Monday 13 February 2012

It's the Peel thing

There is a brief moment in my musical-tastes-timeline which deserves a special mention, perhaps particularly because it was so short-lived.  It was the very early eighties and a whole new crop of UK bands had released songs that just didn’t fit neatly into an existing genre.  Even with hindsight I can’t think of a perfect name for it – it wasn’t punk, nor goth, nor rock, nor pop.  Being generally referred to as ‘Post-punk’ is ok, but sounds a bit too broad.  And  I suppose ‘Indie’ would be an understandable tag,  but that rather blandly convenient term brings to mind a slightly later upsurge of bands.  So I’ll share with you a name which sums up my listening habits of the time:  Peel bands’.  It was John Peel who brought these sounds into my bedroom through his late night radio show and for that reason they’ll always be inextricably linked.

Perhaps one of the first things to draw my attention to these Peel bands was their weird and wonderful names.  They gave no indication as to how they might sound, so when John announced at the beginning of his show, “Tonight we have a session from Crispy Ambulance and records by Ski Patrol and A Certain Ratio..." my curiosity was already stirred.

At the start of that decade I was an art student, feeling happily outside of the norm, with not too many cares in the world, dressing in clothes from charity shops and growing out my once-spiked hair to back-comb it instead.  I bought my singles from places like Small Wonder, who, as well as being a label for acts like Patrik Fitzgerald (and releasing the first Cure single), had a record shop in Walthamstow.  I never went there but it operated a great little mail order service.  You could phone up and speak to founder Pete Stennet  himself to place your order and send your stamped addressed envelope off for the latest list.  It’s funny how little random snippets linger in my memory for no apparent reason; I recall sitting on our brown-carpeted stairs with the curly cord of the big-dialled cream telephone stretching round the doorway from the kitchen when I rang up excitedly to reserve an obscure EP by the Tunes.  A Saturday lunchtime I think.  Rhubarb crumble in the oven.

Before selfies were selfies

I may sound like an old fart but really I’m quite glad I’m of a certain vintage when I think back to those days. I get such a warm feeling.  My world was so small in so many ways, my life’s limits bound by the cost of a train ticket or bus fare, late night curfews set by parents and only three TV channels, all of which turned into mute, black screens by bedtime.  But maybe all that just made me appreciate even more the exotic pleasures to be had from listening to the one and only John Peel. 

Here for your exotic listening pleasure too, I bring you a small, random selection:








Wah! Heat: Seven Minutes To Midnight

(links may have expired...)

18 comments:

  1. Thanks for turning me onto bands I had never heard of. I remember the joys of finding new bands and great looking, to me anyway, clothes from second hand stores back in the early 80's.

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    1. My pleasure, Dr MVM. Great that you also relate to that thrill of finding new bands and old clothes! I don't think there's ever a time in one's life quite like that one...

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  2. Ah, those names are evocative indeed. Once saw the YMGs play in the basement of the Bain Douche in Paris. They shared the space with a swimming pool I seem to remember... happy daze...

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    1. Ooh, that sounds like a very esoteric combination: the YMGs in a Parisian basement swimming pool...? You just couldn't make it up! Glad the names could evoke happy times!

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  3. A lovely selection. I grew up not far from Walthamstow, so we used to hover uncertainly around the Small Wonder shop, trying not to stare at Patrik Fitzgerald (who was a bit of a post-punk pin-up boy as far as we were concerned.). The place smelt of fags and glue, can't think why...

    Who would ever have imagined that one day in The Future, we'd all be able to find those long-lost old songs again and listen to them, just by typing their names into a computer? And they still sound daisy-fresh to me.

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    1. Thanks - oh that's really something - that I can mention a fairly obscure place like the Small Wonder shop and you know what I'm talking about - more than that, that you actually hung around it! I agree about 'The Future' thing - we could never have foreseen this... Btw I saw Patrik Fitzgerald live in about '81 I think, a very low-key gig at the Railway Hotel in Bishop's Stortford, great it was. Nice memories. And as for Small Wonder smelling of fags and glue, I can definitely relate to that too - a few years later I was working in a record shop. The smell of fags, vinyl and indeed occasionally glue will forever be evocative of those times!

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  4. I love teh Young Marble Giants...that's all.

    We got a lot of this stuff a couple of years after the fact...mostly through Burning Airlines catalouges and 120 Minutes. Nobody I knew had ever even heard the John Peel Show on the radio...he was like a mythical figure to us because of the Peel Session tapes that were highly sought after. I've still got a Wire Peel Session cassette around here somewhere.

    It warped me bad....this has always been my favorite phase of underground music or whatever. Au Pairs, Raincoats, Pop Group, Swell Maps, Television Personalities, of course the Mighty Fall...and the Young Marble Giants. I have mentioned how much I love the Young Marble Giants.

    It's really neat to hear you, and others, talk about hovering around that scene and knowing it intimately...while we were all kinda groping at an elephant in the dark with it.

