Coming on as a stroppy hybrid of Huggy Bear and Mambo Taxi, Voodoo Queens were quite a fancy of Peel’s around this time. They recorded three sessions for him between January 1993 and February 1994. Peel may well have been taken both by their music and the fact that one of their guitarists shared a name with a track from one of Peel’s favourite albums.
The resemblance to Mambo Taxi isn’t a huge shock as both Ella Guru and Anjali Bhatia left that group in order to form Voodoo Queens. I have to compare Supermodel-Superficial to Mambo Taxi’s song, Prom Queen, which both Bhatia and Guru played on, and which I changed my mind on including on the metaphorical mixtape when making selections from Peel’s show from 30/1/93. Supermodel-Superficial is an improvement on Prom Queen, because its ire is better directed. While not being a direct attack on supermodels themselves, it instead tears to shreds the lifestyle orthodoxy that was forming around the cult of the supermodel and which was being pushed on to young girls as a desirable way of looking and living.
Whose role models do you really think you are?
Young girls that make themselves sick.
Feel guilty for being size 14
Living in their self hate.
This all slightly predates the size zero controversies - indeed my principal memory of 1990s supermodels is that they were slim rather than thin, though Kate Moss veered dangerously close - but Voodoo Queens can see the direction of travel that things are moving in and they call bullshit on it here.
It all makes me wish that Voodoo Queens had lived long enough to take on some of the things which that journey brought into our lives in subsequent years such as It girls, reality TV stars, influencers and OnlyFans.
I think that this may be the best song about money ever written. I’d wager that it isn’t the first track anyone would think of when asked to name a cash centred song, but, to use a Peelism, in a decently ordered society, Dollars by Bajja Jedd (Dwane Jarvis) would be a global anthem.
I appreciate that venerating a song with a title like Dollars in such a fashion may make you feel queasy if you haven’t heard it, but the great thing about it is that it manages to be both admirably practical about why money is important, but does so without ever succumbing to greed is good vulgarity. The song isn’t about materialism, but rather more about how money can improve the lives, hopes and chances of those in the ghetto and more widely. It takes in class, charity, how working the low paid job can offer a foundation to a better future (Remember where you coming from and where you’re going). It acknowledges that the pursuit of money can lead to crime and that the distribution of money is not an easy task, indeed the earliest lines acknowledge that if God made Man to be equal, then Man made money so as to divide the people into classes, where some have more than others.
Dollars speaks to those in the lower and middle classes, while reserving a few tart lines for those who have become rich and stopped caring. This is key to the theme of the track: the pursuit of money for the betterment both of the individual and society. Dollars ends up celebrating two dirty words - money and socialism.
Some of the sentiments here are not new, Money (That’s What I Want), recorded 34 years before Dollars made it clear that without money, love and community were not enough. But whereas Money always seemed like a tantrum track about not having enough and wanting more, RIGHT NOW, Dollars manages to be empathetic and aspirational. I suspect that first adjective is why no political party would ever go near it for use as a campaign song.
So far, The Werefrogs have provided me with my second favourite track played by Peel in 1992 and a requiem for an ailing great aunt. Had I known about them at the time, I’d have been championing them to anyone who listened, and I know that I would have been in a state of keen excitement when they released their album, Swing. I can only be grateful that I lived in ignorance back then, and didn’t have to suffer the realisation that this beguiling band were not going to survive beyond 1993.
Listening to Potvan, which like Nixie Concussion, had been released as a single from the album, albeit as Peel reported, on pink vinyl, you don’t hear a band seemingly coming to the end of its time. It could be though that they were trying to warn us not to get too upset should anything happen to them through the line, Wipe the tears off your shoulder, everyone which serves as the chorus line on Potvan.
The title appears to be a creation of its authors, as I can find no reference to what a potvan is. I suspect that it may be a hiding in plain sight drug reference given that the song contains wonderfully psychedelic lines like Ride all alone and the nowheres are on board/Lean out the window but I don’t know how to fly/ But it’s all on Dior(?) till he finds me once again/ And that sound in your eyes doesn’t tell me how to fly.
