God's Holy Trousers - Arrant Pony (2009)
1. 9-Up (Morrid - 5m 20s)
‘You’ll never get anywhere without your four-times table’, shrieked Miss McAfferty, Morrid’s demented, one-eyed mathematics teacher, as she grasped at her sadly sparse and gingery hair. She was wrong, of course; it is quite easy, for example, to cross the road outside the Fleapit Studios on a windswept night or catch a train to Arbroath with no idea that sixteen is four squared. That said, it is doubtless Morrid’s inability to count in fours that spawned this song rather than a numerical pun on the name of a lemon-and-lime-flavoured soft drink.
Morrid - All Instruments
2. My Little Pony (Mountjoy - 4m 17s)
Mountjoy is a well seasoned equestrian and likes nothing more than a well seasoned leg of horse, with a dollop of coarse English mustard and boiled new potatoes to boot. On one of his many trips to the ends of the earth, Mountjoy came across a tribe of seven-foot-tall warriors who worshipped the mighty Euos - one of the four immortal horses of the sun-god Helios - but soon converted them to the core beliefs of Trouserism in a month-long orgy of flagellation and singing in microtones. The bones of this track came to him at the height of this mystical experience, while the rest was stolen without shame from a dingy pawnbroker in Smethwick.
Mountjoy - Guitars, Keyboards
Morrid - Bass, Drums
Mizzobel - Vox
3. Latimers (Mountjoy - 3m 49s)
Hugh Latimer, erstwhile Bishop of Worcester, was an English Protestant martyr, who was burnt at the stake in 1555. This resonates with the Trousers, who are never happier than when rounding up hapless peasants and roasting them, Flashman style, in front of the roaring fire at Mountjoy Towers, or tickling their calloused feet with blow torches. It is the smell of singed smock frocks and the sounds of screaming yokels that inspired this paean to pyromaniac torture.
Morrid - Drums
Mountjoy - Guitar, Keyboard, Bass
4. Saippuakivikauppias (Morrid - 4m 56s)
Critics have accused God's Holy Trousers of "living in a timewarp" and "having progressed little beyond the Jazz Funk Fusion heyday of 1974". We would like to thank them for their kind words, but point out that where our music may be occasionally retrospective, our track titles are nothing less than bleeding edge. Here, the title is the Finnish word for a soap-stone vendor and is believed to be the longest palindrome in everyday use.
Morrid - All Instruments
5. Fleapit (Mokshaman, Morrid, Mountjoy - 3m 49s)
Having successfully triggered one earthquake (as well as claiming partial responsibility for the global credit crunch) during his stay in China, the Mokshaman recently returned to England. Making the Fleapit studios his London base, he intends to resume his ambitious sequence of brutal homicides inspired by the poetic works of T. S. Eliot. That the Metropolitan police force has failed to apprehend the perpetrator, let alone identify that the murders are the work of a single serial killer, is perhaps evidence that their profiling techniques are too strongly centred on Keats’s early Haikus, and fail to embrace the subtleties of Eliot’s feline verse.
Mokshaman - Vocals
Morrid - Guitar, Keyboard, Bass and Drums
Mountjoy - Guitar, Keyboard
6. Confusion (Morrid - 5m 08s)
The Trousers are oft in a state of unholy disarray, a chaos brought on by tweed frotting and premature unspecified dementias. In order to capture this sense of befuddlement, Mountjoy undertook the task of writing a track but, disorientated by creosote consumption, instead fashioned himself a working steam engine made of wool. Subsequently, this track was penned by Morrid, a strange result as his original undertaking was to swim the English Channel using only the fingers on his right hand.
Morrid - All Instruments
7. One for the Solo Album (Mountjoy - 1m 32s)
It is a little-known fact that both men from U.N.C.L.E harboured musical ambitions. While Illya Kuryakin’s debut release met with plaudits in his native Ukraine, Napoleon Solo’s magnum opus, Arse Feck, amid legal wrangling and an ironic and virulent outbreak of thrush among the studio’s backing singers, never reached the public’s ears. Little of the work survives except this charming tune written by Mountjoy whilst on a working holiday with James Bond in the Pitcairn Islands.
Mountjoy - Guitars and Bass
Morrid - Percussion, Wok
8. Told You So (Morrid - 6m 04s)
The Trousers’ Icelandic housemaid, Ms. Björk Björgólfur Björgólfdottir, and a nagging old baggage if ever there were one, is on a mission from Thor to admonish the chaps for their untidiness and lack of toilet training. That she does so in 7:4 time on weekdays but 5:4 at the weekends is a feat that should be respected and perhaps even rewarded. As such, the Trousers have petitioned the powers-at-be to award her an honorary damehood. Until then, this track will have to suffice, no matter how paltry.
Morrid - All Instruments
9. Quentin Compson (Mountjoy - 4m 19s)
The Trousers have long been a fan of the stream-of-consciousness writing of William Faulkner and like nothing more than to scale the nearest mountain and shout his name in cod Welsh accents and their best falsetto voices. This track, which shares the name of a character in Faulkner’s works The Sound and the Fury and Absolom, Abolsom!, has, however, nothing to do with these books and is, in fact, a serendipitous anagram of the name of Mountjoy’s as-yet-unpublished play about a group of amusing mountebanks, Conmen Quip Tons.
Mountjoy - Guitars and Keyboards
Morrid - Bass and Drums
©2009 All tracks recorded and mixed at Fleapit Studios and M-Joy Towers
