Half-Witt signs Lord Farding-Knightley
29 12 2007
Half-Witt Media proudly announces the first release in our “Classy Rock” series by British aristocrat, Lord Farding-Knightley. “Before leather jackets, there were leather armchairs”, proclaims the distribution agreement granted to Half-Witt Media by Britain’s House of Lords. This reference speaks to the smoking room of the exclusive gentleman’s club in London where Lord Farding-Knightley engaged his colleagues in brandy-fueled sing-alongs. Rock historians agree that these are the first known recordings in the English Upper Class Drinking Song genre.
Highly influenced by the sporting atmosphere of his estate in the quaint district of Hedging-on-Smallcapps, as well as the social atmosphere of his London club, Lord Farding-Knightley provided the impetus (often while “in his cups”) for a whole movement across the room to the ancient Victrola recording mechanism where ribald tales of fox hunts and sophisticated pranks became immortalized in song.
Listen to an entire song below from the album “Cheers and All That Sort of Rot”. The song below, “The Fear of Bananas”, is a ditty based on a party anecdote where his Lordship, while pursuing the charms of a lady, was plagued by revelers attempting to distract his manuevers for mere sport, by discreetly poking his behind with a banana.
It pains me to see Bumpy reduced to this. The current Lord Farding-Knightly and I were school chums at Chowder, a public school famed as the last ditch option of the ruling class. Our first band- Howling Wilderness- would have taken part in the British Invasion of the 60s if the premature death of Bumpy’s father from Abbreviated Mastication. If not for that tragedy, we could have achieved the enduring fame of classmates Freddy and the Dreamers.
I don’t know how many sherries you had to ply poor Bumpy with to get him to sing again. I hope that the compensation is sufficient to repair the family estate at Little Suffering on Avon.
I would also appreciate it if you could include some sort of screening program to ensure that the hoi polloi will not be able to hear this. The British system is founded on the concept that the members of the aristocracy are not blithering idiots. This song may be constituted as blithering; the rest is hardly a giant step away.
Cheers,
Nelly
Col. Nels “Nelly” Muckington, OBE (Retired)