Guys and Dolls: John Peel Show - Friday 7 May 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

When I was acting in the play, Here Comes a Chopper, last year, I spent several happy hours talking about music with the director’s husband, Brian Harrington, who was playing the part of Death. During the rehearsal period, he was selling the majority of his extensive record collection, most of which made up the playlists for on his shows for Kennet Radio. One band he mentioned to me a couple of times was Stray, who having formed in 1966 are currently - as of 2023 - onto their fifth reformation. I listened to one of their tracks during the rehearsal period, and thought it was OK, but it turned out that I’d already heard them a couple of years previously, when Peel played Jericho from the 1971 album, Suicide. He was inspired to do this after playing a track called Stray by Heatmiser, which featured Elliott Smith. I wonder what Brian would have made of Peel summarising Stray as a good Second Division band from the era.

Amongst all the usual letters and faxes, it was an answerphone message that had grabbed Peel’s attention during the week. An unidentified, distraught man had left a message on the office answerphone talking about the death of their mother. Given that he was still processing the death of his own mother, the year before, Peel reached out to the caller to get in touch again if they were listening.

This blog’s been covering the 7 May 1993 edition of Kat’s Karavan since 21 January, and it’s no surprise given how many good records were broadcast that night. It’s likely that we’d still have been on this show for another month if the following tracks hadn’t fell from favour with me:

Jerry Lee Lewis - Crazy Arms - When it comes to Jerry Lee Lewis, nothing else showed me how much I’ve been ruined by Great Balls of Fire than re-listening to Crazy Arms, which featured on his debut album, released in 1958. It’s only after hearing Lewis perform in slower, more contemplative mood that you realise just how much Great Balls of Fire casts such a shadow over everything else he recorded. Crazy Arms is pleasant, but pedestrian and, for the moment, if I want piano shuffle, I’ll stick with Fats Domino.

If I ‘d been feeling vindictive, I would have included Crazy Arms simply because the opening piano figure  on it reminded me of the opening to I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do by ABBA. I’ve spent most of early April walking around, either singing that song or with it stuck in my head, so I could have chosen to make all of you suffer as well. Have a care if you click on the link… It’s too late, isn’t it? You’re already singing along to it, aren’t you?…

The reason why Peel was playing Jerry Lee Lewis was due to him seeing the TV premiere of Great Balls of Fire, a 1989 biopic about Lewis, with Dennis Quaid in the lead role, broadcast on Bank Holiday Monday. He hadn’t thought much of the film, but had praise for Quaid’s performance, and conceded that the film had been successful in doing what any good music biopic should do, namely sending him back to listen to the records. Furthermore, he had a bit of a connection to Lewis, in that he reckoned he was the first person in Liverpool to own Lewis’s debut album as he had pre-ordered and pre-paid for a copy at his local record shop.

Captain Jesus and the Sunray Dream - I’m So Dead Bored - How to define the sound on this track, or indeed on its accompanying album, All Thanks to the Lord Jesus Christ Amen?  I’d say space rock meets punk rock; with the musical emphasis on the former and the lyrical emphasis on the latter. Take a future Hawkwind frontman on bass, write songs whose titles and melodies subvert Clash/Sex Pistols tunes i.e. the aforementioned I’m So Dead Bored and the now prescient, Anarchy in the USA. Record and issue it on your own label out of Armley, Leeds and you have an album which impressed Peel due to it trying to walk its own path instead of trying to hitch itself to a current guitar scene. It sounds something of a throwback to circa 1980. My notes say that It doesn’t break any new ground for me, but it has undeniable intensity. Which is true even though it hasn’t stood up to reappraisal. 

It’s not helped by the fact that the whole album is on YouTube, and when heard in full context, I’m So Dead Bored ends up sounding like one of the least interesting tracks on the record, albeit the second half of the album falls into space rock jam tedium. Had I been coming back to hear a track like the similarly titled I’m So Depressed, I Wanna Be Me or the album’s big production number, Starship, I’d probably have been persuaded. As I say, you can decide for yourself whether you would have become one of Captain Jesus’s disciples, I’m So Dead Bored starts at 9:36.

Mortal - Psycho (Logic) - How different would this blog look if I posted about tracks as soon as I heard them? I have to ensure that there’s a lag between the period I’m writing about (May 1993) and the period I’m currently listening to (September 1993) so that there is no massive gap between postings. But if I had acted the moment I heard, then Psycho (Logic) would be on the metaphorical mixtape given that my notes call it a terrific dance track. But when I listened back to it, I started to wonder whether I was responding more to the samples of Anthony Perkins being particularly mesmeric in Psycho, than I was to the music around it. 

