It’s always a bit strange when one stops listening to the continued output of a band for no real reason, certainly in the case of this lot. Have my musical tastes since excluded them? Not at all. Have they said anything nasty about me or members of my family / social circle? Not that I’ve been advised of. Has my sense of humour changed? Oh dear me no, which is much to the chagrin of many.
Truth is, I bought Half Man Half Biscuit’s debut Back In The DHSS, their follow-up Back Again In The DHSS, and then bought no more. I have no idea why, as the snippets I’ve caught of their subsequent work – the ode to Willis-Ekbom disease that is Restless Legs and the unofficial anthem of the successful ‘Save BBC6′ campaign that was Joy Division Oven Gloves - are wonderful. And if I’ve a spare couple of minutes, I’ll listen repeatedly to the 30-second epic of Vatican Broadside that is probably the funniest and catchiest song I’ve ever heard.
So, upon hearing that a new one had been released last week, my response was a cheery “oh, go on then”, and so I continued where I left on back in 1980something…
“Well I’ve put the wrong things in the wrong bin again”, goes the opening line, and it’s as if they’d never been away. Picking over life’s everyday oddities, absurd romantic interludes and irritants with a wit that is both acerbic and precise is an art that HMHB possess in droves, and their dark, urban fantasies are both funny and unerringly human – exemplified here in the vengeful RSVP (a tale of a caterer poisoning the wedding reception of his ex-girlfriend) the eerily warm and romantically necrophiliac Excavating Rita, and the tragic The Coroner’s Footnote, ending a suicidal episode with the line “It’s a pity he didn’t spare a thought for / the poor bastard driving the train”
Even at their most scatalogical, the charm is still there in the form of the namedropping of minor celebrities. Tommy Walsh’s Eco House may make little sense throughout its Fall-channelling two and a half minutes, but the disliking of said abode will find an empathetic ear with anyone who has ever accidentally been off sick or unemployed and had to endure it on TV.
At the weirder end of the z-list reminiscing is Descent of the Stiperstones, an entertaining and rambling Bob Dylanish epic about a holiday in Shropshire notable for meeting the woman who played Glenda in low-budget proto-soap ‘Crossroads’ in a Chandler’s shop and discovering that she’s become frighteningly mad, with the list of the shop’s wares descending equally into insanity as our hero tries to escape. There’s possibly grounds for stern letters to be written, but I suspect and hope Lynette McMorrough will find it all very funny. And elsewhere, any request to brick Jim Beglin up is always a welcome one.
At the heart of the record though, and something that HMHB has excelled at in their youth and grown into very well indeed, is a sense of crushing disappointment. Fun Day in the Park describes a familiar scenario where posters rarely deliver on their colourful promises, L’enfer c’est les Autres is scathing social commentary about the selfish gits who take up the whole pavement, and album closer Rock and Roll is Full of Bad Wools casts a cynical, slightly ranting eye over indie acts on Saturday Morning Football shows who have no idea what they’re talking about.
The thing I’m most fond of 90 Bisodol (Crimond) is that everything is still fun and fresh, despite (or probably because of) it not being that far removed from their early, John Peel-beloved origins. Youthful, cynical pisstaking has dovetailed perfectly with an older, wiser cynical pisstaking, and their worldview remains as brilliantly skewed and interesting as ever. I look forward to running amok through their intervening years.
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