I can announce that my podcast, HIT THE NORTH, has reached the landmark of being broadcast into the internet’s ether for a whole month!
This podcast is simply based around my talking to a range of special guests with at least some connection to the North about their lives and experiences and about Northern representation. The North is defined inclusively, and subsequent series may well eventually venture beyond British shores… It is a non-profit podcast, so thankfully I can promise: no ads, it is purely done as a labour of love. No AI is used, as it is a profoundly overrated and absurd Ponzi scheme – one that is consuming our water and electricity at an unseemly rate, to boot.
Here’s a trailer with a decidedly low Average Shot Length! :
And here are the episodes themselves so far on YouTube as embedded videos:
#001: Introduction
#001: Matthew Kelly (NORTH WEST)
“If I were to choose one [finest ensemble cast], it would always be the one I’m working with…”
#002: Ruth-Ann Boyle (NORTH EAST)
“There was a few moments of intrusion, like the press doorstepping me mother…”
#003: Justin Lewis (WALES)
“I could hear the guy who was doing the pub quiz reading out some of the questions that night. And I thought: these are very familiar questions…!”
#004: John Howard (NORTH WEST)
“Who’s been licking the library steps then?”
You will also find it on most of the mainstream podcast platforms, like Apple Music and Spotify.
Here too is a link to the Hit the North musical playlist, containing all the songs featured in the series, alongside exclusive IT’S ONLY A NORTHERN SONG OF THE WEEK selections shared to Hit the North‘s Facebook group. If you want to join that group, please do so here.
It has been an absolute blast, and a delight, so far to talk to these fine people; enjoy the podcast! Please spread the word, give it five-star ratings (or don’t bother!), or indeed get in touch to suggest a guest or correspond about any Northern places or stories. Email: HitTheNorthNE41@proton.me
The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC drama series, following ITV’s lead with Armchair Theatre (ABC & Thames, 1956-74) in amplifying working-class voices. Canadian migrant Sydney Newman, from a working-class background, spearheaded both initiatives. After completing a Ph.D. on The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (BBC1, 1970-84), It’s time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.
This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without textual analysis.
02.10: Horror of Darkness (BBC One, Wednesday 10 March 1965) 9:25 – 10:35pm
Directed by Anthony Page; Written by John Hopkins; Produced by James MacTaggart; Script Editor: Vincent Tilsley; Designed by Tony Abbott.
Now, we arrive at a major Wednesday Play, whose context is vital to outline before we begin: it was only in 1967 when gay sex in private between men over 21 was decriminalised in the UK. The Glasgow Daily Record provides a good summary of the narrative and tone of John Hopkins’s second Wednesday Play of 1965:
Peter is a free-lance commercial artist and Cathy holds an undemanding job that enables her to cope with the constant demands involved in living with him.
On their doorstep one morning arrives Robin, a friend the couple are delighted to put up. But after a few days the relationship of the three people in the house takes on a new and disturbing meaning. (10 March 1965, p. 16)
Peter Young (Alfred Lynch) used to know Robin Fletcher (Nicol Williamson) in their art school days and is now settled in an unmarried relationship with Cathy (Glenda Jackson) in a luxurious London flat. Robin has given up his day job as a teacher due to success he claims in having a short story published in a magazine under the pseudonym Philip Moss; he subsequently has a play staged in London too and brings a party crowd to Peter and Cathy’s house where we hear distant bustle and upbeat jazz music playing.
James Green notes that the Morden-raised Londoner and Cambridge-educated Hopkins’s extremely prolific TV scriptwriting output, while noting Horror of Darkness had cost £10,000 to make and been shot back in March 1964 (Liverpool Echo and EveningExpress, 3 February 1965, p. 2). Green reveals this play – described by Hopkins as “A rather grim play about human relationships” – was held back from broadcast due to the BBC being ‘under critical fire for presenting too many grim and kitchen-sink dramas’ (ibid.).
Eight days later, Fred Billany’s article reveals, in dated language, ‘PERVERSION PLAY WILL BE SHOWN’, indicating that a year on it would finally be screened on BBC One (Aberdeen Press And Journal, 11 February 1965, p. 2). The Observer revealed it had been shot on 3 March 1964 and due for transmission on 14 March as ‘BBC brows were raised’ over the play (7 March 1965, p. 23). Jean Woodhams indicates that the BBC now felt ‘something a little stronger’ was now permissible, given how the present Wednesday Play was ‘concentrating on lighter drama’, thus they could not be ‘accused of having a pre-occupation with the seamier side of life’ (Derby Evening Telegraph, 8 March 1965, p. 13).
The Liverpool Daily Post previewed more circumspectly, branding it ‘a new slant to the eternal triangle theme’ (6 March 1965, p.8). The Observer noted it uses Hopkins’s ‘favourite technique : close examination of character, little plot’, while also quoting him on the benefits of the TV medium:
you can use more words than in the cinema and yet be more intimate than in the theatre. You’re communicating personally with your audiences of one or two. They are reticent of reaction, but when you do get them it’s marvellous. I remember watching a Bobby Wilson match at Wimbledon on TV. I got so excited that even though I was alone I found myself applauding shots. (op. cit.)
Rarely among the press previews, the Scotsman highlight the salient fact that Lynch and Williamson had recently appeared as Estragon and Vladimir, respectively, in the first UK revival of Waiting for Godot on stage at the Royal Court, directed by none other than Anthony Page (10 March 1965, p. 16).
A later article, around the time George Melly hailed Talking to a Stranger as ‘television’s first authentic masterpiece’ reveals something of Hopkins’s tastes and methods and his ear-to-the-ground cultural antennae, noting his research for Z Cars sitting in police cars and looking through logbooks in Liverpool, and how he listens to Radio Caroline, reads Peanuts and ‘is wild about Dusty Springfield’; he is quoted: ‘When it’s going, everything is relevant. I’m not in the market for polished sentences.’ (Observer, 30 October 1966, p. 23).
Rating **** / ****
This is a deeply affecting, contained domestic drama of tortured interpersonal relationships. This drama overtly engages with gay experience, comparably to Simon Gray’s oblique 1970s TV plays. While it does emphasise gay lives’ bleakness and tragic outcomes and therefore was part of a narrative paradigm that needed escaping historically, its sheer transgressive power and incisive honesty emphasise its truth for its times: so it ought to be celebrated.
As well as the (gradually) openly gay Robin and the repressed Peter, there is a portrait of Peter and Cathy’s ‘free’ open relationship which isn’t all that open really, and isn’t bringing any happiness to either of them. Peter has allowed his life to be dominated completely by work and its deadlines. His commercial drawings for a magazine bring no joy to his life, but have enabled their home to be filled with all the mod cons befitting an affluent London flat, as Cathy shows Robin in a significant early scene. Therefore, this play’s elliptical style is also well grounded in sociological and journalistic observed detail.
A workaholic pattern is bound up with emotional repression, while Peter’s clear communication difficulties could, tentatively, indicate his potential neurodivergence. In contrast to Peter, invariably sedentary at his work desk which dominates the sitting room, Robin by contrast is garrulous and physically mobile, and has a love of 1930s jazz dance band music and showtunes, which he plays in the same space which he occupies. Cathy expresses her dislikes of his music tastes, in a pungent line!
Cathy has a zesty modern spirit and a sardonic humour, which makes it all the more significant that she is generally so tolerant of Peter’s customary inattention to her. Yet, the finale where she finally leaves, symbolically for “Florence, Paris, Rome”, is an Ibsen-like moment: rejecting Peter and the loveless environment, entirely necessary for the play and logical for her subtly formidable character.
While it doesn’t deviate too from naturalism, director Anthony Page deploys artistic visual framings and sequences, as when there is a zoom out from Peter and Cathy on the staircase, one of many vividly stylised images of human distance and discord in a shattering play.
In a five minute sequence (c.37-42 mins) dialogue recedes and we have several pieces of music of a frenzied classical nature used alongside fast cuts between scenes of the trio apart, often joylessly doing household chores, or, in Robin’s case, occupying the fancy leather armchair, stretching out in frustration, or is that desolation? :
We see him from a high angle, emphasising his ultimate disempowerment and odd dependency within this unconventional domestic setup. This sequence is at the absolute core of the play, as is the unbearably tragic flashback at the end that Peter sees of himself and Robin running happily with a dog in the woods when he is having sex with Micaela. While Peter’s forcing himself on Micaela is undoubtedly problematic, well, Peter is a problematic human being; in addition, ultimately she does provide some consent, agreeing provided the act is not in the bed where Robin killed himself.
This was my second viewing – after 19 August 2023 when I called it ‘magnificent’ – and I’d forgotten the details, but what a superb range of performances and economical writing this is. It felt productively in the vortex of Pinter’s territorial dramas, where individuals vie for power over space. It also reminded me specifically of James Kelman’s haunting novel A Disaffection (1989), about a Glasgow teacher’s rejection of the nine-to-five, and subsequent ambiguous dissolution – terrain also navigated in the superb Inside No. 9 tale Tom and Gerri (2014).
I have recently watched Blue Jean (2022), a recent British film which is undoubtedly a more careful and responsible prospect, and provides a necessary socio-political reminder of the ghastly history and dire human consequences of Thatcher’s Clause 28 legislation. Acting, writing and vision are all impeccably sound in that film; however, I must say that this play contains deeper artistry in its ambiguity, subtlety and – actually – its mise-en-scene and use of music. I’d say both that film and this film, 57 years apart, are vital LGBTQ stories which deserve to be experienced.
Best Performance: NICOL WILLIAMSON
This is an utter fool’s errand as all three are magnificent, and the two smaller parts provide very able support*, but I had to go for the great mercurial stage and screen actor Nicol Williamson here as Robin Fletcher.
Williamson is an extraordinary actor, whose brilliance was acclaimed by Samuel Beckett. He is tremendous in similarly idiosyncratic, volatile roles in the Jack Gold-directed and John McGrath-written films** The Bofors Gun (1968) and The Reckoning (1969); but in each of these he feels utterly different to Robin, varying the acting idiolect he deploys.
As Robin, he conveys a fantasist whose sociability and need for companionship is real, but clearly often thwarted in the world. He clearly establishes how his love for Peter is for the old Peter of their art school days – that young man is now long submerged. Williamson has a nervous energy and sly dexterity, in verbal and bodily terms that makes Robin a compelling character: a dreamer lost in even the world of mid-1960s London which seems to be opening up.
*Heck, it’s also worth mentioning Wallas Eaton, utterly defines how to act in a small part: both subtle and deeply memorable.
**These two feature-films feel spectacularly close to the Wednesday Play/Play for Today tradition in a way few others manage. Kes (1969), of course, is another…
Best Line: “Now, if you want to do something badly enough, you’ve got to do it. You have got to.” (Robin)
Cathy’s response to Peter’s refusal to go out is also sardonic truth telling: “Oh, I know you’ve got work to do. Oh well, c’est la vie… It certainly is…”
Audience size: 7.92 million
Share of overall TV viewing audience: 57.1%
The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Palace / One Good Turn / Tamara Karsavina: Portrait of aBallerina), ITV (Night Spot / A Face in the Crowd / Professional Wrestling)
Audience Reaction Index: 40%
Reviewed in publications consulted: 61.5%
Reception: The play was very strongly admired by London critics, somewhat more meagre if still quite positive reaction outside London. However, the audience largely disliked it, showing a notable divergence from critical taste, though there was intelligent appreciation from a minority.
