Everton Blender’s career is a reminder that talent can always find a way, even if you don’t succeed first time around. After releasing a number of records in the late 70s and early to mid 80s, a lack of commercial success had seen him leave the music business and go back to working as a house painter. But, his honeyed voice had caught the ear of Garnett Silk, and that led to Blender getting signed to Star Trail. He returned to recording and performing in the early 90s and Create a Sound would act as the starting track on his first album, Lift Up Your Head, which even made some British charts in 1994.
Create a Sound acknowledges that this a second chance for Blender, one that he’s surprised and relieved to have been given. He’s spent many days working through the slog of painting houses, and it sounds as though some of those jobs were in pretty rough neighbourhoods, so now he’s going to relish the chance to do what he most wants to do:
In the same way that we like to wish that MPs had experience of the world before going into politics, so Blender assures us that his working background and experience will inform the music he makes and keep him grounded if he becomes successful:
The longer you live, the more you learn.
The harder you work, I know you will earn.
The heights I reach, I will surely keep.
The Lord is the shepherd and I am the sheep.
I wish he had kept this narrative going, as the track eventually moves into standard reggae semi-religious homilies i.e. A happy father is the result of a wise son etc, but I suppose he worried that to keep singing about his new opportunity risked showing a lack of humility. There’s a likably amusing section in which Blender suggests that having avoided being harmed by the criminals in the neighbourhoods he worked in due to good fortune or pure front, that his music will now have the effect of turning them from crime, which seems a far bigger boast than any of those stated at the start of the track. Might it be worth playing some of his music in the Donbas?
Lyrics copyright of Everton Williams (Blender)
Video courtesy of Reggae Nineties (and early 2000s).
I never like to speculate on whether John Peel would have liked any record released after his death, but I really wish he’d lived long enough to hear a copy of Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out, in which the violinist/mandolinist recorded an a cappella version of The Who’s 1967 concept album. It was released in February 2005, four months after his death. I’d have loved to know whether the record would have tickled or irritated him. It may also have caused him to dig into his record collection and pull out something by that dog. a Los Angeles based band that Petra was part of alongside her sister, Rachel, drummer Tony Maxwell and guitarist, Anna Waronker, who is perhaps, the third most famous music personality in her family after her father, Lenny (president of Warner Records) and her brother Joey (drummer with R.E.M., Beck and as part of the Oasis reunion tour).
For me, Petra’s violin contributions are the best thing about the eponymous double-7 inch mini album that introduced that dog. to the world. And Paid Programming is the only track that deserves being listened to more than twice. The rest of the record veers between fairly dour acoustic arrangements - albeit enlivened by some good harmony vocals - or short, sharp, punk songs written by Anna Waronker’s friend, Jenni Konner, who swapped music to work in television and later collaborated with Lena Dunham on Girls.
It’s the mood of Paid Programming which makes it stand out. With the rise of digital television, everyone in the world now has the chance to experience the American attitude to television which I remember from the 80s & 90s; namely 99 channels and nothing worth watching. America though was, and remains, very much the land of the infomercial, a set of extended commercials stretched out to full programme length, and advertising products, services, lifestyle choices etc. They tended to be broadcast on local affiliate TV stations and go out as overnight broadcasts, usually between 1am and 9am. Perfect fare for insomniacs, stoners, the lonely and depressed; aspirational viewing for those who found mainstream advertising too intimidating, noisy and shallow. Here, the sellers really had to work to build up a connection with their potential customers. It may be that if you found yourself actually watching any of these shows with your full attention, you may have cause to consider what’s happened to your life. But that dog. aren’t here to sneer, and Paid Programming does a great job of evoking a sense of how this kind of television could provide a late night comfort blanket to those who had nowhere to go out to or no need to go to bed, because they had no reason to get up early in the morning. Though, it should be said that from their relevant positions of privilege, one could well believe that Waronker and friends really would dream of strawberry whip delights as something to enjoy at their favourite coffee shop the next day.
If we consider the song from the perspective of those without an emotional, employment or financial safety net, then Paid Programming deserves to be seen as coming from the same sort of musical support network as Realize by Codeine. The curtains are drawn and the sun has gone down, but at least the television is on and maybe Richard Simmons can provide some inspiration for those unable to get off their couch for even a little exercise, while the thought of owning a vacuuming haircut machine could stand as a status symbol comparable to a new car for those down at the bottom of the pile who’ve found that, for whatever reason, they’ve let themselves go or are looking a little shabby. The dream of owning one could be the catalyst to the best night’s sleep they’ve had in ages.
