Momus -

Momus is the recording name of Scottish songwriter and musician Nicholas John Currie. He emerged from the Edinburgh group The Happy Family, which made a 1982 4AD album. As a solo artist, he released two shortplayers and the 1986 album Circus Maximus on Él, followed by six albums on Creation Records. His catalog combines narrative songs with literary, historical, and political subjects.

Background

Nicholas John Currie was born on February 11, 1960, in Paisley, Renfrewshire. His father taught English through the British Council, and the family spent part of Currie’s childhood in Athens. Currie later attended Edinburgh Academy and studied English literature at the University of Aberdeen.

Currie interrupted his university studies in 1981 and formed The Happy Family in Edinburgh with bassist Dave Weddell. Guitarist Paul Mason and drummer Ian Stoddart completed the first recording lineup for the March 1982 EP Puritans. Keyboardist Neill Martin and drummer Ronnie Torrance joined for the November 1982 album The Man on Your Street, subtitled Songs From the Career of Dictator Hall. Currie composed eight of the album’s nine tracks.

The Happy Family dissolved in 1983, prompting Currie to return to Aberdeen and complete his degree. He moved to London the following year and adopted the Momus name from the Greek figure associated with mockery and criticism.

The Beast With 3 Backs

In October 1985, Momus released released The Beast With 3 Backs, a three-song EP on Él Benelux.

Backs presents Momus in an acoustic singer-songwriter setting with self-contained narrative texts about triangular relationships.

“Ballad of the Barrel Organist” sways across acoustic seesaws as first-night intimacy meets a mortuary turn. “Third Party, Fire and Theft” jitters through spare knocks and recurring silences while deadpan phrasing hardens suburban adultery into dry farce. “Hotel Marquis de Sade” murmurs with sinister poise, rises on “Mediterranean,” then darkens around the final literary quotation.

A. “Ballad of the Barrel Organist” (5:12) — A couple’s sex life circles back to a first encounter staged under threat by the woman’s obsessive former lover, with voyeurism and violence folded into the memory. “The night we first made love at gunpoint” makes coercion the event that binds erotic recollection to danger.

B1. “Third Party, Fire and Theft” (4:06) — A sexually depleted suburban executive anticipates his wife’s adultery and treats the incoming lover almost as a subcontractor who will perform work he no longer can. “Cuff-links don’t suit fisticuffs” reduces his masculine predicament to executive respectability and physical timidity.
B2. “Hotel Marquis de Sade” (3:26) — Two English men and a woman form a Mediterranean threesome whose sexual arrangement scrambles the stated chain of affection: Colin loves Alice, Alice loves the narrator, while the narrator retreats into physical sensation. “I love the stains on the ceiling” turns his attention away from either partner and toward the impersonal evidence of the encounter.

The front sleeve reproduces a photograph of German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at his Davos retreat. Currie’s rear-sleeve text refers to the work of Giacomo Leopardi and Marcel Schwob.

Circus Maximus

Momus released his debut album, Circus Maximus, in January 1986 on Él.

The album contains nine Currie compositions built around biblical and classical figures, with several modern characters inserted into the historical settings. Currie sings and plays guitar; he also adds synthesizer. Jane Davies supplies backing vocals, while Neill Martin plays Emulator II.

“Lucky Like St. Sebastian” whispers urgently against harsh, whirring synths, binding martyrdom to private desire. “Little Lord Obedience” unfurls through broad, gentle passages. “The Rape of Lucretia” whispers an urgent, close-set monologue steeped in decadent imagery.

