Rub Me Out

The Shend Rub Me Out (2021)
Legend has it that the Cravats originally had eighteen or nineteen members, and the Shend was formed by welding them all together, or at least the ones which weren't either Rob or Yehudi Storage-Heater. I'm here assuming that you know who the Cravats are, but if not I'm sure there must be some way by which you might fill this comically massive fucking gap in the apparently miniscule storehouse of your knowledge; although there's also a chance you'll recognise the Shend from almost every British TV show ever made. He's menaced both Alan Partridge and Robin Hood, delivered washing machines in The Bill, shared cheese and onion crisps with Gary Lineker - the whole gamut. I actually know a family who sit down in front of the telly to play spot the Shend of an evening. I'm not even joking.

I wasn't going to bother with this because it's a collection of lyrics and I have all the records, and the lyrics are clearly enunciated on those records, and song lyrics don't need to be reproduced in a book because printing them in a book doesn't turn them into poetry - even before we take into consideration that most poetry is wank. Happily, it turns out that the Shend seems to share this view, and even says as much in Rub Me Out, which is itself justified by incorporating a wealth of observations and semi-autobiographical material to accompany each song. So it's sort of like one of those Simon Morris tomes comprising anecdotal lists of favourite hair metal acts copied and pasted from his facebook page, but without either the sneering, the copying, the pasting, or attendant claims of having been the greatest living writer.

The Shend, for those who don't know and who didn't scurry off to Google during the first paragraph, is - for the sake of argument - a sort of Star Trek transporter accident involving Frank Sidebottom, Vivian Stanshall and Tristan Tzara, or at least these are names brought to mind by his characteristically peculiar narrative voice which belongs to the grand English tradition of surrealist subversion whilst taking in Midlands schoolboy slang. This means he's massively entertaining on record, wireless, and social media, but approaching three-hundred pages of this stuff - admittedly with pictures and guest contributions - is initially unsettling, like it doesn't quite sit right on the page. Well, it does, but it took me a while to get used to turns of phrase which would seem twee coming from almost anyone else, combined with a certain tendency to apologise for having failed to write a proper book. The term rufty-tufty is used a number of times, and stonkathon appears on page 239. It's the sort of phraseology I associate with the legacy of Richard Stilgoe; except, this being the Shend, I doubt he actually gives a flying one and is simply keeping himself amused, which is what saves the enterprise. Simon Morris wouldn't have been caught dead describing anything as rufty-tufty, which is sort of why the Shend gets away with it, and why this book - shambolic though it may be in certain respects - does nothing but underscore the potency of his candidacy for the title of greatest living Englishman. As with all his works, you just have to hang on and assume it will make some sort of sense by the time the needle lifts from the centre of the record, which it kind of does, even with Jam Rabbits.

It's probably not the autobiography that at least some of us have been waiting for without quite realising it, but it does something in that direction, at least explaining the mystery of Grimetime and why a few of those songs turned up on subsequent Cravats albums. I liked Grimetime, but they felt a bit ordinary for anything featuring the Shend, and it turns out that it wasn't just me after all.

Rub Me Out is an odd book, not quite like anything else I've read - which could be said of much of the Shend's body of work - which is its great strength. Therefore hoorah, as the man says.