"Nowhere on earth is safe again from my attentions." Let's hope that doesn't include Juliette's house, buddy......
A merry Christmas to all, and a brief reminder of a classic return to form from Peel alumni Andy Kershaw. After his well-publicised public meltdown and brushes with his ex-partner and restraining orders, he found a new home on Radio 3, co-hosting Music Planet with Lucy Duran. As is commonplace with Kershaw, he took any risks necessary in order to bring world music to the masses, including nearly being burned alive at a rocket festival in Thailand. So, if your idea of an ideal accompaniment to mince pies and turkey (and turkey….and turkey….and turkey, “a loaf of bread with wings”, as John Walters memorably described it) is listening to the Bat People of Papua New Guinea or shaman in Mongolia, here’s your chance to download all eight radio episodes.
The band Read Yellow (Jesse Vuona, guitar; Paul Koelle, drums; Evan Kenney, guitar; and Micheller Freivald, bass, with vocals shared between the three guitarists) recorded one Peel session, and they were noisy sods. They formed in 2001 in a basement in Amherst, Massachusetts. and in the six years of their existence played gigs to anything between 2 and 10,000 kids. Extreme-Music Blogspot has this to say about a gig he went to:
When Read Yellow started playing, the vocalist/guitarist began screaming and getting right into the audience. During the show, the other guitarist gave his guitar to the audience, and the audience began playing it and making noise on it. They also gave a microphone to the audience, along with a drumstick and a cymbal, to which the audience began making noise with that as well. Near the end of the show, the vocalist/guitarist began throwing his guitar around, and attempting to play it behind his head. Eventually he began jumping around the stage so much that he jumped into the drum kit. The drum kit fell apart, but the drummer attempted to play what was left standing.
I had never been to a live show with that much audience interaction, or that many crazy things happening on stage. I left that show saying “I don’t know if those guy in Read Yellow know how to play, but that was the best live show I’ve seen in my life!”. I’ve been to some great live shows (Suffocation is always fun to see), but nothing quite ever topped that.
We're still waiting for the last part of your Christmas story, asshiole.
Sounds just like my kind of band. Personal recommendation among the four songs on offer below: the single, ‘Model America.’ And they made a lot of people sad when they broke up after releasing the CD Gang Violins, which I’ve never heard but on the basis of this would very much like to. One may feel that this kind of sound has been done elsewhere, but the band have a dedication to intense squalls of sound that still never sacrifice melody or coherence entirely, with a touch of Julian Cope in the vocals to boot.
Read Yellow, Peel Session (2004-02-12) A Love Supreme/Model America/The Art/The Easiest Part Of Surveillance
Happy Talk is a weird song for a start off. It’s clear the matchmaking lady by the rock pool isn’t doing this purely for unselfish reasons, but the musical as a whole is underpinned by colonialism and as usual makes Asian characters speak and act like retarded five year-olds. I’ve never liked it, despite my penchant for the genre, and this song is to me a low point of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s writing prowess.
Now fast forward to 1982:
Captain Sensible (aka Ray Burns) was at one time the leading light of the Damned, as I’m sure you all know. Among a group of larger than life punks, he stood out as the most flamboyant. He loved to taunt and insult his audience just to get a reaction, viz. the celebrated line, “I love you people, you’re the nicest bunch of people in the whole wide world. Except that man there, you are the ugliest cunt I have ever laid eyes upon.” Small wonder that the front four rows at a Damned gig would be composed entirely of slapheads screaming, “Sensible is a wanker!”
Then it all changed. In the early 80s, after visiting Crass (those post-hippy anarchists with a taste for really rubbishy songs, it has to be said), he was suddenly pacifist, vegetarian (which makes the sight of him singing around a dead seagull on a pole in the above clip rather odd) and releasing This Is Your Captain Speaking on Crass’ own label.
Bad enough, you might think. Yet worse, much worse, was to come. He signed a deal with A&M, recorded Happy Talk, backed by those Peel faves the Dolly Mixtures, and suddenly he was top of the UK charts for two weeks, a housewives’ favourite, and his original band kicked his arse out the door (only for him to rejoin 11 years later).
