Warning! The following entry concerns a band so uniquely English in its outlook, pop-culture referencing and love of a good pun that it will prove to be almost impenetrable to anyone from beyond these shores. It also helps if you watched a lot of TV in the mid-1980s to ‘get’ all the mentions of the posture of chubby snooker referees (Len Ganley Stance), the pathological hatred of half of the Liver Birds (I Hate Nerys Hughes) or exclamations of surprise at meeting a partially-unidextrous cricketing legend in a supermarket (Fuckin’ ‘Ell – It’s Fred Titmus!)… For a teenaged me, this was not only brilliant stuff because it has swearing in it (of course, it helped), but it was one of the first instances I can recall of discovering music which was utterly mine to embrace and which either influenced my sense of humour or helped nurture an already existing love of a good pun at the expense of Z-List celebs of the 1970s, I can never really decide which.
I’m fairly sure that this album was recorded due to financial aid received from the government of the time – there was one of those patronising “helping you back to whatever” schemes underway where enterprising young gadabouts could receive a shiny 50-pound note to help start a business. Not quite sure what businesses could really be started with fifty quid, but this was how stuff worked back then. And, as a callow youth sprawled on the floor in front of the TV (being the youngest in the family, furniture was at the time something I could dream of sitting on), I seem to remember a feature during the local news where a young band from the Wirral had used this money to record their debut album, but I’m buggered if I can find any supporting evidence of this now. Of course it’s probably a sign of my advancing years that my brain has started to create its own apocrypha with regard to Northern Indie bands, but I did find somewhere online that states that this album was actually recorded for a mere forty smackers, and so on the offchance that they did receive Mrs Thatcher’s financial blessing for this, then they made a tenner out of her. Which is more than most other people ever did.
But it wasn’t either Granada Reports or Look NorthWest that guided me towards this band, it was a far hipper route thanks to my recent discovery of the singular (and very much-missed) John Peel on Radio 1, who championed HMHB from early on – in fact, it was their 99% Of Gargoyles Look Like Bob Todd song that he played that hooked me. It’s the sheer combination of ideas that won me over: the punkish deconstruction of icons (“James Dean was just a careless driver / and Marilyn Monroe was just a slag”), the bizarre application of lateral thinking logic to cheese product advertisements of the time (“If you’ve ever wondered how you get triangles from a cow / You need butter, milk and cheese / And an equilateral chainsaw”) and of course the mention of one of Benny Hill’s sidekicks in the title, all set to a jaunty and jangly mid-80s guitar riff that typifies much of the rest of the album.
Well, the bits that aren’t nicked from timeless children’s TV shows set in the pastoral Utopia of the Trumptonshire Triangle – Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley – the imagery and characters were referenced in greater detail in the follow-up Trumpton Riots EP (now packaged with the CD of Back in the DHSS, thrift fans!), but here it’s the wonderful folky strains of Freddie Phillips that once enchanted me as a small child (and which now evokes such nostalgia in me as an old fart) that are lovingly lampooned. Most straight-forwardly in album opener Busy Little Market Town (from Camberwick Green), but it’s not long before the same show’s closing theme (the original of which contains the only clown I’m not terrified of, so there you go) segues into a version of Chigley’s Time Flies By When You’re The Driver Of A Train that is now about the smuggling of drugs with added Pink Floyd referencing (“Under bridges, over bridges, to our destination / Careful with that spliff Eugene, it causes condensation”) – far from being an attack on childhood loves, it’s all affectionate rib-poking. Which is more than can be said about the aforementioned I Hate Nerys Hughes, in which our heroes repeat the title over and over again to ensure that everyone’s favourite District Nurse gets the message.
So yes. It’s silly, it’s irreverent, it pokes fun out of the sort of people that require frequent visits to Wikipedia every now and then and it may or may not have been made for fifty quid. And it’s still one of my favourite albums.
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