Gerald Larner noted how its shocks made it involving, but that such a ‘subtle and complex’ work deserved feature film length, as its narrative became jumpy and elliptical at 65 minutes (Guardian, 11 March 1965, p. 9). Larner admitted however that ‘the obscurities here gave an impression of truth and of depth that formula script editing frequently rejects’ and the excellent script was ‘a splendid vehicle’ for the distinguished cast, whose performances provided ‘considerable if occasionally harrowing pleasure’ (ibid.).
Lyn Lockwood implied that the Pinter or Potter visitation-type narrative is a universal experience: ‘Most of us have experienced the uninvited, temporary guest who threatens to become a permanency’ (Daily Telegraph, 11 March 1965, p 19). Lockwood found its progression to a tragic ending effective, due ‘to what was left unsaid’ (ibid.). The anonymous Times reviewer was similarly effusive, in praising a play which exposed Peter’s ‘way of life which accepts responsibilities but rejects depths of feeling ; it is a tragedy of a man who has made himself an island’ (11 March 1965, p. 15). They gave fulsome praise of a ‘disturbing and at times painful, but […] totally unsentimental’ play which ‘treats youthful, casual ways of speech with mastery’, granting Williamson, Lynch and Jackson great scope for ‘nervously strained acting’ (ibid.).
Initially, Maurice Richardson seemed much as positive, claiming Horror of Darkness was ‘far and away’ Hopkins’s strongest TV play so far (Observer, 14 March 1965, p. 24). However, Richardson felt the ‘elaborate personal tangle was not really properly planted’, finding ‘the sardonic Scots psychopath”s suicide ‘artificially welded on’ and the events of the final act ‘even more contrived’ (ibid.). Notably, the same paper revealed Hopkins had yet another play on ITV the next week for Armchair Theatre, I Took My Little World Away, dealing with the aftermath of suicide (14 March 1965, p. 22).
Philip Purser reveals the prolific Hopkins had also worked on a televised ballet the same week, perceptively likening the five-minute dialogue-free sequence in the play to this (Sunday Telegraph, 14 March 1965, p. 13). He praises Hopkins not as a televisual innovator, but putting others’ showy devices to useful work: especially, the ‘stunning’ flashback near the end – which explained the underlying situation (ibid.). Purser notes all three Hopkins TV works of March 1965 centred on suicide, ‘the pit underlying civilized human society’, while feeling that the ‘very well observed undercurrents of envy’ contained deeper interest than ‘the homosexual undertow’ (ibid.). He noted how the two men both envy and despise each other’s contrasting lifestyles, providing the play’s main ‘tension’ (ibid.). While Purser felt Hopkins had ‘piled on’ the agony, he nevertheless acclaimed ‘very persuasive performances’ and ‘a superbly controlled late appearance by Wallas Eaton’, ending with a command to watch Hopkins’s Armchair Theatre play tonight (ibid.).
The New Statesman‘s critic felt the play ‘as impressive’ as Fable and Hopkins’s Armchair Theatre play were ‘tiresome’, praising ‘powerful, jittery’ acting (New Statesman, 23 April 1965, p. 660). Bill Edmund was another to praise Wallas Eaton, knowing him previously from Take ItFrom Here and other comedy shows, saying ‘his few minutes of screen time stole the play’ here (Television Today, 18 March 1965, p. 12).
Frederick Laws was also rather favourably disposed; while he emphasises Robin as ‘a homosexual, a layabout and dangerous’, he found excellent the ‘intolerable tension of the presence of the intruder and the almost benevolent rejection of him by the girl’ (The Listener, 25 March 1965, p. 463). Laws signs off with praise of its matter of fact worldliness:
Remarkable and creditable that the play appeared to have no thesis about homosexuality but took it for granted that we would know there is a lot of it about. (ibid.).
Of non-metropolitan critics, one K.H. termed it ‘a first-class example of the television director’s art’, but the play itself ‘a morbid affair that must have driven many viewers over to the other channel or out to the ‘local’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 11 March 1965, p. 2). Possibly the same (?) reviewer ‘K.H.’ in a different newspaper said on its later repeat that Hopkins’s play remained ‘depressing […] black, uncomfortable’, and communicated very little, though admitted its saving grace was performances which were ‘deeply considered’ (Northants Evening Telegraph, 28 July 1966, p. 2).
An anonymous – and somewhat eccentric – review in the Scotsman revealed something of the play’s ambiguity, thoroughly taking against ‘the wretched Scot’ Robin:
[who] was so reminiscent facially of his lamentable countrymen of an earlier period, Darnley and his son James I and VI that his peculiarities almost seemed to have an historical justification, and came as no surprise.
With the spite and hysteria which makes such young gentlemen so embarrassing […] (11 March 1965, p. 15).
This review is highly positive, but seems to misread – or at least simplify – the play as deliberately showing ‘the trail of spiritual destruction resulting from such imbroglios’ (ibid.). Furthermore, they are delighted ‘There was no liberal-minded chatter about consenting adults in this piece; a positively Jacobean welter of gloom and catastrophe befell the hapless victims of fate’ (ibid.).
Peter Quince in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner was so riveted and ensnared by the play that his precious pipe went cold (13 March 1965, p. 5)! Quince admired its ‘dramatic tension’ and ‘wholly serious study of a human predicament’, enacted through ‘performances of rare quality’:
Off hand, I cannot remember any television play which maintained such concentrated pulling power from its opening lines to its final curtain. (ibid.).
In contrast, B.L. failed to give any clear value judgement, simply claiming that this and Hopkins’s Armchair Theatre play showed he is ‘concerned, almost obsessed, with the idea of suicide and what drives people to end their lives’ (Belfast Telegraph, 15 March 1965, p. 7).
The only wholly negative response was a thin, tiresomely abhorrent expression of homophobia compounded by lazy anti-licence fee views, from Glasgow’s Sunday Post:
The B.B.C. has done it again. Their Wednesday play, “The Horror of Darkness,” had a homosexual in our living-rooms at a peak viewing time.
This is taking realism too far.
The B.B.C. want a bigger licence fee. It seems to us they’re taking too much licence already. (14 March 1965, p. 3)
Before dwelling on the specific reactions of viewers, it’s worth noting the very large audience, as L. Marsland Gander did: especially impressive and significant in the light of its ‘”extreme”‘ content (Daily Telegraph, 26 July 1965, p. 15). It did a public service to inform and educate people about gay love and desire in the context of its legal prohibition.
However, this clearly went over the heads of rather a large section of the audience (BBC WAC, VR/65/130). 21% gave it A or A+ scores with 52% giving it C or C-, thus leading to the lowest Reaction Index so far in our Wednesday Play story (ibid.). Some comments specifically echoed Mary Whitehouse’s aim to Clean Up TV. A draughtsman stated:
Maybe the play was for intellectuals and queers, but I know one thing – no-one in my office either enjoyed it or understood it (ibid.).
This rather nasty strain of majoritarian conformism was compounded by claims the setting was so huge that it ‘bore no relation to anywhere normal people would live’ (ibid.). This view seems naive, and tellingly resentful, in disputing the reality of large London abodes for well-off couples. It certainly indicated there was an Us and Them attitude among members of the BBC viewing panel.
However, a significant minority loved this play, more in line with London critical opinion, admiring the original framings and arrangings of scenes within ‘a profound study of loneliness in the younger generation’ (ibid.). Its intelligent avoidance of a moral attitude or indeed any simplistic focus on an ‘issue’ was perceptively commended:
the whole play was so much about people and so little about homosexuality as a thing in itself, and people are the ones that matter. (ibid.)
Ultimately, however, the jerkiness and dissonance of the whole play meant many in the public who were expecting Ashes to Ashes or Campaign for One simply weren’t going to enjoy this, hoodwinked by publicity using the hackneyed ‘eternal triangle’ type rhetoric. A compositor recognised that ‘The whole thing was like a nightmare, which is probably what the author intended’ (ibid.). This individual presumably didn’t like the play, as many viewers find empathising with very different people, situations and social settings in drama difficult, especially if any formal experimentation or narrative ellipses are employed…
There were several letters to the press. A June Grundy of 47 Meredith Road, Leicester attacked Lord Ted Willis for defending depictions of sex and aggression on TV, not wanting ‘immorality’ to be ‘presented to us for our light entertainment’ (Leicester Mercury, 16 March 1965, p. 4). As a P.S., Grundy said she’d written the letter just after watching Horror of Darkness, claiming it has put her in Mary Whitehouse’s camp: ‘The fact that the acting was brilliant merely heightened the impact of the loathsomeness of abnormal and degraded human sexual behaviour’ (ibid.).
Similarly, Mary Lisle of London SW3 was affronted, speaking from a silent majority type position, implicating David Frost and John Hopkins as self-obsessed people focusing on what is amusing or interesting and not ‘higher and better’ (Sunday Telegraph, 21 March 1965, p. 27). Lisle asked: ‘Must we watch a man throwing himself on a woman and gnawing amateurishly at her for three or four minutes? Never have any of us been so manhandled. Then why should we be treated to a specimen of their craft?’ (ibid.). Comparably, Mrs. E. Cooper felt a play with a ‘negative and hopeless outlook’ made ‘most undesirable viewing’ and called for ‘more wholesome material’ (Radio Times, 25 March 1965, page unidentified).
On the same page, reducing the margin to 3:1 against, came a positive response from the fine city of Leeds: a Mrs. K. Ewart simply pronounced it ‘perfectly written, perfectly acted, perfectly produced!’ (ibid.).
Claverley’s most famous self-promoting moralist Mary Whitehouse continued her Clean Up TV campaign with a comparatively subtler response to Horror of Darkness than to some other plays – if also one which implicitly attacks permissiveness and homosexuality being represented on screen (Television Today, 1 July 1965, p. 11). She admitted it was technically ‘brilliant’, but felt its material ‘old hat’ and wanted playwrights to ‘accept their share of responsibility for the problems with which the country is wrestling, and show concern for the state of mind in which they leave audiences.’ (ibid.) Whitehouse’s letter had been prompted by script editor Vincent Tilley’s attack on the CUTV campaign for its desire to censor TV drama and stop experimentation. She also evaluates another play repeated in the Wednesday Play slot – that we will come to before too long – as an example of what she feels is more socially responsible (ibid.).
In his column, Philip Purser revealed Whitehouse’s less guarded response to Hopkins’s play: ‘a deliberate attempt to preach suicide and despair to the impressionable and the lonely’ (Sunday Telegraph, 31 July 1966, p. 11). Purser explains how fictional plays work, as if to a child:
But it no more advocates these things than “Othello” recommends husbands to strangle their wives. It shows the plight in which people can trap themselves and shows it with great compassion and skill. Watching it through a second time I admired it even more than the first. (ibid.).
Purser also noted Whitehouse’s ignorance of who Hopkins was, or that he had ‘established some claim to respect’ (ibid.). Purser, at this stage a real drama afficianado, later retreating into crusty conservatism in attacking certain Plays for Today, occasionally in parallel to Whitehouse, though in more intellectual terms. However, in 1965 at least, Purser was on the side of progressive art. Also setting himself against the ‘British puritan Philistine’ tendency, Peter Black felt the idea of a Viewers’ Council to placate Whitehouse was probably unwise, as it might give her kind too much power. Black noted how it was ‘quite easy to justify’ repeating Up theJunction and Horror of Darkness ‘by reference to their objectives’, which were clearly sensitive and serious (ibid.).
