Oliver: D-Nice - To Tha Rescue (26 December 1991)

"These blokes always seem to  have dozens of mates that they can mention on their records, don't they?  If I was to make a record I don't know whose name I'd put on there.  Not very many people, I suspect"

I was so seduced by D-Nice's previous contribution to this blog that I waved this track, the title track of his second and final album, through, almost sight unseen.  It was only when listening to it again that I realised how ordinary it was.  In fact were it not for the catchiness of the title line, which fits perfectly with the sample of Junior Mance's A Time and a Place, I probably would have left it out.

The rest of the track is a series of self affirmations as Nice bigs himself up at the expense of other rappers, but it's all rather tame and Gang Starr did it all much more effectively a few posts back.  You know inspiration is waning when a track ends with a shout out, which Peel passed comment on above.  It wasn't even last track on the album.



Junior Mance makes sure To Tha Rescue gets included on a mixtape that doesn't exist.

Video courtesy of N3r0nFerdy (D-Nice) and groove addict (Mance).

Oliver: Aurlus Mabele featuring Diblo Dibala - Malade de Toi (26 December 1991)

Even in the comparatively upbeat and positive world of soukous, it can be easy to go from "Joy of Life" to "Sick of You".  My GCSE French trained ear isn't good enough to tell from the lyrics whether the sickness is love or hate based, but Diblo Dibala's guitar playing speaks a language we can all understand.

Video courtesy of Tonton Ouzouk.

Oliver: John Peel Show - Radio 1 (Saturday 21 December 1991)

For the only time in its history, the Festive Fifty was replaced by a selection of  Peel's favourite tracks  and sessions of the year.  This covered the last four shows of the year.

I've mentioned before that I would have been happy for Peel to keep this change of format for the rest of his life.  I only ever voted in the 2002 edition.  I can't remember whether my three choices got in, or even what I voted for.  I didn't hear the full list, so don't know whether they would all have got onto my mixtapes in that year.  At least a dozen did including the winner.  It's a perfectly good track, but the best thing Peel played that year?  Not by a million miles.  Had he lived long enough to have held one in 2008, then I would have had no objection to Saloon's next incarnation winning. EDIT: I just looked up the  Dandelion Radio Festive Fifty for 2008 It didn't make the chart: new curators; same issues!

The problem when listening to lists like the Festive Fifty was always frustration over tracks you hated that got in while tracks you loved were completely ignored.  I'm sure I wasn't the only Peel show listener (and Peel himself gave voice to this a few times) who got angry about the apparent philistinism of the rest of the audience.  In 1991, Peel took this irritation away by taking control of the proceedings and the shows were much better as result with all bases touched and a much more accurate reflection of the music that he had played in 1991.  It works well for this blog, meaning that tracks from before November 2 1991 get a chance for an airing.

I made 10 selections from the recording that I heard and happily I'm able to share them all here, perhaps it makes up for the fact that I won't be able to provide anything from the show on December 22 1991.

Complete tracklisting

Oliver: The Pixies [Peel Session] (21 December 1991)

NEWSFLASH! The session keeps getting blocked on this site, sadly.  So I will include individual versions of each track that made up this session.









Videos courtesy of VibraCobra23 Redux, einzack and Subbacultcha.

So having had a single track on the 14 December 1991 show introduce me to the brilliance of The Pixies, this programme had a whole session to salivate over.

What a remarkable band The Pixies were.  Looking at them from nearly a quarter of a century's distance, I'm struck by how such a bunch of un-rock 'n' roll looking people could produce music that rocked as brilliantly and vibrantly as The Pixies did.  Drummer David Lovering looked like he spent all day cruising gymnasiums to work up the muscles to propel the songs along; Joey Santiago sounded like he loved nothing better after a hard day's work on Computer Aided Design programs than to pick up a guitar and pull out mind-bendingly amazing riffs from it; because she looked like the world's oldest exchange student, Kim Deal didn't provide much glamour, but her serpentine bass lines and street punk backing vocals were a cornerstone to The Pixies's sound.  Finally there was Frank Black (hereafter to be referred to as Black Francis) the demented poet/surf wannabe at the heart of it all - striking a blow for the mighty pantheon of slightly overweight men in rock: Jerry Garcia, Chris Burney of Bowling for Soup and err..Buster Bloodvessel.  Best of all, they remained true to their roots in that all their little packages of sonic fireworks could be delivered in 3 minutes 30.  Anything more than that was wasting everyone's time.

