If You’ve Never Then You Ought: Half Man Half Biscuit
Posted: December 27, 2010 Filed under: Raves | Tags: half man half biscuit, popular culture no longer applies to me, Rhian E Jones 2 Comments »My belated Christmas present to you all, in the dead days before New Year, is the recommendation that you get into Half Man Half Biscuit, if you haven’t already. After five or so years of listening to their back catalogue I don’t have a particular song to recommend, but I recommend you discover your favourite yourself.
Many bands polarise opinion; with ‘The Biscuit’ (as absolutely no one outside the febrile hive-mind of the Guardian weekend supplement calls them) it’s more that people divide into those who think they might like them, and consequently do, and those who think they won’t like them and never give themselves the opportunity to discover how wrong they are.
Always a risky business, innit though, ‘comedy’ in music. I don’t know how I’d class HMHB – as comedy goes, they’re more Chris Morris than Carry On, although they’re as quintessentially British as both. They skewer pretension in all its forms – sometimes satirically, sometimes whimsically, sometimes with nailed-on bleak observation of the nation’s corpse picked clean. But there’s a lot more to them than sneering, and a hell of a lot more than self-conscious zaniness. They’re not, as their detractors often presume, the musical equivalent of that bloke in your office who thinks that owning a novelty tie and a mug with a ‘comedy’ slogan makes up for having a wit and charm deficit the size of the national debt – in fact, they’ve probably written a song about him. They also provide, more or less, a running commentary on the spiralling absurdities of the British music scene.
Their lyrics are studded with nods to Thomas Hardy, and their music is often wickedly parodic. They are much, much cleverer than you think. Nigel Blackwell employs the Birkenhead accent’s capacity for dry disdain building to banked fury in a manner only bettered by Paul O’Grady’s anti-Tory tirade last October. In a sane and well-ordered world, Nigel Blackwell would already have turned down the post of Poet Laureate.
Just occasionally, this band make me feel alright about the world and my place in it. Happy new year.
I’ve also half-inched my new tagline for 2011 from them – the old one was getting me an alarming number of hits from bemused Nietszsche enthusiasts.
Gaye Advert and the Great Cock ‘n’ Balls Swindle
Posted: December 19, 2010 Filed under: how i was made, Raves | Tags: albums, music as politics, music journalism, punk, Rhian E Jones, singles, the adverts, the slits, women in music, x-ray spex 3 Comments »‘Sexuality in Rock’n'roll is one more area weighed down heavily by its history and language. While none could or should deny the aspects of sexual interest and thrill inherent in live music, the performance space is problematically male-dominated.’ – Ian Penman, NME, 1979
‘I really wish that I’d been born a boy; it’s easy then ’cause you don’t have to keep trying to be one all the time.’ – Gaye Advert, 1977
Women in bands, when under the media spotlight, often find themselves swindled out of due credit by virtue of their gender. If they’re not being accused of clinging to the coattails of their backing boys to disguise their own lack of musical ability, they’re being judged on their aesthetic appeal to the exclusion of anything more relevant. It’s disappointing to observe how ubiquitously this principle applies. Even in the midst of punk, as girls picked up guitars, bass, and drumsticks, taking the stage alongside boys as more than cooing vocalists or backing dancers, they attracted that lethal combination of critical suspicion and prurient interest.
I love punk partly for the number and variety of women it involved and the freedom of expression it offered them. I loved X-Ray Spex – a Somali-British teenage feminist demagogue whose vocal screech swooped like a bird of prey over twisting vistas of saxophone. I loved the Slits and their slippery, shuddering dub-punk hymns to the tedium of sex and the joys of shoplifting. And I loved Gaye Black, bassist for The Adverts and widely regarded as punk’s first female star.
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An Open Letter to Charlie Gilmour.
Posted: December 16, 2010 Filed under: how i was made, Rants | Tags: music as politics, pink floyd, politics, Rhian E Jones, the indelicates Leave a comment »Oh Charlie, you silly arse. What did you go and do that for?
How interesting the story of last Thursday could have been, eh? But with grim predictability, a story which could have focused on a movement intriguing in its complex, leaderless and hydraheaded nature was swiftly simplified into a tale of two Charlies. The first, your Royal namesake, had his little local difficulty on Regent Street quickly depicted as a drive into the heart of Dickensian darkness, the heir to the throne haplessly thrown into a perfect storm of grimy underclass anarchy. And then you, Charlie, when you swung from the Centotaph by a union flag, and then giggled and gurned your way through an apology, were equally if not more unhelpful.
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Sunday Service: ‘Twas the Riot Before Christmas
Posted: December 12, 2010 Filed under: how i was made, Playlists, Rants | Tags: akira the don, billy childish, blind alfred reed, crass, history, manic street preachers, music as politics, politics, rage against the machine, Rhian E Jones, super furry animals, the indelicates, the king blues, the libertines, the specials, whylout? 5 Comments »If you’re an easily suggestible sort, the last few weeks’ flurry of alarmist headlines on strikes, snow, and student riots might lead you to think of London as the convulsing epicentre of the end of the world as we know it. In fact, it’s still perfectly possible to work and play on the streets of the capital without detecting any signs of the collapse of civilisation, although that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
