Chris Morris: Blue Jam

Do not play this album if there is a chance of being 'interrupted' by someone who doesn't know you very well and trust you intimately. And if that someone who thinks they know you very well, and has hitherto trusted you implicitly, happens to be your mother, hide this CD more carefully than you hid that porn mag you had when you were thirteen. For, though you didn't realise it at the time, your mum pretty much guessed about the mag, so she deliberately didn't look. However, even though — or especially since — you're now a parent yourself, your mum would just not know what to think about you if she thought you listened to dramatisations of parents who cheerfully abandon their offspring to sodomy and murder, who give their children gender realignment surgery, or whatever it's called now, and of a four-year-old girl who plays the Winston Wolf role after a domestic accident but fucks it up badly.

But it's all OK, really. And if you know anyone who says they love "dark and edgy comedy", give them this CD for Christmas and see if they keep saying it. Though comedy is the one thing it probably isn't. I can imagine someone being very impressed with these sketches and not laughing once.

Wincing is a more common response. Wincing at the fin de siècle anxieties that are brutally exposed, not just in terms of adults behaviour with children, but also how we surrender power to people who we hope will heal us (both perverted General Practitioners and alternative remedies like acupuncture with masonry nails).

So what's my excuse for ending with this in my collection? I certainly never heard of the dead-of-night Radio 1 broadcasts of Blue Jam (in the days before the iPlayer, Auntie could be confident that literally no one was listening then, and could be truly brave). I blame those subversives at The Wire who probably suckered me in with a review hinting that listening to this stuff would make a bourgeois like me look subversive.

I once lent my copy of this CD to a writer and artist, and parent, who makes some work similar in spirit to this. Lovely man.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to this album in full at Last.fm