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Music history comes alive. Forgotten favourites & undiscovered gems from the rock, soul & reggae archive and a few of the stories behind them. Your host is Simon Tesler, former publisher and editor of 1980s music, media and pop culture magazine BLITZ.
Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more great Sounds from the Rock, Soul & Reggae Archive and a few of the stories behind them. Each week I select tracks with a specific theme, and this week the theme is FOOD. Coming up over the next two hours, more than 20 tasty tracks from Kylie Minogue, New Order, The Beatles, James Brown and many more. Hopefully a few you won't ever have heard before. But first, a double helping of Peaches.
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The Stranglers of course; and then the Presidents Of The United States Of America, each with their own ode to that sweet juicy tree fruit. Or not. I don't need to tell you that most songs that are supposedly about food generally, and fruit especially, are actually about something else all together. Yes, even writers of rock songs know what a metaphor is.
It's not hard at all to work out what The Stranglers are singing about, and the song's content did much to earn them a reputation for boorish sexism that none of their contemporaries shared. Yet the power of the music, and especially Jean-Jacques Burnel's snarling barracuda bass was so intense that Peaches -- only their second single -- was a huge hit for them and made them the first so-called punk band to score significant commercial success. Released in May 1977 as a double A-side with the rather less leering and more radio-friendly Go Buddy Go, it was their top-selling of all time until Golden Brown almost five years later.
It was also one of the first mainstream songs of that period to experiment with reggae-style rhythms. There's a story behind that. In 1975, a year or so after the band had formed they signed a short-term deal with indie label Safari, then best known for reggae records. The band already had a small PA system which they would hire out for a bit of extra cash. One day, Safari's owner asked to borrow it for an all-day reggae and dub festival, and invited the band along.
"We stayed for the whole gig," Burnel later told Songwriter magazine, "and at the end of it, I was hooked on the idea that the bass should be the most dominant feature. So I went back to where we were living, and that night, came up with the three notes which constitute Peaches. And of course, I wanted to make a reggae song out of it. But we didn't quite get the snare in the right beat. But never mind. We 'Stranglefied' it. We interpreted a reggae theme in The Stranglers way, and it became Peaches."
The Presidents' Peaches are rather more literally the fruit itself. but there's a story there too. Singer Chris Ballew told the website Songfacts the story behind that song.
"That opening line, I was waiting for a bus, and there was a homeless man walking by the bus stop and he was saying it under his breath over and over again: 'I'm moving to the country, I'm gonna eat a lot of peaches.' And I thought, 'That's interesting. I've never heard a homeless guy talk about his future and peaches and the country like that.' I was on my way to my girlfriend's house and I didn't have a guitar there but the phrase stuck with me. I later got home and put it to a little music. All I had was that, then I was trying to be Nirvana in the verse, gnarly and growly."
"So I had a verse and a chorus, and the verses were about how I had taken some hallucinogenic drugs and gone to a girl's house that I had a crush on. I was intending to tell her how I felt but she wasn't home, so I sat in her yard under a peach tree, having a psychedelic experience smashing peaches in my fist, literally like I say in the song, and watching the juice dribble and watching the ants run around. She never showed up, so I never got to tell her, but I bottled it and turned it into that song."
Another pair of foodie twins now, from Kylie Minogue and then The 1975. These are both called Chocolate.
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Yes we're dealing with metaphors again. Kylie's Chocolate comes from Body Language, her 9th album, released in 2004, and building on the huge success of its predecessor Fever, which had marked her crossover from pop pixie to disco diva. Body Language is generally a much more sultry affair than its predecessor, slowing down the tempo for a series of songs like Chocolate, Slow and the title track Body Language that are mostly about, yup, S - E - X. "Hold me and control me / And then melt me slowly down / Like chocolate"
The 1975, on the other hand, are singing about something else completely different. It's a rare example of a song where food is a metaphor for something other than the S-word. In this case, it's because The 1975 already had a song called Sex. No beating about the bush there. In this case Chocolate is a euphemism not for the S-word but the W-word: weed. It says something about the world in 2013 when Chocolate was released that songs called Sex were now fine but a song explicitly about smoking cannabis wouldn't be played on the radio.
Another pair of unlikely twins now, both called Tutti Frutti. In a couple of minutes, the 2015 version from New Order, but first the debut single, released in 1955 by Richard Wayne Penniman, better known to you and me and everyone else as Little Richard.
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Two wonderful songs separated by almost exactly 60 years. Tutti Frutti is of course a flavour of ice cream, with bits of candied fruit mixed into it, first popularised in the US in the late 1940s by American GI's returning from Italy where it was invented. But I'm sure I didn't need to tell you that.
