Vive la difference – 80s French theme tunes for US telly staples

After noting that 80s soap opera Dallas had made a return to our screens in a “next generation” incarnation with original cast members and their progeny, I was reminded of an exchange trip to Northern France in the early part of that decade where I discovered that badly-dubbed versions of such American soaps had a fair toehold on the local telly schedules. But unlike in Germany (where Dynasty was known as “Der Denver Clan“) or Italy (where Knots Landing was simply called “California“), in France there was a special local twist to a fair few of these re-dubbed televisual behemoths.

THEY HAD NEW – FRENCH – THEME TUNES.

Why this was called for was a mystery to my teenage self (and is still, to be honest) but someone on the board of TF1, Antenne2 or France 3 (remember, say the numbers in French) had decided a certain je ne sais quoi was missing from the original theme music and needed adding. In some cases, as with The A-Team – the cleverly punning “Agence Tout Risques” (sounds a bit like “Agence Touriste” or “Travel Agents” but with a bit of risk thrown in.. geddit?) it was just a case of ADDING FRENCH LYRICS TO AN ALREADY INSTRUMENTAL THEME. The estate of George Peppard (we presume) have barred embedding (out of shame, we presume) so you’ll have to click this link to see it.

Sometimes the theme was evidently considered so alien to Gallic lugholes that the lyrics had to be re-written to seem more friendly to the local audience, as was the case with Lee Majors’ second most famous series The Fall Guy, or – as it was known south of Dover – “L’homme qui tombe a pic” which sort of means “The Man With Excellent Timing” but contains the verb tomber – to fall – in it. So the country and western ditty which precluded every episode of the aforementioned series was reworked in French, and sung in a distinctly different style, as you’ll see below:

Of course Majors’ other claim to fame – other than plighting his troth to the most eighties-coiffed one of Charlie’s Angels (which itself was bizarrely re-christened “Drôles de Dames” – or “Funny Ladies”) – was as (Bostin’) Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, which on the other side of the channel was “L’homme qui valait trois milliards” or the “Three Billion (Dollar) Man”. The theme music was kept more or less intact though…

The other massive American import much-loved by Jean-Paul and Marie-France as they sat devant la télé of an evening was Starsky & Hutch. A series much-loved for its acute fashion sense, its red car with a white stripe down each side and its memorable (instrumental) theme music that former Acid Jazzers may recall was covered to good effect by The James Taylor Quartet “back in the day” (1988) with Rob “Galliano” Gallagher providing a bit of inspired and exhilarating rapping over the end of it on the 12″.

Yet French TV not only didn’t care for the fact that the theme was an instrumental (as was the original A-Team theme) but decided to SCRAP THE ORIGINAL THEME ALTOGETHER in favour of a locally – sourced replacement which Wikipedia accurately describes as “singing about Starsky and Hutch”. Or “Starkey et ‘Utch”, more like. You can imagine Daft Punk listening to this in short trousers and sporting acne and bum-fluff moustaches, possibly chewing ‘ollywood chouing gum. This was the era of Gym Tonic – which Monsieur Bangalter used as the title of one of his collaborative projects – after all.

The jewel in the crown of the Franco-American soap theme redux has, nonetheless, to be Dallas, another memorable instrumental replaced by a totally different theme with singing in French. The new theme was written by one  Jean Renard (a Thin Lizzy fan, maybe?) who had already written stuff for the now-creaky rockeur Johnny Halliday and who curiously has one of his compositions sampled by Eminem in 2009. If I remember rightly the French dubbing in the series was also fairly odd as in there was no attempt to carry over the tone of voice of the original actors by the dubbers, so someone with a very “macho” voice could be replaced by a rather weedy voice, or vice-versa. Also JR comes out in French as “Dzjee-Air”, which for non-French viewers is a little confusing. I’ll let you make your own mind up about the incredible French Dallas theme below.

I’m just hoping that Renard’s original French Dallas theme got a 2012 remix by Bob Sinclar for the new series in the land of the baguette and croissant.

Home taping didn’t kill music (Happy Birthday John)

Today, 30th August 2012, would have been John Peel’s 73rd birthday.

73 isn’t a particular number of note (his wife had a collection of 78s as I recall, or was it her pick of his 78s.. not sure..) but it is always worth celebrating the life of the man who in his own way fomented the eclectic tastes of so many of us and who, for people of a certain age (my age and older, I suppose) who lived out their student years before the so-called interweb, was sometimes the sole or at least the initial conduit into a world of music outside the traditional realms of Top of the Pops, although of course many of the musicians he gave an initial airing to would go on to be staples of such programmes.. but that’s another story.

Just as many today would scour music blogs and cheeky content sites trying to find interesting new-to-me music for no money, their counterparts of the 1980s (and before) would sit listening to John Peel’s programme at 10.00 pm on the one-time-wunnerful Radio One (“275 – 285, and stereo V-H-F”) with sweaty fingers paused over rec and play. Downloading a podcast from 6Music or listening to Zane Lowe or whoever on the iPlayer doesn’t really match up in the “magic memory” stakes, however fantastic Stuart Maconie’s musical taste is (and it is, believe me). And just as we would tape the songs off Peel’s programme (or in some cases, just leave the thing running and tape the whole programme), young men and women up and down the country would be inspired to start their own bands, record a demo tape and send it to the BBC for him to hear. Some with the idea of becoming professional musicians, others just keen to meet the approval of their revered tastemaker. Peel usually listened to these tapes in his car while driving to Broadcasting House, or wherever, and once quipped that he imagined many listeners imagined he would be more than happy to meet his maker in a road accident while trying to decipher a cassette inlay. Something he made quite clear was not the case!

Tapes were central to John Peel’s BBC shows, whether they were specially-recorded ones he received in the post from bands, African cassettes sent from foreign parts (like.. er.. Africa) or the cratefuls of TDKs and BASFs that were used to record his shows by listeners like me (and quite possibly by you as well).

Which leads on to the tapes themselves.  Thanks to the web you’re reading this on now, collaborative projects like the fantastic John Peel Wiki compile months and months of Ravenscroft-selected broadcasts, from semi-muffled recordings of  The Perfumed Garden and Top Gear (the pre-Clarkson, even pre-Woollard Top Gear – the “gear” in question probably being a drug reference than anything motor-related) where the great man spoke in what seems a fairly posh-but-weedy voice to crystal-clear digital DAB recordings in the 21st century… recordings of the wise-but-sufficiently-with-it-but-not-embarrassingly-so dad we never had or the one we would have liked to evolve into ourselves one day.

The equally wonderful John Peel Archive, who are currently working their way though Peelie’s “hallowed shelves” a hundred records at a time (100 records per letter, A-Z), have also been keeping their own collaborative documentation of those cassettes on which we tapers recorded Peel’s shows. I myself thought I was being incredibly original in calling one of my “taped off the radio” cassettes “Mixed Peel” until I saw that someone on the Peel Archive Pinterest page had posted photos of his own collection including one with the same name (along with an “Orange Peel”, an “Emma Peel” and so on).

So here are some of my “original” custom-made Festive Fifty cassette inlays from the mid to late 80s, my “golden era” of listening to John Peel. These were the days of photocopied fanzines, of Rotring pens and Letraset, of Pritt Stick and typewriters that jammed. A colour photocopy was a thing of wonder, and nobody owned their own printer. In fact, mention the word “printer” to a sixteen-year-old schoolkid in the 1980s and they’d probably think of orange xerox-mecca Prontaprint or Mr Munnings out of Trumpton.

