Teenage Kicks

It’s My Shout

soitgoes2512 — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:25:22 +0000

Seems to be taking a bloody long time to snuff it.

If the logo that seemed to accompany every A&M LP I ever bought was true, then this piece would never have been written. The sad fact is that the BBC is the least responsible guardian of its own enetertainment output. It’s enough to make one weep when we see lists on Wikipedia and elsewhere of entire series of Doctor Who, the odd Hancock show, the original A For Andromeda or even Peel’s appearaces on How It Is (check out my link to the Wiki page I wrote to see what I’m on about), all apparently wiped just to reuse (at the time) costly videotape.

And that’s just the TV shows. How many countless hours of radio would never be heard again were it not for the unseen heroes who sat woth their fingers hovering over the pause button to capture their heroes like Andy Kershaw, Peel, Alan Freeman and pirate radio with little idea of the value they would have for future generations? Before we get too misty-eyed and anally retentive about all this, I will tell you my purpose. It’s to give a voice to all those people who have decided to share their precious bits of oxide-covered paper in the form of digital recordings of Peel sessions for the Internet massses. I realise that I have allotted plenty of space to my own efforts, so this is the best of the sessions currently available at other locations on the Net in one handy place.

Special mention must be given to the noble Adam at Fades In Slowly, Stuart at The Peel Sessions (who puts up so many tracks and has so many blogs it makes my head spin) and Dave at Fruitier Than Thou, who have really put themselves out to trumpet the cause of these recordings. However, all these blogs are fine pieces of work, and some make me gasp with their inventiveness. So, hats off to all, and go to it. Keep It Peel! N.B. The numbering system follows that of Ken Garner’s The Peel Sessions: if you never buy another book about the man, make sure the one you do is this one.

Sessions 0-9

999: 1978-10-25 (Mondo De Muebles)

Sessions A

Autechre: #1, 1995-08-30 (mUsistenZ)

Sessions C

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: 1984-03-28 (dark circle Room)
Cherry Boys: #2, 1982-08-16 (music..isms)
Cud: #1, 1987-06-16 (Sir Charlie Palmer)

Sessions G

Godspeed You Black Emperor: 1999-01-19 (Big Fat Satanist)

Sessions I

Icon A.D.: 1982-09-25 (Disorder By Design)

Sessions J

Jass Babies, 1981-10-19 (Fruitier Than Thou)

Sessions L

Lung Leg: #1, 1995-01-21 (Fruitier Than Thou)

Sessions M

Madness: 1979-08-14 (Fades In Slowly)

Sessions N

Nico: #1, 1971-02-02 (dark circle Room)

Sessions P

Pastels: #1, 1984-01-17 (Shoegazeralive2)

Sessions R

Rodan: 1994-06-03 (Big Fat Satanist)

Sessions S

Sabres Of Paradise, 1995-03-13 (Ripped In Glasgow)
Shellac: #1, 1994-07-14 (Big Fat Satanist)
Michael Smith: 1982-04-24 (P.A. To Da Reggae)
Smog: #3, 2001-12-10 (Sir Charlie Palmer)
Son House: 1970-07-06 (Sir Charlie Palmer)
Sonic Youth: #2, 1988-10-11 (Sir Charlie Palmer) and here (dark circle Room)

Sessions T

Tanz Der Youth: 1978-08-02 (Always Searching For Music)
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282: 1994-02-13 (YoungMossTongue)

Sessions U

Unsane: #3, 1994-06-07 (shiny grey monotone)

Sessions W

Western Promise: 1985-05-19

You’re The One That I Want

soitgoes2512 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:51:16 +0000

Widescreen not available in this cinema. Obviously.

A new session and a terrific Festive Fifty track for you today: I’m typing this while England sleeps, but I strongly urge you to put the egg soldiers to one side while you give this great music a blast. I needed to put this up straight away for two reasons: 1. This band are terrific. 2. I had to get rid of the picture below that at least one of you found objectionable (understandably).

