Gentleman’s Lament was recorded by Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 for their fourth album, Mother of All Saints, which was released on Matador in 1992. Reflecting on the band’s career in a recent interview with the Quietus, Brian Hageman said of the time leading up to the recording of Mother of All Saints:
We were writing stuff on the road a lot, and there was just so much, that’s how it ended up being a double record. We were loud and chaotic live - we wanted it to be overwhelming. (Hageman, The Strange World of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 by Sean Kitching for The Quietus, published 1 April 2026).
Listening to Mother of All Saints is to be overwhelmed by a band, who over the first half of that record at least, simply refused to stand still within any of their songs. Gentleman’s Lament was the first full track on the album and gives an indication of what to expect. Noisy, atonal, constantly shifting tempo, never allowing the song to settle into any predictable pattern. It’s a relentless attempt to bludgeon the listener with new things every 10 seconds. And for nearly half of Mother of All Saints, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 manage to keep that evolving smorgasbord of sounds coming, until, eventually, the tracks do start to fall into a tonally consistent pattern, and the record runs out of steam in its second half. Trumans Water are an obvious comparison, though Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 had been going for several years prior to them.
What engages me with Gentleman’s Lament is how all the chaotic music within it is used as a setting for lyrics which sound like a letter from a wealthy industrialist intending to make an escape to the country in order to try and cleanse themselves of the pollution that is clogging up the air of the city. The tone of the lyric is formal and archaic:
And suddenly it starts to become clear that it’s not only the body and skin of the narrator in Gentleman’s Lament that has become poisoned but their mind too. The bouncing, juddering music that reflected the sound of the cars and chimneys mentioned at the start of the song now seems to be reflecting the disturbed mental state of the letter writer.
The lyrics, which become harder to hear from 1:40 onwards when the band decide to sing them as a high choral harmony, confirm that the letter writer has indeed been packed off to the countryside - possibly forever - due to a mental breakdown:
Viscous thoughts slosh slowly on through cluttered mind.
Fishies figure eight and horsies butterfly.
Butler scratches chin and sighs, slowly wonders why.
It’s possible that the country retreat is an asylum and that the butler is Mark E. Smith.
Peel dedicated the track to the American band, Polvo, who had visited him at Radio 1 earlier that day, and whom he was going to see performing an in-store set at Rough Trade, the next day. Peel felt that whenever he met American bands, he came across badly to them, and he cited as evidence an awkward encounter with Mudhoney’s Mark Arm at the previous year’s Reading Festival. When Peel originally told that story, he hadn’t gone into detail, which led me to believe that he’d probably been guilty of overwhelming Arm with babble, born out of nerves and admiration. But, he revealed tonight that he had spooked Arm by suggesting they have a drink together after Mudhoney’s set. Maybe Arm had felt this was someone getting too over-familiar, or maybe he was just desperate not to have to prolong a social encounter where he felt that he may not have enough to say. If so, then Arm was probably guilty of behaving in a more British manner than Peel was, who by contrast would have come across - unintentionally, I’m sure - as acting like a pushy American.
Nevertheless, as we shall discover when we get to the 29/5/93 show, Polvo were delighted to see Peel again, not least because they would both have a war story to share about spending that week performing to low numbers*
*More on that when we get to the Notes post on this show and the 29/5/93 one.
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