There were a number of recurring styles that cropped up in Pixies tunes: overlooked Americana, interpersonal relationships that were sliding into disrepair, oddball character sketches and reportage from ghastly sounding parties/get-togethers in which the narrator sounded as gone as everyone around him.  This session had all that and more.  Starting with a track about Salt Lake in Utah, Palace of the Brine is what I'm going to call any chip shop that I ever open.  Letter to Memphis is a doozy of a love song about the desire to communicate and why we go through the most long winded ways to do so (especially pertinent in those pre-email days of 1991).  Motorway to Roswell is my favourite track of the four with Black Francis pondering the mindset of the Roswell alien and how its vacation went tragically wrong:
How could this so great, turn so shitty.
He ended up in army crates
And photographs in files.

The performance is classic Pixies, with Santiago providing some superb lead work over the rock solid  rhythm section.
The session concludes with the mini rap-rock of Subbacultcha, a heart warming mini-epic about how a pick up in a club can lead to a happy relationship, drug running in Panama.

Four albums in, The Pixies were still putting this brand of idiosyncratic rock together better than
anyone else.  Peel had interviewed Black Francis a few months before this programme at the time
that The Pixies album, Trompe Le Monde had been released.  He declared it one of the greatest albums he had ever heard and there were a number of reviews that took the same line.  Seemingly at
the peak of their powers, the world would surely be theirs as the 90s progressed.  Alas no.  Remember what I said about catching the fag end of things?  Well, it's happened again here.  Within two years of this show, the band had split.  Deal went off to concentrate on The Breeders, Francis worked on his solo career - they both feature on my 2002 tapes.  Eventually they reformed as the original quartet in 2004 and became a going concern as a touring band, before finally recording a follow-up to Trompe le Monde: 2014's Indie Cindy album.

Video courtesy of Vibracobra23

Oliver: Tony Rebel & Macka B - D.J. Unity (21 December 1991)

"I'm not sure I'd be happy in a world controlled by DJs."

The result of a collaboration between Jamaican deejay, Tony Rebel and Wolverhampton's own Macka B (Christopher Macfarlane), D.J. Unity starts out with footage of a sound system battle, possibly between Rebel and Shabba Ranks before the plea for collaboration and respect among its various practitioners leads to the proposed formation of the "D.J government".  If old Mr. Loverman isn't in the duel at the start of the track, he receives a namecheck as Minister for Family Planning, which may be entirely ironic given that I'm sure I read somewhere he was a prodigious spawner of little Lovermen and Lovergirls (please comment if he's only got one child and I'm barking up the wrong tree).  Cutty Ranks also gets in as Defence Minister.  It's a neat conceit, brilliantly performed, but the politics slightly trouble me given that one of the reasons for pulling together is to "Make the business prosper".  A statement which now, as then, sounds more Tory Party than Legalise It Party.

Video courtesy of 1dubplate.

Oliver: Public Enemy - By the Time I Get to Arizona (21 December 1991)

I always have a tendency to pick up on things just at the fag end of when they're happening.  Whether it's in fashion, technology or culture, I'll always end up keeping my distance until committing myself just at the point where whatever traction the thing has is slowing to a halt and then something else springs up to take its place.  It's now happening retrospectively.

