Read One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel for Free Online Page B

under his mother’s stairs for three years. This was the man who promised his sister he’d look after her twin teenage boys at Italia ’90, and then through his own ego flailings got them kidnapped and raped. That Italia ’90 summer he was totally out-of-control! Brits Abroad was top of the charts with ‘Last Tango in Paris’ and Mick had even name-checked himself in his own hit! Drunk with power was Mick! Drunk with Mick possibilities! Couldn’tleave well alone. Our fave Machiavellian upstart even used his own brief stardom to allow our admittedly lovely posh friend Full English Breakfast to leapfrog the other long-term band members of our big mates the Kit Kat Rappers – Stu, Yeh-Yeh and Gary Have-a-laugh – by writing a special ‘Posh Rap’ for Breakfast only! Who’d Mick think he was, Prometheus? Of course ‘Her Majesty’s Pleasure’ was a hit for Breakfast, and of course it was a fucking great hit, but it was a jade’s trick to pull on the other three. They’d all been in the band two years longer than Breakfast! Saint Mick, however, could never see these tinkerings as failings until it all coalesced at Italia ’90 and death came a-falling.
    Back at the lay-by, I’d retrieved my copy of Barry Hertzog’s
Prison Writings
from my bag, and now sat fumbling with it looking for new clues. But the disparity between Hertzog’s published words and what he’d said face-to-face was just too great to make sense of. I remembered the vicious expression on that enraged and imprisoned Dutch phizzog when he’d described first hearing Brits Abroad on Hilversum Radio. How it had made him change his plans. How he and his Party Orange gangsters had, throughout 1986, tried to book Liverpool’s trundling Half Man Half Biscuit at his club Slag Van Blowdriver just to kidnap them. Apparently their songs’ vacuous subject matter obliged Party Orange to do this. That is, until M. Goodby’s Brits Abroad had poked its even uglier head into the UK Top Ten, thereby creating accelerated threats of Cultural Vacuity
and
at a truly MTV level. Although
Prison Writings
contained none of Hertzog’s threats of violence, kidnap and judgement, his book’s index of negative entries concerning Half Man Half Biscuit most certainly provided me with endless entertaining quotes, the best surely one that called them:
    “Cynical, corn-fed, semi-artistic pseuds vampiring and suckling at the unhygienic overflow tap of bubbling TV trash, all the while stewing comatose in a glorious Welfare State safety net of near heavenly size, rather than deploying their modicum of nous to try in any way to stem the megaflow of the Monoculture’s effluence into the minds of the surrounding population.” (
Prison Writings
, 120)
    Fair enough. Hertzog had pointed out how, as a 25-year football devotee of Dokkum’s semi-pro Be Quick, he’d initially admired Half Man Half Biscuit’s parochial devotion to little tiny Tranmere Rovers, even found it valiant and inspiring. But then the Judge had explained how, on Half Man Half Biscuit’s debut LP
Back in the D.H.S.S
., their lyrical skewering of Liverpool icon Nerys Hughes of
The Liver Birds
had made his blood boil, commenting:
    “When some evil old bird called Thatcher could be filling up Nigel’s time, instead he’s getting a blather on for my favourite Liver Bird. I want to know why? Half Man Half Biscuit’s worldview is akin to knowing full well that a mass murderer is roaming your asylum, but still choosing to complain to administrators about the nose picker in the next bed.” (
Prison Writings
, 122)
    Thereafter, Hertzog had gone through all of their lyrics and come to the conclusion that – by wasting their iffy songwriting prowess on picking fights with minor TV celebs and transient media phenomena of the kind that
each and every knob-end in the world
would wish to barf over – Half Man Half Biscuit were a bunch of Dwindlers content merely to hold up the mostdelicate of hand mirrors to society,