Track-by-Track: Words and Music — David Shrigley and Malcolm Middleton.
A review of an album, one track at a time, with a small story about where I was when I first heard it.
Track 1 — A Toast
During my final summer and autumn living in Stockport, I spent several weekends a month taking a flask of mushroom tea and walking across the Peak District. Castleton, Glossop, Buxton. It was deep into September when I decided to climb across Stanage Edge. Warm enough to sweat as I walked, but cool enough to be chilled as soon as I stopped. The colours were extraordinary. Purple heather, orange sycamore, bracken turning from green to brown. Keira Knightley climbed it during Pride and Prejudice, and looked out over the barren moors. It is enormously evocative, and I was fucked. Absolutely nutted. Out of my tree. The whole horizon pulsed and throbbed. I felt a prickly tingling in my chest and was at times almost overwhelmed. I was at the edge of the world. Albeit with lots of other hikers, in their neon raincoats, or the climbers making their slippery way up the escarpment.
After a time I decided that I needed to level myself out, so I put on an album and popped my headphones in. My choice was Public Service Broadcasting — The Race for Space. I couldn’t tell you why. But when it finished, with me too spaced out to really comprehend it, Spotify shuffled for something it considered to be a similar song.
It was this.
The first lines of ‘A Toast’ are this:
Greetings, and good fucking wishes to you, and your fuckhead, arsehole family.
Best wishes to you, you fucking wanker
To your ugly fucking wife
And to your moron fucking children, who look, and smell, like rats.
You have to understand that in the moment, when I didn’t even realise the song had changed, I knew implicitly that my phone was talking to me, and that it was very angry with me. And then, when a small note of reason pushed through the psilocybin haze, as the wind whipped at the sedge, and the damp coated the lichen, I thought, I don’t even have a wife.
So I looked at my phone and saw that an album by Malcolm Middleton, of Arab Strap, and David Shrigley, the illustrator and poet, had started to play.
I went back to the start to pay proper attention, and then I started to laugh until it hurt.
Track 2 — Houseguest
I don’t think this is Shrigley, or indeed Middleton, both of whom contribute the spoken words to this album. It’s an obstreperous American, who appears to live with their parents, and deals with a houseguest who comes in and destroys everything. The whole song consists of the narrator berating the houseguest as they destroy their house. It’s hard to adequately convey how funny this is — was to me at the time — without providing some of the lyrics.
Hey.
Put it down.
That’s my dad’s sword.
Don’t touch it.
Put it down.
That’s dad’s sword.
He’s going to be so mad at you.
You’re going to blunt his sword you idiot.
All of this under an spiky, bouncing, propulsive kind of beat, twangs of guitar and drums. The end is the word “fuck” looped, cut, spliced, and then looped again. F-f-f-f-uck. Great.
Track 3 — Monkeys
If the previous two tracks were the puerile end of dark humour, Monkeys is much more unpleasant. Monkeys is the first track where I realised there was something else going on. It is beautiful, slow, fingerpicked, fuzzy electronica and guitar.
Do you remember, way back when, in the old days, when we were both monkeys?
A pastoral narrative unfolds in a different American accent this time, an older, wistful one, a storyteller’s voice, a Dennis Hopper of a voice. A memory, directed to a lover, of being monkeys. Of swinging through the trees, of picking fleas off each other. A woozy, sluggish kind of song. Everything in this is so beautifully, crisply produced.
Do you remember those days when we would copulate whenever we liked?
Defecate wherever we chose?
And the music isn’t a passive participant, a canvas for the words. It ebbs and flows and snipes in at the right time.
We would fight with other groups of monkeys.
And kill them.
Sometimes we would eat parts of ‘em.
Sometimes we would eat parts of ‘em.
Then we would run around screaming.
Beating our chests.
Covered in blood.
A guitar stabs through the haze at the word “kill”. And then the music fades away. Beating our chests… covered in blood. A single, hanging pause. A horrible tension. A moment for the image to linger. And then the delicate fingerpicked guitar hums in again. And the voice seems to drop a semitone. Becomes almost seductive.
You... liked that.
And so it goes on. Infanticide and violence. The debased behaviour of animals. All in these wistful, late night bar-room tones.
Track 4 — Walker
After Monkeys fades out, the unsettling images of blood and violence, we have the rattling, tumbling, baffling Walker. It is a man — or a child, voiced by a man, for the words are childlike and naive — describing looking out of their window and seeing a man on the street. The man, or the child, has I think a Cheshire accent, because Shrigley is from Macclesfield, and this is surely him.
And I saw a man
Walking past our house
He didn’t have any clothes on
But he was wearing a pair of Wellington boots
I noticed that he was quite a funny shaped man.
Is this cruel? Is this a child? Is this an adult with learning difficulties? I have no idea.
He had some hair on his back
And on his bottom.
Silly though this song is, by this point in the album, post-Monkeys, there is a creeping sense of dread in the air. The uncanny. So, though retrospect makes this seem foolish, I had an inescapable sense that something awful was going to happen.
And he was huffing and puffing a bit
It looked like he might be ill
Like it was difficult for him to walk.
So this apparition makes his way down the street. Shambling, balding, wheezing. Naked but for Wellington boots. Under all of this, the same tumbling drums, throbs of synth, tension never breaking, rattling and rolling down the hill towards…what?
I thought that maybe he had escaped from the mental hospital
There is a mental hospital near our house.
And sometimes they get out
And they have to come out and fetch them.
