21 Songs for John: 17 - I, Ludicrous

I, Ludicrous – Cheer Up

I, Ludicrous became one of the few bands to make the festive fifty before they'd had an official release when the flexidisc version of Preposterous Tales that came free with Blah, Blah, Blah magazine got to number 11 in the 1987 listeners' chart.   The band also recorded their only Peel session that year, but John Proctor and David Rippingale, augmented since 1998 by bassist Martin Brett, have continued to make great music, recording two sessions for Pete Jackson's Dandelion Radio show, first in 2009 and the second earlier this year.  This is an early mix of a track that will feature on their forthcoming album, their seventh in all.

www.iludicrous.co.uk


21 Songs for John

21 Songs for John: 16 - Haunted House

Haunted House – The Kindness

John Peel spoke of Lianne Hall with the kind of awe he'd rarely employed since attempting to describe the voice of Sandy Denny.  She recorded two sessions and an additional two tracks for his Xmas 2001 show and was a great favourite of the DJ in his later years.  Now, she teams up with Paul Hartnoll of Orbital as Haunted House and this track will feature on their forthcoming album Brave The Woods.  Orbital were a staple of the John Peel show throughout the nineties, taking techno away from the self-selected club-going elite and into appreciative living rooms and minds all over the world, while pioneering an entirely new use for miners' head lamps.  They contributed five sessions including a set from the 1994 Glastonbury Festival and were frequent visitors to the festive fifty, charting on five occasions.

http://thishauntedhouse.org

http://liannehall.com

http://orbitalofficial.com

21 Songs for John

21 Songs for John: 15 - Jim Milne

Jim Milne – A Cock on his Dunghill

Jim Milne formed Tractor with drummer Steve Clayton in Rochdale and were signed by John Peel and Clive Selwood to the Dandelion Records label, releasing their debut album in 1971.  At this point the band were still called The Way We Live and changed their name, reputedly, after Peel saw a tractor in a field and recommended it to them.  This track comes from Tractor's unreleased Peterloo album, based on the 1819 massacre in Manchester and is sung in the character of Joseph Nadin, the corrupt Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, immediately before the Lancashire Yeoman Constabulary's fateful charge into the crowd at St Peter's Field.  The album was scheduled to be the final release on Dandelion Records but never saw the light of day.  However, the track will feature on the forthcoming release of Peterloo – The Finished Master 1972-2014.

www.facebook.com/jim.milne.14?fref=ts

21 Songs for John: 14 - Cornershop

Cornershop – Soul School (Instrumental Version)

I think people often forget just what an impact Cornership had when they emerged in the early nineties.  Peel got it immediately, of course, and the band recorded the first of three sessions in 2003.  They've changed a lot down the years, of course, making periodic returns to the festive fifty and, in 1997, achieving the distinction of becoming the only band to make number one in the FF as well as the UK singles chart, with 'Brimful of Asha'.  This is a version of a track from the 2009 album Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast.  'We think John would have liked its ridiculousness' say the band, and I suspect they're right.

www.cornershop.com

21 Songs for John 

21 Songs for John: 13. Antony Harding

Antony Harding – Light This Love & Watch It Burn (Demo)

Antony Harding drummed in Hefner through their period of domination of the festive fifty and their excellent series of Peel sessions, also recording a solo session as ANT in 2000.  Following the demise of Hefner, he continued to record as ANT, releasing a series of fine albums including The Birds Sing Goodnight to You & Me, which I named as my number one album of 2012.  That year, ANT also recorded a session for my Dandelion Radio show, subsequently released via the Audio Antihero/Barely Out imprint.  The session included a version of this track, which you can hear now in its original demo version.  He now records under his full name and his most recent release was the '(This Is Just) The Calm Before the Storm' on the Italian We Were Never Being Boring label earlier this year.

www.antpop.com

21 Songs for John 

21 Songs for John: 12 - Yeah Yeah Noh

Yeah Yeah Noh – She Pulls the Petal From the Flower

Yeah Yeah Noh only existed for two years in the mid-eighties and it's probably due to the enormously high quality of what they put out that they seemed to be around for much longer than that.   Their three Peel sessions, released as the Fun On the Lawn Lawn Lawn album in 1986, comprise one of the best collections of session material ever made available, while the band made their only appearance in the festive fifty with the unforgettable 'Bias Binding' in 1984.  The Cherry Red compilation Leicester Square provides an excellent career retrospective.  Yeah Yeah Noh reformed in 2012 and have a forthcoming album of new material in the pipepine.  One of the tracks featured on it will be this, which was recorded early this year and released as the album's first single. 

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Yeah-Yeah-Noh/179922345453384

21 Songs for John