Half Man Half Biscuit – 90 Bisodol (Crimond)

In one of the most amazing about-turns in recent pop music history Birkenhead satirists Half Man Half Biscuit have abandoned their traditional parochial approach to cross the Atlantic in order to work with Kanye West & Armand Van Helden on a triple-disc prog-rock concept album examining the post-crash breakdown of law & order in the Western World from a dialectic perspective.

As if.

For many of us the arrival of a new Biscuit platter is a BIG THING. I still haven’t worked out whether I got up before my son last Sunday morning as both of us raced to download their latest effort 24 hours before its physical release. This is the band’s 12^th album in a 26 year (!!) career and if you’ve heard any of the previous 11 then you will have a pretty good idea of what it sounds like. HMHB are the epitome of an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” band but with an acute sense of self-awareness, most memorably displayed on CSI:Ambleside’s Lord Hereford’s Knob - great title - when they sang “All of our songs sound the same” before following this up with lines from two of their earlier efforts. In assessing any new HMHB release the key question is, I think, “How witty/clever are the songs this time out?” and the answer here is “Very”.

There’s the usual assortment of seemingly random cultural reference points, including: Gok Wan, Swarfega, Ross Kemp, Dignitas, Dick Turpin, Betterware, Jim Beglin, Watership Down, Johnny Cash (“I shot a man in Tesco just to watch him die”), an oil painting by Mercy Rimell entitled “The Raging Ostler”, Kathleen Ferrier, Oranjeboom, the Duke of Westminster, Tories at Cornbury, a Ben Sayers 4-iron, Cadfael, Tommy Walsh’s Eco House, Iceland stores and, in the surreal Descent of the Stiperstones, “The actress  Lynette McMorrough who used to play Glenda in Crossroads”, who proceeds to explain how she is reliving her previous soap-star life by assembling a collection of dolls resembling her TV family.  A particular favourite is when Left Lyrics in the Practice Room drops in a very brief refrain of “Whoah Black Sabbath, bam-a-lam, whoah Black Sabbath, bam-a-lam”.

Main man Nigel Blackwell has always had a black side to his sense of humour but a lot of the content on 90 Bisodol (Crimond) is even darker than usual - the body-count on this record is remarkably high! Excavating Rita is about… well, try to work it out - it’s a companion piece to Jimmy Cross’s I Want my Baby Back - and has a melody (yes, really!) which is very mid-period Beatles. The Coroner’s Footnote is a delightful little ditty, borrowing most of the tune of Black Velvet Band, which concerns a lovelorn fool’s attempt to commit suicide by throwing himself under the train on which his former sweetheart is leaving; this culminates in as great a couplet as I’ve heard about the selfishness of such an act: “Well he thought of a love unrequited and he thought of a life full of pain, it's a pity he didn't spare a thought for the poor bastard driving the train.” Highlight RSVP, another in Nigel’s catalogue of lost-love songs, is built around a lilting waltz-time Irish air and details the pain of the narrator finding himself catering at the wedding of his ex. Just in case you haven’t worked out what’s going on the last third of the song drops in a brief snatch of Here Comes the Bride which cleverly merges into Chopin’s Funeral March to suggest exactly where this particular yarn is heading!

It’s not all death & despair though - there’s still plenty of room for Nigel’s pedantic attitude. Fun Day in the Park reels off a list of inviting propositions from a poster (“Punch and Judy, Shetland ponies, hot dogs, beat the goalie, soft play area with free bananas, Iguana Andy and his iguanas” etc.) – very much in the manner of, again, the (other) Fab Four’s Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite – culminating in “…and much much more. For further enquiries ring this number. I rang it and asked about the much much more. I was greeted with awkward silence. They had lied to me! They had lied to me on their posters!”

The centrepiece (masterpiece?) is probably Rock And Roll is Full of Bad Wools – a 5 minute Blackwell stream of consciousness rant in the manner of CSI’s National Shite Day – which regales us with the tale of a pop star’s appearance on (presumably) Sky’s Soccer AM alongside Heston Blumenthal. All is going so well – when asked about his favourite footy teams he replies “England, Chelsea, Accy Stanley and all the band love watching Barca” before Blackwell describes an unfolding nightmare:
“But then, disastrously, they ask him casually ’You come from Leigh-on-Sea, do you ever get to Roots Hall?’ Which to him means f*** all. Can only look askance and cast a sideways glance. Could use some help with this but Heston's gone for a piss. Needs something to deflect, enter Ruddock left. ‘More doughnuts!’ shout the crew, high art shall not ensue.”

Interest in this avenue exhausted, Nigel then takes the song off to the pub, where he “… went along to what I thought was ‘Curry Night’… it transpired that Curry Night were there to play Crowded House & David Gray” and delivers one of the subtlest put-downs on the album: “They take requests – ‘play one the drummer knows'’”.

90 Bisodol (Crimond) is not going to convert many (any?) non-believers but for HMHB acolytes this is bliss.

90 Bisodol (Crimond) is available now from Probe Plus.