Browsing the spines of my LPs this morning it occurred to me that when choosing an album title, artists can decide to serve a wide range of purposes. The artist’s previous experiences and level of success may play a part, they may choose a title designed to intrigue the casual buyer or to simply signal their artistic or political intent. They may be confident – or lazy – enough just to take the piss with a throwaway title a la Ship Arriving, or they may make a little more effort.
My favourite is in the comments – what’s yours?
Caravan had form in this area.
Cunning Stunts and Blind Dog at St Dunstans (though at should be to)
Howard Werth and the Moonbeams King Brilliant (or should that be ‘King …)
My first thought!
Not an original thought by me but a memorable title all the same.
Many here will be familiar with The Undertones song ‘More Songs about Chocolate and Girls’, a nod to the title of their Sire stable mates’ second album.
Fewer will have come across David Faulkner and Steve Turner’s collection of English and Border Music 1625 to 2017, played on piano accordion and border pipes, entitled ‘More Tunes about Baggage and Hills’. And there, nestled under a cup of tea on the album cover is some Talking Heads vinyl.
https://www.bagpipesociety.org.uk/articles/2017/chanter/autumn/review-tunes-about-baggage-and-hills/
The song was about a critical backlash that the ‘tones expected which, amusingly, didn’t happen.
Jefferson Airplane were good at cryptic LP titles.
After bathing at Baxters’s.
I thought this was about going to a swimming bath. I have just googled and discovered that Baxter was JA’s code name for LSD and the title meant “after tripping on acid”.
Bless its pointed little head
This also baffled me. Googled. Bless your little head is a condescending way to talk to someone not as bright as you.
This article helped.
https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/bless-its-pointed-little-head.1241001/
“When I say “bless your pointy little head” it is not a compliment.
“In the old days, the weakest student in the class (especially if he/she misbehaved) sat in the corner of the room with a paper “dunce cap” on — giving him/her a pointy head.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunce_cap
So, it means something like “you poor, silly/stupid person”
Sheikh Yerbouti and Zoot Allures are brilliant titles, especially the former with yer man as a Saudi prince.
I suppose The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse is based on those non sequitur sentences that allegedly help you learn languages – the pen of my aunt , the monkey in the tree etc.
We’re all to some extent recovering from school. I still slightly feel as if I’ll get a piece of chalk thrown at me if I’ve been staring out the window too long. It usually doesn’t happen
I always assumed that was something brown coiled out surreptitiously, with sheepish eyes looking over the shoulder, by the family hound.
Could be both. Dam’ clever these artistic fellows.
‘A piece of chalk’ you were lucky it was board rubbers in our days, depending on the mood of the teacher the soft or hard side.
Board rubbers for talking. Chalk just for attention. Rosemary for remembrance…
I thought it was the toilet seat in an outdoor lavatory.
…jumpers for goalposts…
ISTR being told that it was a euphemism for an outside toilet shed, the doughnut being the seat therein.
It is indeed, but of course you can always ask to use the euphemism.
The Sisterhood: Gift – a bilingual treat for WEA and Wayne.
Go on., I don’t know this!
Paraphrasing Wikipedia: Andrew Eldritch and Wayne Hussey were fighting over ownership of the Sisters brand. Eldritch moved first and spent the record company’s advance and formed The Sisterhood with a different record label. He called their only album Gift, which is German for “poison”.
Pretty much, except it was an advance (£20,000) from a publishing contract with RCA that could have been split with The Mission. Eldritch put out the record on his own Merciful Release label, (but didn’t sing on it so WEA – who held the Sisters’ recording contract – had no claims on it) and pocketed all the moolah.
The opening song on the album has Patricia Morrison intoning “Two. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero”. Very childish.
Ah nice!
Even 50 years later, I am still amused by the Joe Walsh album ‘The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get’.
Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake and Palmer apparently refers to oral sex.
Stone Roses – Second Coming
Ian Brown’s Unfinished Monkey Business was a better title, though an even worse album. Presumably the Seahorses’ Do It Yourself was the end of “If you want a job doing properly…” Sorry John, turns out you really did need the other three.
Come to think of it IB was probably referencing the second EPMD album. All of their albums had Business in the title – Strictly Business, Unfinished Business, Business Never Personal, Back in Business….
