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Animal Vegetable Mineral?

 

Fred & Al's Debut Album

This is a collection of songs from several years, some of which come from before Fred & Al had decided to join forces

Basil The Sniffer Dog
A song about a rubbish sniffer dog I met in Auckland airport. I was being all friendly with him and talking to the handler as well. Then a week later I found a bag of Coca leaves in my bag I had inadvertently smuggled into the country. Nice one Basil.

Shrew
First song I ever wrote about a Shrew on a David Attenborough show where the little fella just avoided getting eaten by a Pike only to get devoured by a Tawny Owl.

Sprouts
Everyone disses Sprouts, I say, "Give Sprouts a chance".

Crumpets
'Crumpets' was written when Fred came to see me at Uni. He had said that he would bring some crumpets he had and made quite a big deal of it. However when the time came that crumpets were needed quite quickly, as it does when Fred comes to visit, we discovered he had forgotten them. A little down hearted we carried on with our evening and the next day discovered that we had composed this song

Mother Bird
A song about the yearly struggle of being a bird bringing up her fledglings. Dedicated to Charlie the cat, they taste better than whiskers don't they Charlie.

El Topo (56k Download. 1.04Mb)
My favourite Western movie "The Mole". Started singing it and the song fell out.

Gideons (56k Download. 844Kb)
Gideons was written as part of a film script called 'Student Dad vs. the Gideons' or 'Armagideon' it was written by me and Allan Cooke who I lived with at the time. The film was about a Group of rouge Gideons who decided to rule the world (the Gideon’s are the religious folk who leave bibles in hotel rooms and have done nothing to deserve this) and the only man who could be bothered to stop them was Student dad. There is even a romantic sub plot. Me and Fred decided to take the song on when we played our first gig and didn’t have enough songs. It went down so well we decided to keep it.

Curry N Rice
Strange song I didn't really like at first, with Bangra chords I just fell upon. Wrote it in Peru with a really bad guitar while I had some sort of bug which meant every orifice was fair game for waste disposal. I therefore couldn't eat curry and was missing it.

Guila Monster
One of only two poisonous Lizards in the world. It eats everything and basks in the sun a lot. The second verse is about the stupid practice in parts of America were Rattle Snakes are rounded up and killed. They seem to think this is a good idea, and they killed the Buffalo, bastards.

My Doggy Has Died (56k Download 1.16Mb)
Loosely based on a story some girl I used to live with told me whereby she watched her dog get run over. The chorus is dedicated to my late dog Brutus, RIP.

Clubbing For Mums (56k Download 910Kb)
Clubbing for Mums this song came about when I was telling my friends about my mums crazy dancing to M People, and how M People were dance music for mums. I wrote the lyrics in my spare time working at an off licence (you get a lot of spare time there).I did however forget to write M People into the song but the idea is still there. “One Night in Heaven"

Cave Photograph (Secret Song)
We had decided to call the Album Animal Vegetable Mineral, due to the subject matter of the songs being generally Animal or Vegetable based. However we could not warrant the Mineral part as we had no mineral songs. I thought about writing about stalactites but felt strangely un inspired. It was then that my girl friend suggested cave photographs and so the idea was born. The reason we put a question mark after the album title was because we used this as the secret song. It turned out to be one of the best songs id written (now there’s a cliché)

Buy 'Animal Vegetable Mineral'