Pukka prose by Patrick Syms. 

Adolf Hitler

The dentist

Terry & June

So begins Josie Jones’ Imperfect List, the track she released in 1990 as Big Hard Excellent Fish. An idiosyncratic collection of complaints and pet peeves – some distinctly personal, others societally significant – it rides on a simple backing track. Obviously, the music is top notch (Thank you for the remix, Messers Nicolson and Weatherall), but like The Herbaliser’s Serge, it’s the list, the words that interest me most.

As someone who considers himself a writer, I sometimes feel guilty that I listen to so much music without ever noticing the lyrics. Occasionally I think I should pay more attention but then realise that consciously making an effort is not how I want to enjoy music. It shouldn’t be work. However, in a sense, Imperfect List did all the work for me.

Evil gossiping fashion bastard

Tasteless art wanker

Despite being old enough to have bought the record when it was released, I rediscovered the track accidentally, algorithmically, a year or so back, over thirty years later. It made an instant impression. I was making no effort to be impressed. It felt more like being mugged. The song shuffled up in my Discover Weekly playlist, struck up a seemingly innocuous conversation and then shanked me when I wasn’t looking. It had such an effect on me that I can picture exactly where I was standing when it happened.

Greed

Gut wrenching disappointment

Why did it have such an impact? I’ll come to that. But before it made me gasp, my attention was locked on and considering each new item on the list. Thanks to a combination of Jones’ rough as sandpaper tone, her pronounced Scouse accent and the immediately intriguing subject matter, I was hooked. 

The most powerful attention-grabber, perhaps, was the fact that I’d experienced many of Jones’ grievances, lived with and through these things, had forgotten many of them. For example, it reminded me that I’d walked through the demonstrators in Trafalgar Square just a few hours before the Poll Tax riots kicked off. The list belongs to Jones, of course, but there’s enough of the universal for it to be richly evocative of life in the UK at a very specific moment in time. Listening now, it’s like an aural time machine, teleporting me back to late 1980s, turn-of-the-decade Thatcher’s Britain. 

Leon Brittan

[…]

Hillsborough 

[…]

Clause 28

Jones’ itemising tramples across many borders. The target of her disapproval veers from globally significant events to quirkily personal gripes and back again. Some items on the list are just one word, often two or three. Occasionally it’s much longer. The Tory invention of the non-working class. Some topics overlap in Venn diagrams of vexation: comedian “Jimmy Tarbuck” was a prominent supporter of “fucking bastard Thatcher”.

Paired lines mirror or answer one another in a way that’s occasionally explicit but often much less apparent. Early on we hear “Silly pathetic girlies” and “Silly pathetic woman” and a little later there’s “Wife and child beater” followed by “Drunken abuser”. Toward the end, these pairings arrive more frequently, and apart from the reference to murder – both that of John Lennon and then of anyone – the connection is implicit or just an impression. Unlike a rhyme, these pairings have something invisible that makes you want to connect them, like magnets reaching towards each other. The “Death of the rainforest” follows the “breakdown of the NHS”, longer statements of decline. The alliteration of “Rape” follows “Rednecks”, single words that name a crime and imply its perpetrators. “Nancy’s term” and “Ronnie’s term”: presumably the Reagans but phrased in a way that makes you question that assumption.

And then comes the final pairing. This is what made me drop the washing-up sponge. In this last line, all the expectations created so far are crushed. The pleasure that you may have taken from Jones’ dry humour is kneecapped. The final words deliver a gut punch, one that’s all the more powerful for being unexpected. The last line is not another item on the list. It’s a query, a confrontational demand, an accusation in the shape of a question. Here, finally, the connection between lines is painfully apparent. And it hits hard. Heartbreakingly hard. If you are already familiar with Imperfect List, you know. And if you haven’t yet heard the track, I’ll not spoil it. Just listen.