Half Man Half Biscuit—the only band in rock history to break up due to, in their words, “musical similarities.” Half Man Half Biscuit—the geniuses who brought us such brilliant songs as “Joy Division Oven Gloves,” “National Shite Day,” and “Horror Clowns are Dickheads.” Oh, and let us not forget “Styx Gig (Seen by My Mates Coming Out of A),” which could be the funniest song this side of Randy Newman’s “Wedding in Cherokee County.” I should add that in 2005, they released an LP entitled Achtung Bono.
What else do you need to know about Half Man Half Biscuit? Well, they’re witty, incorrigibly sardonic, and their band motto (as found on their website) is “Satisfying the Bloodlust of the Masses in Peacetime.” What you also need to know is they’re from Birkenhead, Merseyside (okay, maybe you didn’t need to know that) and are prone to writing songs replete with obscure pop culture references to people, places, and things (e.g., “Dickie Davies’ Eyes,” “I Hate Nerys Hughes”), a Yank like me has to Google to make sense of.
And this can be a problem, unless you’re willing to either a) let the obscure pop cultural references sail right over your head or b) be prepared to Google up a tsunami.
What else do you need to know? Well, guitarist/songwriter Nigel Blackwell was “still robbing cars and playing football like normal people do” when he co-founded the band with his confederate in arms, vocalist/bassist Neil Crossley.
Oh, and early on (when they needed the publicity), the band was twice invited to perform on The Tube, Channel 4’s live music show. Thanks but no thanks, they said. Playing live on TV would have kept them from watching TV, where their local football team, Tranmere Rovers, were wallowing at the bottom of League Two.
The band reformed in 1990, and proceeded to put out a slew of great albums (check out Some Call It Godcore and the wonderfully titled Eno Collaboration), but I have a soft spot for the music they recorded before their break-up, and in particular for 1986’s “The Trumpton Riots E.P.” It’s a perfect little slice of English whimsy, or would be perfect if it included “National Shite Day” and “Styx Gig (Seen by My Mates Coming Out of A).”
What does the band really sound like? Well, they’re all over the place, lo-fi, as likely to write a quiet folk rock tune as a kick-ass hard rocker (see “National Shite Day”). Think We Might Be Giants without the insufferable cutesy quotient. Or the Bonzo Dog Band sans the vaudeville and music hall. Or a lo-fi Clash with a sense of humor. Or a lo-fi Mekons with an even better sense of humor than the Mekons.
Like Morrissey, they’re quintessentially English, but unlike Morrissey, they’re so steeped in Englishness you have to be 102 percent English to comprehend what they’re going on about fully. But—and this is the important point—they write good songs, very good songs in fact. I like just to sit back and let the wave of obscure pop culture references wash over me until I drown.
The song that first caught my attention was “Albert Hammond Bootleg.” Over a ramshackle and folksy melody, Crossley lays out a hilarious scenario—he returns home one day to, hell, I may as well quote it in full:
“And when I reached my home the kids were on the patio
Looking quite upset, so I asked them what was wrong
And they said: “Beware, there’s an Albert Hammond bootleg in the house in there
An Albert Hammond bootleg in the house
Some man who introduced himself as Stanley Rous came in
And left this Albert Hammond bootleg in the house.”
How wonderful! It’s as if this Stanley Rous person (who, as it turns out, is an English football administrator) had dropped off a suitcase nuke! As for Albert Hammond, he’s an obscure singer/songwriter/record producer from Gibraltar. I have a very strong suspicion Half Man Half Biscuit aren’t fans.
Then they shift scenes to a beach in the south of France, where romance is quashed when the woman Crossley is wooing says Robin Askwith (a British film actor) is funny. Obviously, Crossley finds her lapse in taste an unforgivable character flaw:
“Oh god how I longed for a dangerous wave
So I could surf myself towards an early grave
I would rather talk to plankton than to dance with you
I hope your plane back home’s a DC10.”
That DC10 is a masterful touch.
The wonderfully titled “Architecture, Morality, Ted and Alice” opens with a sleazy-voiced geezer saying, “Good Morning, Ma’am, I’ve come to read your gas meter…” Then the band kicks into a rather rough and tumble rocker with some nifty raw power chords over which Crossley sings,
“The wonderful dexterity of Hannu Mikkola
Makes me want to shake hands with the whole of Finland
But the horrible sincerity of Miriam Stoppard
Makes me want to go out and commit mass murder.”
Does it matter to me who these people are? No. I didn’t even bother to consult my search engine of choice. What matters is the way Crossley commences to shout out the last two lines. After that, the great lines come rushing at you fast and furious, but without the cool car crashes. “I saw the wheels of nihilism rolling my way/And now I live life in the bus lane.” That I understand, and I certainly understand “…the nauseating bashfulness of early Diana/Makes me want to set fire to commemorative tea towels.”