Metaphors and euphemisms again? Well probably not, or at least not in the final versions. Although in fact, the original version of Little Richard's Tutti Frutti was far more suggestive. In fact, he initially performed it live as Tutti Frutti, Good Booty, and it also contained the lines "If it's tight it's alright / if it's greasy it makes it easy." But the song was completely cleaned up before it was recorded.
He told Rolling Stones that he wrote Tutti Frutti while he was working as a dishwasher at a Greyhound bus station in Macon, Georgia where he grew up. "I couldn't talk back to my boss man. We would bring all these pots back for me to wash and one day I said I've got to do something to stop this man bringing back all these pots for me to wash and I said 'Awop-bop-a-lu-bop a-wop-bam-boom, take 'em out'. I wrote Tutti Frutti in that kitchen, I wrote Good Golly Miss Molly in that kitchen, I wrote Long Tall Sally in that kitchen. Tutti Frutti took me out of the kitchen - I was making $10 a week working 12 hours a day, and Tutti Frutti was a blessing and a lesson. I thank God for Tutti Frutti."
There appears to be no meaning behind New Order's Tutti Frutti either. Drummer Stephen Morris told Rolling Stone that it was just a nod to all the Italian electro music that the band had been listening to before they went into the studio. It comes from the album Music Complete, and it marks quite a dramatic change of style away from the more traditional guitar-based rock they'd been playing for the previous few years and back towards the Ibiza-influenced Technique album they'd recorded in the late 1980s. It was also their first album following the acrimonious departure of bassplayer Peter Hook. The backing vocals on that track are from Elly Jackson of La Roux.
Where shall we go now? What do you say we slow the pace a little and go have breakfast, lunch and dinner with Supertramp, Billie Eilish and Kacey Musgraves.
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Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. That was Breakfast in America from Supertramp, followed by Billie Eilish with Lunch and finally Dinner With Friends by Kacey Musgraves. Breakfast In America was of course the title track from Supertramp's album of the same name, released in 1979, but the song is even older still, originally composed by bassist Roger Hodgson in the 1960s about his dream to go and live in America. "It was just mind chatter," he told Songfacts. "Just writing down ideas as they came - fun thoughts all strung together. I do remember the Beatles had just gone to America and I was pretty impressed with that. It definitely stimulated my dream of wanting to go to America. And obviously seeing all those gorgeous California girls on the TV and thinking, Wow. That's the place I want to go."
And speaking of California girls, then we had Billie Eilish, not even a twinkle in Roger Hodgson's eye when he wrote Breakfast in America. Lunch is from her third album Hit Me Hard and Soft, released in 2024. And I'm sure I don't need to explain to you the metaphor behind the sentiments Billie expresses in the song. Not many recording artists of the modern era have quite literally grown up so openly in public like this, encouraged or obliged or maybe just tempted to broadcast every innermost emotion to the world at large.
And then Texas-born Kacey Musgraves and the opening track from her 5th album Deeper Well. Although Dinner features in the title and the opening line, the song is more like, as you probably realised, her own sort-of update of the old Sound Of Music song My Favourite Things. Or as Kacey herself described it, with a slightly darker shading: "Things you'll miss (when you die)".
She said afterwards "I knew I wanted to start the song off with the line, 'Dinner with friends in cities where none of us live,' which is such a specific feeling of being with familiar people that you love but you're in a place that's unfamiliar and exciting."
Let's travel back in time now to the 1960s for our next two tracks. In a few minutes, The Beatles with Savoy Truffle from their White Album. But first up, the Scottish pop singer Barry St John, with a cover of a song originally recorded by US pop group The Newbeats. This is Bread & Butter.
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Who or what is a Savoy Truffle I hear you ask through the miracle of modern technology. It's the name of one of the fancy chocolates in a box of Mackintosh's Good News, one of those boxed selections that were so popular back in the 1960s. Also name-checked are its box-mates Montelimart, Ginger Sling, Creme Tangerine and Coffee Dessert. The song was written by George Harrison about his pal Eric Clapton's particular weakness for a box of Good News chocolates. In his autobiography, Harrison wrote of Clapton, "He always had toothache, but he ate a lot of chocolates. Once he saw a box of Good News he had to eat them all."
And just a brief note on Barry St John: although she had a modestly successful as a pop singer in her own right, she was later even better known within the industry as a top session vocalist working on numerous albums throughout the 70s, including most notably Punk Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. That's her you can hear on Time, Us and Them, and the closing tracks Brain Damage and Eclipse.
Two blues-influenced tracks to take us up to the break, and then I'll be back again after the news. First up, a Chicago blues version by Jimmy Dawkins of Kenny Burrell's jazz classic Chitlins Con Carne. After that, Led Zeppelin and Custard Pie. And that's definitely another euphemism!