Charles Exford writes:
“So do you class yourselves as a comedy band? Is that fair?” asked Marc Riley between songs during HMHB’s recent 6Music Session.
“We don’t ourselves, no.” At this point Nigel gives a long, resigned sigh. “What we tend to do is, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, which often in music terms then gets lumped into comedy, which I don’t personally think is the case.”
Personally, If I’d been the presenter, asking the questions shortly after the first two new tracks, which had featured a life coach dying in a car crash, a murdered body in a bothy, and a mass poisoning, I might myself have put it more like this:
“Death, drunkenness, desperate poverty, diabolical dealings, incest, murder and abandonment. Does this reflect your current state of mind?” (Used to be in Evil Gazebo)
And the interviewee might then have replied “More murders per album than Nick Cave, more suicide than Morrissey, and more general mayhem than in the Best of Johnny Cash, but most people still just seem to quote the jokes.”
THE MURDER BALLADS
Let’s take a few examples:
MURDER
Plans to assassinate our autocratic Mayor (Trumpton)
You said you’d love to so I murdered your family
‘cos I hate the Rocky Horror Picture Show (Our Tune )
I’ve only got 3 bullets and there’s 4 in Motley Crue (Upon Westminster)
Act One, Scene One – Brenda Blethyn gets shot (WBTV)
Now you are gone forever, shot by your Uncle Trevor (Reflections)
Kill, kill, kill, stab murder and dispatch (Petty Sessions)
I’ll murder the verger (With Goth)
Drink the warm blood of the borough surveyor (With Goth)
Tiptoe to the front row of the Korn Show
With a sub-machine-gun (Makes the Room Look Bigger)
Tourniquet matricide (Footprints)
Sonia Lannaman sleeps with the fishes tonight (whiteness)
Rendezvous-ed with Peter Glaze to kill Don Maclean
His head was found on the driving range and his body has never been found (24HGP)
Let’s trash the Murder Mystery Weekend (Monmore)
SUICIDE
Reasons to be miserable, another good excuse to be dead (Reasons to be miserable)
He reached out for the jar
He swallowed every last pill and he lay back on his duvet
A Haliborange overdose is perhaps not the right way
To ooh-ooh, to kill yourself (Sealclubbing)
Stringy Bob still on suicide watch (N.S.D.)
I take my rope down to the crossroads to bring my poor heart ease (Hair Like)
Gary doesn’t live here any more,
Gary took a dive from the seventh floor (Soft verges)
You’ll find me dying casually on the fourteenth fairway (Our Tune)
Just before you take that length of hosepipe
Just before you lock the garage door (Faithlift)
Dock Road can lad on the end of a rope
My suicide to come (Shropshire)
OTHER VIOLENT MAYHEM WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT RESULT IN DEATH
A hammer hit my head and I couldn’t understand
Behind me stood a maniac laughing at me saying:
“I like to watch the adverts…” (Architecture)
You fold your grandma’s neck (Architecture)
Bludgeon chartist demonstrators in the square (Letters sent)
Careering down the aisles like one big psychopathic carnivore (Nerys)
Through garden gates I’ve shoved you
Then there’s the time I slashed you (Reflections)
“And now subversion’s in the air in the shape of flying bricks
And keep Mrs Honeyman right out of sight
Cos there’s gonna be a riot….
….With windmill sails and bombs with nails they smash the town hall door” (Trumpton)
A fight broke out in the bar
Third-Rate Les in his Burberry Fez
Had gone just a little too far (27 Yards)
A man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in Millets (N.S.D.)
And I heard her screaming
And I found her bleeding
And she wasn’t breathing
So I did what I could with my gas mask (Mr. Cave)
Fisher goes beserk. Mayhem. Police cars. (The Ballad of CF)
Let’s go the Metbar, and cause an altercation” (Uffington)
The bottles they rained (With Goth)
21-man brawl (Referee’s Alphabet)
ACCIDENTAL CARNAGE
Small children trampled in the exodus (Asparagus)
Stretch limousine … plunging headlong into a ravine (Evening)
Tour bus crashes and you die (Nove)
THREATENED VIOLENCE
Gun-towers to keep the hippies away (Corgi Registered Friends)
Mention the Lord Of the Rings just once more and I’ll more than likely kill you (Dickie Davies)
one day there’s going to be blood on the quad (Blood on the Quad)
That’s what I’ll do, and we’ll all die together (With Goth)
“You’re a dead man, Fisher” (The Ballad of CF)
I’ve got a shotgun round the back (CAMRA man)
MORTAL CURSING
I hope your plane back home’s a DC-10 (Albert Hammond)
You shall be cast away into the fiery pit
And in the fiery pit there are eternal sleeping policemen (Twydale)
My rejoinder was “Die,
You off-beat cabaret type.” (Doreen)
Federal Metronome
I’ve always thought of HMHB more as social satire than comedy. You want comedy, you listen to Splodgenessabounds.
