Exciting news, readers! After four months of redundancy, I’m starting a new job on September 29th. And with exquisite timing, here comes the exquisite Admiral Tibet asking why it is that working men - in this case sugar cane cutters - cannot earn enough money to pay the rent or feed themselves. The track is very good at highlighting the issues - namely that there are some branches of work which haven’t advanced much beyond the days of slavery, and that full and fair redistribution of wealth is something which isn’t a priority of those who could do something about it.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t put forward much of a solution to these issues. There’s no call for revolution, just a plea for the brethren to keep their heads down and wait for Jah to lead the many to their just reward. We can only hope that Jah has a good accountant given the claims that could be made. But, they’re disappointingly wishy-washy sentiments in the face of the problem. Were it not for the beautiful way they’re delivered, I’d almost be tempted to write Tell Me Why off as an example of CentristDancehall, a genre where you enjoy the grooves and make no waves. But then isn’t that the case for most working people?
Here’s a really nice letter that I discovered as I was going through the mail, and it comes from Manchester, Chorlton. I won’t give the names out to save on embarrassment. It says, “A friend of mine has just started nurse training in Dumfries. She has a boxy room in a staff residence and we agree that whenever you move house and you’re sat there feeling crap and alienated, turning on the radio and getting Peel in your room, gives you a feeling of being at home and no matter how many times you move house, turning on to the Peel show softens the blow.” Well that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be all about and that’s cheered me up a lot, reading that.
John Peel on 17/4/93 and in answer to a request in the letter for a Sebadoh record, he played them Two Years Two Days.
My selections came from a full 3 hour show. I was able to include everything I wanted to keep, but 3 selections fell from favour:
Luke Slater - Amil [Remix] On the Discogs review of Slater’s X-Tront EP Vol 1, which this track comes from, one reviewer puts forward the theory that Amil has nothing to do with amyl nitrite, but instead links to amiloride, which is used to treat high blood pressure. The music certainly does enough to convey the body working with the various beats and lines evoking the pumping of blood, heartbeats and crackling synapses. However, once the track moves into skronk territory with frequencies and modulations which sound like a migraine developing into a stroke, I had to make a decision, and if this was to end up on a mixtape, I think I would end up regretting it. The type of track which, if heard in company, you end up talking to the other people all the way through it, so as to distract them from the lapse in taste. All that being said though, it’s only a near miss. As is….
The Infotainment Scan (1993) was all about regressive idealism. You can’t live in the past like that. It’s a lot more dangerous than you think. Kids growing up hearing their mams and dads talking about how great 1976 and 1981 were - it’s bullshit! There have never been any great years. You get the odd moment here and there but never a clean year of wonder….and then all of a sudden you’ve got those ridiculous list programmes like One Hundred Great Horror Films and whathavya. (Mark E. Smith, p.197/198, Renegade, 2008, Penguin).
From what I can hear - and definitely from what I can read - A Past Gone Mad is a pure embodiment of that idea, with its swipes at Spangles, old football annuals, the glorification of murderers and, oddly, Ian McShane. Even the instrumentation makes clear that this is a track with its eyes fixed firmly on the future - there isn’t a dual drum kit to be heard. The problem is though that everything I’ve learned about A Past Gone Mad’s reason for existing has been learnt away from the actual recording itself. As Smith unleashes his screed against the things he would rather die than become, the production overwhelms his vocal almost to the point of inaudibility. What we end up with is a fairly inessential sounding techno track. The lo-fi cackling laughter at the end of the song could be a deliberate comment on this, but if we can’t hear the points being made, and it strikes me that this was a lyric which was intended to be heard, then who is the joke ultimately on? The 2025 me thinks that A Past Gone Mad is great, but it’s on behalf of the 1993 me, who would not have had the supporting information to hand, and who would have been wondering, “What’s so funny?” that it misses out.
I think that the reason why I initially react positively to Blast Off Country Style tracks is because it’s always nice to hear skinny guitar in amongst the growlier, abrasive guitar sounds that tended to be on Peel show playlists at this time. The problem invariably comes once Evelyn Hurley starts singing….