Well, a recent crop of latterday Peel shows has yielded the one and only session by Rock Of Travolta, recorded on Remembrance Day 2001. They came from Oxford, and somewhat inevitably ended up supporting my old chums (sic) Radiohead on their South Park tour and the quite wonderful …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. Not a bad start for a band that had their first gig playing in a cowshed to 50 people. They have something of an obsession with the increasingly flabby-faced film star’s surname. Their members were: John Travolta (basses), Phil Travolta (keyboards/bass), Handsome Dave Travolta (gtr), Stumpy Joe Travoilta (drums), Roz Travolta (cello), and Deadly Dave Travolta (keyboards). Their website also claimed two extra members were Death Travolta (scythe) and Darth Travolta (light sabre). Unsurprisingly, the latter were not available for this session. The album My Band’s Better Than Yours (Juggernaut) featured one standout track in Giant Robo (FF 2001 #48), an irresistible little post-rock miracle that has a beautiful structure, tight and almost rondo-like in its perfection and sporting a tune that you will be humming for weeks. This also appears on the session in a slightly tighter version, lacking the spoken additions and squalling keyboards, but hell, either would be a proud addition to any band’s repertiore.

The remaining session tracks tread pretty much the same path, but what strikes the ear first and foremost is the singular lack of vocals througout. Purely instrumental bands have a hard time of it coming up with memorable and intriguing material, which is what makes their achievement here all the more striking. The final track, The Body Is Still There But The Mind Is Gone, made an appearance in another version on the memorably named compilation When I Wank On My Guitar, The Whole World Wanks With Me. Right. I don’t really know what the band have been up to since their third album release, Uluru, which saw them transfer to a new label, Tablature, but it would be a real shame if they are not still forging a path they have very much made their own: shorter and tighter than Mogwai, but with a sense of air and freshness around the instruments that betrays real musicianship. Could have done without the overheated female samples on track three, though…

Rock Of Travolta, Giant Robo

Rock Of Travolta, Peel Session 2001-11-11
Lukewarm Skywater/Giant Robo/Oxygen Assisted/The Body’s Still There But The Mind Is Gone

Stupid Useless Fat Bitch

soitgoes2512 — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 09:54:51 +0000

Gorgeous, eh? Pass the sick bucket.

It’s a long time since I’ve treated myself to a rant, one of my previous efforts being to show up Michael Henderson’s pathetic dissection of John. This time I turn to a much older article, one written by that fat, smug, self-satisfied cunt Julie Burchill for the Guardian in 1999, but one that I’ve been waiting to attack for a long time. Apparently, being something of a so-called iconoclast herself, she welcomes negative attention, so I hope she is reading this. Steph, one of my commenters, seemed to think that it was written just after John’s death in 2004: actually, unlike Henderson, she at least had the respect to do it while he was still alive, but that doesn’t make this one-sided tirade any easier to stomach.

There are two sorts of sacred cows, just like there’s a Whopper and a filet mignon. The first sort of cow is one that we know is sacred, but we’re – titter, snigger – covertly encouraged to attack it, both for pleasure and profit. That would be the Queen and Cliff Richard.The second would be the Queen Mother and John Peel. Show me a filet mignon and I become a mad cow. John Peel has become ‘our’ – and, by that, I mean people who consider themselves enlightened and unburdened by tradition – Queen Mother. He needs taking out; if only in a caring way, for his own good. He is in danger of reaching hands-off, Help The Aged status: 60 years old, and he’s still got all his own teeth, sorry, all his own Fall records!

I’ve always loathed John Peel. It started in the Sixties when I was a child, still staggering under the first blow of benediction by black music. All day long on Radio 1 – most of all, on Tony Blackburn’s show – you could hear great creamy earfuls of it: Motown by the mile, Philly by the furlong. But at night Radio 1 became a white desert. It became ‘intelligent’. That is, it became male, hippy and smelly – it became John Peel. I hated him in the Seventies, too, because he liked punk, long after punk – the whitest, malest, most asexual music ever – should have been left to die an unnatural death. I’d been a punk, and knew that the whole thing was, frankly, shit in safety pins. We came to bury the music industry; we ended up giving it one almighty shot in the arm.

In the Eighties, someone gave me as a kitsch gift a Sixties pop annual. I’ll never forget John Peel in it, talking about his father’s absence during his infancy: “He was off playing soldiers.” Reader, this man was fighting in the second world war. What did YOU do in the war, Daddy? Well, John Peel caught VD, and banged on about it. Until recently, Peel banged on a lot about sex. Like many an ugly Englishman, he went to America, where that nation’s young women found a Limey accent so beguiling that they barely looked at the face it came out of: “All they wanted me to do was abuse them, sexually, which, of course, I was only too happy to do,” Peel told the Guardian in 1975. “Girls,” he said to the Sunday Correspondent in 1989, “used to queue up outside oral sex they were particularly keen on, I remember one of my regular customers, as it were, turned out to be 13, though she looked older.” This was the Sixties. Fleeing America after the authorities quite rightly objected to him having sex with young teenage girls, Peel was joined by his wife, Shirley, a Texan girl, who was 15 when he married her. Talking to the Correspondent about this young woman, now dead by her own hand, Peel seems strangely censorious: “She fell in with some extremely dodgy people she married three more times after me, and I was the only husband by whom she didn’t have a child. All the children were in care. She did some terrible things, you know. She didn’t deserve to die, though.” Somebody give that man a medal!

