Half Man Half Biscuit

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Image:Half Man Half Biscuit3.jpg Half Man Half Biscuit (Nigel Blackwell, Neil Crossley, Ken Hancock and Carl Henry) often abbreviated to "HMHB", are a UK rock band from Birkenhead, active sporadically since the mid-1980s, known for their satirical, sardonic and sometimes surreal songs. The band scored instant success with their first LP and first single topping the British Independent Chart, performing a must see set at the Glastonbury Festival, and rapidly becoming tipped as the 'next big thing'. The band are huge fans of Tranmere Rovers, and once famously turned down the chance to appear on seminal 80s rock show The Tube, as Tranmere were playing that night. However as their second single Dickie Davis Eyes entered the national top 40 lead singer Nigel announced his retirement claiming that rock and roll success had led to him missing too much daytime television. 1986 saw the release of a compilation album and Nigel's return to the dole.

They were long championed by DJ John Peel, for whom they recorded twelve sessions before Peel's death in 2004[1], and it was on his programme in 1990 that the band announced their return. The band played live more and more infrequently, prefering one off gigs to tours, driving home each night to sleep in their own beds and arranging concerts to co-incide with Tranmere's away fixtures.

Their musical styles often parody simple popular genres, while their lyrics are dense with cultural allusions, usually to UK popular culture and geography (particularly Wales - Blackwell is a great enthusiast of hill walking in Snowdonia, Shropshire and East Anglia) or to the more obscure backwaters of the lower divisions of British or international football. Songwriter Nigel Blackwell has a love of language and most of the songs contain several words or terms that have never before been used in popular music. It is unlikely that any one person would be able to recognise all of the terms and allusions in the songs, and websites such as hmhb.co.uk provide information to help decipher them. Blackwell's enthusiasm does not only encompass popular culture; to give just a few examples, explicit references to Sylvia Plath, the works of Thomas Hardy, and the Bible are all to be found in his lyrics. In the context of HMHB's enthusiasm for football, Blackwell's close resemblance to footballer Jaap Stam has been frequently commented upon.

As the nineties progressed Nigel's love of blues and folk became more and more apparent both in musical style and lyrical references, as befits a group who perhaps more than any other record the minutae of everyday life and culture. In 2002 Andy Kershaw dubbed them "The most authentic English folk group since the Clash". Bassist Crossley's musical tastes include many late-70s/early-80s new wave or post-punk bands, and at gigs HMHB have been heard to perform covers of tracks by acts as diverse as Joy Division, Tim Buckley and The Beach Boys. HMHB's musical abilities have progressed over the 20+ years of the band's career and on albums made in the last ten years or so.

Blackwell has also started mentioning various fictional bands who appear not only on the sleeves of HMHB releases (for example Joe Public And The General Consensus) but also in the songs -- a long essay on Evil Gazebo (and its relationship to Pankhurst) appears on the liner notes of Trouble Over Bridgewater and both bands are mentioned in the songs; assorted fake cover version acts are also mentioned in HMHB songs (an ELP cover band called HELP, for example).

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Examples of their lyrics

A full understanding of HMHB lyrics is probably predicated on being born near Liverpool in the mid/late 1960s, being unemployed (or at least not working, to permit exposure to daytime television) in the mid-1980s/early 1990s, and an obsessive hoarder of books, records, soccer trivia, and memories of bad television programmes. Blackwell's personal mythology covers a wide range of topics which are often juxtaposed in surprising and counter-intuitive ways.

The interpretation of the title of the band's first album, Back in the DHSS (1985), requires three items of background information: that the Beatles wrote a song called "Back in the USSR"; that the DHSS was the UK state welfare agency, and that at that time unemployment stood at high levels.

"Mention the Lord of the Rings just once more and I'll more than likely kill you" is the first line in the surprisingly emotional 'Dickie Davies' Eyes' (the title of which conflates Kim Carnes' 1980s ode to Bette Davis and legendary ITV sports presenter Dickie Davies). A line from this song, "Brian Moore's Head Looks Uncannily Like London Planetarium", spawned a football fanzine devoted to Gillingham F.C..

Other sports commentators come in for similar mockery; 'Gubba Look-a-likes' imagines a world full of clones of the ginger soccer commentator, and in 'Tonight Matthew, I'm Gonna Be With Jesus' we're treated to some new lyrics to 'Sweet Sixteen': You come on like a dream, Julian Bream, lips like David Vine...

A particularly celebrated couplet comes from the 1996 song "Eno Collaboration":

I know Bono and he knows Ono, she knows Eno's phone goes thus:

'Brian's not home he's at the North Pole, but if you'd like to leave a weird noise....'

Another classic Blackwellism merging football and pop-cultural references is I read the news today, oh boy, Svarc rejects new Layer terms. Which requires the listener to know both Beatles lyrics, and the history of Colchester United football club for a full appreciation.

A more recent example of this lyrical style is the line "When you're in Matlock Bath, you don't need Sylvia Plath" from the album Cammell Laird Social Club (2002).

Occasionally Nigel turns his attention to the absurdities of everyday life: There's people who can't spell 'weird' right driving 'round with thousands in the bank, but I get by; got a lot on my mind; I get by, got allotments on my mind ('Turned Up; Clocked On; Laid Off'). The same song later picks up some cues from 'American Pie': The three men I admire most -- the father, son, and Mickie Most -- took the last train for the coast, to rendezvous with Don Maclean to kill Peter Glaze. The pun on McLean vs Maclean is particularly wonderful, as is the insertion of seventies record producer Most and Maclean's awful Crackerjack sidekick Glaze and the dig at Maclean's rather earnest religious breakfast show that used to be on Radio 2.

And remember: There is nothing better in life than writing on the sole of your slipper with a biro on a Saturday night instead of going to the pub.

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