What were his motives, you might ask? It would be charitable to see it as a kind of post-modern irony, juxtaposing
Ship arriving too late to save a drowning credibility. The Captain claims this song made him a joke in the UK.
the Elysian make-believe of the musical with the harsh reality of the Cold War and the Falklands. But no: he claims he found it in his parents’ record collection and it was done “for a laugh” (or to fill up available space on his LP, depending on which site you read), and averred that it kept him from being a toilet cleaner. Certainly, someone who has had the experience of the police banging on his door wishing to repossess his house might just want a little something to pay the bills.
Notwithstanding, the biggest surprise of the lot was that this cringe-making exercise was considered good enough even to have a shot at the Festive Fifty (obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about it in the first place). It made #59 in the 1982 yearly chart, thus meaning that John didn’t have to play it, But who were the misguided souls that even dreamed for a second that it was worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as the Clash, the Cure and the Cocteau Twins, who were the real stars of the year? I think we should be told.
In case all the above has irretrievably depressed you, allow me to furnish you with a gentle reminder of exactly what the Captain really was capable of: four slices of heavenly power pop with a side project that presumably the Damned did approve of, King, and their only Peel session, recorded on my 15th birthday. In case the organ line in Baby Sign Here With Me is naggingly familiar, it became the classic I Just Can’t Be Happy Today.
King, Peel Session (1978-07-11) Anti Pope/Baby Sign Here With Me/My Baby Don’t Care/Jet Boy Jet Girl
…didn’t really happen for the Kickster this year, did it? I had no time due to pressures of work and family to get anything together. Still, you don’t want my excuses. I’ll just wish you all a merry Christmas for tomorrow, hope to see you back here after the festivities are all done, and leave you with a little bit of blues that you’ll love if you like Canned Heat. Peel played this on one of his BFBS shows from a CD he’d been given as a present. Eddie C. Campbell learned the blues from Muddy Waters and rubbed shoulders with luminaries such as Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf (other Peel favourites). This track is just about as cool as you’re going to get for the Yule, and it’s comforting to know that at the age of 70, Campbell released a new album and is still active in Chicago today.
"If spring is late, in winter it' a marshmallow world." Indisputable wisdom.
Few people in recorded music history can have met such an ignonimous end as Phil Spector. He is currently serving 19 to life for the murder of Lana Clarkson, and yet the fairytale beginnings of the lower middle class Jewish boy who had to deal with his father’s suicide at the age of 9 and then went on to score a massive hit with the Teddy Bears’ To Know Him Is To Love Him while still only 18, should have been the stuff of legend.
He turned to production very shortly after that early smash hit, and pioneered the Wall Of Sound technique, which he described as “a Wagnerian approach to rock’n'roll.” Basically, he doubled and trebled every single part until the result would sound brilliant even on a Philips tranny from Woolworths. His summa cum laude of this is usually considered to be the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, which still makes the hairs on the nape of my neck stand up as it creeps in and builds to orgasmic intensity.
However, the meisterwerk that concerns us today is of course A Christmas Gift For You: he gathered together a whole bunch of artists recording for his Philles label, set them to singing a colection of tried and trusted Christmas standards, drenched them in over-production and packaged the whole thing as an attempt to “take the great Christmas music and give it the sound of the American music of today” (as he said in the sleeve notes).
There is no doubt in my mind that he succeeded in spades: it’s difficult to think of most of these sung by anybody else, or helmed by such a master producer. (Let’s just not mention Let It Be, OK?) The whole show kicks off with Darlene Love showing that not just Bing Crosby needs to sing White Christmas (and she includes Irving Berlin’s extra verse that sets the whole thing in context). Gene Autry’s Frosty The Snowman benefits from the Ronettes’ deft touch, but with hindsight one has to attempt to banish memories of the added panache Liz Fraser gave it on the Cocteau Twins’ by now definitive version and see this one for what it is: unbridled purity and innocence. The inclusion of Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’ The Bells Of St, Mary (not a song I normally associate with Yuletide) is somewhat mystifying but the song is thrillingly sung nonetheless.
