Category: Peel Sessions

Another post that shows my age. If The Best of Blondie was one of the first albums I bought, amongst the first 7″ singles I bought were Gangsters, Rat Race and Stereotype by The Specials. I used to get £1 every Saturday and I’d be straight down to John Menzies for whatever had caught my eye on Top Of The Pops on the Thursday night. I even had enough change left over for a penny chew. I came to regret this in later life when I started getting fillings in my teeth, but not as much as the twang of regret I get everytime I think about the time I gave my singles collection to the BB jumble sale. Baggy Trousers gone. Stand & Deliver gone. Swords Of A Thousand Men gone. D’oh.

The Specials recorded 4 sessions for John Peel. The first (23.5.79) was available for a while. Try eBay if you really need it. Or ask me nicely…

 

The other sessions remain unreleased but you can find the three tracks recorded for the 3rd session below. Recorded almost exactly 27 years ago on the 29th October 1980, the jewel in the crown here is undoubtedly the version of ‘Stereotype’. The single version is sung in 3rd person – “He’s just a stereotype, he drinks his age in pints etc etc,” but in this run through, Terry Hall sings a different introduction and sings in first person – “I’m just a stereotype, etc etc”. Now. Bob Dylan fans get themselves all in a lather over this kind of thing. Specials fans probably don’t, but the Peel version is also faster than the one you’ll know and is less exotica/bossa nova/lounge sounding than the single version. So you need it. Of the other 2 tracks, ‘Racquel‘ dates back to the days when The Specials were still the Coventry Automatics. It’s just about the punkiest thing the Specials recorded and a bit of googling makes me think this version is the only one the band did. ‘Sea Cruise’ is a trombone-led instrumental romp through a version of Frankie Ford’s 1958 RnB hit. It wouldn’t sound out of place on Jools Holland’s Hootenany, which is interesting as the trombone player on Sea Cruise is Rico, who nowadays earns his corn playing with Jools’ Big Band.

For the record, The Specials line-up for this Peel session was:

Jerry Dammers (Keyboards, Backing Vocals)

Roddy Radiation (Lead Guitar)

Terry Hall (Lead Vocals)

Sir Horace Gentleman Panter (Bass)

Lynval Golding (Lead Guitar, Backing Vocals)

John Bradbury (Drums, Percussion)

Neville Staples (Vocals, Percussion)

Rico Rodriquez (Trombone)

Dick Cuthell (Cornet)

You can find out everything you need to know about any Peel Session ever at the BBC’s excellent website here.

Edit, Sunday 11th November

Oops! Thanks to the people at the 2Tone forums who have found this site and have pointed me in the direction of this, the complete Specials BBC sessions.

For whatever reason, most of the casual hits on this site come from people Googling for PJ Harvey. So this post is for all of you. I could have posted the new album. But that’s not what this blog was intended for. I could post the complete Peel Sessions, not just the ones you can buy. But they’re fairly easy to find elsewhere. Instead I’m putting up a few tracks from the first PJ Harvey album, ‘Dry‘, in demo form.

‘Dry’ is by far my favourite PJ album. It sounds garagey, bluesy and down right dirty. Plus it’s got great cello all over it. And ‘Sheela-Na-Gig’ is kinda saucy and has a John Cale-esque violin (or is it viola?) scraping away over the top of it. I wore the 12″ out playing it to death. Polly was only 22. She sounded great and looked even better. I always had a feeling that one day she’d go out with me, till she met that bastard Nick Cave. Oh well, her loss.

Anyway. The music. When Dry was released way back in 1991, initial copies came with a free CD, ‘Dry Demonstration’, which had the album in demo form. Here are 3 demos from that disc.

 ‘O Stella’ sounds a wee bit less intense than the album version. More acousticy but no less frantic. She hits all the high notes, plays all the bent string blues notes and the whole thing sounds majestic. And the way she says, “Stella Marie you’re my star” in her West Country accent at the start is quite amusing. ‘Dress’ was one of the singles from the album. On ‘Dry’ it was a cello led rant against leering boys who stare at girls in tight dresses. This version’s got some cello on it too, but not that high in the mix. An electric guitar is double tracked with an acoustic. By the end, the cello’s all over it, the backing vocals have kicked in, the blues riffs have taken over and it sounds like something Kurt Cobain might have demoed for Nevermind. Seriously. The demo version of ‘Sheela-Na-Gig’ is a straight run through of the single version that I wore out. Acoustic guitar (again), the high notes (again), the mangled blues riff (again), the “you exhibitionist!” vocal, the whole shebang. In lo-fi.

Extra! Extra! Recorded 29th September 1991, ‘Sheela-Na-Gig’ Peel Session version here. By the way, if you don’t know what a Sheela-Na-Gig is, try here.

Tonight Matthew I’m going to be Joan Baez.

So, T in the Park came and went, and going by what I watched on telly it was just like Glastonbury with kilts on. The same acts, the same sets, the same presenters, the same mud, the same audience. The same pish if you ask me. Wean’s World.

It’s hard to come up with any highlights from T, but if there was one it would be the faux pas the singer from Arcade Fire (Wim Butler) made. Telling the crowd that the band had stayed in Glasgow the night before their slot he went on to say, “What the fuck was that parade all about? It was awesome. You guys really know how to play a snare drum.” Cue much booing and many  “Get tae’s!” from the soggy masses. It turns out Mr Butler and co had just witnessed their first orange walk. What a walk to witness as well. Given the date at the weekend, it would have been the big one.

 

The phenomenon of the orange walk may be unfamiliar to some of you so I shall try and briefly explain. In Ireland and in the West of Scotland there is a strong anti-Catholic organisation called the Orange Order. Yes, it’s not just Muslims that get it from us. Anyway, this lot like to remember the Battle of the Boyne which took place over 300 years ago(!) in July 1690, when King William of Orange (King Billy) defeated King James’ and his attempts to regain the thrones in Scotland and England as well as Ireland. Do some googling and you can find out all you need to know. These days, the Orange Order and their associated walks on and around the 12th of July are used by Rangers FC shirt wearing thickos to shout, swear and sing obscenities about Roman Catholics and should really have no place in 21st Century society. That’s why the Arcade Fire were booed. Nice to see the kids of today rubbishing the orange walk. With any luck, these parades will eventually die out, just like my failed attempts here at a bit of political writing.

And now for the music bit. Here’s 4 tenuously-linked tracks related to the 12th of july and it’s associated rubbish…..

 

Kicking things off, two Libertines tracks. First, from their much bootlegged Legs 11 demo sessions, ‘Hooray For The 21st Century‘. Secondly, ‘Boys In The Band‘ from an XFM session 2002 (exact date unknown).

 

Next. The Arctic Monkeys got famous on myspace etc and everyone knew the words to all their songs before they were even released. File sharing? Great, eh? Hooray for the 21st century! Here’s their first demo of ‘Scummy Man‘.

 

Finally, the fantastic Fall. Taken from the Complete Peel Sessions Box Set, which you really should own by now, is their ‘Kurious Oranj‘ from the 31st of October, Nineteen Eighty-eight-ah. Trumpets, giant hamburgers and ballet dancing. No-one does it or says it like Mark E Smith.

Pained and intense, man
They were inquiring.
They were Kurious Oranj…
They rode over peasants like you, they rode over peasants like you,
And their horses loved them too, and their horses loved them too.
They Were Kurious Oranj. They Were Kurious Oranj.
They built the world as we know it, all the systems you traverse.
Rode slipshod over all dumbshits.
They were Kurious Oranj…