Petomane

Celebrating 100 years of Petomane:

Petomane: Imperial Blether

Petomane: Victims of Pop and Circumstance

Petomane: Like Shrapnel Shifting

Petomane: God Help Us If There's A War

Petomane: Dad's Army of Lovers

Petomane: The No-Fixed-Abode-Guard

Petomane: Going Against The Groin

Petomane: Growing Old Gratingly

Petomane: Can't Work The Video

Petomane: Puts the Egg Under the Hen

Petomane: Art Pamphleteers

Petomane: No Cure for Cankers

Petomane: Soiling Gift Underwear This Christmas

Petomane: A Kiosk of Sound

Petomane: Pop's Grumbling Appendix

Petomane: What do you get if you put James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and Dylan Moran into a blender? It wouldn't happen. You wouldn't get a blender that big. Well alright some sort industrial blender might fit the bill but then you've got other problems. Joyce and Wilde did cross-over in terms of life-span but they could hardly be called contemporaries and Dylan Moran wasn't born for decades after their deaths. And if you put Moran in a blender with the remains of these two literary giants, well you'd basically have the smoothified remains of Moran and, at best, the skeletal shards of the other two, possibly one or two strands of hair still clinging tenaciously to Joyce's eviscerated skull; if you're lucky and depending on whether the blender is set to chunky or smooth. I think you're going to end up with a ragu-like mixture; with the occasional porridgey lump of literary giant or an above average comedian. What possible use could this cocktail of carnality be to anyone? And how could it possibly be an accurate description of an electric pop-tet. And why are they all Irish anyway, you racist bastard?

Soledad Miranda

This is a Petomane about, fairly obviously, Soledad Miranda, early muse of Jess Franco and star of such films as "Vampyros Lesbos" and "The Devil came from Akasava" (both excellent). She died in a car crash tragically early and was hypnotically beautiful. Less obviously this song is about my wife: the most astonishing woman I have ever met in pretty much every way.

Soledad Miranda

Soledad is back,
Eyes of black,
All "Death and the Maiden",
But which is she?
A witch is she, for sure,
Soledad attracts,
Snipe attacks,
As she walks through the restaurant,
They carp and spit,
She doesn't hear at all,
She's all alone,

Anybody else,
Would have felt,
Those poison darts falling,
But Miss Miranda,
Understands the world,
Soledad's detached,
What's the catch?
She's a dead woman walking,
This mortal coil,
Can't hope to spoil her day,
She's not here to stay,

The Static Age

This is a Petomane tune for the mooted second album "The Rock Machine Turns You On". It's actually a very old song that Kasch has stripped down and added some Martin guitar. I wanted to include a sample of Edward Woodward saying "Protected by the ejaculation of serpents?" but was shouted down as Kasch doesn't like vocal samples.(he liked them plenty on Fox Base Alpha one of the Petomane's ur-albums! One of our few bonding moments was on a fractious holiday in Portugal where the DJ "dropped" "Nothing Can Stop Us Now" by Saint Etienne)

I didnt take the opportunity of re-writing the lyrics to match the new tune!

The Static Age

Running through the Aquaduct
I got caught in a grating mesh,
I got my goat up I confess,
That's the modern age,
I'm static with rage,
This is the Static age,

Splitting a clementine,
To read the pith and juice within,
A process known as clemency,
I read nothing,
I'm static with rage,
This is the Static Age,

Crushing a serpent's head,
Beneath the tread of my puckered brogue,
Like mythology I've been told,
My shoes are ruined though!
I'm static with rage,
This is the Static Age

The Many Moods of John Patrick Higgins

I have many names. Here are the bands that I am currently in, and what they are for.n.b. All of the following are on hiatus given current circumstances but equally none have disbanded. There is unfinished business with virtually all of them:

Petomane: First album "Top Trumps" came out in limited edition last year to almost unanimous ignorance. A new album "The Rock Machine Turns You On" will be out when it's finished and not before, though given the previous album was over five years in the making and we're just getting older and slower, I wouldn't hold your breath. Unless you have hiccups and limited access to a chilly key.

Key tracks: "The Dark Night of David Soul", "The Plumber", "Yellow Glove"

Lyrical themes: Incredibly varied. Given that the gestation period of the album it's all over the shop. Songs about the flying Dutchman rub shoulders with Climate of Hunter knock-offs and meetings with superannuated TV dectectives in pub toilets.

Personnel: John Patrick Higgins, Christopher Kasch, M K

Red Atlas: A live, or at least responsive to electrical current, six piece proposition. On hold currently for a number of reasons not least the singers mistrust of the rest of the band. Some recordings have been made, none of which were particularly satisfactory.Really good though. in a way that it seems impossible to describe.