Scratch a hippie and find a sexist – well into the Seventies, Peel was drooling on about “schoolgirls”, in print and on air, where his Schoolgirl Of The Year competition was quietly laid to rest during punk’s tenure. I always thought the alleged Sexual Revolution of the Sixties was not a bid to advance women’s rights, but rather to block them, to turn back the clock and push the brave new young working woman back to being barefoot and pregnant. Even the appearance approved for hippie women – long skirts, long hair – spoke of an earlier era, before girls raised their skirts and bobbed their hair and went out to earn a living. Knowing of Peel’s rather sticky track record on matters sexual, it seems both wildly inappropriate and somehow totally fitting that his latest venture is the radio critic’s favourite Radio 4 programme, Saturday morning’s Home Truths, which, as its name implies, is a deeply reactionary idea masquerading as a droll, down-to-earth sideswipe.

Home Truths concerns itself with family matters, both bitter and sweet. These may be as unimportant as the reluctance of teenagers to tidy their rooms or as serious as the alleged False Memory Syndrome, but they are linked by one overriding belief: that after all politics, after all ideas, there is the Family. And that the Family, alone of all institutions, is as natural as breathing. This is, of course, untrue; the Family is a construct like any other, one that has been propped up by a million years of hellfire warnings (“Marry or burn” – so-called “Saint” Paul) and that, the moment the pulpit-bullying ceased, broke down with amazing swiftness. Everyone’s got a right to get old and fat – hell, it’s practically my raison d’être – but I find it filthily objectionable for someone who has grown rich and respected for preaching the Sixties mantra, “If it feels good, do it!”, suddenly to come over so cosy and domestic that it would have Oxo Katie reaching for an icepick.

Peel, being middle class, managed to survive the Sixties, and then thrive in the decades that followed. But for the young working class, the road of excess led to madness, alienation and incarceration; and for the girls who got hip to the Sixties slogans about sexual generosity, a joyless shag led to nothing but a council flat and the end of youth before they were entitled to vote. I don’t blame Peel for changing his mind. But I do blame him for rubbing the nation’s collective nose in the fact that the well-connected can walk on the wild side and return to the fold, whereas the working class need only stray once off the straight and narrow to be trapped in a cul-de-sac of sorrow. A public schoolboy who calls his children after footballers, a lover of World Music who happily took the Order of the British Empire, a landowner who does commercials for toilet paper and Playstations and yet calls himself a Bennite, a past ‘abuser’ of children who preaches Family Values in excelsis: it is not, as his fans like to say, a wonder that Radio 1 has not sacked him in 30 years. No, in all his patronising, phoney, hypocritical glory, he is Radio 1. Lord Reith would be proud.

Well, self-confessed cocaine addict and part-time lesbian (six weeks or six months? she never was quite sure. Maybe that’s because she’s brain dead with no memory beyond her last pay check), Christian (oh, sorry, Catholic…whoops, hold the front page, it’s now Judaism), this may be old news to you, but Peel inspired a devotion that has still not faded five years after he left us. I have yet to see acres of Internet space devoted to your somnolent musings, who scoffs at Peel for being middle-class (since when was that a crime?) and yet refers to a ‘Filet Mignon.’ Can’t say I’ve ever had one of those…well, I don’t get paid exorbitant amounts of money by credulous rags for writing total bollocks for a living. At least my rubbish comes free.

The key, the rationale for all of this shit, is the phrase “I’ve always loathed John Peel.” Right, Julie: that’s why you waited until the Guardian offered you enough cash to write a poisonous attack every week, until you performed your favourite trick of biting the hand that fed you and moving to the Times, where you lasted a few years before history repeated itself. You didn’t like him. That’s it. There is no more substance to this article than that. To correct one of the most obvious of your many mistakes: punk, ‘the whitest, malest, most asexual music ever’? (Er…how can it be male and asexual simultaneously?) So that’s why Lee Perry (a black man) produced the Clash’s Complete Control. And why punk and reggae existed side by side in Peel’s shows of the late seventies: in fact, there’s scarcely a show available when he didn’t play reggae or one of its derivatives. Just to point out one more thing: the first and last records ever played on Top Gear were by Martha and the Vandellas….Motown recording artists, weren’t they?