A brave friend listened to one of the later albums and said it should have been called Cattle’s Business.
Reference to a rumour that went round the music press during the making of Second Coming that IB had completely lost the plot and had started referring to himself as King Monkey
I’ve always thought that Bon Jovi’s ‘Slippery When Wet’ could be interpreted by someone less puritanical than myself to have sexual connotations.
This was news to me. Can anyone confirm this to be true?
Sigur Rós “Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust” (2008)
The entire nation of Iceland colluded on this sick joke played by Sigur Rós, insisting to the rest of the world that the name of this deceptively beautiful album translated as “With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly” – which we all swallowed unthinkingly. Then last month, the very first non-Icelander ever to learn Icelandic finally blew the whistle on this hoax – revealing the utterly obscene and unprintable sex position that the album title in fact describes (graphically).
Surely Sticky Fingers wins.
Not an album title but the Christmas carol O Come All You Faithful should surely act as a salutary warning for all of us to keep this kind of religious filth away from our clean living pop kidz.
Good point, well made.
Having been a choirboy, I confess that Silent Night terrifies me. Sinead O’Connor captured its beauty and horror perfectly, all of it present in just the title.
Voice Of The Beehive – Honey Lingers.
A fantastic album to boot.
Also Not the 9 O Clock News and their swansong The Memory Kinda Lingers. The cover was a completely mystifying stock photo of a family having Sunday lunch – more like a contemporary satirical sleeve of a Crass or Pop Group album than a slightly smug comedy record from the stuffy old BBC.
King Kurt’s Second Album
Otherwise known as Big Cock due to the picture on the sleeve front. The male chicken variety, obvs.
Camel’s I Can See Your House From Here, the punchline to the kind of joke you don’t tell to strangers, the cover being an astronaut floating in space on a cross.
Robert Wyatt – Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard.
Sun Ra and his Outer Space Arkestra – A Fireside Chat with Lucifer.
The Orb – A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld.
Pete Brown and his Battered Ornaments – A Meal You Can Shake Hands With in the Dark.
Johnny Guitar Watson – A Real Mother For Ya.
Things May Come And Things May Go But The Art School Dance Goes On Forever may be even better.
I know a couple called Ruth and Richard and, it’s true, Ruth is stranger than Richard.
Stump – Quirk Out
….celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first Mothers album. I think old FZ would have appreciated the description of American tourists “In blubbery blueberry Burberry”
Marvin Gaye’s 1978 album Here My Dear was recorded to meet alimony payments to his ex-wife
Surely none more cheeky than this.
http://tinyurl.com/3uyx8wdz
That ticks all the mischievous boxes, good shout!
Favourite album of Alan Partridge.
Jean Michel Jarre’s Champs Magnetiques is a corking pun in French.
Another French pun expanded on Matching Mole.
Aussie singer Gulliver Smith,former front man of Company Caine (Co Caine – geddit) wanted to put out an album called”The band Is Alright But The Singer Is Shithouse”. The record company resisted so it was released as “The Band Is Alright But The Singer Is Gulliver Smith”.
Cockney Rejects Greatest Hits Vols 1-3
Thin Lizzy – Live And Dangerous (anecdotally)
Peter And The Test Tube Babies – That Shallot
Was suggested/intended to be their last album. As they have later released another, the humour of the title is now lost.
Throbbing Gristle – 20 Jazz Funk Greats.
Pink Floyd – A Collection of Great Dance Tunes
A couple on John Peel’s Dandelion label from ’69…
“I’m Back and I’m Proud” – Gene Vincent
“Mike Hart Bleeds” – Mike Hart
I liked Mike Nesmith’s “And the hits just keep on coming’ !”.
In the same vein, Depeche.Mode’s Music and the Masses was a sarcastic title because their album sales had somewhat stalled. They thought that roughly the same (small) amount of people would probably buy it.
I have always liked the dual title of R.E.M.’s Fables Of The Reconstruction/Reconstruction Of The Fables. I had noticed that the inner spine of my CD copy used one version of the name and the outer spine the other, but it wasn’t until I looked it up just now that I found out that the two names are used for the two different sides of the vinyl record and on the front and back record sleeves.
If nothing else, it works as word play: the songs are fables of the Reconstruction and here is R.E.M. reconstructing those fables.