A1. “Lucky Like St. Sebastian” (3:10) ” — Paul’s desire for martyrdom and Dante’s suffering for Beatrice become precedents for a narrator who wants romantic rejection to acquire similarly grand, fatal significance. “The tragedy is no-one’s dying!” exposes his frustration that ordinary unrequited love cannot supply the heroic suffering he covets.
A2. “The Lesson of Sodom (According to Lot)” (3:35) — Lot narrates the aftermath of Sodom as a string of drunken excuses for incest with his daughters, turning biblical moral instruction into self-serving evasion. “I’m getting the best of both worlds in incest” strips away the alibis and states the opportunism underneath them.
A3. “John the Baptist Jones” (3:07) — John becomes a boastful careerist who measures prophecy through success clichés until Salome’s dance ends his superiority in decapitation and sexual pleading. “When you’re ahead of Jesus Christ you don’t look behind” makes vanity the flaw that leaves him blind to his fate.
A4. “King Solomon’s Song and Mine” (3:11) — Solomon’s temple becomes a labor camp where coerced quarrymen produce royal magnificence while receiving little except the ideology that keeps them working; even union gains fail to break the hereditary cycle. Their children retain “a future down the mine,” reducing apparent social progress to another generation of the same labor.
A5. “Little Lord Obedience” (5:03) — Sex, reproduction, aging, and death appear as forms of submission to biological forces that override individual autonomy, with the sailor’s docking imagery joining intercourse to the final voyage toward death. “The port in every girl where the sailor obeys” identifies sexual reproduction as one of those compulsory destinations.

B1. “The Day the Circus Came to Town” (3:19) — Carnival erases distinctions between spectacle and ordinary life, authority and disorder, while the narrator refuses any stable allegiance or interpretation of what passes before him. “Being of one mind is a capital crime” turns perpetual revision and contradiction into his governing principle.
B2. “The Rape of Lucretia” (4:48) — Dr. Faust treats a modern English monarchist with the Roman story of Lucretia, using sexual violence and the overthrow of the Tarquins as a grotesquely compressed lesson in republican history. “Stands by incest, falls by sexual intercourse” states the song’s deliberately indecorous equation of monarchy with corrupt sexual power.
B3. “Paper Wraps Rock” (3:50) — Garbo, Monroe, Mary, Helen of Troy, and Diana illustrate a thesis that distance, refusal, and controlled representation can preserve female desirability more effectively than sexual availability. “A woman never made a living by giving anything away” states the transactional logic behind the song’s cult of withholding.
B4. “Rules of the Game of Quoits” (3:55) — A runaway girl and a working boy meet in a gymnasium where sporting instructions become sexual innuendo and formal rules disappear once the encounter begins. “She’s the ink-rubber, he’s the blot” casts the girl as the active partner who pins down and symbolically erases the boy

Momus self-produced Circus Maximus in September 1985 at Alaska Studios in London with engineer Noël Thomson. British landscape painter Keith Grant created the cover painting.

Nicky

Momus released the three-song Nicky EP in April 1986 on Él.

The EP contains English adaptations of songs by Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel. Currie supplied the English texts, while Gérard Jouannest shares the source composition for “Nicky.”

“Nicky” capers through comic stage phrasing with a shabby entertainer’s grin. “Don’t Leave” pleads through close-miked confession, then dwindles into a shadowed final appeal. “See a Friend in Tears” hushes through spare electronics as grave lines gather toward a final image of helplessness.

A. “Nicky” (4:14) – Brel, Jouannest; the narrator imagines successive futures as a debased lounge entertainer, corrupt international show-business operator, and sanctified celebrity, yet each fantasy leaves him mourning the simpler identity buried beneath performance and ambition. “I’d be an industrialist of song” turns artistic success into ownership, leverage, and commerce.

B1. “Don’t Leave” (3:34) – Brel; an abandoned lover moves from promises of impossible gifts and invented worlds toward complete self-abasement, finally accepting mere proximity while his beloved belongs to someone else. “The shadow of your man” reduces him to a residual presence inside the new relationship.
B2. “See a Friend in Tears” (4:12) – Brel; war, ecological destruction, aging, failed ideals, and social decay accumulate as distant catastrophes, but another person’s visible grief makes suffering immediate. “Their worst enemies are their lovers” brings the song from public disaster into intimate betrayal.

Momus produced Nicky in April 1986 at Padded Cell Studios in London. Él and Cherry Red appended the complete EP to the 1989 CD edition of Circus Maximus.

Murderers, the Hope of Women

Creation issued the three-song 12-inch Murderers, the Hope of Women in 1986 under catalog number CRE 037T.

Currie links the three compositions through death, punishment, and execution. The record became his first Creation release following the Él recordings.

