This has ended up being a borderline inclusion. I’ve listened to it so many times over the last couple of days that it has ended up becoming dangerously close to losing all meaning. But I’ve stuck with it because the fault has mainly been mine given that my work is in a particularly intense phase at the moment, and that can make the notion of trying to relax (ha!) by writing a blog/listening to music seem ridiculous when balancing it alongside stuff that means less emotionally, but is more important in a real-world sense.
So distracted have I been that I ended up having to look at the the lyrics, at which point I became possibly the last person in the Western world to realise that Sister is about incest between siblings. The song positively drips with self recrimination, regret, lust and love; both lyrically and in its churned up, propulsive music.
In contemporary culture terms, its author Jason Loewenstein may have been influenced by Stephen Poliakoff’s 1991 film, Close My Eyes, which details the incestuous affair between a brother and sister played by Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves. Alan Rickman played Reeves’s husband in the film, and it’s regrettable that it was made a couple of years before he started to regularly keep a diary again. Indeed, the first entry in the Rickman Diaries book, was made three weeks after this Peel show was broadcast, on 13 June 1993.
If we’re talking about further cultural influences on Sister, then Loewenstein might have felt he needed a palate cleanser after watching the subject matter in Close My Eyes, and so decided to unwind by watching some cartoons instead. That’s the only way I can explain the guitar riff - at the 8 second mark, and especially between 1:38 and 2:01 - that appears to be modelled on the laugh of Woody Woodpecker.
Having sabotaged his Sebadoh competition, the previous week, Peel was relieved to be able to announce winners for it on this programme. Lynn Parsons drew four winners out of a hat which Peel had been given, earlier that day, by the editors of The Memoirs of Seth Bottomley, a Port Vale fanzine. Peel had been a guest of the Seth Bottomley team, cheering Vale on to a 2-1 win over Stockport County in the Autoglass Windscreens Trophy Final at Wembley. Peel was surprised and gratified to see that none of the prizewinners came from London. Instead, copies of Sebadoh’s new album, Bubble and Scrape*, were sent to Gina Twarley from Galway, Jonathan Barnes from Whalley Range, Al Cook from Glasgow and Mark Waters from Hereford (apologies to any of them for misspelling their names, in the unlikely event of them reading this.)
*I suspect the prize may have been this version which included a limited edition 7-inch single.
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