There’s more in the same vein in later verses, and lyrically, it comes off sounding like something which clearly made sense to whoever wrote it down at the moment they thought of it. No revisions, no second thoughts, just crank up the guitars and let Marc Wolf loose with a vocal set to “keening.” I like it, and it’s a nice tune, but the window dressing doesn’t disguise the fundamental vision of a stoned man driving at 5mph which seems to be the force that drove this song into being.
Formed as a side project by members of Steel Pole Bath Tub, Milk Cult released four albums of electronic-rock-avant garde music between 1992 and 2000. Peel approached their debut album, Love God with a degree of distance regarding it as strange as anything I’ve ever heard. He felt that Tuesday was the most accessible track on the album and given that most of it seems to take place within a Formula 1 pit lane, I can see why it appealed to him.
Tuesday will give you a flavour of what to expect from the Love God album: plenty of found sound, genuine industrial noise (engines starting etc), short bursts of rock and excursions into more atmospheric soundscapes. I’m thinking in particular of the two minute ghostly piano/melodica duet which starts at 1:20 and sounds like it’s being played in an abandoned factory. It’s all a bit of a hodge-podge but it hangs together surprisingly well.
Peel gave his listeners something of a potted review of the Love God album, talking in particular about its centrepiece: There’s a 38 minute track on there which I seriously doubt anyone will ever listen to in its entirety. He was was talking about the six-track suite called Clown Party which makes up the second half of the album. I took him up on the challenge and listened to the LP yesterday. I disagree with him that Tuesday was the most accessible track on the album, I think that the title track would be worth an airing, despite its near 11 minute running time. However, Peel was spot on about Clown Party, a title which conjures disturbing images of Pennywise and friends causing havoc, but which ends up being six tracks of repetitive tedium, albeit there are several moments where it sounds like the band are about to start playing Eye of the Tiger. Overall, on Love God, there’s nothing to frighten the horses, but there isn’t much to exhilarate anyone either.
Elements of Trance were a Los Angeles based techno duo made up of Justin King and Ian Rich. The C-Level mix of A Taste of Your Own Medicine puts me in mind of Date M by The Traveller, especially the street percussion. However, I think that the Flammable 6AM and Midi-Evil mixes are both better.
Up to now, all of the productions that this blog has soundtracked took place either in a school or college setting. The next year or two will see the soundtracking of the first production I did with a local amateur dramatics group.
Staging their first production in 1982, Falmouth’s Young Generation were formed as a youth-orientated offshoot of Falmouth Amateur Operatic Society - now known as Falmouth Theatre Company. They always staged one major musical in August of each year, though occasionally staged other productions at Christmas time and were open for any young person to join if they were aged between 10 & 20.
I had flirted with the idea of joining the Young Generation in the late 1980s, but it wasn’t until I was on a BTEC Performing Arts Course with a number of members of the group that I got involved with them. For the majority of those members, YG’s 1993 show, Guys and Dolls represented the opportunity of a last hurrah with the company as they were nearing the maximum age limit. I would be 17 when the show was staged, and felt I was now at the right age to get involved, with pre-teen shyness no longer an issue. It also presented itself as a great opportunity to continue socialising, not just with people that I knew, but to expand my circle of friends even further. It made sense from a drama standpoint too. Having done Shakespeare plays and a contemporary drama since my last musical, I was happy to do another one having had the opportunity to try some other types of production over the last year.
Throughout January and early February 1993, I attended the pre-audition meetings at which we were played and sang along to the various songs, and also read scenes from the script. Adapted from two short stories by Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls is a tale of gamblers, religious missionaries, Broadway showgirls and gangsters. It’s packed with great songs and a snappy script, and within those first few pre-audition sessions I knew that I wanted to be part of this show, because I genuinely liked it. In subsequent years, there were a couple of YG shows which I did more for the beer and company than for the material, but Guys and Dolls still felt fresh, vital and fun, even 43 years after its first production. I was targeting the role of Nathan Detroit, who runs a floating craps game around New York City, but I wasn’t especially disappointed to be cast as one of his lieutenants, Benny Southstreet, which was a decent supporting role who was part of several songs including the title song.
