Half Man Half Biscuit Half Hearted

Half Man Half Biscuit Half Hearted

Ah yes. Why spend time typing up the lyrics to Half Man Half Biscuit songs? Because they are gems like no other. We celebrate British bands and artists for seminal musical works (think Bowie or Elvis Costello) and, unless you happen to know the late John Peel's inside leg measurement or you were enlightened as a student, the majesty, wit and sheer intelligence of the HMHB opus is ignored. Shame, shame, shame.


Over the years a number of web sites have recorded some lyrics and a multitude of research notes for the songs [see the excellent www.hmhb.co.uk]. The latter are invaluable to understanding the wide ranging and often obscure historical references. The former are a mixed bag, with only a few songs listed.


So what started out as a full hearted attempt by me to record the lyrics so my sister could understand the songs has developed into a blog post and a project to educate the half-hearted masses and to provide a definitive song list with lyrics.

They'll be other crap on here too such as my own songs "Progressive Dads", "People called Wilson", "Blog-proof iPod", "Armchair Expert" and "Holistically Challenged"- I need to finish writing them first :)

"...Baby I'm from the Wirral Peninsula.
A merciless despot with nothing to lose"

Monkey Man, June 2007

Please note that all lyrics are mostly my interpretation and are presented here to assist you in understanding the songs. They are the copyright of others.

You should also pay a visit to www.chrisrand.com/hmhb/ for HMHB lyrics - a superb site with a superb range of listings

Friday 18 April 2008

The Light at the end of the tunnel

Some of the more frequent and established viewers will know that my posting rate for new lyrics can be pretty glacial at times. Well fear not for there is light at the end of the tunnel.

I came across a rival site yesterday and rather than shun it, ignore it, pretend it doesn't exist I positively embrace its presence. The author has taken his site in the very direction I had planned and spent a lot of last Sunday failing to execute.

The upshot? Well, we have been in contact with the result being that while my posting rate for new lyrics on here may remain very slow a brilliant alternative site is simply only a click away at www.chrisrand.com/hmhb/ so pay it a visit.

I will still continue to ramble on here occasionally and infrequent bursts of activity will see a whole album appear when you least expect it. Hopefully we'll have everything covered between the two sites!

Sunday 13 April 2008

Okay, some normality restored

I have rid the busted page of horrible artefacts that popped up from orphan code and such like, and the blog is at least readable again. But the song list (the reason you are looking at the blog no doubt) vanished.

I could spend time repairing the list but I may aswell build the new website instead. It will be at www.halfmanhalfbiscuithalfhearted.co.uk

Until I can figure out how to publish effectively to the new domain I'll run this blog and the new site in tandem. My aim is to have the blog/comments structure under the .co.uk site. That should be easy according to the Blogger help pages. Errrrr, no Blogger....I did what you said and my blog got screwed up. Bugger.

EDIT: after much in the dark tweaking I got the blog back as it was. What a waste of a Sunday morning. I have also trialed some web authoring apps including Frontpage, NetObjects, PageBreeze, MoreMotion and Coffee Cup and they all suck. What a load of tosh they were with promised WSIWYG control let down by very poor implementation. I'm off to watch football.

Hmmm

Okay it seems that we have a slight technical problem with the blog.

Blogger is not very receptive to allowing ftp control over the site so I moved to a new domain on which I should be able to publish the blog and tinker with the structure using an ftp client.

I followed the rather poorly described examples and the current blog went boom. I'm not even sure if this post will actually post.

Damn.

Time to get my internet spanners out.