Oliver: Curve - Horror Head (22 February 1992)

Geoff Travis, head of Rough Trade Records, once described Peel as "unpluggable".  There was no point in hustling him to play records by this band or that band - he would play what he wanted to play.  Peel admitted that this sometimes worked against him as major labels would decide against sending him records meaning he had to buy them together with the rest of us Joe Shmoes.
Nevertheless the perception that what went out on his show was his decision alone gave his verdict a greater degree of authenticity than other disc jockeys.

Another reason why record companies were wary of trying to pressure Peel to play their artists was his tendency to ride a coach and horses through their carefully laid plans. Whether it was playing the whole of Bob Dylan's 1975 album, Desire, the day before it was due to be exclusively played by Capital Radio, or abandoning his support of The White Stripes when their record company tried to tell him that he couldn't play tracks from their 2003 album, Elephant until they told him that he could,  Peel was no respecter of record company diktats.

Before playing this track from Curve's debut album, Peel ensured that the PR department at Anxious Records would have their heads in their hands when after reading out a press release which stated that     the Doppelgänger album would prove that not all Curve songs sounded the same, he stated that he wasn't entirely persuaded of this after listening to the record.  It's true that Horror Head is of a piece with a number of the other Curve songs on this blog, but it may be the best of its type, building as it does out of Toni Halliday's sweet opening vocalisations before bursting forward in an explosion of guitar pyrotechnics.  There would be plenty of opportunity to judge the degrees of similarity in Curve's album over the next couple of shows as Peel had tracks from it and a session from them booked in before the end of the month.  For myself, I'm just left wondering whether, when it came to naming their album, if anyone from Curve was a fan of Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

Video courtesy of Felix Stairs.

Oliver: The Aphex Twin - Digeridoo (22 February 1992)

"See, the problem is, the rest of the country thinks Britain stops at Plymouth" - every Cornish resident ever.

I loved living in Cornwall and was thrilled to grow up there.  While I always knew that there was something "other" about the place in relation to the rest of the UK, I was never a separatist.  Neither were many other people who lived there.  The quote at the top of the post was a fairly standard burst of frustration from a population that felt it was in a mutually distant relationship with the rest of the country.  Geographically this was unavoidable, but a lot of the time it felt like we were being left to rot in terms of wider British culture.  The Sex Pistols coming down to Penzance in secret was ancient history by the time I was a teenager. Not only were bands not coming down any more, but no one in Cornwall's music scene seemed to be getting onto the front page of the NME. I still remember feeling  a sense of indignation when Rootjoose, who were the band most tipped to break out from Cornwall got an album released and reviewed in Q magazine and were rewarded with a one star review.  Even Scatman John did better than that.

But that was 1997 and I was still a few years off realising that one man, originally based in Lanner, a granite strewn thoroughfare of a place between Falmouth and Redruth, had broken out and shaken things up massively in his field.  I just hadn't heard of him then, or I'd seen those fucked up pieces of sleeve art and hurried on to other things.

Richard D. James aka (The) Aphex Twin is without doubt Cornwall's best and most important contribution to British music of the last half-century.  He had been making his own records for a year previous to Peel playing Digeridoo on 22/2/92, which according to the John Peel wiki was the first time Peel had played him.  Peel loved the record but wondered how anyone could dance to it given its frenetic pace, up to 150 bpm.  He was unaware that James had recorded the track, almost to order from some of his friends who had been staging raves, as a floor clearer to get recalcitrant ravers to go home at the end of a long night.  Apparently, this track doesn't actually feature any digeridoos on it.  Nevertheless, there's a true sense of space and openness in it.  An aural Outback of shimmering heat haze and blood red sun, slowly rising.  You'll notice that the beat never fully drops, as you would expect from a piece of music designed to send its listeners out into the daylight after an evening's excess.  But it's that sense of anticipation, never fully realised, that makes this track so compelling.  Later described by Rolling Stone magazine as a formative influence in the birth of drum 'n' bass, this may well have been the most important record that Peel played all year.

I'd love to tell you of stories where I spent my teens/early 20s hanging out with Aphex Twin, dancing to his sets across the Cornish club scene, but it never happened.  Nevertheless, it gladdens my soul that if anyone was ever to say, "Cornwall did nothing for contemporary music", I could point out Aphex Twin and there would be no comeback to it.

