NOTE - The video is taken from a Peel Session broadcast on 24 August 1991 rather than the record released through the band’s Stuff Records label.
Happy Shopper was Number 21* on the Phantom Fifty, and it is the first tune out of any of the ones I’ve blogged about from the Phantom Fifty that I feel would have been a deserving candidate as a Number 1 in that chart. More pertinently though, it is unquestionably the finest Foreheads in a Fishtank tune that I’ve heard.
I think there are two major themes which Happy Shopper is based around:
1) Personal disenchantment - There are certain metaphorical signposts which show us that our lives are not moving in the direction that we would have hoped. One of the most dispiriting is when our food and everyday household items come exclusively from own brand sources. It’s pure snobbery, of course, but if you’ve been used to Fox’s Biscuits and Twinings Tea, you may consider McVitie’s and Tetley to be something of a comedown. But there is further to fall, if you’re not careful. And this song plunges into that poverty with its screams of OH CHRIST! WHO BOUGHT THESE TEABAGS/BISCUITS!, delivered with the absolute disgust of someone who has taken said biscuits and teabags out of the cupboard only to discover the Happy Shopper logo on the packaging.
It may be that they taste perfectly acceptable - for instance, my wife loves Sainsbury’s own brand of tortilla chips ahead of Doritos - but that garish orange and yellow logo, as was, shines out one message loud and clear: this is your failure. You can’t even afford “proper” biscuits and teabags. You might as well be supping water straight from the tap while chewing a slice of mouldy bread for all the nutritional satisfaction you’ll get from this. You thought you deserved Fortnum’s and yet here you are, scrabbling around with stuff that Spar would look down their noses at. You need better. You deserve better. Why haven’t you been able to enjoy better? Something….or someone…has led you to this crappy state of life….
Which leads us on to the second major theme of Happy Shopper:
2) Domestic discord - the song makes no bones about the fact that domestic relationships can easily sour once you get enmeshed in the tediousness of household chores. The ongoing relentlessness of keeping a house clean ends up meaning that intimacy and romance ends up as a clumsy fumble over the kitchen table.
As I write this, I’m thinking of my dirty bath upstairs, which needs cleaning. The eight stroke guitar riff that opens and underpins the song sounds like the circling motion of tired arms, windmilling to try and wash away stains that will refuse to shift. That eighth beat is the brief moment of respite before restarting the seemingly endless scrub. And in the back of your mind is the dull, draining thought that once this piece of drudgery is finished, there’s a whole list of other chores to work through. And in a few weeks’ time, you’ll be back scrubbing away another set of stains from this same spot and rotating your way through the same set of chores again.
The regular, metallic clattering which pops up throughout the track sounds like an amalgamation of endless bins needing to be put out with the pots and pans being pulled out of drawers and thrown to all corners of the kitchen. Once you throw children into the mix, and the day starts to become centred around ensuring that you’re in time to relieve the babysitter of their duties, so that you can make dinner with your groceries bought from Happy Shopper, then it’s hardly surprising that the facade cracks and the concept of domestic bliss and the nuclear family becomes something to be hated in as violent way as possible.
As the shout becomes Domestic, domestic, domestic bliss/Oh God, I hate it!, the answer to theme 1 starts to come into sharper focus. You’re not having the better life you deserve because of your responsibilities to others. All the rushing around to pick people up/drop them off, the cooking, the cleaning, the looking after the kids - that’s why your life is a misery. It’s their fault!
And as the track plunges into its final 20 seconds, with Jeff Leahy’s hatred of the crappy teabags being underscored by the clatter and bang of the drums, it sounds disconcertingly like the pots and pans are being used to bludgeon his partner to death - a man finally pushed over his limit by own brand produce, and changing his life in the most terrible way.
Jauntily psychotic, Happy Shopper is Foreheads in a Fishtank’s masterpiece, and I’m only sad that when the time comes for me to do this blog’s version of a Festive Fifty for 1993, I won’t be able to include it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a bath to scrub.
*Peel had meant to play Happy Shopper on the previous Saturday, but had left the record at home. He was apologetic that this meant that it had thrown the schedule out by a week and meant that the eventual reveal of the Number 1 record on the Phantom Fifty would end up taking place a week later than planned - People have had to reorganise their summer holidays and everything.
Video courtesy of Worried Tunes 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment