Even typing is hot work at the moment. I'm not one to moan about hot weather, we get precious little of it in the north of England and once a year go abroad seeking it, but it does make doing everyday things difficult. As Lee Scratch Perry noted in 1977, city too hot.
Lee's solution was to go 'go cool out/ upon the hill top' which makes perfect sense especially when chanted over the top of one of those spacious, otherworldly rhythms he conjured up in the Black Ark in the 1970s. Eight sweltering minutes of dubbed out rhapsody.
In 1990 Mark E. Smith set his sights on British people in hot weather. We're not really prepared for it are we? One hint of sunshine and there are men walking round with their shirts off, moorland fires started by people with disposable barbecues and an array of milk bottle legs and hastily dug out shorts.
The song turned up on the B-side of Telephone Thing. Mark clearly found it all too much.
'British people in hot weather/ Fill green envelopes and send them to you/ On train ride remarks tracks/ Play Walkmans loud behind you/ Demonstrate on Oxford Street/ About what the hell they couldn't tell you....
...people in shorts drunk before you/ Beach wailing Wapping/ His armpit hairs are sprouting/ Designer tramp goes grrrrr/ Looking jolly from Stoke as he walks through/ And makes up titles like this to order/ They're well off their trolley/ Smoking like a chimney/ The spectacles stared out/ British people in hot weather'.
In 1993 The Fall and Lee Scratch Perry came together with The Fall's Why Are People Grudgeful?, a splicing together of two Jamaican singles, Lee's 1968 single People Funny Boy and Joe Gibbs' answer record People Grudgeful. Mark took lyrics from both and combined them as the then current version of The Fall cooked up a post- punk/ alt indie skank.
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