Start of show: "Hello again, my beauties. As Lammo just said, we've got Half Man Half Biscuit and Lonnie Donegan live for you: well, sort of live. Recorded last Friday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and the Peelenium reaches 1959." These performances were part of the Peel Sessions Live and Living Legends series, as noted here (thanks to Jimmy S. for the link).
The third and fourth recordings below contain the complete show. The others are incomplete: the first is a 22 minute segment shared by Dr Mango, featuring the Half Man Half Biscuit set with Peel bookends and the start of the next track. The second, shared more recently by User:Syrtis, begins from the second track of the Peelenium and continues until the end of the show. (However, this link is now dead.)
Long-time Peel favourite Peter Gunn by Duane Eddy kicks off the 1959 Peelenium section. Peel describes it here as “possibly the second-best record ever made after Teenage Kicks.” He also comments that the Flamingos classic is a regular on the show and says he saw both Duane Eddy and Sammy Turner at the Liverpool Empire at the time the records here were hits, as well as the Everly Brothers later at the Albert Hall.
The HMHB set includes the unreleased 'Charlie Goth'. Peel hopefully adds that there are other songs waiting to be broadcast by HMHB, which he will do at a later date.
Sessions[]
Lonnie Donegan, live at QEII Hall. Listed by the BBC as a session, but not in Ken Garner's The Peel Sessions. Donegan seems less than impressed with Peel's introduction of him.
(JP: 'What a dandy LP this is.') (He then crashes the end of the track.) '(I'd forgotten about that little bit at the end. I apologise....I shall certainly play you that one again though, without talking over the end....I don;t suppose there's anybody who's ever been a student who didn't identify immediately with the situations described therein.')
(JP: 'This is genuinely a very important night for me, and I've had a lot of important nights over the years, and this equals the very best of them, I think. When I was 14, I was quite a good-looking lad actually: you may find that hard to believe, but I was, and I take a lot of comfort now from when I see other young men who are terrifically attractive in thinking, "One of these days, you bastard, you're going to look like me." Unfortunately, I'll not be around to enjoy that. But when I was 14, my life was divided pretty equally between school and home, and when I was at home with my dad and my stepmother, I used to be playing records in a back room, almost continuously on the Dansette. I'd customised the Dansette, taken off much of the trim because I thought it made it louder, and my dad, in order to enrage me, used to come in, whatever I was playing, he'd come in and say, "Is that that Lollie Dolligan?", and I'd say, "No Dad, it's Gene Vincent, or it's Fats Domino, or whatever it happened to be. But he'd always get his name wrong, and I'd say, "Actually Dad, it's not Lollie, it's Lonnie," but he'd always call him Lollie Dolligan because he knew it enraged me. When I was back at school, I had a record player in my study (it was that kind of a school), and I used to play records to my schoolmates, and they weren't interested in them at all by and large, but I've brought the first 12 inch LP I ever bought, and it's in a rather deplorable condition, as you can see. But it was recorded here at the Royal Festival Hall, 1954 it was. And the main reason I bought it was because of the banjo player with Chris Barber's Band, and there's a version on here of a New Orleans funeral tune called "Oh, Didn't He Ramble." It starts off very very slowly, and for the first couple of choruses it stays slow, and Pat Halcox who was the trumpeter comes in a little early. In the background, just after he plays a couple of notes, you can hear somebody go, "Oi!". I used to play it to my mates at school and say, "That Oi! is Lonnie Donegan." And indeed it was. So now it is a genuine pleasure for me to introduce Lollie Dolligan, the man who goes, "Oi!" Lonnie Donegan!')
'Uffington Wassail' (Nigel Blackwell: 'Here's a song that was rejected by Marilyn Manson's people.')
'Charlie Goth'
'Improv Workshop Mimeshow Gobshite' (NB: 'This is a song about the laughable respect given to feedback.')
'Look Dad No Tunes'
'You're Hard' (NB: 'We sold the keyboards, we can't do it. Wish I had one of their guitars.')
'Paintball's Coming Home'
'See That My Bike's Kept Clean'
(JP: 'Well, I have to say, if I did the lottery, which I don't do, but if I won it, I should set aside a great sum of money to ensure that Half Man Half Biscuit never had to worry about money again, and could just go on making records: really for the rest of my life, and hopefully for the rest of theirs as well.')
Dr. Scissors: 'Give Me More (2xLP – Nursing Kit)' (Elektrolux)