A. “Murderers, the Hope of Women” (5:20) — Marriage becomes a form of prolonged killing: romance gives way to contraception, television, prescribed domestic roles, and a husband whose respectable exterior conceals the destruction of his wife. “I poisoned you with every kiss” converts ordinary affection into the mechanism of that slow murder.

B1. “Eleven Executioners” (4:04) — Eleven gentlemen embody increasingly arbitrary forms of killing, from moral judgment and wounded vanity to indiscriminate death and nuclear destruction, before the narrator joins their erotic spectatorship of a woman performing for them. “The eleventh kills only our fear of the tenth” makes the final executioner an abolition of terror itself, not another killer of bodies.
B2. “What Will Death Be Like?” (7:05) — An extended catalogue rejects virtually every cultural image used to make death imaginable—coffins, skeletons, disasters, literature, religion, disease, cinema, omens—then stops precisely where an actual definition should appear. “Granite memorials where memories wither in rows” identifies even commemoration as another inadequate human representation of death.

Currie cut the songs as a Blue Mountain Music demo with producer Julian Standen. The American-born, London-based producer joined Matrix Studios as an engineer and worked on the 1986 Siouxsie and the Banshees album Tinderbox. Creation released the completed demo without further touches.

The Poison Boyfriend

Momus released his second album, The Poison Boyfriend, in July 1987 on Creation.

Poison expands his setting with bassist Fein O’Lochlainn and drummer Terry Neilson. Keyboardist Dean Klevatt and percussionist Arun G. Shendurnikar complete the principal group.

“The Gatecrasher” drifts from nocturnal atmospherics into acoustic figures and discreet keyboard shading as a lonely party scene emerges. “Violets” sways through Parisian accordion and theatrical turns beneath a perky tune and fatalistic text.

“Three Wars” broods over spare figures, then rises through a late chord shift into final conflict. “Sex for the Disabled” marches through successive layers toward a bitter massed cry. “Closer to You” murmurs across a slow sensual beat, alternating intimate speech with a sung return as circling guitar surrounds the final plea.

A1. “The Gatecrasher” (4:58) — An alienated young man crashes a party, rejects its social rituals, drinks heavily, and retreats into fragmentary memories of family violence and lost intimacy while everyone else reads his detachment as menace. “Something so real and remote” identifies the buried emotional life that his cultivated sourness keeps suppressed.
A2. “Violets” (4:56) — Images of Belfast, sectarianism, bereavement, Beirut, and media saturation surround an intimate encounter, linking private guilt with a wider culture accustomed to political violence. “Sometimes we’re unbiased observers, sometimes louts” punctures any claim that spectators can remain cleanly detached from the conflict.
A3. “Islington John” (5:16) — A drunken night through Islington mixes flirtation with an actress, street violence, grotesque urban detail, and escalating disorder before John ends amid broken objects and an injured man. “I will pay for this man’s face” turns the night’s damage into a bleakly comic financial transaction.
A4. “Three Wars” (5:48) — Three historical wars become a life-cycle allegory: the First World War represents adolescence and sexual awakening, the Second middle age and disillusionment, while an imagined third war supplies literal extinction. “Desire assassinating the child that you once were” condenses puberty into the song’s military metaphor.

B1. “Flame Into Being” (5:22) — The narrator moves through sex, artistic ambition, jealousy, bohemian pose, parenthood, and separation while searching for a coherent identity through which to experience the world. “Under the swagger I don’t know who I am” states the insecurity beneath his intellectual and sexual self-invention.
B2. “Situation Comedy Blues” (3:49) — An abandoned comedy writer converts ethnic stereotypes, domestic accidents, and social misery into sitcom material until canned television laughter briefly convinces him that his absent partner has returned. “The television laughs again” collapses professional comedy into the mechanism of his loneliness.
B3. “Sex for the Disabled” (4:51) — A motorcycle crash between a libertarian biker and a physically disciplined woman expands into an allegory of Britain’s shift from 1960s counterculture toward Thatcher-era authority, privatization, and exclusion. “Our Triumphs turned to wheelchairs” makes the motorcycle name a pun on political defeat and lost mobility.
B4. “Closer to You” (7:32) — An extended voyeuristic address moves from observing women around London to questioning the misogyny, aesthetic posturing, and artistic production that substitute for unattainable intimacy. “All those men are only making do with substitutes” recasts art itself as compensation for erotic and emotional distance.