If things had worked out as they were supposed to have done, this blog would now be soundtracking an original play called Echoing Steps. During the spring ‘93 term, those students on my performing arts course who were not involved in Equus or Top Girls, spent their time working on developing a community play about bygone Falmouth, which we were due to stage at Falmouth Arts Centre in June. I think around 6 people were working on it - 2 of whom genuinely could not stand each other. The Echoing Steps team, along with the cast of Top Girls, felt unsupported in their work by the course administrator. The college listened to these complaints and made two decisions which affected the balance of the course:
1) The administrator, David Gregg, was replaced as head of the course by the one of the senior tutors, Gerry Finch. This took place in April 1993.
2) With the college starting to take in applications for the next year of learners who were intending to join the BTEC course for two years from the start of the 1993/94 academic year, the whole course would be run out of the college campus in Pool, near Camborne, from September 1993. This made logistical sense because there was far more space there to be able to run classes for two years’ worth of students. There was also an in-built performance space at the campus called the Trevenson Theatre, though curiously, we still ended up doing our productions at Falmouth Arts Centre. As future posts will show, this was an arrangement which had some benefits to me when they first started, but it would soon pall very badly as time went on.
David Gregg wasn’t the only casualty of the upheaval, so was Echoing Steps. In large part this was due to several of the people involved in putting it together, dropping out of the course when the Summer term started. From a starting position of around 35 students in September 1992, around half that number had left by the 6 month mark. The people remaining who had been working on Echoing Steps admitted that they had nothing concrete to offer us to begin working on, and the course changed from one which incorporated classes looking at different aspects of drama running alongside work on end of term productions, to a course that was concerned purely with classes.
Echoing Steps in June ‘93, should have been followed by a pantomime in December ‘93 and then 2 shows chosen by the group for March ‘94 and June ‘94 respectively. All of that, except for the June ‘94 production, went out of the window with the restructuring of the course. It could have been excruciatingly boring for me, but thankfully I had the local drama scene to save me, and before Castaway Theatre Company next found itself on a stage, I had done 5 further productions including Broadway musicals, revue, Restoration comedy, pantomime and 20th Century historical adaptation. Those will form the basis of the next decade or so of this blog.
The first selection for Guys and Dolls comes at the end of a week in which Peel clocked up one of his highest number of on-air hours, since his days on The Perfumed Garden. Between his week of lunchtime cover for Jakki Brambles and his own shows on Friday 9 and Saturday 10 April, Peel spent just under 18 hours broadcasting on Radio 1.
He ended his 9/4/93 evening show by playing what may be the only non-country tinged track released by The International Submarine Band. Sum Up Broke was issued as a single in 1966 by the first iteration of the band and co-written by lead guitarist, John Nuese and future Byrd/Flying Burrito Brother, Gram Parsons. His future influence on The Byrds during his brief stint with them in 1968 is widely known*, but in 1966, they seemed to be influencing him and Nuese. The beefed up jangle in the guitars sounds like the ISB’s stab at raga rock, while the lyrics walk a line between general vacuity and Rolling Stones style kiss off to a girl whose time is up.
The single wasn’t a hit, and Parsons decided that he wanted to push the International Submarine Band exclusively towards a country sound. Nuese and himself hooked up with a new bassist and drummer, and Parsons would go on a lifetime’s musical journey over the course of the next seven years. It would cost him his life, but on the evidence of what followed, he did at least manage to produce compelling evidence of the “cosmic country music” he felt that he was put on earth to make.
*If you don’t know, read this and then start buying up every record on which Parsons played a substantial part, you won’t regret it.
