As Billy Connolly used to say, sometimes my mind sees pictures, and since I heard this short guitar instrumental, which was recorded as a b-side to Wild Jimmy Spruill’s 1964 single*, Country Boy, I’ve been picturing forming an unlikely Terry and Gerry type duo.
In the blue corner, Jimmy Yuill, an actor perhaps best known for his appearances in the Cornwall set police series, Wycliffe, as well his work with Kenneth Branagh, both on stage, on screen and on soundtrack. You can hear an example of this latter talent on Branagh’s short film of Swan Song by Anton Chekhov.
Spruill and Yuill certainly trips off the tongue as a name, but how well their respective styles - cigar box guitar r & b/classical acoustic guitar - would have melded together remains open to debate. I suspect alternating solos would have been the way to go. Plus, Spruill’s death in 1996 means that bringing them together will only ever remain one of my pipe dreams.
This blog will feature more mentions about Jimmy Yuill when we reach 1997, given that I worked as an extra on that year’s series of Wycliffe and was in the background of a number of his scenes in various episodes.
It’ll also feature more tracks of Jimmy Spruill’s if Peel continues to pull out pearls like Scratchin’. Once you get past the first 15 seconds, which sound like the theme tune for an unfunny radio sitcom, we’re into a short, sharp r&b workout that must have thrilled the young Jimi Hendrix, who borrowed a number of Spruill’s visual motifs (playing the guitar behind his head or with his teeth) for himself. The bouncy central riff and brass backing put me in mind of Lonnie Mack’s Sa-Ba-Hoola, which came out the same year. Mack is more of a virtuoso than Spruill, based on the evidence of the two records, but when Spruill cuts loose between 1:04 and 1:19, it sounds as though his guitar has burst into flames.
*Vim, the label that issued the Country Boy single, credited him as Jimmy “Wildman” Spruill, but as this appears to be the only one of his records issued under that name, I’ve chosen to go with his more widely known monicker.
Coming on as a stroppy hybrid of Huggy Bear and Mambo Taxi, Voodoo Queens were quite a fancy of Peel’s around this time. They recorded three sessions for him between January 1993 and February 1994. Peel may well have been taken both by their music and the fact that one of their guitarists shared a name with a track from one of Peel’s favourite albums.
The resemblance to Mambo Taxi isn’t a huge shock as both Ella Guru and Anjali Bhatia left that group in order to form Voodoo Queens. I have to compare Supermodel-Superficial to Mambo Taxi’s song, Prom Queen, which both Bhatia and Guru played on, and which I changed my mind on including on the metaphorical mixtape when making selections from Peel’s show from 30/1/93. Supermodel-Superficial is an improvement on Prom Queen, because its ire is better directed. While not being a direct attack on supermodels themselves, it instead tears to shreds the lifestyle orthodoxy that was forming around the cult of the supermodel and which was being pushed on to young girls as a desirable way of looking and living.
Whose role models do you really think you are?
Young girls that make themselves sick.
Feel guilty for being size 14
Living in their self hate.
This all slightly predates the size zero controversies - indeed my principal memory of 1990s supermodels is that they were slim rather than thin, though Kate Moss veered dangerously close - but Voodoo Queens can see the direction of travel that things are moving in and they call bullshit on it here.
It all makes me wish that Voodoo Queens had lived long enough to take on some of the things which that journey brought into our lives in subsequent years such as It girls, reality TV stars, influencers and OnlyFans.
I think that this may be the best song about money ever written. I’d wager that it isn’t the first track anyone would think of when asked to name a cash centred song, but, to use a Peelism, in a decently ordered society, Dollars by Bajja Jedd (Dwane Jarvis) would be a global anthem.
I appreciate that venerating a song with a title like Dollars in such a fashion may make you feel queasy if you haven’t heard it, but the great thing about it is that it manages to be both admirably practical about why money is important, but does so without ever succumbing to greed is good vulgarity. The song isn’t about materialism, but rather more about how money can improve the lives, hopes and chances of those in the ghetto and more widely. It takes in class, charity, how working the low paid job can offer a foundation to a better future (Remember where you coming from and where you’re going). It acknowledges that the pursuit of money can lead to crime and that the distribution of money is not an easy task, indeed the earliest lines acknowledge that if God made Man to be equal, then Man made money so as to divide the people into classes, where some have more than others.
Dollars speaks to those in the lower and middle classes, while reserving a few tart lines for those who have become rich and stopped caring. This is key to the theme of the track: the pursuit of money for the betterment both of the individual and society. Dollars ends up celebrating two dirty words - money and socialism.
