I

Quipped the prophet Elijah one evening whilst lolling about a particularly refulgent cumulonimbus arrangement - “Do you know this what I’m goin’ to tell you? It would be easier to tear the night-time from the skies with nowt but the yellow off a badger’s teeth, so it would, than to keep even halfways up to date with the recorded works of Jello Biafra.”

“Ho, now” says Mohammad from atop a similarly spectacular cloudscape. “He’s shockin’ altogether, isn’t he just? Never sleeps a wink so long as he knows there’s a record being made somewhere that he hasn’t got somethin’ to do with.”

“You think you’ve got them all” Elijah laments, “When here, by Jesus, hasn’t some Melvins collaboration you never heard tell of gone and revealed itself at the quantum level somewhere?”

“A man I knew” says St Paul, himself lain bare-back midst the sapphire blooms of a copse underneath, “He was troubled somethin’ wicked with a pain under the arm there. Threshing the oxster raw, it was. Says all and sundry; ‘That’s a cyst is what that is, and the devil’s torment thrice over it’ll give if you don’t get it seen to by a doctor.’ So away he goes to the doctor. ‘Doctor’ says he, ‘I’ve the right hoor of a cyst on my oxster there, would you for mercy’s sakes bid it shoo out o’ that.’”

Mohammad gives a knowing sigh. “They’re the wicked buggers right enough, the cysts. One on the back of my neck at a time, I had. Bad rascals if ever were any.”

“The doctor takes the scalpel to the article” St Paul continues, “and here he is pokin’ away there, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t turn out to be no cyst at all but rather six EPs Jello Biafra had somehow released via the poor bastard’s immune system someway.”

Elijah and Mohammad both tut and shake the heads, the latter saying “For the record shelves can hold no more.”

“Damn the shelf can bear another note” Elijah says. Then, after a moment’s thought – “Mind you, we’d be a sorry bunch o’ boys without them.”

“Well this is it” St Paul agrees. “And it’s a sacrifice I’d be hard pressed to refuse. Should it prove the ruin of all the armpits and the quarks in the world, still I wouldn’t be without a single Jello Biafra recording.”

“All the armpits in china I’d relinquish for it” Elijah nods, twirling a length of vapour around his index finger. “Some of the best records ever made, that man put his name to.”

A litany of wonders recounted - Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, Frankenchrist, Prairie Home Invasion, that one with DOA…

“Last Scream Of The Missing Neighbours?” St Paul offers.

“The very one” says Elijah. “The very one.”

“D’you what I love most of all?” St. Paul enquires wistfully. “The spoken word records. Aw but they’re beautiful so they are. Orations as spectacular as any I’ve heard that were given on a stage or a podium and not a mountain.”