Kidney Bingos

"Natural splits sunburn jets price marks smart bets Strikers luck pitch backs heap tips pit slacks Dressed pints demon shrinks bread drunk dead drinks Stretch clubs models box draw skin black shocks Money spines paper lung kidney bingos organ fun Flag stunt rock stone dole axe crash dive Breathe thrift take speed double take weekends Skull row drugs hall colour bars sex calls Sparkle finds rented rings pretty things clipped wings Gold street spy fleet scandal food poor treat Fire run club gun rule mob burn some Bomb time pop crime stock frame steady climb Fresh name donor game fair meat all the same"

Wire - Kidney Bingos

The above are possibly the oddest lyrics of any song with which I am familiar. (And I have been terribly familiar with this song since my teens. Which may be indicative of the vaporous miasma of my mind since that tragically early age ????‍????️????????!!)

Images of human body parts are interspersed with the stuff of everyday 1980's English life.

"sunburn jets price marks smart bets" Sunburnt from a holiday on the Med coast that was flown to on a discounted jet ticket bought with the winnings acquired from laying a smart bet at the horses or a similar sporting gamble. "Strikers luck pitch backs heap tips pit slacks" Northern English miners who work down the pit spend their leisure hours playing on a football-pitch in their preferred position as a center-forward or as a striker. Also the bloody miners' strikes of Thatcher's democidal reign of iron-maiden misrule.

The chorus in the film clip is always accompanied by a butcher's cleaver chopping the rib cage cut of a small animal that is most likely a lamb or a veal calf. Our kidneys are bingos according to this esoteric line of associations. The shots of daily life in the film-clip are always shot through a meshed-wire like that found within the glass-doors on microwave ovens.

We are the citizens of a capitalism whose every day existence is spent in an endless orgy of self-butchering, self-cooking, self-serving self-consumption and self-immolation.

Stream of consciousness lyrics that don't really mean much of anything, but still paint a vivid picture in your head. I suppose if it's about anything, it's about the pressures of the modern world and going a bit off your rocker.

It seems, basically, to be a kind of abstract, stream-of-consciousness portrait of all the things that subconsciously wear on people's minds, perceived indirectly or directly but constantly planting the seeds of latent emotions, in particular sensationalistic news reports of various unpleasantries (plane crashes, political scandals, organ sales). But in the end, it's "all the same", isn't it...?

I once did a mixtape for a girlfriend which had this on it, called Chart Hits from an Alternative Universe. This so should have been on TOTP.