Equus: John Peel’s Music - Sunday 21 February 1993 (BFBS)

 I’m as crisp as a dew picked lettuce - John Peel introducing this edition on 21/2/93.

It’s always nice to hear Peel with a spring in his step, and in this case it could possibly be down to a letter he had received from a listener called Michael, who had written to say how much he enjoyed hearing dance music on the show. Peel was touched by this as he reckoned that Michael was the first person to have said this to him since he started playing dance music on his BFBS programme. He played Home is Where the Hartcore Is by Loopzone in thanks to Michael.

Also getting a spin was a 1979 tune by Skids called TV Stars, which mentioned Peel’s name together with a host of soap opera characters from Coronation Street and Crossroads. Peel warned any listeners who felt this was self-indulgent that they hadn’t heard anything yet as he played a recording called Humbug 1 performed by Combs Middle School which featured his son, Tom, as the lead voice. The song was taken from a show that appeared to be an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, with the song being sung from the perspective of workers in the factory owned by Ebeneezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley; perhaps during a visit from The Ghost of Christmas Past.  Impressively, the show itself was written by two of the music teachers at Combs Middle School. If you haven’t clicked on the Humbug 1 link, I’d encourage you to do so, not least to hear Peel’s tale of his being ejected from the final of a national schools production competition for heckling the judges when Combs Middle School failed to win it.  It’ll also serve as a long distance taster for when this blog reaches late 1994 and soundtracks my participation in Carnon Downs Drama Group’s production of the musical, Scrooge.

When replying to listener correspondence, personally, Peel often wrote by postcard. If he wasn’t using a Radio 1 publicity card - either of himself or more often of a younger, better looking colleague - he would reply on postcards showing images of Stowmarket. However, the company that made these cards had gone bust, so Peel was making up his own cards using photos he had taken of the town. He hadn’t really mastered the picturesque style of postcard images given that his portfolio of shots so far included an Indian restaurant and a set of major roadworks. Stirring stuff….

I’ve already referenced three tracks from this show which I passed on including. Other rejections included one of the few House of Love songs that I don’t care for, namely Love in a Car from their 1988 debut album, which was requested by a listener. Another request was for a 1979 track called Window to the World by the Australian band Whirlywirld, about which and whom Peel had no recollection of having previously played. On this show, he also played Barriers by Northern Irish band, Repulse.  As he back announced it, he thought the next track on the Heads EP was playing. He liked what he heard and let it play on, only to discover it was just the ending for Barriers.

The selections from this show were taken from a full 2 hour show.  There were 3 tracks that I had earmarked for inclusion but was unable to share:

The Brady Bunch Lawnmower Massacre - I’m Gonna Drink Myself to Life - More Australian rock from a 7-inch single on Shagpile.

Tiger - Chaos [Jungle Mix] - As previous posts have shown, I was enjoying the Jungle music tracks on this show, and my notes say that it was the jungle vibe that would have put this up for consideration.

Culture Fire - No Existence - A track taken from their Release EP and requested by a listener called Sebastian, who was due to spend the next 4 months away in San Francisco.

Three tracks fell from favour, having made my initial shortlist:

Nirvana - Oh The Guilt - I remember the excitement when this was released as part of a split single with Puss by Jesus Lizard and it reached Number 12 on the UK Singles Chart, so plenty of people were delighted to have it. But listening to it again for this blog, I have to confess that Nirvana philistinism raised itself within me again and my abiding instinct was to yell, “STOP FUCKING MOANING!”

Leatherface - Do the Right Thing - This is a band who have been appreciated here before for the emotional depth behind their hard rock clatter, but this ended up sounding far too by the numbers for permanent inclusion on the metaphorical mixtape.

Mudhoney - We Had Love - This was Mudhoney’s contribution to Set It Off, a compilation album of artists covering songs by The Scientists, whose work was unknown to me ahead of hearing Mudhoney’s version of We Had Love. I listened to about three-quarters of the performances on Set It Off, comparing each one to the original Scientists recordings, and it was certainly successful in terms of encouraging me to go and discover the work of The Scientists. However, this was mainly because of how poor virtually every cover was in comparison to the original track. I agonised over leaving We Had Love out, not least given the passion of Mark Arm’s vocal, but ultimately I decided that it was as guilty as all the other versions of not meeting The Scientists’ standards.

Full tracklisting

Equus: Camille Howard - Ferocious Boogie (21 February 1993)

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When this blog has finished working through selections from this edition of John Peel’s Music on BFBS, I’m intending to jump ahead to selections from Peel’s Radio 1 show from Saturday 20 March 1993. In terms of chronology, that show went out a week before I and my fellow Castaway Theatre Company members on the BTEC Performing Arts course performed Equus.  It also went out 10 days after the death of Camille Howard, at the age of 78.  I’ve had a look over at the John Peel wiki for March 1993, and it doesn’t appear as though news of her death was communicated on any of his programmes. This wouldn’t be altogether surprising given that Howard had quit the music business in the mid-1950s, and in those pre-Internet days of 1993, news of the death of an obscure boogie-woogie piano player would have taken a lot longer to make itself more widely known.  Peel kept her work in the spotlight by intermittently playing her recordings up to late 2001.