Professor Exford, I think it remiss of you not to quote the entire verger murdering section from With Goth On Our Side, for surely the line “And I’ll write on his headstone, here lies Jones the Corpse” also merits a mention?
Also, under accidental Carnage maybe we should include “It’s a long old vehicle that runs you down” from See That My Bike’s Kept Clean.
Just a thought.
28 October 2010
Vendor of Quack Nostrums
Top categorisation Charles. May I humbly suggest an additional entry for each category.
MURDER
Oh sucking on the bleached bones
Of my dead mates. (Epiphany)
SUICIDE
So now we got a suicide pact with Goole. (San Antonio)
OTHER VIOLENT MAYHEM WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT RESULT IN DEATH
Llewelyn-Bowen, two Carols
Go on Bobby, both barrels. (Problem Chimp)
ACCIDENTAL CARNAGE
I danced a while for Andy and crashed his Cadillac. (Skiffle)
THREATENED VIOLENCE
J is for ju-jitsu, which I quite intend to display given a dark alley and some of the narky blerts I’ve encountered. (Alphabet)
MORTAL CURSING
Millions now earmarked will later be wasted. (Country Practice)
28 October 2010
Bobby String
Here’s another little stat for you, Professor Exford. Of all the lyrics mentioned above, “I hope your plane back home’s a DC10” is probably the one responsible for the most carnage. A total of 1431 people (passengers and crew) have died as a result of the McDonnell Douglas DC10 either crashing or being hijacked. I bet Rain Man wouldn’t have flown on one of those!
Ô¿Ô
30 October 2010
Bobby String
Also, from the same song, I would humbly suggest we include, under the heading of SUICIDE:
“How I long for a dangerous wave
so I can surf myself towards an early grave”
Ô¿Ô
30 October 2010
Wobs
Murder Ballads alone has at least 64 deaths. More if you include animals. Mr Cave has quite a head start all things considered.
Think Nigel has a long way to go.
Although Ms Jaques doesn’t fair too well in her post mortal coil shuffling wotsits.
3 November 2010
Charles Exford
I ike to think that the entire Barmy Army get massacred in Petty Sessions, not just the named trio.
An entire wedding party certainly does in RSVP.
3 November 2010
Lee’s Twenty-first
Suicide:
And I’ll die on the floor and leave a note on the door
Saying ‘This ape has just left Gibraltar’
(1966 and all that)
12 November 2010
Gregg Z
…as for me, I’ll take the TGV to Zurich and jump off the roof of Dignitas.”
(Tommy Walsh’s Eco House)
Yeah, comedy. I’m reminded of the Python episode where the word “SATIRE” flashed on the screen in subtitle, during one of the bits.
Assuming Nigel doesn’t wear a similar sign round his neck, when entering the BBC studios for a session, perhaps Lard ought to venture off the script now and again. Having been sacked from a “comedy band” before, you’d think he’d know the difference…
14 January 2011
Marc
I like to think of it as intelligent humour. Or is that just another phrase describing satire? Either way, the North West (especially Liverpool) hold the patents for it.
25 January 2011
Al Bundy
ACCIDENTAL CARNAGE
Wait a minute. Bridge St? The overhead railway Bridge St? Oh my God! HELLLLLLLLLEN!!!
1 February 2011
WASP
Also: “Off to see the Bootleg Beatles…”
11 April 2011
patrick
“The horrible sincerity of Miriam Stoppard makes me want to go out and commit mass murder”
2 July 2011
Paul Rodgers medodgers
Murder:
Suspected murderer of Tupac murder suspect murdered.Used To Be In Evil Gazebo
I think there’s 4 in that alone.
General death (possibly following carnage)
My favourite: A rare instrumental: Visitor For Mr Edmonds.
