There Is Some Fun Going Forward

There Is Some Fun Going Forward was the title of the final release by Dandelion Records. It was a ten track sampler LP for the label, issued in 1972 through Polydor and retailed at a budget price.

Side One
 * 1) Medicine Head - Only To Do What Is True
 * 2) Clifford T. Ward - Anticipation
 * 3) Coxhill-Bedford Duo - Pretty Little Girl
 * 4) Mike Hart - Nell's Song
 * 5) Tractor - All Ends Up

Side Two
 * 1) Bridget St John - Fly High
 * 2) John Trevor - Sky Dance
 * 3) Stackwaddy - Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut
 * 4) Country Sun - The Colour is Blue
 * 5) Kevin Coyne - Sand All Yellow

The album was re-released in expanded form by See For Miles records in 1995.

Links With Peel
The album is best known for the photograph on the sleeve that shows Peel naked in a bath with a topless model.

From time to time John would be asked about this and would tell the story behind the photo shoot, with some embarrassment. This, from 12 December 2002, is a fairly typical example:

"'It was a woman who was a kind of model I suppose really and she was far less embarrassed about the experience than I was. We had to sit in the bath together for a very long time, a couple of hours while photographers rushed around taking, as they will do, photographs. We had a lot of bubble mixture in the bath and it got very tacky eventually and they had to keep whipping it up with whisks and so forth to cover our embarrassment. But she was completely unabashed about the whole thing. I was terrifically self-conscious and ill at ease. Every time she slipped down in the bath, because it became very slippery indeed, she used to brace herself by putting her foot on my rude bits and pushing herself back upright again. There was a time when I would have found it stimulating, but under those circumstances, no.'"

Mentioned In Shows
Other tellings of the same story:

"'It's rather disgraceful, but it was before we knew such things were kind of morally defective. It was a compilation LP, a sampler really for my fantastically unsuccessful Dandelion Records label. It was called - rather pretentiously, it was a line from Oliver Goldsmith - There Is Some Fun Going Forward. It was a teenage model and myself. I think she told me she was 17. We had to sit in a bath together stark naked for something like an hour and a half. She was completely unabashed by the entire process. Whenever she started to slip down the bath she used to brace herself by putting her foot against my groin and pushing herself upright. I'm trying to avoid too much medical detail here. I was very embarrassed throughout the entire proceedings and as I say, she wasn't at all. The record didn't sell particularly well. I don't know what her real name was. Obviously now she'd be a middle-aged woman, but she sent me some photographs of herself cut from a magazine from another photo session that she'd done a few weeks afterwards when she became something like 'Vanessa, 18, from Wilmslow'. I think she changed her name and age fairly frequently in order to get work.'"
 * 11 April 2001. In response to a listener who had come across a copy of the LP:

"'It was marked down to a pound, which was very upsetting indeed. There's a picture on the front of it actually of me naked in the bath with a young woman whose name I never knew, I don't think, and she was naked as well. That was the kind of cheap marketing thing that we used to do in those days. I bought it because I felt it should be liberated and I didn't like the idea of it going for just a pound to some home where it was treated with indifference. I hadn't listened to it for a very long time. It starts with a wonderful track by Medicine Head.' After playing the Medicine Head track, 'well come on! Worth a quid of anybody's money I'd say.'"
 * 12 July 2001. John had found a copy of the LP when out record shopping in Norwich.

"'I've often wondered what became of the young woman. We were both in this bath completely naked. I was fantastically embarrassed about the whole business and she wasn't embarrassed at all. She said she was sixteen. Every time she slipped down in the bath she’d brace herself by putting her foot against my private parts and pushing herself upright. Which obviously being a shy and sensitive boy I found acutely embarrassing. And then she sent me pictures of herself, other work that she did, and she'd be in magazines 'of a certain sort', as 'Vanessa, 21, who works for her dad's electrical goods dealership in Monmouth', or 'Jane, 19, is in her first year studying chemistry at Sheffield Polytechnic', as it was at the time. Where is she now?'"
 * 24 October 2001. A listener emails in to say that he saw a copy of the LP for sale for £6 in a second-hand record shop in Ilford.

Featured In Shows

 * 09 December 1986: Stackwaddy: Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut
 * 14 July 1995: Medicine Head: Only To Do What Is True
 * 12 July 2001: Medicine Head: Only To Do What Is True