The Indelicates and Bogeyman (2018)
Folk Devils and Englishness
Americans love their serial killers, the English love our perverts. I’m tempted to say this is due to what we repress… but America hardly represses violence and the notion that Victorian England repressed sexuality is a comfortable simplification for a period in which not only was prostitution rife, but the supposedly subtextual undercurrents of stories were often, in fact, on the surface for readers and critics to openly analyse and discuss [the themes of addiction and homosexuality in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for instance, are not hidden]. Last year, reading Bruce Robinson’s 2015 howl of rage against the English establishment, They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper (2015), I was shocked at how explicit much of the contemporaneous reportage on the Jack the Ripper case was… and how quickly Jack was transmogrified into a half-way lovable folk devil. Chris Morris captured the English tendency to do this brilliantly in the cut ‘Peter Sutcliff: The Musical’ sequence in Brass Eye (1997).
My favourite musical discovery of the year has been The Indelicates, a spiky but winsome outfit that resolves around the radiant, shining centre of husband and wife team Julia and Simon Indelicate. Julia (nee Clarke-Lowes) was one of the founding members of The Pipettes, inspired by the KFL’s cynical 1988 book The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way). As such, The Pipettes (with their gloriously absurd name) was always more of a proof-of-concept than a band proper, with The Indelicates seemingly starting in much the same way… not, I suspect, as a money-grab, but out of a desire to comment on (and play a part in) the last gasp of British guitar music. The band’s first incarnation was a mid-2000s “indie rock” band within heavily accented scare quotes. Their first album, American Demo (2008) is an incredibly hooky piece of power pop with song titles like ‘The Last Significant Statement to be Made in Rock and Roll’, ‘… If Jeff Buckley Had Lived’ and ‘We Hate the Kids’. They toured with Amanda Palmer, which should give you some indicate of the acerbic though occasionally precious/precocious lyrical content of their early albums.
Amanda Palmer’s dark caberet stylings (most consistently on display in The Dreden Dolls) must have had an influence because their 2010 follow-up album, Songs for Swinging Lovers (which has an image on the cover of Simon and Julia having hung themselves, because of course it does!) includes less early-Manics power chords and slightly more music hall piano than American Demo. Fourth album Diseases of England (2013) really embraces this mode, with tracks like ‘Class’ and ‘Le Godemiché Royal’ working in a modern Brecht-Weill mode.
All good stuff! However, for me, their masterpiece is their sixth album Juniverbrecher (2017). Juniverbrecher is a sideways-on concept album about Brexit that posits that Jimmy Savile = Punch (of Punch and Judy fame) = the Enfield haunting ghost = the spirit of Englishness that resulted in Brexit. As such, the album is intended as a kind of musical ritual that will [hopefully] banish this malevolent spirit. What gives the album a weird power is the fact, I think, that the aforementioned figures are treated as equivalences rather than as symbols for one another. While this risks being offensive to the still living victims of Savile (since they were abused by an actual man, not a ghost or a puppet) it effectively captures his status as a folk devil who embodies the rot of the heart of the English establishment. A scapegoat is, importantly not always innocent, but they remain a scapegoat as long as they carry collective sins in addition to their own. Reading the illuminating but punishing In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (2014) it is clear that Savile was as close to a monster as a human being can get, but what is even more disquieting is the degree of complicity of English institutions like the NHS and the West Yorkshire Police Force had in enabling his abuses over years.
On the album’s standout single ‘Top of the Pops’, which pastiches glam rock to retell the Enfield haunting as a teenage girl’s attunement to the moral corruption in England as divined through Top of the Pops, Simon proclaims of this rot that:
It's in the NHS and in Broadmoor
It's in the marathon and the machine
She says there's something wrong with the TV
She says there's something wrong with the BBC
English institutions are indicted. Just as Jack the Ripper inadvertently exposed Victorian England’s institutional evils (such as those of the Empire, the London constabulary and – most significantly for Robinson – the Masons) the crimes of Jimmy Savile should have opened the eyes of the English to the level of corruption in the country (the NHS, the BBC and the systems of both care and psychiatry), but instead was/is treated as – to quote a lyric from the album – a “comfortable monster”.
While Brexit was the ‘British exit from Brussels’, I use the term ‘English’ here because in the album’s track ‘Everything English is the Enemy’ The Indelicates are careful to focus in on English parochialism rather than indict the citizens of Scotland, Wales or Ireland. In this track, Simon rails against the cosy romanticism that excuses English nationalism, righteously sneering, “Death to the manners and to deference/ To tea and to gin and the sentimental/ Portraits of the new old men/ Death to all of them/ And to everything/ English”. This screed also encompasses desainted icon of Englishness John Peel, who Simon calls death upon.
Notably John Peel is known to have abused young teenage girls over many years during his early career as a DJ. However, as a young man he was seen as cool and as an older man he was seen as cozy. Looking at such figures dead-on requires the people of English to look at our culture dead-on and reckon with its centuries of corruption. However, as Simon sings on ‘The Plaza Ballroom, Manchester, Christmas Eve, 1956’, for many English people, “These things are too precious/ Even with demons in them/ To leave and to visit no more/ This is our time/ The time of our lives/ So we will lie/ When they ask what we knew/ Of the crimes committed/ While we were dancing”. As with, for instance, the grim truth of facing up to the climate and ecological catastrophes, or racism in policing, or the effects of online pornography on boys etc. it is more comfortable in the short-term to not face up to the truth and taking care of a handful of especially nasty symptoms [a bad flood up north; a single trigger-happy cop; an individually predatory teenage boy] keeps the systematic rot plastered over.