When it came to the work that former members of The Undertones released through the mid/late 1980s and early 1990s, we know that while John Peel felt despairing exasperation at the records Feargal Sharkey was putting out, he was more accommodating towards the music of That Petrol Emotion, which included John and Damian O’Neill. They had featured fairly consistently on his playlists since 1985, including three Peel Sessions. Even John O’Neill’s departure from the band in 1988 hadn’t dented Peel’s willingness to play their records. But, this 7/5/93 show marked the last time in his life he would play anything by That Petrol Emotion while they were an active band*.
Catch a Fire’s appearance on the Volume Six compilation album acted as a trailer to That Petrol Emotion’s fifth and final album, Fireproof, which appears to be the only one of their albums that Peel never played anything from directly. One might have expected him to be all over the record given that it features a Jew’s harp on Catch a Fire, while Heartbeat Mosaic includes a pedal steel guitar. But, for whatever reason, it clearly wasn’t his bag.
On my first re-acquaintance with Catch a Fire, I wasn’t sure if it was mine either. There was a vein of pouting theatricality running through it, especially in Steve Mack’s vocal which I found slightly off-putting. He sounded like he was turning in an overly camp audition to be the lead singer for a Damned tribute act. However, on the second listen, I got it. Catch a Fire is what the theme song for a James Bond film written by Suede would sound like. There’s a particularly enjoyable, ascending guitar line from 2:31 to 2:52 which conjures up images of naked women dancing in Maurice Binder-inspired silhouettes, while John Barry’s orchestra provide underpinning support. Taken on those terms, I was able to enjoy Catch a Fire much more. It’s just a shame that by the time the James Bond films resumed production in 1994, after a four year legal battle, That Petrol Emotion had split and Catch a Fire’s authors, Ciaran McLaughlin and Raymond O’Gorman had to watch the theme song gig go to southern Ireland instead of to the North.
So, Credit to the Nation got played on the John Peel Show, a week ago, and promptly got signed to a large record label, which led to them achieving, if not quite fame and fortune, then at the very least, an opportunity to have their music put out to a much wider audience than Rugger Bugger Discs would have ever reached.
Why oh why, though could a similar benefactor not have been listening to the radio in order to lend a hand to the dance act, L-Dopa? I find it astonishing that not only did Feel Your Need not become a mainstream hit, but that none of their records ever managed to crossover into chart hits. To my ears, in the admittedly limited cross-section of their material that I’ve heard while prepping this blogpost, L-Dopa’s music landed in that perfect dance music sweet spot, in that you could enjoy them whether you were out clubbing, or had them on in the background while working. Not too frenetic, not ultra-chilled but catchy enough to avoid blandness. And Feel Your Need is the perfect embodiment of that dancefloor/shopfloor vibe.
In fairness to him, John Peel certainly tried to help push Feel Your Need over the line to mainstream success. He included it among the records he interspersed with Radio 1’s daytime playlist on his first day as cover for Jakki Brambles’s lunchtime show. He always seemed to prefer the Instrumental Mix, as that was the version he played both then and on this 7/5/93 show. It might have been a good idea for him to play the Song version of Feel Your Need to Brambles’s listeners, then we would be able to read that track’s refrain of Open up your mind as a subliminal message from Peel himself to anybody in the daytime audience whose musical tastes may have been more defensively conservative than his own.
As to why Feel Your Need wasn’t a hit, it’s possible that elements of the track may have been seen as passé in 1993, such as the shift to a mellower tempo between 2:07 and 2:32. Perhaps, those behind L-Dopa were offered the chance to put Feel Your Need out on a bigger label and turned it down. Or maybe I should stop grizzling about a hit that never was and just appreciate the fact that it exists and that it’s wonderful.
Issued in 1959, the instrumental Danger was the only credited release for Rick Allen and his group, the Fairlanes. Curiously, they were not the only American group going by that name at the time. Over in Alabama, another group called The Fairlanes would go on to release a handful of singles between 1960-62, and to add a further level of confusion, they included a Rick of their own - Rick Hall, who would go on to work as a songwriter, producer and studio owner in Muscle Shoals. And to add a further layer of mystery, in the mid-1980s, another group called The Fairlanes, supported Bruce Springsteen at a 1987 concert in New Jersey. This was a band which featured Ernest Carter, who had played drums for Springsteen’s E Street Band in 1974. As to why Fairlane was so common as a band name*, this was probably due to the ubiquity and coolness of the car of the same name, which was marketed by Ford between 1955 and 1970.
Rick and the Fairlanes - by which I mean Rick Allen’s group and not Rick Hall’s group, do keep up…- hailed from New England and owed their spot on Peel’s playlist for this show to Danger’s inclusion on the compilation album, Strummin’ Mental! Volume One, which was first of seven volumes released under that name by Link Records.