4 October 2011
Jason
I think this page needs a good solid update after 90B(C)’s arrival. And a “necrophilia” category.
RSVP alone takes the death toll to significant new heights
28 October 2011
bobbybottler
Bad Losers refers to the battle of Rourke’s Drift – death toll in the hundreds.
And if the light at the end of the tunnel is the light of an oncoming train, is that potential accidental carnage?
8 December 2011
John Burscough
So, to sum up, we have an album named after, and featuring on its cover, a method of suicide.
Most of the characters in it (to quote Tom Stoppard) die heroically, comically, ironically, slowly, suddenly, disgustingly, charmingly, or from a great height.
Death occurs by poisoning (both ethylene glycol and sodium bicarbonate), asphyxiation (carbon monoxide and bricking up), collision (automotive, locomotive and terrestrial) and shooting in Tesco.
An actress mourns a fictional dead father, a mother (possibly two) mourns a dead son, a cyclist mourns (shall we say) a dead lover. A cow is hit by a train, an eel lies decomposing in a fridge. A fiend and a friend both rise from the tomb, and a head is dissolved in acid.
All I’m saying is, if Unknown Pleasures had had as much death in it Ian Curtis would still be on suicide watch.
13 December 2011
The low drone of the treadmill
John: An excellent summary of 90 Bisodol’s morbid fixation, however I feel compelled to point out that unlike bricking up, carbon monoxide won’t kill you by asphyxiation, but by poisoning (specifically it nobbles your haemoglobin so it can’t carry oxygen about any more). Carbon dioxide will asphyxiate, and consequently is a much nastier way to die. (I’m told. My preference remains a single gunshot to the back of the head.)
I occasionally get a big breath of carbon dioxide while scraping around in the bottom of the dry ice bin at work, and it’s nae the best.
29 January 2012
John Burscough
Quite right that death by carbon monoxide is a form of poisoning, LDT. However, there are various types of asphyxiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphyxia, including being nobbled by carboxyhaemoglobinaemia. Or at least so they told me at medical school.
29 January 2012
John Anderson
@Low Drone
When you’re scraping around in the bottom of the dry ice bin are you ever compelled to shout “Hey Jason, they’ve got no dry ice.”?
29 January 2012
Paul F
“First time caller, long time listener Robbie.”
1 February 2012
The low drone of the treadmill
@ John B: Cheerfully retracted!
@ John A: Every single time.
1 February 2012
Tangerine Wizard.
Carlos Sartori killed poor Frank O’Farrell
25 June 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
SUICIDE
If I’d known they were coming, I’d have slashed me wrists
OTHER VIOLENT MAYHEM
They got mugged in Florida
THREATENED VIOLENCE
If I were a linesman
I would execute defenders who applauded my offsides
All from Paintball. And me only new here.
1 August 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
@Exxo, I would argue that your eschatology list belongs in this thread.
Another category in this area, surely with omissions which other mailers will identify:
THE UNDEAD AND THE DEAD
“Landlord of the pub that gets the cemetery trade”, Blood On The Quad
“Howay cemetery gates”, Numanoid Hang-glide
“She finally alights at the cemetery”, Satin Black Tour Jacket
“The cemetery’s full of indispensable cobblers”, Thy Name Is Meltonian
“The sexton’s wife”, Vitas Gerulaitis
“All things undead”, With Goth On Our Side
I Hate Nerys Hughes, passim
Excavating Rita, passim
2 August 2012
Exxo
A putrescent bit of listing there, Mike, and I mean that as a compliment of course.
Off the top of my head you’ve also got the whole of Fear My Wraith and being brushed by the wings of something dark in NSD ……those two are certainly undead.
Then there are the flying worms in the Restless Legs graveyard,which might mistakenly be thought to have exorciseable explanations. Then in ancient times I am sure that if took forever trying to cremate you, it would be assumed you were an oversized cackling hag, and so, well you’d be condemned to errm, being burnt to life, or something ….
Then there are the bleached bones of his mates in Epiphany, a body never found in 24-HGP….and do those funeral arrangements count?
2 August 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
@Exxo. yes, all your suggestions count. Keep ’em coming.
(I’ve failed to find a plausible source for those flying worms. Urgggh. If you think you have one … well you know what to do.)
