The Half Man Half Biscuit Lyrics Project

With the Peel/BBC Sessions material being so readily available online nowadays, it’s the EP-only obscurities which are probably the least well-known HMHB songs. Ecclesiastical Perks can be obtained – expensively – online if it somehow passed you by! There are a couple of guesses towards the end, which some of you might have thoughts on.

M-6-ster is somewhere up around the pinnacle of the very small hillock that is Great British Road Songs. As with many of the noisier songs from the HMHB songbook, there are a few indistinguishable lyrics – from the five people who submitted this, we got five different takes on the last verse, and – more surprisingly – four different takes on the chant at the end. So I’ve just gone with my favourites, although your mileage may differ.

…and if they ever did, I’m quite sure they’d do it to the backdrop of some Casiotone toy keyboard, as hinted at in £24.99 From Argos. I’m sure someone will tell us the exact model being played.

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?

Moody Chops is about all those musicians who continue to play the impoverished, tortured artist even when they’re on the way to sharing G&Ts in the Long Room with Mick and Sir Tim. Or at least that’s how I’ve always read it. One or two people seem to think it’s specifically about Morrissey though. And by the way, the Dutch were never going to decide they could reclaim the IJsselmeer after all, and achieve it in six years, by 2003. Apparently.

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.”

On the day when England actually beat the bloody Aussies at Lords for once, it seemed appropriate to add a cricket-related song, of which there are surprisingly few in the Half Man Half Biscuit songbook. Fuckin’ ‘Ell It’s Fred Titmus refers to the former Middlesex and England off spinner who would have plied much of his trade at Lords (not a fiery Yorkshire pace legend, take note Kevin Sampson) and I guess is probably one of those early songs which permeated more widely into the public consciousness (as in “Half Man Half Biscuit? Aren’t they the ones who did…?”).

Fretwork Homework rather excellently captures the spirit of being in a band with yer college mates. More importantly, I’m extremely concerned for Lisa Dominique’s welfare, as her website doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2002. I only hope she hasn’t gone the way of that one out of Climie Fisher.

And so we bid a fond farewell to the magnificent but now completed McIntyre, Treadmore and Davitt with Hedley Verityesque, which namechecks no fewer than three celebrities in their sixties, who must be taking each day as it comes (if they’re aware of the frequent consequence of getting a mention in an HMHB song). I’ve never fathomed out what might be described as “Hedley Verityesque” (a certain bowling action, perhaps?). I’m sure you’ll tell me.

I’m sitting on dozens of sets of lyrics here (thanks everyone – truly) which will all get used eventually (we’re past the halfway mark now). However, I still relish a challenge, so I managed to find a song which, remarkably, nobody had contributed, and which I could take the entire blame for. Split Single With Happy Lounge Labelmates is a fine singalong, which not for the first time, becomes a “list song” in places – or are those odd items related? Another great HMHB song title, by the way. Was “Happy Lounge” a real label? I’m sure someone will tell me.