Guys and Dolls: The Electric Prunes - Get Me to the World on Time (16 April 1993)

 

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Peel was still receiving correspondence about his week covering for Jakki Brambles and on this show he read a letter from Barry Warren congratulating him on his stint.* Warren said that he had last written to Peel back in the days of The Perfumed Garden to request a play of Get Me to the World on Time by The Electric Prunes. Peel hadn’t played it for Warren in 1967, and he wasn’t holding his breath in 1993, to which Peel could only reply, Better late than never, Barry….

A US top 30 hit - and only 2 places away from breaking into the UK Top 40 - in March/April 1967, Get Me to the World On Time does an excellent job of reworking the trick of a song like Got To Get You Into My Life in that every line of its lyrics could be interpreted either as a love song or a drug song. 

The love song angle leans more towards the sexual than the hand holding, and it’s supported by the music which sounds at times like it’s evoking heavy breathing, throbbing heartbeats and the surge towards an orgasm. The world in this case means the sweet spot inside James Lowe’s lover, rather than Planet Earth. 

If Get Me to the World on Time was a drug song, the songwriters Annette Tucker and Jill Jones chose to hide in plain sight by referencing chemical reactions, disturbed minds and shaken hormones, in a trip to the world on the other side of perception. But, so skilful is the writing that the song could be performed either at the church disco or during a full-on, freak-out orgy and would fit in either setting.

I can find no evidence of Get Me to the World on Time being hit by airplay bans or censorship, but it’s possible that the ambiguity of the lyric stopped it going as high as it should have. If so, it would be another example of the way in which the acts of others conspired to make life difficult for The Electric Prunes. Nobody seems to have been content to let them do their own thing. Although they wrote songs for their first two albums, their producer, David Hassinger, encouraged them to record original material by other writers alongside their own content. This gave them their chart hits but in December 1967, it led to the band going into the studio to record an album which would be written, arranged and produced by David Axelrod. Mass in F Minor yanked The Electric Prunes from Bo Diddley-style psychedelia to religious music, sung in Latin and Greek, albeit fed through a psychedelic pop-rock filter.**  The classically trained Axelrod’s compositions were more complicated than The Electric Prunes were able to cope with, but instead of changing course, the Electric Prunes found themselves being sidelined - only 3/5 of the band played on the record; session musicians taking up the brunt of the work. 

After some poorly received attempts to play tracks from the album on tour in early 1968, the original Electric Prunes lineup disbanded, but as the rights to the name were held by Hassinger, he put together a new lineup and set them up to record another album with Axelrod, Release of an Oath, which was released in November ‘68.  

The Electric Prunes name was finally laid to rest in 1969 after the release of Just Good Old Rock and Roll.

30 years later, the original line-up reformed to play live and record again, releasing three albums since the turn of the Millennium. The band has continued to the present day, but in a case of history repeating itself, none of the original members are with the band anymore following James Lowe’s death in May 2025.  

Video courtesy of Duophonic for Stereo Phonographs ll

*Barry had already been in touch with Peel on Wednesday 7 April.

**I listened to a bit of Mass in F Minor while writing this post, and “awkward” doesn’t even begin to describe the stylistic fit. Take your Prunes from either 1966/67 or 21st Century and it’ll keep you regular. Anything else will go right through you.

Guys and Dolls: Arcwelder - And Then Again (16 April 1993)

 

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As with The Wedding Present’s Rotterdam, And Then Again owes its place on the metaphorical mixtape to a single piece of sound which lifts the track above the swamp of indifference - though that being said, I do think this is a better song overall than Rotterdam.  

Starting the track off and then recurring throughout each verse is a ringing, single note that serves as an almost celestial presence over Arcwelder’s performance. I tried to think what it was that the note reminded me of: tear ducts as in the piano riff on Trouble by Coldplay? Not quite, it put me more in mind of the “guitar in a bell” sound that Datblygu achieved in their Peel Session version of Carpiog. The bell motif stayed with me, and then I got it. That note: insistent, urgent, remorseless was like an alarm clock, desperately trying to arouse its owner from a dream. Though this isn’t a particularly striking revelation given that the chorus begins with the line, This is a dream…

 

When we consider the content of And Then Again, we find ourselves in a sad domestic nightmare. At least one half of the relationship realises that they’re in trouble, given that the second line of the chorus is This is a lie.  The woman has left because she can no longer believe in the relationship or get her partner’s nose out of the paper to notice her. Instead of an alarm clock, the ringing note could be an alarm bell ringing from inside the man’s subconscious about the state of his relationship. And the sudden shut off of the note at the end of the song feels like recognition of the problem suddenly arriving, only to be drowned out by the fading echo of the recently slammed door.

