Guys and Dolls: Marxman - Dark Are The Days/The Fascist Boom (9 April 1993)

 

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Buy The Fascist Boom at Discogs

WARNING - The video for The Fascist Boom contains disturbing images. It was uploaded in 2014/15.

Peel opened tonight’s programme with The Fascist Boom, Marxman’s contribution to a compilation album distributed by Youth Against Racism in Europe called By Any Means Necessary.  Listening back to the warnings given in it, I can only feel shamed by the complacency that I would surely have felt at the time. It wasn’t that I was oblivious to Neo-Nazism, but back then, they seemed like nothing more than a lunatic fringe. They could have their demonstrations and one could feel sorry for any poor unfortunate who got attacked by them, but I never saw them as a direct threat to the world order, because I couldn’t see how anyone could get taken in by it. But a combination of declining living standards and continent-wide NIMBYism has seen far-right political parties make sweeping gains across Europe over the last decade and a half. While in America, the political right has been become rancid and dangerous without anyone seemingly able to do anything about it. Marxman warned us - nothing was done - and now we find ourselves in a time where too many parties & politicians who should know better are trying to court that vote and present anything opposite to it as something to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. 

Exactly one year ago, Peel had greeted the results of the UK General Election with a weary cry of Do you ever have days where you feel you got out of bed on the wrong planet? In 2025, those days outnumber the good ones, I find.

There’s little to cheer us up in the other Marxman selection either. Dark Are the Days is a despondent screed on everything:

1) Capitalism winning out over socialism.

2) The media brainwashing the public.

3) Unions either being depowered or selling out to bosses.

4) Too many low-paid and dead end jobs.

It’s curious how the presence of a beat and some sprightly penny whistle can get you dancing away to such an onslaught of negativity. Had Peel not been distracted by having to be Jakki Brambles, I wonder whether he would have played Dark Are the Days back-to-back with Dollars by Bajja Jedd, which makes a case for how to survive and thrive in a capitalist society.

Videos courtesy of h2eire and blackiron60.

Guys and Dolls: Trumans Water - Sun Go Out (9 April 1993)

 

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Looking at the lyrics to Sun Go Out - and if I hadn’t done so, this post would be even shorter than it is - they appear to be a continuation of the theme of alienation/disenchantment with authority figures that was evidenced in Speeds Exceeding. But where that song felt like a debate between the generations, here the malaise is more deeply set and implacable. Sun Go Out takes swipes at “stars” and politicians for being all surface and no feeling, but does with a shrug of the shoulders and an internalising of the contempt and disgust that they feel.  Early 90s ennui drips all over lines like: 

We know there’s channels where we could register our comments and complaints.

But it’s just as fun to fall back laugh the thing to scorn.

And hey presto! Trumans Water invented social media.

As the song progresses, it starts to make uneasier listening to 21st Century ears. In 1993, the sentiments expressed sounded like classic slacker talk. Even the title of the song sounds like a pun on exhortations made by stressed dads to their surly, couch potato offspring.  But in subsequent verses, the vibe sounds, in 2025, less slacker and more MAGA. This is especially true once the kids do get off the couch:

…we’re just violent, not angry.

And we’d sooner tip things over as watch them topple by themselves.

You aspiring public servants are long on vision and short on spine.

Here’s to spewing thicker drivel and digging deeper graves.

After a final verse which declares that anyone trying to have an original thought should keep it to themselves, the song ends with eight guitar notes which toll like a bell declaring the death of…. hope? Idealism? Public spiritedness? Any number of optimistic qualities that one used to be able to attribute to the United States of America with a semi-straight face. And a look down the list of titles on Spasm Smash XXXOXoX Ox & Ass reads like a MAGA checklist of grievances against authority or their supposed betters: Bludgeon Elites & Stagger, Lo Priest, Our Doctors Think We’re Blind etc.

Scarily prescient, as they say….

Video courtesy of Trumans Water Topic

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Eric’s Trip - Listen (9 April 1993)

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This was a borderline inclusion, because it piles by in a bit of a rush, and I’ve had to take a number of listens to it in order to find any kind of angle that would make it worth keeping. But what’s ultimately retained it is a mixture of what it’s trying to be, and my belief that it’s a lot more optimistic and innocent than I initially thought it was.

