“Where the gods have dumped Diana for a girl called Joyce”
“But the nauseating bashfulness of early Diana makes me want to set fire to commemorative tea towels”
– Architecture and Morality Ted and Alice
So… what do we know about Diana?
The A to Z of HMHB
acidic regulator
Queen and huntress, chaste and fair (Ben Jonson).
I imagine that’s a different Diana?
17 August 2014
Graeme
If Diana had been allowed to live by the government and MI5 and had gone on to marry Dodi al Fayed then not only would she get staff discount at Harrods but would also have a seat in the Directors’ box at Craven Cottage. And of course her good friend Michael Jackson wouldn’t have been killed by the CIA. And the Queen would have been forced to abdicate , King Charles III would have stayed on the throne until William was 18 then handed the crown to him and Tranmere Rovers would have won the FA Cup in the same year. Of course all this is pure hypothesis…
17 August 2014
Eugene C
Sounds totally reasonable
18 August 2014
Featureless tv producer steve
@Graeme – your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
19 August 2014
EXXO
As the genius those early songs came over the radio from the Peel sessions in late ’85 and early ’86, nearly every line drew us more and more to this band. Everything said plenty to us about our lives, from the subbuteo to the Lev Yashin poster to the dodgy fallopian to the wheels of nihilsm to being mocked in my mocks to writing on sole of the slipper with a biro, but the anti-royalism struck a particular chord, with both this line and the Sarah Ferguson one.
It seems really appropriate that the first release on Skeleton’s short-lived Half Man Half Biscuit label featured some anti-royal wedding satire in its lyrics and on its collagey cover, which displayed images of the nauseating bashfulness itself (see post 171 in the media thread).
I think I was sick on the A552 on that royal wedding night after a very messy session seeing of a mate who was leaving town on the midnight tide. Who knows, possibly the last person to ever set off on a round-the-world journey from Birkenhead docks.
19 August 2014
third rate les
The main reason I still buy every edition of Viz, even if it is not as funny as it used to be, is lingering gratitude for their refusal to bow to Diana mania in 1997 – they were in the midst of a photo story called Princess Of Tarts and they just carried on with it. It sounds trivial now, but at the time (for most, just pre-internet) it was the only sign that not everyone had gone completely effing mad.
6 November 2014
peter mcornithologist
@LES .I was with you.I recall utter bewilderment and relative isolation for several weeks.
6 November 2014
dickhead in quicksand
I remember commentators asking whether the popular descent into atavistic displays of mass emotion meant that Britain was evolving into something new and different. And who could forget that mad incoherent rant by Earl Spencer? Frightening. Fortunately, most of my colleagues were at least as cynical as I am.
6 November 2014
BLOOD ON CHAPEL COURT
Her brother-in-law once told me to my face at college how much The Firm despised her and made constant jokes among themselves about how thick she was. It was ironic that he should tell me this because I had been one of the instigators of a petition against him getting into our college in the first place (I don’t think he knew that) on the grounds that essentially he didn’t have the results so was just getting in ‘cos of who he was.
One of the few good things about that period was that for a while ‘the public’ disliked the rest of them a bit more.
6 November 2014
dickhead in quicksand
@@Blood On Chapel Court, good one coming from him! But hey, give him credit, he got a Desmond. Somehow.
That tower has a useful (if somewhat restricted) field of fire.
6 November 2014
nigel
I was living in Northampton when she died and, as the funeral procession to Althorp near enough passed the end of our road, we made the voyage and watched the car go past, although I did draw the line at throwing flowers towards it
6 November 2014
Bobby SVARC
I remember that all the football were off so I went fishing.
6 November 2014
dickhead in quicksand
Snark from a site I thoroughly recommend:
6 November 2014
paul f
I was also bewildered by the response to her death. That morning a mate of mine phoned and said “Have you heard about Diana?” I hadn’t, so he filled me in. At the end of the call he asked what I was up to that day, so I said “well I’ll be off to Anfield later for the Newcastle game.” And he said “Do you think it will still be on?” Confused, I asked him why it wouldn’t be. “Because of Diana.” It never occurred to me that they would cancel a Liverpool game because of a former royal having a car accident. But they did.
7 November 2014
paul f
As an aside, my daughters used to be competitive swimmers and so spent much time perusing swimsuit catalogues. The Italian sportswear company “Diana” had, rather unfortunately, named one of their swimsuits the “Fatality”. I’m not sure how many people in England would have bought a Diana Fatality swimsuit.
7 November 2014
dr desperate
I was more than mildly surprised in the pub on Friday to be told, in a “Surely everyone knows” sort of way, that the name HMHB originated from a description of HRH Prince Charles by someone from Instant Agony.
I must admit I’d never heard that theory before, but it’s been mentioned on the FB admins page today, and I can now see it on the Nostalgia Central website (who, perhaps tellingly, describe Instant Agony as “fellow Liverpool group”).
I know Skeleton borrowed the HMHB name to give to IA’s record label when Nigel and Neil were hawking the first recordings – what about this other origin story?
28 March 2022
EXXO
It sounds like a distortion of the real story to me – that Skeleton borrowed the nascent group’s name for the Instant Agony releases … whether someone then said “very appropriate for the single (anti-royal wedding single 1981) ‘cos that’s what Prince Charles is” sort of thing, or whether Hocky (IA) says he gave the name to Nigel in the first place I don’t know. But I’d be surprised that I haven’t been told before if that were the case. It’s the sort of thing that N & N will be happy to clarify I’d imagine.
28 March 2022
Neil
John Weaver, at Skeleton Records, needed a label name. We said he could use our name. He went with it. As a result it appeared on a record for Instant Agony before it appeared on a record by us.
Any other story came after that. There is a map of band origins in the music museum on the Liverpool waterfront (I can’t remember its name and don’t know if it’s still open) that states we got the name from a Instant Agony lyric. Paul Gallagher, who was a curator in the Museum of Liverpool, asked them to change it, but I don’t think they did.
All fake news!
28 March 2022
BLOOD ON CHAPEL COURT
I can now say that the new king’s brother once told me that the firm’s nickname for her in the early 80’s was ‘Dumbo.’
10 September 2022