Album Review
Your Heterosexual Violence
Some People Have Too Much To Say
CD/ DL/ Vinyl
Released today 26 September 2025
(5/5)
The Band That Time Forgot / The Band That Forgot the Time… and went to the pub for 40 years. Debut album by Punk/Post-Punk band who formed in the 1980’s and have finally got their shit together thanks to the inspirational Jemma Freeman – It’s a remarkably fresh, funny, strange, sonically & lyrically brilliant album, as good as, if not better than anything by much younger current bands… says Ged Babey.
This is my favourite album of the year.
And it’s not just because of the back-story, it’s everything about it: the bizarre songs, the frenetic music, the fabulous production, the characterful vocals, the variety of styles… everything has a familiarity about it but it sounds (and is) brand new. I love this album. (Be objective! – I am boss, honestly)
Every song is different – apart from two that start with exactly the same jagged riff. Life, death, love, mental health, alienation, existentialism are all covered in the songs, yet they are comic, tragic, full of pathos and a life-affirming energy, individualism and self-belief.
Opening with the ragged-trousered pop song, the Camus-inspired House Outside The World lulls the listener into a false sense of security. It was the first single and a thoughtful piece of carrier-bag-man existential pop-punk. And oddly, it’s an antithetical Teenage Kicks for Dour OAP Punks!
The album starts proper with the coruscating noise and ranted greetings of The Plan. A manifesto that sounds like early Sonic Youth channelling the Mekons fronted by a (Buddhist) Rik Mayall (in the role of Master of Ceremonies)
Ladies and gentlemen / And Transgender Neutrals / It’s good to be with you / Hope the feeling is mutual. / We are the mighty Your Heterosexual Violence. / This is our Dharma / We hope you love it / And if you don’t / You can fuck off and shove it…
Yep, there is a parallel with ‘We are the Fall’ as a declamatory introduction.
The unsentimental lyrical sentiment of Valentines Day recalls Gang of 4’s Natural’s Not In It. Or Orwell’s 1984 perhaps. But the chord sequence is pure Stooges/Dead Boys.
This is the new sobriety / Your carefree days are over / The Great Society / Dream Machine lies / Tramples your unconscious desire / We must keep our distance / It’s not natural to look / It’s not natural to smile / It’s not natural to touch / It’s not natural to hold / It’s not natural to kiss / It’s not natural / To fall in love.
The second single follows, contradictorily in content, Love Will, which I covered here. It’s the funniest, most lightweight song on the album – a knowing parody with a massive Cramps influence but the guitar is more Void-oids and the playing phenomenal – and in fact it’s bassist Jemma Freeman swopping over to their main instrument.
The video completely destroys my attempts to convince you that My Heterosexual Violence are a ‘serious’, lost-post-punk band…
Old Boys Just Wanna Have Fun! Brian O’Brien is the vampiric love-child of Max Wall and Keith Richards and the camera loves him.
The batch of songs written in the early 1980’s and re-worked are perhaps at the heart of this album. Two of them (seem to) feature acts of self-immolation: Man in Flames (At C&A) and The Boy Who Had 10,000 Parents – the latter of which appeared on the legendary Communicate!!! album.
The Boy Who... tells the story of a bullied, disturbed pyromaniac orphan shunted around foster-homes who wreaks a terrible revenge on his tormentors… but is told in expressionistic rhyme in a Stephen Berkoff/ Russian literature kinda style. It’s a stunning piece, which may sound ‘very ’80’s’ but to me doesn’t seemed to have dated as the character seems obsessed with his own press coverage.
Another older song is similarly dark yet theatrically tragi-comic: Just One Of Those Things ends with a wrist-slashing suicide of a spurned loner. Musically the most wonderful thing on the album, what I initially thought was saxophone is in fact violin which somehow makes it sound like 808 States Pacific State crossed with the Psychedelic Furs Sister Europe! The O’Brien/Freeman dual vocal towards the end is heartbreaking: It shouldn’t end this way, it shouldn’t end this way / I only wanted her to stay…
Wintershowtime dismisses sexual exploitation and leisure consumerism and is ‘personal/political punk’ which spans the decades and proves that the trick of double-speeding the second half of a song always works.
Changing The Subject, which starts with same noise/riff/feedback as the Plan before taking a Silverfish-like detour is punk rock majesty. Half way thru in another MES style aside Brian sings ‘Anyway, changing the subject..’ as if it’s the most natural thing to say in a song.
Song From The Bottom Of My Heart and I Could Be With You are real-life relationship songs rather than ‘love songs’. The first a touch of Alternative TV style reggae about a failing marriage with some great lines direct from the 1970’s when the expression gas-lighting hadn’t be coined… You try to tell me that he didn’t screw you / I suppose that he saw right through you. And the passive aggressive, You want to know if you’re forgiven? / I’m not too sure, I was not listening. Kitchen-sink drama yet another string to the Your Heterosexual Violence bow.
I Could Be With You is the nearest to a conventional love song YHV get but instead of romanticizing New Orleans or Paris it’s set in a more realistic than idealistic location: I could be with you / living up in Crewe, and I could work on the railways… Jemma who shares vocals and sings backing on most tracks plays the part of the partner brilliantly showing their acting skills, as they reject ‘a guy I met at a book-signing’ for our hero.
No Search Results (for Weatherman On Drugs) is a fantastic closer and one of two songs that include the album title Some people have too much to say (the other being Man in Flames (at C&A)). Part nonsense poem and part existential lament it’s just a thing of beauty on an album which is full of noise and tragi-comic rage and just a great ending, where the band relax into a musicality and demeanour that is more what people would expect-of musicians their age.
Andy Ramsays production and the invaluable input from Hammond player Simon Birch, violinist Maris Peterlevics and sax player Steve Hamilton are a big part of the album sounding so great, and despite my constant comparisons to other bands, so unique.
Like any band, they are only as good as their drummer and Andi Panayi is a fantastic musician – more a jazz drummer than a rock drummer if you know what I mean.
This is a band whose contemporaries back in the 80’s included Poison Girls, The Nightingales, Alternative TV, The Three Johns, Television Personalities… and it is as if they have emerged from suspended animation and been brought back to life and up to date by Freeman – a visionary move and labour of love, for which the rest of the band are forever indebted to them. (Jem will be impressed that I’m getting their pronouns right…for once!).
Realistically, unless Gideon Coe, Stewart Lee and Alexis Petridis all get onboard, this album isn’t gonna sell a million and make the band famous, but if a few dozen, a hundred or more people, ‘get it’ and get as much pleasure out of it as I have, well, job done.
There are only a few times in the life of a music obsessive when you think, ‘This Band Are Absolutely Fucking Amazing – they are MY PERFECT BAND’- the kind of band that I wanted to be in when I was young-er (and even now I’m older)’ – a perfectly flawed, beautifully fucked-up band who somehow, by some fluke, or magic, got everything right… and this is one of those times.
Some People Have Too Much To Say isn’t just an Album of the Week, and my favourite album of the year. It’s an album that spans decades, an album that is the Past, Present & Future combined – and a day in the life/life in a day of songwriters Brian O’Brien and Dodd David (and their comrades) and their untapped heterosexual violence eradicated and turned into fabulous artistic expression…
Pre-order the album: all formats
2025/26 Live Dates:
05 Oct – London – Lexington (matinee) w/ The Baby Seals & Breakup Haircut
01 Nov – Salisbury – The Winchester Gate
22 Nov – Resonance FM Live Session (Dexter Bradley Show)
23 Jan – Stoke Newington – The Waiting Room
All words Ged Babey except band quote in italics
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