By contrast, tabloid journalist Ken Irwin subsequently bracketed Hopkins’s play as an example of ‘weird, off-beat’ plays, alongside ITV’s The Avengers, a Public Eye episode with a gay character and It’sDark Outside, as being part of ‘a “kinky” trend’ affecting British TV, or afflicting it, in his partial view (Daily Mirror, 24 April 1965, p. 15). Derek Bennett, producer of It’s Dark Outside – which starred Veronica Strong as Claire Martin, a promiscuous ‘gay girl-about-town’ – records that the postbag was 9:1 against his show, abusively calling it ‘filthy, disgusting and too sexy’, but argues, vitally:
I still think there is an audience for dramatic emotions and situations. But viewers mustgrow up and be more adult. [my emphasis] (ibid.).
The BBC, in one of its bolder historical phases under DG Hugh Carleton Greene, held its nerve this time. From July 1966, Horror of Darkness was one of twelve 1965 Wednesday Plays to be repeated on BBC One in the usual Wednesday Play time slot. A BBC spokesman claimed this repeat season demonstrated how the strand ‘provided intelligent discussion on important moral issues’ (Television Today, 9 June 1966, p. 11).
It is worth emphasising: an implied 1.66 million people liked or loved this play. How many of those did it inspire to become regular vanguard viewers of The Wednesday Play/Play for Today over the next two decades? A fair few, I’d surmise… One who definitely did was TV critic and historian of gay representation Keith Howes, whose words are apt to close this article. Howes told me he deliberately watched the play on TV in a separate room to his parents:
This is your life, really, you’re watching your life, and you think oh, I just don’t want to be this, you know, I don’t want that at all. (interviewed by the author, 21 August 2020)
Howes also noted how Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) in The Theory Of Everything (2014) watched the play on TV, which brought it full circle and was apt given Hawking’s status as an LGBTQ ally.
— Many thanks again to John Williams for locating most of the cuttings
If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂
Neil Kulkarni [on Wookie]: The crowd’s response to it shows you it’s skill, they’re loving it and they’re dancing and singing along to it […]
Al Needham: Were you entertained when you saw him [Robbie Williams], Neil?
Neil Kulkarni: I wasn’t… I mean, I’ve always been entertained by my own simmering loathing…!
Chart Music: the Top of the Pops Podcast, #37 (2019)
While I was his friend on Facebook, I didn’t ever meet or speak to Neil Kulkarni in-person, so I’m far from qualified to offer the deepest of tributes. But as part of a loose grouping of writers – at the Melody Maker, with Simon Reynolds, Simon Price, David Stubbs and Taylor Parkes, and online, joined by the varied likes of Rhian E. Jones, Marcello Carlin, Mark Fisher, Tom Ewing and Robin Carmody – he was an unrepentantly raucous and erudite writer who made a deep impression on how I appreciate music and life.
Neil Kulkarni was an elegant, Coventry-centred colossus of music writing, who, for a time, was prominent in a culture which could have benefited from heeding his passionate and complex words about a vast range of music into the 2000s.
He came into prominence in autumn 1993 through writing an articulate and irrefutable letter to the Melody Maker about its elision of Black musicians’ work. Thereafter, he was invited to work on the paper in a move showing the relative openness of the music press at that time, which, in its Allan Jones edited era, could still claim with some credibility to be a focal point for the counterculture in Britain. For the next half decade or so, Kulkarni was a fearless and trenchant music critic, interviewer and, curiously, gossip columnist, initially as a permanent staff member at the Maker.
Kulkarni was also latterly a regular guest on the Chart Music podcast. The crucial episode #37 ‘ITV Digital and Chill’ provided an analysis of an August 2000 Top of the Pops episode which was full of love and insight. For instance, there are incredibly layered dissections of Craig David and Mansun, a humanely damning account of Reef and a sterling paean to UK Garage star Wookie. Kulkarni, who waxed humorously about practically anything, also extolled rare “thrilling” moments in the TOTP archive where you see “weird noises exciting people!”, where strange sonic moments in MJ Cole or Sparks visibly affect people in the audience.
However, this is rightly most remembered for Kulkarni and fellow ex-Melody Maker writer Sarah Bee’s account of how the magazine’s ethos was destroyed, its genial, combative pluralism filleted by a range of Marks who mostly came in from the NME and reduced the paper’s audience and reach with a bizarre tunnel-visioned pitch for limited and laddish guitar rock bands, and an “Alternative Nation” which was clearly anything but. Bee and Kulkarni detail, in an extended therapy session mixed with dramatic tirade, the dismal, misbegotten editorial reign of Mark Sutherland, which led to the paper being discontinued and merged with NME at the end of 2000. His angry instantaneous reactions to the very mention of certain bands or journalists come from a place of love for what is good, exciting and generous in life and music.
There is the necessity in certain extreme cases for calling a cunt a cunt. Especially when a magazine which had provided a focal point for disparate genres, people, weirdos, pop fans and all to converge in a benign space with each other was unceremoniously turned into its opposite. Namely, a sneering, exclusive space for white male rock bands, which was, as Kulkarni said, was “separatist” and actively denigrated anything which deviated from this pattern and betrayed certain racist tendencies. Ultimately, Sutherland was patronising to his readership, treating them as idiots – Kulkarni quotes the gauche bracketed clause added in by Sutherland to his own copy which actually assumed readers would not get the cultural reference “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy”. The tirades reach a righteous crescendo when Bee and Kulkarni reach the Sutherland MM‘s ’50 Reasons the Alternative Nation is Fighting Back’, a bullshit litany if ever there was one and one of the dumbest, neediest morsels of prose ever published.
There was a loss of spaces like Melody Maker and indeed Top of the Pops where different tribes and demographics would coexist happily enough. All of which tied into the increasingly nasty public sphere (or bear pit) of the Noughties, which is increasingly recognised by a range of writers. Kulkarni turned to writing for specialist publications pertaining to heavy metal and hip hop, which was a sign of cultural atomisation and silos and how few were being allowed to deploy a pantheistic, inclusive philosophy of music – barring perhaps John Peel until 2004 and Annie Nightingale long after.
Kulkarni’s writings online for The Quietus and various blogs could often be richly entertaining and deeply moving, as in the case of his tribute to the late Terry Hall from one of his favourite bands, Coventry’s The Specials. What struck me most in the last five years or so, as a subscriber to The Wire magazine, was his prolific and wide-ranging reviews and interviews, which gadded freely from genre to genre. Rightly, his friend and colleague David Stubbs has mooted a collection of Kulkarni’s finest, most vital writings. I’d say his interview with Cleveland, Ohio’s mighty Mourning [A] BLKstr to coincide with the release of their extraordinary The Cycle in September 2020 should be a shoe-in.
Following on from the sad departures of Annie Nightingale (1940-2024) and Roy Battersby (1936-2024), Neil Kulkarni’s premature passing leaves British culture immeasurably poorer. Who else could range from discussing fashion to crisps, hip hop to BBC radio 3, Carry On movies to historian Edward Gibbon’s prose style? For David Lichfield, the loss of a good social media friend has meant Facebook now feels ‘pointless’.
But we can donate to this fund to help support his bereaved children, set up by David Stubbs and which 1,550 people have contributed to. We can also return to Neil’s words, which deserve collecting within at least one book, and learn, act and be.
I’m never going to get a tattoo, but if I did, it would be a Melody Maker tattoo. I fucking loved that magazine. I don’t feel cleansed, Sarah, I still feel upset.
Chart Music #37 (2019), op. cit.
Sometimes I think that music is the only prism we have left through which we can process pain, and that’s why in 2020 it has taken on an extra radiant significance, an even more intimate connection with our reasons to be. […] Before we rush back to the usual cycle of auteurist, individualist music made by lauded and pampered artists, we’d do well to listen deep to the communal act of love that is The Cycle.
Roy Battersby, speaking to me via Zoom, 11 September 2023
Roy Battersby was a great TV director able to generate performances in dramas which created an effect of deep, focused intensity. My tribute to Roy here consists mostly of reflections concerning his body of work, with a special aim of generating more awareness and interest in his overlooked single dramas for TV from 1975-93.
Battersby’s main love may have been cinema – and he talked and wrote voluminously about Pabst, Eisenstein, Wajda and many more – but, as a TV director, he was equally adept at use of video in the studio. Escape from Kampala (1991) and Olly’s Prison (1993) used studio confines for gripping and disturbing ends. Yellowbacks (1990), one of two he directed for BBC1’s final video-led contemporary single play strand in prime time The Play On One (1988-91), also presents a real building vividly via Outside Broadcast video. A strong sense of place and ability to foreground the salient features of an environment through lighting, camera movement and careful framings marked Battersby’s work.
This is evident across Escape from Kampala‘s drama of a prison break in Amin’s Uganda, with a cast comprised of all Black actors, Malcolm McKay’s depiction in Yellowbacks of state political interrogation of dissidents in a looming, empty house and Gentry (1988), a very late ITV play by Nigel Kneale, an excoriating drama about class warfare and an attack not just on Thatcherite gentrification but anticipating the inequalities of the asset boom politicians have consistently stoked since. In Olly’s Prison, a three-part drama by Edward Bond shown in increasingly late night time slots on BBC2, one room provides the setting for a frighteningly enigmatic drama in a first instalment which plays out between a jittery, mobile Bernard Hill and his daughter, Charlotte Coleman, totally withdrawn, still and profoundly silent.
Battersby gained a crucial apprenticeship in 1960s documentaries such as The Stockbroker’s World (1964), for the Men and Money series, a carefully observant study of the London Stock Exchange in a time of mottled stability and mild flux. We see archaic top hats, gleaming, and a man shaking a cacophonous rattle, but not as if at a football game.
And inevitably, it’s controversial. A man doesn’t become a stockbroker or a stockjobber in order to serve British industry, or help investors. He buys himself into this little world because his father was there. Or because he’d like to make a good living in a way that’s socially acceptable. But he’s entitled to claim that he and his colleagues are a necessary part of an ingenious mechanism for raising money… For making our kind of society possible…
A lot of metaphorical blood has flowed here, and perhaps a little actual blood as well…
Narrator’s (Tony Garnett) final words in The Stockbroker’s World
Battersby went on to direct Tony Parker’s Some Women (1969), a feature documentary The Body (1970) with a Ron Geesin and Roger Waters score, and Julia Jones’s Home and Away (1972), while displaying his remarkable facility with filmed single dramas.
Roll On Four O’Clock (1970) is a bleak, utterly compelling masterpiece, the first of his two major collaborations with writer Colin Welland and producer Kenith Trodd. Welland’s drama unflinchingly reveals the pervasive bullying and homophobic evil that permeates a Secondary Modern in Salford, with a range of stolid, complacent teachers, like that adroitly played by George A. Cooper, and Clive Swift’s kindly art teacher who is the one to act with humanity. This work carries Welland’s patented immersive veracity, his writings emerging from a mixture of his own experience and embedded research in communities. It is a humanist clarion call that was 18 years in advance of the cruel homophobic Section 28 legislation and thus light years ahead of dramas in the early 1970s which tended to avoid this subject.
Then came Battersby’s three Play for Today jobs. The first, Better Than The Movies (1972) is one of the remaining 32 Plays for Today I’ve yet to see or, in this case, read: a John Elliot drama featuring Christine Hargreaves, which Roy professed he didn’t have strong memories of and that he regretted he’d turned down directing Welland’s marvellous Kisses At Fifty (1973) and got this instead. Roger Smith’s The Operation (1973) is an incredibly odd melange of pointed politics and lurid exploitation filmmaking, a kind of bad taste Marxist Melodrama, which is utterly unique and divided viewers then and would now, as a Play for Today viewing group in April 2021 attested! This is not subtle, or in the liberal humanistic dramatic tradition. There is a thinness to much of the characterisation. It skewers its villainous property speculator protagonist, an oddly well-cast George Lazenby. While I find certain elements of this don’t work – a haphazard diegetic soundtrack* and it is glaringly androcentric, watching fifty years on – few can doubt that this leftist melodrama’s targets are totally deserving and relevant in 2024.
