Albums: This Is Not A Library

Please welcome the newest addition to the Well Hung At Dawn Canon, Leicester's own MJ Hibbett and the Validators. Hilarious, heartbreaking and chock-a-block with brass, twee girly backing vocals and songs about pints, his/their This Is Not a Library is 2K3's best State of the Nation (not our nation, alas -- there are no American songwriters even attempting such stuff) album. As such, it's currently climbing towards the tippy-top of our Records of the Year list. Kudos to all involved! Kudos we say!

As concepts go, MJ Hibbett & the Validators are as barking as Rick Wakeman’s ‘King Arthur On Ice’, Señor Coconut’s ballroom dancing take on Kraftwerk and Deep Purple, and Kiss taking the make-up off. If you’re old enough to remember Ivor Biggun And The Red-Nosed Burglars you’ll feel instantly at home with MJ Hibbett, but where Ivor Biggun was content to regale us with tales of being reincarnated as the seat on a fat ladies’ bike and endless bouts of onanism, Hibbett’s concerns are more cerebral. ‘The Symbol Of Our Nation’ and ‘Last Orders’ make a compelling case for elevating humble village pubs to national treasures, while elsewhere he turns his attentions to the minutiae of daily life with all the ease of Chris T-T and Hefner’s Darren Hayman. That he chooses to dress up his work in the cast-off’s of brass bands, buskers and novelty muzak studios matters not a jot, though the fact that the likes of (Prolapse drummer) Tim Pattison and Frankie Machine are behind that hedge of sound will raise some eyebrows. If pressed for a pigeonhole, ‘This Is Not A Library’ fits somewhere between Belle & Sebastian and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, but really, this is in a field all its own. Like it? Love it!

Literate, sassy human pop music from the Midlands carried off with the usual chirpy Native Hipsters/Yeah Yeah Noh sytle. Fucking great CDr too.

In the same way - sort of - that Arab Strap are very obviously Scottish, MJ Hibbett and pals are perhaps the archetypal English pop group. Not part of any fashionable Essex or Camden scene, these Midlanders are an eccentric, alien-accented collective. They sing of the "Symbol of Our Nation" (a pub) and sport a curious obsession with libraries. Obvious comparisons are confronted head-on when Billy Bragg gets namechecked (just after Bob Dylan) on "Things'll Be Different When I'm In Charge", which is at the comical end of The Validators' spectrum. But they span the emotional gamut too: "History slides down a pint glass and my hair is getting thin", is the refrain on "One Last Party", a decidedly poignant closure to the album. All eighteen tracks are linked by one thing: an ear for a tune. The obvious references are revered English songsmiths such as Half Man Half Biscuit or the Wedding Present, and they're driven by ex-Prolapse drummer Tim Pattison (on a tribute to Midland Rail Lost Property). The main man is ably backed by, or duetting with, Emma Pattison, and with a multitude of instruments like brass and strings employed, the realisation hits you - take away the accents and the comedic lyrics, and you've got the Black Country Belle and Sebastian. Which, if nothing else, shows that maybe we're not that different after all.

I have to declare an interest here. I first encountered MJ Hibbett via the free cassette that came with "Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters" #1 way back at the end of 1998. Two years later Mark had acquired a backing band, The Validators, and produced an album, "Say It With Words", which I bought rather belatedly. Having enjoyed it a lot I invited Mark to do a session for my student radio show "John Kell vs. Satan" and 18 months later was the first person ever to play tracks from the new album, the still unfinished, on the radio (whatever ne'er do well Johnny-come-lately types like Steve Lamacq might tell you). In fact the album's recording dates - a period of 3 years detailed on the sleeve - coincides to within a couple of months with my time as a student. But I don't think this makes me particularly biased - after all, I got in touch with Mark in the first place because I liked the first album.