When we come to the Crystals’ Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, we are by now in classic, unforgettable territory. The gauche address to the child too excited to sleep at the outset is actually a cunning ploy to pave the way for the powerhouse unleashed in the chorus, and the Ronettes’ Sleigh Ride is right up there with the best Christmas songs ever, complete with its ‘ring-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-dong-ding’ backing adding a magic touch that composer Leroy Anderson could only ever have dreamed to be possible.
Side One of the original LP closed with Darlene Love adding whipped cream to the whacking fruit cocktail of Marshmallow World, a song that doesn’t actually mention Christmas but seems to have become an honorary member of the canon, then we flipped the vinyl to get the Ronettes’ sugary interpretation of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, a song I’ve never liked personally, and the Crystals’ Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, which is a trifle under-powered for my tastes. But Darlene Love is a past mistress of the turns and phrasing inherent in Winter Wonderland and the Crystals’ Parade Of The Wooden Soldiers is just fine, locking us in a fantastic toyshop of melody and loving every minute of it.
Darlene is back for one of the finest moments in all Christmas music, Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), which has a range of feeling and longing that mocks U2′s miserable effort from afar. Finally, Bob B. Soxx (a name I’m sure he tired of pretty quickly) and and the Blue Jeans give us a final adrenalin shot of excitement before Spector himself adds a maudlin postscript in the form of all his crew carolling Silent Night while he goes through a list of thanks that is guaranteed to make you bring up the turkey before you’ve eaten it.
All in all, this album is a remarkable achievement, and marks the first time TK has ever gone to the lengths of posting such a release in its entirety. I do it in order to encourage you to go out and invest in this guy’s work, because, although he has turned out to be a lying piece of human slime, his musicianship is beyond doubt, and he gave us some of the greatest musical climaxes in every sense of the word. I tell you, if you have no other Christmas CD in your collection, you must own this. No arguments. And my sister still plays it every Christmas morning before any other music.
Various Artists, A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector
There never was a good war or a bad peace. (Benjamin Franklin)
If you don’t see this on the box some time over December, it’s just not Christmas, is it?
Not that there seems to be much cheer around at the moment. The Koreans are taking a very blase attitude in general to the recent unpleasantness: they make jokes about it, tell me they’re not worried, and have Christmas decorations and toys in the shops much earlier than usual. Genuinely not bothered, or pretending not to be? We’ll see.
Anyway, I thank all of you who continue to read my words (mostly, it seems to me, for the James Brown and Mike Oldfield posts, strangely enough), but am saddened that one who used to comment on here regularly has seen fit not only to take me off their blogroll but also to delete a comment I made about this on one of their posts. To that person I say:
Look, I’m genuinely sorry I haven’t been around much this year, but life has genuinely intervened, and if you’re not prepared to stick around fothe duration, there ain’t a hell of a lot I can do about it, and I’m not about to lose any sleep either. (I’ve removed your site too, if you’re bothered.) So instead I’d like to remind you of what a great bunch the Seoul Motet Choir are, and share some of the music you probably can’t get outside this country, which is a shame, as it “consoles the internal mind reveling (sic) what the true mneaning of healing music is.” (I am indebted to Park Chee Yong’s notes and his conducting of these fine musicians.)
From their 2005 CD Merry Christmas, I give you their versions of Ecce Concipies and Omnes De Saba venient by J. Handl; two Bach settings of Nun komm der Heiden Heiland; and two choruses from Handel’s Messiah, ‘And the glory of the lord’ and ‘And he shall purify’, the latter two sung in Korean. These will be familiar to those of you who remember my failed blog of a couple of years back, ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’, but they’re so pure and affecting I felt like reposting them. More to come soon.