I was, however, able to place what her voice reminded me of, and why I suspect I may not be able to take them seriously in the future - although Peel gave them plenty of exposure during the 90s. Nevertheless, listening to Hurley I found myself transported back to 1992/93 and evenings spent watching the erotic drama, Eleven Days, Eleven Nights (1987), which I rented on a few occasions from a video shop in Penryn.
The story of Eleven Days, Eleven Nights revolves around an affair which an architect has with a romantic novelist who he meets by chance, 11 days before he is due to get married. Unbeknownst to him, the novelist is using their relationship as material for her latest book, which chronicles relationships with 100 lovers, and the architect is Lover Number 100. The second half of the film deals with the emotional fall out as the architect’s guilt begins to battle with his lust, the novelist’s detachment starts to turn into love and the architect’s fiancée begins to suspect that something is going on with her husband-to-be. The first half of the film details several of the lovers’ assignations, one of which takes place at a recording studio, where they get up close and personal in order to provide real heavy breathing for the soundtrack of a porn film. Before that though, the architect is waiting in reception where a dippy looking woman, channeling Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall look is strumming an unplugged electric guitar, while tunelessly singing an utterly dreadful song that she’s written about her pet dog. She’s convinced it’s going to be a hit, and that she’ll be a star. I suspect that Blast Off Country Style had more self awareness than that character, but if I hear them on future Peel shows, it’s going to be a struggle for me to see much beyond the Dog Song lady.
If you find The Cars original version of Drive to be a bit too po-faced and solemn, then this Steely & Clevie production, which served as the title track on Eustace Hamilton’s seventh studio album might be for you. The original is treated respectfully, Thriller U provides an impassioned vocal and there’s no big bwoy Carribean toasting rap dropped into the middle of it (I’ll drive ya home/Be ready ta go etc), but the synthesisers are, in typical dancehall style, a good deal more jaunty than they were on the original. The key difference is probably that you’d play Thriller U’s Drive in the middle of a party, and The Cars Drive at the very end of one.*
Peel felt that Thriller U’s version had a chance at being a hit single, which given that this show was being broadcast a few weeks after the top 3 singles in the UK chart were Oh Carolina, Informer and Mr. Loverman, and while the chart also contained other reggae flavoured songs like Sweat and reggae covers of 80s material such as Jamaican in New York, seemed a decent prediction. In the event, Thriller U never had a UK hit single, but my checking of the UK Singles Chart website provided me with a lightbulb moment that I hope I’ll be able to go on pursuing for as long as I enjoy listening to music.
My Friday evenings tend to be quiet these days. Nobody seems to rehearse plays on a Friday night anymore, and I don’t go out on the town. Instead, my wife and I sit at home and watch Gardeners’ World, while I might also have a football match on mute on one tablet, while scanning Bluesky to read people’s pithy remarks about the Top of the Pops repeats showing on BBC Four. I’ve been disengaged from the singles charts and contemporary music for nearly 20 years, I reckon. It’s a mixture of me growing older and the market changing. Given that the charts now include downloads of any song ever released, I wrote off any attempt to follow them given that it struck me they would be stuck in a perpetual version of the charts circa 1972, with contemporary releases jostling alongside re-releases of tunes that could be 10, 20 or 30 years old.
In this environment though, I found myself wishing that Top of the Pops were still around now. The great thing about it was that it gave viewers - whether they were in the target demographic or not - a snapshot of what contemporary pop music was like. Parents, grandparents, those who feel that music was better when they were young could all get some kind of handle on what was happening now. They wouldn’t necessarily rush out to buy any of it or namedrop it to try and appear cool, but it would at least keep them in the loop. That seemed to be gone now, and the consequence of it is that if you asked me to sing any hit song from 2010 onwards, I couldn’t.
But looking over the chart yesterday, with its blend of songs both modern and ancient, it struck me that in the age of YouTube, it would be easy to do your own version of Top of the Pops each week. Just choose 7 songs, all of which have to be climbing in the chart, regardless of how old they are - but skew more towards the newer releases than the older ones - and Bob’s your uncle, you have your contemporary pop music snapshot. My list from last night was:
I liked them all, though it’s a good thing I like electropop which seems to be the dominant style now. I intend to pick seven songs each Friday in order to give me that snapshot and in the case of the older tunes, educate myself on what I missed. I won’t do anything with this, except to maybe link contemporary tunes that I hear post-2010 with things that the artists themselves may have heard in Peel-aligned artists. In the main, it will serve to keep my head in the musical present, while my heart and soul remain in the musical past.