So it's not entirely unreasonable for me to like this one. A lot. Lamacq himself has said he has "come to love" it, and he's got something there, it's a very loveable record. Arguably it's folk music, in the same way as Half Man Half Biscuit or Billy Bragg are: it deals with everyday life, which is how folk music started out, however much it now seems to have forgotten it. The kind of song you can quote in a way that's relevant and not pretentious. The music itself is as indie as you could want without getting twee (mostly), and the great thing about it is the way it hangs together as an album. The sequencing of the 18 tracks is pretty much flawless, and in this regard it succeeds where others this year such as Radiohead have failed so woefully. The record comes complete with a multimedia computery bit which contains lots of information about the recording of the albuym, plus Mark's web diaries from the last 5 years, which have now transformed into a fully-fledged and highly entertaining blog at www.mjhibbett.com. Actually, this IS quite a difficult record for me to review usefully, despite what I said earlier, so I'll leave it by saying it's smart, it's lovely, at times it's not a little touching, and you're a fool if you don't go to the website and buy it. Now!

Virtually three years in the making, this second album from the indie scene's favourite unkempt old busker certainly doesn't cut corners, containing over 2 hours of material and a veritable library (oh no it isn't) of related items such as biographies for each track. It would take a heart of stone to dislike his chipper world view and it's this charming joyousness that sets him apart from the all-too-earnest singer-songwriters that clutter the field. MJH combines the cultural iconaclasm of Half Man Half Biscuit with ramshackle early-Bragg-isms and a Gedge-like provinvial drawl, all the while backed by his robust Validators adding brass and strings to his prankish, knockabout elegies to life and lovin' it.

By day, MJ Hibbett is a database manager; by night a singer-songwriter who runs the indie record label Artists Against Success. The IT profession's very own Billy Bragg hopes to follow the cult popularity of his Hey Hey 16K anthem for the ZX Spectrum generation with a new downloadable track, Programming Is A Poetry For Our Time, musing "I wonder would Wordsworth have written in Perl?/ Would Keats have used Notepad for HTML?".

There's a bias against politicized rock music in America, fostered by the knock-kneed notions that "real" art somehow rises above political "propaganda", or that political discourse is not "entertaining", or that lyrics with political content are too "obvious", or that their views are insubstantial and vague. Of course, all such criticism constitutes a politics itself -- a reactionary one that bristles when the status quo is questioned. MJ Hibbett, a rabble-rousing musical polemicist of the Billy Bragg school, deals with these kinds of critics on This Is Not a Library's first song, wherein he lays out a ludicrously specific political program to demonstrate what a silly expectation that is to have of an artist. On the songs that follow, he succeeds in raising provocative points without ever seeming dour, humorless or self-righteous. While his topics can be somewhat Anglocentric (the significance of the "Holdalls Is the New Name for Midland Mainline Lost Property", for example, will be lost on most Americans), he still touches on many things to which we all can relate. In fact, many of Hibbett's songs are about pubs: enumerating the pubs in a his town, proclaiming the pub to be the symbol of his nation, anatomizing the sentimentality that surrounds pubs, and so on. Much of the album has the sound of having been conceived in pubs, whether on makeshift stages or at a table with a few pints, hashing out the many ways in which the system screws people over. This gives even the album's most specious rants a feeling of warmth, and permits you to afford Hibbett the leeway you'd give to someone you thought might be inebriated.

MJ Hibbett is a genius. He and his merry band known as The Validators, stepping fiercely on the toes of mopey rain-soaked British poppers, are helping to return a bit of life to rock and pop. You may have never heard of them, but you better educate yourself. Quickly.

This is Not A Library is a ray of sunshine blasting through overly serious indie pop, neither twee nor melancholy. Between 2000 and 2003, these 18 songs came to life thanks to the assistance of Frankie Machine, Tom McClure, Emma and Tim Pattison. “The Symbol of Our Nation” (from whom the group take the name of this album) is damn perky, with brass bringing perhaps a tad of that Sixties London into their sound, and in fact the brass informs and imbues the majority of the album. They just as often can sound like the best damn pub band on earth, like in the hokey “Good Cooking”. MJ Hibbett himself sounds to be the lovechild of Billy Bragg and Mark E. Smith (on the earlier Fall records) which automatically sets him apart from the scores of Morrissey disciples (and that bloke from The Music who sounds like Steve Perry from Journey).

