Oliver: Culture - See Them a Come (14 December 1991)

In many respects, it doesn't seem such a leap to link from Culture to Cliff Richard.  Think about it; religion played a huge part in their lives and music.  Where Joseph Hill and his compadres stole a march on Cliff was by also tackling politics and drugs.  I'd love to have heard it, but can't picture Cliff singing "Legalise it" in a cover of The International Herb somehow.

Culture were the closet thing to reggae superstars on Peel's show and I've yet to hear a Culture track I didn't like.  Joseph Hill had a certain quality of wisdom about him which meant when he sang you listened and responded.  With the exquisite harmony work of Roy "Kenneth" Dayes and Reginald Taylor (later Telford Nelson and Albert Walker) alongside him and the spare but precise backing engineered by The Mighty Two (Joe Gibbs and Errol Thompson), they hit the mark time and again.

See Them a Come was recorded for Culture's debut album, the iconic Two Sevens Clash (1977).  Lyrically it's a little hard to follow, but there is a definite subtext about police brutality and their ways of confronting people with false charges:

Jah Jah see dem a come, but I an I ah conqueror 
They are coming to accuse I, for tings I know not about
They are coming to lock I down, and tell I that dem suspicious yeah

Hill continues by associating his situation with that of the similarly incarcerated Marcus Garvey, who was sent to prison for a time on fraud charges which Garvey felt were politically motivated.
Eventually, the legal element is sidelined as Hill places his trust in Jah to protect him and keep him safe, regardless of what his accusers try and do.  It's a classic Christian Rock trope, but somehow it always seemed to carry more credibility and likelihood in a reggae track and especially when Culture were bringing the message.

Video courtesy of 5446 Robo's Channel.

Oliver: Cliff Richard & The Shadows - We Say Yeah (14 December 1991)

Another example of "I didn't expect to hear John Peel play that" though in this case, it owed its inclusion in his programme to one of Peel's tenuous links as it was played after a dance track by  The Pied Piper called I Say Yeah which failed to make my cut.

This seems to have been Peel's favourite Cliff song, as it got a number of plays over the years.  Indeed, he had a particular fondness for Young Ones era Cliff for reasons closer to home:

One of the many reasons I was initially attracted to the Pig, my wife, was the fact that she knew the entire opening sequence to The Young Ones and could sing it and do all of the voices and things; still could if prompted to do so.

Moreover, when Peel played The Pied Piper's track on his Boxing Day 1991 show for Radio Mafia of Finland, he played a snatch of The Young Ones soundtrack to illustrate Sheila Ravenscroft's party piece.  He followed this up with a track from Extreme Noise Terror, naturally.

Regardless of what you may think of Cliff's subsequent work, his rock 'n' roll stuff still stands up well and for a schoolboy, the "Maybe they're not so square" line would have stood out.  Furthermore, while writing this, I've recently gone through a period where after saying no, I've started to say yeah instead.  And I feel much better for it.

Cliff ended up making his presence felt in a terrific production of Willy Russell's play, Stags and Hens, which I was fortunate to be part of in 2000 (how far off that seems now - both retrospectively and in terms of this blog).  The action takes place in a Liverpool nightclub in the late 70s and I remember spending a highly enjoyable evening with the directors and some of the rest of the cast going through the record collection of the co-director's parents to find suitable records to play.  We all laughed when someone pulled out a Cliff greatest hits album, but upon noticing that Devil Woman had come out a year before Stags and Hens was set, we put it on for a listen and all around the room, smiles widened as the plinky-plonk keyboard opening gave way to those dampened drums and Cliff's enigmatic vocal.  We made up a compilation CD of all the music used in the show and it sits dead centre of the 18 tracks we included.  Sadly, it doesn't appear that Peel played this, even retrospectively, but there's still time to find out...

Video courtesy of finetunestv.