Also with Welland and Trodd, Leeds United! (1974) opened Play for Today’s fifth series in especially trenchant, politicised fashion, dramatising an actual 1970s strike in Leeds. While it found predictable brickbats from Whitehouse types, and defensive responses from union leaders and textiles firm bosses alike, it was this very uncompromising attack on both these settled establishments that shows the drama’s power. It really is a people’s drama, conveying the vox populi of the women textile workers who are grassroots union members who develop a fervent, ferocious socialist consciousness through their industrial action and who learn the bitter lessons of betrayal by senior figures in their own movement. Clearly, even the compromises of the 1970s seem Utopian compared with today, when the unions are disempowered. This is part of this drama’s historical value, in that it shows a time of relative strength in the Labour Movement, and also warns against compromising too much with conservative forces, as it lets passionate demands for structural change fade away. Battersby’s peerless cinematic technique for TV is kinetic and often deeply moving.
The elaborate, virtuoso opening tracking/crane shot is a British TV equivalent of Pabst or Welles. The set piece exchanges in the Town Hall send the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, while the Woodhouse Moor sequence evokes a gradual, melancholy realisation. While it’s very much a de-individualised crowd drama, and thus is demonstrably socialist, Battersby enables especially fine performances from Lynne Perrie, Elizabeth Spriggs and Lori Wells.
Next, Battersby directed Post Mortem (1975), a superb one-set studio drama by the undervalued Brian Clark, which anticipated Battersby’s later mastery of video studio aesthetic. This is a one-hander centring on the intense Judy Parfitt, playing an archetypal English workaholic, a formidable backstairs fixer in the financial world, notably in the year that Margaret Thatcher became Tory leader. This play, one of several masterpieces, utilises Battersby’s experiences with The Stockbroker’s World, and also his visual sense, to deploy some elaborate camera movement unusual for the studio setup – anticipating Alastair Reid’s work on series 1 of Gangsters (1976). Battersby is the ideal director to tell a story whereby professional flux and incomprehensible jargon and deals is interwoven seamlessly with the personal tragedy of the forsaken private life. The hubris is writ far wider than this one room.
By the mid-1970s, Battersby had taken a job working full-time for the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. His self-published memoir gives a fascinating account of a controversial incident in Derbyshire, which I have yet to fully read, and there’s a nuanced account of the Party’s aims, tactics and intractable limitations.
While working for the WRP, and largely due to the uncompromising radicalism of Leeds United!, Battersby was effectively blacklisted by the BBC, under pressure from MI5, with Post Mortem an overlooked final parting shot. However, Verity Lambert and June Roberts, producers of Thames Television’s ITV daytime soap opera drama Couples (1975-76), employed Battersby to helm several instalments written by his old collaborator Tony Parker. ITV work dried up after that, and in his full time WRP role, he worked on film projects, the most significant and sadly relevant of which is the documentary The Palestinian (1977), which contains testimony of Palestinian children in Lebanon dying through lack of water supply. It’s partial in its politics, yes, without any attempt to chase the elusive and often duplicitous goal of “balance”. It reveals the disturbing, subjective truths of a particular moment and illuminates the facts of its historical context.
Suffice it to say, that the independent thinking Battersby fell foul of the autocratic Gerry Healy leadership, for being too vocal in a way that the controlling Healy could not countenance. After a semi successful stint organizing for the WRP in Glasgow, for which he gained scant recognition, Battersby left after the falling out with the leadership and had fully left his full-time role and the WRP itself by 1980.
His memoir details his more humbled attitude to life since then, speaking of his love of his then new partner Judy Loe and how he recognised and valued family life anew after effectively being married to his work and the WRP for so long. There are some almost unbearably moving reflections on their life in Italy and the attempts in the late 1980s with Kenith Trodd to get a political and historical drama set in Italy with full cooperation of the locals, which a touchy, cautious BBC kiboshed.
However, that’s jumping ahead. Aided by Margaret Matheson in his return to TV work, in her time at ITV regional company Central, Battersby directed tantalising series by Peter Tinniswood and Barrie Keeffe which I have yet to see, including the latter’s No Excuses (1983) starring the peerless Charlotte Cornwell. He subsequently worked with another great Play for Today alumnus David Rose, producing Films on Four including Winter Flight (1984), irreverent and damning about masculine pub culture, if with a somewhat questionable ending, and Mr. Love (1986), which I’ve not seen, yet sounds a lovely, perhaps uncharacteristically upbeat work in the Battersby oeuvre. Others I’ve sadly yet to be able to investigate are Farrukh Dhondy and W. Stephen Gilbert’s notable series King of the Ghetto (1986) and for, BBC2’s leftfield, experimentalist strand ScreenPlay, The Act (1989).
Battersby worked on a range of the generally stronger and vastly popular range of police dramas of the 1990s like Between the Lines, Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost and Cracker. His autobiography gives a frank and caustic account of his thoughts about certain other police dramas of the era they came to wearyingly dominate. His book in that and another section is also as strong an inside account of how television drama lost its soul in a Faustian, nay Birtian, pact whereby utilitarian economics and ratings obsession merged to snuff out the questing innovation and the sort of passionate, committed focus that Battersby and two whole generations of writers, directors, producers and actors, had provided from the 1960s to 1990s.
My interviews with Roy, held on Zoom in September 2023, were, therefore, probably his last, as he was, as I only faintly knew, very ill, though he seemed in good spirits and managed to talk at some length both times.** In his chats with me, his fundamental geniality and helpfulness and interest in other people shone through. He was deeply intelligent and impassioned, and wore these attributes lightly. His memoir clearly indicates a lifelong socialism, and awareness of the need for more than incremental reforms, despite his bad experiences with the WRP organisation. In this book, he shows his political development by engaging with environmentalism and the need to stop destroying our planet in so many interlinked ways.
Roy seemed flattered and happy to be able to discuss his life’s work with me, especially the deep acres of it which have undeservedly passed into public obscurity. I intend, very much in line with his stepdaughter Kate Beckinsale’s public calls, to ensure his unparalleled contribution as a great BBC-trained director, equally at home in ITV’s popular dramatic mould, is remembered and inspires others to look deeply at the world and make good, intense art infused with commitment.
*They should’ve stuck to and expanded its Stanley Myers underscore, which does have some of that Roy Budd seedy grandiosity… But, perhaps, BBC budgets, as ever, would only stretch so far. **I hope to publish the transcripts and audio recordings to the British Entertainment History Project.
During its run from 1970 until 1984, the one-off drama series Play for Today employed seven different title sequences. In my article for the Special Issue on ‘Play for Today at 50’ for the Journal of British Cinema and Television , I provide a historical analysis of these. Focusing on how the different sequences invested the strand with a particular identity and prepared audiences for the plays that followed, it identifies the main modes of address employed by the title sequences and the ways in which they both startled and seduced viewers.
This shorter post is intended to complement this article by presenting the findings of a survey I undertook from June 2021 to January 2022. This aimed to gather the views on the various title sequences of a range of interested parties. While there is no pretence at rigorous sampling, the views of the 61 people…
Here are my favourite albums of 2021. The very favourite is marked by an * though! On that matter I’m actually in exact agreement with the Guardian, which is a rarity!
I’ve played some of these more than others. But they are all ace in various ways.
There is also a Spotify playlist here with a track each from these releases for your listening pleasure.
Little Simz – SOMETIMES I MIGHT BE INTROVERT Bruno Pernadas – PRIVATE REASONS Axolotes Mexicanos – :3 Jazmine Sullivan – HEAUX TALES Mzylkypop – KIEDY WILKI ZAWYJA? Remi Wolf – JUNO Doja Cat – PLANET HER Genesis Owusu – SMILING WITH NO TEETH Fievel Is Glauque – GOD’S TRASHMEN SENT TO RIGHT THE MESS Haiku Salut – THE HILL, THE LIGHT, THE GHOST Space Afrika – HONEST LABOUR Mason Lindahl – KISSING ROSY IN THE RAIN Cities Aviv – THE CRASHING SOUND OF HOW IT GOES Lost Girls, Jenny Hval & Håvard Volden – MENNESKEKOLLEKTIVET Andy Stott – NEVER THE RIGHT TIME Rochelle Jordan – PLAY WITH THE CHANGES Öona Dahl – MORPH Douglas Kearney & Val Jeanty – FODDER (LIVE AT DISJECTA IN PORTLAND) Anthony Joseph – THE RICH ARE ONLY DEFEATED WHEN RUNNING FOR THEIR LIVES Dave – WE’RE ALL ALONE IN THIS TOGETHER Billie Eilish – HAPPIER THAN EVER Virginia Wing – private LIFE Joan As Police Woman, Tony Allen & Dave Okumu – THE SOLUTION IS RESTLESS HARD FEELINGS – HARD FEELINGS Damon Albarn – THE NEARER THE FOUNTAIN, MORE PURE THE STREAM FLOWS Arlo Parks – COLLAPSED IN SUNBEAMS Nun Gun – MONDO DECAY Tom Jones – SURROUNDED BY TIME NOUS, Laraaji, Arji OceAnanda & Christopher Bono – CIRCLE OF CELEBRATION *Self Esteem – PRIORITISE PLEASURE
Highly honourable mentions to Lindsey Buckingham, Naked Flames, Jana Rush, Claire Rousay, Field Music… Many of these people’s and others’ albums are represented on this other Spotify playlist: MC TOMSTER’S 2021 GALLIMAUFRY. This is a mix inspired by the eclecticism of John Peel and Annie Nightingale and veers far more oddly and expansively than the BANGERS or TREMENDOUS THIRTY playlists.
Some of the videos for the TREMENDOUS THIRTY selections are, in themselves, amazing. Watch them! :
Bruno Pernadas – THEME VISION
Doja Cat – NEED TO KNOW
Andy Stott – HARD TO TELL
Rochelle Jordan – ALREADY (Beckettian!)
Further VHS aesthetics here:
Nun Gun, feat. Mark Stewart – STEALTH EMPIRE
NOUS, Laraaji, Arji OceAnanda & Christopher Bono – GIVING PRAISE
I have decided on my 21 bangers of 2021: listen to them in full on my Spotify playlist here.
1. Joel Corry, Jax Jones, feat. Charli XCX & Saweetie – OUT OUT 2. Caroline Polachek – BUNNY IS A RIDER 3. Kero Kero Bonito – THE PRINCESS AND THE CLOCK 4. AERO GROS M – IN BETWEEN A MANSION’S GATES 5. Shmu – (TECH, NO HUMAN) MEMORIES, THOUGHTS & IMAGINATIONS EXIST WHERE? 6. Go_A – SHUM 7. Fred again… & The Blessed Madonna – MAREA (WE’VE LOST DANCING) 8. Noizu – SUMMER 91 9. Jungle – ALL OF THE TIME 10. PinkPantheress – PAIN 11. Central Cee – OBSESSED WITH YOU 12. Sam Fender – SEVENTEEN GOING UNDER (edit) 13. WILLOW & Travis Barker – t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l 14. SZA – GOOD DAYS 15. beabadobee – LAST DAY ON EARTH 16. Doja Cat, feat. SZA – KISS ME MORE 17. Altin Gün – Yüce Dağ Başında 18. cEvin Key feat. Edward Ka-Spel – WATCHING YOU 19. Hannah Peel – EMERGENCE IN NATURE 20. Jane Weaver – SOLARISED 21. Lizzie Esau – CAFFEINE
Many thanks to Marcello Carlin, Justin Lewis and David Lichfield for alerting me to many of these songs; I wouldn’t necessarily have even been aware of them otherwise.
