John Peel, my birthday and me

So here’s a thing. I always knew that John Peel played the B-side of our single Trouble with a Capital T – a song called Forward – on April 28 1995. I never heard it becuase
a) you don’t stay in listening to the radio all day just in case and
b) it was my birthday and so I was in the Neel Akash on Charlotte Street, eating curry.
But here is something that is amazing to me. The whole show is available as a selection of MP3s. I only found this ten minutes ago and of course waited through all the buffering and that and fast-forwarded to the point where Peel says: “This is Pastel Collision”.
What a moment!
It made me feel very strange sitting here listening to that, 13 years after the event.
It’s a bit like being told you won the Cup final 13 years ago, but you didn’t realise.
How many people have heard Peel say that about their band?
Okay, about 12,000.
But even so.
I must say that all the songs on that record came out very disappointingly thin-sounding. We have demos of the same songs that sound loads better. Demos we effectively produced ourselves at West Orange studios in Preston. Demos with big guitars and trumpets.
The record was made at Peter Hook’s Suite 16 Studio in Rochdale. We didn’t see Hook but we did see a postcard he’d sent to the ‘fellas’ at the studio from a holiday with his wife, the brilliant Caroline Aherne.
Anyways, we paid £250 a day and the total cost was £700-plus, so you’d expect it not to sound like it had been recorded on a dictaphone from the other side of the room.
Wouldn’t you?
Playing the Peel show, Forward fits right in. He was always playing lo-fi stuff, of course, or wilfully amateur-sounding stuff. Proper indie.
Obviously, we were proper indie but not in the way that record sounds ie as if we – or at least the sound engineer – haven’t got a clue.
We wanted our records to sound wilfully pop, not wilfully recorded from inside a can of baked beans.
It breaks possibly the No 1 rule of pop, I’m afraid. Al lthe instruments – and there are many – are playing all the way through.
(That may be the most important thing I learned from doing music with producers who actually had a clue.)
Still, it’s got a good tune. And lyrics. It’s coverable.
Anyway it was, I always thought, a shame that the only song of ours played by Peel was one of our worst-produced ones.
Then I also learned, via the power of Google, that he had played our first single, Young, on July 15 1994 (are you still with me here?).
And that song really is a corker. Trust me. A record with trumpets and big guitars.
Proper indie.
The way we wanted it to sound.
Maybe I’ll even upload it sometime.