Rancid Cyril & His Mighty Balloons were an ensemble approached by Peel in the days of Dandelion Records to join the label. The DJ, however, was turned down and, as far as is known, the band remained unrecorded.
Peel recalled the incident on his show of 13 June 1983, after commenting that if he had limitless funds he would also like to establish a record company to record bands that had good names:
When I did have a record company ... at the end of the sixties, there was a band operating down in Brighton who were called .... Rancid Cyril & His Mighty Balloons, which at the time was quite a good name. And I once got in touch with Rancid Cyril and asked him if he wanted to make a record, and unfortunately he was very serious person and thought I was taking it rather too lightly and wasn't prepared to make a record for me. When I said that I hadn't heard the band and just wanted to see the name on a label, he thought this wasn't a good enough reason. I could think of no better reason.
Clive Selwood, Peel's long-time friend and business partner at Dandelion, was not as enthusiastic as JP on the idea of adding Rancid Cyril to the label's roster:
In hindsight, perhaps the apparent failure of Dandy could have been avoided if I had fought harder and spent more time and money on those acts with commercial potential. ... On the plus side is the fact that, had we been more successful, John would have pursued his plans to record Rancid Cyril and his Mighty Balloons and even possibly assembled enough Girls Named Sharon to produce the hundred-piece choir he envisioned. You were at least spared that.[1]
Little is known of the band - they do not feature in any known gig listings available online, even if Peel claimed in a 1991 interview[1] that he saw the name "advertised in a local paper from the Brighton area" and that they were "a trad jazz group". So the suspicion lingers that the group could simply be one of Peel's invented names, as with the Flying Cream Shots. Any information on the career of Rancid Cyril and his associates will be gratefully received.
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- ↑ Clive Selwood, All The Moves (But None Of The Licks), Peter Owen Books, 2003, p. 119.