Peeling Back The Years 5 (Transcript)

This is a transcript of the fifth show in the six-part documentary series Peeling Back The Years, in which Peel was interviewed by his long-time producer John Walters about the development of JP's musical tastes down the years. The fourth programme is about the years after punk.

Transcript

 * Ray Martin & His Concert Orchestra: Blue Tango

John Walters: Blue Tango by Ray Martin & His Concert Orchestra. And for anybody who’s just joined the series, that was the first record John Peel bought, back in 1952, and we’ve been tracing the history of his listening since then. And if you have just joined in the series, well, you’re almost too late, because we’re nearly at now, or at least we are looking at life after punk. Now, common sense told us even then that sort of safety pin punks, rather like Teddy boys, would take their place in the sort of museum of pop history. You must have realized that, but what did you expect would follow musically?

John Peel: Goodness. Uh … I must admit I don’t think I ever really thought about it. In fact, I have never, as far as I can recall, thought about what was going to happen next, because I was too much enmeshed in what was going on now.

JW: That’s what occurred to me. That’s something I’ve never really asked you before…

JP: Yeah.

JW: …during that period. That was a surprise question. I mean, have you always felt like that? All the period we’ve talked about, do you ever think – let’s say like an art critic or somebody think: “This is all right, I wonder what’s going to come around the corner, I wonder what we are looking out for?” You always look at now then really?

JP: Yeah, right. Because I like these things to come as a surprise and I think that if you do try and predict what is going to happen, you know – well, I don’t think you can frankly. I mean, when the Two Tone thing came along, quite clearly if somebody had told me at the beginning of that year that I was going to be scouring secondhand shops for old ska and bluebeat records I’d have thought they were nuts, but that’s what I was doing, and I like that element of the unexpected and the surprising. I like the idea that I don’t want my tastes to be transformed totally, I don’t want them to go through like 180 degrees, not like a religious experience – but I quite like the idea of all of your attitudes and tastes being adjusted by a few degrees, but very permanently, to the point where the things that at one time you used to think were quite wonderful suddenly become substantially less than wonderful in your own eyes or your own ears.

JW: That is one of the clues to your lasting ability yourself. I mean, we’ve throughout this series, this is the fifth programme, several people in the BBC have said to me, “I enjoyed that programme” - and you realize that was their period. They didn’t like anything before that period and didn’t like anything after. But you’ve gone through, and you’re not quite like a weather-cock, but you know what I mean. You were able to change.

JP: Well, I think so, yes. But I can’t… It always surprises me – it doesn’t entirely surprise me, I mean, I can understand why people do stop at any particular time, I suppose, but I’m just glad that I don’t really feel like that myself. I mean, I always relate these things to football, because I find that football provides any number of useful analogies for life, but I’m more concerned about what Liverpool do next Saturday than what they’ve done in the past. Their past history, although matchless, isn’t of particular interest to me, you know. So it’s the same with the music. When I say I’m more concerned about those records that I have in the back of the car that I’ll listen to this weekend than I am really even in the ones I’ve played in this week’s programmes.

JW: Yeah. Of course, there were in the punk period, the period that we looked at last week, people who impressed you then and did keep going and kept impressing you. They weren’t sort of punk sort of frozen in time – the Fall we mentioned last week, who have always been relevant to you. The group who weren’t the Nightingales then, and aren’t the Nightingales now, but became – what were they first?

JP: Well, they were the Prefects. Because we went to see I think it was the Clash, who were playing at the Rainbow in London, and I had to leave before the Clash came on, so I never actually got to see either the Clash or the Sex Pistols live – but that didn’t bother me a great deal anyway. But I did see the Nightingales, or the Prefects as they were then. And although Robert Lloyd now denies that the song was exactly as I remember it, they did do a song called “I’ve Got VD”, which went along the lines of they just came on and went, “I’ve Got VD” – and that was the end of the song. And I thought, “Well, that’s just terrific!” And so I was a fan from that moment. And if someone had said to them – one felt anyway that if someone had said to them at that point, “You go no further than this, this is your last performance, your first performance and your last,” they actually wouldn’t have been too concerned about that. You know, in that every event was sufficient unto itself, and I quite like the idea of that, you know. There was certainly no long-term career structure built into what they were doing.

JW: But they had the ability to keep going, and Robert Lloyd still appears on the programme. But as the Nightingales, let’s listen to something from their earliest recordings. Urban Ospreys is the one you’ve picked.