Some of the sentiments here are not new, Money (That’s What I Want), recorded 34 years before Dollars made it clear that without money, love and community were not enough. But whereas Money always seemed like a tantrum track about not having enough and wanting more, RIGHT NOW, Dollars manages to be empathetic and aspirational. I suspect that first adjective is why no political party would ever go near it for use as a campaign song.
So far, The Werefrogs have provided me with my second favourite track played by Peel in 1992 and a requiem for an ailing great aunt. Had I known about them at the time, I’d have been championing them to anyone who listened, and I know that I would have been in a state of keen excitement when they released their album, Swing. I can only be grateful that I lived in ignorance back then, and didn’t have to suffer the realisation that this beguiling band were not going to survive beyond 1993.
Listening to Potvan, which like Nixie Concussion, had been released as a single from the album, albeit as Peel reported, on pink vinyl, you don’t hear a band seemingly coming to the end of its time. It could be though that they were trying to warn us not to get too upset should anything happen to them through the line, Wipe the tears off your shoulder, everyone which serves as the chorus line on Potvan.
The title appears to be a creation of its authors, as I can find no reference to what a potvan is. I suspect that it may be a hiding in plain sight drug reference given that the song contains wonderfully psychedelic lines like Ride all alone and the nowheres are on board/Lean out the window but I don’t know how to fly/ But it’s all on Dior(?) till he finds me once again/ And that sound in your eyes doesn’t tell me how to fly.
There’s more in the same vein in later verses, and lyrically, it comes off sounding like something which clearly made sense to whoever wrote it down at the moment they thought of it. No revisions, no second thoughts, just crank up the guitars and let Marc Wolf loose with a vocal set to “keening.” I like it, and it’s a nice tune, but the window dressing doesn’t disguise the fundamental vision of a stoned man driving at 5mph which seems to be the force that drove this song into being.
Formed as a side project by members of Steel Pole Bath Tub, Milk Cult released four albums of electronic-rock-avant garde music between 1992 and 2000. Peel approached their debut album, Love God with a degree of distance regarding it as strange as anything I’ve ever heard. He felt that Tuesday was the most accessible track on the album and given that most of it seems to take place within a Formula 1 pit lane, I can see why it appealed to him.
Tuesday will give you a flavour of what to expect from the Love God album: plenty of found sound, genuine industrial noise (engines starting etc), short bursts of rock and excursions into more atmospheric soundscapes. I’m thinking in particular of the two minute ghostly piano/melodica duet which starts at 1:20 and sounds like it’s being played in an abandoned factory. It’s all a bit of a hodge-podge but it hangs together surprisingly well.
Peel gave his listeners something of a potted review of the Love God album, talking in particular about its centrepiece: There’s a 38 minute track on there which I seriously doubt anyone will ever listen to in its entirety. He was was talking about the six-track suite called Clown Party which makes up the second half of the album. I took him up on the challenge and listened to the LP yesterday. I disagree with him that Tuesday was the most accessible track on the album, I think that the title track would be worth an airing, despite its near 11 minute running time. However, Peel was spot on about Clown Party, a title which conjures disturbing images of Pennywise and friends causing havoc, but which ends up being six tracks of repetitive tedium, albeit there are several moments where it sounds like the band are about to start playing Eye of the Tiger. Overall, on Love God, there’s nothing to frighten the horses, but there isn’t much to exhilarate anyone either.
Elements of Trance were a Los Angeles based techno duo made up of Justin King and Ian Rich. The C-Level mix of A Taste of Your Own Medicine puts me in mind of Date M by The Traveller, especially the street percussion. However, I think that the Flammable 6AM and Midi-Evil mixes are both better.
Up to now, all of the productions that this blog has soundtracked took place either in a school or college setting. The next year or two will see the soundtracking of the first production I did with a local amateur dramatics group.
Staging their first production in 1982, Falmouth’s Young Generation were formed as a youth-orientated offshoot of Falmouth Amateur Operatic Society - now known as Falmouth Theatre Company. They always staged one major musical in August of each year, though occasionally staged other productions at Christmas time and were open for any young person to join if they were aged between 10 & 20.
I had flirted with the idea of joining the Young Generation in the late 1980s, but it wasn’t until I was on a BTEC Performing Arts Course with a number of members of the group that I got involved with them. For the majority of those members, YG’s 1993 show, Guys and Dolls represented the opportunity of a last hurrah with the company as they were nearing the maximum age limit. I would be 17 when the show was staged, and felt I was now at the right age to get involved, with pre-teen shyness no longer an issue. It also presented itself as a great opportunity to continue socialising, not just with people that I knew, but to expand my circle of friends even further. It made sense from a drama standpoint too. Having done Shakespeare plays and a contemporary drama since my last musical, I was happy to do another one having had the opportunity to try some other types of production over the last year.