Ferocious Boogie was the b-side to Howard’s 1949 single, Maybe It’s Best After All, and is of a piece with many of the other Howard boogies that Peel played through early ‘93, not least in the way that it knocks its more conservative A-side partner into a cocked hat.  Peel wondered how different his life would have been had he actually heard the track when he was a boy in 1949, instead of the records he was actually listening to at the time which he remembered as being by artists such as Doris Day and Jo Stafford.

Video courtesy of Tim Gracyk.

Equus: Pulp - Razzmatazz (21 February 1993)

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Described in its sleevenotes as the bits that Hello! leaves out, Razzmatazz swaps the breathless, urgent, romanticism of O.U. (Gone, Gone) for contemptuous, derisive misogyny.

According to Jarvis Cocker, the lyrics of Razzmatazz are about a former college girlfriend of his. He described it at the time as the most bitter song Pulp had ever done, and he certainly goes in with both feet on the girl and those closest to her by throwing around accusations of incest, unplanned pregnancy, ignorance, stupidity, shallowness, mental instability and - most damning of all - getting fat while she goes out with someone uglier than him. 

It took me a couple of listens before I decided to include Razzmatazz here. I’ve had to confront a personal truth about Pulp that I’d only vaguely suspected back in the 90s, but which I have clarity on now.  Quite simply, they were too difficult for me to embrace as a favourite band.  There’s great humour in their music, and in my late teens, they seemed to be the only band I heard during the Britpop era, who acknowledged the desperate hunt for sex in a pre-internet world.  But there was always an underlying bitterness to their material which kept me at a distance from them. They could certainly do warm material, as O.U (Gone, Gone) and 1996’s Something Changed confirmed, but I’ve come to feel that the tone of Razzmatazz is far more indicative of the type of band that Pulp were, and that doesn’t make them an easy band to love, either then or now.

What’s undeniable about Razzmatazz though, is that it’s the sound of a band who were starting to find greater confidence in themselves and were turning more heads and minds towards them.  I suspect that this would have found its way on to the metaphorical mixtape in an attempt to, if not follow the herd, then at least trail along at a quizzically interested distance from it.

Cocker revealed in subsequent interviews that, to his embarrassment, he had bumped into his ex-girlfriend and that she had worked out that she was the subject of Razzmatazz.  Apparently, she had taken it in good humour, perhaps feeling, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, that when it’s the opinion of one of the most famous British men of the mid-1990s, it’s better to thought of as a twat than not to be thought of at all. I also like to think the female verses on Ciao! by Lush, which Cocker guested on two years after the release of Razzmatazz, offer his ex some form of right of reply.

Video courtesy of Pulp.

Equus: The Fall - The Legend Of Xanadu (21 February 1993)

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Having played a number of tracks from it during October 1992, Peel returned to the NME’s 40th anniversary celebration album, Ruby Trax, to play The Fall’s version of a 1968 Number 1 hit for Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.

When I started devouring 60s British pop music during 1992, I saw two tracks by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich on the BBC’s Sounds of the Sixties TV show: the clattering, unstoppable charge of Hold Tight (1966) and the tribal infused, lyrically opaque Zabadak (1967). I loved the former, as did Quentin Tarantino, who used it in the soundtrack to his 2007 film, Death Proof.  Put Hold Tight up against any other piece of buzzsaw, freak beat pop from 1966 by The Who, The Yardbirds, Small Faces etc and it stands up well.  There was a woman on my BTEC performing arts course called Jean, who 30 years earlier had gone out with Peter Noone, shortly before his band Herman’s Hermits became successful. Given that she had known an actual 60s popstar, Jean tended to be my go-to option to ask for an opinion on various bands I’d discovered. I asked her about Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich and she told me that the perception about them back in the 60s was that they were a bit of a novelty band. Zabadak was of a piece with the group’s singles moving away from the hard rock directness of Hold Tight towards quirkier records which saw the group adopt different musical styles for each release. This may have been because their A-sides were written for them by a songwriting team, Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, and the need to make each one sound ear-catching and different led them down various routes such as the Zorba the Greek rip-off of Bend It, the Latin American knees-up of Save Me or, as mentioned earlier, the African rhythms of Zabadak.

I swallowed the orthodoxy that Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich were no more than a party band, in it for a laugh and playing a game to see how many exotic sounds they could hit on to get on the radio, in lieu of having nothing interesting or profound to say.  As I’m shortly about to celebrate my 48th birthday, I’m now able to be far less harsh than I was in my youth and can recognise that their records were, first and foremost, amazing productions as well as musically exciting, especially given that, as far as I can tell, they actually played those same exotic instruments on the recordings.