It’s been a long, hot and depressing summer, with so little joy and less motivation on my part. You’re probably surprised to see me back again and to sport the Christmas logo I used to some acclaim last year, but I have to break the silence, as yuletide approaches and gives me one of the few bright spots on the horizon to get excited about.
At any rate, I thought one way of shifting myself from the Peel Wiki and back onto here was to begin celebrations a bit earlier: and I take you back in time to December 1977. This was the official Xmas number one for that year:
Paul’s maudlin pile of sheep droppings became the first UK single to sell more than two million copies, thereby surpassing anything he ever did with the Beatles. Now, isn’t there something wrong with that? There’s nothing like rubbing people’s noses in it, along the lines of, “Hey, I’m a multi-millionaire and I can afford a Scottish farm, so buy buy buy, you peasants heading for a winter of discontent and a Tory government.” The nostalgia is false: the addition of bagpipers is merely a cynical move to snag the credulous and spike them on the horns of their own lack of sound musical judgement.
No, if it was nostalgia you were after at this time, something else, a one-hit wonder that Mull Of Kintyre kept off the top, offered a more immediate and joyous celebration of what our memories hankered for.
The Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band is composed entirely of self-financed amatuer musicians and has been delighting audiences since 1881 with their professionalism and consummate artistry. Like most one-hitters, this is the single that should never have made it. The song itself is not as old as you might think: although the original ‘Furry Dance’ which it celebrates is a traditional Cornish tune, most of the song was written by one Katie Moss, a violinist, in 1911, and recorded shortly afterwards by Peter Dawson (a name that those of you who downloaded the 1900 Peelenium should be familiar with). The Briggus’ version was a Derek Broadbent arrangement (for it is he you see on the video), and it sold half a million in England. (My dear buddy Adam celebrated Terry Wogan’s knowing and artful version last Christmas, if I remember rightly.) I post it here now both as a reminder of one of the very best Christmas Number Twos and as a salute to my father, who would have been 81 this month and loved this to bits.
It’s good to be back and I hope to regale you with more delights soon.
The time has come for me to make good on my promise to post something session-wise on the anniversary of John’s death in Peru. it is remarkable, if one takes the time to consider it, how much recorded evidence of his contribution to music has surfaced in the last few years, and how much is still coming out. Proof then that fidelity to his cause has not died: at least not outside the BBC, who initially organised two Festive Fifties, a host of documentaries and a few John Peel Days but who seem to have lost interest subsequently.
Well, John, some of us are still definitely in your corner, and my contribution comes from post-punk reconstructionists the Pop Group. Thier sound is still to my ears remarkably contemporary, betraying little of the slam-bang of that era, and they paved the way for sessions by a host of 1980s pretenders attempting to marry the new wave with splashes of jazz and later dub reggae and funk in the same way that the Slits did (and in fact at one point they shared the same drummer and managers, and released a collaborative single with them). Since they came from Bristol, they are usually stated to be precursors of groups such as Massive Attack and Portishead, but listening to this remarkable session (the only one they did for Peel) no such affinity is evident. They did not, however, impress Bill Aitken, the engineer at the time, who writes on his site Starry Eyed And Laughing about the recording:
The Pop Group were the most obnoxious bunch of prats I ever had the misfortune to record. Their instruments sounded bad, they couldn’t play in tune or in time, their act (I refuse to use the word songs) was crap, and like many acts of the punk / new wave era, they were arrogant beyond belief. I remember working hard to get the backing tracks to sound respectable – and when the band came in for a playback the reaction was to inform me by means of a high volume harangue that “You make a shit sound!” The drummer then went on to insist that I make him sound “like David Bowie’s drummer”. I didn’t even bother debating the issue with them. Because they were so bad, they overran the double session. We only just got the backing tracks down by the early hours of the morning, and had to arrange another session for remix. I was pleased, because I was dreading the mix, and hoped that they would not have the time to turn up for the second session. On the remix session, just as I was about to lay down the first track on 1/4″, the band turned up. They asked if they could hear the track before I laid it. The reaction was predictable (“the sound is a load of shit!