Welcome to Part Two of my grand gazetteer of the year 1993 in music through its UK Top 75 hit singles. I listened to around 1,100 – which is to say, virtually all – singles that charted that year. I have appeared on David Lichfield’s STORMERS podcast here, where I introduce and talk about five of my favourites – while also being put on the spot about every number 1 that year! In this article, I reveal my loosely ordered Top 25, plus a separate Top 25 of my favourites which are just available via YouTube videos. Here is my full Spotify playlist will all 75 selections; please listen!
Firstly, some other tracks which struck me, whether good, bad, baffling or surprisingly better than expected…
Let’s get the truly woeful over with first! The following three veer on Worst 200 Songs territory:
Go West – STILL IN LOVE (just dismal)
Garry Lee and Showdown – THE RODEO SONG (objectionable attitude to this and banal swearing! Shite),
Covidiots Right Said Fred – BUMPED. (Awful leery cover of HITS! shows on Spotify. Whoever tells you they are mad or whacky totally isn’t. A lesson again proved by this dismal tripe. “Timbuktu. De ja vu, hoooo!” “Turtle dove”… How punchable is the singer due to his forced laugh and smug tone (see 1:15-1:38)!?)
These were actually considerably better than I’d have expected beforehand! I don’t care about credibility, one iota! 😉
Genesis – TELL ME WHY (a left-wing or at least social liberal conscience after all that went down in the 1980s?)
Phil Collins – BOTH SIDES OF THE STORY (ditto)
World Party – IS IT LIKE TODAY? (slacker Americana type ramshackle and affable feel, a more mainstream Sufjan Stevens even!? And YOU’VE GOT ME THINKING is serene stuff, hints of dance)
Duran Duran – COME UNDONE (deft liquid melancholy)
Jellyfish – THE GHOST AT NUMBER ONE (a fair Beach Boys pastiche) & ‘New Mistake’ (similar, if a bit more Supertramp)
The Time Frequency per se; theirs is a great, very 1993 album cover, and their music, while unremarkable is breezy Scottish eurodance pop.
M. People – HOW CAN I LOVE YOU MORE? (actually, this is tremendous; I’d also really disliked them via just how prevalent and overplayed certain songs were in the mid and late-1990s.
As with probably any year, there were a wearying number of pointless, crap, cash-in cover versions. By far the best reissued song in 1993 was Edwin Starr – WAR. Co-written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for the Temptations and it is on the Psychedelic Shack album (released June 1970). An utterly magnificent track that loses none of its power: Whitfield produces. Other notable “oldies”: Prince – CONTROVERSY, Barry Manilow – COPACABANA, Sister Sledge – THINKING OF YOU, Sophie B. Hawkins – I WANT YOU (Bob Dylan).
I also found the following interesting or notable in varied ways:
– The Shamen – RE:EVOLUTION (what does it sound like? Malcolm Clarke’s out-there soundtrack to 1972 Doctor Who serial ‘The Sea Devils’, that’s what!) & POSSIBLE WORLDS – IMAGINARY MIX (ace psychedelic dance) – Fluke – SLID (odd Jagger-esque vocal amid a lengthy dance track) – Hardfloor TRANCESCRIPT (proper hypnotic techno, sliding into trance?) – Belly – GEPETTO (excellent) – Donald Fagen – TOMORROW’S GIRLS (nifty enough from the Steely Dan player) – k.d. Lang – MISS CHATELAINE (Francophile with accordions) – Buju Banton – MAKE MY DAY (hazy eerie high vocals behind the chorus. Dancehall from Kingston, Jamaica. He has apologised for a 1992 homophobic track) – Mad Cobra – LEGACY (Ewart Everett Brown, aka. Mad Cobra doesn’t really sound like the name! Chilled soul uncoils. Ragga type vocalist too, or is that the MC Mad Cobra? Pretty good. Sadly, he was yet another dancehall vocalist guilty of writing homophobic lyrics, though) – McKoy – FIGHT (CITY LICK MIX) (bit baffling, funk, hip hop with prominent vibraphone, which is always good. Interesting curio!) – David Sylvian & Robert Fripp – JEAN THE BIRDMAN (as odd as you’d hope!) – Spiritualized – ELECTRIC MAINLINE (psychedelic drone from Rugby; very good stuff) – The Cat – TONGUE TIED (it features in a Red Dwarf episode ‘Parallel Universe’, 1988, in a dream sequence; Danny John Jules sings, Naylor and Grant lyrics and Howard Goodall music. Fairly acute RnB pastiche. Key change!) – Eskimos & Egypt – FALL FROM GRACE (sounds very like Super Hans and Jez’s music from the Channel Four sitcom Peep Show. It has its moments, but is over-egged. “I’m talking to the human race!”; there’s another one that rants on about “UK-USA”…) – Dina Carroll – EXPRESS (Dina had as many as five hits in 1993, four of which feel like identical ballads, but this is more upbeat. It is archetypal libertarian neoliberal stuff. Freedom of choice. A focus on openly showing emotions. Quite body-centric too. This is individualism writ large, in its heyday) – Lisa B. – GLAM (notable instance of enticing 1990s hedonism) – Freak Power – TURN ON, TUNE IN, COP OUT (This has Ashley Slater vocal and Norman Cook produces. Massive in 1995 due to featuring in a Levi’s ad. Very retro, more than acid jazz or trip hop which they are supposed to be. Admittedly well done. – Midnight Oil – IN THE VALLEY (and several other pleasingly earnest ones) – Chumbawamba & Credit To The Nation – ENOUGH IS ENOUGH (I don’t like most of Chumbawamba’s hits from 1993, but this one is damnably catchy!) – Blaggers I.T.A. – STRESSS & OXYGEN (Riot Grrrl is rightly now remembered a bit more, e.g. the enjoyable, thoughtful film Moxie; this sort of thing is very much in parallel, I suppose. Carter USM but not as mainstream) – Marxman feat. Sinead O’Connor – SHIP AHOY (more leftist hits; The Levellers with flute and dance beats. More anarcho-punk than Marxist?) – Dinosaur Jr. – OUT THERE (a trudging, slacker grunge type tune. Closer to the sort of melancholy of a Daniel Johnston or Sparklehorse. GOOD) – Brad – 20TH CENTURY (Grunge, nicely organ led. Bit psychedelic. The album cover is a fine, weird photograph of masked figures) – Iron Maiden – HALLOWED BE THY NAME (I am not into heavy metal on the whole, but would say this is a good melancholy tune and plays up the melodrama) – Little Angels – SAIL AWAY (sailor boys, Quayside. This is deft, very strings and harmonica based. [Alan Bennett voice]: They’re from Scarborough. Not many bands are…)
Now, for that moment every discerning 1993 reader and listener has been waiting for. My Top 25 hit singles from 1993 that are on Spotify…! Seasonally, such a mix, 9 of these are actually from the autumn months… While 3 were Top 10 hits, a further 8 reached between #11-40 in the charts and 14 charted from #41-75.
#25: Pet Shop Boys – I WOULDN’T NORMALLY DO THIS KIND OF THING (11/12/1993, #13, 7 weeks; Parlophone, CSR 6370) There had to be something from Messrs Tennant and Lowe here: Northerners transplanted to London; this is from one of their finest albums, Very (1993).
#24: DJ Hype – SHOT IN THE DARK (Gunshot Mix) (20/03/1993, #63, 1 week; Suburban Base, SUBBASE 20CD) Hardcore, DnB, why aye. DJ Hype is Kevin Elliot Ford, a DJ and record producer who also founded the pirate radio station Fantasy FM. Suburban Base was started from the Boogie Times record shop in Romford by Dan Donnelly and had released Smart E’s ‘Sesame’s Treet’ (1992).
#23: Martyn Joseph – PLEASE SIR (09/01/1993, #45, 3 weeks; Epic, 6588552) This is among the earliest songs on my Spotify playlist. Joseph was born in the coastal town of Penarth in South Wales in 1960. This reflects on family, working-class community and deindustrialisation and contains an anger at social class inequalities and powerlessness to rival the Manics, frankly. Folk anger from the UK’s Celtic fringe, again an anti-establishment release from Epic.
#22: Ground Level – DREAMS OF HEAVEN (Candlelight Mix 7″) (30/01/1993, #54, 2 weeks; Faze 2, CDFAZE 14) This opens as almost early 1980s synth pop – OMD et al – but from 1:15 picks up as an exciting dance tune. Ground Level were an Australian duo: David Walker from Melbourne and singer Jean Marie Guilfoil from Wisconsin, USA. This has a ood, straightforward lyric and expectant music. Faze 2 was a house/rave label based in London NW1.
#21: Duran Duran – ORDINARY WORLD (30/01/1993, #6, 9 weeks; Parlophone, CDDDS 16) One of a few other early 1980s mainstays still to be charting, like OMD and Simple Minds. Though the latter certainly never produced a song of this calibre post-1982. They were formed in Birmingham in 1978, with singer Simon Le Bon born in 1958 in Bushey, Hertfordshire. This is a song of real gracefulness and heft.
#20: 10,000 Maniacs – CANDY EVERYBODY WANTS (10/04/1993, #47, 3 weeks; Elektra EKR, 160CD1) This is, as the video emphasises, a barbed critique of consumerism and advertising in ‘sweet-centred’ indie pop form. This band were formed in 1981 in Jamestown, NY, where singer Natalie Merchant was born in 1963. The attitude and musical style reminds me of Mary Margaret O’Hara and Kirsty MacColl: high praise. There is a fine live version with Michael Stipe singing with Merchant here.
#19: TC 1993 – HARMONY (10/07/1993, #51, 2 weeks; Union City, UCRD 20) Seems more proper house stuff than most. Good, very danceable. “Everybody shake a hand, make a friend” is a part of the song and this and “harmony, my sisters and brothers” is sampled from The Temptations’s ‘Friendship Train’ from Psychedelic Shack album recorded at the turn of the decade and released on 06/03/1970. Italo. Bergamo, North East of Milan in Lombardy region of Italy. Mark Fisher’s psychedelic Acid Communism writ large!
This is my favourite mix of it, the most spacious, with best nifty synth work and most use of varied parts of The Temptations track. MASSIVE! :
#18: The Boo Radleys – WISH I WAS SKINNY (23/10/1993, #75, 1 week; Creation, CRESCD 169) Underdog indie, openly so in the lyric. This band, active from 1988-1999 (and who I think have returned this year?), were founded in Wallasey, Merseyside. Singer Martin Carr was born in Thurso, Scotland but raised on the Wirral Peninsula. The label, of course, was founded in 1983 by Alan McGee, Dick Green and Joe Foster. Likeably jangly, this, from an expansive, fine LP Giant Steps.