Video courtesy of All Reggae.
*In case you’re wondering, Thriller U sings “Mm-mm” instead of “pork pie”.
This blog is now reaching the stage where I could make playlists of tracks based not just on genre of music, but on specific subjects. Nutritious Treat would take its place on the Intense Driving Songs playlist alongside tunes such as Potvan by The Werefrogs, Bow Hitch-Hiker by Rollerskate Skinny and the pinnacle of the genre, Pacific Coast Highway by Sonic Youth. But, Nutritious Treat shares a sound closer to the blues rock rumble of Two Tons of Chrome by Gear Jammer. Indeed, it’s probably the first song I’ve heard since that record to produce what feels like the movement and life of a motor engine in full, ominous effect*. Using only bass and drums, godheadSilo create a thunderous wall of noise which serves to remind us that cars can be exceptionally dangerous things. The track roars and judders along like some kind of mechanical/beast hybrid.
The line Is it the alcoholic or the alcohol? provides an ominous extra layer of darkness, albeit one working with a clever degree of subtext. Those souped up Thunderosa Cadillacs could be dangerous enough to control at anytime, but they become lethal weapons when driven by someone who’s been drinking.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 1993, there were 17,461 traffic fatalities which were alcohol related. These accounted for 44% of the total number of traffic related deaths in the USA for that year** The subtext comes in the way that godheadSilo use drink driving as a way to expose the hypocrisy behind the assertion that guns don’t kill; people do. Which is true, but giving them access to the tools which allow them to do so is a moral puzzle that America shows no sign of being able to solve. In the case of driving under the influence, what Nutritious Treat suggests is that we are fundamentally weak creatures, unable to resist the sweet temptation of alcohol, which then opens the door to behaviour and actions we were either always capable of, or thought we could get away with. However, there will always be a price to pay.
And yet, the song also feels upbeat, alive and excited as it jumps behind the wheel. If American Graffiti were set in 1992 Washington State, instead of 1962 California, then I can just picture the opening 50 seconds of Nutritious Treat soundtracking the journeys of Richard Dreyfuss and friends. Although the line referring to putting Chachiin charge suggests that godheadSilo were thinking of Happy Days rather than American Graffitti. Maybe, Chachi was the designated driver? Regardless, with cries of Thunderosa, Cadillac worm, we career into the final 20 seconds watching godheadSilo drive off, picking up speed, passengers hanging out of the windows, engine growling, exhaust exploding and on a journey towards their fate.
Video courtesy of Stars Kill Rock
*I’m discounting Tuesday by Milk Cult because its automobile music was produced from samples.
The dance sensation that’s sweeping the nation - John Peel after playing Testament Two on 17/4/93.
And indeed, it’s very easy to picture walking into any club in Britain over the last 32 years and hearing a clued in DJ playing any one of the three Testament tracks that make up Chubby Chunks (Vol 1). The disco swing and the house beats on all three tracks sound utterly timeless, and I have no hesitation in recommending Testament Two as perfect accompaniment either for a party or while doing work around the house.
Going by the John Peel wiki, Testament Two appears to be the only one of the tracks that he gave any airtime to. Listening to them all, this morning, it seems just about the right choice though I think that Testament One would have been in with a shout as it’s an absolute banger for the most part, but is let down by a piano piece which seems to have been lifted from a school music lesson. It’s clunky enough to lift the listener out of the track, whereas Testament Two is seamless in comparison. I’m also a little surprised that Peel wasn’t tempted by Testament Three, which is a little jazzier and more sonically interesting than the first two Testaments.
A year later, Chubby Chunks Vol. II came out - as with Vol. 1, on the Cleveland City label, out of Wolverhampton - and brought us Testaments 4, 5 & 6. While still focused on the dancefloor, they were a little more quirky and playful than the previous year’s tracks. Testament 6 is a good representation, I think, but there is no record of Peel playing anything from Vol.2, nor from the remainder of Chubby Chunks’ output. Nevertheless, the early Testament tunes appear to have stuck in the memory, with Testament One receiving fresh remix releases in 1994 & 2021. Testament Two was paired with Testament One on a 2003 re-release through S12.
