Well, in a monumental week for The Half Man Half Biscuit Project, our man (and I think after having made 184 of the 2,077 comments on this site, I can call him that) Charles Exford Esq managed to get a friendly chat with Nigel Blackwell himself. And the result? A fantastic set of clarifications of some of the most argued-over lyrics on the site. The “official” corrections (or indeed confirmations) are going on the relevant pages, and wherever they’re made, I’ll put a reference back to this page as the source, so you’ll know that it might be wisest not to argue any further. Although I bet you lot will anyway.
A big thank you to NB57 for his time and patience, as well as to “Charles” for getting it all organised.
Charles Exford
Somebody in another thread suggested that there should be a list of the forty-odd clarifications I obtained by mithering NB57 during recent visits to Prenton. Maybe it could be the lead post in this thread? The Book of Clarifications, as revealed to Exxo the div, reads as follows:
“Ivan Mauger robbed my car”
“rock cakes”
“and die in midweek”
”Friday night and I just love complaining
and no I haven’t got anything better to do”.
“Dave & Barbara”.
“Goth on a bouncy castle”
“Fine shoes, incredible tunes”
“The car that’s parked on a pavement narked”
“Iranian crêpes” (apparently the sort of thing they’d offer you at a book launch)
“accepting alms” (Nigel said he didn’t realise at the time that wasn’t how to pronounce the word, and nobody in the studio said anything either, not Neil, not Geoff- no-one)
“Where the Transit full of Keith
In the side-streets has no beef
With Elgin, Nairn or Brora anymore”
Regarding “Trouble Over Bridgwater”, Nigel said he’d not previously heard of the Trevor Crozier’s 1970s Wurzelly-type album of the same title.
“pots and pans” (just before the line “Frampton Comes Alive!” on “3rd Track Main Camera”- a line which some people previously thought was “once again” )
“I’m a hard-jackin’ sound-scaping jump-uppin’ left-of-centre”
“Bill (not “Phil” ) in Hay-on-Wye”
“Cod ’n’ bass”.
“With Goth on our Side”, “first snakebite when I was in halls” and “ Dylan can’t sue”.
“far beyond dim sierras” in ‘Emerging from Gorse’.
“Fib Central” in ‘Ordinary to Enschede’.
In ‘Jarg Armani’ : “Therefore praise the permanent fixture in this firmament” ?
”Now that Thelma’s gone” ?
(Nigel said he likes all those old names, like Joyce, Doreen, Phyllis, etc, and he’s thought about doing a song about a Norma)
“And her sense of relief at my friendly tone
Reveals itself in her karmic moan”
“goose rule”
Spelling of “Edward McCrae” confirmed.
“used to be in Acidic Regulator [the name of a band] from near the equator .”
“Was it you who invented the school run at the Laboratoires Garnier, Gaul?”
“Prick barriers at both ends”
Spelling of “McVeigh” confirmed
A survey on “alley gates”
“The mummers and the poppers”.
“Pleasure grounds with maze in the shape of a sled” (not “maize”). Citizen Kane reference.
In “Evening of Swing”, it’s all “has”, with no “hads” or “haths”.
“Too late with your Nxe3”
“Me go Leominster, eat dog’s heart”
“Thelwall Friday afternoon
So much so for Brig o’Doon” ?
“porcine feed”
The final part of ‘Give us Bubblewrap’ is “bubblewrap, doublewrap, other crap, have it back, dinner queues, river cruise, Bladder News (a freesheet of sorts) inner tubes.” Nigel confirmed that the song is primarilyabout the residents of an old folks’ home.
“His exposed skull a perch for the quartering crow”
“(Don’t fear Bert), Red Cross box, clipboard and chit, (Bert hears Bells) Come be my queen of quick wit.” Nigel explained that one should ignore old Bert the commissionaire on the door as he’s merely tokenistic (no-one has the heart to sack him) and that he simply smiles at everyone and “hears bells” in his head permanently.
“website nonce”
“try my hand at drag”
“the laurel walk” is the only one from the new album so far.
16 March 2010
a_p
A tinge of sadness now that the magic has been broken…
Like looking up the answers to the crossword rather than filling it in with answers you’ve spent ages sweating over then bending and justifying to your own satisfaction.
Perhaps the next release will be accompanied by a lyrics booklet only for Nigel to produce more of those ephemeral moments during live performances where all ears are keen to pick up the variations.