I think that the track was recorded in reverse. Not in an I’m Only Sleeping lead guitar solo style, but the different parts of the song seem to tell the tale of the narrative in reverse. What’s the narrative in an instrumental, though? Well, for me, the song is called Danger, and opens with a suitably gloomy snippet of Chopin’s Funeral March, which implies that the danger caused someone to die, and if we follow the theory that 99% of 1950s rock’n’roll tunes are about one of girls, dances or cars, then the cause of death was a car crash. That covers the opening 9 seconds of the track, what we can establish from the remaining 126 seconds of music is that the final drive was a hell of ride. It’s packed with joyous screams, driving guitar, delirious saxophone and red hot piano. You can feel the wind in the hair, the liquor bottle being passed around and the female passenger planting a big kiss on the driver’s lips as they reach the highway. The reverse motif continues to work given that the closing drum fill sounds like someone slamming a car door shut.
There is an alternative reading that could be floated, to say that Danger is actually a tune with religious connotations. The music after the funeral march could be the soul springing forth to Heaven…or maybe diving straight down to Hell so as to give itself to the Devil’s music for eternity.
It’s a wonderful record, and I bet it went down a storm whenever they played it live.
Fun fact - you can listen to the whole of Soukous in Central Park in the time it takes to read this post. Hell! You can probably listen to the whole of The Last Waltz in the time it takes to read this post.
If any of you reading this have ever gone through the breakup of a marriage, engagement or long-term relationship, I have to ask you, what was your break-up record of choice? The one that served as an aural backdrop to your heartache? Perhaps it was one from the 46 albums contained in this list. In my case, it was the Kanda Bongo Man live album, Soukous in Central Park, recorded in New York in June 1992.
It doesn’t feature among the 46 albums compiled in the above link by udiscovermusic.com, though that could be because nobody was available to translate the lyrics that Kanda Bongo Man was singing. For all we know, every line of every song in the set could be him pouring his heart out after a relationship has gone sour. The music certainly isn’t depressing or downbeat, but I associate it with a period of heartbreak and confusion in my life that took place during the autumn and winter of 2000.
A and I had been together for 3 years when we got engaged in August 1999. We didn’t set a date for the wedding because we both had potential career priorities over the course of late-‘99/early 2000, which we needed to get clarity on first. I was 23 years’ old and I wanted to be an actor, but I didn’t have the desire to try and create stuff and flog myself around festivals and small venues trying to get noticed. It was always going to be difficult to do that down in Cornwall, but I felt that because I had somebody else’s future to consider as well as my own, I would only get a couple of chances to try and get trained. I resolved to audition for a couple of drama schools in London and if it didn’t work out, then I’d buckle down to getting a job so that we could marry and move into our own place together. I auditioned for Central School of Speech and Drama (December 1999) and Guildhall School of Music and Drama (March 2000). I enjoyed the experiences, but I was unsuccessful in both attempts.
A also had aspirations to work as an actor. She applied for a six-month short course with Graeae, Britain’s leading disability theatre company. She was accepted on to the course which would be run in Manchester, starting in September 2000. I was delighted for her, and we initially saw it as a great opportunity for her as an individual, and potentially an exciting one for us as a couple. It could have led on to work in other parts of the country, and although the plan was for her to go to Manchester alone to do the course, six months didn’t seem too disruptive a length of time. We’d been through longer separations before when she was at university. But the thing about new opportunities is that they give people a chance to take stock of their lives and compare where they’ve come from with where they’re going…
I spent Saturday 29 April, 2000 in a great mood. I had a job placement with the Cornwall Adult Education Service’s functional skills department lined up to begin in 3 days. Ipswich Town produced a fine 3-1 victory over Charlton Athletic at the Valley to ensure that the race for automatic promotion to the Premier League would go to the final weekend of the season. I was looking forward to going to the cinema that evening. A and I were going to join a couple of my friends to go and see Galaxy Quest. A came over to my house about an hour before we were due to meet our friends. We nipped upstairs to my bedroom, usually a time to talk, cuddle and kiss. As I closed the door she sat on the bed and said, “We need to talk.” “What about?” I replied with blithe unconcern. “About us,” she replied looking down at the floor, with a worryingly analytical look on her face. The kind of look you have when contemplating what to do about something like a door that struggles to close properly or an oven that has spent weeks refusing to work properly unless you kick it while firing the gas ignition. Something that has gone wrong and needs either to be fixed…or thrown away.