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    1. I think this is amazing, e.f. - excuse my ignorancce but I really didn't appreciate that you would have had the same exposure to, or take on, that 80s UK underground scene over there, I'm so impressed that you did. I meant to include The Pop Group's 'She's Beyond Good And Evil' btw - a fave of the time - but forgot! Great to see the other names you mention too. And I listened to the first Wire session as it went out on Peel, I remember it well because I had just got my ticket to go and see them at my local college, (1978 I think it was?), and I hadn't heard them until that session, was so excited knowing I was going to see them soon after. Great session and great gig. What you say about hearing about the scene here works the other way too I'm sure; I've been into a lot of obscure US bands too over the years. And I'm chuffed that all you lovely commenters here can share these interests!

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    2. I was probably worse about than some you can see it all over American music in the 90's.

      Curt Cobain was obsessed with the Vasalines (a little later on but in the same spirit I think) and the Raincoats. I think he had a lot to do with getting both those bands back together.

      Then there was Pavement...they made their name brilliantly ripping off Swell Maps and The Fall.

      Interestingly some of it came back to them. The Wedding Present covered a Pavement song (Box Elder) very early on. They've always had a strong following in Britain (They did an untouchable Peel Session early on). Later in the decade, Blur around the time of Blur went on and on about them...and Song 2 is fairly obvious homage.

      We were into it.

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    3. Oh yes that's so true, e.f. - those influences did surface again in the 90s didn't they, and my feeling was that there was some really exciting music coming over from the US too. You know, I saw Pavement in a small venue local to me at the time ('The Square' in Harlow) and I don't remember much about it! I just checked google to see if there was a date for it and (oh, the wonders of google!) it comes up as August 1992. But I didn't get into them and don't know enough about them to know how that fits into their personal story! Talking of bands who were liked by Kurt Cobain, I loved the Wipers. Pyscho Records put out some of their stuff out here quite early on - 'Is This Real' was rarely off my turntable (what's a turntable?!) for a while back then. Happy days!

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  5. In 1980 my band wrote to John Peel - we didn't even
    have a tape! We just wrote to tell him that we loved
    his show, we had a band and to look out for a
    tape....sometime in the future! Amazingly he wrote
    back. His handwritten note said he looked forward to
    hearing our 'fab teen combo' and it was signed
    'music lovin' Johnny P'. We were all flabbergasted
    that he took the time to write and the letter took
    pride of place on the wall in Andrew (the drummer's)
    house where we met to practice.

    The band, of course, didn't last and Andrew no doubt
    still has the letter. He went on to make
    experimental electronic music of some note, trading
    as Lagowski.....and yes, he did eventually make it
    on to John Peel's show.

    Another great post C - and very evocative for those of us who are also...of a certain vintage!

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    1. That's such a great story, and so brilliant that he took the trouble to reply. I hope that original letter is safe somewhere, suitably framed perhaps! I was sure I saw JP some years ago driving along my road, which was perfectly feasible really as he didn't live so far away. It could have been any balding, bearded middle-aged man I guess, but I just like to think it was him!

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  6. Enjoyed going through those tracks - don't think I'd heard any before. Ta.

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    1. Thanks - a lot of it has been forgotten I think, because it wasn't around for that long and now the '80s get associated more with the whole Duran Duran/Spandau B/FGTH/Stock, Aitken & Waterman type sound. But there was so much more, wasn't there.... SO much more!

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  7. How did I miss this?! You'd have hit it off perfectly with an acquaintance of mine in high school who was all about the Young Marble Giants and many of these bands! Patrick D. Martin....I only ever heard "Computer Dating" by him on a budget priced U.S. I.R.S. double LP samplerm, wow that's a name I hadn't heard or thought of since "then"! And the pic is very cute too! I'd almost forgotten what cameras looked like back then!!

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  8. Thanks Wilthomer! And you're so right about cameras - huge isn't it? - really dates the pic!

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  9. Favourite John Peel moment ? I owned a secondhand record shop for a few years, ending in the early noughties. Got a phone call from a friend at the Arts Centre saying Peel had been in and asked for directions to the shop. Twenty minutes later, in he walks and goes straight to the 50's 7" singles. Pulls out a few. I'm playing it cool, not fawning over this legend or taking photographs. I am, however, sweating. As he passes the counter, a guy says " Can I listen to this ? I know it's some weird disco shite but I just want to hear if this is actually the third drummer for James Brown or not ..." He walks past Peel, to the record deck. Peel looks at me and failing to whisper, says "Don't some people talk utter bollocks about records?!". I let him have his records for free...

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    1. I hereby award you first prize for best Peel story!
      What a great anecdote, thanks! He seemed like such a nice guy in so many ways but not one to suffer fools gladly - I can just imagine him saying that in that soft, lightly accented voice of his.
      And you had a second-hand record shop - envious!

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