This was the last of the Jakki Brambles cover shows that I listened to. The show on Friday 9 April was split into a series of smaller, shorter files, and as I’d got the point by the Thursday, I was content to skip that one and go onto Peel’s Friday evening show, which will serve as the starting point to soundtrack my next production, Guys and Dolls.
Compared to shows from earlier in the week, there’s less records to get enthused about and little in the way of extraneous excitement too. I felt that this programme saw Peel lumbered with the worst record that he had to play from the daytime playlist, Still in Love by Go West, which didn’t do much with the record buying public either, as it stalled at Number 43 on the UK charts.
Peel’s selections for today included Split Personality by dc Basehead, which moved one of Brambles’s production team to note that it sounded like The Smurf Song, and I have to say, I think they were on to something there.
Selections I would have included on the metaphorical mixtape, would have been:
The Fall - Lost in Music
Video courtesy of The Fall
We live in challenging times. A couple of weeks ago, I heard people throwing around the threat of nuclear war because of the latest hardware use developments in the Ukraine War as casually as the threat to clamp a car which had parked in a residents only area. The potential saviour in all this is supposed to be Donald Trump, presumably once he’s finished being a dictator on day 1 of his return to the US presidency; a reminder that January really can suck. And to compound the feeling of depression and desolation, The Annotated Fall website has been deleted! A consolation is that the deletion has been a surprise to the person running it, so hopefully it will be back up and running again soon. I certainly hope so as the prospect of having to decipher Mark E. Smith’s lyrics, without assistance, fills me with gloom.
Thankfully, little verbal safecracking is required here in The Fall’s splendid cover of Lost in Music. Originally, a hit for Sister Sledge in 1979, it was recorded by The Fall for their new album, The Infotainment Scan. This recording also features The Fall making use of an instrument which they seemed to utilise more effectively than any other artist: the answerphone. In The Birmingham School of Business School, Smith used it demonstrate how underwhelmed he was by the performance of the band’s manager. Here, the answerphone is used to set the track up with Smith getting through to a French woman and leaving a typically cryptic message, partially in French but also noting that “The palace of excess is the palace of access.” I had initially considered this version to be fairly faithful in spirit to the original, albeit with Smith’s brief digressions on refurbished pubs serving as a reminder that disco night in Prestwich was a million miles away in spirit from a night at Wigan Casino. But listening to it more closely, I think the key to this version is the cacophony of telephone voices chirping away in the background through the first half of the song. The music that Smith gets lost in is the symphony of voices and lives that he overhears while working at a telephone exchange. Or maybe he had an old TV set like I did in the late 1980s which if you hit the channel buttons incorrectly, would go to static, but be able to pick up on telephone conversations. I listened to some absolutely blazing rows and breakups on occasion.
The track is bookended by an odd sound effect which sounds as though The Fall are being absorbed into the tripods from The War of the Worlds, but here reflects the way that the prattle of modern life can overwhelm us.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Day Tripper [Top Gear Session]
Video courtesy of belfastorbust.
Recorded by The Jimi Hendrix Experience for Top Gear on 15 December 1967, for broadcast on the Christmas Eve edition, which Peel co-hosted with Tommy Vance, this was played by Peel, 26 years later, as his segue out of a traffic bulletin. We actually get one and a quarter Beatles covers for our money here, as the opening seconds catch the band playing the riff from I Want to Tell You. Once Hendrix chocks into the Day Tripper riff, the Experience make the track their own. It’s a genuine band performance as well given that large parts of the vocals are handled either by a double-tracked Noel Redding or with support from Mitch Mitchell. Debate has always raged as to whether The Beatles original was written about weekend hippies or a sexual tease. The Experience make it into a full-on acid anthem, but bring it back to Earth within 3 and a half minutes. I’ve always been slightly ambivalent towards Hendrix as I think that his, and Eric Clapton’s virtuosity opened the door to a lot of self-indulgent guitar rock, but here he sounds just what he was in 1967 - the most exciting musician of the year.
