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.
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