And on and on it goes, with Crossley being hit in the head with a hammer wielded by a maniac and various other absurdities, until the closing lines,
“Have you tuned into Radio Dada
Every Friday evening at six in the morning
Scan the airwaves for Radio Dada
It goes something like this.”
The title track is a strum-crazy hard rocker with a hint of the Mekons that proceeds at a Pogues-fast clip, and unless you’re familiar with (and who is) Trumpton, a fictional town inhabited by stop-motion characters that was the setting for a trilogy of interrelated BBC TV children’s programs from 1966 to 1969, you’ll have zero idea what Crossley’s going on about.
But the song’s message comes through—there’s violent insurrection in cartoon land! Chaos! Anarchy! With a cutthroat cast of characters, including one Dr. Mopp, Chippy Minton (whose violent socialists are set on bringing down the town mayor), Captain Snort, PC McGarry, and more! It ends with a military coup, and I only quote the chorus because it’s downright anthemic:
“Oh, someone get a message through to Captain Snort
That they’d better start assembling the boys from the fort
And keep Mrs. Honeyman right out of sight
‘Cos there’s gonna be a riot down in Trumpton tonight.”
I can’t tell you how much I’d love for them to write a song called “Anarchy in Bedrock.” The Flintstones references I would get.
“1966 and All That” is a doleful and mid-tempo tale of romance gone rancid, with Crossley talk-singing over some basic drumming and what may be a real flute, but who knows. And it only includes two cultural references I had to Google—a world record! There’s some “Song of the Volga Boatman”-school chanting in there, but what you mostly get are great absurdist lines like:
“And I’ll die on the floor and leave a note on the door
Saying ‘This ape has just left Gibraltar’
And in hell it will rain and I’ll say once again
That I’d stand next to you at the altar.”
And I simply adore the resentful chorus:
“If only you’d give me my Lev Yashin poster back
Six months ago I returned your brown anorak
But you keep forgetting and it’s far too upsetting
So baby Ferenc Puskas to you, to you
Baby Ferenc Puskas to you.”
Do you need to know that Lev Yashin was a Soviet footballer and the greatest goalkeeper ever to stand in front of a silly net? Or that Ferenc Puskas is perhaps the greatest Hungarian ever to headbutt one of those silly non-American footballs? No, but I had to know! And it irks me that I have no idea what the “baby” in front of Ferenc Puskas means. A little help here, you good-for-nothing spotted dick eaters!
Closer “All I Want For Christmas Is a Dukla Prague Away Kit” sounds like the title of a song by the Fall, and the song has the occasional Fall-like feel, and it’s about football, and Mark E. Smith was a football obsessive, so maybe that’s what they were going for.
Duklas Prague is a Czech football club and I’m assuming that “away kit” is English for “away uniform,” not that any of it really matters—the subject of the song is a childhood acquaintance of Crossley’s (fictional, perhaps) who owned both an electric racing car track and an electric soccer game toy, sort of like the one I owned for American football when I was a kid.
Crossley is aggrieved—aggrieved because it took “fifteen billion hours to set the [racing car] track up/And even when you did the thing never seemed to work,” and even more aggrieved that when it came to the electric football set he’d “always get palmed off with a headless centre forward/And a goalkeeper with no arms and a face like his.” And what’s more, his friend was always bending the rules to his own advantage, leading an apoplectic Crossley to hold a one-kid Trumpton riot of his own, with predictable consequences:
“So you’d smash up the floodlights and the match was abandoned
And the dog would bark and you’d be banned from his house
And your travelling army of synthetic supporters
Would be taken away from you and thrown in the bin.”
This song captures my childhood as well as any song this side of R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon” ever has, and, oh, I should add that the power at his rival’s house was always going out and spoiling the non-fun, as Crossley lets us know on the impossible-to-get-out-of-your-head chorus:
“It was a dodgy transformer again and again
A dodgy transformer again and again
It was a dodgy transformer again and again
A dodgy transformer that cost three pound ten.”
But the real kicker (pun not intended) comes at the end, when Crossley crossly lets us know their childhood rivalry ended in his humiliating adult defeat:
“Now he’s working in a job with a future
He hands me my Giro every two weeks
And me I’m on the lookout for a proper transformer …errr.”
Half Man Half Biscuit have to be the most English rockers ever, far more English than Ray Davies or The Divine Comedy or Sleaford Mods or any other band I can name, with the exception of the Bonzo Dog Band. And their maddening capacity for strewing their songs with obscure references to football, pop culture, and everything else is likely to intimidate anyone not from England’s Green and Pleasant Land.
But they don’t deter me. I think of them as a better key to understanding the bizarre English psyche than reading the works of Lord Alfred (or is it Alfred Lord?) Tennyson, Joe Orton, or Leonora Carrington, even. Or the guy who wrote Alice in Wonderland, which I’ve never read, even though I’ve done LSD.
Half Man Half Biscuit add up to a whole great band. Just ask Captain Snort.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