She didn’t use these words, but she effectively told me that she had fallen out of love with me. The catalyst for this wasn’t down to anything I’d done but she had taken a good look at me the previous evening when I was taking part in a rehearsal of a Cole Porter revue that she was directing for Carnon Downs Drama Group and suddenly found herself wondering whether she really wanted to spend the rest of her life with me. I had been putting on weight, which she didn’t like, and I looked in her view, unattractive to her. She basically wanted me to smarten up my act and start looking after myself better. I was shocked and more than a little put out. She was telling me that we were in trouble for what sounded like some of the most horribly superficial reasons that I’d ever heard. But then again, if you don’t look after the micro issues, it can completely undercut whatever progress you’re making on the macro ones i.e. the new job which I saw as important to our future.
What turned out to be subsequently worse about this conversation was that she wasn’t dumping me, she was just giving me a warning. But it really would have been more of a mercy if she had ended things there and then. Instead, she skipped going to the cinema and I attempted to enjoy Galaxy Quest with my friends, but with the thought running around my brain that the woman I loved and wanted to spend the rest of my life with, had effectively snapped out of some kind of four-year-long delusion to see me, not as her future husband but as some kind of repellent oddity. After the movie, my mates and I went to a pub which was hosting a karaoke evening, and it took a huge effort of will on my part not to get up and sing What Becomes of the Brokenhearted .
We limped on for another three months; that awful period which doomed relationships go through where every interaction causes another layer of affection to crack and peel off like sunburnt skin. I spent so many days during that time second-guessing her moods and feelings; wondering whether her kisses were regaining any of their former ardour, whether she was looking at me kindly or just suffering my presence. We started to get tetchier with each other; there was one evening where we essentially broke up for 15 minutes only to talk ourselves out of it. Some days were good, most days weren’t, but none of them seemed to contain joy anymore.
I could see her withdrawing from me and I didn’t know how to bring her back. I wondered whether her going to Manchester would help, perhaps absence would make her heart grow fonder again. I told myself that if we got to her departure date, it might make things better. I didn’t want to lose her, but she wouldn’t let me go either despite the fact she was getting more frustrated and distant. In the event, she was waiting for me to do something which would effectively give her permission to end the relationship, and it duly happened over the weekend of 29/30 July 2000.
This date marked a year since we had got engaged. To celebrate, I booked a meal and a room at a hotel near the seafront at Falmouth. It was meant to be a romantic evening together, but it was a disaster. She didn’t want to be there, and the atmosphere turned poisonous. I’d had enough of being treated so badly and told her so, in pretty curt terms.
The next morning we went back to my house, so she could drive home. In an excruciating atmosphere, my mother tried to keep up a flow of polite conversation over a cup of tea while A tried not to cry and I just wanted the ground to swallow me up. When A left, my parents urged me to take control of the situation, one way or another. But A now had her justification for cutting the cord, and on Monday 31 July 2000, 365 days after we had got engaged, she phoned me to say it was over. I had mentally accepted this on the Saturday night and took it without tears or rancour.
“Thanks for the good times,” I said at the end of the call.
“And they were good times,” she replied.
It was the first tender thing she had said to me since 29 April.
So after 4 and a half years, I was single again. And as per the 5 stages of grief, I rolled together denial and anger in an attempt to avoid feeling hurt or sad. I told myself that I was better off without her and used the anger I felt about the way I’d been treated as a way of trying to sustain that sense of relief that I wasn’t having to chase after somebody who no longer appreciated me. A and I met up again for a drink a few weeks later so that she could give me back the engagement ring and I could pass on some engagement gifts that we’d been given, a year earlier. The mood was businesslike but friendly and when I drove away from the pub, I told myself that I was fine. No, honestly, I was completely fine…I tried to pawn the ring but on the day I went into the pawnbrokers, nobody was available who was authorised to give me a price for it. I didn’t want it hanging around the house, trying to make me feel sad, so rather than go back to the shop on another day, I went for the dramatic option. I drove to Pendennis Point and threw the ring into the sea.
My attempt at emotional shielding held up for a few weeks. I was also helped by the fact that the play I was appearing in at the time, Stags and Hens, in which a bride-to-be has second thoughts on her hen night, offered me a chance for some cathartic venting, as my character, who is the best friend of her fiancé, tells her some angry home truths. I took it up a notch when I was told that A was in the audience at one of the performances.
After Stags and Hens finished its run, I threw myself into my new job, but the attempts to distract myself and lead a social life couldn’t stop me from starting to feel a darkness creeping in around the edges of my mind. The date came when I knew that A was leaving for Manchester and melancholia started to edge out defiance. Gradually, with each day, this feeling started to grow and I had to acknowledge that I was upset about the break-up and that I wasn’t fine or lucky or better off. I was heartbroken, and I had been since 29 April.