It’s news to me that he ‘banged on’ about catching VD: the only time I can recall him mentioning it on the radio was when he admitted having it on Night Ride…..once. Moreover, I think you overestimate his success with women: Sheila recalls that his attempts to snare women by offering free passes to gigs he did resulted in zero conquests. In any case, his marriage to Shirley was truly a very unhappy one, and if you want to talk about abuse, do a bit more research and find out exactly what she used to do to him. That would mean reading a few books, wouldn’t it? Or does that take second place to stuffing your face with chocolate on the sofa, and pretending you’ve seen or read things you haven’t, just as you used to make up reviews about films while getting your unfortunate partners to see them for you. No, it’s because Peel wasn’t one of your group, the Groucho set that seemed to be in competition to see how much they could snort, just like that other tosser Will Self. ‘Filths savour but themselves’…that is presumably why you leapt to Daniella Westbrook’s defence. Oh and by the way, he didn’t want the gong from the Queen: it’s well documented that one of his children had to talk him into accepting it.

I could go on about this, but I feel like it’s focusing more on you than on Peel, which is obviously what you want. So I’ll content myself by reminding you of the fact that the ‘desert’ you refer to, Top Gear, started out on weekend afternoons, and it wasn’t until 1975 that Peel got a regular night-time spot. Not always at night, then. And the family is a construct, yes, but one that you as a devotee of all things religious would surely have approved of (this fatuous statement coming from someone who thinks Big Brother is ‘reality TV’). But then, that wouldn’t have fitted in with the keynote of this archival claptrap…“I’ve always loathed John Peel.” Jealousy, the one-eyed god, has enslaved you, and even though this was written ten years ago, nothing in your life seems to contradict the sentiments expressed then. You get an F: don’t see me after class.

And I hated what you wrote about John Lennon too.

Black Magic

soitgoes2512 — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:34:39 +0000

"We are entranced, spellbound." Couldn't have put it better myself, Ms. Ballion.

As a kind of lapsed Baptist of some 10 years standing, it’s not in my nature to give any credence or support to Halloween, but I guess many of you will be digging out the Friday The 13th, Halloween, Nightmare On Elm Street and Candyman DVDs for tonight, so as a little soundtrack to part of all that, here’s the fourth Siouxsie and the Banshees session from 1981. By this time, Siouxsie had renounced the abrasive yet thrilling punk persona for the prototype Goth, and any of these songs could have come straight out of a slasher movie, so dark and sinister are they. This time around, the archetypal line-up of Siouxsie on vocals, black make-up and scary hair and Steve Severin on pulsating bass was augmented by Budgie on tribal drumming and ex-Magazine wallah John McGeoch drafted in to contribute the screeching and fragmented guitarwork. The overall result, with its slight tinges of melody to bring light to the darkness, puts it miles away from their early material but poles apart from the competition. As usual, this is stunning, unforgettable, plangent, and a throwback to a more musically adventurous and resonant time in my life.

The set was intended to showcase their eopchal turnabout, Juju, and three of the songs from that appear here. In case you’re expecting samples from the excellent Voices In The Air set, you may be disappointed (or alternately thrilled) to hear these as they were first broadcast on the 18 February 1981, atmospheric, chilled, and bloody to the core (but still smashing quality). So the radio cuts are what I’ve gone for. Look behind you at every opportunity.

Siouxsie And The Banshees, Peel Session 1981-02-10
Halloween/In The Light/Voodoo Dolly/But Not Them

Five Years Gone

soitgoes2512 — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:23:30 +0000

The many faces of the greatest DJ ever. Whatever Julie Burchill and Michael Henderson say.

I’d love to believe in an afterlife, not because I want to meet Shakespeare or anything like that…I’d like to find out from my dad whether he meant me or my brother to have the Welsh dresser...With my old car, I could play cassettes in that, and I used to think that I would probably die trying to read the name on the box by the headlights of the car behind me, and then people would say, “He would have wanted to go that way” : quite untrue. (Peel in 2002 on Room 101).

