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No. Stop. It's second rate comedy and second rate indie and the two don't meet at the middle to become any kind of expression. It's every student band and every coward's desire to make art only to back away with comedy as a get-out clause. It's worse than that, it's Viz put to guitars.
If we're going to do this vein of stuff (and it's hitting me harder every day how awful most of the eighties music that meant a lot to me at the time really is) The Fall, for sure. Bogshed? Blimey, that's a take-no-prisoners band right there.
Fintan-
I think you miss the point with HMHB; they are both funny AND sad in equal measure. In any case, to talk in terms of second-rate comedy sounds like snobbery to me (I'm not having a dig, just saying what it sounds like). Something will make you laugh or it won't, I certainly didn't affect my chuckle when I heard this for the first time:
"Down in the High Street somebody careered out of Boots without due care or attention. I suggest that they learn some pedestrian etiquette: i.e sidle out of the store gingerly, embrace the margin."
That's every suburban town high-street, that is, and it's funny because it's true, funnier still because it's well put.
Just my opinion, but I think Nigel Blackwell would stare at you vacantly if you told him he was trying to "make art".
And so what it they were a band students once listened to, they don't now. Maybe they should?
The_Kindness_of_Trees
Ha Ha, excellent. I guess you're a fan of Annie Lennox/ have a German Shepherd dog called Prince/were due to appear on the Crystal Maze, etc.
Seriously, Half Man Half Biscuit weren't some 'wacky' alternative comedy type band - it's satire really (the aspiring middle classes being the object of their ridicule, mainly).
It's no coincidence that, when asked what current 'Indie' bands Nigel Blackwell might be into, he paused for a moment, before proffering, "The Fall..."
In any case, they're misanthropes, and there's nothing wrong with that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-fWf_SaPwE