This post pays homage to my least significant musical enterprise: a band called Happy Happy Fun Twins.

HHFT was comprised of myself and the bassist from my more ‘serious’ school band. Best friends since the age of 11, we had more than enough time to make some shit music together. And make some shit music together we did.

The first track, Never A Sound, is a bluesy country pastiche, including words such as ‘grain’, ‘land’, ‘wife’, ‘drink’, ‘Lord’, and ‘guitar’. Made on a summer’s afternoon in my bedroom at an age just a little bit too old to find this sort of thing funny, the song has two notable features:

1. My voice has broken, but not completely. I am quite clearly struggling to reach the bottom notes, and my friend’s voice seems to be lower at many moments, even though we were probably trying to sing the same melody. I imagine we didn’t change the key because I wouldn’t have liked to admit defeat – at that age, a low voice is a prized possession to store in the Fabricated Masculinity Ego Cabinet© along with general strength, footballing skill, ability at Halo (check the year, this may be dated), confidence with girls, and the matter often talked about in hushed worried tones (or blasted out loudly with a false sounding bravado) – the size of your penis.
2. I strum the chords, and my friend plays an ingenious slide guitar solo, using a glass we had in my room as the slide. This clever tactic has the unwanted side effect of sounding terrible, as you hear the rest of the glass making a scraping sound against the neck of the guitar. But it lends the song a certain air of authenticity, maybe. I don’t know, I’ve never really listened to any country music.

The second song was our first in the Happy Happy Fun Twins outfit, recorded, according to my computer, in 1970. I rechecked my birth certificate just to make sure, and have concluded that I can’t possibly have recorded HEavy Shit then. It’s more likely to have been created some 33 years later. We sat at night (when his mum had already told us to go to bed!!) and recorded this vocal performance by picking out random phrases we found written around his bedroom. I remember us being distinctly impressed with ourselves, sitting there in our pyjamas. It features some of my early attempts at beatboxing. They aren’t good, but unlike most musical skills, my beatboxing has not improved over the years, so I shouldn’t be too condescending.

‘Soak in a pile of soap’ and ‘heavily-laden dishwasher’ are undoubtedly good lines however, as any poet will tell you. I won’t even scrape the surface of their potential interpretations here, but my god, tomes could be written.

There were two HHFT songs that didn’t make the cut here. One was some variations on the Happy Birthday song, made for my first girlfriend. She was pleased. The other was an improvised story telling/singing attempt called Revenger of the Peace, which sounds a lot like we were high at the time. We weren’t. We just had the giggles. Spend enough time with one person in a house and you begin to find anything funny. They have been omitted mainly because I can’t be bothered to write about them.

Another two will come later, as the years wind on.