Video courtesy of rp61productions.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: The Fall - Service/I’m Going to Spain (16 April 1993)

 

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As was previously mentioned, Peel had received a copy of the latest album by The Fall. In this case, his first listen to The Infotainment Scan came via its cassette version. This was useful as he had had recently had a new car radio fitted, which had included a cassette player. He was pleased about this as it meant that he could listen to demo tapes while out driving again. Peel continued his campaign against the onslaught of developing technology by taking the time to find a radio which could be tuned by turning a dial rather than by pressing buttons.

So, the essential website, The Annotated Fall appears to be no longer operational. This is dreadful news for Peel show bloggers because it means we now need to stick our necks out and try and interpret for ourselves what Mark E.Smith meant in his lyrics. I guess it’s the image of the old bastard, sitting up in a pub on a cloud somewhere, pissing himself laughing and saying to himself, “He’s a genius this bloke, isn’t he? He really should be teaching musicology somewhere. I could learn from him.” that has us so wary of interpreting his material. However, in the case of Service, I have a theory which I think fits well enough. So using the Who-What-Why-When-Where-How theory and mixing it with the kind of mental deductions required for the latter rounds of 3-2-1, my take on Service is that it is a poignant song about ghosts and mental illness.

Winter is here declares Smith. A line setting which gets further clarification with references to kicking rotting leaves, the brownness of tree branches and streets washed clean by the rain. However, the lines referring to vulperines (anything with the features of a fox), wolverines (which here refers less to the X-Man and more to the carnivorous animal, which by extension leads to thoughts of werewolves) and the witch that is at Smith’s left shoulder all conspire to give a strong Halloween vibe. But Service doesn’t exist in the world of little kids in plastic masks and cheap capes going door to door for fizzy candy, it lives squarely in the realm of the supernatural. Smith’s character is putting on his hat and corny brown leather jacket in order to go to work at the local mental hospital. I assume he sometimes has to sleep in at work on some nights and that the man who would spit out two or three teeth a night on the floor is the same patient who also laughs at everything and nothing. I think that this particular patient might be equally at home with the witches, vulperines, wolverines and all things associated with All Hallows Eve. It’s my supposition that the patient is R.M. Renfield, the servant of Count Dracula - which is where the title, Service is taken from in this song. Renfield spends the majority of his time in an asylum, both proclaiming the coming of his master and fearful of it.

One striking thing about Service is how elegant it is, with its central piano figure managing to conjure both the feel of a once stately castle and the approaching storm clouds of Dracula’s flight. If it wasn’t for some poor mixing which drowns Smith out at times and the dated synth trumpets, I’d be calling this one of my favourite Fall songs to listen to for pleasure.

During his stint covering for Jakki Brambles, Peel played The Fall’s cover of Lost in Music. On this 16/4/93 show, he played the other cover tune which made it on to The Infotainment Scan, the lesser known I’m Going to Spain, recorded by Steve Bent, an actor who was best known for his appearances in the ITV soap opera, Crossroads.  His single, which was released in 1976, appears at face value to be trying to cash in on the vogue for holiday themed singles which became big hits on the UK charts in the mid-70s, such as Y Viva Espana or Barbados. Unlike them, Bent’s more modest effort missed out on the charts, but was considered awful enough to merit inclusion on the 1978 compilation album, Kenny Everett - The World’s Worst Record Show.* Outside of this, the record had languished in obscurity. Peel didn’t have a copy of his own, and when he signed Bent’s single out of the BBC Record Library so that he could include it in a future programme, he noted that he had been the first person to borrow the record in 17 years.

The Fall didn’t record a cover of it just to take the piss. For a start, Smith liked Crossroads, not least because it starred Carl Wayne for a time, and The Move were one of Smith’s favourite groups. I’m Going to Spain isn’t a great song, but what makes it interesting is that it isn’t concerned about sun, sea and sangria, but about using travel as a way to broaden the mind and life experience.  The refrain at the end of each chorus is I hope I can quickly learn the language, after all. Smith may also have enjoyed the ambivalent humour on lines like :

The factory floor presented me with some tapes of  Elton John.

Though that should keep me company

And I hate them,

Yes I hate the goodbyes….

If we need any further evidence of the regard in which Smith held the song, it’s that he tried to sing it in the same high key register that Bent did. They even sneak the castanets in at the end.