Jamiroquai - Too Young to Die
Video courtesy of JamiroquaiVEVO
Hearing the opening string riff at the start of Too Young to Die engendered in me the same ecstatic reaction that I felt when hearing the opening scat vocals on When I’m Good and Ready by Sybil. Indeed, the only thing to surpass that is the “doo doo do doo” chorus on this. I’d forgotten all about just how excited I was by Too Young to Die when it came out, and how intrigued I was by Jamiroquai when they first appeared. In fairness, they weren’t doing anything that the likes of Back to the Planet or Levellers weren’t already covering in terms of issues and subject matter, but they sounded absolutely divine.
Musically, Too Young to Die is packed with ideas that sweep you along. We’re greeted at the door by strings, a blast of slinky brass takes our coat, there are gorgeous keyboard lines spiralling down from the sky above you, funk basslines tracing every step you make across the floor, subtle wah-wah guitar kissing your ears. And enveloping the whole thing, the reincarnation of Stevie Wonder delivering an updated version of Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology). No wonder they stood out like a beacon of brilliance at the time.
All that being said, this track was as far as my admiration for them went. Something restrained me from buying the Emergency on Planet Earth album. I felt somehow that the sumptuous excess of Too Young to Die would pall if stretched to LP length. I was also looking for pop stars that I could relate to as well, and there was something about Jay Kay and those extraordinary hats of his which felt distancing. Then Britpop happened and gave me what I was looking for both musically and socially, so Jamiroquai dropped off my radar. Not literally of course given some of the enormous hits they had in the second half of the 90s, but none of Cosmic Girl/Deeper Underground etc ever felt as involving as Too Young to Die.
Mica Paris - I Never Felt Like This Before
Video courtesy of CharmeMusicAmbire.
I was reading recently that a couple of pop stars who made their names in the mid to late Noughties, are now using OnlyFans accounts to top up their finances. Kate Nash is using money raised from selling pictures of her bottom to subsidise costs for her next tour. Meanwhile, Lily Allen is using it to sell pictures of her feet. It got me thinking that when times get hard for female pop stars, there’s always nudity to fall back on. In Mica Paris’s case, she didn’t have the ease of access to an OnlyFans account, instead she had to take part in a television programme. Do you remember that she co-hosted What Not to Wear in its final two series? I think it was on that show that I saw her sit down to have lunch with the partner of one of the women that the show was helping. Nothing out of the ordinary about that, except for some reason Paris and the partner were lunching in the nude, albeit with tastefully arranged table settings preserving her modesty.
I wonder whether, during a break in filming, Paris’s mind drifted back to memories of recording videos in the Caribbean, as was the case with I Never Felt Like This Before, instead of sitting, topless, in a semi-detached house in Bromsgrove, having lunch with the partner of a woman with terrible dress sense. The fall from the pop heights always seems to take female performers to less edifying new gigs than it does to the male ones, doesn’t it?
Let Loose - Crazy For You
Video courtesy of Mark Remington
The Man Ezeke had taken his Radio 1 Easter egg hunt to Luton today. Indeed, the one thing I regret about not listening to Peel’s final show covering for Brambles, is that I don’t know where Ezeke finished his Easter egg tour on Good Friday, or whether he went all the way through to Easter Monday. This itinerary would have been possible surely:
Friday - Portsmouth
Saturday - Bristol
Sunday - Plymouth
Monday - Penzance
Any Cornish readers will, naturally be scoffing at that last destination. Radio 1 brought its roadshow to several Cornish towns, including my hometown on a couple of occasions, but they would never have bothered to pop down past the Tamar Bridge unless they were properly making a morning of it. The thought of, say Shampoo - shortly to feature on Peel’s night time playlists - hoicking themselves down to St Austell for Ezeke to ask them their names and what they did seems absurd.
Nevertheless, Let Loose dutifully trooped up to Luton in order to get their debut single, Crazy For You, played on the radio. This is the original version of it, which opens with a brief scat rap instead of the better known piano hook. The trip worked out slightly better for Let Loose than it had for Oui 3 the previous day, given that this version only just missed out on a Top 40 placing. Crazy For You was palpably the best record played in any of the Ezeke slots that I heard, and this was born out when a re-issue of it, with the piano more heavily prominent, got to Number 2 in the UK charts, a year later. This would start Let Loose off on a brief, intense, but very successful career.
