The Penguins Steal the Show: On Specificity in Song

Why this detail and not that one?

A coincidence of events. New releases by Pulp, Little Simz and Half Man Half Biscuit mix with conversations I have at a conference in Cornwall on British Popular Culture, where I’m giving a presentation on culturally specific objects in the songs of Richard Dawson.

I draft a post on specificity in song. I recall a text I started some time ago called ‘The Penguins Steal the Show’. I realise it’s 45 years to the month since the release of Nic Jones’ Penguin Eggs, one of two musical references that inspired my title-in-waiting.

I rename my essay, knowing I want to stay culturally specific. That means sticking to British songs or to songs that mention places where I’ve spent time, though neither of my penguin-referencing songs quite fit that bill. Could any song I know well be a place I’ve spent time? I suppose so, and vice versa.

I’ve lived in enough songs to call them home.

But I still want to turn the volume down on US-centred specificity. I’ve consumed a lot of that (haven’t we all?), and I’ve a habit of getting things wrong when I speak about some of my favourite US artists, like that time I didn’t know that moccasins were water snakes in a Guy Clark song.

Specificity doesn’t always translate, and that can feel good. Things get lost in translation, and that’s mostly okay where popular song is concerned. It’s not diplomacy.

Specificity doesn’t always translate, and that can feel bad. It can feel exclusive, divisive, like you’re not in on the joke, not a member of the club. Doesn’t our online culture thrive on endemic division? Don’t we rely on binary oppositions to sell our hot takes? Does specificity help or hinder that?

I’m still thinking through these and other questions as I write. There will be contradictions.

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To return to Richard Dawson and what I said in that conference at Falmouth University:

I’m tempted to read ‘Nothing Important’ and its long companion piece ‘The Vile Stuff’ not so much as personal autobiography, but something closer to collective or regional autobiography. I mean something to do with those regional references that appear in many of Dawson’s songs. We shouldn’t take them too literally; there’s that point that Dawson makes about Newton-by-the-Sea, that listeners can translate specific reference points into their own local versions. But it still seems important to me that its these details rather than those that illustrate the songs.

That passage also appears in one of my Substack posts about Richard Dawson (‘Nothing But Things’), while the Newton-by-the-Sea reference links to another one (‘I Can Feel It In My Molecules’). I’d suggested to Richard that the place name makes the song special for an audience familiar with North East England; he’d replied that ‘everyone’s got a Newton-by-the-Sea somewhere near them’.

Some commenters from outside the UK have mentioned that Dawson’s references can be hard to follow. So I think specificity can point in different ways: to the reference point itself and an audience’s familiarity with it; and to a vaguer gesture towards something that means something to someone and that someone further from that orbit might transliterate to a more familiar situation.

I can’t be 100% sure a British audience will get all the references I pull out of a Richard Dawson song. I still felt the need in my Falmouth talk to explain what a Ringtons plate was. I thought I was on safer grounds with Highland Toffee and Ladbrokes pens. You can’t take these things for granted, though.

In the Q&A that followed my talk, when it seemed the topic of specificity and British culture had struck a note with my audience, I mentioned Dawson’s recent song ‘Gondola’ and how it explores the everyday mundane by weaving TV references into the thoughts and feelings of its protagonist, an unfulfilled grandmother:

Good Morning Britain, a soft-boiled egg
Piers is on Lorraine, shooting pains down my left leg.
Holly & Phil can pay your energy bills, 
dead wasp on the windowsill,
the last drops of Blossom Hill,
hailstones on the bus up to Lidl.

These lines will have more meaning for listeners who recognise the references to UK daytime TV shows and their hosts. They paint a picture of a person viewing the world through a mediascape, of the merging and saturation of the media world and the immediate physical world. And the despair inherent in seeing the world through Blossom Hill-tinted glasses.

The juxtaposition gets darker in the second verse:

Cash in the Attic, A Place in the Sun,
a very long-overdue phone call from my son William,
Deal Or No Deal Or No Deal Or No Deal Or No Deal,
Box number 17 is opened to reveal
a wound that’s never healed

Like other songs on End of the Middle, ‘Gondola’ is quietly devastating, a glimpse of the forlorn hopes that exist within the everyday.

There’s humour and play, though. Dawson isn’t laughing at his characters, but he’s having fun as a songwriter: lining up the TV show references, finding the musicality in ‘deal or no deal’ and coupling it to rhymes (‘reveal’, ‘heal’), mixing the mediated and the mundane.