Sonically, Listen comes across as a kiddie-pop take on the verses in You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine, albeit that it tempers this with quieter moments between the noise squalls. 

Lyrically, I initially thought that the song was about someone preparing to kill themself. This was because of the chorus refrains of Soon I’ll be gone. But repeat listens and further scans of the lyrics have now led me to believe that this is actually a love song, and that the title, Listen, refers to that nascent moment in love affairs when emotions burst forward, the internal editor checks out and we blurt forward to the object of our affection both our most profound and trivial thoughts, simply because this is the moment when we can be sure that they will really listen to and value what we’re saying.

Stick around, for a while.

Listen to my thoughts.

It makes you smile.

Hold my hand, my life.

Thinking quiet down, make me right.

It’s a plea for love which really could save the singer’s life.

I have the film critic, Antonia Quirke, to thank for this insight. I’ve just given up on her 2007 memoir, Choking on Marlon Brando. The book combines Quirke’s portraits on various actors alongside the highs and lows of her love life through the 1990s. Quirke writes brilliantly about movies, she occasionally writes brilliantly about love, but by the time I reached page 150, I realised the problem with reading about real people’s love lives - the emotional highs are too difficult to read about without cynicism and misanthropy crowding in and willing on the fall. And that’s no way to live life or experience culture.

Also, just as when confronted by a social media picture of someone’s delicious looking pub lunch, the elation of an individual’s love affair is precisely too individual for anyone else to really care about, especially when it’s spread over 310 pages of a book.* Eric’s Trip manage to convey these sensations in two and a half minutes, so they trump Quirke’s ability to get them across, albeit I’m grateful to her for making me look at Listen in a way that I might otherwise have missed.

The upshot of all this is that I’m setting up the first giveaway in the history of The Smell of the Greasepaint and the Sound of John Peel. If you would like a copy of Choking on Marlon Brando before it goes either to my local second hand bookshop or the charity bookshelf at Chieveley Services, please send me a DM on bluesky  (greasepaint.bsky.social) by April 30. First come, first served.

*I know that I’m guilty of writing about my romantic elations on this blog every so often - and when we get to the show week of Guys and Dolls in the first week of August ‘93, you’d better be ready to see me go full-on Quirke - but at least I try and attach them to a beautiful piece of music.

Video courtesy of mynameisasuka

Lyrics are copyright of their authors.

My thanks to the John Peel wiki for identifying the title of the track, which Peel did not give on the 9/4/93 show.

Guys and Dolls: Hole - 20 Years in the Dakota (9 April 1993)

 

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Hole, writing a song about Yoko Ono is one of the most brilliantly predictable things that could have happened in 90s rock. The parallels between Ono and herself would have been ringing out loud and clear to Courtney Love as her husband’s band grew to become a globally recognised name, and Love would almost certainly have slapped down anyone who addressed her as being “only” Kurt’s wife. Like Ono, she was an artist in her own right and was married to a man who, in the eyes of many, transcended the label of “musician” and her reward was vilification.  Other similarities include drug use and the early deaths of their husbands - via different means - to firearms. 

Ultimately, what links Love and Ono is a steel and toughness; quiet and playful in Ono’s case, belligerent and angry in Love’s. What she makes clear in 20 Years in the Dakota, both to herself and the “riot grrrls” trying to bring her down is that Ono is the patron saint of them all, and that none of them will ever truly be able to repay the debt they owe to her. I do find myself wondering who The Fabulous Four would have been in Love’s case: Kurt, Krist, Dave and…..Butch?

At 1:34, the focus of the song shifts from Yoko to Courtney, touching on - among other things - motherhood (My waters break like turpentine), but more pertinently, a recognition of her husband’s developing death wish: The pee girl burns to be a bride/Your ever lovely suicide. Cobain’s heroin usage was growing to the extent that overdoses were becoming an almost normal occurrence for him. In contrast, Love was trying to clean up her health, perhaps shaken by a lengthy and expensive battle the Cobains had gone through with The Department of Family Services, which had seen a very real risk of their daughter, Frances, being taken into care.

