Guys and Dolls: Meat Beat Manifesto - Radio Babylon/Soul Driver/Fire Number 9 [Peel Session] (14 May 1993)

 

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Having failed to bill the first airing of Meat Beat Manifesto’s one and only Peel Session when it was broadcast on Saturday 6 February 1993, the Radio Times tried to make up for it when the repeat went out on this 14/5/93 show. Unfortunately, they spelled the band’s name as Meat Ball Manifesto, a mistake which Peel felt moved to apologise on air for. But, all things considered, the Radio Times error wasn’t so far off the mark because the quality of 3/4 of the tracks in this session really was different gravy…

Listeners were treated to past, present and future in this session. The three tracks that would have made it on to my mixtape all differ stylistically from one another, but contain little offcuts and sprinkles that offer moments of familiarity amid the strange melange of sounds and atmospheres in each track. 

Radio Babylon grabs me for slightly more synesthistic reasons than it might to do others. Primarily an exercise in breakbeat, what I like are the samples of Babylon that ring out throughout the track. I had initially thought it was taken from some high-minded, ecstatic reggae record, but why should Meat Beat Manifesto have to reach into the deepest corners of their record collection, when they can just lift the word straight out of the chorus of Rivers of Babylon by Boney M, drench it in reverb and in doing so, transport me back to a mental space where I’m watching exotically filmed adverts on sunny curtain drawn afternoons in the mid 1980s -  The Art of Noise did that to me once. To my ears, what Meat Beat Manifesto did with that sample moved it from the realm of drunken family parties and instead evoked sun blasted landscapes and the bleat of a car horn as a crowd of millions takes to the streets, chanting for something better than the wretched normality they’re served up with as their everyday existence and hissed at to be grateful for.  It’s retro, it’s the sound of Rastafarian New Yorkers playing their mixes on the ghetto blaster on a hot day in the West Side as the fire hydrant plumes its water upwards.  This isn’t bad going for two men - Jonny Stephens and Jack Dangers - from Swindon.

As it progresses though, it becomes slightly stranger, as though the radio is picking up subconscious thoughts and feelings on its frequencies. One of these appears to be a sample of the panicked cry of Oh no! which opens I Can’t Control Myself by The Troggs. It leads me to wonder whether, when Meat Beat Manifesto recorded the session on 13 December 1992, they were trying to warn the world that 18 months later, a cover of a Troggs song was going to be completely inescapable for the whole of a summer. By the end, the track has descended into something which sounds like it’s trying to fuse together the sentiments of Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft with the mood of the final 90 seconds of Bike by Pink Floyd. 

 If Radio Babylon represented the past - it had originally been released as a single in 1990  - then Soul Driver points to the immediate future. Starting out of a trip hop beat, we’re then taken into a lyric in which Dangers details various stages of paranoia, to which music seems to be the only cure:

Soul driver, the beat improviser.

Soul driver, the rhythm organiser.

Soul driver, the beat provider.

Soul driver,  can you turn the lights up on the rhythm.

Which it then does as Meat Beat Manifesto try to take us inside the rhythm, garlanding it with noodling guitar lines of such gentleness, that it feels like the music is trying to cocoon the listener from their troubles. Even the repeated verse of paranoia and worry finds itself being subsumed into the music as it tries to filter out the bad vibes. And from 2:33 onwards to the end of the track, Soul Driver plays out with a repeated Mellotron line which leads the listener down to Eden, to the accompaniment of an aural winding down, which encourages the listener to let go of all feelings of struggle and stress. In a year’s time, this would start to become a dominant sound in dance music, just within a brief window, but long enough and distinctly enough to mark it out as an original 90s scene.

The sense of something winding down also permeates the last 90 seconds of Fire Number 9, which was a remix of a track called #9 Bad Acid, that had originally been recorded by Dimensional Holofonic Sound on the original version of House of God. Jack Dangers’s remix was put out by DHS on a record called LSD3D Acid Mixes. The only real difference between the record mix and the Peel Session version is that the record opens with someone saying It only has to be heard to be absorbed rather than the more hypnotic refrain of You’ve eliminated any interruptions or distractions. For the rest, the track remains dominated by a driving drum beat waiting for Primal Scream to swoop in, take it away and titivate it up for use in Rocks, later that year. It also brings together two of the definitive found sounds of the year 1968:

1) Arthur Brown bellowing I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you at the top of his Number 1 hit, Fire.

2) The most famous use of the words Number 9 in Western culture; namely as part of the refrain heard at regular intervals throughout Revolution 9 by The Beatles. 

For me, it’s that juxtaposition that makes the track essential to keep. 30 years on from this session, Meat Beat Manifesto and DHS would come together again to collaborate on an EP called Man From Mantis.

The fourth track in the session was Drop, a discordant electronica track which had an additionally atonal vocal thrown in for added annoyance. But three out of four isn’t bad and in many ways Meat Beat Manifesto were only getting started. With Jack Dangers as the only constant member, they have continued to issue singles, albums and collaborations up to the present day. But Peel, whose support had only been occasional since they started issuing records in 1988, didn’t go with them. Barring a single play of one of their tracks on a 1997 compilation album called Sally’s Photographic Memory, they never featured on a Peel Show again after this session repeat.

 

Videos courtesy of Dub Records.

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.