My Peel Back... selections in my Dandelion this month came, as has become customary, from this calendar month 50, 40 and 30 years ago.
From July 1976, I feature folk singer Nic Jones and Ten Thousand Miles, a version of which appeared in session in July 1976 before later surfacing on his album The Noah's Ark Trap the following year. Jones' career was unfortunately short-lived: he only released one further album before being injured in a car crash, which brought his performing career to a close.
Bhundu Boys, meanwhile, will be familiar to anyone who was a listener to the Peel show in the mid-eighties. Their track, Manhenga, which featured in session in July 1986, is from the album Shabini which memory tells me Peel played incessantly that year. Sadly, this Zimbabwean band, who reduced the DJ to tears the first time he saw them live, broke up acrimoniously a few years later. Three of the band would die of AIDS soon after while lead singer Biggie Tembo suffered with depression, eventually hanging himself in a psychiatric hospital in 1995.
The July 1996 offering comes from the always magnificent space-surf combo Man...Or Astro-Man. The track 9 Volt appeared in its Peel Session version on the ROYGBIV collection of BBC recordings. In a prolific eight-year period between 1993 and 2001 the band released eight albums and have since resurfaced sporadically for live gigs and occasional recordings.
You can hear my selections in my Dandelion Radio show for July, which can now be heard on-demand here.
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