Videos courtesy of The Fall and HexenDefinitive.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

A list of other records released by Crossroads cast members.

*I think this may have been more due to the Crossroads connection rather than the song itself.

Guys and Dolls: Guided by Voices - Exit Flagger (16 April 1993)

 

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It’s exactly 1 year since Guided by Voices first appeared on this blog, a year which covers 3 weeks in terms of Peel shows. My God, how does anything get accomplished here? It’s a good thing he wasn’t doing daytime stand-ins on a regular basis or we’d get nowhere.

So happy anniversary to GbV and it’s a pleasure to come back to a track from the album, Propeller. This was originally intended to be the swansong release for Guided by Voices, who had spent most of the last decade plugging away to widespread indifference. They had quit live performance and chose to make Propeller a bit of a special occasion to sign off with. They restricted its run to 500 vinyl copies and took the time to give each copy a unique cover. 

Exit Flagger, which is the job title given to anyone on a roadworks team who flags traffic off at exits when a road has been closed, alludes to the changes which awaited a band who were ready to take the exit from being Guided by Voices and potentially from music altogether.

I don’t know where I’ve come from.

I don’t know where I’m going.

And I need to find a way out.

And he’s here to help me find it.

The exit flagger could represent all those people down the years who may have advised Robert Pollard that it was time to put rock ‘n’ roll dreams aside and find a “proper” way to make a living. And with the refrain, I’m not going to race you today, it sounds as though Pollard was ready to agree with them. The song continues with Pollard continuing to make promises of change, at least real soon i.e.once GbV have finished their final album. And if Propeller hadn’t found the attention it did, which led the band to carry on, then who knows what road Pollard and friends may have found themselves travelling on. In the event the exit flagger directed them to the future Pollard always wanted.

Video courtesy of PeteAxm.

All lyrics are copyright of Robert Pollard.

Guys and Dolls: Hole - Olympia/Pee Girl/The Void [Peel Session]/ The Raincoats - The Void (16 April 1993)

 

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On Thursday 25 March, 1993, Hole recorded their second and last session for John Peel. In the two years that had passed since they recorded their first session, they had replaced Jill Emery and Caroline Rue with Kristen Pfaff and Patty Schemel on bass and drums respectively. They brought three songs to the session which would eventually feature on the band’s next album, Live Through This, which was released almost a year after this session went out.  Interestingly, Live Through This would also feature two songs which the band had played in their 1991 Peel Session.

Two of the songs saw Hole in attack mode. I wasn’t taken by She Walks On Me, which according to Courtney Love is about the way geeky girls try to impersonate weird girls in order to seem more interesting. Beyond its everyday observation, this could have been a swipe against Riot grrrl bands that Love had so little time for. 

They were certainly the target in Olympia, the capital city of Washington State, noted both for the liberal arts/progressive politics at Evergreen State College, and its music scene which was seen as the hive for riot grrrl bands such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy etc, in the way that Seattle was seen as the hive for grunge music. Although Love’s upbringing was peripatetic, marriage to Kurt Cobain had seen them set up home in Seattle, and on one hand it’s possible to look at Olympia as a song in which one major city disses another major city within the same state. Hole take the piss out of the political earnestness and community ethos of the bands in Olympia, compared to the more nihilistic attitude underpinning the music of Seattle’s bands. The collection of yelped “Yeah?”s which end the track sound somewhat passive aggressive. Less “yeah, I agree with you”, more “yeah, I thought you were a moron and everything you say is confirming it, so I’ll keep drawing out your stupidity for everyone to see.”

The version that Hole recorded for the Peel Session had several differences from the out-take version

which ended up hastily substituting for the original album closer Rock Star* on Live Through This. There’s less profanity for a start, and the session version also has a verse scoffing about time spent with someone called Calvin. This appears to be Calvin Johnson, whose record label K, had distributed records by numerous Olympia bands for over a decade at this point. On the album, the track cuts much more quickly to its point that too many of the bands look and sound the same, that they are condescending to their audience and that all of them preach revolution but leave Love unconvinced that any of them would know what to do if they achieved their goal. Love’s whispered “fascist nexus” comment is particular to the session, and in 1993, could be read as a reaction against politically correct feminism, as embodied by the attitudes of the riot grrrl groups.  It’s a reminder that, in the age of wokeism, the terminology changes but the insults stay the same.

