Kill, kill, kill, stab murder and dispatch
Charles Exford writes:
“So do you class yourselves as a comedy band? Is that fair?” asked Marc Riley between songs during HMHB’s recent 6Music Session.
“We don’t ourselves, no.” At this point Nigel gives a long, resigned sigh. “What we tend to do is, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, which often in music terms then gets lumped into comedy, which I don’t personally think is the case.”
Personally, If I’d been the presenter, asking the questions shortly after the first two new tracks, which had featured a life coach dying in a car crash, a murdered body in a bothy, and a mass poisoning, I might myself have put it more like this:
“Death, drunkenness, desperate poverty, diabolical dealings, incest, murder and abandonment. Does this reflect your current state of mind?” (Used to be in Evil Gazebo)
And the interviewee might then have replied “More murders per album than Nick Cave, more suicide than Morrissey, and more general mayhem than in the Best of Johnny Cash, but most people still just seem to quote the jokes.”
THE MURDER BALLADS
Let’s take a few examples:
MURDER
Plans to assassinate our autocratic Mayor (Trumpton)
You said you’d love to so I murdered your family
‘cos I hate the Rocky Horror Picture Show (Our Tune )
I’ve only got 3 bullets and there’s 4 in Motley Crue (Upon Westminster)
Act One, Scene One – Brenda Blethyn gets shot (WBTV)
Now you are gone forever, shot by your Uncle Trevor (Reflections)
Kill, kill, kill, stab murder and dispatch (Petty Sessions)
I’ll murder the verger (With Goth)
Drink the warm blood of the borough surveyor (With Goth)
Tiptoe to the front row of the Korn Show
With a sub-machine-gun (Makes the Room Look Bigger)
Tourniquet matricide (Footprints)
Sonia Lannaman sleeps with the fishes tonight (whiteness)
Rendezvous-ed with Peter Glaze to kill Don Maclean
His head was found on the driving range and his body has never been found (24HGP)
Let’s trash the Murder Mystery Weekend (Monmore)
SUICIDE
Reasons to be miserable, another good excuse to be dead (Reasons to be miserable)
He reached out for the jar
He swallowed every last pill and he lay back on his duvet
A Haliborange overdose is perhaps not the right way
To ooh-ooh, to kill yourself (Sealclubbing)
Stringy Bob still on suicide watch (N.S.D.)
I take my rope down to the crossroads to bring my poor heart ease (Hair Like)
Gary doesn’t live here any more,
Gary took a dive from the seventh floor (Soft verges)
You’ll find me dying casually on the fourteenth fairway (Our Tune)
Just before you take that length of hosepipe
Just before you lock the garage door (Faithlift)
Dock Road can lad on the end of a rope
My suicide to come (Shropshire)
OTHER VIOLENT MAYHEM WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT RESULT IN DEATH
A hammer hit my head and I couldn’t understand
Behind me stood a maniac laughing at me saying:
“I like to watch the adverts…” (Architecture)
You fold your grandma’s neck (Architecture)
Bludgeon chartist demonstrators in the square (Letters sent)
Careering down the aisles like one big psychopathic carnivore (Nerys)
Through garden gates I’ve shoved you
Then there’s the time I slashed you (Reflections)
“And now subversion’s in the air in the shape of flying bricks
And keep Mrs Honeyman right out of sight
Cos there’s gonna be a riot….
….With windmill sails and bombs with nails they smash the town hall door” (Trumpton)
A fight broke out in the bar
Third-Rate Les in his Burberry Fez
Had gone just a little too far (27 Yards)
A man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in Millets (N.S.D.)
And I heard her screaming
And I found her bleeding
And she wasn’t breathing
So I did what I could with my gas mask (Mr. Cave)
Fisher goes beserk. Mayhem. Police cars. (The Ballad of CF)
Let’s go the Metbar, and cause an altercation” (Uffington)
The bottles they rained (With Goth)
21-man brawl (Referee’s Alphabet)
ACCIDENTAL CARNAGE
Small children trampled in the exodus (Asparagus)
Stretch limousine … plunging headlong into a ravine (Evening)
Tour bus crashes and you die (Nove)
THREATENED VIOLENCE
Gun-towers to keep the hippies away (Corgi Registered Friends)
Mention the Lord Of the Rings just once more and I’ll more than likely kill you (Dickie Davies)
one day there’s going to be blood on the quad (Blood on the Quad)
That’s what I’ll do, and we’ll all die together (With Goth)
“You’re a dead man, Fisher” (The Ballad of CF)
I’ve got a shotgun round the back (CAMRA man)
MORTAL CURSING
I hope your plane back home’s a DC-10 (Albert Hammond)
You shall be cast away into the fiery pit
And in the fiery pit there are eternal sleeping policemen (Twydale)
My rejoinder was “Die,
You off-beat cabaret type.” (Doreen)
Go on. Tweet a link to this page.
21 Letters Sent:
Federal Metronome
I’ve always thought of HMHB more as social satire than comedy. You want comedy, you listen to Splodgenessabounds.
Professor Exford, I think it remiss of you not to quote the entire verger murdering section from With Goth On Our Side, for surely the line “And I’ll write on his headstone, here lies Jones the Corpse” also merits a mention?
Also, under accidental Carnage maybe we should include “It’s a long old vehicle that runs you down” from See That My Bike’s Kept Clean.
Just a thought.
Oct 28th, 2010
Vendor of Quack Nostrums
Top categorisation Charles. May I humbly suggest an additional entry for each category.