Oliver: Sam Dees' Beauty and the Beat - The Homecomings [Peel Session] (14 December 1991)

Sam Dees's second session track selection (I didn't hear the third, One In a Million on the recording, but I didn't like it when I played it) has none of the political subtext of Child of the Streets.  Instead, it's a straightforward love song in which the protagonist looks forward to the end of the working day so that he can get back to the loving arms of his woman.  It's slick, glossy, exquisitely arranged and performed, and to paraphrase Danny Kelly, sounds every inch like a record made in California in 1974, though it was actually made in 1991.  You could picture this being played in upscale penthouses in New York and London, or at the end of romantic yuppie dinner parties.  It's a potential Smooth FM standard and the last few seconds of the track sound like they should be soundtracking a luxury bubble bath commercial.  In other words, it doesn't sound like typical John Peel fare, which makes it an automatic inclusion on a mixtape.

Peel's relationship with soul, funk, and disco was a cautious one.  Soul music didn't do too badly, and his late 90s/early 00s shows threw up some wonderful discoveries, but by his own admission, funk and disco didn't receive much attention from him in the 70s. As production got smoother into the 80s and "blue eyed soul" started to dominate the market (you know the kind of stuff I mean - pin drop synthesisers, gated drums, tenor sax solos, guitar way down in the mix, two female backing singers and a pony-tailed bassist with his instrument slung under his chin), the divide became even greater.  I actually quite like some of that stuff - Its critics attacked it as a white take on soul, sucked dry of any oomph and I can agree with that up to a point, but sometimes, simple melody as practiced by say, Black in Wonderful Life or Paradise, carried the day.  I also feel uneasy about music which gets attacked for being what white gas fitters in Essex listen to.  Sod the audience, does the music move you?  And if it doesn't, can you see yourself singing along to it, when you least expect it?

When black artists who had released records which had some genuine aural heft to them in the 60s and 70s, started to use the same blue eyed techniques in the 80s, the sneering was at least accompanied by sorrowful disappointment.  With such a fabulous heritage, black soul artists were offering up this?  Stevie Wonder's I Just Called To Say I Love You, being perhaps the most famous example, but there were plenty of others too.  The genre defaulted to ballad status, with everyone aspiring to be Lionel Ritchie.  Which would have been fine if they'd tried to be All Night Long, Lionel instead of Hello, Lionel.  Marvin Gaye might have saved us all because what is Sexual Healing if not a synthed up version of Let's Get It On, but it would have asked a lot of him to pull that off consistently.

By the 90s, the genre appeared to be dying out until R'n'B revived interest, sales and credibility from the mid 90s onwards.  After this, it became de rigeur to have a "proper" singer guesting on your track.

The Peel session version of this track, which is not available for sharing, was furnished with some fine horn work which doesn't feature on the recorded version.  The Homecomings EP was a rare release from Alabama born Dees, whose recording career had been sporadic since The Show Must Go On album, though he had made a good living as a songwriter through the aforementioned One In A Million You giving former Sly and the Family Stone bassist, Larry Graham a U.S. Top 10 hit, as well as writing for the likes of Whitney Houston.

Beauty and the Beat refers to Dees' all female backing band.



Colin Vearncombe aka Black - just for the gas fitters?

Videos courtesy of Bren106 (Dees) and Steve Chase (Black).

Oliver: Mudwimin - Have a Good Time (14 December 1991)

This remains a marginal call for inclusion.  When I first listened to the 14/12/91 recording, this piece of swamp rock caught my ear but not my interest.  It wasn't until I listened to the show again that I found myself drawn to the track, if not entirely seduced by it.  It's rare to find a track which you go from liking to cold-shouldering almost on a line by line basis.  I think it's the "give out, take in" refrain that does the trick.
It may also be because it reminds me of a track from the 9 November 1991 show that I turned down, but which has been bothering my memory.  Play Have a Good Time back to back with Sacrificial Shack by Pain Teens and you have a great split single that never was.



Videos courtesy of Richardchancy1 (Mudwimin) and redhenna1 (Pain Teens).