#17: Caron Wheeler – BEACH OF THE WAR GODDESS (11/09/1993, #75, 1 week; EMI, CDEM 282) This is good, unusual. ‘A contender!’ I said in my notes and, aye, it deserves this high placing. Wheeler was born in 1963 in Acton, London. This song is from the album of the same title (1992); it is impossible to pigeonhole, with Acid Jazz, RnB and chanting of the Yoruba Victory Prayer from Fabemi Fashina – Yoruba is a language associated with parts of Nigeria, Benin and Togo. There are raps too from Kundalini and Cinderella MC. This is brilliantly produced by Derek Johnson, a guitarist who has worked with Alton Ellis and John Holt among others and has a fascination from the African Diaspora’s musical styles.
#16: Staxx feat. Carol Leeming – JOY (02/10/1993, #25, 6 weeks; Champion, CHAMPCD 303) A paradox of major key title and minor key chords. Great perennial early 1990s synth sounds. This feels like a particular mix of De’Lacy’s ‘Hideaway’ (1995) with the pinched, unique horizons of Bassline House. Or, a British take on Eurodance with its commanding vocal from Leicester-born Carol Leeming vocal. The song was written by Staxx who were Simon Thorne and Tom Jones (not that one!). Their four singles from 1993-97 were released by Mel Medalie’s Champion, a London label which generally put out soul, dance and house. The video has Carol and others in an abandoned swimming pool. The version there is more upbeat than the one I listened to via Spotify… Both are excellent, though. The initial one I listened to seemed to be a 2009 version. StoneBridge do a remix of it on that single too. 1997 remix reached #14, did 4 weeks then.
This is a great expanded version with added scat vocals, house piano, orchestra hit and an organ which feels akin to Bark Psychosis:
#15: System 7 – 7:7 EXPANSION (13/02/1993, #39, 1 week; Butterfly, BFLD 2) Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy’s techno and plangent prog interface, founded in 1990. Both had been former members of the psychedelic space rock collective Gong. That it spent just one week in the Top 75 despite entering in the Top 40 suggests a notable fanbase. Clearly, Hillage was one veteran (born London in 1951) very much able to reinvent himself and expand his musical reach, as evinced by his collaborations with The Orb. His 1979 LP Rainbow Dome Musick is tremendous new age ambient. This is more than good stuff: it almost invents Forest Swords in the evocative sampled choral vocals – twenty years before the Wirral’s Matthew Barnes released Engravings.
#14: Shakespears Sister – MY 16TH APOLOGY (27/02/1993, #61, 1 week; London, LONCD 337) I love this gleefully messy voicing of erring, apologising humanity. They were ‘formed’ in 1988 with Bananarama’s Siobhan Fahey joined in 1989 by Marcella Detroit. They were from Dublin (born 1958) and Detroit, MI (1952) respectively: great cities yielding great performers. This, from later in the same month as #15, was the lead track of an EP and feels – perhaps just to me – like a unique brew of Kate Bush, The Beautiful South and The Shangri-Las: also charting ground later traversed very well by Alisha’s Attic and Sing Sing.
#13: P. J. Harvey – MAN-SIZE (17/07/1993, #42, 2 weeks; Island, CID 569) This is just extraordinary. It feels like Polly Jean Harvey (born Bridport, Somerset, 1969) represents a new generation fully breaking through – using a unique rock idiom that isn’t slavishly tied to the past, Godot, or anything… The same year’s 50ft QUEENIE is also great.
#12: Urban Cookie Collective – THE KEY, THE SECRET (10/07/1993, #2, 16 weeks; Pulse 8, CDLOSE 48) This is a bit rave, bit Eurodance; vocals Diane Charlemagne. Written by Rohan Heath (born 1964), son of Guyanese Roy Heath, supposed to be a great short story writer and author of The Georgetown Trilogy. This song was actually about taking magic mushrooms. Also good: ‘Feels Like Heaven’, again with Diane Charlemagne vocals. Excellent dance pop. There was a remix that charted in 1996. For me, Manchester’s Diane Charlemagne (1964-2019) is one of the voices of the 1990s, singing the remarkable lead vocal to Goldie’s ‘Inner City Life’.
#11: Björk & David Arnold – PLAY DEAD (23/10/1993, #12, 6 weeks; Island, CID 573) This is co-written by Jah Wobble (born Stepney, London, 1958) and Björk (born Reykjavík, Iceland, 1965) featuring David Arnold (born Luton, 1962). Björk was asked to write the melody and lyrics for the song, while Wobble wrote the bass part and Arnold composed the score – with these vast strings – which Björk described as a “greatest hits of what’s in the film” – crime drama The Young Americans (dir. Danny Cannon, 1993). If #8 is a reaching out to a non-existent, idealised spacey other, this is the grounded answer song from an actual woman mired in “A place called Hate, the City of Fear”, playing dead to “stop the hurting”.
#10: Sybil – WHEN I’M GOOD AND READY (20/03/1993, #5, 13 weeks; PWL International, PWCD 260) I am delighted that this did so well in the charts: tastes converging! Sybil was born in Paterson, NJ in 1966 and this flows with waterfall-like pop modernism. It is assertive, plaintive and deftly produced by Mike Stock (born Margate, Kent, 1951) and Pete Waterman (born Coventry, 1947). I am hearing not just waterfalls, but mills, jaunty boozers and car factories. There is nothing ‘lightweight’ about a song speaking of love and consent. Hedonism and escape? Yes, but with clear, mutual human dialogue. A remix in 1997 reached #66.
#9: The Lemonheads – IT’S ABOUT TIME (27/11/1993, #57, 2 weeks; Atlantic A, 7296CD) One of my favourite songs from the excellent Boston, MA band, led by Evan Dando (born Essex, MA, 1967). Not an official answer record to #10, but a tremendous burst of “SUNSHINE!” as Juliana Hatfield sings as part of her glorious backing vocals.
#8: The Beloved – OUTERSPACE GIRL (14/08/1993, #38, 2 weeks; East West, YZ 726CD) The aqueous video to this dance stormer also has a motif of clocks and time, alongside copious flora. A Cambridge band who released 3 albums from 1990 to 1996. Originally formed as the Journey Through in 1983, they were renamed The Beloved in 1984 doing two Peel sessions the next year. Jon Marsh on vocals. His wife Helena Marsh had joined by this point, and they were now a duo. EastWest label was originally launched in 1957 by Atlantic Recording Corporation, but disappeared a year later, only to return in 1990. Of course they remain best known for the sublime ‘The Sun Rising’ from autumn 1989. Also on the 1993 album Conscience, ‘You’ve Got Me Thinking’ is serene dance stuff. The languid but propulsive ‘Outerspace Girl’ is at the sort of winsome, expansive interface between song and techno later shown by The Aloof in 1996. Or perhaps a less abrasive Underworld…
#7: Björk – VENUS AS A BOY (04/09/1993, #29, 4 weeks; One Little Indian, 122 TP7CD)
#6: Monie Love – IN A WORD OR 2 (12/06/1993, #33, 3 weeks; Cooltempo CDCOOL 273) This is lovely loving stuff, serene music, like Prince blended with Saint Etienne; Monie born Simone Gooden in Battersea, London on 2 July 1970. A protégé of Queen Latifah. She recorded 2 albums. Cooltempo was a London W6 label which started releasing stuff in 1984. Sylvester, Phil Fearon, Doug E. Fresh, Paul Hardcastle, later… Adeva, Gang Starr, Kenny Thomas, Danny B, Innocence. This is the sound of love.
Now for my top 5 from the year, as unveiled on David Lichfield’s stormers podcast: 1993. Only one reached the Top 40, the other 4 charting in the Top 75.
#5: The Other Two – SELFISH (06/11/1993, #46, 2 weeks; London, TWOCD 1) The Other Two were Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert, Macclesfield, Cheshire. New Order side project. Gilbert, born 1961 in Whalley Range, Manchester, is lead vocalist. Gillian’s are Mekons or Alison Statton (Young Marble Giants) type vocals alongside deft, synth pop. Buoyant chords underscore lyrics which I assume concern romantic jealousy, paranoia and suspicion, with “No sense of reason”. New Order had several singles in 1993. I’ll go out on a limb and argue that this Strawberry Switchblade-like delight is up there with ‘Regret’ and much better than the others.
#4: Meat Beat Manifesto – MINDSTREAM (20/02/1993, #55, 1 week; Play It Again Sam, BIAS 232CD) John Stephen Corrigan aka. Jack Dangers, a vintage synthesiser enthusiast, born in Swindon in 1965. Jonny Stevens aka. Fire Escape. The band formed in Swindon in 1987. This is industrial hip hop, even leading to big beat and trip hop. Some have even said Illbient! El-P, Dalek, Locust, though I think the best comparison for this has to be the great Underworld. Corrigan had been part of Swindon band Perennial Divide who released Purge (1986) LP. MBM have released 12 albums over their 34 years, the last so far in 2019. Play It Again Sam Records was based in Brussels in Belgium, founded in 1984. It’s now known as PIAS and has an SE1, London base; they have released Front 242, The Young Gods, Vitalic, Simian Mobile Disco, New Fast Automatic Daffodils and, best of all, the Legendary Pink Dots’ Island of Jewels (1986) LP. On 13 December 1992, they’d done a pretty sound Peel Session, but for me, nothing on that quite matches ‘Mindstream’.
The video seems to be a different version to the album version on Spotify. Whichever, though, well, wow… Sublime lap steel guitar. This speaks to 2021 with its lyrics concerning sensory overload and things so easily slipping from the mind. But, “PEACE” and “LOVE” emerge to the surface repeatedly towards the end. As they must, more broadly.
#3: Back to the Planet – DAYDREAM (04/09/1993, #52, 1 week; Parallel, LLLCD 8) Erik Satie Gymnopedies opening loomed. Anarcho-punk band from Peckham, this is an oddity. Punk dance wistfulness, has a plangent hazy rawness to it. The Geezer on keyboards. The great vocals are by Fil Walters, aka. Fil Planet. In 1994 they contributed to an anti-Criminal Justice Bill compilation, putting them into the company of the righteous. They met squatting in Peckham in 1989, Rodney Trotter just out of shot. This was actually one of two #52 hits they had in 1993 after ‘Teenage Turtles’, a trenchant attack on the early 90s pop culture phenomenon. Both were on Parallel Records, a short-lived 1990s UK label. They did three or four cassettes or albums of art pop, alternative dance or anarcho-indie finishing up with Messages After the Bleep… in 1995.
Revel in sublime dreams from a squat. Try and remember this 1990s and live anew through its inspiration.
Here’s a TV appearance of them performing ‘Daydream’ on the top of a roof.
#2: One Dove – BREAKDOWN (radio mix) (16/10/1993, #24, 3 weeks; Boy’s Own, BOICD 15) This was One Dove’s biggest hit, with a Stephen Hague radio mix. Good lyric and vocal from Dot Allison (born in 1969), amid dub reggae swirling alongside enveloping strings. They were a Glasgow band but Dot was born in Edinburgh. Musical giant, DJ and psychedelic techno tastemaker Andrew Weatherall produced their album of this year. Member Ian Carmichael produced The Orchids and The Pastels. This evokes ‘Pale Sceptre’ by The Wake in its downbeat Gothic lyrics of “the moon”, “only dark can wax and wane” and “Tides and werewolves”. In contrast to the shimmering jangling synth pop there, this is spacious spacey dub electronica to a reggae beat. With Allison’s ghostly lovelorn vocals equidistant between a lone Shangri-la and Anna Meredith. Magnificent…
#1: Urban Hype – LIVING IN A FANTASY
(09/01/1993, #57, 3 weeks; Faze 2, CDFAZE 13) And my no 1 of 1993 has to be… Rave pop, so it is…
This is woeful. NOT! Urban Hype’s ‘Living in a Fantasy’ just hits the mark, in every single way. A more concise lyrical variant on the escapist dreaming of The Beloved’s fine ‘Outerspace Girl’. Lyrical and musical and beat repetition, wistful synths, deftly balanced between jubilation and regret. It samples Taylor Dayne’s ‘Tell It To Your Heart’. And it has perhaps the best pan pipe solo in recorded sound of the early 1990s. Lent giddy glee by the lass’s cry of “Yeaaaahhh!”