 * Nightingales: Urban Ospreys

JW: Urban Ospreys by the Nightingales. In this post-punk programme, let’s start to get onto some of the bands that have sort of, you know, marked this post-punk period but started in that period. Here’s somebody I certainly didn’t get onto at the start, but you did…Joy Division, that are still, in a sense, a lasting force, Joy Division/New Order, of course, and I see we had a session in January 1979. The kids got onto it quite quickly…I remember walking by a big place like the Lyceum, and saying, “Who’s on tonight?”, there were crowds outside, and they said, “Joy Division”. I thought, “Joy Division?” I know you’d gone on about it. What was it? Was it the sort of gloom that attracted you?

JP: Well, they weren’t initially of course all that gloomy, their early things, some tracks on the Factory sampler and so forth and they had some tracks on a 10″ LP from Virgin, which also featured the Fall and John Cooper Clark, I can’t remember who else was on it, but anyway… But they weren’t particularly gloomy, but they weren’t by any means punky. I mean, they’d moved away from that sort of thrashy…

JW: Do you know what I mean by gloom? I mean, sort of there is an aspect of teen life which is looking moodily into your bedroom mirror with one or two spots on and seeing yourself as gloomy, kind of as a rebel without a cause, the James Dean thing. Isn’t that almost something you’ve carried on into middle age in your own life, and I wondered if it touched a chord as it did with the kids who went for Joy Division, touched a chord with you?

JP: I suppose it might have done. I mean, it wasn’t something I was aware of particularly at the time. I always think of them in a rather romantic way as being introspective and rather Russian, although I have no Russian ancestry at all that I’m aware of. But I quite like - I read somewhere that that kind of introspection was classed as Russian, so it always makes me feel at least slightly central European if I get into one of these what most people would describe as feeling sorry for myself, but…

JW: But did you get onto Joy Division because you thought, “Hello, there’s a bit of a buzz”, or did you hear some and think, “I don’t know who this lot are, but this goes for me”? What did your ears say to Joy Division?

JP: Well, initially they just said, here’s another… Because there the first of the post-punk bands did seem to be coming out of Manchester, which is something of course I deeply resented really. Although I was fiercely partisan in Liverpool’s favour, almost before the football thing – I mean, this was like six, seven years old, something like that. So I resented the fact that the best and the most interesting bands seemed to be coming out of Manchester. I’m afraid this is something that is still true. But I can’t remember to be honest with you what my… I mean, I didn’t at the time think that Joy Division were a band that I was going to prefer above any other really. They were just one of a whole handful of bands whose work I was quite enjoying at that time.


 * Joy Division: Twenty Four Hours (LP – Closer) Factory

JW: Now strangely enough they were not punky in the noise they made as I remember it, but they became a sort of seminal band just after, the first real seminal post-punk band, you know. They influenced so many other people.

JP: Well, that’s true and obviously the death of Ian Curtis sort of mythologised them to a degree to which I think the surviving members of the band must have found very difficult to cope with, and I’m always rather glad that they’ve gone on as New Order and have made something of that, because they could so easily I think have been sort of crushed by that whole attitude and approach. It must have been a very melancholy thing to have to live with. But I still, not so much from Britain now, but I still get demo tapes from America and from the greater Europe by bands which are quite clearly influenced by nothing as much as they’re influenced by Joy Division. And you get a bit fed up with it, really.

JW: Although they were the key influence I suppose at that time stylistically in what was happening, you rather played down Liverpool, unusually for you, there in saying it’s a pity there wasn’t, but there was a lot going off in Liverpool and we used a lot. There were people like Big In Japan. Fairly forgotten bands, but I look down the session sheet and there were, I was going to say Frankie – Holly from Frankie Goes To Hollywood, or would be from Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Budgie, from Siouxsie.

JP: Yeah.

JW: You know, there were good names around that scene. And particularly I notice August 1979, we started to play Echo & The Bunnymen.

JP: Well, it was a much more it seemed to be – the Manchester thing seemed to be much more general and it didn’t seem to be quite so incestuous. All of those Liverpool bands seem to spring from a sort of common source really. I mean, only eight or ten or ten people. And so you’ve got the Teardrop Explodes…

JW: Yeah.

JP: …and Echo & The Bunnymen, and subsequently all the various manifestations of Wah that appeared.

JW: Pink Military.