“One Last Party” ends the album with a bang, and don’t forget the ‘futuristic multimedia’ also included, with scads of demos and unused tracks, lyrics and everything but the kitchen sink. Bless ‘em, these Validators.

I present a diverting link to one of the songs from MJ Hibbett's GRATE (obv.) new album, which is based around the idea that the pub is the true symbol of englishness. There are also at least three more songs on the album that are about the pub (and one about food as well).

Nearly three years in the making This Is Not A Library has become long awaited by default and the longer time has gone on the higher expectations have become. So has Mr Hibbett managed to deliver? Well, yes. For starters, as well as the 18 great tracks that make up the album you can find another 20 if you put the CD in your computer and access the "futuristic multimedia" (something my aging computer is refusing to do) and it's all painted with MJ's honest and personal take on life.

Subject matter for the album includes national identity (Things'll Be Different When I'm In Charge, The Symbol Of Our Nation), railway privatisation (Holdalls Is The New Name For Midland Mainline Lost Property), Pubs (Last Orders - with mentions in several other songs too), fashion and health (Fat Was A Feminist Issue, Post-Subsonic Bass) and probably a large proportion of things you can think of in between. Special mentions go to the do-it-yourself nostalgia of (insert title here) and the annoyance that an ex-girlfriend failed to live up to her claims and cease to exist on You Will Be Hearing From My Solicitor. Hey, it's all great and there's too much to talk about. Buy it!

In Issue Three of Careless Talk Costs Lives the inestimable Michael White writes with typical insight about the wonderful Sportique. He calls their Sportique No. 9 album (Matinee / WIAIWYA) a “volley of righteous indignation, pitch-black humour, and the sort of sharp-cornered hooks that Wire and The Fall used to throw down”. Of course he is spot on, and naturally it’s impossible for me to say much more than that, so go get your copy of Careless Talk and Sportique No. 9 this instant.

In the aforementioned article, Michael notes how Sportique are, like the Kinks and TV Personalities, “boldly, defiantly English”. Well, in a similar vein, MJ Hibbett and the Validators’ This Is Not A Library is an exploration and dissection of the state of the nation, a peculiar evocation of waspish midlands England that comes across as warmly nostalgic. The sleevenotes say “it’s about love, it’s about pubs, it’s about life and death” which means of course it’s all about the imperative Pop themes, which is fine by me. Musically it’s kind of a collision between Half Man Half Biscuit, early Wedding Present/loads of mid ‘80s trashy thrashy guitar-pop bands and vintage Animals That Swim. Personal faves would be ‘the back of the sofa’ and ‘holdall is the new name for midland mainline lost property’. Divertingly charming and a charming diversion.

second album from mj hibbett is an hour's worth of songs with a big hearted charm.it has a lofi charm of early half man half biscuit or the fall and the songs cover national identity,rail privitisation,pub regulars,mens health issues and the joys of ignoring fashion.there is an enhanced section with an extra hour's worth of demos

loads of great songs about going to the pub!

Ok, this band aren’t from Sheffield or South Yorkshire, but sometimes we get an out of town record through the L2SB letterbox which deserves a mention anyway. One of the tracks mentions the ‘trams of Sheffield’, so I’ll use that as very tenuous justification.

MJ Hibbett is a Peterborough singer/songwriter, backed by his band The Validators. There are obvious Billy Bragg influences in there, but although politics are mentioned (in such things as national identity and rail privatisation) the main topics are the more mundane things in life, such as love, friendship and pubs.

In fact the good old public house constitutes a large portion of the subject matter here, including a convincing argument that the symbol of England should be a pub, and laments that times in old locals are now sadly gone.

It’s the sound of a man with a few niggles to sort out, but who is generally content with life as long as he has a foaming beer in his hand and a bar to prop up. It’s a charming album with intelligent lyrics, that warms the cockles of your heart and has you thirsting for a pint of mild.

Hibbett is threatening a Sheffield gig later in the year. Make sure you all pop down.