…. etc). Anyway, as I played the track through again, trying to decode from the bullshit around me anything valid that might help get the recording more to their liking, the vocalist leaned over, pulled up the “lead vocal” fader to levels that were technically overloaded and artistically crass and said – “I want more vocal”. For a joke, I grabbed the fader and said “oh … you mean like this!” – and I proceeded to wank the fader up and down furiously in time with the music. I fully expected to savour the satisfaction of insulting them all, but to my amazement, the reaction was “hey …. that’s great!!!!” Stung into action, I compounded the lunacy of the situation, and so I started doing the same alternately with the bass and drums and – not content with screwing around with the levels – I started to put the most ridiculous eq on everything, and to feed-back the delay lines and reverbs to each other – almost to the point of oscillation. Looking back, I suppose the band had a point. If I hadn’t done something ridiculous to distract the listener, the Great British public would have been that much more aware that what they were witnessing really was a load of crap. Anyway, to add insult to injury, the following week the Melody Maker referred to the “amazing John Peel tapes” in reviewing the Pop Group – and I was told that on the strength of my tapes, the band had managed to get themselves on the Patti Smith tour. This was the only time I remember a BBC session getting a positive review in a music mag! What a travesty! It was about this time that I started thinking about making a move to earn a living outside studios. The whole punk thing was a joke for me, and I became very disillusioned with some of my colleagues at Radio 1, who seemed to be succumbing to the “king’s new suit of clothes” syndrome. I think the passing of time has sorted out the wheat from the chaff. Who remembers the Pop Group? For that matter who remembers Patti Smith?
They split in 1981, with vocalist Mark Stewart moving on to work with On-U Sound, and early member Simon Underwood taking his bass guitar into Pigbag: however, a reunion was announced this year. Festive Fifty entries? Nah. A bunch of poseurs pulling a confidence trick on Rough Trade? You make up your own mind. Influential? Beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Summer has come and gone, the sticky heat and constant sweat of Korea has given way to a cool haze, and TK is always at the back of my mind. I haven’t posted anything for over a month, and it’s time I broke the bad habit. My only excuse is that I have been beavering away on the John Peel Wiki, and am constantly looking for new and exciting things to say about a DJ who’s been away for nearly six years now.
So an excuse has been granted to me by Darren Stuart, the writer of the Football And Music blog, which as we all know are two things JP was obsessed with. His idea is an excellent one. Peel died while on holiday in Peru, October 25 2004, and though it’s not a day I like to remember (I spent most of it being stunned rather than in floods of tears), it’s more than appropriate to remember him in some way at this time. I urge anyone who cares about this to post a session track on that day, as the BBC seem to have by and large lost interest in the Keeping It Peel celebrations they used to organise.
There are several ways our chap suggested we do this. If you are a Facebook user (as I am, though once again I rarely visit), post a YouTube link. If you are on Twitter, post a Tweet using the hashtag #keepingitpeel and add a session song or video clip. And if you are on B******t or WordPress, do what I do: less frequently than usual, but still with fervour.
As a taster, here’s a session that has recently come my way by Huntingdon indie band the Charlottes. Their opener in 1988 was the single ‘Are You Happy Now’ on Molesworth, and they moved labels quite frequently, ending up on Cherry Red, who reissued some of their material in 2006. I’d never heard of them before this, but they remind me of the Primitives without the coyness, mainly due to Petra Roddis’ silvery voice. Graham Gargiulo and David Fletcher mainly contributes a wall of overdriven guitars, and Simon Scott drums away frantically in the background. It’s all been heard before, frankly, and there were a plethora of bands treading the same path around the time, but if you lived through this era, it will bring more than a whiff of nostalgia to the living room, and their cover of ‘Venus’ knocks Bananrama back into their over-coiffured dressing room where they belong. Quite stunning.
Charlottes, Peel Session 1989-09-21 Where You’re Hiding / See Me Feel / Could There Ever Be / Venus