Interestingly (or perhaps not), I have a second copy of the same CD, one manufactured in the U.S., that uses Reconstruction Of The Fables on both the inner and outer spines.
I rather like the title of the solo album from Belle and Sebastian guitarist, Stevie Jackson: ” I can’t get no…”
I always liked Neil Tennant’s explanation behind the title of the PSBs’ first album: so that people could go into their local record shop and ask: “Have you got the Pet Shop Boys album, ‘Please'”?
Also: EMI wanted Marillion to release a live mini-LP to introduce the band to a new US audience. The name chosen: Brief Encounter. Similarly pun-based, the band’s first live album: Real to Reel.
Great interview with the Pets in today’s Graun: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/03/pet-shop-boys-nonetheless-interview
And they answer “No we haven’t, Actually”?
Similarly, “Have you got ‘Anything’ by the Damned please?”
I like the title of the live album by Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott ‘We’re usually a lot better than this’ – I can’t tell if it’s self-effacing or boastful.
The title of last year’s Bell X1 album, Merciful Hour, made me smile. It was a phrase you might hear in Dublin when I was a child, usually from old geezers – it was an expression of surprise i.e. ‘Merciful Hour! Would you look at that rain!
Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly and the Hairy Bowsies album was brilliantly titled Publocked. It’s works better if you’re Irish and au fait with the Sinn Fein newspaper An Phoblacht. It’s a great album too.
See also the Sundance Festival sensations, Belfast hip hop outfit Kneecap.
An gceapainn tú go bhfuil an fear sin san IRA?
Ní cheapaim!
Hilarious!
Crowded House’s second album “Temple Of Low Men”
“Mom’s Apple Pie”. Not going to explain why, but the album cover was pulled from stores and banned. I used to have a copy of the original version of the cover.
I have that LP. It’s probably more accurately described as puerile rather than mischievous!
I know it’s just an EP but Nick Lowe’s ‘Bowi’ falls into this category.
As did The Rumour’s EP “Max”.
After leaving the band and starting his solo career, The Replacements’ Chris Mars called his debut “75% Less Fat”
John Otway has released a fair few albums with amusing titles – or at least titles that his fans might find amusing. Otway and Wild Willy Barrrett’s second album was Deep and Meaningless and they put out a compilation a while ago called 40 Odd Years. Otway solo released All Balls and No Willy and also a live album called The Set Remains The Same.
Electric Landlady by Kirsty McColl.
Of course there’s Frank Zappa’s triple album of guitar solos “Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar”.
I quite like the Caravan album title For girls who grow plump in the night and the track contained on that album The dog, the dog he’s at it again.
Probably a link to the blind dog.
So good of the second dog to help his blind canine friend
get back to school
You are Noël Coward and I claim my five pounds.
And let us not forget If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You.
Andrew Gold’s “What’s Wrong With This Picture?”. Hours of fun.
May I nominate the DHR dark ambient classic by Christoph de Babalon – If Your Into It, I’m Out Of It and Ted Nugent’s live album – Intensities In 10 Cities, thank you
Always liked “This is Howlin’ Wolf’s new album. He doesn’t like it. He didn’t like his electric guitar at first either”.
Could only have been improved if it had read:
“This is Howlin’ Wolf’s new album. He doesn’t like it (he didn’t like his electric guitar at first either”.
Bit off topic, but it occurs to me we’ve all made tapes for mates where we had to come up with a title. I remember not long after Echo & The Bunnymen brought out a hits compilation called Songs To Learn And Sing (itself quite a cheeky title). I made a tape called “Songs To Burn and Sting”. Reader, the tracks picked themselves..
I once made a Kate Bush compilation tape called My Life In The Ghosts Of Bush. I was very pleased with myself, as you can imagine.
Antmusic was by Anthony Phillips in my house.
A mix MiniDisc that I put together about 20 years ago was called “The Burnt-To-Buggery Pizza Co. Of Tibet”. It consisted of two continuous mixes, the first of which was Technical Difficulties (Jailhouse Mix) and the second was May Contain Nuts (Way Beyond The Mix).
Spooky Tooth in 1973 bought out
You Broke My Heart, So..
I Busted Your Jaw
Artwork was by Klaus Voormann I noticed.