I’ve spent the last couple of days soaking up the relaxing, dreamy, ambient tone of Spacey, which was presented on this 17/4/93 show, courtesy of the compilation album Volume Six, as a dry run for the overhaul which it would receive when it was recorded for Fluke’s second studio album, Six Wheels on My Wagon, later in the year.
The chilled feel on this first version is a perfect setting for lyrics which read as a counselling session set to music. Amidst the burbles of rainforest-like keyboards and descending piano scales, vocalist Jon Fugler delivers some gentle thoughts on the process of maturing and accepting that the certainties of youth can and should evolve with greater life experience: Everyone changed, always the way and always the same.
Perhaps, this was because he had turned 30 during 1992? All that being said, the lyrics suggest that change is good, providing you maintain some kind of link to your younger ideals: You can’t stop the love in you.
It makes for a calming, yet exciting mixture, and I think it’s superior to the album version, Spacey (Catch 22 Dub), which dispensed with the homilies, only retaining the various You can’t stop the fighting…refrains. The version on the Volume compilation outdoes the final recorded version, which wasn’t always the case, and in one infamous example threw a spanner in the works of this blog’s 1992 Festive Fifty.
Me-Jane sounds like it shares its lead riff with 50Ft Queenie, which gave PJ Harvey her first Top 40 hit, but it’s much the better song.
I’ve got so used to hearing Harvey songs where she’s either prostrating herself to a lover (Oh My Lover), or trying to dominate them (Rid of Me) that’s it a bit of a shock to hear one where she’s so viciously giving up on her man. During 1992, Harvey went through a relationship breakdown, which appears to have provided inspiration for the lyrics to a number of the tracks on Rid of Me. In the case of Me-Jane, the contempt and hatred is on full display as Polly reaches the end of her tether with her brutish, alpha-male other half. She may have fallen for the John Greystoke figure of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels, but the song suggests that he has now morphed into the apeman figure of the films, but without any of his redeeming values.
We know that there’s trouble brewing thanks to both the riff and Rob Ellis’s drum pattern, which very effectively convey a sense of foreboding within the tribe, which can be heard from one side of the jungle to another. While Polly starts out by conveying her contempt in coldly, unemotional tones, things quickly start to build to a more violently upset conclusion.
It’s not just a break-up song though. There’s a thread of self-affirmation running through the track, highlighted by the reversal of the famous line, Me Tarzan, you Jane (though this apparently was a misquote), which now sees Tarzan left out entirely and Jane foregrounding herself around who she is and what she wants. If it inspired one other woman to get out of a similar situation, it will have justified its existence.
Heartical is patois for genuine or sincere and this 1990 recording sees Lloyd Hemmings getting straight to the point on nothing less than the key tenet of Rastafari: The time to pack up, leave behind the everyday world of Babylon and make the journey to Zion to reconcile with Jah. The problem is, as Hemmings notes, too many people are obsessed with fighting wars or fighting with each other, to set their differences aside and make the collective move. Whether it’s warring countries or warring family members, Heartical Decision is a lament for the time and energy wasted on negative emotion.
It’s just unfortunate that it’s only in its last 20 odd seconds, from 3:00 to 3:25, that Hemmings really seems to get animated with a message to the older generation about how they may be able to persuade their children to accompany them, instead of being bidden off by them in ill grace. Typical that just as we start to get some detail on how this split could be avoided, the fade out kicks in - though the video segues on to the dub side of the single which was overseen by Augustus Pablo and Rockers All Stars.
Welcome everyone to another edition of A & R Officers’ Corner, where we once again try to answer the thorniest of questions about the mechanics of the music industry. Today, we go back to a real doozy, a point that’s been debated for as long as the marriage of art and commerce has existed. And that question is: Should singles released from an album serve as a gateway to what listeners can expect from an album, or should they purely be focussed on getting the public’s attention as a means of potentially luring them into buying the album, even if that ends up being something they didn’t expect?