There’s a video for ‘Gondola’ which adds extra layers for interpretation, especially around the unrealised dreams of the protagonist that give the song its title. Commenters on YouTube note how Dawson wrings universal themes out of specific details, which is my reason for mentioning the song here too.

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Another coincidence. End of the Middle was playing on my car stereo as I drove to the Falmouth conference. Then it finished and the next album on the SD card came on: Artefacts: Sacred & Profane, by St. James Infirmary, a band from the North East with links to Richard Dawson.

St. James Infirmary is the name given to various permutations of people working with the Ashington-based musician Gary Winston Lang. Artefacts is a 2023 album that features several prominent NE musicians. As I was driving, my specificity radar picked up the opening lines from the song ‘Northumberland Rapture’: ‘I saw the Virgin Mary at the crossroads / Between the Spine Road and the A19’.

The Spine Road is the A189. It starts just south of the River Tyne, runs close to where I live (Longbenton), then runs north towards Ashington. Where it meets the A19 is about five miles from my house. I’ve never seen the Virgin Mary there, but I appreciate the reference.

Artefacts also includes a version of a song I wrote about last year, Nev Clay’s ‘Cuddy’s Cave’. It’s a recitation of places, people and cultural events associated with the North East that has gone through many versions, each bringing out new specificities. The song’s references to places I’ve spent time—from the Free Trade Inn to the Wilko on Shields Road—remind me how our specificities intersect with those of others.

This kind of regionally specific reference always grabs me. They don’t have to be local to where I’ve lived. ‘Northumberland Rapture’ and ‘Cuddy’s Cave’ put me just as much in mind of Billy Bragg’s ‘A13, Trunk Road to the Sea’, a song that names Wapping, Barking, Dagenham, Grays Thurrock, Basildon, Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-On-Sea, Chalkwell, Prittlewell and Southend, all places I’ve never been.

Bragg’s 1980s ‘translation’ of ‘Route 66’ makes some neat swaps for the original, especially in its opening lines where ‘if you ever plan to motor west’ becomes ‘if you ever have to go to Shoeburyness’. There’s a YouTube clip of Bragg explaining to a German audience how it seemed necessary to adapt the song to a geography he could understand better; he’s also aware of the irony of his non-English fans struggling to follow his version.

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Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit was still recent when I visited Melbourne in 2015 (for another conference; I was speaking about Janis Ian and Nina Simone). Its opening track ‘Elevator Operator’ had already made an impression on me, but it came to mean so much more once I’d encountered its lyrical references: the 96 tram line, Swanston Street, the Nicholas Building.

I came to appreciate the Melbourness of the song and its video. And the best Vegemite reference in a song since Men At Work’s ‘Down Under’.

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I’ve not listened enough to the new Half Man Half Biscuit album to gauge its use of specificity in relation to the band’s previous releases. Considering where I was presenting my Dawson talk, though, I have to note the appearance of ‘Falmouth Electrics’ and its mention of Redruth, the town where my dad lives.

I was thinking about the band because there’s a point in my Dawson talk where I say ‘there simply aren’t that many songs which feature Phillips-head screwdrivers, bars of Highland Toffee, Woolworth’s price stickers, trolleys and snooker cues’. I half-expected someone to respond by saying, ‘what about Half Man Half Biscuit?’.

You might say The Fall, too. Both bands have plenty of super-specific cultural references deployed over large song catalogues, and fans who love to quote them. In HMHB’s case, there’s a longstanding and thriving community of fans who transcribe the band’s lyrics and discuss their takes on the songs and differently heard lyrics. Fans of The Fall do the same, of course.

Complementary specificities. Or, as The Half Man Half Biscuit Lyrics Project puts it, ‘Pop Songs Picked Over By Pedants’.

Below is a list of HMHB songs that were in top ranking as fan favourites during a 2023 poll.

