Half Man Half Biscuit (Nigel Blackwell, Neil Crossley, Ken Hancock and Carl Henry) often abbreviated to "HMHB", are a UK rock band from Birkenhead, active sporadically since the mid-1980s, known for their satirical, sardonic and sometimes surreal songs. The band scored instant success with their first LP and first single topping the British Independent Chart, performing a must see set at the Glastonbury Festival, and rapidly becoming tipped as the 'next big thing'. The band are huge fans of Tranmere Rovers, and once famously turned down the chance to appear on seminal 80s rock show The Tube, as Tranmere were playing that night. However as their second single Dickie Davis Eyes entered the national top 40 lead singer Nigel announced his retirement claiming that rock and roll success had led to him missing too much daytime television. 1986 saw the release of a compilation album and Nigel's return to the dole.
They were long championed by DJ John Peel, for whom they recorded twelve sessions before Peel's death in 2004 , and it was on his programme in 1990 that the band announced their return. The band played live more and more infrequently, prefering one off gigs to tours, driving home each night to sleep in their own beds and arranging concerts to co-incide with Tranmere's away fixtures.
Their musical styles often parody simple popular genres, while their lyrics are dense with cultural allusions, usually to UK popular culture and geography (particularly Wales - Blackwell is a great enthusiast of hill walking in Snowdonia), Shropshire and East Anglia) or to the more obscure backwaters of the lower divisions of British or international football. Songwriter Nigel Blackwell has a love of language and most of the songs contain several words or terms that have never before been used in popular music. It is unlikely that any one person would be able to recognise all of the terms and allusions in the songs, and websites such as hmhb.co.uk provide information to help decipher them. Blackwell's enthusiasm does not only encompass popular culture; to give just a few examples, explicit references to Sylvia Plath, the works of Thomas Hardy, and the Bible are all to be found in his lyrics. In the context of HMHB's enthusiasm for football, Blackwell's close resemblance to footballer Jaap Stam has been frequently commented upon.