Throughout January and early February 1993, I attended the pre-audition meetings at which we were played and sang along to the various songs, and also read scenes from the script. Adapted from two short stories by Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls is a tale of gamblers, religious missionaries, Broadway showgirls and gangsters. It’s packed with great songs and a snappy script, and within those first few pre-audition sessions I knew that I wanted to be part of this show, because I genuinely liked it. In subsequent years, there were a couple of YG shows which I did more for the beer and company than for the material, but Guys and Dolls still felt fresh, vital and fun, even 43 years after its first production. I was targeting the role of Nathan Detroit, who runs a floating craps game around New York City, but I wasn’t especially disappointed to be cast as one of his lieutenants, Benny Southstreet, which was a decent supporting role who was part of several songs including the title song.
If things had worked out as they were supposed to have done, this blog would now be soundtracking an original play called Echoing Steps. During the spring ‘93 term, those students on my performing arts course who were not involved in Equus or Top Girls, spent their time working on developing a community play about bygone Falmouth, which we were due to stage at Falmouth Arts Centre in June. I think around 6 people were working on it - 2 of whom genuinely could not stand each other. The Echoing Steps team, along with the cast of Top Girls, felt unsupported in their work by the course administrator. The college listened to these complaints and made two decisions which affected the balance of the course:
1) The administrator, David Gregg, was replaced as head of the course by the one of the senior tutors, Gerry Finch. This took place in April 1993.
2) With the college starting to take in applications for the next year of learners who were intending to join the BTEC course for two years from the start of the 1993/94 academic year, the whole course would be run out of the college campus in Pool, near Camborne, from September 1993. This made logistical sense because there was far more space there to be able to run classes for two years’ worth of students. There was also an in-built performance space at the campus called the Trevenson Theatre, though curiously, we still ended up doing our productions at Falmouth Arts Centre. As future posts will show, this was an arrangement which had some benefits to me when they first started, but it would soon pall very badly as time went on.
David Gregg wasn’t the only casualty of the upheaval, so was Echoing Steps. In large part this was due to several of the people involved in putting it together, dropping out of the course when the Summer term started. From a starting position of around 35 students in September 1992, around half that number had left by the 6 month mark. The people remaining who had been working on Echoing Steps admitted that they had nothing concrete to offer us to begin working on, and the course changed from one which incorporated classes looking at different aspects of drama running alongside work on end of term productions, to a course that was concerned purely with classes.
Echoing Steps in June ‘93, should have been followed by a pantomime in December ‘93 and then 2 shows chosen by the group for March ‘94 and June ‘94 respectively. All of that, except for the June ‘94 production, went out of the window with the restructuring of the course. It could have been excruciatingly boring for me, but thankfully I had the local drama scene to save me, and before Castaway Theatre Company next found itself on a stage, I had done 5 further productions including Broadway musicals, revue, Restoration comedy, pantomime and 20th Century historical adaptation. Those will form the basis of the next decade or so of this blog.
The first selection for Guys and Dolls comes at the end of a week in which Peel clocked up one of his highest number of on-air hours, since his days on The Perfumed Garden. Between his week of lunchtime cover for Jakki Brambles and his own shows on Friday 9 and Saturday 10 April, Peel spent just under 18 hours broadcasting on Radio 1.
He ended his 9/4/93 evening show by playing what may be the only non-country tinged track released by The International Submarine Band. Sum Up Broke was issued as a single in 1966 by the first iteration of the band and co-written by lead guitarist, John Nuese and future Byrd/Flying Burrito Brother, Gram Parsons. His future influence on The Byrds during his brief stint with them in 1968 is widely known*, but in 1966, they seemed to be influencing him and Nuese. The beefed up jangle in the guitars sounds like the ISB’s stab at raga rock, while the lyrics walk a line between general vacuity and Rolling Stones style kiss off to a girl whose time is up.
The single wasn’t a hit, and Parsons decided that he wanted to push the International Submarine Band exclusively towards a country sound. Nuese and himself hooked up with a new bassist and drummer, and Parsons would go on a lifetime’s musical journey over the course of the next seven years. It would cost him his life, but on the evidence of what followed, he did at least manage to produce compelling evidence of the “cosmic country music” he felt that he was put on earth to make.
*If you don’t know, read this and then start buying up every record on which Parsons played a substantial part, you won’t regret it.
