My Top 22 of 2022: #1

1. Half Man Half Biscuit – The Voltarol Years

I thought long and hard about this. Whenever Nige Blackwell releases a new album, it’s usually guaranteed to be in my Top Ten of the year. But could I really justify naming a Half Man Half Biscuit record my Number One? 

When was the last time you saw a "funny" record at the top of a music critic’s list? Although HMHB are well-regarded by the cognoscenti, there’s always a sense that their “satirical, sardonic and sometime surreal songs” (thank you, iffypedia) are not quite fit to be held up against more “serious” artists. Can art be funny? Oh shit, I’m not getting into that. Wouldn’t want to irk the purists.

Over on No Badger Required, the always eminently readable barrystubbs (formerly, or maybe still, SWC) has a weekly feature called Almost Perfect Albums, for which he invites guest contributions. I almost submitted The Volatrol Years. Only two things stopped me – first, the usual paranoid insecurities; second, I knew I wanted to write this post. But it is an almost perfect album, more almost perfect than anything else I’ve heard this year, and (I will fight even the most ardent HMHB aficionado) the best album of their entire 38 year career. Because it’s not just a “comedy” record.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some very funny songs on this record. Lyrics that still make me chuckle after 10 months solid listening.

Take the opener, I’m Getting Buried In The Morning, full of great lines, though this couplet takes some beating…

See you later, undertaker
In a while, necrophile

Like a lot of Blackwell’s material, it works on a number of different levels. Here there’s the pastiche of the Bill Haley song, coupled with the song’s morbid humour, and then the extra suggestion of darkness and disgust in that final word. When you analyse humour, it stops being funny. Must try not to do that.

The fact I still find this record amusing even though I know all the jokes off by heart says much about Nigel’s way with a line. Like all great comedians, it’s all in the delivery. The most blatant example of that is the monkey joke in Grafting Haddock In The Back Room Of The George. The first time I heard it, I almost crashed my car. Now I look forward to its arrival like a funny old friend. It’s a combination of the venom in the monkey’s voice and the exaggerated Scouse accent. That’s art to me.

Then there’s the observational stuff and the bitter Middle-Aged-Ranting, like the lost dog poster complaint on Rogation Sunday’sHere Again or the public service vigilante who’s going out of his way to bury the worst aspects of modern life (“the odd job man who never got back”, “the ukuleles outside Sports Direct”, “Kelvin Mackenzie”) In A Suffolk Ditch. (That one is particularly pleasing for me as I did briefly encounter the former Sun Editor when his company bought our radio station way back in the day… so the added detail that he’s been left “in a second-hand hessian sack” warms my heart.) Even the most overt “comedy” track on the album, the throwaway nursery rhyme singalong of When I Look At My Baby is improved by the precise conversational detail of “his snidey little mouth”.

Elsewhere, Nigel rails against “the drunken heathen gormless bores in Superdry” who attend gigs just to drunkenly heckle the band (Midnight Mass Murder), and those talentless wannabes who seized upon the Covid epidemic as an opportunity to boost their singing careers through social media, brought to life in the form of Lockdown Luke (Token Covid Song)...

God fled when God saw the bread queues
But fear not ‘cos here’s Julie Andrews
Luke will lead us through

And this is where the album starts to cross over for me. Because it’s not just about making us laugh. On his latest (clearly HMHB-influenced) record, Gavin Osborn sings that “the best way to get some people to listen is to hit them right in that funny bone”, something Nigel Blackwell has been doing for years. There’s a serious point to the piss-take of Lockdown Luke, and Nigel balances the comedy with the pathos exceedingly well on this record.

Lockdown Luke is on the regional news
Sings his thing and laps up all the reviews
And as poor Jim succumbs
Luke adds up his thumbs
Was it for this the clay grew tall?

All this and literary allusion too! That last line is a reference to Wilfred Owen's poem Futility. I’d like to pretend I knew that, but the hivemind of the HMHB Lyrics Project is much smarter than me. And it’s not the only reference to that poem on this album, or to the wider world of poetry and prose. Take the opening to the aforementioned Grafting…

When I was young
And the blood pulsed swiftly through my veins
Before age, trampling upon youth
Powdered my head
With the snows of fifty winters

Nigel freely admits he stole that opening, though he can’t remember where from… much debate about that on the HMHBLP, but it’s a lovely image anyway. 

And that’s where I’m coming from when I put this forward as my Album of the Year – there’s so much more to appreciate here than just the jokes. Nigel is continually pushing himself as a writer, tackling more serious topics such as dementia (Slipping The Escort) and toxic masculinity (Big Man Up Front). Both feature amusing lyrical detail, both also feature elements of tragedy, and the subject matter itself is not made light of, but treated but seriousness and sensitivity. Quite the tonal balancing act, and something that many lyricists wouldn’t even try, for fear of falling flat on their faces.

No-one ever loved her, nobody took her hand
Bore her mother’s dominance, suffered each demand
It was life without
 
Edgar made it tolerable, but Edgar’s in the ground
Now it’s ‘Doctors’, maybe ‘Father Brown’
It stays her thoughts
Keeps her from the brink

And then comes the pièce de résistance, the closing track, Oblong of Dreams, which I’m going to recommend to the GCSE Exam boards for inclusion in next year’s poetry anthology. It’s a meticulously crafted lyric about finding solace in nature, culminating in a genuinely uplifting singalong refrain which some feared might be a swansong… though Nigel has thankfully refuted that. Still, if it was, it would be a gorgeous way to bow out…