[1] In 1979, Blackwell was editing a football fanzine (Left For Wakeley Gage); he met Crossley when he went to see the latter's band play.

[2] In 1984, when Half Man Half Biscuit were formed, Crossley moved to bass and the two were joined by Nigel's brother Simon Blackwell (lead guitar) and his friend Paul Wright (drums), both previously with a group called Attempted Moustache, presumably named after the album by Loudon Wainwright III.

[3] The quartet started to rehearse in the Liverpool-based Vulcan Studios, where they soon turned a five-piece, with David Lloyd now on keyboards.

The band reformed in 1990, with a performance at the Reading Festival following, and a new single, "Let's Not", issued before the year was out, followed in 1991 by a collaboration with Margi Clarke on a version of Edith Piaf's "No Regrets".

By the time This Leaden Pall was released in 1993, Wright and Lloyd had left the band, with Carl Alty joining on drums.

In April 2010, the band's song "Joy Division Oven Gloves" from their 2005 album Achtung Bono was the subject of a Facebook campaign to get it to No.

[14] Eliza Carthy praised the band for their "pathos disguised with wit and sarcasm", describing Blackwell as a "genius".

[15] Journalist Ben Myers has described Blackwell's lyrics as "the antithesis of most rock songs, and iconoclastic in their total avoidance of cliche".

The songs of their leader, Nigel Blackwell, suggest a very real world of people too educated to be on the dole but too luckless or lazy to be anywhere else.