When noticing the symptoms of such cultural rot it is easy to pretend that the foundations were firm and just… and that the past was a halcyon eden. In ‘The Bins’, Julia sings plaintively of “The bottles in the bedding/ The plastic in the hedge/ The gnawed at bones of battery hens/ Scattered round the edge” before lamenting, “You don't know how it once was/ The days they burned and shone/ In cut grass and in vinegar/ As summers hurried on”. However, this has always been a pre-lapsarian fantasy. The sequencing of Juniverbrecher is vital to getting this across since ‘The Bins’ comes just before ‘Cold Reading’ and ‘By the Sea’.
‘Cold Reading’ provides a case study in miniature of how easily people are hoodwinked into believing bullshit. Instead of a politician proclaiming “Take back control” or claiming that leaving the EU will give the NHS £350m, the main narrator of the song is a medium promising to reconnect members of his audience with their departed loved ones. While the ruse is grimly (and amusingly) apparent to the listener, his adoring and duped audience chorus, “He's a miracle worker/ He gives us all hope for a future” before Simon and Julia make the Brexit parallel explicit, “All of these experts, what the hell do they know?/ We need him/ Because the world's so pitiless and sad/ We'd go mad”.
While this portrait of the English public is sympathetic (or, at least, pitiful) the acidic ‘By the Sea’ is far less forgiving. The track sounds like a cracked taproom knees up with a horrible plinky-plonky piano and Julia – who has a usually melodious singing voice – intentionally caterwauling like Mrs Lovett. While the lyrics begin with “Proper manners, canary yellow flowers/ Remember when the air was clear and we could run for hours” they quickly give way to “Pink slapped faces, pork pie hats/
Pasty white and proud and there is nothing wrong with that”. Nasty, insinuating whispering creeps into the track. The experience of listening is – I imagine – a rough approximation of what many tourists and immigrants to English experience… at first encountering confusing etiquette, stodgy food and seaside humour, before increasingly appreciating how these are the outer rind upon a rancid cake of prejudice and narrow-minded parochialism:
The nasty jokes and idle threats
And barbecues and coal briquettes
And everyone here says the same
So why should I feel any shame?
And after all we're not to blame
And everyone here says the same
And everyone here says the same
And don't you know my fucking name?
Arguably it’s a reductive and unfair caricature… yet it is upon a people who have sought to reduce the horizons of the world over centuries, caricaturing anyone who doesn’t look and speak just like us. The bile in the lyrics here is only matched by some of the closing lines of ‘Everything English is the Enemy’:
And the English
Ugly in their houses
At their jobs in their angry English suburbs
With their slop-weakened arteries
Dying nastily
Sunburned and ghastly
As the night falls
What is worse though is that instead of facing up to this ugliness (such as, for instance, teaching the savage violence we unleashed upon Kenyans in response to the Mau Mau rebellion) we twist it and disguise it through jokes, often doubling down upon it.
[Simon and Julia do ultimately frame this ugliness as more of a male than a female pathology with the track ‘Crooked’ providing, I think, a lyrical reflection upon how and why women are copted into enabling male abuses… It is a tricky song though and I would have to buy the album’s annotated lyrics book to understand fully. The Indelicates have a complicated relationship with feminism as evidenced by the angry satirical bop ‘Our Daughters Will Never Be Free’ and the disturbing ‘Flesh’.]
While the final track on the album, ‘Mr Punch (A Banishing)’, begins with the grotesque but ultimately reassuring image of the Punch/Savile figure having fallen off his chair and cracked his head open, it is clear that the chorus (the English public) have an ambivalent love-hate relationship with him. While they sing, “He's the last soul/ That anyone wants to see back […] a rum'un, no doubt”, they quickly concede:
Oh Mr Punch
You're a charming devil, Mr Punch
You're a lovable rogue, Mr Punch
You're a comfortable monster
The album ends on a very inconclusive note as to whether the banishing worked or not. Intriguingly, this same ambivalence marks the ending of Mirrah Foulkes’s brilliant 2019 directorial debut Judy and Punch, in which the abusive Mr Punch ends up locked away in a sanitarium, but performing a puppet show through the bars of his cell which it is clear ends up becoming the canonical ‘Punch and Judy’ show known throughout much of the world. Similarly, in the Tiger Lillies’s 2004 puppet opera Punch and Judy it is Punch who gets the last word on the final track ‘Why Are You Laughing?’ telling listeners, “Only fools and idiots are optimistic/ This isn't a film with a happy end/ Only death and disease wait for us at the end/ So why are you laughing?”
If we fail to learn our lessons from the past then Punch – the malevolent agent of chaos that feeds off lawful institutional evil – wins.
I discovered The Indelicaes through Elizabeth Smyth’s horribly compelling interactive fiction story Bogeyman from 2018, which I replayed earlier this year. I would highly recommend clicking on the link and playing it even if you don’t know what interactive fiction is. In her portmortem of the game Smyth reimagines it as a movie and writes “If this game were not a game, it would be a stop-motion animated short film starring Simon Indelicate as the man himself and Julia Indelicate as Tabitha. The Indelicates also do the music”.
I have much less to say about Bogeyman than I do about Juniverbrecher, but I will say they act as brilliantly disquieting companion pieces. Bogeyman looks at the abuse of power and gaslighting within the domestic space just as Juniverbrecher does so within the political realm. Both posit that we can become comfortable with the inhumanly uncomfortable, telling ourselves “better the devil I know”, but that doing so comes at a horribly price.
While much of the above might suggest I hate English and Englishness [I did try to escape Brexit by moving to the Netherlands but with the Covid lockdown that ensued employment did not work out and me and my partner had to return] I am ultimately English and this strange isle is my home. I think England can do better (and that we are better as Britain, just as we are better as part of Europe) however doing so requires us to face up to some of the grimmest realities of our past and present. Bogeyman and Juniverbrecher in their own ways help us do so.