A personal Half Man Half Biscuit Top Ten
The four lads who shook the Wirral are the best band of all time. There are probably five or six hundred people who agree with me, give or take.
To celebrate the rare delights of a new Half Man Biscuit album and a London gig — they play the Kentish Town Forum later tonight — here’s a very personal top ten of their tunes, based on their impact on my life rather than any form of objective or critical analysis whatsoever.
Four Skinny Indie Kids, 1998 BBC Session
The first time I consciously heard a Half Man Half Biscuit tune was 24 February 1998, on the John Peel show. I was eighteen and was mainly spending my time listening to the unsuccessful follow-up albums to Britpop smashes and feeling like I had slightly missed the boat, which of course I had. Four Skinny Indie Kids drinking weak lager in a Camden boozer was basically my platonic ideal. Why were these northerners mocking my ideal? And why was it so funny and angry at the same time? What was a “website nonce?” Was I a website nonce?
This was the song used in an ad on XFM for their gig at the Astoria 2 — the now defunct Astoria 2 — on Friday 21st July 2000. The indie-leaning radio station had been taken over by Capital a couple of years beforehand, and had eliminated much of the weirder stuff and replaced it with Smiths and banter. So it was quite a surprise to hear someone singing “Hüsker Dü, Dü Dü, Captain Beefheart ELO” to the tune of Agadoo. No-one I knew was interested in coming to the gig, and this being the second tune of theirs I knew did reinforce the idea they were something of a sarky-edged comedy band. The tiny soggy bit of my brain in which they resided was also home to Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, who I also had misjudged on the basis of their name.
99% of Gargoyles Look Like Bob Todd, 1986
If you ever wondered how
You get triangles from a cow
You need butter, milk and cheese
And an equilateral chainsaw
I don’t remember when exactly, but the first Half Man Half Biscuit album I bought was their debut, Back in the D.H.S.S, on vinyl from that second hand record shop you stumble upon just up from the Cutty Sark in Greenwich. You know the one I’m talking about. There used to be a pie shop nearby, but that’s probably gone now. There were also between one and three identical Tex Mex restaurants and an all-you-can eat Chinese buffet. They are probably all Bills’ by now.
I’m not the biggest fan of Back in the D.H.S.S. With the exception of 99% of Gargoyles Look Like Bob Todd none of the tunes really got lodged into my head. Even now at HMHB gigs, there are blokes who only want to hear tunes from this or the Trumpton Riots E.P, which I think is a terrible shame. There’s so much they’re missing out on.
Dead Men Don’t Need Season Tickets, 1997
My interest piqued by the above, I took to walking into CD shops and reading the tracklistings, which was just as satisfying as reading all the magazines in WH Smith. I was intimidated by their enormous back catalogue and the fact all their albums, all with fairly terrible cover art, seemed to be £14.99, which was a lot of money in those days. Where to even start? I fell in love with Tonight Matthew, I’m Going To Be With Jesus a good half a decade before I even heard it.
Tonight Matthew, I’m Going To Be With Jesus was on Voyage To The Bottom of the Road, which with hindsight feels like the first album of the Half Man Half Biscuit Golden Age, which — somehow— is still ongoing. The tone of songs like Dead Men Don’t Need Season Tickets — described, memorably, by Taylor Parkes as “an especially uncomfortable Curb Your Enthusiasm digested into 3 and a half minutes” — is a very, very difficult trick to pull off. These lyrics are the work of a genuine one-off, and not *merely* funny. My obsession with the band began to grow.
Lark Descending, 2001
Only Half Man Half Biscuit could reference the singer out of Dinosaur Jr and a bloke out of Coronation Street in the same line
An important, significant figure in my story looms into view at this point — that of Denny, neighbour from early childhood, who I had become re-acquainted with quite accidentally via a hat-wearing man called Nathan. A total music obsessive, with a bedroom collection of records and CDs that I can still see when I close my eyes, Denny guided me in the ways of Half Man Half Biscuit, via kind gifts of advice and mp3s. There was something really pleasing about our lives being separate for so long, but us both ending up liking this same, niche band which none of my other London friends seemed to understand.
His gift to me has been many years of friendship, an introduction to the Editor’s Recommendation EP, and the observation above.