Momus recorded The Poison Boyfriend at the Chocolate Factory in New Cross, London, with producer Julian Standen and engineer Douglas Morris. Music journalist Vici MacDonald designed the blue portrait sleeve from photographs by Nick Wesolowski.

Creation prefaced the original LP program with the three Murderers, the Hope of Women tracks on the 1989 CD edition.

Tender Pervert

Momus released his third album, Tender Pervert, in April 1988 on Creation.

The album marks Currie’s move to self-performed, sequenced production. Dean Klevatt programs and performs the electronic parts. Currie initially titled the record The Homosexual but changed the name after Creation founder Alan McGee raised concerns about overseas distribution.

“Love on Ice” waltzes through warped fairground meter and discordant brass simulation as a skating tableau buckles into farce. “I Was a Maoist Intellectual” capers over cheap Casio samples and clown whistles before bitterness gathers toward a sharp finish. “Bishonen” glides across a gentle arpeggio that expands and recedes beneath the spoken narrative.

“A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17–24)” slinks from a machine-coded opening into sleek electronic turns and a late hallucinatory whirl. “In the Sanatorium” whispers amid rain, thunder, and soft synth washes before an unresolved close. “The Charm of Innocence” confides over plucked guitar and hushed monologue before flurried strings crowd the final plea.

A1. “The Angels Are Voyeurs” (2:46) — God and his angels observe humanity as erotic spectacle, with human vanity, fragility, and self-destruction supplying the real pornography. “New ways to kill ourselves” turns technological ingenuity into the behavior that most excites the celestial spectators.
A2. “Love on Ice” (3:54) — Two champion figure skaters maintain the image of a heterosexual couple although each loves a same-sex partner; once they come out, the publicity machine that sold their perfect pairing loses interest. “The ice is a mirror” identifies skating as a surface onto which audiences project national and sexual ideals.
A3. “I Was a Maoist Intellectual” (4:34) — A revolutionary singer recalls trying to transform society through politically explicit music, then watches commercial indifference and professional failure reduce his ideology to an obsolete pose. “A miner at the coal face of meaning” casts intellectual labor as heroic manual work while exposing the narrator’s inflated self-image.
A4. “The Homosexual” (4:44) — A heterosexual man accepts the gay identity repeatedly projected onto him by homophobic men, then exploits their assumptions to gain intimate access to their wives and girlfriends. “That spectre they projected” makes his adopted persona a product of other men’s neurosis, which he turns back against them.
A5. “Bishonen” (7:41) — A boy raised according to a guardian’s Japanese ideal of the beautiful young hero learns elegance, misogyny, swordsmanship, and an expectation of early death, only to survive into marriage and banking. “Raise him to die young” closes the cycle as the disappointed survivor plans to impose the same fatal fantasy on a future son.

B1. “Right Hand Heart” (3:39) — A woman whose heart lies on the right side repels the narrator despite his fascination, and her relationship with a callous man forces him to examine his own intolerance. “My contempt for freaks” marks the reversal: the abnormality he condemns becomes evidence of his own emotional deformity.
B2. “A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17–24)” (5:39) — Jealousy expands beyond former and possible lovers to encompass strangers, rivals, rejected men, and even abstract figures connected to the beloved. “Still jealous of Plato” pushes possessiveness past reason, while the closing invitation to take other lovers turns jealousy into something the narrator needs preserved.
B3. “Ice King” (4:55) — An emotionally guarded man cultivates coldness because he fears that revealing the intensity of his attachment will drive his lover away. “I was always warm” exposes the supposed detachment as a defensive performance maintained for her benefit.
B4. “In the Sanatorium” (5:07) — A lover tends an ill woman in isolation, destroys messages from other men, and grows increasingly attached to the illness that keeps her dependent on him; care shades into possessiveness and possible coercion. “Which keeps you close to me” states why recovery threatens him as much as sickness threatens her.
B5. “The Charm of Innocence” (6:35) — A narrator traces a life from abuse and adolescent shame through pornography, sexual exploitation, military violence, and old-age voyeurism while insisting that some internal innocence remains detached from his conduct. “This innocence burdens me still” makes innocence less a moral quality than a persistent self-conception that survives overwhelming contrary evidence.
B6. “The Angels Are Voyeurs (Reprise)” (0:56) — Humanity finally destroys itself while the watching angels reach sexual climax, after which they create another planet populated by still greater sinners. “Blow ourselves to bits” completes the opening song’s equation of human self-annihilation with celestial entertainment.

