The Comedy of Errors: Delta 5 - Mind Your Own Business (13 June 1992)

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Until I heard the file for this 13/6/92 show, I had always believed that Mind Your Own Business was a Chicks on Speed song due it to being on their debut album and its sentiments fitting the group’s chilly, stentorian, darkly humorous aesthetic.  However, it turns out that the origins of the track were not to be found in pre-Millennium Munich but rather 1970s Leeds.

Delta 5 provide a couple of templates for Chicks on Speed in that their core membership was three women, 2 of whom played bass guitar (though the band also included 2 male musicians on guitar and drums respectively) and they did a nice line in chilly, stentorian, darkly humorous songs themselves.  The divergence, based on what I’ve heard of Delta 5 so far, is that they used that dual bass-lineup in order to go down a funk-punk route rather than exploring synths/electronica although the two jarringly, angular guitar solos at 1:43 and 2:47 sound like something which could feature on a Chicks on Speed track.
If you were to put 50 essential post-punk tunes in a capsule as a guide to future generations as to what defined that scene then Mind Your Own Business would have to be part of it. Like so many tracks of its era (1979), it borrows from what went immediately before it by setting its lyric out as a stroppy, playground chant.  Interestingly, the vocal melody remains the same throughout the track, but in contrast to how this may have turned out had it been recorded in 1977, Delta 5 use layered and delayed vocals in order to amplify the number of demands and requests being fired towards the subject of the song.  The content of the song deepens as it goes on and what may have started out as a rebuffing of unwanted interference starts to look at wider themes of alienation within a relationship.

Can you feel those people behind me?
Looking at your feelings inside me?
Listen to the distance between us
Why don’t you mind your own business.

Another reading is that the lyrics are a duologue between one half of a couple craving to be let into the emotional depths of their loved one, while the title refrain is that other half refusing to give them admittance to their inner thoughts and feelings.  The end of the song suggests that Hell will freeze over before any emotional openness is possible.
The refusal or inability to communicate openly was a recurring theme in Delta 5’s work.  I particularly like their 1980 single, Try, which concerns itself with both the inability to communicate and the impossibility of it when one side only wants to communicate solely so that the other side agrees with them, no questions asked.

A third reading of the song takes us back to the cinema.  While Vertigo might have been recording after going to see My Cousin Vinny, there are touches, especially in the opening verse, that suggest  Delta 5 had seen Robert Altman’s 1977 psychodrama, 3 Women.  The opening requests i.e. “Can I interfere in your crisis?” etc and the emphatic rebuttal of the title line both suggesting an attempt to assimilate another person’s life and behaviours being met with a frantic attempt to hold on to a self-identity which is being leeched away.

Mind Your Own Business owed its place on Peel’s playlist for tonight due to him reaching the D
section of his singles collection in his ongoing search for the Little Richard cover version.  “Nice to
hear that again, at least a decade old.”

Video courtesy of Beauty Above All
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.