Equus: Action Painting! - Sensation No.5 (26 March 1993)

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In prepping this post, I’ve spent most of the morning listening to the music of Gosport band, Action Painting!, who put out 3 singles on Sarah Records between 1990 & 1993.  By quite some distance, Sensation No.5 is the least distinguished and interesting of the tracks I heard. In it, Action Painting! replace their usual acerbic storytelling style, with a simple count-up of sensations from No. 1 to No. 10, before rounding the lists off with 2 separate tag-lines. It doesn’t seem as though the band rated the tune much either, given that they left it off their 2018 compilation, Trial Cuts (1989-95).

So why have I included it? In large part, down to assumptions that I made while browsing the photos on the Classical Music EP, which Sensation No.5 was part of. 

To my eyes, the band all looked like they were barely out of school when they recorded it, with several of them parading ferocious early-90s fringes, which disprove the theory that nothing has changed in English grooming over the last 30 years. With these images in mind, I heard the count through the sensations ending in the respective taglines of All the girls around you scream to me and then All the boys around you smile at me suggesting one of two things for what the song was about:

a) A tour through a drug trip, with there being 10 levels of sensation/consciousness to go through. The girls can’t hack it; the boys just feel blissed throughout. The song ends on Sensation No.1, which suggests everyone has reached the comedown point.

b) The more interesting interpretation is that the sensations refer to burgeoning sexual experiences and the progression from kissing to touching and then the building senses of intimacy that end with sexual intercourse and orgasm. For the girls this leads to screams of pleasure (or pain), for the boys it leads to smiles of pleasure.

It’s also possible that the singer is supplying these sensations to both genders, thus lending the song a bisexual subtext, or it could be a treatise on puberty and the move from childhood to adulthood. For the girls, this includes menstruation with all its physical and psychological pains - hence why all the girls scream. For the boys, this leads to masturbation followed by more masturbation and for the lucky ones, sexual experience with another person.  No wonder they’re smiling.

I suspect it’s actually drug related, especially given that this 2018 Louder Than War Interview with frontman Andy Hitchcock suggests that the band members were well past puberty by the time they started their work as a band.  Nevertheless, the fact that something which sounds like nothing more than a band-warmup could provoke so many theories in my mind as to what it was about suggests that there was genius at work, even in Action Painting!’s offcuts which would deserve to be preserved on any metaphorical mixtape.

Lyrics copyright of their authors.

Video courtesy of Nicolas.

Equus: Guided By Voices - Weedking (26 March 1993)

 

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When it comes to Guided by Voices, John Peel and I both have something in common. Namely, we discovered them a long time after everybody else. In my case, this ignorance was far longer than Peel’s had been. In the summer of 2001, during a spree of record buying, I bought a compilation CD called The Sound City Sessions, which had originally been given away in an October 1999 edition of Melody Maker. It showcased bands who had, at various times over the course of the 90s, played as part of Radio 1’s Sound City event, which was a precursor to their Big Weekend event. 

Some of the performances on the CD were taken from the artists’ sets at Sound City gigs, including Oasis at Glasgow in 1994 and a performance of Supersonic, where the engineers put Noel Gallagher’s lead guitar so low in the mix that the whole performance is carried by Paul Arthurs’s rhythm guitar. We also got Garbage performing Dumb at Leeds in 1996, Reef performing End at Bristol in 1995, Travis performing Hazy Shades of Gold at Oxford in 1997 and future Peel favourites Ash performing Jack Names the Planets at Leeds in ‘96. As far as I’m concerned, the CD justifies its existence because its tracklisting includes Gangsters by Longpigs, but it also introduced me to Guided by Voices who were due to perform at the Sound City event being held in October ‘99 at Liverpool. The track they had on there was Teenage FBI, which I thought was OK, but didn’t really inspire me to go much further given that it appeared to be modelling itself on the work of The Supernaturals.  In my ignorance, I assumed that Guided by Voices were a “new” late-90s band who hadn’t got further than the stereo in the Melody Maker office. It was only in subsequent years that I discovered just how far back they went - formed in 1983, first records released in the mid-80s - and, indeed, they had been so busy and productive that by the time Peel discovered them around February 1993, they had retired from live performances and were onto their fifth album, Propeller, from which Weedking was taken.

I was also to discover that the sound on Teenage FBI and its accompanying album, Do the Collapse, were considered to be unrepresentative of what a Guided by Voices record “should” sound like. If someone had played Weedking and Teenage FBI to me in 2001 and asked me to guess who they were by, I would have probably answered with two different bands.  Teenage FBI sounds glossy, shiny and hopeful of getting the listener’s attention, but Weedking sounds monolithic, slightly prog and mythical.  It’s quite the trick to go from sounding like grizzled rockers to preppy pop stars in 7 years, but having listened to both the Propeller and Do the Collapse LPs over the last two days, they both share what I consider to be core elements of Guided By Voices music:

1) Psychedelic poetry which tells the listener nothing specific, but somehow transports them to the place, time and emotion that their tracks are set in.

2) A sense that everything they put out is considered, solid and complete. Propeller features maybe half a dozen tracks that could have fit in next to the smoothly produced tracks on Do the Collapse. The rest of its content is lo-fi, sketchy and immediate. As if the band set their 4-track to record wherever they were, grabbed the instrument closet to them, and recorded the song. But although the recordings may feel haphazard, the songs themselves never seem unfinished or ill-fitting. It’s as if they instinctively know which tracks need extensive colouring/layering and which can be presented in a basic form. Regardless, the songs are ready for you to hear.*

As far as 1) goes, for me Weedking sounds as though it is a song about the thrill of discovering rock music and the even greater thrill of being able to play it. Robert Pollard spent part of his mid-1970s teens playing in a heavy metal covers band and going to concerts. The titans of heavy metal guitar playing, as referenced in the opening verse, appear to inspire Pollard - We conjure ghosts and then we feed them - and the remainder of the song sounds like a procession through the joy of making music, improving your ability, hanging out with friends and like-minded people, going to shows until the musicians reach their logical endpoint: lighting up a joint and using it to set a state of mind from which to create music and sing your songs.

For the dreams of the weedking, we all sing.

It’s also possible that the song was meant as a farewell to rock music. Over the course of a decade, Guided by Voices had struggled to attract much interest, and by the time they came to record the Propeller LP, they had quit live performance and were putting out Propeller as a farewell record. Just in time, the record picked up some attention and Guided by Voices carried on into the present day.

Video courtesy of stonedcomedianringo.

Lyrics are copyright of Robert Pollard.

*I appreciate that I’ve only heard 2 out of 40 studio albums that the band have put out, so if you do know of examples in their discography where they’ve succumbed to a “that’ll do” sensibility, please leave a comment.

Equus: 70 Gwen Party - Auto Killer UK (26 March 1993)

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CAUTION - The uploader of this video not only shares his name with one of Ipswich Town’s greatest ever players (wouldn’t it be terrific if it was the man himself), but they have also bought into the doomy, ominous nature of Auto Killer UK itself by using it to soundtrack scenes from Kinji Fukasaku’s 2000 film, Battle Royale, which features a lot of explicit if muddily visible violence. So, you may prefer to start the video and then open a fresh tab to have it playing along in the background.

Peel played Auto Killer UK on this show because it had come in at Number 28 on The Phantom Fifty. It is presented here for reasons of completeness, not least because I had more to say about the track when 70 Gwen Party performed it as part of a Peel Session, broadcast on 20 June 1992.

Video courtesy of johnwark.

Equus: John + Julie - Red Alert [2] (26 March 1993)

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A quick question for you before we go any further; on your first listen to Red Alert [2], do you think that the spoken word sample is saying “Where’s the money?”  I did, and initially had plans to write about how this track seemed to combine techno tropes with a noir sensibility. But then I heard it again and realised that it said “Red alert” instead and that its sensibility was decidedly futuristic.

John + Julie was an alter-ego of the husband and wife team of Michael Wells and Lee Newman. Red Alert was the final record they put out under that monicker and contained three different versions. Red Alert [1] and [2] are very similar to one another, albeit [2] is taken at a faster pace while [1] flirts with trance music. 

Red Alert [3] is the least commercial sounding of the 3 and has a more hardcore, tribal edge to it.

Peel did indeed play Red Alert [2] while sitting in for Jakki Brambles on Thursday 8 April 1993.

Wells and Newman may have finished with John + Julie, but as was their way, they went on to many other projects and aliases, the best known of which was probably Technohead who enjoyed a Top 10 hit with a remixed version of I Wanna Be a Hippy in early 1996. Discogs lists at least 11 separate projects that they worked on, and who knows how many more there may have been but for Newman’s premature death from cancer in 1995.

 

Video courtesy of Webbie, taken directly from Peel’s 26/3/93 show.

Equus: Marxman - Do You Crave Mystique (26 March 1993)

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This anti-drug screed from the Anglo/Irish hip hop crew, Marxman, is a beauty. I’ve been caning it since the weekend simply because it’s one of those instances where everything about it just seems right. From the brilliance of the arrangement through to the lyricism of the storytelling, whereby across four verses, we’re taken on the journey of:

1) Newly minted drug dealers who revel in the influence and contacts their new business brings them.

2) Feckless institutions, such as universities, which allow drugs to be bought and sold on their premises. Meanwhile, the rap community itself, despite its own entreaties to its audience to stay clear of drugs, has also allowed Crack to enter its bloodstream both as a recreation and a business opportunity.

3) Drug addicts who see their lives start to shrivel up in front of them as they damage themselves and alienate their families.

4) The concerned circle of friends who come to mourn their drug dealer/addict friend who has over-reached himself and ended up dead. The only thing worse than the death is the way in which the lifestyle has influenced their younger brother who wants to follow in big brother’s footsteps and perpetuate the cycle of  bling, illegality, degradation and ultimately death.