It was in this mood, circa October 2000, that during an aimless walk and spot of window shopping through Falmouth town centre, I went into Compact Records and Tapes in the high street, now better known as Jam Records. I browsed the racks listlessly, but with a certain curiosity. Having been an occasional listener to John Peel over the previous 3 years since he soundtracked my journeys home from rehearsals, I spotted a few names that I’d heard him play and many more which it looked like he would probably play. But, I was stopped in my tracks after seeing a copy of Soukous in Central Park in the shop. I’d loved hearing the regular plays of Kanda Bongo Man on Peel’s show over the previous year, given that I first heard him in June 1999. And at this time, seeing a Bongo Man record was only going to make me think of A given that I’d been driving out to see her, when I first heard Bongo Man on the Peel Show. All the same, I felt I needed the joyous sound of Kanda and friends to lift me from the slough of despond I could feel myself falling into.
If I’m being honest, the album failed to do what I wanted it to do for me at the time. All of the tunes, including Liza, were perfectly catchy and pleasant, but they lacked the zest that I so desperately needed to feel. I think the reason is pretty obvious. In the vast open space of Central Park, you really needed to be among the 6,000 who were at that concert, otherwise it all sounded slightly distant and underpowered. The studio version, recorded for the Kwassa Kwassa LP in 1989, is understated too, but at least you feel as though you’re in the room when it’s being recorded. By contrast, the live version, instead of grabbing the listener by the throat and dragging them on to the dancefloor, sounded, in parts, contemplative and circumspect, especially in its main refrain (see 0:54, 3:13 and 6:38 to the end), and that was the last thing I wanted to feel at that time. The sound of the album as a whole seemed symbolic of my life and mood in October 2000; there was a good time being had somewhere, but it was too far away from me to be able to join in with it.
At the end of October, I cracked. I asked A’s father if he could give me an address for her, and bless him, he did. He told me that she was finding it hard going in Manchester, and maybe thought that my writing to her would cheer her up. I wrote to her, telling her that I missed her and wondering whether she would be open to meeting up for a date when she came back for Christmas. She wrote back telling me that she would be happy to meet up, and confirming that she was hating both Manchester, and a lot of the elements of her course.
We met up a few times over Christmas, we kept things light and the possibility of reconciliation was floated, but she didn’t want to commit to anything until the course was finished. I agreed to go up and see the production of Blood Wedding that A was going to be touring in with Graeae around the North of England through February/March 2001, and that I would stay the weekend with her in Manchester, over 23-25 February 2001.
Although A and I were moving towards reconciliation, there were a couple of problems still to be resolved. For instance, my parents were not happy about the thought of A and I getting back together. She had upset them hugely with what they perceived to be aloofness when my father was diagnosed with bowel cancer at the start of 2000. The tumour was detected just in time, and my father spent ten days in hospital after having it removed via surgery, followed by a short course of chemotherapy throughout the summer. A had not visited him in hospital, which wasn’t a problem, but on her first visit to our house after my dad returned home - which was about a month before 29 April - she came in and said nothing to him except “Hello”. I still remember us standing in the lounge, and the seconds passing like hours while we waited for her to ask him how he was feeling, or whether he was glad to be home, or even just to go and give him a hug. But she was content to stand there in silence, until I gave the prompt, “He’s looking well, isn’t he?” I was surprised at her behaviour, but I didn’t call her out on it at the time because she had been very supportive to me at least, after Dad’s initial diagnosis and during his time in hospital.
That being said, I understood where where my parents were coming from and found A’s subsequent explanation of her reaction - that her family had lost people to cancer and so found any mention of it hard to deal with - somewhat unconvincing. As my mother remarked at the time, she really couldn’t bring herself to deliver a simple platitude to her future father-in-law?*
My parents felt that if I wanted to get back with A, then I was perfectly within my rights to do so, but they were so hurt by her attitude towards them when Dad was going through his cancer, that they told me that if we were ever to get married, then they would not attend the wedding. All this led to a Christmas Day in 2000 of brittle tension as the three of us sat at home, trying to pretend that there wasn’t an elephant to be carved instead of a turkey.
So, the drama went on into 2001, with me now not only to trying to tentatively fix things with A, but also trying to engage in diplomacy between her and my family. I remember one night in late January, I was walking home from a night out with friends. I was drunk and running over the situation in my mind, and the stress of it caused me to start crying in the street. I was trying to please everyone and felt like I was being pulled apart by my obligations to people I loved.
My depression wasn’t helped by me discovering a new heartbreak album at this time. I’d got a copy of Parachutes by Coldplay for Christmas. I’ve mentioned before on this blog how I find the opening piano refrain in Trouble to be evocative of a pair of tear ducts being hit by hammers. And just as the song said, I felt myself trapped in a spider’s web of emotions, love, desire, obligation and fear. It didn’t help me that the song seemed inescapable at the time, being used on adverts and TV trailers as an underscoring to scenes of emotion.
