2005 Nizlopi: JCB

"I'm Luke I'm 5 and my dad's Bruce Lee, drives me around in his JCB" - and that's a line that just about sums up Nizlopi's song; a first person childhood reminisce of a boy riding with his father in his JCB. Whether that's an actual memory of writer Luke Concannon or purely a work of fiction matters not - 'JCB' has a folksy charm and innocence enough to make its source material irrelevant. I was briefly tempted to brand it the number one Jonathan Richman never had, but on reflection that would be doing both 'JCB' and Mr Richman a disservice I think; 'JCB' is too controlled, too plotted and too carefully written to equate to most of Richman's looser, almost spontaneous output that frequently border too close to twee for comfort. It's that same level of control and writing that keeps 'JCB' away from the trite and the childish with lines like "And we're like giants up here in our big yellow digger, like zoids or transformers or maybe even bigger. I wanna transform into a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and eat up all the bullies and the teachers and their pets. And I'll tell all my mates my dad's B.A.Baracus, only with a JCB, and Bruce Lee's nunchuckers" taking it into the realms of the best of Dahl, Disney, Postgate or Pixar; that is, a work ostensibly for children that carries far beyond it's obvious target audience to resonate with older minds. Like mine. Which finds this an absolute delight. The fact the name of the band is the name of a Hungarian girl Concannon had a crush on in school just makes it resonate all the harder.