Key tracks: Little Nemo, Drink the young wine, Deep, deep sleep of england,

Lyrical themes: Initially starting as a series of faintly mysogonistic revenge songs things take a spooky supernatural turn as loads of ghosts turn up and hang about, not doing much.

Personnel:John Patrick Higgins - singing, Simon Endicott - guitar, Ian Olney - guitar, M K - guitar, Ben Pestell - bass guitar, Simon Oldham - drums

Big Marker: Big Marker were amongst the first sustained works that Douglas Steel and I made and the concept was fairly solid: we were three 17 year old boys from the village of Hartley Wintney in Hampshire. Our songs reflected our interests: girls, trying to get served in pubs, getting arrested for flyposting over a postbox and er King Alfred. In fact Douglas couldnt contain his musical sophistication and i couldn't maintain my stated intent not to sing and Big Marker became more and more jaded as time went on. The music of Big Marker remains far and away my wife's favourite band. Of the bands I've been in at any rate.

Key tracks: Really Hitting Ashley, Kilometres Davis, Etiquette,

Lyrical themes: getting drunk, feuding with ex-band members, mythical bluesmen.

Personnel: JPH, Douglas Steel


The Woods: The Woods was a band specifically invented for the musical "The Night of the Crabs". It's scope is vast encompassing thrash metal, folk tunes, music hall, nu-wave and even a sort of anaemic funk. Its some of the best and most realised music i've ever made and it WILL make it out into the world in some way.

Key tracks: I'd rather be drinking than thinking, Bartholomew's Fare, King Crab, A King Considers, Water Works,

Lyrical themes: Giant crabs invading the coast of Wales and paraquat poisoning.

Personnel: JPH, Douglas Steel, Michael Steel


KNOCK-KNOCK : KNOCK-KNOCK had it's genesis in an episode of Geraldo and the first song was entirely Douglas' construct: I filled in a few of the lyrics but the structure, title and concept were all his. After we put together "When it comes to girls (I ain't got no friends)" it was quite obvious that it was neither a Big Marker song nor did it fit anywhere within the framework of a musical about giant rampaging crabs. So a new band was born: KNOCK-KNOCK. With KNOCK-KNOCK we could explore whole areas of sound: Devo, Sparks, Eno and Gabriel, Sly Foxx, Fox, Landscape and Rockwell all flew into the mix. And I discovered the joy of singing in a German accent a la Klaus Nomi. KNOCK-KNOCK is a lot of fun. To do, at least. I can't vouch for the listening experience.

Key Songs: When it comes to girls (I ain't got no friends), Heart Murmur, If you prick me, Sleep Plated Nightmare,

Lyrical themes: er...friends, brer rabbit, The Trains by Robert Aickman

Personnel: JPH, Douglas Steel

The Club of Queer Trades: Writing songs with M is a joy as i get to write the words first and he then wraps my strangulated prose into some musical swaddling while managing to give it a melody and meaning at the same time! He's no slouch. I write a lot of my best lyrics for The Club as I am allowed room to play with form as well as content. The general trend is toward melancholia but some of the angriest songs i've ever written fall under this umbrella too. Oh, and i mean it, ma-an!

Key songs: I am beset by angels, That Plane has Sailed, Cold Devils, Boaster's Bar, Hip Replacement Priest, Not safe in Taxis,

Lyrical themes: Love, loss, love lost, jealousy, spite and righteous indignation

Personnel: JPH, MK


The Namedrops: there is a contradiction at the heart of The Namedrops . The Namedrops is M's serious attempt to pay tribute not only to the riot grrl bands he so adores, as well as the entirety of the female fronted pop records from the year dot (and there is an inherent dichotomy there as well). However these would be grrl power anthems written by two men, espousing the sorts of things we thought girls songs should be about and trying to find girls to sing them! We may find some yet as the songs were quite good but Martin has deflected this compromised situation beautifully by joining a real female fronted punk band: The Ethical Debating Society.

Lyrical themes: girls = good, boys = bad, dancing, premature ejaculation,

Key Songs: Welcome to Dumpsville, Impossible, No Sex Please (we're skittish,) Never been afraid,

Personnel: JPH, MK

The Charlemagnes: Another high-concept project. Or at the very least fair to middling - good to firm concept project. The Charlemagnes again are a two piece Nuggets style garage band with an awful lot of dead former members many of whom will be eulogised in song. The singer is Johnny Ghostly and the guitarist is Marty Polpette and I had originally writing between song banter as the main part of the show: it would be like Buster Pointdexter but without the credentials! The songs are the foray into parody I've ever done; titles like "Stoopid Girl", "That Girl is a mess" and "teardrop stop" are clearly from snot-punk school of terrified mysogyny, whereas "Shellshock Shuffle" clearly owes some small debt to the Ramones' "BlitzKrieg Bop". I still have some of Johnny Ghostly's monologues and it would be good to play these in a live setting - if nothing else they rock!

