Half Man Half Biscuit. Where to start? Formed in the early 1980s in Birkenhead, HMHB are perhaps the best band you’ve never heard of. Nigel Blackwell’s sublime lyrics mix social commentary with sardonic surrealism, and a healthy portion of god-awful puns.

I just got hold of Achtung Bono – their recent tenth studio album. Whilst track one, “Restless Legs” is perhaps oddly underwhelming, it’s followed by “CORGI Registered Friends”, an acerbic attack on vacuous middle class bores. The opening trilogy is completed with the actually quite touching “For What Is Chatteris…”, essentially a love song about the pointlessness of the quaint country village once your love has left it behind, in which Blackwell introduces the irrisistable phrase “drive-by shouting”.

Shit arm, bad tattoo” is a thinly-veiled attack on The Libertines, the title and refrain refer to the cover of their eponymous second album.

Witness:

When she wakes up in the morning, she writes down all her dreams. Reads like the Book of Relevations, or The Beano or The Unabridged Ulysses… –The Libertines, “What a Waster”

versus

If you’re going to quote from the Book of Revelation, don’t keep calling it the Book of Revelations. There’s no “s”, it’s the Book of Revelation. As revealed to St. John the Divine. –HMHB, “Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo”

“Surging Out Of Convalescence” is another rant about the things in life with which we’re all familiar, but only Blackwell has the nerve to actually mention: “Is your child hyperactive, or is he perhaps a twat?” rails against the trend of applying labels rather than correction to wayward youth, whilst “I wrote to the Horse and Hounds, to gloat over what I’d done. I’d stored their magazine, in a data retrieval system” highlights the stupidity of the copyright blurb in the first pages of every bloody magazine you buy, of which nobody is ever going to take the slightest bit of notice.

“Upon Westminster Bridge” begins with a bass guitar picking out the melody of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and just when you think it’s going to turn into another of their “list songs” (ITMA, Referee’s Alphabet, Breaking News), Nigel comes out with “If Jesus came to Earth today, they’d crucify him straight away, upon a cross of MDF, and they’d use ‘no need for nails’”. Then a time signature change and we’re finished off rather nicely with a somewhat unorthodox version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”:

Spoiling good Friday, my true love sent to me:

12 drummers singing
11 chairmen dancing
10 mascots whinging
9 stewards flapping
8 christening invites
7 cows a-barking
6 vicars strumming
Nick fucking Knowles
4 boring words
Carphone Warehouse and Matalan
And a pulled-up at Bangor-On-Dee

“Joy Division Oven Gloves”, quite aside from being the best song title I’ve seen in several years, not only manages to be both the catchiest and most surreal song on the album, but also makes some kind of point about the incessant commercialisation and capitalist culture marauding its way into the last holy ground – music itself. It then segues into traditional song to end with “My Grandfather’s clock was too tall for the shelf, so I sold it and opened up a stall… selling Joy Division Oven Gloves”.

“Mate of the Bloke” I already knew from a performance on Andy Kershaw’s show a few years back, and is a rousing endorsement of the side-benefits of being a “mate of the bloke who sets up the PA”, whilst “Asparagus Next Left” warns of the unseen gruesome dangers lurking behind the roadside signs imploring drivers to stop for assorted fruit and vegetable produce: “‘Ooh, ooh, rhubarb – let’s go!’ She’s still not been accounted for…”

“Depressed Beyond Tablets”, quite aside from garnering praise simply for lifting the title from Chris Morris‘ gloriously biting Brass Eye series of yesteryear, not only perhaps deservingly chastises the recent music scene’s love of songs of depression and angst (Emo, argh), but manages to sum itself up wonderfully for the sake of this paragraph with the one-upmanship of “Belle Epoque sang ‘Black Is Black’? Yeah, well I sing ‘Black is Black is Black is Blacker’”.

“Bogus Official (public information tune)” is exactly what is says on the tracklist, and swiftly brings us to “Letters Sent”, which although on ocassion is lyrically perhaps a little impenetrable, still contains the joyously downbeat “Leisure centre cashpoint. Always out of order. And there’s too much chlorine in the pool”.

“Twydale’s Lament” is probably the most musically complex piece, managing to effortlessly flirt between a range of time signature and keys, wonderfully conveying the rage of the opening line “Indicate then, you stupid bastard – how was I supposed to know that you intended to go left, I’m not a mind reader… You should be cast away into the fiery pit – and in the fiery pit there are eternal sleeping policemen. ” The mid-section riffs along to Nigel’s spoken monologue about taking elastic bands discarded by his postman and taking them to the pub in order to flick cigarettes out of his mouth. Then we mellow out for the closing refrain of “Gouranga gouranga. Yes, I’ll be happy – when you’ve been arrested for defacing the bridge”. If you’ve ever driven under a certain motorway bridge in the north-west, you can’t help but punch the air in elated agreement with this particular line.

Finally and all too soon, we close with “We Built This Village On A Trad. Arr. Tune”, not only a terrific riposte to Starship’s worst song ever, but a jolly upbeat finale containg gems such as “It fills me with joy to see moshers out jogging”, and “graduated to solids disturbingly early”, themselves shoved unceremoniously aside by the awe-inspiring “It’s a cricketing farce with a thickening plot- Act 1, Scene 1: Brenda Blethyn gets shot”.

Twelve tracks. Forty minutes. Anyone who didn’t grow up in the UK in the 80s or 90s won’t understand most of the references, and it won’t make any impression whatsoever on the charts – but it’s my record of the year so far.