There’s was also another thought that I held in my head when A returned to Manchester for the second half of her programme. I knew that one reason she had responded positively to my overtures in October was because she was having a hard time in her new environment. But I wondered how she would feel if the second term went better for her? Manchester in winter might be a struggle, but Manchester in spring time might be easier. Not to mention the excitement of touring a play. Although I was all over the place, emotionally, I was clear headed enough to realise that I couldn’t yet trust her not to row back on how she had felt over Christmas.
I was wise to feel this way. As we spoke to each other through January and early February, she began to talk about the course in more positive terms. Inevitably, this led to her telling me, in a call we made the week before I was due to visit her, that she had been seeing someone on her course. It was a casual thing at this stage, and she still wanted me to visit, but she wanted to be honest with me too. I actually felt oddly relieved to hear about this. My instincts had prepared me for it, and I began to see that the drama and heartache might be about to clear, even if it meant that A and I didn’t get back together.
I drove up to Manchester expecting nothing, and that was pretty much what I got. I didn’t see Blood Wedding because the ticket I had reserved for their performance on the 23rd of February was the only one that was sold for that night, so they cancelled it. A was pleased to see me but the fact that I was sleeping on the floor of her room and that we spent most of the weekend accompanied by a woman who was also on her course showed me the direction of travel. Shortly before I left, late on the Sunday afternoon, she was phoned by the man she’d been seeing. As we walked down to my car, I realised that although I had wanted to get her back, what had actually happened over October 2000/February 2001, was the next best thing. She had broken up with me, and then ended up helping me process and come through the split in a way that had seemed impossible to imagine during the curdling of our relationship, the previous summer. We weren’t getting back together, but we had at least mended our fences.
“You’re not coming back (to Cornwall)” I said to her, before I got into the car. It was a statement rather than a question.
“We’ll see how things go after the course,” she replied. “But I want to see what progress I can make.”
I hugged her and wished her luck. Then I drove away and for the first time in 10 months, I felt a weight fall away from me. I could move on with my life just as she was moving on with hers. I didn’t have to sacrifice my relationship with my parents and I could replace Trouble with Everything’s Not Lost as my internal anthem. Also, I could give Soukous in Central Park a second listen too.
In the event, A was back in Cornwall by the summer. She wasn’t especially happy about it at the time, and I remember her coming round to visit me at my flat** in the autumn of 2001, by which time I was seeing someone else, and she painting a pretty dispiriting picture about where her life was, post-Graeae. But she persevered and started getting acting work here and there. She now acts in different projects, both on stage and especially in short films. She also advocates for those diagnosed with her own disability, cerebral palsy. Furthermore, after a brief period apart, she and the man she met at Graeae ended up in a long term relationship, which I think has endured to this day.
We’ll meet A again in due course as and when this blog reaches the mid 90s, and the Peel Show will soundtrack the good times I enjoyed with her, as well as more than a dozen plays which I acted in over that time, several of which were performed alongside her. I can only reflect now on what I would have foretold the 17 year old me, had I heard Liza on 7/5/93, and how 7 years later, I would be trying and failing to kwassa kwassa away a broken heart.
*By contrast, my wife is so solicitous towards my parents’ health that they only need to sneeze and she’s there with remedies, hot drinks and TLC. The difference is like night and day.
**While I was trying to bridge the gap between A and my parents in early 2001, I spoke to someone I knew through work that rented out bedsits and flats about whether he could put me on his waiting list, in case I needed to move out of the family home, in order to have somewhere to be with A. Once I moved on from her, I forgot all about the request until he contacted me at the start of September 2001 to see if I was interested in moving into one of his flats, which was furnished and less than 10 minutes’ walk away from my workplace, the town centre and my favourite pub. With a new girlfriend to entertain and my parents having just moved into a new house which needed doing up, I snapped his hand off. I made sympathetic noises when A came to visit and complained about living back at home with her parents, but I’ll also confess to feeling rather smug about where I had ended up. After all, it was all thanks to her.
Outside of a radio studio, the default image of how John Peel spent his time tends to be of him pottering around his music room or hanging out with his family at Peel Acres. But, although he tended to refer to himself in disparagingly tongue-in-cheek terms when it came to his place in the showbusiness/media world pecking order, Peel could often be relied upon to be a presence, or at least find himself on the invite list, to all manner of parties, ceremonies, receptions and launch events. Such was the case in this 1/5/93 show, in which Peel had 3 separate events to tell us about.
