Summer Of Guff

Summer Of Guff
The Paedophile Priests

Polymorphous Pervert Records

Review by Alexander Stark

The well-known phrase ‘difficult third album’ might well have been invented for the much awaited new release Summer Of Guff from controversial Swansea cult indie rockers the Paedophile Priests, but for all the wrong reasons. Just before Christmas, iconoclastic front-man ‘Bald’ Archie Canterbury was rumoured to have left the band to concentrate on his new side-project Joan Bakewell & The Tarts in collaboration with Des Lynam, Julian Assange, and a broken lawnmower, and drummer Tutu Bishop was arrested on drugs charges during a charity concert in Timbuktu. With guitarist Ike Davis in much-publicised rehab for model addiction after his public split with girlfriend Kate Moses, the Priests’ disarray and disintegration seemed complete and completely dismal.

But in characteristic style they have returned just in time it seems to re-take their place at the apex of Brit pop, enthralling fans and virgins alike with their usual blend of acerbic lyrics and ear-ripping aural bricolage. But did I say ‘usual’? Of course, nothing is ever usual with the Priests, and that is the essence of their power to shock and spring eternal from the jaded and dusty fountainhead that is the flagging heart of the British musical scene. Indeed, with the whole country on its knees economically, Summer Of Guff feels like the morale-boosting breath of foul air that we’ve all been waiting for.

As ever, instrumentation runs the gamut of invention: from detuned violas and retro-wrecked harpsichords, to eviscerated goats guts miked-up to back-firing motorbikes, didgeridoos and recordings of NATO night-time bombing raids. Particularly topical as events have subsequently unfolded, is Muammar Gaddafi (now how did they pull off a coup like that?) providing guest vocals on two of the tracks Oil, My Ass and: I Fly Pariah International. Despite numerous attempts at imitation over the last few years, no other band have even come close to the originality and influentiality of the Priests since their seminal release Father Tolled Me Off With The Bells, and its astonishing follow-up Get Behind Me, Satan.

The heart of every song is still Canterbury’s hauntingly ecclesiastical vocals and wry observations on the world, like a sermon from some sort of drunken Jesus who survived the cross, sold his story to The Sun then got busted by Interpol on his way over to Al-Jazeera. “There’s always time enough to repent/ Time enough to tell you what I really meant” he laments in the stirring Tony B. Liar’s Confession Cubicle, and after an appealingly vile zither solo from Ike Davis, he rounds it off with “Nail me to your floorboards/ I’m so sorry I made you cross/ Vote me a penance baby/ I’ll take the street and a dodgy doss.”

But the Priests save the best for last, with the last three tracks on the album amounting to an impassioned lampooning of all things Royal and British. Patriots beware. Prince Andrew Junket Junkie blows us sideways with coronation trumpets overlaid with the sound of yelping corgis (“No royal family members or equally dumb animals were harmed during the making of this record”, the sleeve notes helpfully tell us). Duke Of Anywhere But Here, mercilessly berates the Queen’s Consort with a meticulous list of diplomatic gaffes over the years: “Slanty eyes and golly wogs/ Swiss cuckoo clocks and Dutchman’s Clogs/ Prejudice ’gainst nations diverse/ I get my views from Taxi Drivers/ Closeted, moi?”

The Paedophile Priests are the urban troubadours of our troubled age, bringing an inane smile to even the most inane of our kingdom’s weary serfdom. Archibald Canterbury is a true poet of the modern world. I’ll leave you this from the magnificent closing track Organise Your Own Street Riot, in which we encounter the edifying spectacle of BBC Royal Correspondents Jenny Bond and Nicholas Witchell being entombed alive with the Queen Mother in the manner of an Egyptian Pharaoh:

In patriotic royalty haze
Street parties in the good old days
Were timed to set the minions free
To celebrate the Jubilee
Or even better when a wedding
Tabloid froth and see-through bedding
Diana’s fringe and Charles’ bald pate’s
Been swapped this time for Wills and Kate
Let’s all forget the nation’s fate
To watch two people copulate

Blessed by God as from above
He pours down cocktails Molotov
A recipe from Jenny Bond
Right royal advice to correspond
To Nick Witchell’s prime hot air
We wonder what he sees up there
Gazing up the royal pudenda
To postulate the day’s agenda
Two silly poodles we should have smothered
The day we lost the old Queen Mother
Sealed up like Pharaoh with her slaves
Alive inside the Dowager's grave
Endless commenting on putrefaction
We’d hate to miss out on the action.

Bark odes

Forget about the so-called bible codes, feast your eyes on ring sonnets and bark odes! 

Every schoolchild knows how bees invented television, and ants conceived telepathy, but new advanced research by the Royale Botanical Association has discovered that common trees, like the easily recognisable horse chestnut (which spawned a whole human infantile subculture of conkers), or the fast-growing walnut, have secretly been composing poetry for millennia. In forest and copse, timeless wood-wordsmiths etch lyrical prose with epochal variations, often discussing nature and entropy with a matchstick profundity that mere mortals like us could never hope to equal.  

Diatribes..? Well, yes, certainly – the focus of political and social commentaries by trees is particularly fascinating. Despite the usual pacifism of trees, their virulent polemical rants about several varieties parasitical fungi are very probably more fascistically objectionable than most forms of human racism. And let’s not forget the infamous troubles of colonial ‘oppression’ between American oaks and Canadian maples (as immortalised in rock music by that Rush song), which first led curious researchers on the trail of so-called ‘vegetable panic attacks’ - detected as a subtle, almost psychically attuned, infrared mottling on bark (see picture: ‘new proverbs for old’ - translated from Aramaic), and in false colour imaging of seasonal ring patterns (pictured: ‘this is what the Romans did for us’ - abridged version).

Terror felt by trees has increased dramatically ever since humanity’s industrial revolution forever changed agricultural practices regarding forestry, so trees that once feared campfires, and felling by mankind’s primitive axes, nowadays have to contend with chainsaws and mechanical up-rooters. Dendrochronology studies, finding disturbing patterns of climate change, prompted further investigations into extraordinary upheavals in the social history of trees. Although quite immobile, the lividly roving rage of activist-poet trees is found in their classic agitprop protest anthem, ‘timber is murder’. You don’t want to know what noble pines think about humankind’s ritual barbarism of Christmastime! And yet, preliminary evidence suggests that many trees maintain a somewhat contrary respect for the supposedly civilising influence of the ‘book publishing’ industry upon homo sapiens’ typically callous banditry.

Shunned by naturally endowed trees, the forced-evolutionary leapfrog of their gene-mod vegetable cousins - the unwholesomely motile and wholly dangerous, so-called ‘triffids’; is another twig of contention between species. It’s a deep-rooted sourness (epitomised by the silent seething specificity of a standard ‘walk on by’ rejection) that resulted in triffids’ irreversible expulsion from the big society of trees, after redwood parliamentary debates, and even disbarment from regular autumnal leaf-dropping parties. Unfortunately, some of the recent ‘scientific’ discoveries concerning poetry by trees are entirely spurious, at best. There is no compelling data whatsoever that any modern trees send ‘txt’ messages.  

 Activity is very slow in this gym for trees...