For the definitive word on Aphex Twin and Cornwall's role in his music, I urge you to read this splendid piece by Laura Snapes.

Q seemed to hold their version of this song against them for some reason:



Videos courtesy of HouseMaster75 (The Aphex Twin) and Darren Curgenven (Rootjoose).

Oliver: Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps - Who Slapped John (22 February 1992)

Gene Vincent was maybe the width of an eyelash behind Captain Beefheart in any list of Peel's greatest musical heroes.  Certainly, he could lay claim to being the key influence on Peel's musical tastes, prior to him becoming a disc jockey.  There was no particular reason, not that there needed to be, for Peel to play Who Slapped John, beyond the fact it allowed him to link a Revolver session track called John's Not Mad.  To a near 16 year old who would still have been wearing out a parental copy of the soundtrack to That'll Be The Day, this would have been an automatic inclusion.

Video courtesy of Lilly Blue.

Oliver: Verve - All In The Mind (22 February 1992)

We're in to Smashing Pumpkins/The Smashing Pumpkins territory here, but given that Peel dropped them from his playlists before they added the definite article, I'll give Wigan's finest their initial name here and in subsequent blog titles.

If truth be told, I never really warmed to Richard Ashcroft and company.  The first I heard of them was when I read that they were celebrating the release of their 1995 sophomore album, A Northern Soul by splitting up.  "See ya then", I thought, but clearly I should have been listening more closely given that man of the moment, Noel Gallagher dedicated the best song on (What's The Story) Morning Glory to him.  However, when The Verve re-emerged in 1997 with Bittersweet Symphony, I recognised the quality while remaining resolutely disengaged throughout.  It took me a decade to get round to listening to Urban Hymns and I came out of it feeling the same way I felt after the last of the Harry Potter films had finished - glad to have experienced it but once was enough.  I think it was the fact that they looked like they were hating every minute of it which put me off.  A suspicion that seemed justified when they split again in 1999.
This time they did splitting up properly, waiting 8 years before coming together to make the album, Forth heralded by the fantastic Love is Noise, my favourite Verve track by some distance, for what it's worth.  Alas, having finally achieved their goal of making me actually love something that they had created, with no further worlds to conquer, The Verve split again.

Listening to All in the Mind, their first single, I can see why Love is Noise resonated with me in a way that Urban Hymns era Verve didn't.  While that record was made for sharing among the largest possible group of people as could hear it - notwithstanding the fact that it touches on troubling emotions and themes - All in the Mind is a much more intimate and disturbing piece of music. It's as far removed from 33,000 people at Haigh Hall as it's possible to get.  Despite starting out with the obligatory, for the time, feedback, it's antecedents feel closer to something like The House of Love rather than shoegaze.  The action takes place over the course of a decade, starting from the perspective of Ashcroft being picked up by a mystery woman, and mixes together several possible interpretations including childhood abduction and grooming given that it's five years from that initial car trip till the subjects becoming lovers and then the woman assumes a disturbing parental role.  Ashcroft sounds disarmingly young here, his vocal proceeding at a level just above a whisper for long periods allowing him to play both roles, before bursting out in the choruses.  The music too is equally unsettling, hinting at dark rituals and abuse especially in the Who-like Morse guitar solo, while the closing squall of feedback sounds uncomfortably like a child being dragged down to the cellar.  It manages to be both horrifying and weirdly sexy.  Compared to their later work, it's doubly effective at
50% of the fuss.

Video courtesy of emimusic.

Oliver: Otis Redding - There Goes My Baby (22 February 1992)

"Remember when you showed me that poster where you were top of the bill with Otis Redding at The Talk of the Town, London."
"It was Laurie London at The Talk of the Town, Reading!"
Only Fools and Horses - Stage Fright written by John Sullivan.

Peel was playing some intriguing sounding "unreleased recordings" compilations by prominent soul artists in late '91/early '92.  I'm still mourning the fact that 44 Long from the Rufus Thomas compilation, Can't Get Away From This Dog, which Peel played on 8/12/91 hasn't turned up yet for sharing.

This track was taken from a compilation of unreleased Redding recordings called It's Not Just Sentimental.  Listening to it, I can see why it didn't come out in Redding's lifetime - lyrically it peters out and there's a sense of "We may come back to this, later" about it by the end.  But the performance is irresistible with the Bar-Kays horn section in great form.  At the end Peel found himself having to mute the next track, Remember Me, when it crashed in over his back announcement.