JP: Yeah, all excellent in their own way, but at the same time you still don’t feel… I mean, what they were doing didn’t – the influences were easier to see I think. You know, the Doors, predominantly a kind of Doors influence, I suppose Jim Morrison influence, was the strongest thing there. Nothing wrong with that at all, but with the Manchester bands, you felt that, well, you couldn’t say who the Fall had been listening to or who Joy Division had been listening to.

JW: Yeah.

JP: They just appeared to have arrived out of nowhere, and that is something that has always appealed to me more. I mean, I like the Echo & The Bunnymen, I like the songs, the songs that I could remember and in some cases sing along with.

JW: Do you want to pick one now – but please don’t sing along with it.

JP: OK, I promise not to do that. Well, I always liked Villiers Terrace.


 * Echo & The Bunnymen: Villiers Terrace (LP - Crocodiles) Korova

JW: Villiers Terrace, fortunately just Echo & The Bunnymen, not J. Peel singing along with it. But you were saying that you do like, I think you always have liked, the bands that were a surprise, they weren’t yet another blues influenced band…

JP: No.

JW: …whatever it was. You prefer them to say, “This has come out of nowhere almost.” Surely the band in the post-punk period that as much as anybody did that – and became a great favourite with you – was the Cocteaus, who were clearly not a punk noise at all. They were a beautiful music noise.

JP: Yes, well, not so much initially. I mean, when they first appeared, I’ve got an acetate somewhere at home and an early demo tape, and everybody just said, “Of course, well, this is another kind of Siouxsie & The Banshees really.” I must admit, that always struck me as a bit of a nonsense, I must admit. I mean, just the fact that there were two women singers with fairly strong and identifiable voices didn’t I think make the Cocteaus Siouxsie & The Banshees clones by any means.

JW: I’m not really aware of the early stuff that you must have heard at the time. Was it not this kind of swirly-whirly kind of spacey stuff that we’ve got used to?

JP: It was pretty swirly-whirly. I mean, some of the early things sounded like they might have been produced by some kind of post-punk Phil Spector, you know. They were very kind of Wall of Sound-ish.

JW: Yeah, cathedral swoopings.

JP: Cathedral Swoopers – what an excellent name for a band! There’ll be one on the streets next week…


 * Cocteau Twins: Musette And Drums (LP – Head Over Heels) 4AD

JW: Musette And Drums from the Cocteau Twins. Can you say then, apart from the cathedral swoopings, what was it then? Because that did strike very much of a chord with you, didn’t it?

JP: Well, again it was just because – I mean, I preferred them then to now. I preferred them when they Elizabeth was still singing identifiable words. And I suppose once again the big attraction was that it was such an extraordinary voice. I mean, people would have said, people might have said that it was a very mannered voice. If it was mannered, then I’m perfectly happy for it to have been so. I just liked the noise of her voice, in the same way that I liked the voice of Marc Bolan and Roger Chapman with Family and Captain Beefheart and all of those other people. It’s just a strong and identifiable voice.

JW: It’s rather implying that whereas obviously the punk thing, Anarchy In The UK or If The Kids (They Will Never Be Divided) – there were usually clear messages, even though shouted at you, bellowed at you, in there. Once she started, Liz in the Cocteaus, doing all that shally-wally, shilly-willy business, you just seemed to take that as well, the kind of noise it made.

JP: Yes…

JW: You were listening to the noise rather than the message.

JP: Uh, yes, well, I don’t think, you know, one excludes the other. I think it is perfectly acceptable to be affected by both. I mean, another voice from the same era, actually slightly predating it I’d have thought – my sense of history is a bit uncertain…

JW: It doesn’t matter for this programme. Go on, carry on.

JP: …would have been Altered Images, who again were accused of being Banshees clones. And I first heard them on a demo tape. I actually could take you to the spot on the road – it affected me that strongly that I can remember exactly where it was that I first heard them. And it was Dead Pop Stars came up on the demo tape I was listening to. It was one of those things I was driving along, at great risk to myself and other motorists, shoveling demo tape after demo tape into the car machine, and then hurling them across the car followed by strings of foul oaths – and it is actually rather a dangerous thing to do. Anyway, listening to this tape and was very much affected by it and obviously got home and phoned you and said we must book these people at the earliest opportunity.

JW: Yes, because they were amateurs at the time.