Looking back on these lovingly-prepared covers (who said “sad bastard” back there?) I really don’t think I could have imagined making such an effort for any of Peel’s contemporaries, even though I regularly listened to Janice Long, Kid Jensen and Annie Nightingale (as well as Mike Allen on Capital and other stuff) and enjoyed most of the music. I no longer own a working tape recorder as various Walkmen, ghettoblasters and tape-to-tape separates have long given up the ghost. Occasionally I dip into the very programmes that live in the cases you see here, recorded by someone else at the same time I was listening (these shows – at least to my knowledge – were never re-broadcast on Radio One) and digitised by that same person or those same persons with more technical flair than myself.

Home taping didn’t kill music, you see. It saved it. For posterity.

Here are some links to some site with shows originally preserved on tape:

• Keeping It Peel
• Ray’s Tapes
• Pates Tapes
• and the wonderful John Peel Archive.

Now to start digging around for something for Keeping It Peel day, October’s not that far away!

Adam Yauch – Growing Up In Public (Part One)

“They call me Adam Yauch but I’m MCA” – note tongue placed firmly in cheek

Like quite a lot of people out there I was saddened, if not a bit shocked, to hear of the death of Beastie Boy MCA – known to his parents (who are both still alive) as Adam Yauch – at the age of forty-seven. Although I wasn’t lucky enough to have seen them live I do have quite a few of their albums (all, oddly, except their mega-selling breakthrough  License to Ill – though I do have a couple of singles from it – and their final Hot Sauce Committee Vol. 2) as well as various 7″s, 12″s… and rather a lot of cheeky downloads (*cough*).

I’m not going to feign deep personal distress here, I never personally knew any of the Beastie Boys nor have any distant blood connection to Mr Yauch, although it is always very sad when anyone – famous, talented or otherwise –  is cut down by the dreaded c-word in their mid-forties. I believe he had been ill since 2008, but you always imagine that if the damn thing doesn’t get you in the first couple of years then the threat isn’t. I have known friends, family, family friends and family of friends who have been victims of cancer, most of whom did not survive three months after being diagnosed. But sympathy to Yauch’s family (he had a young daughter) as to Adam Horovitz and Michael Diamond is most certainly due…

By all accounts the man seems to have been a genuinely nice bloke, as can be seen from the thousands of R.I.P. tweets and tributes flooding cyberspace, from the expected roll call of transatlantic rappers (Chuck D, Ice T, Eric B, Redman, Busta Rhymes, Eminem, Rev. Run from RUN DMC, Nas, LL Cool J, Dan le Sac and Scroobius Pip, Goldie Lookin’ Chain etc) through genuine 80s popstars – (Boy George, Gary Kemp, Duran Duran), local “homies” (Moby, various New York politicos), authentic luminaries (the Dalai Lama, Thom Yorke) and the downright unexpected (Jeremy Vine, Bombay Bicycle Club, The Hives, Gwyneth Paltrow, Molly-Ringwald-out-of-Pretty-In-Pink etc). Also seems most people who had worked with  MCA – photographers, djs, other bands at festivals etc – seem to have held him in high regard. Sadly, certain people – presumably caught up in the tragedy of it all – could have phrased their tributes a little better…

As the mags, blogs and newspapers have all reminded us, the Beastie Boys penetrated (oo-err) public consciousness in 1986 with their (cliché alert! cliché alert!) game changing debut “License To Ill”, with which Rick Rubin’s Def Jam label was able to cross over to the White America so beloved of the Manic Street Preachers. Noisy rock guitars melded to solid beats fronted by three young punks (in the American sense of the word – as in juvenile oiks and rabble rousers – although in an earlier incarnation the Beastie Boys HAD actually been a Black Flag – inspired hardcore punk band) who seem to have wandered out of Animal House, Budweiser cans in hand. An inflatable phallus accompanied them on tour, and their penchant for wearing VW logos from chains around their necks in the same way that Flavor Flav sported his oversized “what-time-is-it” clock lead to tabloid outrage as young men up and down the UK set upon Golfs, Polos and other motors to emulate their fratboy idols.