MURDER
Oh sucking on the bleached bones
Of my dead mates. (Epiphany)
SUICIDE
So now we got a suicide pact with Goole. (San Antonio)
OTHER VIOLENT MAYHEM WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT RESULT IN DEATH
Llewelyn-Bowen, two Carols
Go on Bobby, both barrels. (Problem Chimp)
ACCIDENTAL CARNAGE
I danced a while for Andy and crashed his Cadillac. (Skiffle)
THREATENED VIOLENCE
J is for ju-jitsu, which I quite intend to display given a dark alley and some of the narky blerts I’ve encountered. (Alphabet)
MORTAL CURSING
Millions now earmarked will later be wasted. (Country Practice)
Oct 28th, 2010
Bobby String
Here’s another little stat for you, Professor Exford. Of all the lyrics mentioned above, “I hope your plane back home’s a DC10″ is probably the one responsible for the most carnage. A total of 1431 people (passengers and crew) have died as a result of the McDonnell Douglas DC10 either crashing or being hijacked. I bet Rain Man wouldn’t have flown on one of those!
Ô¿Ô
Oct 30th, 2010
Bobby String
Also, from the same song, I would humbly suggest we include, under the heading of SUICIDE:
“How I long for a dangerous wave
so I can surf myself towards an early grave”
Ô¿Ô
Oct 30th, 2010
Wobs
Murder Ballads alone has at least 64 deaths. More if you include animals. Mr Cave has quite a head start all things considered.
Think Nigel has a long way to go.
Although Ms Jaques doesn’t fair too well in her post mortal coil shuffling wotsits.
Nov 3rd, 2010
Charles Exford
I ike to think that the entire Barmy Army get massacred in Petty Sessions, not just the named trio.
An entire wedding party certainly does in RSVP.
Nov 3rd, 2010
Lee's Twenty-first
Suicide:
And I’ll die on the floor and leave a note on the door
Saying ‘This ape has just left Gibraltar’
(1966 and all that)
Nov 12th, 2010
Gregg Z
…as for me, I’ll take the TGV to Zurich and jump off the roof of Dignitas.”
(Tommy Walsh’s Eco House)
Yeah, comedy. I’m reminded of the Python episode where the word “SATIRE” flashed on the screen in subtitle, during one of the bits.
Assuming Nigel doesn’t wear a similar sign round his neck, when entering the BBC studios for a session, perhaps Lard ought to venture off the script now and again. Having been sacked from a “comedy band” before, you’d think he’d know the difference…
Jan 14th, 2011
Marc
I like to think of it as intelligent humour. Or is that just another phrase describing satire? Either way, the North West (especially Liverpool) hold the patents for it.
Jan 25th, 2011
Al Bundy
ACCIDENTAL CARNAGE
Wait a minute. Bridge St? The overhead railway Bridge St? Oh my God! HELLLLLLLLLEN!!!
Feb 1st, 2011
WASP
Also: “Off to see the Bootleg Beatles…”
Apr 11th, 2011
patrick
“The horrible sincerity of Miriam Stoppard makes me want to go out and commit mass murder”
Jul 2nd, 2011
Paul Rodgers medodgers
Murder:
Suspected murderer of Tupac murder suspect murdered.Used To Be In Evil Gazebo
I think there’s 4 in that alone.
General death (possibly following carnage)
My favourite: A rare instrumental: Visitor For Mr Edmonds.
Oct 4th, 2011
Jason
I think this page needs a good solid update after 90B(C)’s arrival. And a “necrophilia” category.
RSVP alone takes the death toll to significant new heights
Oct 28th, 2011
bobbybottler
Bad Losers refers to the battle of Rourke’s Drift – death toll in the hundreds.
And if the light at the end of the tunnel is the light of an oncoming train, is that potential accidental carnage?
Dec 8th, 2011
John Burscough
So, to sum up, we have an album named after, and featuring on its cover, a method of suicide.
Most of the characters in it (to quote Tom Stoppard) die heroically, comically, ironically, slowly, suddenly, disgustingly, charmingly, or from a great height.
Death occurs by poisoning (both ethylene glycol and sodium bicarbonate), asphyxiation (carbon monoxide and bricking up), collision (automotive, locomotive and terrestrial) and shooting in Tesco.
An actress mourns a fictional dead father, a mother (possibly two) mourns a dead son, a cyclist mourns (shall we say) a dead lover. A cow is hit by a train, an eel lies decomposing in a fridge. A fiend and a friend both rise from the tomb, and a head is dissolved in acid.
All I’m saying is, if Unknown Pleasures had had as much death in it Ian Curtis would still be on suicide watch.
Dec 13th, 2011
The low drone of the treadmill
John: An excellent summary of 90 Bisodol’s morbid fixation, however I feel compelled to point out that unlike bricking up, carbon monoxide won’t kill you by asphyxiation, but by poisoning (specifically it nobbles your haemoglobin so it can’t carry oxygen about any more). Carbon dioxide will asphyxiate, and consequently is a much nastier way to die. (I’m told. My preference remains a single gunshot to the back of the head.)
I occasionally get a big breath of carbon dioxide while scraping around in the bottom of the dry ice bin at work, and it’s nae the best.
Jan 29th, 2012
John Burscough
Quite right that death by carbon monoxide is a form of poisoning, LDT. However, there are various types of asphyxiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphyxia, including being nobbled by carboxyhaemoglobinaemia. Or at least so they told me at medical school.
Jan 29th, 2012
John Anderson
@Low Drone
When you’re scraping around in the bottom of the dry ice bin are you ever compelled to shout “Hey Jason, they’ve got no dry ice.”?
Jan 29th, 2012
Paul F
“First time caller, long time listener Robbie.”
Feb 1st, 2012
The low drone of the treadmill
@ John B: Cheerfully retracted!
@ John A: Every single time.
Feb 1st, 2012
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