I don’t have many things in common with Courtney Love, but one thing we both had to endure was being given a derogatory nickname in our childhoods. For me, the failure to pull out a handkerchief when I sneezed in a lesson at junior school, and exposed my classmates to a shower of mucus, meant I had to put up with being called Bogieman for the best part of two years, until I went to secondary school.** Love’s nickname was marginally worse as she was known as Pee Girl, mainly due to the smell of urine on unwashed clothes that she often had to wear while living on a hippie commune.  In adulthood, Love managed to regain some semblance of ownership on the nickname. She included it in the lyrics to 20 Years in the Dakota, which was recorded as a b-side to their then current single, Beautiful Son.  

Now, it had a song all to itself, but there’s nothing particularly triumphant or self-asserting about its use here. This is a song in which its lonely and vulnerable heroine is seeking a friend to confide in and unburden themself to amid bursts of domestic violence (Pee girl gets the belt) and allusions to potential sexual abuse (Your milk is so sour). When the song was recorded for Live Through This under the title Softer, Softest, the line became even more uncompromising (Your milk has a dick). Having not long become a mother herself, Love appears to be hitting out at her own mother for the abuse she suffered (Burn the witch/The witch is dead/Burn the witch/Just bring me back her head). She also references her own struggles and self-destructive behaviour, which she was trying to break free from (I’ve got a blister from touching everything I see/The chasm opens up, it steals everything from me.)  The song tries to surge in its final 40 seconds, but remains a sad and dispiriting piece.

Peel played The Raincoats original recording of The Void from their eponymous 1979 debut album on this show and broadcast Hole’s cover of it, 10 tracks later. When you hear the chorus line on The Void it sounds tailor made for Love’s voice. Hole slightly rework the lyrics, referring back to their own Olympia with references to revolution, but both versions do a good job of addressing depression and ennui in a manner which seems invigorating rather than crippling, although the churning violin on The Raincoats original recording provides an extra layer of emotion which isn’t quite there on Hole’s cover.

It could be argued that, in 1993, no-one was doing more to boost the reputation of The Raincoats than Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain. The previous autumn, Cobain had met Ana da Silva while she was working in her cousin’s antiques shop in London. He wrote about this meeting and his request for a copy of The Raincoats debut album in the liner notes to Nirvana’s rarities and early tracks compilation, Incesticide. A few months after this session was broadcast, all three of The Raincoats albums, recorded between 1979 and 1984, were reissued in the UK and US. Cobain again contributed liner notes to the reissue of The Raincoats. Early in 1994, The Raincoats reformed after a 10 year hiatus, and exactly a year after this show, Peel broadcast a new session by them, which included a dedication to the recently deceased Cobain.

When considering this session as a whole - pardon the pun - it’s a curious beast really. A cover and 3 works in progress. It shows signs of the poppier direction that Hole were looking to move in, away from the days of Pretty On the Inside and which had prompted original bassist, Jill Emery leave the band.  I wonder whether the content of this session would have produced any new Hole fans. I’m not sure that it would have, but it’s an interesting signpost to where the band were going and would have asked any existing fans, listening in, whether they were going to join them on their journey.  At the end though, I find myself going back to a comment Peel made after playing Hole’s session version of Drown Soda on 13 March 1992: There are so many bands doing pop, but only one band doing Hole.

*Although Olympia replaced Rock Star on Live Through This, the substitution was made after the album artwork and track listings had been completed.  Live Through This was released a week after Kurt Cobain’s suicide and Rock Star’s refrain of You’d rather die was attached to verses about being in Nirvana, creating an unbearably shocking case of art imitating life.  Curiously, the titles have never been changed on reissues of the album, making the Peel Session one of the few recordings to feature Olympia under its own name.

** It could have ended up being replaced by an even worse nickname in subsequent months, given that an attack of diarrhoea during a PE lesson in Year 5 caused me to shit myself. But I got away with that to a large extent because while people were aware it happened, no-one actually witnessed it, they just knew that something pretty extreme had happened which meant I had to be cleaned up by the headmistress in the toilets.

Hole videos courtesy of Anna Logyka, VibraCobra23 Redux and JusticeforCourtney.

Raincoats video courtesy of The Raincoats - Topic

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Metamorphism - Mecano (16 April 1993)

 

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Tony Clements, the man behind Metamorphism, would, over the next couple of years, go on to become something of a fixture on Peel show playlists as part of Distorted Waves of Ohm.