John died on October 25 2004 in Cuzco, Peru, while on holiday with Sheila. It’s tempting with hindsight to wonder why a 65 year-old outrageously overworked man suffering from diabetes should have been allowed to take a vacation in a country with a high, thin altitude, but such reflections are fruitless now. As Ken Garner said,

He’s still around. There are dozens of shows out there you have not heard. You can get them easily. In 2007, the listener and fan-generated tribute sites to Peel on the web mean that there is today, almost three years after his death, more Peel available than ever before. (Garner, K. The Peel Sessions, BBC Books 2007, p. 181)

The old adage goes that you never know what you’ve got till it’s gone, and in the case of this DJ that rings mordantly true. However, whether you are a seasoned listener, or have never heard of him, the facility to visit and revisit Peel country is on the Peel Wiki, created by my great friend Adam from Turkey and now with upwards of 2,600 pages, more than a few of them the work of yours truly. It can be accessed here, and a lifetime of discovery and rediscovery awaits. Still miss you as much as ever, John.

On this day, I pondered about what to post in his memory, being reluctant to trot out again the song from which this blog takes its title. Far better to feature one of the wonderful products of his Indian summer, the only other track I can recall that seemed to reduce him to tears on hearing it, Amsterdam’s wonderfully evocative Does This Train Stop On Merseyside (FF 2003 #31). Vocalist and guitarist Ian Prowse explains here in great detail how this paean to Liverpool came about, and the homage to his hometown port certainly gains added resonance when one remembers that when a locomotive was named after John some time ago, they played this on the train during its maiden journey.

Amsterdam themselves seem to have taken a long and thorny road to stardom. Despite being formed in 1999, they had to wait until 2005 for a top 40 hit in the UK with The Journey. Not that they were short of fans in those early days: they won an NME competition to find the best unsigned band in 2000, appeared backing Elvis Costello on the Jonathon Ross show, and recorded session tracks for Janice Long. More recently, they have split with their original record label Beat Crazy and issued a new LP with CIA last year, Arm In Arm. I haven’t, I must admit, heard anything they’ve done apart from this, but the strong melody and incisive lyrics of Merseyside could probably convert even this musical Luddite to their charms. Shame they never did a Peel Session, indeed.

Amsterdam, Does This Train Stop On Merseyside

Midnight At The Lost And Found

soitgoes2512 — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:24:35 +0000

''I fumble for change and pull out the Queen, smiling beguiling'...oh well, maybe not.

John Peel told an interesting story in one of the 2002 shows (I think) that have kept me companion on the long lonely trips to and from Seoul on the subway for the last few months, armed with my Sony Discman and an mp3 disc of ripe Ravenscroft treasures, my newly acquired copy of the Olivetti Chronicles waiting disconsolately in my backpack for when somebody leaves the train and I can grab a seat. It concerned the fate of those ‘lost’ Peel Sessions from the late 60s, and was in response to a listener query. He related that the session artists routinely signed a contract stating that the BBC was only allowed to keep the recordings for up to three months after the first broadcast, and then they had to be disposed of, because keeping them would be a breach. In essence (he said), they were ‘left in a skip’ outside the Radio 1 studios and anybody could help themselves to whatever they wanted. Yes, people, the BBC had little regard for these treasures in those far away days, and recycling magnetic tape was a greater priority than preserving these monumental jewels for future generations.

Nonetheless, due to the activities of a small group of dedicated individuals at the Peel Mailing List, a host of Top Gears (and Night Rides) have been rescued from the depths of a reel-to-reel collection, and from one of these I present to you most of the only session by Mandrake Paddle Steamer. During that aforementioned reminiscence, this was spoken of fondly by Peel, who speculated that the BBC had since wiped the tapes. They were formed in 1967 by vocalist Brian Engel and guitarist Martin Briley, subsequently joined by Paul Riordan (who has a good site about the band here), and debuted at Walthamstow Town Hall supporting Pink Floyd and subsequently gigged long and hard around the UK, releasing one single on Parlophone. Paul seems to think that there was more than one session, but Ken Garner’s The Peel Sessions argues otherwise.

My personal favourite from the three surviving songs is ‘Senlac Lament’, which between broadcasts became ‘Senila Lament’, but, unless you really enjoy King Crimson and music of that ilk, it’s unlikely you will see what John did in this session. Apparently EMI released them on Parlophone because they were ‘too commercial’ for Harvest, as Paul says. Does that come across in these tunes? I’ll let you be the judges of that.

Mandrake Paddle Steamer, Peel Session
Cooger And Dark/Senila Lament/The Ivory Castle Of Solitaire Huske

Progress Report #5

soitgoes2512 — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:41:07 +0000

Bangers’n'Mash: Blizzard Boys, Shitmat. Sessions added, text updated.

The Drugs Don’t Work

soitgoes2512 — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:20:24 +0000

…but why would you need them to, when you have psychedelic videos like this?