If Kurt Cobain had been happy to write and record three Smells Like Teen Spirit-alikes alongside 9 or 10 tracks of whatever noisy, discordant, abrasive music he wanted to make on subsequent Nirvana albums, then maybe the course of his life would have taken a different turn. I’ve not been able to establish whether Dr. Phibes and the House of Wax Equations were deliberately trying to fool record buyers with the single releases that led up to their second and final album, Hypnotwister, or whether they were following a plan to put accessible material out there ahead of unleashing the ball of fury that large parts of the album are made up of. I’ll be posting again about some of the tracks that best summarise the vibe of Hypnotwister, in the coming months, but having first suggested that they were trying to channel a spacier Red Hot Chili Peppers vibe with the November 1992 single, Misdiagnosedive, Dr. Phibes and the House of Wax Equations now stepped on to The Verve’s * territory with the spacy and contemplative Moment of Truth.
Anyone who missed Misdiagnosedive - as I appear to have done on this blog - would have been tempted to hear Moment of Truth and think, “Ah! They’re going ambient.” And that’s no bad thing here. The track is far less tedious than The Verve could sometimes be in similar compositions. Indeed, the 9 and a half minutes fly by, despite the languid tone, and even when the track tries to up its tempo and energy levels in the last 2 minutes, the band maintain wonderful control over things. There’s never any sense of impatience or impetuosity, they know exactly what sounds they want to make and where they want to take the listener to. The rock solid rhythm section keep things perfectly moored as Howard King Jr. coaxes atmosphere and moodlines from his guitar.
Three times the track coalesces around a scat-mantra from King Jr., which sounds like it’s describing a process of transition. Does Howard’s reference to resurrection soulicide or worlds colliding refer to the moment that the consciousness passes from straight to high, or perhaps from life to death? In contrast to most of the material that the band recorded for Hypnotwister, this manages to be quite supportive and comforting. An oasis of calm in what ended up sounding like an emotionally incendiary record; and all put out in a single to lure in the unsuspecting.
I can only think it must have been a sales masterplan, especially given that neither the band nor John Peel followed the advice I would have been frantically giving to put out or play the album’s best track, Real World.
Apart from a comment that Fats Domino didn’t seem to get much contemporary radio play, Peel didn’t add anything else about his playing of Domino’s 1956 recording of Blue Monday on this show, but I’m wondering whether he was subconsciously inspired to do it by the fact that Sting’s new single, Seven Days had been released earlier that week, and maybe he felt that his audience deserved to hear a better example of a song about the stresses of a week.
For myself, I call an honourable draw between them, especially given that Seven Days deals with Sting spending his week contemplating having to genuinely fight a rival for his lover’s affection, who is bigger and stronger than he is; whereas Fats deals with the standard blues lamentations of having to face the horror of Monday morning and then dragging his ass through the working week to get to payday on Friday before a day of debauchery on Saturday, and a day of rest on Sunday. You’ve heard those themes a million times but Fats’s style carries the day.
In case you’re wondering, after playing this version of Blue Monday, Peel chose not to follow it up with an obvious open goal.
Listening to Seven Days again, I can imagine Fats Domino absolutely smashing a cover of this.
Videos courtesy of Jazz Everday! (Fats) and kirtww (Sting).
A classic case of misdirection in the title as there’s nothing particularly jazzy - or indeed jizzy - in this mix of Spunky Marimba. The Spunky Mix does feature some keyboard parts which sound marimba like, but is a less interesting track than the Marimba Mix, which, curiously, doesn’t feature anything resembling a marimba.
Instead we have a perfectly serviceable piece of techno electronica, which with its whistle refrains and drum breaks intermingling with pulsing rhythms and shadily, melancholic synth lines does a good job of taking the listener to the Shindig club nights running in Newcastle at the time. Shindig started as a duo (Lee Mellor and Scott Bradford). On subsequent releases - though not this one - they would be joined by Chris Scott, who would go on to enjoy a top 10 UK hit with I Believe as part of Happy Clappers. That record got its initial release on Shindig’s own label.
Video courtesy of The Space Cadet 90s House and Techno.
