David Bryant

Good God. Maybe this year I need to buy one of those £20 tickets to get access to my local pub and stay there for the evening.

Definitely true that the late 90s is where things really pick up. I remember hearing them on a 1998 Peel Show and feeling that they'd improved significantly. I also suspect if they'd known their first album was going to attract the degree of attention it did, they might have thrown more at it.

He was getting attention and plaudits on the London poetry circuit back in the 00s, so all this goes way back!

He's had a long run of doing amazing stuff. "Fires In The Park" was in a longlist of possibles for the Mercury Music Prize in 2013 as I remember - which would have changed things enormously - but obviously never got into the final set.

YouTube video by Benin City - Topic People Will Say

People Will Say was the soundtrack of the summer in London 2013 to me at least. And in fact the whole album Fires In The Park was amazing.
youtu.be/D7GfsV-4Fbs?...

YouTube video by Audio Doughnuts Benin City - Baby (Official Video)

I know everyone's started to get excited about Joshua Idehan's stuff because "Mum Does The Washing" went viral, but I do sometimes want to scream "He's been involved in tons of amazing things for years, you know!"
youtu.be/hzTc9no4V_w?...

They absolutely packed out my local 1,000 capacity venue a couple of years back and a great time was had by all. To be fair, so did the House Of Love, but when their time comes on the blog I'd be surprised if they do as well.

I've actually got the Mice LP on vinyl somewhere - they popped up for £1.99 all over the place after the record label went under. Absolutely years since I last gave it a listen, but you've reminded me to put it on the list.

I'm sorry to hear all this. Sorry, but actually not very surprised.

Honestly, I thought that Half Man Half Biscuit blog entry would struggle, but it's now had the all-time second highest number of unique hits within a 24 hour period (The Cocteau Twins are still way out in front with Pearly Dewdrops back in May). There are more HMHB fans than I realised.

My Mum watched doctors in an understaffed NHS hospital like a hawk while she was looking after Dad, because often they would just plain forget whether they'd given him a dose of his tablets or not (and he was too confused to remember). Double doses or no doses would have occurred in her absence.

If you’re a journalist who’s still on Twitter, from now on in your writing you have to replace “the American people want” with “troll bots in Eastern Europe demand”

Being there makes your judgment suspect. I don’t care how savvy you think you are, you’re marinating in a disinformation campaign.

New entries also covered lower down the charts:

- Stump "Mud On A Colon"
- The Wolfhounds - "Cut The Cake"
- The Gents - "Give It To Me"
- Leather Nun - "Desolation Avenue"
- Psychic TV - "Godstar"
- Jake Burns - "She Grew Up"

Said the phrase 'I'm over the moon!' to a Polish man and he was a little confused and asked what I meant so I explained and when I finished he just shook his head and said 'You're happy but you have no business in space.'

YouTube video by Rex Reynolds The Jams (The KLF) - Burn the B*$tards - Who Killed The Jams? - 1988

It says a lot about me that when I hear the chime of a city clock at 12, I don't hear the Nick Drake song - despite living in Warwickshire these days - but the announcer at the end of the KLF's "Burn The Bastards" saying "And a very Happy New Year from BBC1".
youtu.be/GiP1gLk6FOM?...

FLA 34: Emma Anderson (23/11/2025) As a first-year university student, one of the first songs of the 1990s I cherished was ‘De-Luxe’ by the London-based quartet Lush, who were signed to the independent record label 4AD. I was in the…

NEW! #FirstLastAnything Episode 34: As a big fan of the album Pearlies by Emma Anderson (@emmaandersonmusic.bsky.social), I was delighted that Emma joined me on my music textcast to discuss it, her career in Lush and Sing-Sing, and some favourite recordings. firstlastanything.co.uk/2025/11/23/f...

It's time we faced up to the inconvenient truth that Paul McCartney murdered Rupert Bear.

New entries also covered lower down the charts:

- Stump "Mud On A Colon"
- The Wolfhounds - "Cut The Cake"
- The Gents - "Give It To Me"
- Leather Nun - "Desolation Avenue"
- Psychic TV - "Godstar"
- Jake Burns - "She Grew Up"

76. Half Man Half Biscuit - The Trumpton Riots (Probe Plus) All the singles to top the NME Indie Charts since its launch in 1981, complete with an overview of the other music in the charts each week.

Blog update: Did Half Man Half Biscuit - indie chart toppers in March 1986 - have anything to do with the Oi subgenre Punk Pathetique? Did it matter? And how did the "Caretaker's Band" at a Liverpool recording studio become cult sensations with a jokey tape anyway?

I see people are talking about career paths.
I wanted to either be a performer or a writer or both, but got a backroom job in the arts, surrounded by other colleagues who wanted to be DJs, actors, members of successful bands, writers or performers. It's not what I wanted but it could be worse.

"Thirty-eight years ago today a Chicago television signal was hijacked and the airing program was replaced by a stranger in a Max Headroom mask. The perpetrator has never been identified."

Reddit user asking: "Do people of Muslim faith eat porkchops in Minecraft? If you don't eat pig meat in real life do you also not eat it in video games? Is it religiously ok to do if you did it?"

Reddit users continuing to ask the questions the mainstream media just won't touch.

It's "London Is Sinking" by Chris T-T. Despite hearing take after take of it through the floor, I still think this is an incredibly powerful album which dodges the hectoring of so much political work, and digs deep into the humanity. And its still relevant, sadly.
youtu.be/AZ5X6y9vzZs?...

Listening to the vinyl debut of an album which was originally released in 2003, and recorded in a studio I lived above. One of the tracks seems to feature the noise of the back garden, so I'm effectively listening to my old yard in remastered form. VERY odd.
What LP is this? I'll tell you in a sec.

Looks set to rain solidly all day. Ideally, it would be a good day to turn up the thermostat, light an incense stick, drink a lot of tea and listen to music, never venturing outside again, but my wife is away visiting friends and I own a dog that needs 2 hours walking a day. The joy.

I don't know whether to say "Unfortunately I didn't still know him at that point" or "Thank fuck he was well and truly out of my life by then".

I've long thought there's a story waiting to break here, but I suspect the old bastard has kept his funds tied up so carefully and directed them through odd channels that it's difficult to directly accuse him.
Plus, his deflection will be "What about the historical Russian money in Tory & Labour?"

I was in a corridor at my sixth form college when I heard a cheer go up from the common room, and had to ask what happened. I don't know what felt better at the time, hearing about her resignation, or seeing the resident snippy Young Tory looking crestfallen rather than smug for once.

The Long Con Comes To An End The Trump Administration Takes Off The Mask (Again)

as Phillips O'Brien also points out, this plan has been in negotiation for a long time, probably since Trump took office.

open.substack.com/pub/phillips...

Zia Yusuf - We need to talk about Zack Polanski

Funny they'd want to do that while not talking about NATHAN GILL at all.