The titles alone give a sense of the specific topics broached by the band. Of course, there’s a wealth of extra detail in the lyrics. I could be here all day selecting, so I’ll restrain myself by picking some lines from the songs above as examples:

For when you’re in Matlock Bath you don’t need Sylvia Plath / Not while they’ve got Mrs. Gibson’s Jam — ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel (is the Light of an Oncoming Train)’

There’s a man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in Millets — ‘National Shite Day’

It’s a cricketing farce with a thickening plot / Act One, Scene One – Brenda Blethyn gets shot … Oh the mummers, the poppers / The Best Of The Coppers — ‘We Built This Village on a Trad. Arr. Tune’

Speedwell, campion, jack-by-the-hedge / Orange-tipped butterflies, Bradley Dredge / I’m about a thousand miles away / From Claire Jenkins’ gin reports / And Stuart Bell and dull Adele / And Janet from Accounts banging on about turmeric — ‘Oblong of Dreams’

Ground Control to Monty Don / The testimonial silver’s gone — ‘Every Time a Bell Rings’

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While I feel there are some clear differences between Richard Dawson’s lyrics and those of HMHB’s Nigel Blackwell or The Fall’s Mark E. Smith—Dawson’s approach to his characters and their situations is empathetic rather than critical—they are all brilliant at using the detail of everyday, mundane life to provoke emotional responses.

In this, they could be examples of the ‘boring’ social realism that Glenn Fosbraey has written about in a summary of British songwriting that jumps from the Kinks’ 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society to later acts such as The Smiths, The Streets, Niko B, Lady Leshurr and Yard Act. As Fosbraey says of The Streets, ‘[Mike Skinner’s] songs about Playstations, London Underground travel cards, cans of Carling, bottles of Smirnoff Ice, smoke-reeking jeans, McDonald’s and KFC documented the lives many of us were actually living’. This reads like a more culturally translatable set of lyrical objects, but the everydayness is the point here.

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Is this the place to mention CMAT’s ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’, with a title that sounds like it’s from the Half Man Half Biscuit songbook, from an album called Euro-Country (and all the issues of cultural translation that brings up), and with a lyric that goes ‘This is making no sense to the average listener / Let me try to explain myself in a few words’?

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I’m drawn to specificity, but I’m not saying it’s the be all and end all of song. Ambiguity in song can also be wonderful: blurry words, muddy mouths, foggy textures.

I’m focussing on words in songs here, but specificity is equally about musical settings. Why this note and not that one? Why that modulation? Why use harpsichord there? Why that sample? What was it about the take with the broken vocal that made it the one? Such song moments, as I’ve written previously, are puncta erupting from the studium of their setting. I’ll return to more of them in future posts.

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Specificity in song may not always be about precision. Or rather, it may be precision in word choice rather than meaning, or some other form of precision. When I explored the sound of nonsense in my 2015 book of the same name, I was interested in precise choices in word and sound, but it was how they precisely played with sense and meaning that made them stand out for me.

One type of ‘nonsense' I discussed in the book was slang, which has often found its way into popular music. I used the example of ‘Slang Like This’, released by True Tiger in 2011, in which British grime MC P Money repeats a string of slang terms—‘bredrin cuz bredrin bradda bredrin safe bredrin’—that have come to the UK from the Caribbean. Instead of exclusivity, P Money argues that slang brings different audiences together around his music and this sense of community is echoed in the song’s video, in which a diverse range of people are seen mouthing the lyrics.

A version of the song by north-east-based rapper Aems, entitled ‘Geordie Slang Like This’ attempts a similar strategy, with a video showing people from the Newcastle area mouthing the Geordie terms.

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Specificity in song may relate to topicality, as in many protest songs. Phil Ochs preferred the term ‘topical singer’ to ‘protest singer’, and many of the songs he sang have details that, when they were written, were ‘all the news that’s fit to sing’. But it’s not topicality I’m chasing here, not the ‘here and now’ so much as the ‘this not that’.

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List songs, which I’ve written about extensively, may trade in specificity, but they provide such an abundance of specific items that each one risks getting lost as a punctum. That said, musical decisions can highlight some list items more than others; ‘Leonard Bernstein’ is always going to stand out in R.E.M.’s ‘It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’.

Equally, a list song may benefit from curiously specific turns of phrase. I think about ‘These Foolish Things’, one of the songs that set my Songs and Objects project in motion. I’ll leave it to Neil Armstrong (not that Neil Armstrong) to quote some of the lyrics, not least because he provides some interpretive specificity of his own:

Are there any more evocative lyrics in the popular songbook?

A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces, an airline ticket to romantic places, and still my heart has wings, these foolish things, remind me of you.

It’s clear we’re not talking here about a crumpled roll-up or an easyJet to Magaluf. In ‘These Foolish Things’, the singer is surrounded by reminders of a lost lover—’Oh how the ghost of you clings’—and enumerates them in a long list of vivid images such as ‘the sigh of midnight trains in empty stations’ and ‘the waiters whistling as the last bar closes’. These are, insists the singer, ‘foolish’ things—he is trying to make light of the enormity of his loss. But he’s not fooling anyone.