For all that though, why have I only included one track from Roovel Oobik’s session? Well, I should say that it was touch and go that Betterlife [Recreation Version] made it on to the metaphorical mixtape at all, but having listened to the session again this morning, I did seriously consider including the whole session here. We’re back in Revolver territory again…
All of the songs in the session follow a pattern: strong, melodic starts which get undercut by weak vocals - albeit I need to make allowances that vocalist, Tonu Pedaru, was singing in a second language - and that ultimately lead onto slightly overindulgent playouts. I did nearly change my mind and include Masters of Day Dream Machinery here as well, but I think that Betterlife [Recreation Version] does all anyone really needs to be able to enjoy Roovel Oobik. For me, the gorgeousness of the wah-wah guitar work and the ska-dub playout counterbalance the gormless vocals. We can’t have one without the other, so let’s embrace the glorious and the grim here.
Peel hoped that Roovel Oobik would come back and do another session the following year, but in the event, he never played anything by them ever again after the session was repeated on 20 August 1993. He doesn’t appear to have played anything from their 1994 album, Psychikosmos, and it took him a decade to discover that from the mid-90s onwards, several members of the band had been recording and gigging as a dance act called Una Bomba.
He always spoke fondly of them though, remembering when, during their brief stay at Peel Acres, the band would always go outside to smoke on a grass verge opposite the house. During one smoking break, Peel went out to join them and told them to consider the verge as a part of Estonia, the band even made up a sign which they planted on the verge saying, Welcome to Estonia. In 2003, an Estonian TV crew interviewed Peel about the band and took footage of the verge. They also passed on to him a copy of the Una Bomba album, Aerosol and Peel played a track from it on 19 March 2003.
In 2005, Roovel Oobik reformed to release an album called Supersymmetry. Since then they’ve released two further albums, the most recent being 2024’s Transcent.
Video courtesy of VibraCobra23 Redux
Apologies for not being able to include the dots over the o in the band’s name.
The video is taken from Peel’s show on 17/4/93, and as you’ll hear him say, Come Alive is taken from the album, Cake and Eat It, but what he didn’t mention was the lengthy journey that The Blue Up? had gone through to get an album distributed.
Formed as an all-female quartet in 1984, the Minnesota outfit released two singles in the mid-80s on Susstones and by 1989 were set to record their first album. The album, called Introducing Sorrow, was due to be released by British label, Midnight Music, but it ultimately never saw the light of day due to Midnight Music going bust. By the time The Blue Up? recorded Cake and Eat It, they had reduced themselves to a trio and, clearly eager to make up for lost time, produced an album boasting 23 tracks, albeit half a dozen of them were snippets ranging between 7 & 23 seconds in length.
With its jittery time-signature verses and strident choruses, Come Alive somehow marries together Eastern European folk with Goth rock. In the verses, singer Rachel Olson - now better known as Ana Voog - sounds as though she’s channeling the heroine of Another Day by Paul McCartney, a woman out of place in the modern world, simply trying to get through another day without being harmed or hurt. And yet lurking under the surface is a more confident, sensual figure waiting to burst forth when the time is right. The cries of despair after each chorus showing how desperately the heroine wants to break free of the constraints placed upon her, constraints which in Voog’s case were later attributed to Post-traumatic stress disorder and agoraphobia. These conditions foreshadowed Voog’s later work as a visual and internet artist, where she would garner notoriety with anacam, one of the earliest life-casts on the nascent internet, in which she set up a webcam to broadcast her life 24/7, and did so for 13 years. This Vice article by Voog from 2018 gives more details of why she did it and what she learnt from it.
The band clearly had a high opinion of Come Alive as they re-recorded it for their only major label album, Spool Forka Dish, released on Columbia Records in 1995, but the snippet of that which I heard on genius.com suggests that, like Shonen Knife before them, The Blue Up? lost something of what made them so compelling once they stepped into bigger and shinier facilities. Stay in the Catacombs where The Blue Up? recorded this version and enjoy something both catchy, chilling and icily magnificent.
Back in the 60s and 70s, if John Peel was excited about the release of a new album, it was common practice for him to play the whole record on one of his shows. Examples include Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles* and Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan** (as well as Desire by the same artist). In subsequent years, Peel would content himself by playing trios or quartets of tracks from new records that particularly excited him.
