The prolific indie legends of Birkenhead fronted by the rapier wit of singer-songwriter Nigel Blackwell return with their 16th LP in four gloriously ironic decades, following 2022’s The Voltarol Years. Released last month, but it’s never too late to enjoy or write about them. If you’re familiar with HMHB, then you’ll get exactly what you’d hope and expect, if not, a treasure trove here and beyond awaits you. Highlights include: Record Store Day (“Hip hip hooray, it’s Record Store Day / You’re going to need a second mortgage”); Horror Clowns Are Dickheads (“Hardly M.R. James/ Hardly Edgar Allan Poe/ Get a decent mob together/ They don’t wanna know”); Rawlplugs of Yesteryear (“Rawlplugs of yesteryear/ Just trying to write a song to break the USA / In the 1960s the jute fibre was replaced by a thermoplastic device / An improvement, doubtless, though nowhere near as romantic”). A witty reference to the Cliff Richard’s 1960s hit Goodbye Sam, Hello Samantha in Goodbye Sam, Hello Samaritans – bemoaning some poor football results due to a missing player: “I saw Badly Drawn Boy in a badly parked car/ With a badly grazed elbow/ What can you do? / On a badly lit street I was badly in debt/ Badly in need of a goal at Field Mill/ Four draws, there’s always someone lets you down/ Four draws, if only you were still around.” The Bliss of The Hereafter: “Comedy, tragedy, neither much appeal to me/ Nor pathos or farce/ Trying to get a trestle table/ Back off Beth Tweddle/ Such a pain in the arse/ I use obvious rhyme/ When I haven’t much time …” There’s much more to enjoy, such as the sheer level of detail, ,variety and gentle melancholy on No-One Likes A Polymath, but perhaps the funniest and also most tenderly tragic, is Falmouth Electrics, about someone who loses their job and decides to become a ventriloquist. Obviously it’ll all end in not beers, or even gears, but tears: “Seventeen years at Falmouth Electrics/ Then I got made redundant along with everyone else/ Some of the other chaps got taken on at the new Morrisons/ That wasn’t for me though, I wanted something anew/ I bought a ventriloquist dummy from a shop in Redruth/ I took it on home, pierced its ears and back-combed its hair/ With eyeliner on, it looked like Pete Murphy a bit/ He could talk fairly well though he couldn’t pronounce the letter B/ I said,/ “That’s OK lad. It makes life much easier for me.”/ He said his name was Gary/ I said: “Do you mean Barry?”/ He said: “Yeah”. A treasured national institution. Out on RM Qualtrough.
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