In general, I try to avoid speculating on what Peel felt or thought about things, if he himself didn’t express a direct opinion on something. However, I feel on fairly safe ground here by listing, in ascending order, the excitement and interest he would have felt on the 3 events he talked about on this show:
3 - Unidentified Women’s Sex Magazine Launch: I’ve just opened an envelope which contained an invitation to the launch for a new sex magazine for women. I’m not quite sure why I’ve been invited to this. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always yearned for the era of the pear-shaped man and perhaps it’s about to occur. I shall be extremely grateful, although I suspect that it’s really rather too late for me.
2 - The Sony Radio Academy Awards: the radio industry’s version of the BAFTA Awards. Peel had been asked to attend the ceremony mainly to act as a chaperone ensuring that an award winner would be present at the ceremony. He didn’t mention on air who it was that he had accompanied to the ceremony, but looking at the list of award winners for 1993, it may have been his former Radio 1 colleague/nemesis, Tony Blackburn, whose breakfast show on Capital Gold won the award for Best Breakfast Show -Contemporary Music. However, while Peel may have been pleased for whoever he was accompanying to the ceremony, a big surprise was waiting for him as he won the award for National Broadcaster of the Year. This was the second time he had won this award in seven years.
1 - The Infotainment Scan Reception: Peel had been playing tracks from The Fall’s new album for several weeks ahead of its release on 26 April 1993. The release was heralded by a reception, presumably thrown by the band’s record label, Permanent Records. Peel had met a lot of people at the reception, including several members of the band. However, Mark E.Smith had not attended, and we should probably have expected no less.
A few weeks ago, Peel got a chance to see the Boat Race, close up. With the football season about to finish, the summer sports started to line up to replace them including the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. Time will tell as to whether Peel ever got an invite, or even went as an ordinary punter to SW19, which is possible given that he had had a tennis court built at Peel Acres. However, he wasn’t impressed by the Today programme’s coverage of the stabbing of Monica Seles by a deranged Steffi Graf fan at a tournament in Hamburg, which he felt was less concerned with Seles’s well-being, and was more focussed on the potential effects on the Wimbledon tournament.*
The selections from this show were taken from a two and a quarter hour long file. Everything that I listed from it was available but there were three tracks which fell from favour:
C - He Was: I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t like this enough to include it on the metaphorical mixtape after subsequent hearings. When I started this blog, one of the things that most excited me about taking the 1990s as a starting point was anticipating hearing the emergence of trip hop. In Peel Show terms, we’re still a year or two away from it truly breaking through. Up to now, I can only remember Daughters of Darkness by Depth Charge featuring trip hop elements on a Peel Show across 1991-93, so when I heard the smoky spoken narration of Leslie Winer, the mournful jazz trumpet sample, brushed drums, dub basslines and echoing refrain of Born and raised in the heart of the city, yeah I instantly jotted it down for inclusion. But listening back to it again, I found it to be dull and insubstantial. I feel that this is more my failure than Winer’s, but each time I find myself listening to it, I find that I really don’t want to engage with Winer’s story, and that ultimately outdoes the fact that Born and raised…has been an undeniable earworm with me these last few weeks. A marginal miss and the wait for more trip hop on Peel Shows goes on.
Eric’s Trip - Happens All the Time: With their lo-fi angelic aesthetic, Eric’s Trip often walk a tightrope between the engaging and the ennui-inducing. Happens All the Time has plenty of fire in its performance, but I suspect that it lost me because it wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as previously heard tracks like Listen or Haze.
The Werefrogs - Lighthouse: And here’s another example of a track missing out because it doesn’t match a band’s earlier high standards. Lighthouse starts out quite well, but once Marc Wolf starts singing, it all starts to ebb away. The wah-wah pedals do a lot of work in the second half of the track to try and pull things back, but the dire chorus repels all efforts to revive the song.
*Peel may still have had a general downer on tennis after the back injury it caused him, the previous autumn.
For some artists, being played on the John Peel Show could be an immediate, life changing experience. The Midlands hip-hop trio, Credit to the Nation, were arguably the greatest beneficiaries of John Peel related airplay in 1993. Within a week of him playing Call It What You Want on this show, One Little Indian had signed them up to a three-album deal and bought the rights to distribute the single from the label which originally put it out, Rugger Bugger Discs. By the end of the year, Credit to the Nation had 3 entries in the 1993 Festive Fifty, with this at Number 24 and their collaboration with Chumbawamba, Enough is Enough sitting in the Number 1 spot.
I don’t think there’s anything especially game-changing about the content of Call It What You Want, which frames a call for racial unity around a takedown of white hypocrisy. For songs about race, as with songs about love, it becomes a question of what niches you can find to distinguish this track from countless others like it. I do like the lines about black people being better at sport, and the implication that if racists can overlook skin colour for the duration of the game when a black person is representing their team or their country, then why should it be so difficult to do that all day, every day given the basic similarities between any two people whose only outward difference is the colour of their skin.