Rejoice and let jubilation reign because MJ Hibbett is back with his second album! This hour-long collection has been a full three long years in the making. In that time Mr Hibbett has been ably assisted by The Validators - comprising Frankie Machine (Whose album should be compulsory listening), Tim Patterson (of Prolapse fame), Emma Patterson (Who gave birth to Edie mid-recording, although not literally I hope) and Tom McClure (from Lazarus Clamp) - as well as Kev Reverb (Crazyhead) on production duties.

The apparent juxtaposition, by the standards of conventional wisdom, of an album that is well thought out whilst simultaneously being jaunty and upbeat is part of the whole MJ Hibbett & The Validators appeal. There is a rich vein of well observed and finely class=reviewer targeted humour runs through 'This Is Not A Library'. This album covers topics from English national identity to media enhanced male neurosis and does so in styles from country to punk rock without sounding like a haphazard compilation. For all that, the real reason to listen to this album is because it is just damn good music.

If you're in London or can get there, you catch MJ Hibbett Upstairs at the Garage on August 1st.

Leicester's MJ HIBBETT has been compared to Billy Bragg, once put on a massive proto-rock opera in the local town hall square, claims to have released the first internet-only single ('Hey Hey 16k', a spectacular tribute to the ancient history of computer gaming which comes highly recommend by us - http://listen.to/HeyHey16K) and has admitted he's had people join his band only because he occasionally supports ver Biscuit. NTK like him, but don't let that put you off. His second album with The Validators, This Is Not A Library, including a song called 'BBC2 (A New Hope)', has just been released on his own superbly named Artists Against Success label – see http://www.mjhibbett.com

MJ Hibbett & The Validators are a five piece from Leicester, UK. Their first album 'This is not a library' is a collection of 18 songs and was just released on 'Artists Against Success'. Musically I would compare them with fellow Leicesteronians 'Airport Girl', your standard guitars and the occasional lovely trumpet or even strings. There are a few good songs on here but I afraid not good enough to excite me anymore. I've heard too much of this stuff. What's more refreshing are the lyrics, the songs are about life in England in the early 2000s and there is enough wrong this that life to fill the 18 songs. Unusually the CD also has a big multi-media part with additional tracks as MP3s, notes and lyrics for all songs and lots of additional information about the band on a really cool web-interface. This is the sound of angry young England and its worth the listen.

A second album from the man who released the first ever online single (so it says here), aided by a Prolapse drummer+wife and a Lazarus Clamp string arranger amongst others, oh yes. You get 18 songs/60 minutes recorded over a period of three years, plus a whole calcavade of sound+words+pictures on the fancy “futuristic multimedia!” part of the CD. This fabulous technological assortment of wonder crashed my humble dilapidated PC, so I can only tell you about the music.

MJ is one of those “intelligent” lyricists; part of a school that eschews whinging and whining about love and despair for more homegrown/humdrum issues. The tired old formula of themes and bad metaphors have been rejected in favour of being “topical”; celebrating the more banal aspects of life+society with a tongue nestling discreetly within cheek, and spinning out a mildly catchy chorus or two out of some fairly unlikely lyrical content. Thus we get cheeky chappy songs about BBC2’s programming schedule, rail privatisation, the new name of lost Property at Midland Mainline [actually, this is probably one of those bad metaphors], and of course the sacred activity of good ol’ going down the pub. Whilst the words are pretty sharp, I’m not so sure about the appeal of Mr Hibbett outside of these homely shores…

Musically, there’s not a huge amount to write home about. Slightly jangly guitars do most of the gruntwork, though this occasionally tedious formula is pleasingly usurped by the frequent inclusion of horns and strings and things (the Lazarus Clamp touch). Unfortunately, the recording is so flat that any warmth you might have gleaned from such textures is pretty much lost. Shame. All this said it’s not really the instrumentation that you’ll be listening to on this record – the lyrics far outweigh/shine everything else, which is probably just the way it should be. It’s just a shame that a gathering of such talented people didn’t garner more musical energy and adventure over the course of 18 songs. Ah well.

In short, this is fine. Not great, no’ bad, definitely more diverting than yer average indie fare. And whilst it never threatens to approach the giddily surreal heights of prime Half Man Half Biscuit, ‘tis certainly pleasant enough.