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)