JP: I think they had actually done support to the Banshees on a tour, and I think I did a gig with them at Leicester Polytechnic, which always used to be the best gig. It used to be the best gig in the world, Leicester Polytechnic – an unlikely location. But they were very, very good. And I must admit – I can say this now – I was very smitten by Clair Grogan. The only time I’ve ever felt infatuated by a pop star, which was quite nice because I was already like 40-something, so it was quite nice to experience what quite clearly are adolescent feelings at that age. And she is almost the only person, apart of course from my wife, who could have persuaded me to go into a recording studio and sing. And they came and collected me, her and the drummer, after a programme. They hadn’t warned me about it beforehand, which was probably a very good idea, because I should have found excuses not to go.

JW: As you usually do.

JP: As I usually do. And they took me out to a recording studio. And on the way out there I was horrified to find the drummer and Clair put together weighed the same as me, which was a very depressing statistic. We got out there and they wanted me to sing on Song Sung Blue, the Neil Diamond song. And there is actually some rather fine whistling in this as well, and it was my idea to do the whistling. I’ve always liked whistling.

JW: Is it you whistling?

JP: It’s me whistling.

JW: In that case, although this is a little self-indulgent, I’m sure the listeners will not forgive us if we go through the programme without you – are you singing on this?

JP: Singing. I’m the sort of footballing chorus.

JW: OK. Here we go.


 * Altered Images: Song Sung Blue (LP – Pinky Blue) Epic

JW: John Peel singing and whistling, probably for the only time in his life, on one record – Song Sung Blue by Altered Images. Now it seems to me that you’ve rather lost any idea of where your ears are taking you to except whatever we like kind of thing. It’s very much not any more of a movement now. And the whole of the scene seemed to be a little like that.

JP: Yes.

JW: Do you think people were getting almost too diverse and just, “Let’s do this if it’s funny.”

JP: I don’t actually stop and think about these things in advance, you know. I don’t pursue one particular movement. You know, the punk thing when it was happening dominated all because there wasn’t anything else that was interesting. Or there wasn’t anything else that interested me. But once the first sort of fine, careless rapture of that had diminished, then I returned to a kind of a differently informed approach but similar to the one that I’d had prior to punk, when I was just going around like looking for different areas of music and tried to find what I regarded as being the best in those different areas. I mean, previously it had been kind of American rock and folk and things like that, of course reggae. But there was just a wider area, more different places for me to go and potter about and look at what was going on. So in a way I was happier at that time than during punk itself, when as I say I was beginning to feel a sort of, I was slightly compromised by the requirements and the expectations of the people who listened to the programmes.

JW: Yes. That sort of brings us onto something, I’m wondering how you feel now, when suddenly everyday is saying “oh, world music.” You can get a New Musical Express special. World music – everybody is writing articles. World music, man. What they mean is really a lot of the stuff that you had worked into the programme ever since I’ve known you over this 20 years. A bit of African music, a bit of all sorts of foreign musics, blues, country, everything sort of comes into it. Don’t you feel a bit annoyed when suddenly people are saying, “Look, ma, no hands” - and you think, “I’ve been doing that for years.”

JP: Well, not really. I mean, a lot of it obviously does echo what you and I have already heard. But as Andy Kershaw always points out when we mention this to him, there’s a whole new generation of people who actually didn’t hear sort of Joni Mitchell and so are quite happy to listen to Michelle Shocked. And you know you can find parallels throughout all of those things. And I’m not enormously keen on the bulk of it myself, but you know if other people are enjoying it then good luck to them. You see, people are always determined - and I can understand why, because it’s a handy marketing thing and so forth – but I can never understand why people are so desperate to stamp some kind of group identity onto all of these things. Because as far as I’m concerned, something like the Butthole Surfers or something like that is as much world music as whatever people regard as being world music, like the Bhundu Boys or something like this or whatever it happens to be. I mean, it’s either really good or bad or exciting or not exciting.

JW: Probably like a famous quote when somebody asked Louis Armstrong how he felt about folk music and just say, “Well, I ain’t never heard a horse sing.” Something like that. It’s all folk music.

JP: That’s right.

JW: It’s folks singing it is the simple crackerbarrel philosophy.

JP: It’s one with which I entirely agree. I’ve always argued that people like Robert Lloyd – we mentioned him earlier on, you know, the Nightingales; now of Robert Lloyd & The New Four Seasons – but to me is a folk singer.

JW: He’s not pretending to be a thatcher or a blacksmith.

JP: That’s right. Or David Gedge of the Wedding Present, you know. Or Morrissey even. I mean, they are singing songs of folk experience.