Mecano was the lead track on an EP called Mekanix, and it makes for a wonderful listen with its blend of techno, tribal and musique concrete. As the video shows, Peel made another of his invariably inaccurate attempts to identify the distant voice at the start of the track. His guess at Mark E. Smith may well have been due to over-excitement given that this 16/4/93 show, which the video is directly taken from, featured Peel’s first plays of tracks from the new Fall album, The Infotainment Scan. It quickly becomes clear that the voice wasn’t Smith’s unless he was working for NASA on the side, which provides quite the picture come launch day: Commencing countdown. 10-ah, 9-ah, 8-ah, 7-ah, 6-ah, 5-ah, 4-ah, 3-ah, 2-ah, 1-ah. Lift off! Lift off! It’s cleared the tower. Oh…that’s fucked then, isn’t it?

Peel would continue to make auditory guesses until his last days.

“Spacey” best describes the vibe around Mecano, and the collection of voice samples from Mission Control, tribal cries and I am a mechanical man refrain sounds like a dry run for a concept album where robots from the future land on a planet/time populated by primitive man. I’d have bought that record, but isn’t it curious how yet again in this show, we find ourselves back in the milieu of Planet of the Apes.

Video courtesy of distortedwavesofohm.

Guys and Dolls: The Wedding Present - Rotterdam (16 April 1993)

 

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Placing at Number 22 on The Phantom Fifty and completely unconnected to The Beautiful South’s hit single of the same name, this is something of a damp squib for its first two minutes. That’s not because of the content, despite the fact that it breaks no new ground. It’s a Wedding Present song, so obviously David Gedge is lamenting the latest piece of miscommunication which has left him grovelling apologetically to a woman. She feels sad, and he feels bad for making her that way.  I wanted you but not the way you think. We’ve heard it all before and perhaps because of this, the producer of the track, Steve Albini has decided that we don’t need to clearly hear what Gedge is singing. It isn’t quite John Lennon yelling the final chorus of Yer Blues into a dead microphone, but you have to strain to hear what Gedge is singing and it doesn’t help the song given that Gedge’s singing voice has always walked the line between distinctive and unprepossessing. My notes from this show had a question mark next to Rotterdam, and when I listened to it again for the first time in a year, last week, I was all ready to keep it off the metaphorical mix tape, based on those first two minutes.

And then, at precisely 2:00, the reason for sticking with Rotterdam makes its entrance. Peter Solowka’s multi-note guitar riff encapsulates a choked sob of such distress that it can’t fail to move the listener. Over the last minute, the whole band move in on this as the riffs and drum fills get more urgent, taking the sound from sobs and tears to the metaphorical smashing up of the room. It could be Gedge taking out his regret on anything that isn’t nailed down, or his friend breaking everything in sight while he sits cowering in the corner.  Either way, it’s the closest thing to violence that I’ve ever heard on a Wedding Present song and pulls the dollars out of the fire in fine style.

Rotterdam was recorded for The Wedding Present’s 1991 album, Seamonsters, which marked Solowka’s last work with the band, before he devoted himself full time to The Ukrainians.

John Lennon demonstrates how dead mic singing should be done from 3:17.

Videos courtesy of The Wedding Present - Topic and The Beatles - Topic

Lyrics are copyright of David Gedge and as we can’t hear them, please feel free to read them.

Guys and Dolls: The Mummies - (You Must Fight to Live) On the Planet of the Apes (16 April 1993)

 

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NOTICE - This post contains mild spoilers relating to Planet of the Apes (1968). I mean it’s a twist that’s quite widely known, but I don’t want to make assumptions.

The world was a simpler place when The Mummies recorded (You Must Fight to Live) On the Planet of the Apes. In 1993, one could listen to this piece of lumbering, yet enjoyable slice of  garage metal and conclude that singer Trent Ruane and friends had completed a binge watch of the five Planet of the Apes movies released between 1968 & 1973, and chose to mark the occasion by writing a song, most likely told from the perspective of Charlton Heston’s character, George Taylor, an astronaut who finds himself on a future version of Earth, where in the centuries following a nuclear holocaust, apes became the dominant, intelligent species, while man was reduced to mute animals.  The lyrics describe some of the authoritarian stratas seen within that society with gorillas as the military class,  orang-utans representing the religious orders and chimpanzees as the scientific elites. It’s through striking up a relationship with a pair of scientists that Taylor gets into a position where he can escape and try to live as a free man.

Alternatively, we could have looked at this as an allegory of an allegory, with the broader context being about the way in which man’s cruelty to man - in ways both large and small - sees us treating others as though they were animals. The fight to live on this planet of apes could relate to the struggle to get from one end of the day to another. The great strength of the Planet of the Apes series is that it’s open to so many interpretations and packs in so many concepts: slavery, the science/religion debate, nuclear dread, genocide, cultural shift, fear of the outsider and so much more. It is, to my mind, one of the greatest series in 20th Century film.

