This gig took place the weekend before Christmas, 1985, not long after I’d first interviewed Half Man Half Biscuit.
PROBE PLUS CHRISTMAS PARTY
The System, Liverpool
Melody Maker, January 11, 1986
IT SAYS something about the musical climate at the moment that no-one dances for the group with punk leanings and lots of people dance to the group with folk leanings. And it says something about the musical flavour of the moment that an audience with as much leaning as you'd expect the weekend before Christmas gives its greatest approval to the group that are more individual than either. It says something, too, for Liverpool's Probe Plus label that they've assembled three stablemates of such diversity.
First on are DEMENTIA: black clothes, blond hair and yet to learn that leather trousers and a broken guitar string don't make a punk band and that adrenalin and simplicity are of more use than designer haircuts and designer guitar playing.
The biggest dose of adrenalin comes at the end of the evening in the form of GONE TO EARTH. Generally spoken of in terms of folk - and they're more Fairport than Pogues at the moment - they don't exactly look like folkies. They're T-shirted and short-haired, most of them, but look - there's the spikiest member of Dementia playing guitar. There are interesting prospects in sight. Mostly, though, it’s the fiddle that dominates, a manic virtuoso, and around him the group plays hard and fast, aided by a raw voiced singer and an audience that won't stop stomping.
But it's HALF MAN HALF BISCUIT that most people had come to see. They look scruffy and out of place and their music matches wonderfully. They're getting known, rapidly, for their particular world view and their particular lyrics - the audience knows all the titles and choruses already - but it's the music, first, that counts.
They make it count. Half confident, half learning, they make the best use of what they've got. Nigel, the spinner of words, changes a chord. "Is that right?" he asks a colleague.
Together they scrape up real songs with verses and tunes, sometimes jaunty and melodic, sometimes hard and raw, hovering on the biting edge of pop music. The guitars are as sharp as the words, and the words tonight are as clear as you could ask. The band might still be getting fan mail on Postman Pat notepaper but these are no nursery rhymes. Half whimsical, half extremely unpleasant, they're personal audio nasties fashioned from the collective unconscious of a generation brought up on Sixties TV.
It's the collective that counts tonight, and the audience go for the nostalgia of the infantile: "Time Flies By (When You're The Driver Of A Train)" is the big hit, and that's the one that should really have Brian Cant suing for plagiarism. On "God Gave Us Life" they sing along happily enough, but when Nigel reaches the words "Lionel Blair" he's not even spitting them out, he's vomiting - and he hasn't reached the depths of his venom yet.
Half dangerous, half endearing, this group is wholly entertaining.