Half Man Half Biscuit
It’s hard for me to be objective about the best band around. And it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to experience these songs for the first time, squeezed into a couple of hours, and performed to a crowd that surely must be comprised mainly of people already comfortable with the idea that Nigel Blackwell’s lyrics frequently achieve a mesmerising beauty.
The evening starts with ‘The Light At The End Of The Tunnel (Is The Light Of An Oncoming Train)’ in which the lovelorn narrator laments his fate while cramming in a typically disparate array of references (fair trade cocaine in Notting Hill; Buena Vista Social Club; the Peak District; Matlock Bath; Sylvia Plath; Mrs Gibson’s jam; poor quality cocaine in the Staffordshire village of Leek; Capri; Eva Cassidy; the ‘plague village’ of Eyam; aphids in Picardy) before adapting a line from Dillinger’s 1976 single ‘Cokane In My Brain’ to extol the virtues of a town in Derbyshire (‘A knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork, that’s the way you spell New York’ becomes: ‘No frills, handy for the hills, that’s the way you spell New Mills’).
Most of the 30 or so songs that follow contain a similarly obscure mishmash of reference points. The set list spans the entire period of the band’s existence, from 1984’s ‘Back In The DHSS’ (‘Fuckin’ ‘Ell It’s Fred Titmus’; ‘99% of Gargoyles Look Like Bob Todd’ amongst others) to their latest album ‘The Voltarol Years’ (numerous songs, including, towards the end of the evening, the sublime ‘Oblong of Dreams’), and, afterwards, it is the shorter, often simpler, songs that stick in my mind:
‘Renfield’s Afoot’ (a vigorous objection to the notion of organised bat walks); ‘When I Look At My Baby (in which the realisation is made that the unusual eyebrows of the narrator’s child are an indicator of his partner’s illicit dalliance with that ‘low-down, no-good, pig-thick waster Richie Stevens’ possessor of both a ‘snidey little mouth’ and, crucially, giveaway ‘weird uneven eyebrows’) and, of course, Vatican Broadside (the singer out of Slipknot goes to Rome to see the pope; the pope is nonplussed and declines to leave his bed).
Between songs Nigel takes the opportunity to refine his pronunciation of local place names (he asks for, and receives, help with ‘Wymondham’ and makes it clear that he’s already mastered ‘Happisburgh’), declines a request to play a song that mentions Swaffham, comments approvingly on the new layout of the A14, and is prompted by a note he’d earlier made on his set list to say some appreciative words about Norwich Castle’s world-beating collection of ceramic teapots. All of this, in addition to delivering a near faultless performance of a succession of bewilderingly excellent songs, and finding time to fit in a couple of top-quality covers (‘Little Old Wine Drinker, Me’ and, during the encore, ‘Jimmy Jimmy’ by The Undertones). What more could anyone ask for?