Oliver: The Pixies - Bone Machine [Live] (14 December 1991)

There's a Peel session from this band coming up in a few posts time, so I'll leave the analysis till then, but in the meantime all I can say is how did anyone refrain from choosing The Pixies as their favourite band ever, when they emerged in 1988?  I'm not sure why Peel was playing this track from 1988's Surfer Rosa album, when their Trompe le Monde album was less than three months old at this point, but I'm glad he did.  The grab bag of abrasive guitar, three minute melodies and Lewis Carroll style nonsense filtered through an East Coast sensibility shouldn't work anywhere near as well as it does here, but somehow it pulls off the miraculous feat of making the listener think hard about what's being said while simultaneously turning off one's mind and floating into the carnival, crazy house that characterised so much of the Massachusetts four-piece's early work.

Video courtesy of Brad SuperFreedomRock.

Oliver: Spanner Banner - Battle Field (14 December 1991)

Buy this at Discogs

It's a battlefield in life.
All guns are aiming at you.

Sentiments which Unsane would surely agree with, indeed I think we can all agree with this slice of dancehall homily.  Ironic sentiments given that it was written at a time of apparent peace.

On the personal front, I would have definitely gobbled this up on any mixtape.  Although, I look back on my GCSE year with contentment over the fact that I'd finally reached the top of the school chain -sixth form excepted, and they weren't really a problem to any of us still in the year 7 - 11 cycle - school always was a battlefield.  I wasn't one of those kids who was in danger of having his head shoved down the toilet, but there was always the fear that if I dropped my guard or breathed out for a second, that I could be.  So my school days, saw me glide through the waters like a swan - relative serenity on the outside, kicking furiously underneath.  But with the GCSE year providing distractions like acting and interest in girls suddenly a world beyond the school gate started to make itself known. Through the autumn and winter of 1991, I wrapped this around me like a warm, comfortable coat, only to see it pulled off and hung in the distance like an out of reach washing line in spring 1992, but we'll come to that in due course.

Edit - I cannot let a post about Spanner Banner aka Joseph Bonner go by without including this, his biggest hit as a writer.




Videos courtesy of TheMrE1974 (Spanner Banner) and ole50centownu (CD & P).

Oliver: Unsane - Exterminator/Vandal X/AZA 2000 (14 December 1991)

Exterminator

Vandal X

AZA 2000

Buy these at Discogs

I stand to be corrected while we tour through 13 years of Peel shows, but one aspect of them that seemed to fade out over the years was the multi-track play.  This was usually Peel taking up some air time by playing three tracks in a row from whichever record was thrilling him most.  The selections were normally from a current record, but in shows on 23 and 24 November 1991, he had played trios from  Mono Men's Stop Dragging Me Down (1990) and Nirvana's Bleach (1989) albums.  Earlier in his career, Peel had played whole sides of albums such as Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and had defied an exclusivity order for another radio station to play the whole of Bob Dylan's 1975 album, Desire.  This practice seemed to have died out by the time I started hearing him in the late 90s, but could well have been resurrected for the likes of The White Stripes.  We shall see.

As previously posted Peel was dazzled by the debut album from Unsane, and with a show lasting three hours, he had plenty of scope to give them as much airplay as he wished.  On this night, he played four tracks all of which I would have kept.  One of them, an industrial rocker called HLL isn't available for sharing but I hope you'll like the other three selections.

What's great about these tracks is how they show off Unsane's versatility.  A quality which helped them produce such a stunning album.  From the on manoeuvres opening which falls into the perfect rock storm of Exterminator; the storming punk scream of Vandal X, a tune so good it inspired two Belgians to start their own band (though this guy trumped them all) and finally the inspired proto-grunge of AZA 2000 which rounds off its alt-rock stomp with the perfect sinkhole finish.  What can one add, except to echo Peel himself, "What a band, eh listeners?"

Videos courtesy of Unsane - Topic and Alien Hi-Fi.

PS - to anyone upset over Unsane's cover art on this blog, all I can say is you should see the shots I didn't use. (Contains upsetting images).