But what really earns Call It What You Want its place on the metaphorical mixtape is its chutzpah. How, in 1993, do you make a message about racism and the call for unity between the races stand out in a packed field? Simple, you structure the intro and chorus around the opening riff of Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. And not only do you use what was, at that time, the most recognisable guitar riff in the world, you do it in such a way that it sounds less like a gimmicky lift and more like the riff was composed especially for your tune. It’s one of those instances that demonstrates how when sampling is done as brilliantly and seamlessly as it is here, the re-creators show how they too are touched with the same stroke of genius as the creators were.
Xeper was a Downie alias, and reading through some of his obituaries - he died on 20 December, 2025 - one thing that is mentioned about the ethos of Black Dog is how many of its recordings were inspired by two of Downie’s great interests: technology and history. David Abravanel described this fusion as Cyber-Egyptology and a couple of the tracks on (Bytes), I’m thinking especially of Focus Mel by Atypic (Andy Turner) sound like excavation and archaeology set to a break beat. Even the collective’s name, Black Dog, has its roots set less in connotations of depression and more to do with links to Anubis/Anpu, the ancient Egyptian god of funerary rites and guide to the underworld, who is represented in hieroglyphics as either a black dog or a man with the head of a black dog.
Carceres Ex Novum translates as Prisons from the New. This could reflect a desire on Downie’s part to immerse himself in the past as a way of blocking out the pressures and ghastliness of the modern world. Alternatively, if we read the title as New Prisons, it could also signal an awareness of how the creep of technology could make us prisoners and slaves to it. It’s this interpretation which I lean more towards when considering the track, which is a gorgeous piece of downtempo IDM.
Thinking back on it, I’m wrong to describe a creep of technology; in 1993 it was more like an approaching gallop, given that within 2 or 3 years of this track going out on Kat’s Karavan, I was buying albums which had website and email addresses for bands and record labels on their inlay cards. With the benefit of hindsight, Carceres Ex Novum does a brilliant job in its near 7 minute running time of previewing the progress that developing technology would bring to us and how it would become a part of our routine. It breaks down as follows:
- Opening 95 seconds - the synth drone which runs throughout the track reflects our consciousness as we work through the daily grind. But in that stretch, we hear certain beeps, like satellite signals reflecting the work going on in the background and the building of new technological structures that will eventually cocoon us all.
- From 1:35, the burbling piano line suggests the slavish search for information and gratification on the internet. A new world, albeit made up of garish colour schemes and awkward code, but which allows us to find out about things which are both vital and trivial to us. And once you’ve made one search another will follow, and then another, as we start to see just how far we can push the boundaries of this new technology. It will soon become clear, that nothing is off limits and anyone can create in this new space, with these developing tools.
- 2:40 onwards, are those squawking voices I can hear? Well, yes, quite possibly given that the new technologies allow us access to publish our thoughts via blogs/video channels. We’re all authorities now on our chosen areas of interest, aren’t we?
- 3:10 onwards - it ever there was such a thing as a quizzical piano line, then we get it here. It heralds a cautious welcome to these new opportunities we have to share information and communicate with one another, wherever we may be. This is something that Downie had direct experience of at the time given that he had been running a bulletin board system called Black Dog Towers.
- 4:40 onwards, more and more of us start to plug into the new systems of communications and online noise becomes our perpetual environment. As a result, we walk into our new technological prisons, but attempt to make them feel like our homes. When I consider my life in terms of pre and post Internet time frames, there’s one way of consuming the world up to about mid-2000, and then there’s the way I’ve consumed it, and it has been made easier to do so, over the last 26 years. Others will have different timescales, but it will have claimed all but the most dedicated off-gridders.
- 5:44 onwards, it does feature earlier in the piece but the stabbing piano refrain, which sounds like a car horn suggests that this mode of communication and info sharing may occasionally invite confrontation, discord and an online version of road rage. But this was 1993 and optimism remained high about what this technology might bring to our lives. I mean, just how toxic could differences of opinion expressed from a computer terminal ever become, eh?
If the notion of Downie as a technological soothsayer seems a little far-fetched and we want to consider Carceres Ex Novum as being a track which was a little more in-the-moment, it could serve as a musical commentary on virtual reality, which was still being trumpeted at the time as means by which humans could escape their everyday environment and put themselves in universes of their own creation. Certainly, for anyone looking to create an environment from the past in which they could subsume themselves, it appeared a perfect solution, albeit one that would function as just another new prison.
Ultimately, VR hasn’t yet managed to capture as much of the world’s everyday attention as the internet has. But we can be sure that like all bad ideas, it will never truly go away.