I can’t understand why anyone wants to chemically alter their senses. People should do this in a much healthier way. [The Lady Miss Keir Kirby, Hype Magazine interview]

Yes, it’s the song that you all love to hate. Or just hate. Peel was quick to point out that he was the first DJ on Radio 1 to play this, but is that necessarily laudable? I still haven’t made up my mind on this one, and have yet to be convinced that it wasn’t just a huge con-trick.
Throwbacks to the sixties have always been a failsafe for artists lacking the necessary originality to blaze a completely new trail. Conversely, Clinic wore their indebtedness to the Velvet Underground on their sleeves, complete with stabbing organ lines and laconic vocals, but added a sense of discovery, a new verve that compressed and streamlined the Sister Ray-like stream of feedback. What Dee-Lite did in effect was to throw together a bunch of samples from funk and jazz, overlay it with Q-Tip’s rapping and Bootsy Collins’ bass (as if to imply a nod of approval from the artists they were pinching all their ideas from) , add that bloody annoying slide whistle, and front it with chanteuse Lady Miss Keir attempting to marry the gauche and the savant in one fell swoop.
Naturally it was catnip to the rave-sodden masses of 1990, who saw a twist to the familiar dance themes around at the time, but failed to see the dead end lurking just around the corner. Other acts such as Candy Flip would continue to mine the possibilites inherent in trotting out the remake formula again and again, but the new decade demanded harder and faster rhythms and more merciless beats to complement an Internet-based lifestyle that brought such delights as a war played out in real time. This is why Deee-Lite were doomed to crash and burn in their own rainbow catsuits, and why drum and bass continues to have the impact now that it did then.
In retrospect, Groove Is In the Heart (FF 1990 #44) is a footnote to an era rather than its sine qua non. Mark Whitby said it ‘told us a lot about what was suddenly becoming possible’, even though the sampling had been done elsewhere and to more devastating effect. Very much a cult item that luckily crossed over (and narrowly missed making number one in the UK due to an absurd rule on number one chart ties that was only invoked here), I listen to it not with the sense of over-familiarity that caused me to despise it then (I did work in a record shop, after all), but rather instead a dissatisfied recognition of themes undeveloped and the baton casually passed for others to run with.

Deee-Lite, Groove Is In The Heart (Meeting Of The Minds Mix)

Progress Report #4

soitgoes2512 — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:16:03 +0000

A Rabid Poodle On Speed: (god help us) Melt Banana. Post updated, sessions added, no recanting whatsoever.

Goodnight, thank you, now it’s time to go home

soitgoes2512 — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:47:20 +0000

We are the sultans that play creole. I see.

Number 28 in 1978’s Festive Fifty exposes the true underbelly of the British listening public, but at the same time confirms their good taste, to these ears at any rate. Dire Straits have achieved a kind of notoriety in Peel fanatic circles as one of a select group of people that were never offered a Peel Session: apparently, Charlie Gillett discovered them. That, of course, doesn’t mean to say they weren’t any good. John was simply a man who knew what he liked and stuck to his guns, and in any case Margrave Of The Marshes reveals that he had a sneaking liking for this song and knew all the words.
The song is a paean to a jazz club like a thousand others, but celebrates the very non-celebratory qualities that make it special. All the detail’s there: “a crowd of young boys they’re fooling around in the corner/Drunk and dressed in their best brown baggies and their platform soles”, Harry who is only doing this work on the side, George who can’t afford a spanking new guitar….and all this is taking place in London, not Chicago, to an infectious beat and inspired drumming from Pick Withers.

It was released as a single on Vertigo, and took its time to hit the charts, but when it did…and you doubtless know the rest. For me, their summa cum laude was the peerless Making Movies, which became the soundtrack to a very boring job in the Civil Service, but I also bought Sultans when it first came out, loved it to death, and of course it disappeared in the great vinyl purge of the mid 80s (if anybody has an mp3 of that single version, as featured in the video above, faster and punchier than the more showy LP version which JP played, I’ll laud you to the skies if you let me have a copy). It seems to draw a line between what the Peel Show had been and what it then became. The band themselves ploughed a similar furrow for many years, with Mark Knopfler (not, I think, the guitar genius that everybody makes him out to be, but sounding better and more alert here than he did subsequently) coining it from soundtracks and the like, but it was clear that they had gone in a direction which was at a sharp tangent to the one John was travelling. And that is why they made it to the BBC, but not for our hero.

Dire Straits, Sultans Of Swing