Peel Back...The Vibrators/The Primitives/Broadcast

The Peel Back... selection in my Dandelion Radio show this month (listen here) contains what I think was the first ever genuine punk Peel session, specifically the one by The Vibrators broadcast in October 1976. The studio version of I'm Gonna Be Your Nazi, Baby (re-titled Nazi Baby) would see the light of day in 1978 but here, in all its glory, is the session version which began to twitch Peel listeners' ears in the direction of a new, raw musical force. Things would never be the same again.

Ten years later came the fresh-faced indie pop of C86 and we feature the session version of The Primitives' Stop Killing Me. Two years on, the band would storm into the national charts with Crash but the 1986 model had a raw element that combined with girl group hooks and sub-Buzzcocks guitar stylings to place them at the forefront of something that, in retrospect, was less a movement than an attempt to capture and preserver all that was good about 80s pop before the gravy train really kicked in and over-production turned the pop to pap.

Finally, from 1996, we have Broadcast's The World Backwards, a fine example of this band's fairly unique blending of electronica and wintry pop tinged with late sixties flourishes. Singer Trish Keenan's death would rob us of a vocalist whose distant style would be much imitated by legions of dream pop wannabes, none of which, to my ears, have ever got close.