Gubba Look-a-Likes forms some of the most disturbing imagery in the HMHB songbook, yet the payoff is a lesser-known footy commentator. Well, of course it is. Thanks to Jon and Stu.
See lyrics to Gubba Look-a-Likes
Gubba Look-a-Likes forms some of the most disturbing imagery in the HMHB songbook, yet the payoff is a lesser-known footy commentator. Well, of course it is. Thanks to Jon and Stu.
See lyrics to Gubba Look-a-Likes
leigh
And the chorus was so good, it was re-used for Give Us Bubblewrap. 😉
9 May 2008
Mr Larrington
Could that be “Tam” (short for Tamworth) pigs?
23 July 2008
Ricardo
“Besides all this, he gave them the apanage of Gluttony, with its many privileges, viz. to swear great oaths and drink all day in diverse taverns, and gossip and joke there, and judge one’s fellow-Christians; to eat before the proper time on fast-days, and then sit gorging till overpowered by sleep; to breed like town-pigs, and wallow luxuriously in bed till their sides were fattened with sloth and sleep; and finally to awake in despair, with no will to amend, and in their last agonies, to believe themselves lost.”
From “Piers the Ploughman” by William Langland.
19 February 2010
Ricardo
Incidentally, according to Tony Gubba’s official website, “…he has been known to provide the vocal entertainment at the annual ‘Match of the Day’ Christmas party and serenade his colleagues with songs from West End shows,” which frankly conjures up images even more horrifying than anything contained within the lyrics of this song.
22 March 2010
John Anderson
I once asked Tony Gubba if he knew about the song and he looked utterly bewildered and nonplussed so I didn’t pursue it.
23 March 2010
MIKE IN COV
“And always keep a-hold of Nurse, For fear of finding something worse.” Hilaire Belloc. A possible unconscious reference?
25 July 2012
MarkLiptrott
and another one goes, RIP GUBBA!
11 March 2013
Little Eve
As he walked towards the light, let’s just hope that things were right.
11 March 2013
Graeme wright
RIP Tony. Just hope you got to listen to the song before you passed away as I’m not sure how popular HMHB are in heaven.
19 March 2013
Little eVe
John Peel is the DJ in Heaven, so you know that HMHB will be played on a regular basis.
31 March 2013
Slow dempsey
Miscellaneous tweakery.
There’s an unnecessarily capped up “Mother”, who is at least acting as a counterpoint to the “Dads” who abound in these parts.
“In every film, in every play” rather than “and every play”.
“In all the grounds” rather than “on all the grounds”.
And finally, how do we feel about a hyphen in “one-armed bandits”?
13 November 2014
EXXO
Yep. There’s only one Slow Dempsey!
Whatever the outcome of his views on those ‘Baguette’ lines, he’s always going to have some of the best stats of any Biscuiteer in the all time hall of fame for the first 20 or so comments of a rookie season.
His sword of truth is still unbowed
We have not winced or cried aloud
Of all the readers, he hath picked us
And his sword of truth is still invictus.
13 November 2014
Peter Mcornithologist
Initially amusing and wonderful poetry as normal. But the more I hear this track , it is a wonderful insight into the world of depression.
12 May 2016
Peter Mcornithologist
keep finding Fleeting joy Beauty
19 October 2017
EXXO
Inspired by ‘Bobby Pancake’ and yet another awful Dele dive just now, I went to invent a bit of a ‘joke’ for football-loving connoisseurs of medieval literature, which was to go something like “Q: Whereabouts in medieval literature does Dele Alli drink? In divers taverns with smarmy acrobats.” But then I wondered if it wasn’t really a joke for HMHB fans, so I ended up here, again.
Trouble is, where most editions of Langland have ‘divers taverns’, with ‘divers’ meaning ‘many’ as it does, for example in the old King James bible (36 occurrences), Mr. B pronounces it ‘diverse’ and it may even be that he has read “diverse” in a version of Langland (as it appears Ricardo did – see comment above).
So it’s back to the football section of medieval literature forums, then.
25 February 2018
EXXO
After further research, it seems quite common for modern readers-out-loud-ers to mispronounce the archaic word ‘divers’ as ‘diverse’, and since Mr. B has form in this area I’ll wager that he is actually saying the old word “divers”, borrowed from Langland, in the lyrics to this song. I’ll ask.
25 February 2018
dr desperate
Ricardo got his version of Langland from J F Goodridge’s modern (1966) translation. The original (B-text) of Passus 2 has:
“Glotonye he gaf hem ek and grete othes togidere,
And al day to drynken at diverse tavernes”.
25 February 2018
transit full of keith
I quite like this by comic poet Brian Bilston, but with a title recalling one Biscuit song and the content recalling another, should Blackwell sue? https://twitter.com/brian_bilston/status/1308736217513635840?s=20
27 May 2021
dr desperate
Bilston has form with adapting NB’s lyrics, having used the phrase “embrace the margins” in his 2020 lockdown poem ‘On Leaving the House and Encountering Another Human Being’. Called out on it, he freely admitted, “Totally. Every day is National Shite Day’.
He was invited to compose a poem made up entirely of HMHB lyrics (as Exxo and I did last year) but replied “I wouldn’t dare to tamper with Nigel’s words too much”.
30 July 2021
dr desperate
Incidentally, I noticed on last night’s ‘Pointless’, in a round all about 1960s film titles (during which Richard Osman joked that he thought the answer to ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia…?’ was going to be ‘Wade’) that there’s a Jason Robards movie entitled ‘A Thousand Clowns’. Color unspecified, unfortunately.
30 July 2021
dr desperate
As Jo Bradley points out, the clown in The Big O’s ‘In Dreams’ is candy-colored.
30 July 2021
cream cheese and chives
My wife was doing some online banking and has just asked me about a payment I made a while back. I gave the payment a reference of Gubba Lookalikes. Amid the usual car insurance, Council Tax and the like a contribution to fund cardboard cutouts at Prenton Park might have gone better under ‘Other’.
6 September 2021