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a dance track, specifically because of its samples - there’s one potentially coming up in a few shows time featuring an off-mic Ronald Reagan - but, with a tinge of regret, I eventually concluded that if the Perkins samples weren’t included, I may not have even noticed the track in the first place. If you are looking for further Hitchcock infused material, then you may enjoy the Bernard Hermann-esque sounds on PJ Harvey’s Man-Size Sextet, which was also broadcast on this show.

Gallon Drunk - You Should Be Ashamed - featuring Terry Edwards on saxophone. I think this probably made the initial list purely because there’s an instrumental refrain in it which reminded me of two tracks that were released after You Should Be Ashamed. Namely, If I Only Knew by Tom Jones (1994) and Amnesia by Chumbawamba (1998), both which I have a regard for which sees-saws between pleasurable amusement and outright derision. But the rest of it left me wondering what on Earth I’d seen in it given that it sounded like standard Gallon Drunk mumblerock. It struck me that You Should Be Ashamed might have sounded out of place when listened to away from its parent album, From the Heart of Town. I was able to listen the LP, which has the feel of a concept album given that the record feels like it’s set among drinkers, druggies and debauchers who are united by disgust at themselves and alienation from civilised society. However, this didn’t change my opinion on You Should Be Ashamed. The whole exercise was:

a) pointless, as I wouldn’t have had the album as a point of reference to use in 1993, and…

b) frustrating, as I finally came across some Gallon Drunk songs that I really liked*, but I won’t be able to write about them here as it doesn’t look as though Peel ever gave any of them an airing.

Full tracklisting

*The tracks were Keep Moving On, Push the Boat Out and Bedlam. Apart from a single play for the latter in September 1992, when it was released as a single, Peel passed on all three of them.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Terry Edwards - 7even Steps to Heaven (1 November 1992)

Buy this at Discogs

The first person to say ‘anarcho-jazz’ eats lead - John Peel, BFBS, 1 November 1992.

Earlier in the year, Terry Edwards had used a Peel Session to showcase a couple of numbers from his upcoming EP, Terry Edwards Executes Miles Davis Numbers.  This cover of of the title track of Davis’s 1963 album didn’t feature in the Peel Session, but was worth the wait as far as I’m concerned.

I wouldn’t dream of describing it as anarcho-jazz, but Edwards and his colleagues have pulled off something pretty stupendous here by putting Davis’s rolling jazz shuffle through the Napalm Death blender and highlighting the link between jazz and noisecore.  I wonder whether a copy of the Edwards EP found its way to Providence, Rhode Island because it sounds a lot like the sort of content which one of Peel’s favourite labels, Load Records used to put out.  They began operations a year after the release of Terry Edwards Executes Miles Davis Numbers and if that isn’t proof of the Circle of Life, I don’t know what is.

Videos courtesy of Terry Edwards - Topic and Miles Davis.

Oliver! Terry Edwards - 4our/Knife [Peel Session] (10 April 1992)

The mix of political and domestic news on 10/4/92 left Peel in a state where it wasn’t safe for him to be alone around sharp objects.  Fortunately, he had some company to distract him from his despondency, as session guest Terry Edwards joined him for a chat throughout the show.  Without the pressure of a schedule to keep to, the conversation was much more engaged than Peel’s car crash phone interview with Lesley Rankine of Silverfish had been three months previously.  Edwards, a personable chap with a disturbing laugh, revealed that his old band, Serious Drinking, were reforming to make an album.  Indeed, Edwards had spent the evening playing with them.  The album never saw the light of day, though an EP did.  Peel reminisced about Eugene McCarthy, guitarist with Serious Drinking, selling him some seriously large shirts.

This session proved to be very popular having initially been broadcast in February 1992, it would get three further airings through the course of the year.  The only tracks from the actual session that I’ve found were Edwards’s Napalm Death medley - death metal through the medium of saxophone, it doesn’t seem obvious until you’ve heard it.  Edwards was playing solo on this session, but the recordings presented here were taken from solo records and his work with The Scapegoats.  Four is a Miles Davis composition taken at, well, four times the tempo of Davis’s original.  Of greater interest was Knife, an Edwards composition which in the session concentrated on the descending saxophone phrase (transposed to the bassline in the recording) supported by shrieking horn embellishments. Given more life and support by The Scapegoats when recorded for My Wife Doesn’t Understand Me, it becomes a thrilling, noirish jazz/funk hybrid in search of a TV detective series to soundtrack.

Miles Davis and friends - four times slower than Terry Edwards:




Videos courtesy of Terry Edwards - Topic (so enjoy them while they last before the bots reset themselves) and jazzman2696 (Davis).