Hey-ho as they say, as the mysteries unravel…
16 March 2010
Chris The Siteowner
I know what you mean, but Nigel has only confirmed or corrected a few dozen of our most pressing enquiries, and there are many, many more which Exxo didn’t get around to asking about. So there’ll be plenty more pedantry to follow, I’m sure.
16 March 2010
Colin Hammond
Just to let you know, the various groups on FB have chosen Joy Divivion Oven Gloves to be the 6Music protest song to get in the charts, buying week 4-11 April. Link
17 March 2010
@steve_nicholls
Well we haven’t really got stuck into This Leaden Pall yet…
I’m looking forward to singing “Papal entourage give us a song” when Popey visits the UK this year.
Has anyone thought of attending in Slipknot fancy dress..?
17 March 2010
Neil G
Chris – ” there’ll be plenty more pedantry to follow, I’m sure.”
What we really need is a new album’s worth of stuff to argue over, don’t you think?
23 March 2010
Joe
As long as the correct words are given for ‘Four Skinny Indie Kids’, ie ‘Web site Notts’ and not the clearly incorrect ‘Web site nonce’, I’ll be happy.
26 March 2010
Charles Exford
Second Saturday in Lent. The annual pilgrimage to Prenton. Cleansing, purifying us Commodores of our erroneous ways. Like last year, three precious points for the Rovers. Unlike last year, only two points of clarification. But equally vital:
(i) ‘nonce’ is confirmed. Those who advocated ‘Notts’ receive the mandatory automatic suspension.
(ii) The appeal against its red card by ‘brag’ is rejected. It’s ‘drag’ and evermore shall be.
22 March 2011
Charles Exford
Sorry – the 4 question marks there have escaped from when they were questions in another document and they should’t be there any more.
31 October 2011
Vendor of Quack Nostrums
Perhaps Chris could produce some sort of Certificate of Authenticity for those who, like Charles, find the means to solve once and for all, the minutiae which we regularly struggle with on this site. (Not that I’m in any danger of receiving one given my track record in recent weeks).
Oh and in the interests of pure pedantry you understand, one of Exxo’s 4 fugitive question marks is, in fact, correctly placed.
31 October 2011
John C
“The car that’s parked on a pavement narked” – I don’t care if Nigel wrote it, he’s wrong. “Marked” would be a much better lyric. Maybe a new thread – lyrics that Nigel got wrong.
On a similar subject, maybe a thread for the worst interpretation of a biscuit lyric – a friend of mine thought that when pining for a cigarette, you could get free ones by killing yourself and coming back as a penguin (something about penguins eating cigarette stubs)!!
12 September 2014
exxo
Strange post there, and while I don’t claim to understand why you find the line ‘wrong’, I wonder if it’s because you are treating it as one self-contained ‘line’ ,rather than reading the whole sentence (or possibly two, depending on how we choose to punctuate) that spans the entire stanza?
The car that’s parked on a pavement narked
Pedestrians, and children with chalk –
Their games, their shapes, their capers, their japes
Destroyed by a thoughtless shitehawk
The thoughtlessly-badly-parked car narks the pedestrians & the children; the pedestrians & the children are narked by the thoughtlessly-badly-parked car.
How would the car ‘mark’ them?
12 September 2014
John C
maybe with some inverted commas…
The car that’s parked on a pavement
marked “Pedestrians”, and “Children” with chalk –
Their games, their shapes, their capers, their japes
Destroyed by a thoughtless shitehawk
why would a pavement be narked? I was not aware that they had feelings, but I will certainly bear it in mind in future. Having said that, now I have typed the line out, there are flaws in my argument, I am not sure that chalk is a common material for use in road marking
14 September 2014
John C
and also the “narked… with chalk” thing confuses me, how can you be narked with chalk? Although I can see now that maybe some children with chalk are narked but its a confusing line if so. Do the pedestrians also have chalk?
14 September 2014
EXXO
I was very much cheered the other day when I encountered two separate hopscotch grids on the same day, chalked in two quite different parts of town. It is extremely rare to find even one, in these days of computer games, DVDs and parental paranoia.
However surely we all had them in nearly every street when we were kids (though they were always a mystery to me cos neither me nor my mates happened to have any sisters). The children with chalk are narked because the car denies them the space to play hopscotch (and other games, japes, etc – they may even be frustrated in their occasional bid to draw other more dubious ‘shapes’ on the pavement).