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Listening to the new album by Little Simz, I’m reminded that specificity in song may also be about biography. Many tracks—especially, but not exclusively, diss tracks—trade on the audience’s knowledge of the artist, their life, their traumas, achievements and disputes. Generally, though, I’m more interested in what makes Simz a culturally specific and brilliant rapper than I am in the details of her current beef with Inflo, even if it’s the beef that’s given the album meaning for many critics and fans.

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Penguin Eggs, the 1980 masterpiece by folk singer and guitarist Nic Jones, is one of my all-time favourite albums in any genre. As well as opening with a spellbinding version of ‘Canadee-i-o’ (inspiring Bob Dylan to record the song a decade later) and containing several more ‘trad arr. Jones’ numbers, there are songs by Harry Robertson and Paul Metsers.

Jones recorded Robertson’s ‘Wee Pot Stove’ as ‘The Little Pot Stove’ and his ‘Ballina Whalers’ as ‘The Humpback Whale’. Both songs are packed to the gills with imagery from Robertson’s experiences as an engineer on whaling ships in South Georgia and Australia. The song about the little iron stove provides Jones’ album with its title and was one of two songs that inspired my title for this piece.

We live it seven days a week
Cold hands and frozen feet
Bitter days and lonely nights
Making grog and having fights
But there's salt fish and whale meat sausage
And fresh penguin eggs a treat
Then we struggle on to work each day
Through the icy winds and sleet

These are the lyrics as I hear Jones sing them. They are not the ones listed on Genius (which are wrong), nor are they Robertson’s original lyrics (which can be found on a website dedicated to his legacy). I’ll leave the detailed discussion of those variants to the folk at Mainly Norfolk and Mudcat Café; the lyrics above are the ones I know and love, the ones I sing along to whenever the song comes on, that set the context for my delight in hearing about grog, salt fish, whale meat sausage and, above all, penguin eggs.

I said earlier that I wanted to stick to examples whose cultural references I was familiar with. What to make of ‘The Little Pot Stove’, then, set as it is in Leith Harbour? That’s Leith Harbour in the South Atlantic, not the port near Edinburgh.

I’ve tasted grog and salt fish, but not whale meat sausage or penguin eggs. They’re easily understandable song items, though, and I relish the vivid detail. The lure of the unreachably exotic, perhaps? An appealing contrast to the mundane specificity I was discussing earlier.

Or do I home in on the penguin eggs because they provide the album’s title? Possibly. I think I’d have noticed them anyway in Robertson’s or Jones’ performances, but that singling out adds something. Jones and his audience clearly think so too; witness the way he raises his hand at this point of the song in this rare late performance, and again here, where the line elicits a roar of recognition from the crowd.

(For anyone unfamiliar with Nic Jones and interested in why it seemed miraculous to see him performing again in these concerts, it’s worth reading his biography, watching this documentary or listening to this profile.)

There are many lines that jump out at me on Penguin Eggs. Here are some from ‘The Humpback Whale’:

Back in to Ballina we steered, tied up and stowed the gear
All hands headed for the pub, and we filled ourselves with beer

And here’s Jones singing them:

It’s that ‘filled ourselves with beer’ line I love. There are so many ways to talk about getting a skinful, but this one has a glorious clunkiness.

With Jones’ songs, it’s as much about musical arrangement and voice as it is lyric. While I admire Robertson’s detailed songwriting, it’s Jones’ delivery I cherish and which, in turn, increases my admiration for Robertson’s imagery.

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My other penguin-referencing lyric is by Townes Van Zandt. It’s from his song ‘Two Girls’:

Now it's cold down on the bayou
They say it's in your mind
But the moccasins are treadin' ice
And leavin' strange designs
The Cajuns say the last time
That this happened they weren't here
Oh Beaumont's full of penguins
And I'm a-playin' it by ear

There are those moccasins again, the ones that tripped me up in Guy Clark’s ‘The Mud’. Here at least I’m going to risk assuming a double meaning: the tread of footwear on the surface of the ice; water snakes treading frozen water. Either could leave a strange design.

But it’s the penguins I’m here for. Suddenly Beaumont is full of them, and I don’t need to have been to Beaumont to appreciate this as a standout image.

Once again, the penguins steal the show.