Had I been asked to contribute to any of the 30 year retrospectives on British pop music in 1994, I’d have used my 750 words to put forward my thesis that if Oasis represented the 1966 Beatles in ‘94, then Let Loose represented the 1964 Beatles in ‘94. After all, they were hailed as the teenypop band that played their own instruments - and watching the videos has given me bad flashbacks as to how much I used to get irritated by drummer Lee Murray’s right-hand drumstick twirl - and I could comfortably see Crazy For You nestling onto A Hard Day’s Night or Beatles For Sale. The theory falls down though when we consider that in 1994, Oasis were as much Beatles ‘63 as they were Beatles ‘66. After all, what was Live Forever but She Loves You for the 90s.
The success of the Crazy For You re-release propelled Let Loose into a two-year spell of success, which saw them enjoy six further Top 30 hits, with four of those getting into the Top 12. By 1996, they had split, but given that the identikit Australian act, Savage Garden appeared almost immediately after Let Loose went their separate ways, I’m convinced that all Savage Garden records were made by Let Loose and they sent Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones out as their public faces, almost like Gorillaz, but minus an animation budget.
Lovecraft - Medicine
Video courtesy of staceyconer
I was tempted to hold this over till the new year as Peel played it on his evening show of 9/4/93, but it also served as an example of him trying to use the opportunity of a daytime stand-in slot to try and break an unknown band to the wider public. He certainly believed in Medicine, telling his Friday night audience that he thought it had potential to break into the singles chart. Unfortunately, he was wrong, and Lovecraft, which included Cleo Murray, a former member of The March Violets, didn’t release any more records after this.
It’s the mainstream’s loss because this is a terrific record, but I suspect that the heavily drug laden lyrics killed off any chance of getting much exposure outside of Peel’s play of it. The first half of the record alludes to marijuana (baby Jane), cocaine (sugar), acid (pink butterfly) and heroin (water drops and blank walls). The title alone gives the game away too as I suspect that the medicine in question isn’t Lemsip. And in case we aren’t getting the message, the She took it all/ She took everything/She took anything refrain batters the point home. But having gone on a drug tour in its first half, the second half of the track flips things around and sounds as though as it’s reflecting someone going through cold turkey:
She’s counting the cracks on the blank walls.
And she’s singing a song about Jesus.
Says he going to save our souls.
It’s an attempt at escaping the clutches of addiction, but as the song progresses, we are shown how difficult this is to do and the temptations that remain on offer. The spiralling guitar line over the last 30 seconds also shows how Gimme Shelter remained the go-to inspiration for conveying decadence and desperation in early 1993.
Peel might have been wrong in predicting that Medicine would take Lovecraft into the charts, but a year later, Primal Scream got to Number 7 in the charts with Rocks, which sounds very similar to Medicine and a little more cannily put together so as to ensure it got played across the whole of Radio 1’s schedule. The Rolling Stones were clearly a big influence on Primal Scream, and they may well have provided inspiration for the title of Primal Scream’s biggest hit to that time, but inspiration for the melody of it may very well have come from Lovecraft.
Elmore James - Dust My Broom
Video courtesy of Vernons
The votes are in, and with the inclusion of this tune, originally recorded by Elmore James in 1951, I can now officially say that I am in James’s camp ahead of Jimmy Reed in the choice of Favourite Blues Guitarist Played Frequently by John Peel. This is the third James track that I’ve included here over the years, whereas I seem to be more content to talk about Peel’s love of Reed, rather than demonstrate it by including tracks from him - that will change when I reach any Peel show in which he plays Too Much.