In late spring [1993], [Love] hired a psychic to help her kick drugs. Kurt balked at paying the bills from the psychic and laughed at her advice that the couple needed to reject “all toxins”. Courtney took it seriously however; she attempted to stop smoking, began drinking fresh-squeezed juice every day and attended Narcotics Anonymous. Kurt taunted his wife at first, but then encouraged her to attend N.A. meetings if only so he had more free time to get loaded. (Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven, page 276, Sceptre, 2001)

At its conclusion, 20 Years in the Dakota features one final audacious touch, with the band working in a tribute to the end of Hey Jude, but replacing its choral enormity with a droopier, hazier feel as the lines I don’t remember, I forget fall away like someone nodding off into a drug induced stupor.

In the event, Ono spent 50 years in the Dakota, finally selling her apartment in 2023.

Video courtesy of David Rolfe’s Rock and Metal Channel

Lyrics copyright of Courtney Love.

Guys and Dolls: Nelories - Peel Session (9 April 1993)

 

The Radio 1 Fun Computer has rather scrambled their names, unless one of them has a surname spelled K-v-b-o-m which I rather doubt - John Peel, introducing Nelories’ session on 9/4/93.

NOTE - The order of tracks on the show was different to the order on the video. It was originally broadcast to run as follows: Run Free > Trampoline > Neutral Blue > Garlic.  This post will follow the order of tracks on the video.

On Sunday 14 March, 1993, Jun Kurihara and Kazmi Kubo took their guitars, drum machines and accordion into the BBC’s Maida Vale studios to record a Peel Session. It satisfied all the usual labels that can be attached to certain styles of Japanese pop music; veering from the catchily kitsch to the profoundly heartfelt, before ending in a manner that leaves this listener - and I hope other listeners who read this post - feeling warm, fuzzy and cosseted, which is quite an achievement considering that they were singing in a second language and with voices that walked the tightrope between soothing and adenoidal.

The jazzy Garlic follows in the spirit of their earlier Banana in using foodstuffs as pseudonyms for other things. If Banana dealt in sex, then Garlic deals in love as it appears to be the pet name for a lover, identified by their long blonde hair…blue blue eyes, which appear to make up for the earlier acknowledged absurd freaky smell. Given body odour once played a part in breaking up a relationship I was in, I wish Garlic could have passed on some tips to me about how to ensure that can be cancelled out in favour of one’s more positive qualities. Although, if the song is about a dog, it all becomes moot given that pets can be loved regardless of what they do. It’s the trade off for them not being able to enjoy alcohol  and culture, I suppose.

When I first heard the 9/4/93 show, for some reason, I ended up leaving Neutral Blue off my list of inclusions from the session. I can only conclude that I was having a funny couple of minutes, because listening to it again on this video reveals it to be the highpoint of the session. My initial thoughts on it were that it was about repenting the breakup of a relationship with a steady but boring person, especially given that, in the slightly garbled lyrical language of Nelories, we learn that neutral blue was the colour of your talking. But subsequent listens have me wondering whether the song is more about mourning the death of its subject rather than breaking up with them. For it seems that the separation really is a permanent one and this comes home in the key line of the song: I’ve heard that loneliness and being alone don’t always mean the same.  Also, Kubo’s guitar run from 6:22 to 6:32 sounds like someone desperately rummaging around to find a handkerchief to cry into.  Brutal blue, indeed….

Run Free is another example of the way in which Nelories’s songs could work as advertising jingles. This one could either be promoting the benefits of holidays (You may go everywhere/Everywhere’s a destination), exercise (Let’s go for a run/We’re on the road to nowhere/I am sure to say that/We’ll feel a whole load better, loads better than miles) or mindfulness (Walk slowly, don’t hurry, you’ve got more things to see…slow down, don’t hurry). It’s a beautiful mix of the bizarre and the profound, which is only to be expected given that Kurihara was writing her lyrics in a second language. It’s testament to her skill that she gets more right than wrong in what she writes, though this Trouserpress overview of Nelories back catalogue highlights some of her more unusual lyrical non-sequiturs.

The theme of Trampoline appears to be much clearer. The title serves as a metaphor for the behaviour of the kind of charismatic, attractive, sexy man who has friends and lovers everywhere, but never takes the time to stay in one place too long. Any time a commitment is sought, they jump on their trampoline and spring off in another direction. Typically, Kurihara is in love with this gadabout, all while recognising his flaws: Maybe I cannot be his trampoline.