To me their (cliché alert!) sophomore hit single “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” was an exhilarating mix of  guitar riffs, beats, rhymes (like a lemon to a lime, a lime to a lemon, sticks in my mind… although that’s not a rhyme, of course) and… well… shouting. And when I bought it it was THE B-SIDE of  “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)”, the only single in my entire vinyl collection to contain two sets of brackets in the title. “Time To Get Ill” was the other song on the 12″. What a set.

When I first heard the Beastie Boys I had just finished school and moved to university, or, as many Americans are prone to calling it: to “school”. Whether the band’s supposedly loutish baseball behatted members in the Fight For Your Right video were meant to have been still in secondary education or – as I – dipping their toes in the water of further education was never quite made clear to me, but although I was hardly American fratboy material myself, as any fresher (or “freshman” – and these lads were certainly fresh in the hip-hop sense of the word) knows, copious imbibing of beer was certainly the order of the day for Ad-Rock, Mike D and MCA as it was for myself. But not the Budweiser they drank. Cos that’s gnat’s piss. Anyway, their blend of rock, rap and goonery struck a chord with American youth and before long it “License To Ill” was the first number one rap album on the US Billboard charts, boosted by still-infant MTV back when MTV was a music video channel (hence the name – duh!) and not wall-to-wall programmes on teenage pregnancies and the like. Additionally the fact they were white, sadly, was a bonus.

I remember hearing Brass Monkey and Paul Revere (not UK singles!) being played in the Haçienda on my visits there and before long the 3 MCs had made a stack of money. Later, of course, it was revealed that these raucous Beastie creatures were just caricatures (Ad-Rock’s old man was a successful playwright, let us not forget) and the juvenile sexism and drink / drugs bragging on the record was said to be just play-acting, but something of the band’s old hardcore punk attitude was still part of the hip hop mix. then they took a bit of time off, learned to play their instruments a bit better and acquaint themselves a little better with recording studios and “crate-digging”, which lead to Paul’s Boutique, the album many consider to be their masterpiece.

But just like all those cult films beloved by hipsters that did bugger all at the box office, when compared to its predecessor, Paul’s Boutique stiffed. Or at least the record company considered it had, as it failed to crack the Billboard Top 10. Yet its fantastic cornucopia of beats from a variety of different genres – “Paul’s Boutique had all the best beats” claimed Public Enemy’s Chuck D – and despite its relative commercial failure, the album was certified double platinum in the USA, albeit in 2009! I could waffle an entire day away on the multiple multi-layered joys of “Paul’s Boutique”, on how it changed hip hop, on sampling legislation before and after, on how the shop never really existed, on how it was a hymn to the band’s beloved NYC (not their last), on how they got kicked off Def Jam, but paulsboutique.info does it so much better you can save me the fingerwork and go there instead.

So before this all becomes old hat I’ll wrap up part one of this MCA (he had the raspy voice, in case you didn’t realise) tribute / Beastie Boys retrospective “ting” and leave the rest of the story – Sabotage, Buddhism, basketball, Grand Royal, Nathanial Hornblower, Ocilloscope Labs etc – for a Part Two (with bootleg links, mad videos and stuff), but leave you with these gems to take away. As the man said: “No, I didn’t retire, I’ll snatch you up with the needle nose pliers”.

Poetry.

Beastie Boys – Licensed to Ill (original unreleased 15 track version)

Beastie Boys – New York State of Mind (Green Lantern mixtape)

Beastie Boys – Dub The Boutique 

Beastie Boys – Gratitude

From the vaults…

From the original aborted WE LOVE ALL THAT fanzine, early 1990s. Sign of the times and all that.

Note quaintly now-obsolete old-school cut-n-paste technique combined with vintage Olivetti typeset font-thing.

Don’t call it a comeback…

…I’ve been here for years. Idle, yes, but here.

However I am dusting down the keys and planning something for inclusion on these yearning pages.

So, to wet your collective whistle, here is a vintage snippet from the 1970’s pet shop book favourite “Bunnies As Pets”.

