Griff Pilchard – Henry the Giant Turd

Griff Pilchard
Henry the Giant Turd
1989 Griffnoizes Tapes (GP7)
Rushden, Northants, United Kingdom

Griff Pilchard – vocals, guitars, keyboards, sound effects

Side 1:

1. Danny’s Sideburns Go All the Way Down to the Bottom of His Ears Nearly (but not Quite)
2. The Yo-Yo Song
3. Henry the Giant Turd
4. Free Entertainment
5. Tea
6. 21st Century Spacemen

Side 2:

1. I Wanna Look Like Cheech Marin
2. My Bicycle
3. Ethel the Transexual Spider
4. Let’s Guild a Motorway Baby Yeah
5. Let’s See This Night Through
6. The Further Adventures of Henry
7. Cat Paper (as Sold by Dick Cells)
8. Gooey Gnome

Yes, this is a rather odd tape. It’s mostly acoustic folk-ish music with a few sound effects here and there to help tell the joke stories for each song. The sense of humor here is really off the wall. I would say it is closest to Marc Catley – but I don’t really see Catley ever singing about turds and transsexual spiders. It’s oddly entertaining, even if the jokes occasionally fall flat here and there. The song about the transsexual spider could have gone to some bad places, but seems to stick with a few bad clichés about transsexuals applied to a spider as more of a detail about the spider than a way to bash transsexuals. Also, the song about cat paper is about… someone testing out whether toilet paper really is as soft as a kitten. I’ll just leave it at that. So, yes, there are definitely some moments of actual potty humor in a few of the songs beyond just the title song. Everything on here was apparently recorded in one day all by Griff himself. Since the number of this tape is “GP7,” I guess we can assume he has 6 tapes before this one? There was at least one after it that I know of.