All of this — the childlike recollection, the hairy back, the boots, the casual “sometimes they get out”, has such a ring of truth to it that I can only assume it happened. But David Shrigley has a very particular gift for the uncanny.
And one point he seemed to notice me
And he stopped
And he turned around
And he said…
What did he say? The music changes. The drumbeat lifts. A new texture hisses into the mix. The tension beats in your chest.
And then he walked on.
Track 5 — Dear Brain
This is the closest to straight-up spoken word poetry, with only a seasoning of musical accompaniment, a single piano supporting the monologue. A man addresses his brain, demanding to know why it compels him to behave in the way he does.
I would behave more nicely
And I would not be violent
Or abusive
To strangers
And I would wear clothes.
Nakedness is a persistent theme. In Shrigley’s art too. When you are naked you are vulnerable and sometimes when you are naked you are mad. Clothes are one of the trappings of society shed by the mentally ill. Nakedness is shameful.
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But oh brain, if it is your will.
Stop making me behave like such a degenerate.
Track 6 — Caveman
I love Caveman. Caveman is horrible, ugly, and funny. It starts with a recording of Shrigley presumably providing just the vocals. It may even be improvised. It is a mock Hall and Oates song about a caveman.
He’s sitting in a cave, he’s chewing a bone.
In a cave, chewing a bone!
He says it’s very good to be here.
Very good to be alone.
The caveman recalls all of the girls he has known.
Pulled their hair.
Made them moan.
This repeats twice.
Of how he killed them with a stone
Of how his beard has grown.
The jolly caveman in his cave, killing girls with a stone. It immediately made me think of Tell The Women We’re Going by Raymond Carver, an extraordinary story about a pair of suburban men who go out and murder two girls because they want to have sex with them, but delivered in the most ugly, off-handed way.
Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s.
And then, in this recording, perhaps as the implications of what he’s actually saying dawn on him, he says:
He killed a bunch of girls
He killed a bunch of…
And then he laughs at how horribly casual it all is. At what an awful image he’s just offered. They keep the recording. And then Middleton’s beat pumps in, a menacing guitar sawing under it, and it turns into a song again. And the story is told again, but now it’s an Arab Strap song (the vocals are Middleton here I believe), only it isn’t a story of lost love or nights out, it’s a murderous caveman, delivered with deathly seriousness. I’ve never heard anything like.
Track 7 — Sunday Morning
Okay, this one is stupid. It’s about masculinity being inherently ludicrous. Once more it uses the language of the playground, and childhood. So much on this album feels like it is through the eyes of a child, who hasn’t yet attached the right set of meanings to the violence and chaos of the world, or developed the kind of immunity to it that allows you to get up every day. All of that said, the first words are:
Take out your dong
And make it long
And bong it upon the gong.
Bong your dong
Bong it!
There probably isn’t much important to say about this, it seems like David Shrigley enjoying the word “dong” and the sound of saying it several times. But there are still some parts that tickle me.
You are an amazing man.
Other men will bow down and worship you.
Get it out, and show the other men.
Track 8 — Story Time
There are a few here which are just straightforwardly gags. This is a story about woodland creatures, delivered by a female narrator as if for a group of nursery children, with another fingerpicked, pastoral guitar line. Inevitably it descends into orgy, violence, a plague. By this point, on my first listen, I didn’t know what to do with myself. There is no line I could quote which captures how I was feeling. But when in mock-storytelling voice, we hear:
“I don’t mind eating shit,” said a booming voice from behind them.
They turned around to see a big brown bear.
I became so overwhelmed that some other hikers had to come and check on me. I couldn’t breathe.
Then lots of other animals came along
Curious to see the cause of the commotion
Then they all started to fight
And kill each other
Then lots more animals came and joined in
And then some of them started fucking.
God help me. I think this might have been the best day of my life. I mean that. I have never laughed so hard and been in such a beautiful place. It was beyond words. It’s taken me three years to try and describe it at all. I don’t expect anyone else to find it a fraction as funny as I did when this was all a surprise.
Track 9 — Help
By this point my signal was patchy and I had calmed down a little. This one doesn’t really do it for me, though it’s a bit more propulsive musically. A whining voice repeatedly begs for help.
Help me please
This dog is biting me
A series of misfortunes befall them. I walked by a copse of conifers and I thought: these can’t be native. Is this a Forestry Commission plantation? It’s very small.
It began to rain.
Track 10 — Touch My Face
There is a bit of a lull at this point in the album. This is about begging a policeman to assault a man who touched the narrator’s face.
Track 11 — The Tree
I believe this is a reference to Rabbie Burns’ The Last Leaf. Not a lot to say.
Track 12 — A Computer
The album ends with a story from the perspective of a computer, delivered via vocoder, simulating a robotic voice.
I am a computer.
I am able to process large quantities of data.
At incredible speed.
The track is bassy, atmospheric, thick with voices echoing and repeating. It changes key, shuffles around. There is a purring noise in the background. Is the computer purring?
But yet…
Here I am.
A miracle at your service.
The computer is neglected. Forgotten.
My outer casing is made of plastic.
Plastic that was once clean
And nice
And new
But which is now rather dirty.
The voice is not chiding. It is politely observant, like a butler or a functionary.
And now…
I am filthy.
But no matter.
I will still perform for you.
For you are my master
And I love you.
Oh, my heart.
I don’t believe there is a single person in the world who loves this album more than I do.