On 17/4/93, he dotted 4 tracks from Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, the debut album by Swirlies, throughout his programme. My notes show that only Pancake would have interested me enough to keep on a mixtape. I like the tension between the driving, grinding rock sound coming up against the woozy keyboards and off-key singsong vocals of Seana Carmody. The lyrics mentioned missed classes, and given that the album’s tracklisting featured titles such as Bell and His Life of Academic Freedom, I wondered whether the album might be a concept record about life in college. I listened to the record last night and soon discovered that it wasn’t. If the record has any kind of theme, it’s around those of regret and tough love, but most of the lyrics are too abstract to be definitively pinned down.
What I must say about Blonder Tongue Audio Baton is that it is very much a record of two halves, and as I waited for Pancake to roll around - it’s the sixth track out of eleven on the album - I found myself wishing that I hadn’t felt the need to satisfy my curiosity about whether the record was a concept album. I found the first five tracks a slog to listen to, mainly because Swirlies fell into the trap of layering them in all kinds of discordant sounds and weird modulations, while simultaneously failing to lift the tempo above meandering, and I discovered last night that I really cannot get on with meandering drone rock, no matter how scuzzed up the band make it.
Then we reached Pancake, the halfway mark in the album and the first track that Carmody sings on. The first five tracks were sung by Damon Tuntunjian, which had me wondering whether Swirlies were in the same category as Moonshake and whether I would find myself leaning more towards “her over him”. Nevertheless, it was a welcome harbour to reach after 5 tracks of audio gristle. But then something rather wonderful happened. Over the second half of the record, Swirlies leave behind the sonic kinks and knots and let the material breathe a bit more. The album becomes progressively more “songy”, more involving and more exciting to listen to. I’m always happier to hear an album which has a stronger second half than first half, not least because it’s better to be looking at the time and thinking “How much more have I got left to enjoy?” instead of “How much more have I got to endure?”
But I only took one track out of the four that Peel played. A look at the tracklisting for this show reveals that, alongside Pancake, Peel played Bell, His Love Just Washed Away and His Life of Academic Freedom, which are…let’s see…tracks 2, 4 & 5 on Blonder Tongue Audio Baton. So, Peel was leaving us in no doubt which half of the album his preferences lay with. In fairness, he did play tracks from the second half of the record in subsequent programmes, ***but based on my experiences with it, I can’t help but wish that he’d gone back to his 1970s self and played the whole album, so as to give a fuller and truer picture of what it was like. Sometimes, John Walters’s attitude of We’re not here to give the public what they want, we’re here to give them what they didn’t know they needed could work against both audiences and artists, and that’s something which I feel happened in this programme.
Video courtesy of Swirlies - Topic
*Strictly speaking, the link doesn’t go to a Peel show. Radio London got an advance copy of Pepper about three weeks before it was released, and Ed Stewart was the first DJ to play it, albeit with a highly emotional Peel sitting in with him as he did so. I’d be surprised if Peel didn’t give the album a full play on The Perfumed Garden at some point.
*** On 1 May 1993, Peel played what I think may be the best track on the album, Jeremy Parker, but aggravatingly, the file of that show, which I made my selections from, missed the track off, so it won’t be blogged about here.
2) 13 year old, Tom Ravenscroft’s apparently pitch perfect impression of PJ Harvey. His father was so impressed by it that he wanted to record it and play it on this programme, only for Tom to make himself scarce every time he tried to get it down on tape.
There were two tracks that fell from favour on my original list of selections:
Trumans Water - Limbs - The Spasm Smashers etc are always an acquired taste, though up to now I’ve generally given them the benefit of the doubt. Limbs has elements in it which led me to think about including it, but it’s one of those tracks where, for too much of it, the dissonant elements conspire to drive the listener away, and the dynamics of the final minute couldn’t quite claw the deficit back.
Spine Wrench - Fleshstorm - I can only conclude that I felt that as there are very few tracks out of the 900+ on this blog that showcase the demonic growling vocals of say, Raw Noise or Disemboweled Corpse, that there was clearly an opening available for the Norwich industrial rockers, Spine Wrench, especially given that Fleshstorm told a bit of a story. But when I listened to it again, as part of a split LP they shared with Sin called No Rest For the Wicked, I was almost rendered unconscious by the sheer tedium of the whole enterprise.