But in 2025, (You Must Fight to Live) On the Planet of the Apes feels like a state of the nation address on politics in the United States. Characters from the films can now be replaced by current symbols of authority which are running unchecked in the United States. For example:

Men were caged like beasts  (Alligator Alcatraz)

Soldier apes on horseback/Soldier apes on foot (ICE)

Learned apes with orange hair, give you dirty look (The shitgibbon himself) 

And where in Trump’s America are the figures that Ruane could strike up a relationship of mutual understanding with? Either intimdated into silence or tacitly accepting of the new reality in America.

With two members of their band having South East Asian heritage, The Mummies would not have been unaware of the conflicts and prejudices that their friends went through in early 90s America and how vulnerable they would be if the events of the Planet of the Apes films ever bled through to the real world, but back then, such things seemed the work of fantasy that they were. It’s the certainty of a world and a time which was still a layer or two removed from the venality of 2025 which people lament and pine for when they talk about “how great the 90s were” on any message board or set of YouTube comments. I appreciate that it’s lazy writing on my part when I say that songs from 30+ years ago speak more to the times we live through now, than they did when they were originally recorded, but I can’t be the only one who misses the days when songs like (You Must Fight to Live) On the Planet of the Apes were fables instead of documentaries.

Video courtesy of entropyness.

Guys and Dolls: Zimbabwe Cha Cha Cha Kings - Shanduko [Peel Session] (16 April 1993)

 

A pleasant time passer from the session recorded by Zimbabwe Cha Cha Cha Kings on 24 November 1992. The session had Peel promising to catch the group if they came to the UK in 1993, as he had missed them last time they had toured here.

My lists initially included another track from this session called Naome, but I suspect if I was making up a mixtape, I would be more eager to replay Shanduko, so I’ve just gone with that one. The other tracks on the session were Dear Maideyi and Makandiramba. The whole session, together with Peel links from 16/4/93, can be heard here.

Video courtesy of Vibracobra23 Redux.

Guys and Dolls: Akash - Balle Balle Balle (16 April 1993)

 

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A week after delighting us with some Bhangra tinged grooves, Peel went the whole Bhangra hog this week with a track from Akash’s fifth and final album, Sky’s The Limit. 

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 Eastern 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).

Guys and Dolls: Tommy McCook and the Supersonics - Second Fiddle (16 April 1993)

 

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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).

Video courtesy of Jorge M.

Guys and Dolls: Spiral Tribe - Going All the Way (16 April 1993)

 

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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.

Vice Magazine with more on Castlemorton Common - “The Biggest Illegal Rave in UK History”

Video courtesy of Bryan G.

Guys and Dolls: The Sonics - Dirty Robber (16 April 1993)

 

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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.

 Unlike The Wailers, The Sonics never had a hit single, though their influence was huge on many, more successful bands that came after them. Michael H. Little gives some reasons as to why success may have eluded the band during the 1960s*.

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.

Guys and Dolls: Eric’s Trip - Haze (16 April 1993)

 

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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.

*The 1984 John Carpenter film, not the David Bowie song.

Video courtesy of RockAllTheTime247.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls - John Peel Show - Saturday 10 April 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

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. 

Full tracklisting

*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.

Guys and Dolls: IPG (International Peoples Gang) - Disneyland [KKKings mix] (10 April 1993)

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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…

Bhangra falling 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.

Videos courtesy of h3lme.

*Anything could happen and duly didn’t.

Guys and Dolls: Cornershop - England’s Dreaming (10 April 1993)

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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.

Neil Kulkarni - Melody Maker 1990s

Lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Video courtesy of Borstal Boy.

Guys and Dolls: Leo Kottke - The Driving of the Year Nail (10 April 1993)

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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)

Video courtesy of toke to elk.

Guys and Dolls: Militia - Electro-Static (10 April 1993)

 

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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.

Video courtesy of Sound of 88/92

*For completists, it was between 1:43 and 2:08.

Guys and Dolls: Slint - Good Morning, Captain (10 April 1993)

 

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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.

Guys and Dolls: Hamp Jones - Pack Your Clothes (10 April 1993)

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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…

Video courtesy of DJ Pete Pop.

Guys and Dolls: High on Love - In My World [San Fran Vibe] (10 April 1993)

 

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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.

Video courtesy of Freddy Loves.