The narrator of the song is clearly one of the pedestrians who is particularly narked, otherwise he wouldn’t have put it in a song would he? HMHB songs are mostly about being narked; rarely if ever about being marked.
14 September 2014
EXXO
The confusion is all the more irksome when the sentence structure is relatively simple as these things go.
SUBJECT – VERB – OBJECT.
SUBJECT (and adjectival phrase) – the car (that’s parked on the pavement)
VERB – narked (synonyms include annoyed, irritated, etc). This is an active verb – not passive.
OBJECTS – (1) pedestrians (who have to walk in the road to get by) (2) children (with chalk cos they were hoping to play hopscotch on that spot)
14 September 2014
EXXO
The confusion may also be caused by the way that in order to conform to the anapestic metre of the hymn, the singer almost seems to create “the pavement narked” as an entity, but get that out your head and see narked as a separate concept, the main verb, and you’ll soon get over it.
14 September 2014
Jeff Dreadnought
It’s a nice idea, someone going round with chalk writing “pedestrians” and “children” on the pavement to keep cars from parking on it. Sadly, I’ve never actually seen it done. Nor did any of my three hopscotch-playing sisters ever restrict her activities to areas thus designated.
My problem with this line is that I think the tense is wrong. Surely it should be “narks”, i.e. If the car is still parked on the pavement, then it continues to nark the pedestrians and children in question?
15 September 2014
nigel, no not that one (nx3TO)
But if the car has now been moved (by its owner, an approriate authority or simply half-inched), the children with chalk and the pedestrians are no longer being narked, but have been so. Hence the past tense, which seems fine to me.
16 September 2014
Jeff dreadnought
Fair enough, but then if the car has been (re)moved, shouldn’t the song begin “The car that was parked” rather than “The car that’s parked”? Although of course that would upset the anapestic meter.
16 September 2014
CHARLES EXFORD
You’d think Wirral Council would have pavement wardens ready to fine anyone not having a valid ticket for the anapestic meter.
17 September 2014
nigel, no not that one (nx3TO)
Fair point Jeff.
Perhaps the pedestrians and children with chalk are no longer narked, but were at some point. They may have have calmed down or simply moved off to a stretch of non-obstructed pavement. This, I believe would retain the tenses as written.
17 September 2014
Jeff dreadnought
Sadly, NX3TO, I suspect that the version of events you are suggesting is correct. The thoughtless shitehawk gets away with it. When he returns to the spot, he will find his car where he left it. Meanwhile, the children and pedestrians go on their way with a resigned shrug of the shoulders. And the parking warden finds the anapestic meter intact next time he does the rounds.
19 September 2014
EXXo
Fortunate enough to again obtain some lyrics clarifications today. About 14 or 15 of the little blighters in fact, as NB10 was very patient and gracious, spanning a majority of the songs on the new album and making me feel quite foolish in a couple of cases, but that comes with the territory I guess.
There will be different views on how best to not be a spoilsport (or, conversely, a terrible tantalising tease) with this – but my initial instinct is in each case to wait for relevant comments from other contributors to reply to (like I did with SIMPLEM’s one just now in ‘Mileage Chart’)?
Anyway, there will be plenty left to debate beyond these clarifications, don’t worry.
22 November 2014
dickhead in quicksand
@@Exxo, I recommend the maximum embarrassment tactic. Hold fire until there’s a consensus that we’ve unpicked all the tricky lyrical obscurities and conundrums, then show us up for the fools we are. I for one wouldn’t want it otherwise.
22 November 2014
Chris The Siteowner
Well, if anyone knows anything about any proper nouns, speak now or forever hold thy peace, ‘cos I’ve got a helluva job coming up, adding everything from the new album to the A to Z. I don’t want to be adding stuff that we’ll later regret.
And when that’s done, I’ve got to add the entire new album to the Random Lyrics Generator, although at least I can dip back into that and amend amended lyrics. Luckily I don’t have a life.
22 November 2014
Dr Desperate
Your gaff, your rules, CtSO, but might it be a bit soon to be adding UfO references to the A to Z, if they’re going to remain there permanently? I’d be happy to let the dust settle on a few of the trickier ones first.
22 November 2014