A guest series by The Robster
#7: The Man Don’t Give A Fuck (1996, Creation Records, CRE247)
Last week, I mentioned that a track planned to feature as a b-side to If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You had to be swapped out in favour of another track. That eschewed track did finally get a release in December 1996, but as a single in its own right.
mp3: The Man Don’t Give A Fuck
I wondered how much I’d need to write about The Man Don’t Give A Fuck as I thought it had been featured by numerous members of our blogging family over the years. But when I looked into it, it appears that none of those I expected to have written about it (JC, Swiss Adam, Jez) actually had done. I could be wrong, of course, but I never found anything. It seems it was just me, back here. Unless you know better…
Demoed back in 1995, the song is built around a sample from Steely Dan’s Show Biz Kids. It wasn’t finished in time for the album, and when it was finished and mooted as a b-side, they couldn’t get clearance for the sample from Steely Dan’s Donald Fagan. Eventually, the greedy bastard Fagan agreed to allow the song to be released in exchange for 95% of the royalties! The band actually agreed to this, taking the stance that as it was unlikely ever to be played on the radio for its prolific use of the f-bomb, it was unlikely to earn them much dough anyway. This was coupled with plans to release it in very limited quantities for one week only.
The song is described by Gruff Rhys as a multi-purpose protest song which can be used against “any organisation which you feel is terrorising you as an individual, anyone who’s cramping your style”. Its release was also seen as a way of demonstrating to people how ridiculous censorship is, with Rhys claiming no one is offended by the word ‘fuck’ anymore “unless you’re in the church where it’s beaten into you that … swearing is bad.”
The Man Don’t Give A Fuck entered the UK singles chart at number 22 and dropped to number 65 the following week as the limited run of copies of all formats sold out. It set a new record for the most number of f-words in a UK chart single, an honour the band would hold onto for three years before Insane Clown Posse’s Fuck The World beat it. They did get the record back though, but that comes later in the series.
Since its release, The Man Don’t Give A Fuck has become one of the band’s most popular tracks. It was the regular set closer of their live shows for the next 20 years and always took the roof off.
The 7” was issued on blue vinyl and contained just the one track. The CD included two remixes, one of which is called the Howard Marks mix. The band’s admiration for the notorious Welsh drug smuggler was already known, and the claim was that he came into the studio to remix the track. The more accepted version of events is that, while Marks probably was in the studio, the band members themselves did the actual remix.
mp3: The Man Don’t Give A Fuck [Howard Marks mix]
mp3: The Man Don’t Give A Fuck [Wishmountain mix]
The 12” featured a third remix, and to be fair is even less worthy of your time than the other two.
mp3: The Man Don’t Give A Fuck [Darren Price ‘mix’]
This week’s bonus track is the original 1995 demo. Of all the demos I’ve featured so far in the series, this one is clearly the roughest and least developed. It’s really interesting to compare it with the finished version, and you can understand why it wasn’t ready for the album.
mp3: The Man Don’t Give A Fuck [demo]
And in case you’ve never heard it, here’s the song that infamous sample was taken from (at 3:52):
mp3: Show Biz Kids – Steely Dan
Next week, the ‘Radiator’ phase begins…
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 
I wasn’t expecting the Steely Dan cover! And I like that they play it straight.