The Legend of Xanadu was their masterpiece. A dark tale of lost loves and haunting memories, set to a Mariachi feel, with Spanish guitar, bombastic brass and a whip crack effect which saw Dave Dee actually brandish a proper bullwhip whenever the group promoted the record.

The Fall’s version of it is taken at a faster pace, which I prefer to the original which is guilty of dragging a little in its final minute.  Mark E. Smith opens with a clarion call of his own, but delivers the lyric in respectfully, deadpan style. There’s a synth effect to replicate the whip crack and they incorporate their own version of the brass figure in the playout.  All in all, they do Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich proud. 

Peel played the two versions back to back on Radio 1 on 23 October 1992, stating that if he was ever invited to appear a second time on Desert Island Discs, he would include The Fall’s version of The Legend of Xanadu among his 8 choices of record. Unfortunately, this had been but a glint in Mark E. Smith’s eye when Peel had appeared on the show in January 1990.

Videos courtesy of inviciblesticks (The Fall) and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich - Topic.

Equus: 11:59 - The Ticket (21 February 1993)

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Having just posted that if I could live my record buying youth all over again, I would have bought more jungle and trip hop records, it’s nice it is to see the latter represented here.  I appreciate that insiders will be urgently flagging me down to tell me that 11:59 were first and foremost Conscious hip hop, but that languid, loping bassline and drum pattern together with those tasteful Moog squelches, shimmering Mellotron and a shout out to Massive Attack - among many others - in the coda show where the group’s head was at, sonically, when they recorded the Ruff Life EP.

The Ticket does a wonderful job of both advertising 11:59’s skills to those who may not have previously heard of them, and promoting a sense of communal wellbeing between them and other like-minded bands and artists.  If tonight were the last night of 11:59’s lives, the people mentioned in the coda are who they would want to spend that night with.  The ticket could be entry to a private party, but I think it may well run a little deeper than that.  

I’m currently reading The Custard Stops at Hatfield, the 1982 memoir by Peel’s former Radio 1 colleague, Kenny Everett. In the late 1960s, Peel used to say about the brilliantly creative Everett, Kenny knows. A statement which, at the time, meant everything and nothing. In 11:59’s view, those who hold the ticket also “know”, and with the confidence of youth and talent, they believe that allying with them will make them unstoppable. The confidence is infectious, contagious and irresistible.

Video courtesy of UKStandTall.

Equus: The Moog - Jungle Muffin [Micky Finn Remix] (21 February 1993)

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I’m really pleased that Peel played this track from The Moog Remix EP, because when I was prepping the blogpost on the Mercy remix of Live Forever from the same EP, I got the chance to listen to all four tracks that were on it, and the Micky Finn* remix of Jungle Muffin was by far and away my favourite track.  I was seduced by the jungle vibe to the mix and it’s caused me to look ahead with hope that as the early and mid 90s Peel shows get covered here, I’ll get to enjoy more jungle music and appreciate it more than I did 30 odd years ago.  If I had my record buying youth again, I’d have stocked up on more jungle and trip hop records alongside the Britpop I was gorging myself on at the time.  I’ve lamented my youthful tunnel vision on this previously, and happily my notes for this edition of John Peel’s Music promise some further potential jungle treats subject to availability and me not going off the track…**

Compared to the original mix, Finn’s mix works in a couple of dub interludes, ostensibly to give the track space to breathe. The Italo-piano break is still in both versions so as to firmly remind us that this was still 1992/93 and some of-their-time conventions still had to be acknowledged, but the persistent noise of the Star Wars blasters sounds like one of dance music’s new developments killing off a previously dominant form and announcing itself in thrilling style.

Video courtesy of NEINSHIT

*Not that one. Or this one.

** I think it’s available, but if it’s what I just heard, it may miss out.***

*** It’s not currently available.

Equus: Admiral Bailey - Butterfly (21 February 1993)

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I had hoped that this was a tune about sex and that the butterfly of the title referred to the sexual technique, the Venus Butterfly. Whenever I include a reggae/dancehall track on this blog, I always check West Indian patois dictionary sites to see whether words on the records have alternative meanings in Carribbean dialect. You can imagine how my spirits soared when the index for one dictionary had it spelled buttafly.  Here we go, I thought, confirmation that Admiral Bailey is singing about anal sex.  Giddy up, giddy up just seemed to offer further encouragement to that line of thinking.  New style come up (“He’s talking about his cock”), yes it was all becoming clear. 

And then I clicked on the link and discovered that buttafly is indeed patois for er…butterfly and I must reluctantly concede that it’s about a dance craze which was sweeping the clubs and if Bailey is to be believed, was conquering the world as well. 

Any disappointment about this banality is tempered by the fact that it’s a tremendous piece of music and in the reggae dominated singles charts of 1993-95, I’m surprised it never got picked up for wider release. It could have been a Loco-Motion for the 1990s.

Video courtesy of IrOnLiOnZiOn92

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.