Oblong of Dreams

I first discovered Half Man Half Biscuit while living in Bristol and working on the music search UI at MixRadio. You type a lot of test search queries when you're building a search form. It inevitably becomes swear words, which is how I stumbled on National Shite Day.

Down in the High Street somebody careered out of Boots without due care or attention
I suggest that they learn some pedestrian etiquette
i.e sidle out of the store gingerly
Embrace the margin

If I was the kind of person who had a personal anthem, National Shite Day might be it. Homesickness for the Wirral had become a big part of my life by then, and it meant the world to me to have discovered this band from back home through a search for a word from back home.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia audio sample for the word "shite" provides a great opportunity to experience how weird it sounds to hear it in a southern accent.

On top of that, the lyrics narrate a walk through Birkenhead town centre, which was a magical place to me in the late 90s and early 2000s. Like, it was where you went to buy CDs, that kind of thing. Listening to National Shite Day became a way to reach back across time and space to that.

Map of Birkenhead. Birkenhead market and the Pyramids shopping centre are visible. — Literally the most exciting place I knew as a kid

It also felt kind of cool that you practically have to be from the Wirral to stand a chance of understanding some of their songs. The layout of the town centre in National Shite Day is one example. Another one is in Twydale’s Lament.

Gouranga Gouranga
Yes I’ll be happy
When you’ve been arrested for defacing the bridge

There used to be a good few bridges in the north west of England with Gouranga spraypainted onto them, but there's a very specific one over the M56 that had it for absolutely years when I was a kid. I think the line's about that one in particular, because everyone in the Wirral has to drive down the M56 anytime they go almost anywhere except Liverpool.

Motorway scene with a bridge in the middle distance. Traffic is heavy. — This one, I think, except on the other side. Photo thanks to Bill Boaden.

These little things became a roundabout way to feel connected to home despite being physically far away.

I started to lose touch with this music a little bit during the "peak digitalisation" era of my life from around 2018 to 2022. Streaming services don't really exist to let you listen to your collection of albums in peace. Playlists and recommendations give them music industry leverage and lock you into their services more, so they want you on those, and a small army of talented people works to adjust your listening in that direction through thousands of subtle nudges.

The return of intentionality to music listening since waking up from that has been like rebirth. The scarcity of needing a CD or a record changes the whole experience. You stop using music as 24/7 white noise and start actually listening to it again.

And speaking of needing CDs, once during a trip home I had a spare couple of hours to myself, and decided to see if there was a good record store to visit in Birkenhead. I discovered Skeleton Records, which my dad used to go to as a kid.

Red brick building with shop signage on the front and a red entrance sign pointing down at the door.

My guess was that a place like that in Birkenhead would probably have some Half Man Half Biscuit, and I was more right than expected. Not only did I pick up 11 albums, but the lad behind the counter seemed to know the band personally, and had even played trumpet and keyboard on a couple of tracks in The Voltarol Years. I was smiling like a mad person the whole way home.

A stack of Half Man Half Biscuit albums in CD format.

Bringing this haul of music back to Sweden on the plane felt like Midnight Express. I'd forgotten how special CDs that you've bought on holiday feel, too. I've been slowly working my way through it ever since and finally got to The Voltarol Years this week. And then it happened. Oblong of Dreams. Fucking hell.

Map of the Wirral, which is a peninsula with an oblong shape. — The oblong in question

The whole song is one big walk around the Wirral. It hit me like a fucking train. I first listened to it late in the evening, and had trouble getting to sleep after. That CD on the shelf now rivals the concentrated psychic power of the Aristocats soundtrack record we bought last year.

It wasn't just the nostalgia trip that did it, either. And it's some nostalgia trip, even crossing the river next to the farm I grew up on. But there was something more, like something supernaturally, recursively cool about the fact that I'd finally gotten this chance to return to the place from National Shite Day, relive that childhood memory of buying CDs there, and it had in turn triggered this encore of the original experience of discovering National Shite Day itself and brought back even more memories.

There's a lot of talk about stuff like "friction-maxxing" at the moment. I think there's a growing awareness that overdigitalisation and an obsession with efficiency have begun to optimise away some of the meaning and human connection from life. Rather than fixate on the critique itself, I think it's interesting with positive examples of what the alternative can look like, and I reckon my copy of The Voltarol Years is a decent one of those.