With this blog taking late 1991 as its starting point, I've made a few interesting discoveries regarding some of the artists and scenes that Peel was playing at that time.  The most relevant to this post is that "the golden age" of rap and hip hop was coming to an end when Peel played this track on 21/12/91.  It may not be an exhaustive amount of reading to determine this but both Simon Reynolds in Retromania and Tim Grierson in Public Enemy: Inside the Terrordome have referenced 1987-91 as the genre's highpoint both from a thematic sense and the kid in a candy store mentality which saw unlimited sampling intermingled with a perfect fusion of MC and DJ in so many crews.  Gradually over the course of the 90s, oversampling became more expensive and the MC gained more prominence, altering the balance that made so many of the cuts and records from that first rush of releases so memorable.  That's their theory anyway, it will be interesting to see how Peel shows from subsequent years reflect that and how they affect my selections.

The sense of a golden age being brought to an end also applied in many people's eyes to Public Enemy by late 1991.  The release of their fourth album, Apocalypse 91...The Enemy Strikes Black has been regarded in wider critical circles as the last essential Public Enemy record, part of a continuum with their earlier releases: Yo! Bum Rush the Show, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet.  I haven't heard the complete Apocalypse 91.... yet, but according to Grierson, it's overall theme marked a shift away from examining how white repression has stifled black people from enjoying the same opportunities, instead it looked inward to how and why the black community had allowed this state of affairs to come about.  By the Time I Get to Arizona though was on more familiar ground, taking as its inspiration, the decision by the states of Arizona and New Hampshire not to have a public holiday to mark Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday. Using the riff from Mandrill's song Two Sisters of Mystery, Chuck D's response to this oversight is predictably incendiary: nothing less than assassination will do and this coming from a collective who were the antithesis of the gangster rap acts that would start to gain more of a foothold in the market after the "golden age" was over.  The riff is fed through the same kind of distortion that characterised Public Enemy's sound in the Nation of Millions...era; "Recording in the red" as Hank Shocklee put it. And this meant that even if the noise discomfited you, as Chuck D wanted it to, you were primed and ready for him to come over the top of it all and tell you the way it is.

This cut was promoted by a highly controversial video.  It was broadcast once on MTV in January 1992 and Chuck D found himself having to defend it on a number of American TV shows, usually being dragged in to do interviews at 5:30am by satellite because Public Enemy were on a European tour at the time.  Nevertheless, the controversy achieved its aims given that in November 1992, Arizona voters voted for the King holiday.  New Hampshire waited a further seven years before agreeing to it.

Tim Grierson's book is an interesting look at the whole of Public Enemy's career up to the present day.  In a happy accident of timing, they've released a new album this week: Man Plans, God Laughs.



Videos courtesy of R3dJerro and PublicEnemy.

Oliver: The Fall - A Lot of Wind (21 December 1991)

Having previously posted two vintage Fall tracks on this blog, A Lot of Wind is the first "contemporary" Fall track to be selected, having been recorded for their 1991 album, Shift-Work.  When I first heard it, I dismissed it as typical Mark E. Smith blether; only one lot of wind round here, mate, and it's coming from you.  Second time around though, it smacked me round the face with how good it was and how in step I am with his its thinking.  The panels on TV which Smith was at that time railing against were getting larger in number and shriller in voice.  The Internet has now made the wind into a typhoon (and I'm aware that I'm an isobar in that state of affairs).
With its pissed off lyrics and constantly chattering guitar/violin interplay, it would be perfectly fine on its own terms but the passing years have given extra layers of piquancy to Smith's observations of the weatherman who "used to teach all our friends".  Throw in sideswipes at This Morning and the "King of Granadaland", undoubtedly Tony Wilson, and it's all too easy to picture Smith grinding his way through a hangover and caught between the dead boredom of fragility and the prattle of experts on the "tragic lantern".  No wonder he has "antagonals" on his eyelids and is suffering nightmares.

The theme of A Lot of Wind got me remembering this from BBC 2's TV Hell night on August 31 1992, which we'll see Peel on eventually.  Did Danny Baker get the idea from Mark E.Smith, I wonder?



The track was the third out of the four selections for the 1991 Peelenium to be played on this night.

Videos courtesy of #TheFall and magus26.