Video courtesy of kaffehaken.

EDIT - well, I'm sorry about this folks, but as I'm sure you'll understand, I have no control over the activities of video uploaders on YouTube.  So only 72 hours of Otis Redding, but will you accept this original version of Love Mandarin by Cud which Peel played on 14/12/91 and which was pulled the day before I went to post about it.  Back with a selection which I can confidently predict will be going nowhere, at the weekend. xx



Video courtesy of Cud - Topic

Oliver: Revolver - Peel Session (22 February 1992)

Mixtaping is supposed to be easy.  Listen to tracks - those you like are kept, those you don't like are rejected.  At its root, it sounds simple, but every so often nuances crop up which leave you questioning your instinct, judgement and taste - while living with the spectre of the question that hangs over every mixtaper: why did I choose to preserve this?

Such has been the case with the band Revolver, formed in London, circa 1990 and their session for Peel recorded on September 12 1991.  Revolver have been chafing at my ears almost since I started this blog when Peel played the track, Drowning Inside on one of his November 1991 shows.  From its beautifully classical arpeggios through to the little key change towards the end of the song which made me think of the way my mid-90s band, Extraordinary, would try and do similar things in our songs to make them seem more harmonically interesting (unfortunately, we couldn't really do any of the things that Revolver would do before they reached their key changes, hence why we stayed in the garage while they went out and got signed and did Peel Sessions), 95% of my brain said in response to it, "This is a great pop song". But somehow the 5% going, "It's by the numbers indie" won out.  The same thing happened when I heard bits of their session on the 23/11/91 show.  In fact, the live version of Drowning Inside saw my brain capacity jump to 10% worth of derision.

It took until the repeat of the session on 22/2/92 for me to wake up and fully appreciate how good these tunes were.  These four tunes, at times, sound like what an electric guitar was made for.  There's grandeur, compassion, longing, empathy for the outsider and the disaffected in this music.  The third track, Wave, even manages to pull off that George Martin trick of creating sound pictures - the opening minute wonderfully evoking the approaching ocean as the listener lies waiting for it to break over you.  And once it does so, the restorative power of the waters has you up and running through the spray like you could swim forever. But just in case this all feels too elemental and ethereal, there's the brute force of instrumental session closer, John's Not Mad, which channels The Mono Men, The Stooges and the whole garage movement, though the excessive feedback wankery at the end almost spoils it for me.
And it's details like that which have meant that while trying to prepare this post, I've turned mental cartwheels and flip-flopped constantly over this session.  I've veered between liking none, half and all of the tracks.  The big problem has been Matt Flint's vocals.  In among this stirring, majestic, powerful musical background, they are either too nasal, too high or too whiny - but he can still floor me with lines like "The words just stumble out my mouth/I've never been upset by sounds" in session opener, Crimson.  A pean to awkward communication worthy of Daniel Johnston.  And even when he's straining for that key change in Drowning Inside, I can't help but think back to 1992 and know that the jump on "Lie on the ground with a light in my head" would be the template for my own doomed attempts to be a singer by the middle of the decade.  And I can only, ultimately, acknowledge
the unspoken debt, put the carping aside, and give in to a magnificent session.

Video courtesy of Vibracobra23

Oliver: Smith & Mighty - Too Late (22 February 1992)

Had I not been brought up in Falmouth, then Bristol would have done just as nicely for me.  Beautiful area around it, thriving city centre, easy to get out of and back into, situated perfectly when it comes to reaching the rest of the country, plenty of sport to get interested in and a wonderfully diverse cultural scene - not least its music scene.

In the 90s, the focus on Bristol's music scene began to shift away from Snakebite quaffing heavy-metal biker band cliche and onto a strain of dance music that sold by the shedload, made stars of its leading exponents and which produced some sounds which by their very texture and tone could have come for nowhere else but the M5/M4 interchange.  However, we're still a few years away from the word, "trip hop" making its presence known.  Instead, Smith & Mighty, who knew all the right people in Bristol, but who never quite got the same exposure, serve up a delightfully eclectic mix that while fusing together Lynchian style drones, horror movie vibes, Florida Soul and more, sticks to one of the fundamental but little known rules of music: there isn't a record in the world that can't be made even better by sampling This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both of Us by Sparks.



Videos courtesy of Anonymous (Smith & Mighty) and Sparks.