The Strange Death Of Liberal England - A Day Another Day

These scamps come from Portsmouth, home of docks, ports, ships, boats, water and sea. And this is their new single, which I'm enjoying, it's good.

The song opens up with the most pleasant of noises, it’s a lovely stroll in the park, in the tree to my left, there’s a little tinker plonking away on his glockenspiel, across on the rockery, a cheeky young knave plucks away on his guitar, and behind the hedge shaped like a cock (chicken, perverts) is a singer, doing that David Byrne/Clap your Hands Say Yeh! thing.

It’s a beautiful, therapeutic little number, but hang on, what beast is this that is creeping up on me from the bowling green. Fuck it, this park analogy thing that I’m trying isn’t working. Basically, it starts off dead canny, nice and quiet, no bother at all, then it just launches into this big psychotic rant, this big scary monster, shouting it’s message at me. The song is like some sort of multi personality character, in the way that it launches from nursery rhyme to all out assault.

My auntie Joan was a schizophrenic. Well, she wasn’t my auntie, she was my mother’s, but you don’t have "Great Aunties" do you, and you definitely don’t have "Great Aunt’s". You do have them, but it’s much too middle class to say, “I’m off to my Great Aunt’s on Sunday”. Saying that like, back in those days, it would have been more like, “I’m off to my Great Aunt’s on Sunday, to clean up the big pile of piss she’s left in her kitchen and to clean her arse”. Bit more working class and rock and roll eh?

I miss my schizophrenic auntie Joan, she used to always come round ours, crying her eyes out, screaming at my mother, saying people were trying to kill her, it was brilliant. As soon as she came in, we’d have to get the brandy from under the stairs, because that’s where the spirits are kept, under the stairs. She always needed a quick double brandy for the shock (?) and to take the edge off things.

She was fantastic, she used to buy a pair of men’s shoes and put them in mud and then go round on her hands and knees, making footprints on her carpets with the shoes, then go in her cupboard, get all her bits of paper out from an old tin, and throw them all over the bedroom. Then she’d stub cigarettes out on the carpet and smash some plates in the kitchen. Next, she’d get on the phone to my mother and the police, saying “he” had been in her house, his footprints were there and he’d been going through her stuff. Fuck knows who “he” was, or was meant to be.

After finally being disowned, after being exposed for the fraud that she was, she done off with some bloke she’d met at the head hospital and they went away and got married. Don’t even know if she’s still alive, what a brilliant woman though, wish I had've thought on to give her a guitar and see if she could bang a tune out, they reckon there’s a fine line between genius and madness. She might have been the next Syd Barrett, or something.

This single is very good though. If it really was a multi personality type person, it would have pinched bits from Arcade Fire, from Clap Your Hands Say Yeh!, from Hope of the States, loads more actually, but comparing people is for losers, and I’m not a loser, honest.

The single is out now, you can get more information, and listen to the single at their MySpace, and here is the video............