The Half Man Half Biscuit Lyrics Project

D’Ye Ken Ted Moult? is, shall we say, not one of the band’s most complex songs, musically or lyrically. However, unlike this one, few other HMHB songs caused their subject to shoot and kill himself within a few months of its release.

Probably the most famous example of the so-called curse of HMHB. A little over a decade after Rod Hull Is Alive – Why? was written, Rod Hull was not alive of course, which made the whole question redundant. The Watney Cup was long dead, although some of us are old enough to very much remember watching our team playing in it.

Sealclubbing lifts the title and the bit at the end from the poptastic David Essex’s 1982 Me And My Girl (Night-Clubbing). Of course in this day and age the term makes more headlines for (not) being an iPhone app.

Arthur’s Farm tells a tale as curious as any in the songbook, which I’m sure someone’s going to explain here. I’d certainly appreciate it. The end of the second verse also presciently describes the vuvuzelas many years before they’d even been invented, never mind inflicted on the world. I may regret writing that though, as it’s going to mean nothing after summer 2010. I hope.

“I think there’s a future for you in Tortured Artist circles, Nigel” says Saint John at the end of Mr Cave’s a Window Cleaner Now. The title’s from this and the song itself is a comment on grim Nick Cave stuff like this, although thankfully, somewhat more listenable.

My, how everyone laughed at the “hope your plane back home’s a DC-10″ at the time. Of course, those of us of a certain age still do. Albert Hammond Bootleg failed to finish off the artist of that ilk, and indeed, the man himself even went on to produce an equivalently-poptastic son of the same name as if to prove there is no such thing as the curse of HMHB. Stanley Rous barely lasted a year, mind.

A song with a slightly chequered history, Carry On Cremating is said to have been left off the first album (or was it the second?) although I can’t believe it was “for reasons of taste” despite apparently originally having been called The Continuous Cremation Of Hattie Jacques. Anyway, it eventually popped up on ACD as the only original (non-live) track on that strange bastardisation of Back In The DHSS.

Reasons To Be Miserable (Part 10) is an early example of a song with a spoken-word verse in it, of the kind we’d come to know and love a lot more later. “Reasons To Be Miserable” is also the title of an earlier, unrelated (and terrible) song released on the back of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and an even worse version by Stephen Fry released when his quality control department was on holiday.

I’ve always felt that 1966 And All That is a standout from the earliest days of the band, because in style and sentiment it presages so much of what was to follow. But then again I may be talking nonsense. The song originally comes from The Trumpton Riots EP, which was released a few months after the debut album Back in the DHSS. Later, when CDs became trendy, the album and the EP were combined, which is why nowadays we tend to attribute it to the album. Lev Yashin went to mind the great sticks in the sky within five years of the song being written, but Ferenc Puskas soldiered on for nearly 20 more years, despite the namecheck.

Well, despite Hannu Mikkola and Miriam Stoppard being OAPs, Architecture and Morality, Ted and Alice singularly failed to finish either of them off, although the same can’t be said of no-longer-early-but-now-rather-late Diana. And I can’t find any record of Jane Scott, a business I’m led to believe.