Completely á propos of nothing.

Whatever that means.

Keeping it Peel with Ted Chippington and The Popguns

Seven years ago today saw a vast number of popular, seminal or struggling musicians and an even vaster number of music lovers around the world shed a tear over the unexpected death of an avuncular balding gentleman from the Wirral with various children named after vestiges of Liverpool Football club and a wife he fondly referred to as “the Pig”.

John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, better known as John Peel, was responsible for bringing artists as disparate as The Smiths, Bob Marley, Orbital, Bolt Thrower,  The White Stripes, Public Enemy, PJ Harvey and The Bhundu Boys to a wider audience.

His late night BBC Radio One show, with its specially recorded sessions (which somewhat logically became known as Peel Sessions) had generations of spotty teenagers like myself waiting, fingers poised over the rec and play buttons of a radio cassette recorder, for the latest offering from The Fall or the latest import from far away, be it New York, Kinshasa, Nagoya or Brussels.

Although it was tempting to provide links to Peel Sessions by the holy trinity of my teenage years – namely The Cure, The Smiths and New Order, each of whom recorded at least a couple of Peel Sessions – or other much-loved Peel staples The Fall, Half Man Half Biscuit or The Wedding Present, you’re going to get another couple of personal favourites.

First up is another balding (now completely bald, but in the 1980s he was merely balding) fellow,  from Stoke-On-Trent.

Ted Chippington.  Ted by name and Ted by nature,  Chippington dressed like a 50s Rock-n-Roller, brothel creepers and all. I was fortunate enough to see this legend of “top entertainment” in his prime and even purchase one of his “A Good Mate of Ted” badges afterwards. Deadpan before Jack Dee had bought his first suit, poker face before Lady Gaga was out of nappies, Ted was, at the time, a unique proposition: old style comedy coupled with the kind of 70s karaoke singalong one might encounter at a Brit-filled bar in Benidorm. But with his own personal touch, as seen in the following visualisation of his oeuvre below:

Peel played Ted’s first single “Non-Stop Party Hits of the 50s 60s and 70s” featuring Ted’s own spins on chestnuts such as “Hound Dog”, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” and “Rock around the Clock”, along with a first airing of his own composition “Rocking With Rita” and a wheel was set in motion.

An album, Man in a Suitcase, was released with a trucking theme to its sleeve and Peel’s nemesis Steve Wright (not the murderer, but the Radio One DJ) soon picked up on Ted’s masterful rendition of the Beatles’ “She Loves You”. Fame and fortune beckoned, with Ted even getting a TV spot on Pebble Mill at One. It used to be up on YouTube, but after a glance at this, some sourpuss has taken it down.

So here you can enjoy one of Ted’s trucker’s tales, set to music instead:

Other joys on this quintessential slice of alternative Midlands variety were a version of Russ Abbott’s cheesy wedding-disco anthem of the time – “Atmosphere” (the original of which Peel once memorably  introduced on Top of the Pops as a Joy Division cover.)

Later, a version of “Rocking With Rita” was released with an all-star crew of labelmates from Vindaloo Records, meaning that Ted was accompanied by We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It (who had also released a Peel Session by then and who would later go on to bother the charts with radio hit “Pink Sunshine”) and The Nightingales. If I recall, Vindaloo Records rock was produced for the occasion, featuring the legend “Greetings from Ballsall Heath“.

A follow-up – “The Wanderer” was released in 1987 (where Ted revealed he was not the wandering type, but would rather spend a quiet night in “with the missus”). Shockingly, it did not set the UK Top 40 alight, and only made 28 on the indie charts.

By 1990, Ted had apparently had enough of the rock n roll lifestyle and retired from “the business” (allegedly) to become a trucker in the US, but abandoned  this romantic career option when his lorry shed its load on the highway somewhere.  After fleeing to Mexico to work as a cook (it says here) he returned to the UK, eschewing Stoke-on-Trent and Bank’s Bitter in favour of a house on the English Riviera.

