Whenever our old friend Nicholas Currie wants to tell us how, you know, *radical* and *sexual* and *dangerous* his music is compared to all those *repressed* and *parochial* Brit-rockers (hmmm … Fran Healy hollering his way through “Turn” as though he was reading out somebody else’s shopping list, Paul Weller shouting “He’s the keeper!” as though he’s warning young kids off the sinister owner of some Hampshire museum … for the first and only time in your life, Nick, you’re right) he draws our attention to one song – an irritating and inconsequential little throwaway called “Coming in a Girl’s Mouth”. This, apparently, is the most subversive thing ever recorded, the jewel in his crown which places him millions of light years of subversion above Primal Scream, whose most recent album got its most positive review in the Daily Telegraph (for the benefit of those outside the UK, a rabidly right-wing, fanatically pro-tradition and indescribably backward-looking newspaper).
Currie would doubtless have us believe that Telegraph editor Charles Moore would, if he knew of the existence of “…Girl’s Mouth” and of Momus himself, fire off some epic rant about how this marks the final downfall of British Civilization. Don’t fucking fool me about Moore’s priorities. We all know he’d just look up from his work, give a profoundly uninterested expression, and bray in an Etonian accent “Well, if that’s what the young coves like these days …” before getting back to wondering whether that letter which suggests that John Aspinall and the Dowager Lady Birdwood (two prominent recent stars of the paper’s obituary page) were the greatest Englishman and Englishwoman of the last century is *quite* racist enough to print, before writing another thunderous editorial suggesting that a ban on foxhunting would eradicate 1000 years of British tradition. Currie has certainly achieved his ambition of isolating himself from the Brutish (as he would say), the thing is that he’s gone so far that his regular outrageous scams are now greeted with predictable yawns here.
And that’s before we get to Momus’s actual music. His most recent “new direction” (if he’s had one of those he’s had 30) is Analog Baroque, which seems to consist entirely of ancient twiddly synths playing in an English folk style (as if Gryphon weren’t bad enough …) and Currie merrily trilling “Heigh ho the wind and the rain”. And he claims to hate Britain! Last time around he jumped on the loungecore bandwagon just when everyone was realising how stupid the Mike Flowers Pops were, and wrote a song about Tamagotchis just when everyone was realising how fucking irritating they were. And let’s not even mention the time before that (or was it before even that, I can’t remember or want to) he was going on about how he ate girls, rolled around in shit, and paid 5-year-old children to watch him having sex. It’s OK to be crap if you have to, but as for a man with such a mind …
Glossing briefly and happily over his poor imitations of Gainsbourg / Brel over late 80s British indiepop backing (once again, he claims to hate Britain but sounded weak and stiflingly polite throughout all those records), and all that twee business about Ancient Rome released on a label whose raison d’etre was to recreate the upper-class London of 1935 (and he claims to hate … blah blah blah) we can see Momus for the thieving magpie idealising poseur he is. Those who can’t create anything for themselves but instead opt to spend their time counting how many Japanese porn sites they can wank over and how many delicate Oriental girls he can dirty dream (number two) of making babies with will never create great pop music. All they’ll manage is a photocopy of a pale shadow, stuck in their own self-defeating fantasy world (Nick Currie wanks over Japanese porn sites the way retired couples from Utah wank over his hated parochial little Britain). See you, Momus. Would quake in terror if I ever had to be you.