JW: Ah, but we’ll come onto Morrissey shortly. Before we leave that area – thinking of world music approach. Fine, the Bhundu Boys, we’ve played that a lot recently, you’ve got onto them very quickly. But somebody who has not proved as popular – well, more a style that has not really proved as popular – was referred to in, what, programme 2, I think – reggae. It’s never quite made that breakthrough in sort of media popularity as you perhaps thought it would. But you’ve always just stuck with it. You’ve never sort of abandoned it. Misty is one of the post-punk bands that you’ve probably featured most on the programme until quite recently. What made them stand out in reggae for you? You seemed to think there was something special happens here.

JP: The fact is that People Unite, which is Misty’s label, put out the first single by the Ruts. Of course obviously the Ruts are not a reggae band by any means. And then Misty released the LP which I think along with the Bhundu Boys’ Shabini is probably my favorite LP of all time, which is that live LP recorded in Brussels at the Counter Eurovision festival of - is it in 1979? It doesn’t sound like me to say it really, but I just found it a very spiritual record in some vague and ill-defined way, and still do, oddly enough. And when I get fed up of like listening to lots of new bands sounding like the Sisters Of Mercy and so forth at home, then I quite often put on that LP. And I always insist that…. In fact, when they did an Arena programme about our radio programme – I think doing radio programmes about radio programmes is weird, but doing TV programmes about radio programmes is weirder yet – but I insisted they start it with the introduction to the live LP in Brussels.


 * Misty: Introduction (LP - Live At The Counter Eurovision 79) People Unite

JW: Reggae was never quite as popular with you as it was with many of your listeners. I suppose the same could be said of another rock deviation – hip hop, which although it has always seemed to me to be very varied and witty, some people thought it was very samey and very boring, and even wrote in to tell you, didn’t they?

JP: But not as much now. Maybe they’ve just given up writing, given up listening possibly, I don’t know. But I get a lot of letters from people, genuinely get a lot of letters from people, saying, “I was one of the people who wrote into you a year and a half ago about hip-hop saying don’t play any more of it ever, and then I discovered that the last five records bought were all hip-hop records.” And how people can say it all sounds the same or boring, I simply don’t know. Because I mean the structure of the conventional pop song does at least make that one performance as kind of pretty much the same all the way through - it’s guitar, bass, drums and somebody singing. But with hip-hop, there are so many elements brought into play and brought in from such random points - I mean, like just sampled speech and sampled rhythms and sampled bits of guitar and so on – I mean, there’s just so much going on there’s almost too much happening in a lot of the records, where you have to listen to them quite carefully, quite a lot, in order to identify everything that’s going on.


 * Double Dee & Steinski: The Payoff Mix (12” single) Tommy Boy

JW: Double Dee & Steinski there showing that there is life after the old guitar, bass, drums. But let’s just get that’s not finished of course, what we’ll call mainstream rock, you know, right back to your earliest choices of rock and roll through the Beatles and everything else right up to the present day, the basic guitar, bass, drums noise does persist – mainstream rock. But out of the sort of liberation that punk brought to the model that that area was getting into, I should imagine the most successful band that you’ve had on the programme recently must surely be the Smiths – who clearly don’t have a punky noise of a “1-2-3, I’ve go VD” style. Totally different, but probably couldn’t have existed without punk. And you had them on very early on, May 1983, before they had a record out, after I think they first came from Manchester and appeared in London. Again, looking back to that Manchester gloom, the weather in Manchester – there’s always been that melancholy solitude feeling.

JP: Yes.

JW: A whimsical and rather ironic, witty approach to solitude in Morrissey’s stuff. Would you say, well, “Morrissey, I suppose he is my sort of chap”?

JP: Well, I would like to think he was, yes. Obviously I’ve only met him a couple of times. And I think you actually deserve some credit, because it was you that went out and heart the Smiths. It was one of the very few times that you’ve come back very enthusiastic about a band and said, “We really must get these people in at the earliest opportunity.” So I always try and give you credit for that to people for that. That’s the kind of open-hearted and open-minded chap I am.

JW: But still, get on. What did you make of them?

JP: I just liked the fact that I was hearing words being used in popular songs that I wasn’t used to hearing. Just the use of language really pleased me as much as anything else. And his voice again was not a voice that you could immediately trace back to somebody else. I mean, he wasn’t trying to be Marc Bolan or he wasn’t trying to be Jim Morrison again. And they were as Manchester bands – so many of these bands do seem to be from Manchester – just another band that arrived from nowhere with a very clear and strong identity, you know. And that is always attractive.


 * Smiths: Reel Around The Fountain

JW: Reel Around The Fountain by the Smiths. Very kind of you to give me some credit for seeing them. It was just I was free to go and it was quite obvious that they were going to come to something. And there would have been enough buzz for you to say, “I think we better get those in,” as often happened. But something that you did come onto pretty much on your own I think and in fact more or less gave the name to, which you now see quoted all over the place. I’m not quite sure always – you’ll have to put me right on this – what actually it applies to. People often say, “Of course, the shambling bands.” It was you that first said of a certain type of band, the shambling bands, I think.

JP: Yes.

JW: And then it started to appear as a critical, rather like the word Impressionism, like it definitely meant something. And it often seemed to be those sort of bands often from some sort of Midland or northern label, either they were all little short S-words, like Shrump, Stump, Slab, Snot, those sort of bands, or Big Flame, Bogshed, particularly. Have I got it right? Because are they all sort of part of the shambling thing? And what did you hear in it and is it just the slightly anti-social noise they make that attracts you?

JP: No, it wasn’t that at all. In fact, I have on several occasions apologized to the members of Bogshed both publicly and privately for lumbering them with this shambling business, because they were the band I was speaking of when I first used the expression on the radio. And what I was trying to imply was – I certainly didn’t see it as a kind of generic thing really - but a band again really whose preoccupations were not necessarily with either developing extraordinary instrumental skills or with becoming international celebrities. And it was an approach.

JW: Sort of like a public school kind of thing – it was an attitude that they got right.

JP: Yes, yes. It was just their approach to it and the sound that they made, which sounded sort of attractively disorganized.


 * Bogshed: Tried And Tested Public Speaker (single) Shelfish

JW: Bogshed shambling their way through Tried And Tested Public Speaker. Obviously we’ve been looking at not only the post-punk period here, but we’ve been looking at now. Before we finish, it’s been quite a wide area that we’ve had to look at recently, because there have been so many different styles – political rock, electro-rock - all sorts of different things that have come up in the last ten years, the post-punk years. But can you think of one record - we’ve finished all the programmes with you picking one record to play in full – one record that you would say, well, that sort of says yes to life after punk? You know, punk wasn’t the end. Yes, it’s still going on, something’s happening, and it stands up on its own as a post-punk record that we can now hear and say, “Yes, Peel’s picked this one”?

JP: Well, I think oddly enough… I know what you mean, but I think that some of the records that I’ve liked best over the past ten years have been those records which said no to life, and I think I’d pick one of those really, because I went to see the Butthole Surfers play in Hammersmith a few weeks ago, and it was the week after Big Black had played and everybody who saw Big Black said they were absolutely apocalyptic, but I missed them and they’ve now broken up and that is something I shall regret, genuinely regret, like not having seen the Smiths play live, I shall regret forever I think. But I saw the Butthole Surfers and came away genuinely – “with one’s senses reeling” does sound like a cliché from a regional newspaper, but that is exactly how I felt after I’d seen them. All of my preconceptions about what things should be – for example, one obvious thing was sexism for example, because they had a completely naked woman dancing on stage with them throughout the entire thing. I don’t know, is that titillation? I mean, what attitude should I have had to that? And that was just one aspect of what they were doing. So, I think the Butthole Surfers would define something for me, although I’m not quite sure what it is. I mean, I don’t feel one should necessarily always enjoy popular music. This is one of the things, you know, one of the conflicts that I’ve had with people over the years. I mean…

JW: Mainstream Radio One really.

JP: Yeah.

JW: The kind of “where’s the fun in it?”

JP: That’s right. But I mean, not every play has a happy ending or every film you go and see has a happy ending, not every painting that you see is necessarily going to be of kittens sitting in baskets.

JP: Well, in that case, let’s make sure that this programme doesn’t have a totally happy ending. We will finish with the Butthole Surfers, 22 Going On 23.


 * Butthole Surfers: 22 Going On 23 (LP – Locust Abortion Technician) Blast First

JW: Well, that was the Butthole Surfers, and next week we end the series by sitting back and taking stock. A sort of John Peel overview, I suppose, called Past, Present & Future, which was the title of a great song by the Shangri-Las and actually sounded nothing like this….


 * Ray Martin & His Concert Orchestra: Blue Tango