Other soon-to-be-far-more-popular fledgeling comedians were later to take a leaf out of  Ted’s book. As well as Jack Dee (who I mentioned earlier) Stewart Lee has often spoken of his love for Ted’s unique brand of entertainment, and even subsequently tracked him down  at his Torquay abode to record this. His sometime sidekick Richard Herring was no less forthcoming in showing  respect to Stoke-on-Trent’s finest. Even Vic and Bob were apparently regulars at Ted’s early gigs.

In 2006 he returned to the stage, dog collared-up, and re-styled as The Rev. Ted Chippington (possibly inspired by Run out of RUN DMC or Kurtis Blow), and the following year Lee and Herring and other comedy luminaries hosted a “Tedstock” benefit gig to raise money for a very noble cause: a 4 CD Chippington box set.

The other week Ted performed to “a crowd of  aggravated Welshmen” , supporting The Fall and The Nightingales, with a mixture of old and new material.

Predictably, he was bottled off.

Peel was an avid supporter of Ted Chippington, and once played a legendary set that he had performed on a ferry in Liverpool in 1985 (supporting Scouse indie-dance chancers The Farm) in its entirety on his show. Hopefully some kind soul will post this today as I personally love to hear it again! However, let’s leave Ted with a clip of the b-side of his first single, introduced by John Peel himself, and then a few random moments of “True Greatness”

Ted Chippington – Non Stop Party Hits of the 50’s, 60’s & 70’s (b-side)

Ted Chippington – She Loves You

Ted Chippington – Feel Like Buddy Holly

Ted Chippington – The Wanderer

Ted Chippington – I’m a Human Being

Ted Chippington – Ted Chippington

The Popguns were a jangly pop band from Brighton, fronted by one Wendy Morgan and featuring ex-Wedding Present sticksman Shaun Charman. They recorded two Peel Sessions, both – I think – first broadcast in 1990. Amazingly they never became the “next Sundays”, the “next Primitives”, or even the “next Darling Buds” (who were themselves the next Primitives), although their first two albums Snog and Eugenie should rightly be championed as indiepop classics.

I forked out for the 12” singles of their debut “Landslide” (which made the lower echelons of the Festive Fifty) and follow-up “Waiting For The Winter”… both had a special quality, maybe the combination of those jangly guitars and the singer’s voice, the wistful lyrics… but one of the rare moments that Peel played something and I thought I’ve got to have this record instead of just contenting myself with three or so minutes of a C90.

Charman left the band and the Popguns’ moment in the indie limelight seemed to be running out. A third LP – entitled Love Junky – was released in 1995 and the following year a final album – Á Plus de Cent – appeared, featuring covers of both Serge Gainsbourg (in French!) and A Tribe Called Quest. Their finest hours were compiled on a Best of the Midnight Years collection.

Amazingly all four LPs, along with the compilation, are available on iTunes, and the band even have a website with bits and bobs from their fleeting career here. 

Here is their first Peel Session from 1990.

The Popguns – Debut Peel Session.

Remember, remember, the 25th of October…

We’ll be Keeping It Peel next Tuesday.

But here’s a tune to play in the meanwhile…

Grinderswitch -Pickin’ The Blues (download)

Pardon my French

The above song – Que veux-tu by French band ( (c) Air 1998) Yelle – has been lodged in my head ever since I (*cough*) discovered it on the internet in its abovely remixed form. As you will see, it features abundant wild dancing by a fellow in a pith helmet, probably due to the fact that the album from which the track is extracted is called Safari Disco Club.

Apparently the guy who remixed it is only 17, also French, and goes by the soubriquet (did you see what I did there?) of Madeon.

He’s also done a handful of other remixes, from the Killers (you can download that ‘un) to Deadmau5.