Vatican Broadside, 2001
Sheffield’s legendary indie club, Offbeat, used to play this important and very short punk thrash about the singer out of Slipknot going to Rome to see the Pope. We loved them for it.
For What Is Chatteris, 2005
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The first Half Man Half Biscuit song I learned to play — badly — and probably the only one there exists a file of me singing somewhere on the internet or other. There are certain bands you just don’t cover. The Velvet Underground are one, unless of course you’re Lou Reed in which case go right ahead. HMHB are another, because Nigel Blackwell’s voice is crucial to this stuff working in the first place.
This band, contrary to popular belief* write love songs — occasionally, as with Excavating Rita, heartbreaking ones - and this is probably the best of the lot.
Denny had already memorised Achtung Bono before I got a chance to hear it, and delighted in singing the songs I didn’t know yet at me as we walked down the street. Thanks for that, Denny.
*These things are all relative
National Shite Day, 2008
Achtung Bono remains my favourite HMHB album, and at the time its follow-up, CSI Ambleside, felt like a bit of a disappointment, a Pocahontas to Achtung’s Lion King. Having grown to love it over the years, I would now put it above even Mulan. Little In The Way Of Sunshine, a deeply sympathetic character study of the depressive and eccentric loner I fear one day becoming, is a deeply bittersweet and unsettling listen; Evening of Swing is the band’s best and funniest evisceration of the upwardly mobile classes; the genius Took Problem Chimp To The Ideal Home Show features something dangerously close to rapping; King of High-vis is a shout-out to jobsworths everywhere.
And album closer National Shite Day, with its remarkable tales of pedestrian etiquette and the unfortunate case of Stringy Bob, should be the national anthem.
Fix It So She Dreams Of Me, 2011
90 Bisodol (Crimond) is a very dark album, and I came to know it while I was in a pretty bleak place, much like the singer out of Evil Gazebo.
Perhaps the darkest HMHB album yet, this album featured a lot of death and murder, if not necessarily, drunkenness, desperate poverty, diabolical dealings, incest, and abandonment.
One shaft of relative sunlight comes with the delightful Fix It So She Dreams Of Me, with its spoons, collection of ammonites, beaches far aware in time, and empathetic androids. There’s an awful lot to unpick, even by the standards of a HMHB tune, and the humans of the Half Man Half Biscuit Lyric Project do an amazing job of identifying all the kinks and references. But first and foremost, it’s a beautiful, driving tune that takes you to all sorts of unexpected emotions and places.
In 2014 I attempted something very teenage, or possibly an early sign of an impending midlife crisis: I attempted to go to every single Half Man Half Biscuit gig in a calendar year. On the face of it, this isn’t the most outlandish of exploits: the band tend to eschew tours, as such, preferring to arrange between five and eight gigs a year, only visiting That London on occasion. There are a collection of hardy souls who attempt to make every gig they can, and you see familiar, overjoyed faces as you travel to unusual corners of the country.
I managed to go to the first five HMHB gigs of the year.
First up: a barn in Somerset in mid January, with Denny. Food was promised, none was forthcoming. We survived on a diet of beer, crisps and listening to a bloke shout “National Shite Day!” between every single number.
Second up: The Academy in Bristol, with a local friend and his wife who didn’t know any of the songs apart from Vatican Broadside. I moshed with the King of High-vis (an actual person, as gig-goers will know).
Third up: That London, at the Kentish Town Forum, and accidentally bumping into the lovely singer out of the Just Jones
Fourth up: Leamington Spa, alone, being picked up after by an old Coventry-dwelling university friend like I was seventeen.
Fifth up: the beautiful Picturedrome in the village of Holmfirth, synonymous with Last Of The Summer Wine and old men traveling down hills in tin baths and the like. Staying in a freezing tent in a campsite nearby.
Aaaaand then gave up. They kept announcing new dates that I couldn’t make, and so my dream of seeing every HMHB gig in a calendar year remains unfulfilled. For now.
You’re probably wondering when I’m going to mention the song, so here we are: on this tour, the band revealed the odd line that would form the material on Urge For Offal, which came out in November that year. This One’s For Now was performed acoustically, by Nigel, as a rant. I still remember the laughs at the Standard Liege non-sequitur every time I hear the recorded version.
And there we are. See you all in the mosh pit!