Video courtesy of Fruitier Than Thou.

Lyrics are copyright of Jun Kurihara.

Guys and Dolls: Voodoo People - Altitude [Malana Edit] (9 April 1993)

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I’m feeling anxiously excited as I write this. Tonight, the greasepaint part of this blog becomes relevant to me for the first time in 6 years as it’s the first night of Here Comes a Chopper, a 1970 play in which Eugene Ionesco predicts COVID-19, 50 years before it happens. It’s meant the world to me to get back on a stage again over these last 8 weeks or so. I suspect my stomach will be going over and over around 7:25pm tonight as I’m faced with the prospect of acting in front of an audience again after so long, but the show is in good shape, and I wouldn’t swap it for anything.

I couldn’t let today go past without blogging. I’m aware that a number of recent posts have marked things I’ve been doing - see records by The Slickers and The Upsetters while I was on holiday in Saint Lucia.

I’m celebrating my return to the stage with a near 7 minute burst of Goan trance from Paul Jackson aka Voodoo People.  While I can’t see Altitude replacing Paul Jones’s High Time as my choice of opening night music - a tradition I’ve maintained for 32 years now - it’s got enough energy and life to send me out into the spotlight again with my heart racing and the blood pumping.  It also makes for a marginally better listen than the track which Peel misidentified Altitude as when he played it on this show, the slightly scratchier Love, Love American Style.

Video courtesy of DuffMcShark80.

Guys and Dolls: Puressence - Offshore (9 April 1993)

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Sometimes, writing this blog allows me to consider alternative histories that I could have lived through, at least in terms of what my musical passions could have ended up being.  All of the qualities that caused me to fall in love with Marion - surging guitars, vocals that mixed soul with passion - are to be found here in Offshore by Puressence. Had I been fully clued into contemporary British music, two years earlier than I chose to start buying the records, listening to the shows and reading the magazines and papers, I can well believe that I’d have fallen under Puressence’s spell under the belief that they had something which set them apart from the rest, just as I did with Marion in 1995/96.  It opens up the distressing possibility that I’d have dismissed Marion as copyists, imagine! A world without This World and Body - ugh! - I have to take a lie down to dismiss the possibility.  No, history takes care of itself for the right reasons, and I am grateful that, in this instance at least, it played out as it did.  Apparently, the two groups toured together at one point. I wonder how many of the audience had to be carried out due to being overcome by emotion at those gigs.

My abiding memory of Puressence in the 90s is the way that the music press kept suggesting that achieving major success was only a question of time for them. Be patient, lads, stardom is coming - albeit in the manner of a bus service which ran once a day, every sixth Sunday. At least Puressence’s fans never had to wait too long for new material from them.  Offshore was their third EP release inside a year on 2 Damn Loud, and their last before they signed to Island Records.

The title track here demonstrates how Puressence were still able to play their strongest cards, while sloughing off some of the bloated tendencies of their previous releases. For example, Offshore clocks in at 3 and a half minutes, whereas each of the tracks on their Petrol Skin EP were between 4 and 6 and a half minutes long, while seeming to want to fill every available second with James Mudriczki’s admittedly brilliant voice.  Lyrically, Puressence mixed the agitational with the painterly. “Offshore” in this track alludes to a self-imposed wish to isolate oneself from others. Paranoia runs rampant, indeed Mudriczki’s vocals often sounded like someone trying to keep a panic attack under control. And yet running alongside that is the gorgeous, near-chorus of Underwater butterfly keeps so dry, it just bowls me over/Gazing through pathetic lies and I can’t keep down/Something’s got me going now. 

And it’s this that was crucial in understanding why groups like Puressessnce and Marion inspired such devotion in their followers. They fully acknowledged the pressure of being alive and the pain it exposed us to, but they never gave into it. There was always reason to fight on and find your way back to shore. Whether you crawled up it or strode up it, Puressence weren’t about to let themselves or their listeners drown.  

Bonus points are also awarded for them working mal de mer into the lyrics.

Video courtesy of naayfiysh72.