What if the award-winning, hilariously lewd musical ‘Avenue Q’ had been written by NOFX? Probably not a question that’s ever been asked by anyone, but one that’s nonetheless been answered by the forthcoming production ‘Home Street Home’.
The result of a collaboration between NOFX’s Fat Mike, Jeff Marx (a lyricist and composer who worked on the aforementioned ‘Avenue Q’) and Soma Snakeoil (a writer/director about whom I can’t tell you anything because the results that come up when you Google her name are bold, underlined NSFW), ‘Home Street Home’ may actually be the birth of an entirely new cultural phenomenon: the punk rock musical.
Being the soundtrack album to a fully-storied musical – and thus featuring the spoken-word interludes and reprises which are the hallmarks of such endeavours – it would be difficult, and possibly unfair, to simply review this as a standalone album. Tracks like ‘Bad Decision’ and ‘Another Bad Decision’, which feature Frank Turner and total less than 90 seconds in length, simply don’t make a lot of sense out of context. Actually, you could say that for many of the 18 (!) songs on ‘Home Street Home’ but as with any decent musical soundtrack it’s possible to discern a vague idea of the plot simply from the lyrics and interludes themselves.
‘Home Street Home’ tells the story of a group of teenage runaways, living one day at a time on the street and various other ‘gritty’ clichés. From its lyrics it would seem to follow a similar narrative to The Rocky Horror Show and (again) Avenue Q – a tale of naivete lost, of a journey from innocence to experience. On drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.
So, is it any good? Well, yes and no. Musically it’s really quite spectacular, swerving as it does between acoustic balladry, classic musical numbers and NOFX’s signature punk rock sound; it’s like getting a lift with Fat Mike’s drug-addled alter-ego Cokey the Clown. Opener ‘Monsters’ is a creepy, atmospheric early highlight and High Achievers – a pastiche show tune about very successful people getting off their faces – may have a questionable message but is brilliantly written and genuinely funny.
Our reservations, and we have a few, lie solely with its lyrical content. ‘Avenue Q’ famously, infamously even, trod a very fine line between hilarity and obscenity but worked precisely because it got the balance exactly right. With ‘Home Street Home’, Fat Mike – who, lest we forget, is 48 years old – doesn’t so much cross the line as trample over it in a Challenger tank, drunk, naked and with a prostitute on each arm.
This won’t surprise anyone who’s encountered Fat Mike’s work before, but so much of this album is played for pure shock value. Too much. While the music is an entertaining Broadway/SoCal melting pot, the lyrics are a relentless tirade of references to sex work and drug use. There’s an entire song (‘Gutter Tarts’) about ‘getting f–ked…sucking c–ks…and getting paid’; ‘Urban Campers’ contains the admittedly unforgettable couplet ‘I won’t work for food, but I’ll f–k for pay/more space for pure MDMA’ and ‘Safe Words’ stops dead so that one of the characters can explain in graphic detail the meanings of terms like ‘pearl necklace’ and ‘snowball’.
The majority of the lyrics are funnier than that and as you’d expect given its pedigree, there’s nothing here that’s objectively ‘bad’; it all just feels a little puerile. But then again, that’s probably the point. After all, who’s better placed to write teenage characters than a man who’s pushing 50?
That said, it may only be February but ‘Home Street Home’ is inarguably unlike any other punk rock record that will be released in 2015 and for that reason alone it’s worth a listen. Like its creator it’s messy, rude and not particularly clever, but a hell of a lot of fun.
ROB BARBOUR