Although Dust My Broom doesn’t quite hit the heights of Stranger Blues, it comes at the listener with such swagger, drive and bravado that you can’t do anything but be carried along by it. Based, as so many blues tunes are, on a Robert Johnson recording from 1936 called I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom, it bulks out the sound from Johnson’s original with James’s explosive slide guitar and the brass section putting across the grindingly relentless sound of a man on the move from one place to the next, searching for something he cannot seem to find. In fact, so good is the performance that it pulls off the accomplishment of distracting the audience from noticing that the lyrics make no sense. He wants to move on in order to not break up his home? Oh, and down with prostitutes while we’re at it. Maybe, the vote needs to go to a recount…but not today.
The Teardrop Explodes - Reward
Video courtesy of whammo64
Just why were so many British pop groups spending their time in late 1980 recording songs for release in early 1981 with the intention of scaring the shit out of the infant me? If it wasn’t Ultravox seemingly trying to chide me for insisting that I would only go to bed if I was allowed to have a radio on in my room, then I also had to put up with Reward by The Teardrop Explodes, which got to Number 6 in early 1981, and despite being less austere and chilly than Vienna was, it continues to give me mild anxiety to this day. And when I was 5, it sounded like trouble was going to come bursting into the house at any minute. That iconic trumpet refrain that powers the song along sounds like a metropolis undergoing a collective panic attack. I’m always surprised to see that it was a winter release, it’s always sounded to me like the packed streets of Paris in the middle of a heatwave, with the brass echoing the blare of a thousand car horns, all desperate to get somewhere, but only able to travel perpetually around the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe, until by the end of the song, everyone simultaneously explodes into a mass pile up.
While the music may have been Parisian in flavour, the lyrics take on a decidedly early 80s British dystopian feel. It was never specified quite what the reward of the song’s title was, but considering that 1981 would see Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe propose that The Teardrop Explodes home city of Liverpool should be taken into managed decline, it presents a disturbing image of a generation, and by extension, whole communities, being offered some form of numbing placebo as their lives are gently wound down into some form of aimless meaninglessness. In that context, the frantic, furious pace and tone of Reward suggests not just anxiety, but also fight and defiance. And that, I think, was what contributed to it being the hit that it was.
Garnett Silk - Jah Jah is the Ruler
Video courtesy of Garnett Silk - Topic
This had a question mark against it when I first heard it. I think because its sound comes from the thinner, tinnier end of dancehall reggae. After the fortissimo brass in Reward, the synthesised equivalent on Jah Jah is the Ruler sounds like a wet fart in comparison. But, Garnett Silk’s voice shines through in any setting. With its sermonising and glorying of Jah, it has to count as perhaps the most religiously minded record played at circa 2pm in Radio 1’s history. There’s also a shout out to 2024 at 1:34 as Silk sings, Whether you are a black man or a Syrian/Whether you’re white, pink, yellow or blue/Jah rules over me and you. Given its cheap sound and some lyrics which, when written down, look tremendously awkward to sing, Garnett really does carry this off so well, that I’m almost minded to agree with his thesis.
Almost…
DJ Dick - Silver Surfer
Video courtesy of freeze84
I left this until last, because I was initially going to list it as a track which fell from favour with me. But having just listened to it again so that I could articulate my reasons why I was going to reject it - the underwhelming first half of the track - I found that once Silver Surfer kicks into high gear at the 1:38 mark, it rewards the patience required to get there. A borderline inclusion, but one I’m happy to have onboard.
And with that, we bid goodbye to John Peel’s dalliance with daytime radio. His next cover assignments would be for former Peel Session producer, Mark Radcliffe, though this would be in the familiar 10pm to midnight slot, which Peel would re-inherit in 1997 when Radcliffe was moved to the breakfast show.
I have to say I’m looking forward to getting back to blogging about 1 track per post. The blog will return in January, probably with a bluesky account to promote as well. Until then, my thanks to all those who put up the audio files and videos which allow me to do this blog, special thanks to ubermensch Webbie for coming through with requests, and thanks to any of you who read this.
Wishing you all a merry Christmas, and I’ll see you in the new year.