It was recorded at Greystoke Studios XX. Faze 2 was a London, NW1 label, 1992 to 1997. The main members of Urban Hype, whose origins were in Chandler’s Ford, Hampshire, on the Winchester to Southampton road, were Bob Dibden and Mark Lewis. The latter produced or mixed Rozalla and Malaika and Goa trance. They were both also in Universal State of Mind, a later trance project. Bafflingly, Urban Hype did a version of Andy Stewart’s comedic Tartanry novelty hit ‘Donald Where’s Your Troosers’, also on Faze 2, in 1995!
Now, for the even lost-er continent of YouTube-only singles which charted Top 75 in 1993…
I think the following were all good in different ways and deserve shout-outs:
Sydney Youngblood – ‘Anything’
Saffron – ‘Circles’
Undercover ft. John Matthews – ‘Lovesick’
Gayle and Gillian – ‘Mad If You Don’t’
Suzette Charles – ‘Free to Love Again’
Mother – ‘All Funked Up’
Sister Sledge – ‘Thinking of You (1993 Ramp Radio Mix)’
Motorhead – ‘Ace of Spades (CCN Remix)’, SFX – ‘Lemmings’
Gary Clail, On-U Sound System – ‘These Things Are Worth Fighting For’
Dee Fredrix – ‘Dirty Money’
Subterrania – ‘Do It For Love (StoneBridge Club Mix)’
The Carl Cox Concept – ‘The Planet of Love’.
Now, what were the most notable 1993 curios hidden away on YouTube?
Well, there’s a horrendous Worst 200 Songs Ever contender in Hulk Hogan’s version of a horribly creepy song. Produced by Simon Cowell, no less. There is also Stan – ‘Suntan’. A terrible summer novelty hit: closer to Garry Bushell than Roy Ayers. One of the – thankfully – perishingly small number of artists who have followed Right Said Fred’s example of tabloid pop. This actually reached the Top 40, unlike the vast majority of my Top 25 selections below, reaching a high of #40, and spending a total of 3 weeks in the Top 75. Leery shite, released without any sense of shame or irony, by a record label called Hug.
As well as wrestlers – at least 3 tracks involve the massively popular WWF figures – there is… Well, Bill Tarmey doing his attempt at Frank Sinatra or Richard Harris crooning of a Barry Manilow song, with a Stock and Waterman production which, I suppose, can’t not include a saccharine kiddies’ choir and power ballad percussion… Now, Manilow is an overlooked omnipresent figure through the 1970s to 1990s and Tarmey was a fine soap actor who even appeared in a Brian Glover-written Play for Today, but this… well… I suppose it’s no worse than Tom Jones’s corporate junket-on-a-budget cover version of ‘All You Need Is Love’…
More baffling and somewhat more interesting is Bill – ‘Car Boot Sale’. This was apparently endorsed by Steve Wright and his posse. The main force behind this is a comedian and writer Richard Easter. It spent a mere week in the Top 75, at #73. Fucking hell… It is unique, I suppose, clearly better than Stan’s ‘Suntan’, with an unusual blend of electronic aesthetics and home-brewed, deliberately annoying catchiness . Someone has made a decent stab of comparing it to Half Man Half Biscuit – but I’d say it is limp buffoonery. A real curiosity that Mercury put out this strained, ultimately exasperating ordinariness!
As you might expect, given Spotify’s stranglehold over the music industry, the sort of artists on my YouTube Top 25 aren’t as prominent. Thus, it follows that only four of my 25 charted in the Top 40, while none reached the Top 10! 21 of these utter gems reached the lower reaches and thus didn’t get Mark Goodier or whoever it was in 1993 reading them out in the chart.
#25: Ian Wright – DO THE RIGHT THING (charted 28/08/1993, reached #43, spent 2 weeks in the Top 75; M&G, MAGCD 45) “I’m no saint or sinner”… “If you’ve nothing good to say, keep the peace”. Wise and salient words from Wrighty, then and now. He sings “Keep the peace” as it fades out. The M&G label was founded by Lord Michael Levy with backing from Polygram Records in 1990. Ian Wright was born in Woolwich, London in 1963. Chris Lowe appears in the video! Among more direct footer songs, this low-rent soul oddity by Arsenal 93, Tippa Irie and Peter Hunnigale is not bad either: though Wrighty takes the honours. Great tune, banger territory.
#24: Wendy James – LONDON’S BRILLIANT (17/04/1993, #62, 1 week; MCA, MCSTD 1763) “Revolutionary days were sadly over…” Written by Elvis Costello and Cait O’Riordan. Wry stuff! Lesley Ann Down in the tube station! Unusual film centric lyrics, funk undertow. James’s other single was good too. She was born in London in 1966. MCA Records was founded in Chicago in 1924 as a talent agency, though now is based in Los Angeles and has a London base.
#23: Revolting Cocks – DO YA THINK I’M SEXY?’ (18/09/1993, #61, 1 week; Devotion, CDDVN 111) This is an out-there, aesthetically extreme shrieked cover of the Rod Stewart disco “classic”, remoulded, detonated by Belgian-American band. Formed in 1985 in Chicago, IL. Devotion was in NW3, London, now defunct. It was put out by Sire elsewhere.
#22: Lindy Layton – WE GOT THE LOVE (24/04/1993, #38, 3 weeks; PWL International, PWCD 250) Lindy is cool, a pop artist born in Hammersmith, London in 1970 and singer on Beats International’s 1990 number one hit, ‘Dub Be Good To Me’. This is mildly racy pop soul, less urban than Beats International, but it works very well. The label is owned by Pete Waterman and based in SE1, London.
#21: Sultans of Ping F.C. – MICHIKO (30/10/1993, #43, 2 weeks; Epic, 6598222) Peelite stuff from this Cork, Ireland band, who had been formed on 1988. It feels a bit like a band The Hitchers I heard via the Peel show in 1997/98. Their album of this year has a track about Old Big ‘Ead Brian Clough, this one isn’t on that album. It is odd, really, that this was put out by a New York record label founded in 1953 and one of the majors.
#20: Zero B – LOVE TO BE IN LOVE (24/07/1993, #54, 2 weeks; Internal, LIECD 6) This has a very serene repeated bit! Starts off the Reconnection EP from William Dorez and Nick Coles. The record label is a London W6 one, established by Christian Tattersfield.
#19: Dannielle Gaha, now Dannielle DeAndrea – DO IT FOR LOVE (27/02/1993, #52, 2 weeks; Epic, 6584612) I’d say this was fine pop soul. ‘Secret Love’ is also very good. She was born in Australia in 1967, she is now Sydney-based.
#18: Ten City – FANTASY (11/09/1993, #45, 2 weeks; Columbia, 6595042) Good. Strings and vocals. Elegant bliss. A Chicago, IL House act from 1987 to 1994 with Byron Stingily, Herb Lawson and Byron Burke. ‘That’s the Way Love Is’ (1989) is their best known. Columbia is the oldest brand name in recorded sound, founded in 1889 in Washington, DC. Its US base is in New York, UK in London, W8.
#17: Bryan Powell – IT’S ALRIGHT (13/03/1993, #73, 1 week; Talkin’ Loud, TLKCD 34) This is an atmospheric New Jack Swing tune. Cool. Powell was born on Rugby, Warwickshire, but raised in Hackney, London. The record label Talkin’ Loud was founded by DJs Gilles Peterson and Norman Jay in 1990, in London. Gilles hasn’t been involved since 2001. Galliano and others released on it.
#16: Rhythm N Bass – CAN’T STOP THIS FEELING (03/07/1993, #59, 2 weeks; Epic, 6592002) ‘Can’t Stop This Feeling’ is a demonstrative RnB banger; a UK response to US RnB, led by Alistair Tennant and Wayne Hector. Irrepressible stuff. Good judgement from Epic to put this out: a shame it wasn’t bigger. Tennant was born in London in 1973 and has released albums and singles. Hector became a Sony ATV songwriting and doing vocals for the likes of Boyzone, Peter Andre, Five, Damage, Westlife and Gareth Gates.
#15: Aftershock – SLAVE TO THE VIBE (21/08/1993, #11, 8 weeks; Virgin America, VUSCD 75) The multi-ethnic pair of Guy Routte and Jose Rivera, aka. Frost were behind Aftershock and this fine mix of Prince and New Jack Swing. At least I felt that; RateYourMusic says this is garage house. Virgin is a major label founded by Richard Branson in London in 1972. It is now art of Universal, having been part of Thorn EMI. This is by far the biggest hit in my non-Spotify list! Unfairly elided since.
#14: Krush Perspective – LET’S GET TOGETHER (SO GROOVY NOW) (16/01/1993, #61, 2 weeks; Perspective, PERD 7416) Mint production, this. Krush were comprised of Angie Smith, Ashley Jackson and Christy Williams who, sadly, and unaccountably, only released this one single. The label was formed in Edina, MN by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis in partnership with the parent label A&M in 1991 and closed in 1997. It’s no surprise to learn the ace production on this is Jam and Lewis.
#13: Serious Rope feat. Sharon Dee Clarke – HAPPINESS (22/05/1993, #54, 2 weeks; Rumour, RUMACD 64) Serious Rope were Aron Friedman and Damon Rochefort, a UK based duo. Rochefort was a journalist for Smash Hits and the Sun who loved Black music. Friedman a regular producer, remixer, arranger orchestrator and musician on records by Steve Hackett, Bad Boys Inc., Jonathan King and Take That and many more. Sharon Dee Clarke, born in London in 1966, is a singer songwriter who released a range of singles from 1986 to 1999; as well as a theatre and TV actor. With Rochefort and Steve McCutcheon, Clarke was a member of the house group Nomad. This has a good, long intro and a memorable hook.
#12: Sandy B. – FEEL LIKE SINGIN (Def Classic Mix) (20/02/1993, #60, 1 week; Nervous, SANCD 1) Sandy, also known as Sandra Barber, was born in New York in 1955 and attended high school in New Jersey. She had released a soul funk disco LP The Best Is Yet To Come as far back as 1978 and had also been in the band Chew and on Rare Pleasure’s ‘Let Me Down Easy’. Nervous Records was formed in NY in 1990 by veteran Sam Weiss and his son Mike Weiss. This is delightful stuff. What organ! Such woozy wheezing.
#11: JC-001 – NEVER AGAIN (24/04/1993, #67, 2 weeks; Anxious, ANX 1012CD) Strong track, opposing ethnic purity and strongly advocating anti-racism, anti-fascism and anti-ethnic cleansing. The Specials are sampled. We hear Jonathan Chandra Pandy, an Asian-Irish rapper from Ladbroke Grove in London, born in 1966, the son of historian Bob Pandy who stood as a Labour candidate in the 1979 General Election. Bob’s sister Gloria is Killing Joke’s Black Jester Jaz Coleman’s mother. So JC and JCP are cousins. Anxious Records is a record label belonging to David A. Stewart of the Eurythmics. Founded in 1985, it is based in London, EC4N, its parent label is Warner.