(Everyone knows the story of how to catch the haggis, with its three legs of unequal length. My father asserts that it only applies to the highland subspecies. When he was a boy in Glasgow, the (now extinct) lowland haggis would hover around gaslamps on foggy nights, and men would leave public houses to beat them out of the air with sticks.)
2 August 2012
Rubber Faced Irritant
Wasn’t there something to do with a chap tending the wrong grave? As well as those dead folk still being sent letters inviting them to switch their home and contents insurance.
2 August 2012
Exxo
Mike – is that a serious question about the ‘source’ for the flying worms, or a bit of self-parody?
3 August 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
@Exxo – a serious question. If I didn’t know better by now, I’d suggest something to do with school dinners, or “flying wyrms” (i.e. dragons).
Apropos of nothing, contrast the definition of “Flying Pasty” in Partridge’s Dictionary Of Slang And Unconventional English as “Excrement that, wrapped in paper, is thrown over a neighbour’s wall” with its uses as a greyhound’s name and in technology.
3 August 2012
Exxo
Imagine if you will that you, Mike, are some kind of lyrical genius writing a highly amusing song about Restless Leg Syndrome. You take it to the point where the listener doesn’t think it can any better and then, because it’s worked for you before, you take it into the graveyard. What else would be a funnier, more gruesome result of a corpse with RLS than its constant kicking up of unsuspecting invertebrates from the unquiet earth?
Why does that have to have a source other than your genius? I’m not saying there isn’t some kind of direct or indirect source of inspiration for the image – there may or may not be – but it does also seem highly likely that it’s an original line. It’s just your assumption that there has to be some kind of directly quoted source in almost every line that is starting to grate somewhat.
This is a song with a number of wide-ranging references but, because of the style, it seems to me likely to be one of those with few if any actual borrowings.
5 August 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
@Exxo, it’s always NB’s selection of words and images that counts. Trying to identify quotes is a sideshow, though their original context often illuminates a song. I found “flying worms” such a startling image that I wanted to learn whether it was new or not. Contrast, for example, “psychopathic carnivore”, which feels so clearly original that I wasn’t going to look for precedents – until I just did, to ensure I wasn’t using a bad example. And whether or not “spartan and monastic” is commonplace or a quote, our argument thereon prompted you to point out that “feel spartan and monastic” is a novel brilliancy. For me, that insight rendered the exercise worthwhile.
5 August 2012
Charles Exford
It is clear that NB57’s work contains a large number or direct quotes, indirect paraphrasings, brilliant adaptations of famous or obscure lines and parodies of generic ways of using language. It seems certain that part of the creative process involves collection, processing and suifting of such material from a myriad of souces.
However, this does seem to have misled you into assuming that nearly everything has a fairly direct source. Dare I say that perhaps your background in science and law gives you quite a linear approach to such matters (or indeed that because you have quite linear feelings on such matters that is why you favoured science and the law)?
A lot of the stuff has a ‘source’, a lot doesn’t (NB57 in interviews has said stuff like “it’s all nicked anyway”, but clearly that’s self-deprecation. And if you ask him about particular sources, other than the known ones, he is often vague – in my view yes it’s partly to avoid sounding too pretentious and too damned well read, but also to avoid any focus on the brilliance of the originality of the whole and of some of the parts ).
In the infinite monkey sense, language is what is finite and time fairly infinite, so while much of what is creative is new, yes, more than we think has been said before. And when something’s been said or done before we may or may not know it’s been said or done before, but Nigel of all people probably knows. So I can sympathise with your endless searching – lord knows I have done (and do) it enough.
In the it-takes-input-to-produce output sense, everything has its inspiration. That may be direct, unconscious, or just (obviously) the product of everything that has made us think how we think. You just make it sound as if the relationship is so direct, which it sometimes is but often surely isn’t, and you do often seem to be searching for stuff that will probably never be found, mostly because it can’t be.
It is clear too that similar patterns can often be observed musically – there are direct quotations and adaptations but many tunes, while showing strong influences, tend to be as strikingly original as any band’s can ever be these days. ‘Soft Verges’, which somehow you’re searching for a tune for in another thread, may be one of many, many such.
Even a collector of striking or daft phrases, musical and lyrical, doesn’t necessarily have to get them from one particular place, and as well as using them or adapting them, can either use generic examples of a particular style or can actually invent them.
(I can’t help imagining , with considerable dread, an intervention from Simon Smith or Neil “leftie” G. at this point. If I used to piss those contributors off so much with my own theories, goodness knows how they’d react to the recent exchanges between us, Mike!)