Momus recorded and produced Tender Pervert at Scarf Studios in London with engineer Nigel Palmer. Photographer Thomi Wroblewski shot the sleeve portrait, which shows Currie before a floral backdrop with both index fingers raised above his head.

On the original 1988 Creation vinyl LP of Tender Pervert, “Right Hand Heart” was not part of the album proper. The track appeared as bonus 7-inch with the first 2,000 copies, backed with the 1982 Happy Family outtake “The Poison Boyfriend.” When Creation issued Tender Pervert on CD in April 1989, “Right Hand Heart” appeared as the sixth track.

B. “The Poison Boyfriend” — A resentful lover remains trapped in a relationship where humiliation, dependence, and hostility have become inseparable from desire; every vow to leave collapses into renewed submission. “Each day I say I will leave for good” states the contradiction plainly: he recognizes the damage but accepts permanence.

Don’t Stop the Night

Momus released his fourth album, Don’t Stop the Night, in November 1989 on Creation.

The album develops the sequenced approach through programmed rhythms and synthesizers. Currie’s working title, Sexual Crimes of the Professional Classes, links the songs through abuses of authority and sexual coercion. Several texts also address celebrity culture and social status. Currie composed the complete program. He includes a lengthier, re-recorded “Right Hand Heart” (spelled ““Righthand Heart”).

“Trust Me, I’m a Doctor” stalks through a strident beat, chilly piano, acidic squelch, and discordant chords before machine chatter crowds the close. “How Do You Find My Sister?” saunters through a slower beat, syllabic replies, and ringmaster shouts with comic menace. “The Hairstyle of the Devil” surges on propulsive motion and ascending portamento before a forceful return.

“Don’t Stop the Night” careens through buoyant samples and quickened steps toward a sprightly final release. “The Guitar Lesson” tiptoes over a soft arpeggio until alarm tones intrude; a martial pattern then carries the song to an abrupt stop. “The Cabriolet” soars through grave chord changes and a dramatic ascent before a slow fade.

A1. “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor” (5:20) — A doctor disguises sexual exploitation of an actress as treatment, then reveals that his professional detachment masks his own emotional and erotic desperation. “Help me break this frozen sea within” reverses patient and physician: he wants her to cure the numbness he invoked to excuse his behavior.
A2. “Righthand Heart” (5:04) — The narrator recoils from a woman whose heart lies on the opposite side of her body, then watches her with a brutish lover whose indifference exposes his own supposedly refined disgust as another deformity. “Could it be that what makes me a freak / Is my contempt for freaks?” turns the physical anomaly back onto the observer.
A3. “Lord of the Dance” (2:59) — Jesus and Buddha return as female disco divas who translate Christian redemption and Buddhist impermanence into ecstatic dance-floor liberation. “Fantasy is transitory, fashion is impermanent” makes pop ephemerality itself a Buddhist lesson in non-attachment.
A4. “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” (3:35) — A rejected man watches his partner prefer a wealthier, socially connected rival and concludes bitterly that money, celebrity, and power matter more than the values he once claimed. “I’m wrong the world is right” states his capitulation to the materialism he resents.
A5. “How Do You Find My Sister?” (5:18) — A servant trains and prostitutes his sister Lulu to businessmen and politicians, using her access to elite men to accumulate money, leverage, and social rank until he receives a knighthood himself. “I set the prices and balance the books” makes explicit that his supposed guardianship operates as organized exploitation.

