Following my reviewing a number of seventies novelty records a while back - and enjoying them - my famous friend Stan Batcow of Howl in the Typewriter dared me to tackle the Wurzels. I'll do it! I barked at the screen of my PC, partially because I'd been meaning to get around to the Wurzels for some time - not, as you might suspect, for the sake of sneering at The Combine Harvester or any of the others which regularly clogged the upper reaches of the charts in my youth, but because I remember my pal at junior school making me a tape of early Wurzels - or Wurzels rarities if you will, the Wurzels you were referring to when you told those other kids at the Blitz in Covent Garden in 1979, I only liked their first album. I'm talking about Down in Nempnett Thrubwell, Twice Daily, Cheddar Cheese and others - this had been a different Wurzels, a comedy turn for sure but with a softer, more wistful side to their music meaning even the inevitable numbers about rumpy-pumpy in the hay loft had a certain charm beyond the obligatory succession of cow pat gags. Subsequent research has revealed that I didn't imagine there having been a better Wurzels, and this line-up significantly featured one Adge Cutler who obviously left a massive hole in the group when he tragically lost his life in a road accident in 1974.
So I hunted around for anything featuring those songs I'd once loved, but a few of them didn't even seem to have been recorded by the Adge Cutler line-up, and the rest were scattered hither and thither across the back catalogue, and The Wurzels Are Scrumptious! seemed like the best bet given that I had no plans to buy more than one record. In its favour, the Wurzels play well and it sounds as though they had a shitload of fun; but really, I just fucking can't…
I'd forgotten about that seventies thing where albums purchased from your local WHSmith might turn out to be live albums if that's where the band were most at home, usually recorded in some working men's club complete with rambling introduction comprising gags and comic asides which were hopefully funnier at the time. I guess the whole point of the Wurzels was the live performance and how much cider you could knock back before passing out in someone else's field. I don't know if it's really fair for me to offer comment on this one, because even if it leaves me wishing to cancel the subscription to my own ears, this was the record they made after their most talented member had just pegged it, so it's arguably the Wurzels' equivalent of the first New Order album.
The problem is partially that this sort of thing is very much woven into my childhood mythology, and as NWA were to South Central Los Angeles, so the Wurzels were to the farms and villages of my youth; and it's significant that I moved to somewhere a bit less rustic as soon as I was able. Sometimes there's nothing funnier than comparing a cucumber to a penis, or the other way round, but the comparison is arguably funnier in the moment and probably doesn't work so well in song, and a song on an album which mostly seems to be about drinking, shagging, and then laughing about it at such length that the laughter ends up sounding a bit weird. It feels akin to an episode of Esther Rantzen's That's Life* but with accordion, and a hilarious chorus of ooh arr following each alleged zinger, and maybe with the more highbrow jokes left backstage so as not to confuse anyone from that neighbouring village with which we've had an amusing rivalry since 1687; until the music stops and we get another long-winded and deeply unfunny introduction reaffirming those rustic credentials, except one of them clearly isn't from Somerset, and another really doesn't have the accent of a man whose economic status ever obliged him to wade through cow shit at 5AM on a freezing November morning. Quibbling over authenticity is usually a mug's game, but it's nice to know that whatever you're getting at least has one foot in the paddock it's milking for chuckles, even if the chuckles aren't so great as they may have been on the evening.
Somehow, I expected better.
*: One for the kids there.
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