CD (PROBE75), 18 May 2018

Interview with Nigel Blackwell about the album

Album Reviews

  • Don’t expect much in the way of reviews. The band aren’t interested. But while you read these, perhaps have a listen to Grace Petrie’s I Wish The Guardian Believed That I Exist.
  • “Theirs is the sound of a population despairing at the country’s own stupidity, of getting distracted by the minutiae of the everyday, of just getting your head down and getting on with shit. No-One Cares About Your Creative Hub So Get Your Fuckin’ Hedge Cut is the sound of personal discontent and resignation. It is the sound of Half Man Half Biscuit remaining unswervingly culturally relevant. It is the sound of life today.”
    Jon Bryan, Backseat Mafia (8.5/10)
  • “The music on ‘No One Cares About Your Creative Hub so Get Your Fuckin’ Hedge Cut’ bounces along with an energy I’d call youthful if I didn’t know Blackwell was a couple of years older than me. It’s a cheerful, tuneful collection, though thankfully it’s as lyrically sharp as ever. Like the Chatteris Town Hall Band CD, it’s a grower. In a week of playing it on heavy rotation I’ve gone from ‘this is really quite good’ to ‘bloody hell this is a damn good album’.”
    John Stevenson, Road.cc (9/10)
  • “No-One Cares… is far more upbeat than 2014’s Urge For Offal, with the majority of the album’s 14 tracks fizzing with more energy than a band half their age can muster. And just a quick glance at the tracklisting shows that we’re on familiar HMHB territory – Knobheads On Quiz Shows, Harsh Times in Umberstone Covert and Swervin’ The Checkatrade already sound like Blackwell classics, and there’s the usual references to cycling, TV shows and the music business.”
    John Murphy, musicOMH (4/5)
  • “It’s a welcome attack, particularly in an age when wearisome ex-boyband members inexplicably gain full-page reviews – week after week – in The Guardian. There is a significant sonic reversal here, as the band’s attack now seems curiously thunderous. Never before have Blackwell’s lyrics seemed so achingly poignant… and just at the point where they might have drifted. Suddenly, amid the drivel, this is a band who have shifted into overdrive.”
    Mick Middles, The Quietus
  • “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that if Philip Larkin or Alan Bennett wrote lines as aching as “time creeps up unseen, and it puts me back at the front of the bus… hands I once held no longer there…” GCSE students across the nation would be currently scribbling in the margins of their Anthologies analysing the beautiful tragedy of those fragile verses. So there we go, I’ve gone from punk to Hemingway via the middle classes. See, there’s no going back, is there?”
    Matthew Loughlin, Liverpool etc.
  • “After thirteen albums in 33 years, Nigel Blackwell and co may be mellowing. While earlier releases largely poked fun at minor celebrities and daytime TV to a chaotic punk rock backing, the band seem to have moved off the couch. In the end though, a minute of invective directed at people who organise batwalks shows that the Biscuits are most definitely back.”
    Stuart McHugh, Is This Music?
  • “Ultimately, the real test of a new HMHB album is how many of its songs can stand alongside the trusty standards in a live setting; on this basis, I can confidently assert we’ll be shouting lines like “Ground Control to Monty Don/The testimonial silver’s gone” for years to come.” (No.50 in ‘Top 100 Albums Of 2018’)
    Matthew Eland, Getintothis