The Killers – Smile Like You Mean It (Madeon remix)

Deadmau5 – Raise Your Weapon (Madeon remix), “ripped” off Pete Tong on Radio One

The remixes have a sort of vaguely Justice-y French Touch 2.0 feel to them, and monsieur Madeon has even made a LIVE mash-up that sounds like a whole new beast by combining the best bits from 39 songs – including his Yelle remix, along with Daft Punk, Justice, Stardust (no surprise there), The Buggles, Kylie, Britney, Coldplay, The Who, Ratatat, Gorillaz, Chromeo…  – into a 3’25 pop collage called “Pop Culture” using some piece of techno wizardry called a Novation Launchpad.

Push the button..

Flagging…

In anticipation of a decent chunk of time becoming available to dust off this blog, I thought I’d install a flag counter to see who’s looking in and from where!

It seems I’ve installed it in the wrong place though.

Ho hum…

Keeping it Peel

Six years.

Six years since John Peel shuffled off his mortal coil (not This Mortal Coil.. oh you know…) in Cuzco, Peru and left behind him a legacy of music from Bowie to Bogshed, from C86 “shamblers” to happy hardcore, old skool hip-hop to Brit Pop, prog to punk, M.E.S to D & B etc, etc, etc.

Six years in which the sales of CDs have fizzled out, vinyl has returned to the non-specialist record shops and ringtones and glorified karaoke singers have swamped the ears of our ever more homogenous youth.

There are, of course, those who bravely try to follow the great man’s example – Rob Da Bank, Jarvis Cocker, 6Music in general, but that combination of enthusiasm, championing the new from all fields of the musical spectrum and an overwhelming love of The Fall is a hard act to follow. It was thanks to Peelie that I first heard the indie heroes of my youth – New Order, The Cure, The Smiths – but also heard what was then known as electro, old blues records, dub reggae, and.. er.. more indie subgenres. His programmes also cemented friendships between myself and my oldest friends who often met up in one friend’s big-ish bedroom to listen to records bought on the back of hearing them on his Radio One programme… Psychocandy being a prime example.

So first up, to celebrate the great man’s anniversary, here is my commemorative Spotify playlist. Lots of session tracks in there, plus Festive Fifty favourites and my own Peel show memories. Sadly Ted Chippington, Bogshed, Eton Crop and Billy Bragg’s first album are not very well represented on Spotify so you’ll have to make do with the below:

Keep ‘Em Peeled

Oh, and I almost forgot… for Keeping It Peel I’m meant to include a favourite Peel Session, aren’t I?

Well, I’m sure no-one else will be posting this one… *coughs* …

Back in the midsts of the early 1980s Peel played a track by a German band whose name translated as The Dead Trousers – Die Toten Hosen, who had a 7″ called Bommerlunder which was basically a hymn/drunken paean to a rather potent schapps or something similar. Peel became quite enamoured with the track and subsequently acquired the band’s debut album Opel-Gang and played tracks fom it on the show despite it being all in German. The band – with names like Trini Trinpop, Campino, Breiti and Andi – then got in contact with Peel (or was it the other way round) and a partially English language session was recorded in Maida Vale. I recorded it on a C90 many years ago, but it found its way onto the web, and here it is below to enjoy again, with bits of Peelie himself talking between the tracks.

Die Toten Hosen later recorded a great hip-hop collaboration version of Bommerlunder called Hip-Hop Bommi Bop with Fab Five Freddy which I loved but never “did” anything chart-wise. The band did however become a stadium-filling cartoonish punk band (imagine Green Day if they hadn’t heard any ska records and sang in German) in their native land, complete with a new drummer called Vom (not his given name, I’d wager). In fact so massive did they become that in Germany you can even buy a Toten Hosen Sing Star karaoke thing for your PlayStation!

Die Toten Hosen – John Peel Session 1984

Die Toten Hosen – Hip Hop Bommi Bop

Die Toten Hosen – Bommerlunder

Oh, and on the band’s website you can find a video to the original Bommerlunder, re-recorded… in Polish.

Raise a glass to the late, great John Peel!