#10: Jomanda – NEVER (Band of Gypsies Original Mix) (13/11/1993, #40, 2 weeks; Big Beat, A 8347CD) Jomanda were an RnB house act from NJ, USA, consisting of Renee Washington, Cheri Williams and Yavahn (died October 2003.Actually their only UK top 40, this. ‘I Like It’ is also decent. Their label is New York based, with an emphasis on house and hip hop, having been founded by 22 year old Craig Kallman in 1987.
#9: Shades of Rhythm – SWEET REVIVAL (KEEP IT COMIN’) (20/02/1993, #61, 1 week; ZTT, ZANG 40CD) I love this – classic rave house stuff with Fairlit, collaged vocals. Dance act from Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, consisting of Kevin Lancaster, Nick Slater and Rayan “Gee” Hepburn. The Zang Tumb Tuum (ZTT) label was founded by Trevor Horn, Jill Sinclair and Paul Morley in 1983. This is good!
#8: Bizarre Inc. feat. Angie Brown – TOOK MY LOVE (27/02/1993, #19, 5 weeks; Vinyl Solution, STORM 60CD) Bizarre Inc. were formed in Stafford, Staffordshire in 1989. Angie Brown was born in Brixton, London in 1963. The label Vinyl Solution, now defunct, was run from Portobello Road, London, W11. This is more good pop: excellent, lascivious sounds.
#7: JTQ with Noel McKoy – SEE A BRIGHTER DAY (03/07/1993, #49, 2 weeks; Big Life, BLRDA 97) Flute. Uplift. A jazz-funk for 1993. Wise lyrics deepen the effect of what are wonderful chord changes. And that hazy Barry Briggs synth undertow. The James Taylor Quartet was formed in Rochester, Kent in 1985 and vocalist Noel McKoy was born in Clapham, South London. Their previous 1993 hit ‘Love the Life’ is canny too. The flipside to this includes a soul jazz version of the TV theme, ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’, no less. They did loads more in that ilk. This Acid Jazz emerged from The Prisoners who had been on Stiff Records. Taylor played Hammond organ for them. Big Life Records was founded in 1986 by Jazz Summers and Tim Parry and is based in London, NW1.
#6: Moodswings feat. Chrissie Hynde – SPIRITUAL HIGH (STATE OF INDEPENDENCE) (Remix) (23/01/1993, #47, 2 weeks; Arista, 74321127712) A UK downtempo or New age band who started in 1989. They were James F.T. Hood and Grant Showbiz, aka Grant Cunliffe who had produced The Fall, The Smiths and Billy Bragg. Hynde was born in Akron, OH in 1951. The New York label was founded by Clive Davis in November 1974, subsumed within RCA in 2004. Just class, this record.
#5: Efua – SOMEWHERE (03/07/1993, #42, 5 weeks; Virgin, VSCDT 1463) Efua Baker, who is married to Jazzie B, was born in Ghana, 1967 and has appeared in a recent FKA twigs video. Efua’s delivery of spoken word type vocals is engaging, matched by myriad expressive gestures including judicious eye rolling in the video. The ethereal chorus almost evokes Young Marble Giants or the Shangri-Las, curiously enough. “I live my penthouse, my happening career… I would not like it ever again!” Unusual and refreshing! Should’ve been massive, but then at least it did stay in the lower reaches for over a month.
#4: Inner City – BACK TOGETHER AGAIN (14/08/1993, #49, 1 week; Six6, SIXCD 104) Inner City here are Paris Grey (real name Shanna V. Jackson, born 1965 in Glencoe, IL) on vocals and Kevin Saunderson (born 1964 in Brooklyn, NY) as the mixer. The Detroit, MI group formed in 1988. The label is in Surrey, UK, KT14. While this is oddly unheralded, it is actually fantastic: circling, crystalline soul with an ace vocal hook and chorus. ‘Till We Meet Again (Brothers in Rhythm Remix)’ is also good.
#3: Brothers Like Outlaw feat. Alison Evelyn – GOOD VIBRATIONS (23/01/1993, #74, 1 week; Gee Street, GESCD 44) London, jazz hip HOP group consisted of Isaac Bello and Karl “K-Gee” Gordon, who later did mixes of George Michael, All Saints and Sugababes singles. BLO released two albums in 1990-92, and then a third in 2018. Bello had rapped on The KLF’s ‘America: What Time is Love?’ (1992). The label, founded by Richie Rich and Jon Baker, was a subsidiary of Island Records, and also was home to Jungle Brothers, PM Dawn and others. Alison Evelyn later writes and sings on Ty’s Upwards (2003): ‘Inner Love (Samba)’. This is a fine tune. Evocative as owt.
#2: Rapination feat. Carol Kenyon – HERE’S MY A (10/07/1993, #69, 1 week; Logic, 74321153092) An Italian House pop duo Charlie Mallozi and Marco Sabiu (born Forli in Italy’s Romagna region in 1963) who relocated to London in 1988/89. Carol Kenyon was born in the UK in 1959 and had contributed backing vocals as part of the Sisters of Scarlet with Katie Kissoon and Samantha Brown to Dexys Midnight Runners’ Too-Rye-Ay (1982). Sabiu worked with Take That, Kylie Minogue, Leee John, Tanita Tikaram, Ennio Morricone, Luciano Pavarotti and Barry Blue – and in 2010 composed actor Christopher Lee’s first concept album. The label was founded by Michael Munzing and Luca Anzilotti in 1989, has offices in Offenbach, Germany and London W1V, Berwick Street. “We should all love disillusion…” Fantastic line. Should have been massive, like the same label’s Dr Alban track ‘It’s My Life’ rightly was. Has a good track sampled too in one bit.
#1: Seven Grand Housing Authority – THE QUESTION (ORIGINAL MIX) (23/10/1993, #70, 1 week; Olympic, ELYCD 010) Sublime house from Terrence Parker. Born and raised in Detroit, MI, Parker has been a DJ since 1980 and recorded music under a vast array of aliases, including this evocative moniker: Seven Grand Housing Authority. The label was created in Liverpool, L1 in 1992 by Andy Carroll and James Barton. Both involved in managing K-Klass who did a remix of this. This is on ANOTHER LEVEL to so much else, even among everything else I have praised in my Spotify and YouTube lists. A brisk, forceful slice of distended techno disco, this draws on gospel and samples ‘Make My Day’ by Grace Under Pressure. Utterly magnificent stuff.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this and listening to this range of music which charted in the UK in the year of 1993. Please let me know: (a) if you agree with my choices, (b) if you have any personal favourites from 1993 I’ve not mentioned…
Philip Martin, who died last December, was the author of two Play for Todays – Gangsters (1975, which subsequently spun off into two BBC series, 1976-78) and The Remainder Man (1982). Forgotten Television Drama pays tribute by publishing an article in three parts, drawn from extensive interviews with Martin conducted by Tom May last year. In Part One Martin talked about his memories of Gangsters. In this second part Martin discusses The Remainder Man and The Unborn (1980), while Part Three forms a tribute with contributions from Peter Ansorge, David Edgar and David Rudkin.
(Text taken from two Zoom interviews with Philip Martin by Tom May, 17 June and 1 July 2020. Transcribed by Juliette Jones and edited by Billy Smart.)
PM: I was born in Liverpool. My education was pretty rudimentary. I left school at 15, I was…
I rarely comment publicly in any depth on American affairs, but an attempted fascist insurrection, spurred by an incumbent unable to accept actual election results needs some comment. This ‘coup’ was an inept, often buffoonish successor to the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, that may yet presage more organised, violent threats to democracy from the far right. No-one can deny there was at least some neo-Nazis among the number of protestors nor that one man carried a Confederate flag.
While I await more evidence about the complexion of ‘Antifa’, I currently fail to see any equivalence in proportionate threat between the far right and the far left. Where in the Western World have we seen the far left commit the sort of mass murder committed by the far right that we saw in the 22 July attacks in Norway? In 2011 there, 77 people were killed in a politically motivated domestic terrorist attack.
In the protest marches I have attended in my life, against the Iraq War on 15 February 2003 and as a public sector worker against austerity on 26 March 2011, I didn’t witness any violence or storming of democratic premises. Indelibly etched in my mind is how student protests in November 2010 over tuition fees were marred by the irresponsible violence of one idiot throwing a fire extinguisher from a roof towards a crowded courtyard. Exactly five year later, further student protests were undermined in the public consciousness by reported instigation of violence by the anarchist Black Bloc. Such acts must be unreservedly condemned. These conceited political actors were not directly facing a Nazi threat, as with the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 or the Rock Against Racism marchers of 1977-78, but were needlessly threatening the safety of neutral members of the public.
The “threat” from the anti-democratic left in the UK is paltry and entirely negligible besides that posed by fundamentalist Islamism and, increasingly, far right Nazism. In November 2014, a plot by a disaffected teenager to kill people in my workplace in Newcastle upon Tyne was foiled by police, who raided his home and found a stockpile of bombs and a 9mm Glock handgun. The 19 year was given a life sentence for his planned massacre specifically inspired by the events in Norway 3 years earlier.
Since then, police and intelligence evidence suggests that the threat level from the far right hasincreased, approaching that of its cousin in ideological nihilism, violent and fundamentalist Jihadism. In 2019, Europol reported that the UK had the highest number of far-right terror attacks and plots in Europe.
As any sensible person would, Andrew Neil squarely lays the blame for last night’s events in Washington, DC on ‘TRUMP’. However offended his, Matthew Goodwin or Spiked Online‘s “sensibilities” might be, you just cannot elide though the underlying culpability of the British and American media eco-systems which supported and abetted Trump’s demagoguery at every stage. As Ed Miliband rightly stresses, we cannot be so “high and mighty” in the UK over this as we might like. In 2016 , during the divisive EU membership Referendum campaign – with its abysmal level of debate and rhetoric on both sides – a Leave-backing Nazi killed the Labour MP Jo Cox in Birstall, West Yorkshire.
Thankfully, enough ordinary Americans of all ethnicities in Georgia have pointed towards a way out of this. They voted at the ballot box to deny a fascist President and his many willing senatorial accomplices in the Republican Party their way in thwarting the results of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Importantly, this means that, in 14 days, the Democrats are in a position where they control all three branches of US government – the Presidency, the House of Representatives and the Senate. More recently, they have only held this strong, unimpeded position for 2 year spells: 1993-95 under Bill Clinton and 2009-11 under Barack Obama. You have to go back as far as to the Jimmy Carter-Tip O’Neill-Robert Byrd Democrat triumverate of 1977-81 to find such an arrangement that has lasted more than one electoral window.
Hopefully, we are going to see more and more Americans making the sort of humane turn the West Virginian senator Byrd made in his career – from opposing 1964 civil rights reforms to strong anti-racist, from supporting the Vietnam War to opposing. Evidently, it is not hard for Biden to achieve a civilising improvement in the level of rhetoric and optics in comparison to his frankly evil predecessor. However, Democrats will seriously need to act in helping people with jobs and wages and work hard to win over voters they have complacently took for granted in Texas and Florida, as Mike Davis has counselled in this excellent essay.
Americans have got to hope that Trump will be the last US President to have had a father being a prominent member of the KKK. They also need to demand that the Democrats make a fairer economy than the Republicans have presided over when controlling 2/3 of the arms of government from 2015 to date.
To end Limited British Take On This #29997, I can do no better than directing you to Albany Georgia-born Ray Charles performing Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell’s 1930 song ‘Georgia on My Mind’:
‘Other arms reach out to me Other eyes smile tenderly Still in peaceful dreams I see The road leads back to you, yeah’
May's Britain... 