One week at number one on 26th October 1986
“Mention The Lord Of The Rings just once more/ and I’ll more than likely kill you” - there aren’t many better opening lines to songs than that. Even Neil Tennant had to highlight just how well Nigel Blackwell had nailed a common frustration with eighties life; the Tolkien obsession overhanging from the seventies into the squat and bedsit walls of the eighties student and doley generation.
This single once came up for discussion when I was in the pub with friends, and we all realised that when we first heard the song, each of us related the opening line to somebody we knew (although admittedly three of us were all thinking of the same individual). Every damn one of us knew someone who, however unrelated the conversation, would find some unlikely way of relating the situation back to Tolkien’s works. These days the opening line would probably have to be about Terry Pratchett or Doctor Who, but in the eighties and the early part of the following decade, Middle Earth still held a surprisingly firm grip.
Perhaps partly for those reasons, “Dickie Davies Eyes” is Half Man Half Biscuit’s strangest and bleakest early work; whereas their other material prior to this point had been a knowing, jokey three chord thrash through daytime television and the suburban shopping parade, DDE begins with opening instrumental lines that can’t decide if the song wants to be maudlin or jaunty. That marching drum beat seems to be designed to push bottoms off sofas towards a waltz with a partner, but the organ seems to be playing an anonymous fugue for somebody’s funeral. It doesn’t feel like much of a joke, and it continues in the same vein despite Nigel Blackwell’s lyrical interventions.
Besides Tolkien, it references footballer Brian Moore, whose “head looks uncannily like London Planitarium” – a line which would eventually become the title of a football fanzine – the erotic Cadbury’s Flake adverts doing the rounds on television, and science fiction writer Michael Moorcock. Unlike their other tracks, it feels unfixed, drifting, the sharp observational eye replaced by an indecisive pre-REM sleep brain, picking up the frustrated or underwhelming memories of the day. Blackwell sings not with a rant or a cry, but a mumble, to himself rather than anyone else.
For a long time, I regarded this as one of the least satisfactory HMHB songs as a result. Blackwell’s lyrics are usually razor sharp – as a lyricist, his output is usually far funnier than most comedy poets, whose wit is often blunted by an apologetic tweeness and bounciness (performance poets are often slightly embarrassed about their craft and are desperate to try and make friends with the audience as quickly as possible). “Dickie Davies Eyes” is, by comparison, adrift on a coffee table raft in the middle of what passes for a frustrating friend’s living room, desperately grabbing at the detritus in the hope that something might provide a helpful anchor.
At some point in the last ten years, though, I’ve decided I actually like that. For one thing, the instrumentation on this is interesting and sometimes gets stuck in my head by itself – a queasy folky jaunt which sounds as if it might ordinarily be accompanying a tale of the sole survivor of an ancient shipwreck. Half Man Half Biscuit have been compared to folk music a few times in more recent decades, and you can hear the beginnings of that on this single. Punk rock it isn’t, except for the aspects which despair of hippy culture.
The promotional video also feels as if it ties in neatly with the surrounding C86 movement (whether that was Blackwell’s intention or not). The poet, musician and artist Edward Barton once said that the streets of the eighties seemed to be filled with discarded children’s toys from Boomer children who had grown up, their infant years left abandoned at the kerbside. Barton saw poetry and meaning in this and collected and appropriated them in various ways, as did less obviously “artistic” people like Stephen Pastel who could be found playing with battered Action Man toys at people’s parties. The video features endless examples of such childish behaviour, presented blankly and almost through a fog of boredom. If The Pastels seemed thrilled to be back out in the back garden playing with Stretch Armstrong again, Blackwell and his cohorts seemed to be pointing towards this discarded kinder-trash as the only thing that was freely available to him on a bored Tuesday (though the ride in the mechanised child’s toy in the shopping centre must have cost at least ten pence).