One other thing: I wanted to get an authentic 60's NY fuzz-beat sound for the guitars but it never happened: M plays guitar with an English accent!

Lyrical themes: Fallen soldiers, stupid gurlz, heartache, drugs and those they kill, being cool,

Key songs: Teardrop Stop, Shellshock Shuffle, That girl is a mess, Heart Face

Personnel: JPH, MK


Nude Scientists: If you can imagine Big Marker twenty years on, living in an urban, metropolitan environment and beginning to feel middle-classed and middle-aged pangs of terror, as their life and life-style are suddenly irrelevant and the howling paranoia of the Daily Hate is starting, sickeningly to wear them into a rounded, more ergonomic ball of fear. Then add some synths. Nude Scientists are the snobbish terrified uncles of Big Marker; aghast at what they see hear and smell on the bus but more aghast at having to use public transport in the first place! They are snobbish, resolutely misanthropic and deeply, deeply terrified. Morrissey would love 'em.

Lyrical themes: Young people today, aging, no respect, hatred, the Daily Mail, Clarkson,

Key Songs: You again, Intruder Alert, Hangover Hospital, Idiot, Chicken in a box on the back of the bus,

Personnel: JPH, Doug Steel

Gainsbarre (French Tickler)

This was written for the second Petomane album "The Rock Machine Turns You On". Petomane are myself, the painter Christopher Kasch and Martin Kent Smith; the only other person i know who is as loose with his musical favours as I am. We are bikes; no foolin':bikes! Petomane is the reason I got back into creating music after not doing anything from my mid-twenties to my early thirties. It was initially a lot of fun as neither of us could work Reason or Cubase and some of the original songs like "My Little Vampire" and "Hulk Sadness" were both magnificent and astoundingly stupid. We hit an early groove with a song called "The Dark Night of David Soul"*, from which point it be came far, far less enjoyable but a lot more artistically satisfying. On a lot of the early recordings you can hear Kasch's fishtank gurgling away in the background: our version of the jug played constantly throughout the 13th Floor Elevators records.

This is a song about, duh, Serge Gainsbourg, a universal constant in the Petomane world and the cornerstone of any equations formulated there. He is one of the building blocks of our life; a washed out, listless loop in our DNA strand. Gainsbarre is the latter dissipated Serge and the song is a fairly straight forward biography of the great man. I sing it in a rumbling monotone that sounds almost exactly unlike Serge Gainsbourg. Though possibly a bit Serge Danot.

Fact: an early incarnation of petomane was called Serge. That first e.p. released under that name (The Drinking Classes)is now a collector's item. Potentially.

*and by general consensus still the best thing we have ever done. I'll pop the lyrics up here at some point.

Gainsbarre (French Tickler)

I’m understudied and I’m ill prepared,
Hope you don’t notice that the words are slurred,
My fingers tremble as I flick the catch,
And Marie Curie turns to ash,
I’m always shivering though it’s hardly cold,
How’d an enfant terrible get so very old?
Looking out the windows at ticket punchers and English girls,
I pull my pants down and the tricolour unfurls,
My house is all black like Goya’s dining room,
I find I’m thinking dirty thoughts and waiting for the blue of noon,

One Pastis and one Gitane,
Again and again and again and again,

They call me lulu though I don’t like to shout about it,
I love the ladies but I’m never quite devout about it,
In the movies I never come up trumps,
Who casts heavy wearing women’s ballet pumps?
I am for Apollinaire and Stephane Mallarme,
I am for Rimbaud, the one that got away,
Baudelaire, Jacques Vache and Boris Vian,
Mine’s a slower suicide than Thomas Chatterton’s,

One Pastis and one Gitane,
Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine,

Guarding my modesty and girding my loins,
The kind of profile that you see on Roman coins,
A Jewish Russian Frenchman but you can’t see the joins,
Everybody knows me – from Descartes to Desmoines,
I staged a little riff on Bach called Je t’aimes moi non plus,
The Vatican then banned it and that was quite a coup,
In terms of sales specifically, cause between me and you,
Anywhere outside of France they think that’s all I do!

One Pastis and one Gitane,
Again and again and again and again

I am of the infinite in the Champs Elysees,
Plucking on a harp and drinking holy wine all day,
The women here are beautiful but lack certain grist,
I find I’m more a gourmet than an ornithologist,
You would think a cannon was a pretty heavy thing,
But my cannon moves the angels, god wants me up with him,
So while I serenade the seraphim with my celestial song,
They all know that down below is where I belong

One Pastis and one Gitane,
Amen, amen, amen, amen









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