Rolfe’s Rock and Metal Channel
The Radio 1 Fun Computer has rather scrambled their names, unless one of them has a surname spelled K-v-b-o-m which I rather doubt - John Peel, introducing Nelories’ session on 9/4/93.
NOTE - The order of tracks on the show was different to the order on the video. It was originally broadcast to run as follows: Run Free > Trampoline > Neutral Blue > Garlic. This post will follow the order of tracks on the video.
On Sunday 14 March, 1993, Jun Kurihara and Kazmi Kubo took their guitars, drum machines and accordion into the BBC’s Maida Vale studios to record a Peel Session. It satisfied all the usual labels that can be attached to certain styles of Japanese pop music; veering from the catchily kitsch to the profoundly heartfelt, before ending in a manner that leaves this listener - and I hope other listeners who read this post - feeling warm, fuzzy and cosseted, which is quite an achievement considering that they were singing in a second language and with voices that walked the tightrope between soothing and adenoidal.
The jazzy Garlic follows in the spirit of their earlier Banana in using foodstuffs as pseudonyms for other things. If Banana dealt in sex, then Garlic deals in love as it appears to be the pet name for a lover, identified by their long blonde hair…blue blue eyes, which appear to make up for the earlier acknowledged absurd freaky smell. Given body odour once played a part in breaking up a relationship I was in, I wish Garlic could have passed on some tips to me about how to ensure that can be cancelled out in favour of one’s more positive qualities. Although, if the song is about a dog, it all becomes moot given that pets can be loved regardless of what they do. It’s the trade off for them not being able to enjoy alcohol and culture, I suppose.
When I first heard the 9/4/93 show, for some reason, I ended up leaving Neutral Blue off my list of inclusions from the session. I can only conclude that I was having a funny couple of minutes, because listening to it again on this video reveals it to be the highpoint of the session. My initial thoughts on it were that it was about repenting the breakup of a relationship with a steady but boring person, especially given that, in the slightly garbled lyrical language of Nelories, we learn that neutral blue was the colour of your talking. But subsequent listens have me wondering whether the song is more about mourning the death of its subject rather than breaking up with them. For it seems that the separation really is a permanent one and this comes home in the key line of the song: I’ve heard that loneliness and being alone don’t always mean the same. Also, Kubo’s guitar run from 6:22 to 6:32 sounds like someone desperately rummaging around to find a handkerchief to cry into. Brutal blue, indeed….
Run Free is another example of the way in which Nelories’s songs could work as advertising jingles. This one could either be promoting the benefits of holidays (You may go everywhere/Everywhere’s a destination), exercise (Let’s go for a run/We’re on the road to nowhere/I am sure to say that/We’ll feel a whole load better, loads better than miles) or mindfulness (Walk slowly, don’t hurry, you’ve got more things to see…slow down, don’t hurry). It’s a beautiful mix of the bizarre and the profound, which is only to be expected given that Kurihara was writing her lyrics in a second language. It’s testament to her skill that she gets more right than wrong in what she writes, though this Trouserpress overview of Nelories back catalogue highlights some of her more unusual lyrical non-sequiturs.
The theme of Trampoline appears to be much clearer. The title serves as a metaphor for the behaviour of the kind of charismatic, attractive, sexy man who has friends and lovers everywhere, but never takes the time to stay in one place too long. Any time a commitment is sought, they jump on their trampoline and spring off in another direction. Typically, Kurihara is in love with this gadabout, all while recognising his flaws: Maybe I cannot be his trampoline.
I’m feeling anxiously excited as I write this. Tonight, the greasepaint part of this blog becomes relevant to me for the first time in 6 years as it’s the first night of Here Comes a Chopper, a 1970 play in which Eugene Ionesco predicts COVID-19, 50 years before it happens. It’s meant the world to me to get back on a stage again over these last 8 weeks or so. I suspect my stomach will be going over and over around 7:25pm tonight as I’m faced with the prospect of acting in front of an audience again after so long, but the show is in good shape, and I wouldn’t swap it for anything.
I couldn’t let today go past without blogging. I’m aware that a number of recent posts have marked things I’ve been doing - see records by The Slickers and The Upsetters while I was on holiday in Saint Lucia.
I’m celebrating my return to the stage with a near 7 minute burst of Goan trance from Paul Jackson aka Voodoo People. While I can’t see Altitude replacing Paul Jones’s High Time as my choice of opening night music - a tradition I’ve maintained for 32 years now - it’s got enough energy and life to send me out into the spotlight again with my heart racing and the blood pumping. It also makes for a marginally better listen than the track which Peel misidentified Altitude as when he played it on this show, the slightly scratchier Love, Love American Style.
Sometimes, writing this blog allows me to consider alternative histories that I could have lived through, at least in terms of what my musical passions could have ended up being. All of the qualities that caused me to fall in love with Marion - surging guitars, vocals that mixed soul with passion - are to be found here in Offshore by Puressence. Had I been fully clued into contemporary British music, two years earlier than I chose to start buying the records, listening to the shows and reading the magazines and papers, I can well believe that I’d have fallen under Puressence’s spell under the belief that they had something which set them apart from the rest, just as I did with Marion in 1995/96. It opens up the distressing possibility that I’d have dismissed Marion as copyists, imagine! A world without This World and Body - ugh! - I have to take a lie down to dismiss the possibility. No, history takes care of itself for the right reasons, and I am grateful that, in this instance at least, it played out as it did. Apparently, the two groups toured together at one point. I wonder how many of the audience had to be carried out due to being overcome by emotion at those gigs.
My abiding memory of Puressence in the 90s is the way that the music press kept suggesting that achieving major success was only a question of time for them. Be patient, lads, stardom is coming - albeit in the manner of a bus service which ran once a day, every sixth Sunday. At least Puressence’s fans never had to wait too long for new material from them. Offshore was their third EP release inside a year on 2 Damn Loud, and their last before they signed to Island Records.
The title track here demonstrates how Puressence were still able to play their strongest cards, while sloughing off some of the bloated tendencies of their previous releases. For example, Offshore clocks in at 3 and a half minutes, whereas each of the tracks on their Petrol Skin EP were between 4 and 6 and a half minutes long, while seeming to want to fill every available second with James Mudriczki’s admittedly brilliant voice. Lyrically, Puressence mixed the agitational with the painterly. “Offshore” in this track alludes to a self-imposed wish to isolate oneself from others. Paranoia runs rampant, indeed Mudriczki’s vocals often sounded like someone trying to keep a panic attack under control. And yet running alongside that is the gorgeous, near-chorus of Underwater butterfly keeps so dry, it just bowls me over/Gazing through pathetic lies and I can’t keep down/Something’s got me going now.
And it’s this that was crucial in understanding why groups like Puressessnce and Marion inspired such devotion in their followers. They fully acknowledged the pressure of being alive and the pain it exposed us to, but they never gave into it. There was always reason to fight on and find your way back to shore. Whether you crawled up it or strode up it, Puressence weren’t about to let themselves or their listeners drown.
Bonus points are also awarded for them working mal de merinto the lyrics.