B1. “Don’t Stop the Night” (4:33) — Two lovers try to recreate their first sexual encounter, but memories of an obsessive ex-lover, voyeurism, and interruption repeatedly invade the present until nostalgia itself becomes the third party in bed. “The skeleton came / Out of the closet” literalizes the past they cannot keep outside the room.
B2. “Amongst Women Only” (4:03) — After a woman leaves him, the narrator claims freedom from jealousy by imagining her masturbation and lesbian encounters, converting rejection into a fantasy from which he can still derive pleasure. “For my clumsy butter fingers she abandoned me” admits sexual inadequacy beneath his elaborate pose of acceptance.
B3. “The Guitar Lesson” (3:52) — A guitar teacher sexually abuses a twelve-year-old pupil after her mother leaves, then retrospectively aestheticizes the event as an enigmatic tableau instead of confronting the harm. “The lesson left no traces at all” captures the narrator’s attempt to erase evidence and consequence through artful recollection.
B4. “The Cabriolet” (4:24) — A man who felt little attraction to his passenger crashes his car and suddenly perceives her injured, vulnerable body as beautiful, turning belated emotional recognition into an unsettling mixture of desire and catastrophe. “Someone I never took the trouble to know” identifies the indifference that preceded his sudden declaration of love.
B5. “Shaftesbury Avenue” (5:57) — A solitary narrator wanders London’s West End through clubs, sex commerce, nightlife, and street spectacle while seeking a woman who might provide intimacy and an escape from his own anonymity. “Make me somebody” reduces the whole nocturnal search to a plea for identity through another person.

Momus produced Don’t Stop the Night in summer 1989 at Scarf Studios. MacDonald designed the sleeve around a portrait by photographer Michael Daks.

“Amongst Women Only” appears on the 12-inch version of “The Hairstyle of the Devil,” an April 1989 Momus standalone single backed with another exclusive, “Monsters of Love.” The single reached No. 94 on the UK Singles Chart and No. 2 on the UK Independent Singles Chart. Both tracks appear on his 1990 compilation. “The Hairstyle of the Devil” also appears on the CD version of Don’t Stop the Night.

Monsters of Love: Singles 1985–90

Creation released the compilation Monsters of Love: Singles 1985–90 in June 1990.

The ten-track collection gathers all six tracks from The Beast With 3 Backs and Murderers, the Hope of Women along with and both sides of “The Hairstyle of the Devil” single, plus the new tracks “Morality Is Vanity” and “Gilda.”

1. “Morality Is Vanity” (3:26) — The song rejects fixed categories of guilt and virtue, setting mass death, criminal fashion, and public shame against cabaret hedonism and the indifference of time. “All the guilty people have misunderstood” reduces moral condemnation to another unstable human judgment.
2. “Ballad of the Barrel Organist” (5:16)
3. “Third Party, Fire and Theft” (4:06)
4. “Hotel Marquis de Sade” (3:27)
5. “Murderers, the Hope of Women” (5:20)
6. “What Will Death Be Like?” (7:05)
7. “Eleven Executioners” (4:04)
8. “Gilda” — Rita Hayworth’s Gilda persona becomes an emblem of glamour built from male desire, hostility, and possession, with hatred repeatedly exposed as another form of erotic fascination. “Hate is a very exciting emotion” states the contradiction that drives Johnny’s fixation.
9. “The Hairstyle of the Devil” (4:31) — A jealous man becomes obsessed with the unseen rival sharing his lover, demanding details while simultaneously refusing to hear them; after finding physical evidence, he starts searching every stranger for his imagined adversary. “The beast rules with rivalry” turns sexual jealousy into an elemental law that sustains the triangle.
10. “Monsters of Love” (4:20) — A sexual encounter between a hotel hostess and her guest in Marrakesh becomes a grotesque fantasy of predation, reproduction, mutation, and biological contingency. “The spider releases her fly” casts consummation as the final act in a black-widow tableau where desire carries both ecstasy and annihilation.

Momus produced the new material with engineer Doug Martin, establishing the studio partnership that continued on his next album.

Hippopotamomus

Momus released his fifth album, Hippopotamomus, in August 1991 on Creation.

