trumans water | peel sessions

trumans water is a band to hold onto fiercely. chaotic, sprawling, churning, controlled, breathless, breathtaking. how the hell did they remember those arrangements? all i can say is they must have practiced a lot.

john peel famously played their debut album, 'of thick tum', in its entirety on his show. smart man.

released by strange fruit in 1995.

your plastic culture sucks and it's gonna blow!

various | john peel's all time festive fifty

whenever i hear 'school' by nirvana, it always surprises me when it doesn't segue into 'jack' by moose - that's because john peel did precisely that, i taped it and then listened to it over and over. most people reading this blog probably have stories about how much the dj influenced their musical upbringing. even if you didn't listen to the man, you can bet half the bands you like did.

the debut single by my old band, sarandon, was featured in the last playlist he ever programmed. sadly he died before he good broadcast it, so we got rob da bank reading his notes instead. but still, john peel liked our record. and he had great taste.

in 2000 he broadcast the fifty best songs of all time as voted for by his listeners, and as a compilation it serves as an excellent crash course in the indie music canon. despite the absence of moose.

01 joy division - atmosphere
02 the undertones - teenage kicks
03 joy division - love will tear us apart
04 the sex pistols - anarchy in the uk
05 the clash - (white man) in hammersmith palais
06 new order - blue monday
07 the smiths - how soon is now?
08 nirvana - smells like teen spirit
09 the smiths - there is a light that never goes out
10 this mortal coil - song to the siren
11 robert wyatt - shipbuilding
12 pulp - common people
13 captain beefheart & his magic band - big eyed beans from venus
14 dead kennedys - holiday in cambodia
15 joy division - new dawn fades
16 my bloody valentine - soon
17 new order - ceremony
18 the only ones - another girl, another planet
19 new order - temptation
20 joy division - she's lost control
21 the wedding present - brassneck
22 the smiths - this charming man
23 the sugarcubes - birthday
24 the fall - how i wrote 'elastic man’
25 the wedding present - my favourite dress
26 the delgados - pull the wires from the wall
27 my bloody valentine - you made me realise
28 joy division - transmission
29 the sex pistols - pretty vacant
30 pixies - debaser
31 belle & sebastian - lazy line painter jane
32 new order - true faith
33 the clash - complete control
34 the fall - totally wired
35 jam - going underground
36 stereolab - french disko
37 the jimi hendrix experience - all along the watchtower
38 the fall - the classical
39 the damned - new rose
40 tim buckley - song to the siren
41 the beach boys - god only knows
42 velvet underground - heroin
43 nick drake - northern sky
44 bob dylan - visions of johanna
45 the beatles - i am the walrus
46 the beach boys - good vibrations
47 the sundays - can' t be sure
48 culture - lion rock
49 pj harvey - sheela-na-gig
50 pavement - here

numberwang 1
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numberwang 3
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70 gwen party | peel sessions

i once asked victor n'dip of duo 70 gwen party to write a recipe for my fanzine, speeder, so he did beans on toast, which was pretty much what you expect, apart from the stipulation that the toast had to be burnt. that sums up the band pretty well: quintessentially english, but slightly bitter.

fiercely independent, largely ignored and generally commercially unsuccessful, the band released a raft of 7" singles and a couple of lps on their own snape label. most of the singles had text-only photocopied sleeves, largely devoted to useful underground contact lists and rants against the mainstream media's bias towards those bands that advertise in their pages.

fortunately, john peel suffered no such bias and had them in time and time again. here's the sessions.

released by snape in 1995.

beans a la toast.

the cranberries | peel session

it seems hard to imagine now that the cranberries were ever in a position to be offered a peel session. while today they might be largely forgotten, for a while they were huge, a great wailing behemoth of a band, churning out increasingly bland soft rock/pop ditties to be lapped up by hoards of americans (mostly). stories abounded of singer dolores o’riordan’s diva-esque behaviour, while no stories whatsoever abounded of the three sleeper blokes. in short, the cranberries were not a cool band.

but i still remember reading about them for the first time in nme, cutting out the cute picture of dolores and sticking it on my wall, then going out and buying dreams on 7” single. back then they were just a shy irish indie band, first on the bill before stereolab, providing back vocals on moose’s first album, doing a peel session.

sorry, quality isn’t great – these are ripped from a third generation cassette copy – but somehow the hiss adds to the general wispy atmosphere for me.

::: waltzing back (peel session, first broadcast 16 january 1992)
::: linger
::: wanted

zipped here.