[peel] John Peel Day - Stanley Winston track (and anecdote)

[Trevor Huddleston]

Hi,

The Stanley Winston track is a work of genius. I took many years to track it 
down on CD. It can be found on "Soul Jewels - Volume 2". The link below 
takes you to the Amazon page for this item:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005QD11/qid=1129293637/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-1459738-2848638

The George Perkins tracks are also worth the price alone!

Trevor H


>From: John Bravin <john.bravin@...>
>Reply-To: peel@yahoogroups.com
>To: peel@yahoogroups.com
>Subject: [peel] John Peel Day - Stanley Winston track (and anecdote)
>Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 22:54:44 +0200
>
>Heard the Stanley Winston track No More Ghettos in America on the BBC
>Radio 1 John Peel Day show tonight and was reminded of the Peel quote
>about Stanley Winston/Mick Hucknall.  For those who missed the article
>in The Grauniad in September 2000 see below.
>
>  >>>
>**With more than 25,000 LPs straining the floorboards of his home, *John
>Peel* is more curator than collector, tending to a precious archive of
>leftfield music
>
>*Will Hodgkinson
>Friday September 1, 2000
>The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>*
>
>When a man's house has to be fitted with reinforcements in order to take
>the weight of his records, you know that his vinyl addiction has reached
>rarely seen heights of severity. John Peel's record collection is beyond
>a joke. There's a large wooden shed used only to accommodate his 12-inch
>singles, and another one, just past the chicken coop, which houses the
>45s. Being Britain's leading vanguard of any kind of music that falls
>out of the mainstream justifies the addiction somewhat, but these
>records aren't just the tools of his trade - they're too cherished for
>that.
>
>Article continues
><http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/homeentertainment/story/0,12830,1336434,00.html#article_continue>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>"As my wife would confirm if she wasn't out shopping, I still spend an
>insane amount of time - six to eight hours a day - listening to records
>and putting together lists for the show," says Peel from the hub of his
>record world, which is his East Anglian farmhouse's old garage. All the
>new releases come here, a large cardboard box making up a week's worth
>of the records sent. The room has a boyish, den-like feel; between the
>racks of records and CDs are football memorabilia, photographs of his
>wife, Sheila, and hot rod magazines from the 50s and 60s.
>
>Although the room feels chaotic and cramped, the records are very well
>ordered. The ones chosen to be played on future shows are recorded on a
>list, before being elevated from the boxes on the floor to the heights
>of the collection itself. Each is recorded on a card index. "People say,
>'Why don't you put the collection on computer?' But to put 25,776 LPs on
>to a computer would almost certainly take the rest of my life."
>
>Passing into another room that houses Peel's first 1,500 records, it
>dawns on me that a curator's mindset must be essential just to keep the
>collection at least reasonably accessible. This is where his four
>children, and their boyfriends and girlfriends, come in handy. "Last
>summer I paid my daughter Flossie's then boyfriend to file my seven-inch
>singles, and he turned out to be the best filer I ever had.
>Unfortunately he and Flossie broke up shortly afterwards. Young people
>have so little consideration. My son William did that lot of CDs," says
>Peel, pointing to a rack, "and got paid prodigious sums of money to do
>so, but he took all summer - he's naturally an extremely indolent boy.
>He seems to have no grasp of the alphabet, either."
>
>Some men have garden sheds to potter about in and get away from the
>wife; Peel has his two outhouses of records. "I'll come in here to find
>something, and almost always find something else that I've completely
>forgotten about. It's a great stress-reliever." Peel mulls over a 45 by
>Wild Willy Barrett, an eccentric hippie chiefly famed for his
>collaboration with 70s pub rocker John Otway. The record collector's
>mind is at work here - revelling in the obscure, celebrating the
>authentic, and finding release in a three-minute song.
>
>Peel has been a DJ since 1963, working in the US for a number of radio
>stations before joining Radio 1 from its birth in 1968. He has the
>freedom to play what he likes, and what tends to make it through is
>anything that fulfils a degree of honesty, be that a scratchy old reggae
>45 or the latest student union indie favourite. A few records have moved
>beyond work into the realm of the intensely personal. "I've got a clutch
>of about 20 records which I'll grab in an emergency, and which will go
>into the grave with me," Peel explains. They're all 45s, they're all
>impossibly obscure, and each one, says Peel, "can almost always reduce
>me to tears".
>
>Within this sacred box, there's a Jagger-Richards composition, I'd
>Rather Be Out with the Boys, by mid-1960s Manchester no-hit wonders the
>Toggery Five; and a great reggae take on Paul Simon's Richard Cory by
>Jamaican singer Yami Boro, who, not quite understanding the words of the
>song, called it Richer Cory. "There's a reggae version of Whiter Shade
>of Pale which does the same thing," says Peel, "but the lyrics of that
>song were complete bollocks anyway, so misinterpreting them just adds
>another dimension."
>
>There are also a number of heartbreaking early-70s soul ballads. In one,
>Stanley Winston's No More Ghettos in America, the singer's voice quivers
>before collapsing into feverish falsetto. "This is the only record this
>guy made," Peel explains, just as Winston breaks down entirely. "You
>hear somebody like Mick Hucknall described as a soul singer after his
>25th LP. This guy made this one 45 and the first 30 seconds eclipses
>Hucknall's entire output." And each of these records tells a story in
>Peel's life - such as the R'n'B classic You'd Better Move On by Arthur
>Alexander. "It was given to me by a girlfriend in Texas, and I think it
>was a hint. Her way of saying, 'Suit action to the title, fatboy.' "
>
>A British institution, John Peel, like so many music lovers, is a
>sentimentalist at heart, a man who can live through his most valued
>vinyl finds. "I'll play them all together one day," he says of his 20
>moments of greatness, "and then go mad."