a witness - the peel sessions

It was, of course, a big thing to be asked to record a session for John Peel. We'd been playing live as a three-piece for about a year and our sound had developed to the point where we were tight and punchy so we made our way to Maida Vale that Sunday in 1985 feeling very positive.

All four of the songs were in our live set and were well-rehearsed, so it was just things like tweaking the drum machine and getting the mix right that bothered us. Oh, and giving the fourth song a title - we made up "Smelt Like A Pedestrian" in the canteen during a break.

So we headed back home and early in the New Year Peel played the session on the show. I remember he rang me shortly afterwards to tell me a story about a meeting he had with the then-controller of Radio 1, Johnny Beerling. He'd met him in a lift the day after playing our session, and Beerling said to him, "Who was that you had on last night? They were terrible". Peel said he'd defended us, then said to me, "When Johnny Beerling said that to me, I knew I was doing something right."

There were just the three of us on that session, with the drum machine, a Drumatix TR 606. Alan Brown came in as drummer for the second session (with a number of noms des plumes, as he'd done Peel sessions with the Inca Babies and Big Flame already).

We'd spent 1986 making our first album I Am John's Pancreas then touring in Germany and Holland with Alan and Big Flame, so he knew the songs well. We'd met Peel out in Germany, when he visited Oberhausen to visit a friend of his, and we were the 'Ron Johnson pop-noise tour', so we met up with him at the gig and went for a meal afterwards, spending the night having a really good laugh with him. I wrote "Faglane Morris Wind" on the ferry over to France and we worked the song out at soundchecks, recording the football pools numbers on "Raw Patch" in my car on the way down to Maida Vale.