They may be straying on to the turf of Scarface, but Marxman more than match him with Do You Crave Mystique. My only complaint is that all that proximity to drugs may have had something to do with them not including a question mark on the end of the title. Music can be such a force for good, but its sloppiness towards using accurate punctuation remains one of its principal blindspots.

Video courtesy of John Ryan.

Equus: Trumans Water - Speeds Exceeding (26 March 1993)

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I’m currently up to June 1993 in my Peel Show listening and one of my takeaways from the year so far is that the San Diego band, Trumans Water were possibly Peel’s favourite band of the period. He’d fallen hard for them the previous year and gave tracks from their album, Of Thick Tum, heavy exposure on his programmes through September 1992. I’ve missed all of that because I wasn’t involved in any shows at that time, so there was no opportunity to blog about them.

By March 1993, Peel was like an over-excited child waiting for Christmas morning. Coming into this 26/3/93 show, he had spent 3 weeks waiting for permission from Elemental Records to be able to play tracks from Trumans Water’s new album, Spasm Smash XXXOXoX Ox & Ass, only to hear nothing from the label. Tonight, he lost patience and played Speeds Exceeding and in the process introduced me to a band who when I’ve found them good, have been great; and when I’ve found them bad, have been unbearable.

Stylistically, Trumans Water put me in mind of a faster, punkier version of both The Happy Flowers and Wckr Spgt. Their songs are the sound of utter human desperation, pinning the listener against the wall and frantically screaming their sentiments into your face because if they don’t do it that way, you won’t get it. And if you don’t get it, then there’s a very real chance that the band will mentally collapse into a sobbing heap in your arms.  It’s not surprising that as I’ve heard most of their music through the spring and early summer of Peel’s 1993 playlists, anything of theirs which has made my shortlists for inclusion here has usually had a question mark next to it. Speeds Exceeding didn’t though.

In large part, I think it’s because they chose to base the thrust of the song’s melody around one which sounds like a close cousin to You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine. That’s always a good start in  terms of drawing people in to a song.  Lyrically, Speeds Exceeding reads like a conversation between the philosophies of both the younger and older generation in America. The lines tumbling over each other like quick replies to the other’s assertions. The older generation believing that the country needs to be saved (where have we heard that before?) while the younger generation claim to be ignorant of the needs of the country and commit themselves to pleasure, mainly because the previous generation have left them nothing to build on. This could have been a reflection of the American political mindset in late 1992 as the    70 & 60 something presidencies of Reagan and Bush Mk I were succeeded by the youthful mid-40s new broom of Bill Clinton. Though it feels that the older generation felt it meant America was going to Hell in a handcart, while the younger generation felt that nothing would really change. That being said, the political subtext starts to get lost when the song reaches its slow movement at 1:38.

For John Peel, Trumans Water were not a passing fancy. They were astonishingly productive, with at least 5 albums coming out on a variety of labels across 1993 and into 1994.  They have remained active well into the 21st Century and Peel was playing material by them up until the year before he died. They’re likely to have me putting question marks down against their name for a long while to come.

Video courtesy of vanwolf2.

Equus: 81 Mulberry - Ephedrine (26 March 1993)

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So much of what is going on with both this band and this track is guesswork. Although hailing from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, did 81 Mulberry name themselves after the Mulberry Island Plantation in Stoneville, NC?  Has this track been called Ephedrine because its properties as a remedy for hay fever allow the band to link it to the track’s themes of urban suffocation? Or is it an allusion to its possible use as an amphetamine, which ties it to the line about killing at 2:10. They give so little away about themselves.

All of it is guesswork because the vocals have been mixed in such a way that even when the singer is screaming his head off, it’s a struggle to fully catch what’s being sung. Even when the band re-recorded Ephedrine in a less lo-fi manner for their 1995 album, Drive Shaft to Culdesac, it’s clear that getting a clean vocal wasn’t on anyone’s list of priorities. As a result, Ephedrine ends up being one of those most frustrating of things to blog about: a track I really like, but would struggle to explain why because of the lack of clarity in what the lyrics are telling us. 

This post should have gone up earlier in the week, but I held off on putting it up after I saw that someone claiming to be 81 Mulberry’s drummer had popped up in the YouTube comments of C Geoffrey Taylor’s upload, albeit from 6 years ago. I asked them them whether the song touched on any of the following perspectives:

- Disenchantment with school. (missing class line at 0.22, and I think that the opening line complains about struggling with maths.)

- Someone feeling suffocated by their domestic environment.  (The same streetlights on/First I’ve got to run between 0:31 and 0:38.)

- Whether the second half of the song was told from the point of view of a school shooter. (See first paragraph.)

I gave them until today to get back to me. I knew it was a long shot and indeed I found out that not everyone is Col from Mr. Ray’s Wig World, so it looks as though - until I hear differently - we can say that Ephedrine is about all the things I mentioned above.

Video courtesy of C Geoffrey Taylor