Label: Probe Plus Format: CD
And they’re back. Nigel Blackwell‘s lads are here to give anyone, and anything, they think worthy a damn good kicking. And they’ll do it catchily too, and with some great jokes. Quite some expectation, and opener “Restless Legs”, while funny, seems remarkable targetless. After this breezy opening, though, we get one of the two most acerbic tracks on the album, “CORGI Registered Friends”, a pop-punk stormer which sees Nigel firing his arrows of pure vitriol into the middle-class idyll: “You call Glastonbury ‘Glasto’/You’d like to go there one day/When they’ve put un the guntowers/To keep the hippies away”. The way he enunciates the line “Ralph’s in Brize Norton” is a thing of joy in itself- never has spite been quite so funny.
Except when it’s aimed at Pete Doherty, the headline-grabbing junky no-mark once of The Libertines. Who is the target of the other standout track, the catchily-titled (and catchy) “Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo”- “If you’re gonna quote from the Book of Revelation/Don’t go calling it the Book of Revelations/There’s no ‘s’., it’s the Book of Revelation/As revealed to St John The Divine”. I would say it was a damn sight better than Babyshambles, but that would be damning with faint praise. Instead I’ll say it’s ace, and a contender for my favourite song of the year so far, tearing the little fuck the new one he so richly deserves. It’s not all hatred and sneering, though- uncharacteristically, they come up with the strangely touching (yet still savagely funny) “For What Is Chatteris…” (“What’s Chatteris if you’re not there?/I may as well be in Ely or St Ives”). Like all Half Man Half Biscuit stuff, though, you’re not gonna get everything out of it on the first listen. As with the music of The Birthday Party, or a particularly amusing disease, it needs to be lived with for a while to discover its full armoury.
An instant attention-grabber, though, merely on the strength of the title (and the wondrous liner photos) is “Joy Division Oven Gloves”. Apparently a satire on consumerism, it’s perversely made my life feel somewhat incomplete without a pair of my own. To give away all the jokes would, however, ruin the album. Suffice it to say, I’d put Blackwell up there with Morrissey in the “cruel yet funny” school of Wildean humour. But I’d bung him up a couple of notches for missing out the whole “self-importance” part. He’s clearly one of the best lyricists in the country, with his Mark E Smith-style “bored yet angry” delivery having lost none of its power over the years, and still capable of the kind of one-liners you’d have expected him to run out of years ago (my personal favourite this time round being “Is your child hyperactive? Or is he, perhaps, a twat?”. Fittingly, Achtung Bono is dedicated to long-time Half Man Half Biscuit champion John Peel. It’s a shame he didn’t live to hear it.
-Fuckin’ ‘ell, it’s Deuteronemu 90210!-
