The Half Man Half Biscuit Lyrics Project

Slight Reprise is a 55-second instrumental. All theories about its deep meaning and reason for existence gratefully accepted. Anyway, I left the easiest until last, and that finishes off Trouble Over Bridgwater, still for me not only the finest album title in HMHB’s discography, but one of the best titles by anyone, ever.

At this stage, we’ve also completed Achtung Bono, Cammell Laird Social Club, CSI: Ambleside, Editor’s Recommendation EP, Eno Collaboration EP, Four Lads Who Shook The Wirral, McIntyre, Treadmore and Davitt and Saucy Haulage Ballads. I’d say that from all those songs, there are fewer than half a dozen lines or words which nobody seems sure about, and no more than a dozen or so which remain at all contentious, so we’re not doing badly. Mind you, with revelations like the handwritten lyrics to Joy Division Oven Gloves revising our consensus on the first line of a much loved song, who knows what surprises are still in store between now and the voyage to the bottom of the road?

The title of Third Track Main Camera Four Minutes refers to some bizarre captioning which made a fleeting appearance on Match of the Day a few years ago, comfortably telling you which camera Auntie Beeb was using (presumably as a response to Sky’s interactive select-your-own-camera facility). Like so many great HMHB titles, it then has no relationship to the song. Frampton Comes Alive! does have an exclamation mark, and gets namechecked in Wayne’s World 2: “Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide.”

Bottleneck At Capel Curig is a live favourite and at first glance seems pretty straightforward, but the three people who I’m grateful to for sending in this one arrived at some wildly differing interpretations of one or two lines. I’ve taken the consensus, and listened to two session versions as well as the original, but I’m sure there may be a few, er, suggestions.

Well, hardly the curse of HMHB, but in the week when Countdown became Carol-less, it seemed appropriate to add Emerging From Gorse. And anyway, it’s been a long time since I put a song on the site which nobody had sent in*, and which doesn’t appear to be anywhere else on the entire whole interweb: another original! A great song, as it happens, with the music and football obscurometer going well into the red.

Visitor for Mr Edmonds is presumably the sound of beardy’s career/heart monitor wobbling and fading. To date, the composition has not reduced him to the same state of (de)composition as writing about Messrs Hull, Fisher, Jackson, Gerulaitis etc. Oh well. As there’s not much else to say, perhaps I can encourage you all to visit Word magazine’s attempt to revive Peely’s Festive Fifty, and vote for your favourite CSI:Ambleside selection!

Nove On The Sly appears to refer to listening to newsreader, “voiceover artist” and easy-listening DJ called Charles Nove. On the sly, of course. The song is also a chance for the band to make a song in an electro-style, as it’s about all that sort of malarkey.

There are many people referenced in Half Man Half Biscuit songs who’ve died – well, you’d expect that through natural attrition – but when many of them pass away unexpectedly, you begin to hope you never get one written about you. (“Rod Hull is Alive – Not”?). Anyway, when the fantastical Ballad Of Climie Fisher was written, including the line “You’re a Dead Man, Fisher”, who was to guess that Mr Fisher would be just that, within months, aged 39? For the more masonically inclined, the stone referred to as “Canterbury Spur” is actually called “Canterbury Spar”.

As it’s the hundredth song on the site, of course we ought to do a commensurately high profile one. So here’s the original album version of Twenty Four Hour Garage People from 2000, since which there have been almost as many versions as live performances. My, how the price of Pringles has varied over the years.

Irk The Purists rescues all sorts of bands from the dumpster to annoy a certain breed of person. And anyway, who hasn’t got a sneaking admiration for one or two of the acts mentioned? (Also though, I’m never sure what a couple of them are doing in this song in the first place…)

Mathematically Safe is under two minutes, quotes the title half a dozen times, and yet is quite perfect. I always dreamed about meeting a girl who would regard “I wanna make you mathematically safe” as an attractive comment. Ho hum.