Oh and Mike – you should invent an obscure fanzine & try to get an interview with the man himself to test out some of your theories – you might even get the occasional straight answer!
5 August 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
THE UNDEAD AND THE DEAD
Also:
“Chester Barnes is risen from the dead”, Leaden Pall.
“In relation to me raising from the dead”, alternative last line in Vatican Broadside (Hedley Verity, post 3).
8 August 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
“Gary took a dive from the second floor”; not seventh as in the header to this thread. It should not be corrected; this could be the first instance of one of us pedants spotting an unconscious reference in another’s contribution. Seventh Storey Love Song, The Stone Roses. @Charles, what do you think?
1 September 2012
Exxo
Ha, good spot there Mike, apologies for my mistake. But no, although it’s decent tune that by the Roses, if there was an unconscious thought behind my error, it must merely have been ‘how much damage can you do yourself from the second floor?’
Incidentally, has anyone ever commented that the Cliff Richard parody simultaneously manages to be a hat-tip to the final lines of TV Smith’s classic ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’? In this case, conscious or unconscious hardly matters.
8 September 2012
Mickyhoss
BREAKING NEWS – Strictly Come Dancing…………………LISA RILEY
8 September 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
Exxo’s post#35. The first task given a workmate in the H&S department was to investigate a fatality. Someone had stepped backwards off a flat-bed lorry. Two storeys can be plenty.
I’m adding a comment on Exxo’s suggested GGE connection to the Soft Verges thread.
9 September 2012
Dr Desperate
Roger McGough’s ‘Poetry Please’ on R4 last night had a floral theme, and included William Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’:
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Apologies for resurrecting an issue which had seemed dead and buried (see posts 25 – 32 above). Not to mention opening a can of…never mind.
2 June 2013
ACIDIC REGULATOR
@Dr Desperate … arrggghhh .. I think you’ve nailed it! – Blakey and his flying worm of COURSE. (Cf. Depressed Beyond Tablets.)
I think some sort of biscuit nomination is called for, possibly worm-eaten.
8 June 2013
Charles EXFORD
Perhaps a Gold or Silver Acid Tab nomination, for having pressed the Regulator’s “ah – that’s where I’ve heard a bit of flying worms imagery before” button, but as Blakey’s image doesn’t have much to do with graveyards/digging up graves etc, I personally doubt it will have had much influence here.
(and anyway, looking at possible actual parasites of garden roses, Blakey is presumably referring to metaphorical moth larvae eating into whatever you want to think the rose symbolises (love, England, etc), rather than any species that a humorous writer of modern English would call a ‘worm’).
I’m sure I’ve seen more than one actual digging sketch in cartoons, movies, etc that involve getting worms in your face.
Talking of awards, this thread surely has to qualify for a ‘Breaking News’ award as one of the maddest and most annoying threads anywhere on the interweb – it’s really 3 threads on different topics. Half of post 26, all of 28-32, and then 38-40 all belong in the ‘Tending the Wrong Grave’ thread.
(I used to have OCD but then I realised it wasn’t in alphabetical order, so now I’ve got CDO)
8 June 2013
Chris from future doom
Have we had a death count yet? The only 2 that spring to mind are the suicide in My Outstretched Arms and the old girl in Teenage Bride, though others may have gone over my head, Goodyear Airship-style.
29 October 2014
acidic regulator
@@CFFD, deaths? I Hate Nerys Hughes, Excavating Rita, Tending The Wrong Grave, The Coroner’s Footnote, RSVP, Evening Of Swing. I may have missed a couple.
29 October 2014
Chris from future doom
@Acidic i was thinking of deaths on the new album.
29 October 2014
acidic regulator
Like, A Country Practice.
29 October 2014
acidic regulator
Kill, kill, kill, stab, murder and despatch (which is a quote I can’t track down even in part, but has for me the flavour of an obscure Jacobean tragedy about it). Has anyone compiled a list of deaths in the songs? I don’t remember one.
Oh, and Cremating Hattie Jacques (a song I’ve never liked).
29 October 2014
Kendo nagasaki
Re: deaths. Dead men don’t need season tickets, 24hr garage people, tour jacket with detatchable sleeves……
30 October 2014
acidic regulator
Does a dead eel count?
30 October 2014