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The Big Issue • 6 June 2016 A VERY BRITISH ODYSSEY by Peter Ross This is is a love story from B-road Britain; Man Half Biscuit songs. That really helped from unsung towns and unsung lives. Roger me.” Green, a 53 year old accountant, lives near He was the youngest man on the whole Pontefract. Karen Carter is a fortysomething stroke ward. A nurse called Joanne, perhaps civil servant from Nottinghamshire. They taking pity, would sit with him for hours on have been together for the last couple of end as he worked his way through the back years, having met during a Half Man Half catalogue. One song, Look Dad No Tunes, B i s c u i t c o n c e r t a t t h e H o l m f i r t h proved a particular challenge; once he had Picturedrome. This bright cold Spring day, cracked that, he knew he had his voice back. is a sort of anniversary; the group having His hobby now is making scale models of returned to the pretty West Yorkshire long-demolished football stadia, and by way village for one of the handful of shows they of thank you, built one of Tranmere Rovers play each year. Bogart and Bergman in for Nigel Blackwell, Half Man Half Biscuit’s Casablanca would always have Paris; Roger enigmatic singer-songwriter. Blackwell and Karen will always have Holmfirth. “Half declared himself “gobsmacked”. Man Half Biscuit,” she says, brooking no argument, “are just the best band in the Mick has a vivid memory of the first time he world.” heard the group. It was not the Road to Damascus, it was the A604 near Kettering, This is a minority view to say the least, but but it might as well have been. This would those who espouse it do so with remarkable have been the mid-1980s, when HMHB fervour. Half Man Half Biscuit, though became, for a few glorious months, the ignored by most of Britain for most of their biggest indie band in Britain, outselling 30-odd year “career”, have developed a even The Smiths. Anyway, there’s Mick hardcore band of travelling supporters who pootling along in his Ford Escort van. “I was buy every record, know all the words, dress coming home from a race meeting at up as characters from the songs, and attend Snetterton, and Annie Nightingale come on every show. These Biscuiteers make even the radio and played Dukla Prague Away the most obsessive Dylan fans, the Bobcats Kit,” he recalls. “I about crashed when I of legend, look like mere dilettantes. Their heard it. I pulled over because I had a real devotion is more akin to that displayed by crap radio and got the best reception I could fans of lower league football clubs, by putting my hand outside and touching struggling along ungritted roads to away the aerial. I thought, ‘God almighty!’ and games in dismal grounds, breath clouding in took the details down by scribbling in the the Bovril air. There’s something very dust on the dashboard.” British about it, something mundanely magical or magically mundane. Man, they’ve All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague got stories to tell. Away Kit is one of the band’s totemic songs. See also: Joy Division Oven Gloves and The Take Mick Bates. He’s 55 and lives in Trumpton Riots. The titles give the Leicester. Mick is in a wheelchair, following unfortunate impression that Half Man Half a stroke and brain haemorrhage he suffered Biscuit are a comedy group. They are funny, twelve years ago. The music of Half Man no question, but they are lots of other things Half Biscuit has been vital to his recovery. “I too – lovelorn, full of scorn, bookish, had lost the power to speak,” he explains. hookish, cock-a-snookish. The songwriting, “That lasted about a month really seriously according to the folk musician Eliza Carthy, then it came back gradually. I was in the is “bitter and very funny, which is very hospital six bloody month. To keep me going English: pathos disguised by wit and and train my voice again, I was reciting Half emotional detachment. It’s like a camera “That is the essential question,” says Nick, flying over the country, zooming in and out; “and essentially we don’t have an answer.” like watching a film of England”. “But,” says Steve, “we’re committed to it Occasionally a critic, swimming against the now. It feels like a very Biscuity thing to do, tide, sticks up a hand and proclaims Nigel doesn’t it?” Blackwell the greatest lyricist working Nick nods. “There’s a real English today. This is not news to fans. The online eccentricity about it. It sometimes feels like Half Man Half Biscuit Lyrics Project (“192 we are characters from one of Nigel’s Pop Songs Picked Over By Pedants”) offers songs.” an ongoing crowdsourced analysis of the references within the 13 albums and four Nigel Blackwell is a whippet-thin, whip- EPs. Thy Damnation Slumbereth Not, for smart man in his early fifties. He lives in instance, quotes from Thomas Hardy, Birkenhead. I meet him, briefly, after the Richard Wagner and the Child folk ballads. soundcheck. A diffident, shaven-headed Irk The Purists, meanwhile, borrows figure in a cardigan, he winced at the melodies from the hymn Give Me Oil In My volume as the band ran through a few songs. Lamp and Black Lace’s Agadoo. He has never given many interviews, and is less inclined to give them as the years go by, This music breeds obsessiveness in those so this is more in the way of a chat. He is who take it to their hearts. Consider Steve puzzled, he explains, that so many people Harman and Nick Dawes. Pals from spend so much of their lives following his London, they have spent the last three and a band from gig to gig. “Don’t they get bored? half years cycling around Britain in an Maybe it’s because it’s a good day out for attempt to visit everywhere mentioned in them, and we’re the not so good bit at the Blackwell’s songs. This project is called Half end.” Still, such loyalty has its advantages. Man Half Bike Kit. They have, so far, Blackwell feels physically sick before going managed 102 out of a total 234 destinations, performing, but when he walks out and sees and hope to have bagged the lot by 2020. familiar faces down the front, it calms him They worry, though, that Blackwell may down. have got wind of what they are doing and started adding in far-flung places just to “I don’t like playing live,” he explains. “I get thwart them. The most recent album nervous and I don’t think we’re that good, mentioned – among other locales – Plockton, and only put up with having to do it so I can Skye, Ullapool and Kirkcudbright, all lovely buy food and pay bills. Scottish spots, none of which are easily “I much prefer to simply write songs and put gettable-to from London. “As well as going them out, but there’s not enough money in to some beautiful mountainous places, we just doing that for me these days so I have to have to go to some absolute shitholes,” says psyche myself up and walk onto a stage to Nick. “We went to Tredegar in South Wales perform. It is not a good state of affairs for and it was terrifying. Everyone stared at us me to be honest but I’m stuck with it as I until we left town. On another occasion, we don’t have the skills to do anything else. I’m got told off for taking photographs outside a not qualified in anything and I am shite kebab house in Swaffham.” around the house. I do not possess any tools I meet Nick and Steve in a country pub just whatsoever and sandpaper sets my teeth on outside Holmfirth. They have spent the day edge. I buy one scratchcard a week and fill crossing the moors. They are both 41 and out a fixed-odds coupon at William Hill’s cheerfully self-aware. “I’m in PR, he works every Saturday morning in the vain hope of for a luxury yacht magazine,” says Steve. landing the big one so that I can be in a “We are exactly the kind of people who situation where I don’t have to arrange would be satirised in a Half Man Half Biscuit concerts. song, and it would be well deserved.” “I am not a gig-goer myself, particularly, and The essential question, I suppose, is why are the terminology and clichés surrounding they doing this? that world fair makes me wince … I always just want to get it all over with and go home as soon as possible. I do, however, endeavour to do the best I can whilst on Retirement beckons. But Blackwell has said stage because people have paid hard earned that if Geoff retires, he, too, will probably money for a ticket and I wholly appreciate pack it in, saying, “I couldn’t do it without that.” you.” So Geoff worries that if he stops, they’ll stop, and as he doesn’t want to This sounds rather more like Eeyore-ish deprive the world of Half Man Half Biscuit, dysfunction than a mulish refusal to he carries on. One senses that Geoff finds conform; can’t not shan’t.

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