Our last post covered the future of car insurance, it makes sense to follow that with a track which appears to be encouraging listeners to get their funeral care sorted.
Throughout the previous year, Jacob’s Mouse had been a regular feature on Kat’s Karavan with tracks from their LP, No Fish Shop Parking. They had shown that they could rock out or hold down a groove as well as anyone. Now, they were back on a new label (Wiiija) and with a new album, I’m Scared. The previous year’s Peel Session gave everyone some indications of what to expect, featuring as it did an early versions of the LP track, It’s A Thin Sound. Box Hole showed that while Jacob’s Mouse could still switch effortlessly from rock to funk, they were now throwing in both industrial metal and noise rock as well. Box Hole is one of those thrilling pieces of guitar music that comes along periodically, grabs the listener by the ear and shows us all just how fascinating and exciting rock music can be. There are at least three different cue points at which anyone listening to the track could find themselves leaping out of their chair to get to the dancefloor, and this serves to keep it a constant delight each time it’s played.
1) Acid heads will be able to attune themselves to the trebly dynamics of the track’s opening section as Hugo Boothby’s piercing yet melodic line intersects with his twin brother, Jebb’s contemplative bass line.
2) Dub freaks will find themselves honing in on the Butterfly suits they are watching, watching section.
3) Everybody gets to have a good old fashioned early 90s mosh around during the What am I s’posed to say?/What do I have to say? thrash section.
I had initially thought the theme of the song was about getting away from the world and hiding, with box hole being use as a variation on foxhole, but I now find myself agreeing with the consensus that the song is actually about death. This makes perfect sense if we regard:
a) a box hole to mean a resting place for a coffin.
b) the butterfly suits they are watching, watching to mean angels and spirits which walk alongside us, waiting to welcome us into their domain.
c) What am I s’posed to say?/What do I have to say? sounds like the desperate cry of someone trying and failing to find the words to comfort the bereaved.
If that all sounds a bit scattershot, then it’s at least of a piece with Jacob’s Mouse’s methods of working which were to pack in all the ideas that they could to a song and see what happened. I’ve written before about my theory that because their singer, Sam Marsh, was also the drummer, it made sense not to write reams and reams of lyrics. Instead of writing lyrical epics, the band came up with single, repetitive lines which they could build the different stylistic sections of the song around. One of the strengths of this approach, as recorded in this article from B-Side Magazine, reprinted through repeatfanzine.co.uk is that it allowed the group to be one of the most experimental rock bands of the period.
Curiously though, Peel doesn’t appear to have embraced I’m Scared as much as No Fish Shop Parking. A look at the John Peel Wiki shows only 7 plays of I’m Scared material, against 11 plays from No Fish Shop Parking. Tellingly, Box Hole accounts for 3 of those plays.*
If it wasn’t for the fact that my notes for this 16/4/93 show go over two pages and Link Wray is on one page, while The Sonics are on the other page, then I would have paired Rumble up in a post with Dirty Robber in a “future of car insurance advertising” mash-up.
Rumble was Wray’s debut release in 1958, and it gave him both his biggest hit (Number 16 on the US charts) and his signature tune. It is celebrated as one of the first rock ‘n’ roll records to make use of tremelo and distortion, and has in one sense or another influenced practically every electric guitarist since. When played next to its catchier, more conventional sounding b-side, The Swag, it sounds positively futuristic.
Rumble was a hit despite concerns over its title’s link to gang violence, and its famous two note refrain certainly implies menace and malevolence. I’d imagine it would have been a popular record to play if you saw yourself as a street smart tough guy, and you needed a tune to get you in the mood for a night out.
It’s future use on the Confused.com insurance adverts was but a glint in an advertising executive’s eye when John Peel was including Rumble in his live sets, and some 35 years after its release, it was still entrancing young people who had grown up on music made by artists who had channelled Wray’s style. After playing Rumble on this show, Peel remarked I played that at The Powerhaus last week and lots of interesting young people with skin conditions came up and wanted to know what it was.
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.
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
**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.
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.
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.
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.