The album concentrates on sexual fables, bodily transformation, and childhood imagery. Currie performs the principal parts, with Noko on electric guitar for “Ventriloquists and Dolls.” Preacher Harry Powell sings the low-register part on the title song. Vicky Cassidy and Tammy Yoseloff add character parts to “Marquis of Sadness,” while Zoë Pascale whispers French text on “Bluestocking.” Lovecut DB contributes electronic effects.

A1. “Hippopotamomus” (4:23) — A surviving hippo recalls a volcanic eruption that fossilized him in copulation and turned the pair into a museum exhibit, then warns a mocking schoolgirl that sexuality will eventually reduce her to the same animal condition. “You’ll be in this position by and by” makes her future adulthood the punch line.
A2. “I Ate a Girl Right Up” (3:16) — The narrator describes cannibalism as an ecstatic rejection of civilized disgust, insisting that people periodically need to acknowledge their animal selves. “Cross the line dividing clean from dirty” states the song’s collapse of the taboo separating appetite from revulsion.
A3. “Michelin Man” (1:54) — An inflatable rubber figure becomes a comic sexual surrogate whose size and potency depend on repeated pumping. “Make him Zeppelin big” reduces exaggerated masculinity to artificial inflation.
A4. “A Dull Documentary” (3:12) — A child walks in on her babysitter having sex with the narrator, prompting his memory of witnessing adults copulate when he was five and establishing a cycle of childhood exposure to adult sexuality. “Casting new light on the primal scene” explicitly supplies the Freudian frame.
A5. “Marquis of Sadness” (3:31) — Female students anticipate the arrival of a celebrated, miserable writer-in-residence, while his own sections reveal an equally calculated expectation of intimate visits from them. “They’ll call on me at all hours” exposes the sexual opportunity beneath the literary appointment.

B1. “Bluestocking” (3:11) — The narrator eroticizes a well-read woman through her knowledge of Ovid, Sade, Bataille, Nin, Mishima, and other sexually charged literature, merging intellectual culture with carnal experience. “Your carnal knowledge knocks me dead” makes learning itself part of the attraction.
B2. “Ventriloquists and Dolls” (3:55) — A disabled ventriloquist returns to a room filled with painstakingly realistic dolls of little girls and has sex with one, whose manufactured submissiveness turns ventriloquism into a disturbing image of total control. “Immediately agrees to everything he asks” identifies the doll’s absence of agency as the central unease.
B3. “The Painter and His Model” (4:29) — An artist seeks increasingly literal materials to reproduce his model until representation merges with erotic contact between painter, medium, and subject. “The ultimate unity of fingers, brush and breast” collapses depiction into physical possession.
B4. “A Monkey for Sallie” (2:44) — A pet monkey overruns a household through eating, drinking, masturbation, sexual interference, and vandalism until comic misbehavior takes on a threatening edge. “It plays the barrel organ / And sharpens kitchen knives” makes the animal’s anarchic curiosity suddenly dangerous.
B5. “Pornography” (3:04) — Pornography appears as a detached image of bodily desire: sensation requires neither touch nor emotional intimacy, only representation. “You don’t need feelings / To feel this feeling” states the song’s separation of physical response from personal attachment.
B6. “Song in Contravention” (4:36) — A song about outlawed same-sex love turns listening itself into participation, implicating audience, jury, and prosecution in the act the law seeks to suppress. “They constitute the crime that it reports” makes censorship self-defeating because description alone reproduces the prohibited act.

Momus recorded Hippopotamomus from March through April 1991 at The Spike in Fulham, London. He produced the sessions with engineer Doug Martin. Paul White’s London studio Me Company created the sleeve, which adapts the Michelin Man into a hippo-headed figure.

Michelin threatened legal action over “Michelin Man” and the sleeve image. Creation destroyed remaining stock and omitted the song from later pressings. The label also revised the cover. Cherry Red restored the track to the original sequence on the 2018 box set Create 2: Recreate.

Later Activity

Momus followed Hippopotamomus with the 1992 concert album The Ultraconformist (Live Whilst Out of Fashion) and the studio release Voyager. Creation issued Timelord the following year. Currie subsequently recorded for Cherry Red and his Analog Baroque label while expanding his work into journalism, books, and visual art.

Discography: