Mitch Benn



"That's how it is with me, folks. Slightly grim, slightly rude, reassuringly clever."

- Mitch Benn

Mitch Benn is a British satirical songwriter, best known for his topical comedy songs on The Now Show. His favourite topics include James Blunt, Coldplay and Twitter (where he had a feud with Stephen Fry, which was settled when Fry agreed to make him 'Viceroy of Face Book' in return for Benn giving up the quest to be 'King of Twitter'.) He is Liverpudlian-Scottish and looks a bit like a Viking. He has released several albums, some solo and some as 'Mitch Benn and the Distractions'.

He's done two other radio shows: Mitch Benn's Crimes Against Music started out with him discussing various aspects of music and musicians with Robin Ince, before the third series became a sitcom about him and Ince going on tour. Either way, the plot was an excuse for him to play his songs and Ince to be rude about them. The Mitch Benn Music Show is simply him showcasing his favourite comedy records by others.

Tropes used in Mitch Benn's songs include:
"The World's full of Nutters all ready to Snap.
 * Anti-Love Song: Plenty, including "Now He's Gone" and "Imagine You Were Mine". The latter is a Stalker With a Crush song.
 * Author Existence Failure: "Please Don't Release This Song"
 * Black Comedy: A lot of his comedy songs seem to be about death. Often real deaths. "Rock'N'Roll Hall of Death" is about a museum dedicated to how rock stars died ("We got Mama Cass's sandwich box and Brian Jones's flippers"); "Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation" is about people who hanged themselves, and whether they were attempting this ("Did they wanna die? There's no way of knowing/They couldn't tell if they were coming or going").
 * Boy Band: a song called "Boy Band"
 * Crapsack World: His song Hello Aliens is a plea to be taken away because Earth is so horrible

The Air's full of Poison, the Sea's full of Crap.

People are Stupid and Life Isn't Fair.

Doctor Who's finished and Boris is Mayor!"

"Home taping isn't killing music
 * Distant Duet: "West End Musical" (also a Counterpoint Duet)
 * Elvis Impersonator: "Everybody's Elvis" and "If Elvis Were A Northerner"
 * Everything Is Worse With Bears: Averted in no less than four songs about Knut the Polar Bear, most recently an Elton John style Eulogy.
 * Exactly What It Says On the Tin: Most of his song titles.
 * Follow the Leader: "Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now"
 * Great Balls of Fire: "Never Mind The Song (Look At The Stage Set)"
 * Hell-Bent for Leather: "Stinky Pants" discusses the hygiene problems of leather trousers.
 * Horny Vikings: "IKEA", which borrows the first line of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song"
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes: "The Hardest Song In The World To Find"
 * "I Want" Song: 'I Want'. Appropriately.
 * Least Rhymable Word: Benn is inspired by Tom Lehrer, and it shows.
 * Painful Rhyme
 * Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion
 * List Song: 'These Ghoulish Things Remind Me of You'.
 * "I'm Proud Of The BBC" is a list of awesome BBC shows and personalities. Including Doctor Who three times.
 * "I'm Still Here" is a list of all the ways a musician trying to go out with a bang has failed to get himself killed.
 * Midword Rhyme: In Mitch Benn's Crimes Against Music, to rhyme with orange.
 * Mixed Metaphor: "The Devil And A Hard Place", inspired by a global warming spokesman saying the world was "standing on the precipice of a runaway train".
 * Mushroom Samba: "Tea Party"
 * New Media Are Evil: "Steal This Song" disagrees:

Music's dying of natural causes"

"And you may say I have no dreams,
 * One of Us: "Call Me During Doctor Who And I'll Kill You"
 * Protest Song: Most of his songs on The Now Show. He's usually funny about it, though. "Not Everybody Has To Imagine" is interesting, a skewering of John Lennon's "Imagine" from the opposite end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism:

Well perhaps that's how it seems,

But in a world this tough,

Dreaming's not enough."

""...and you dooooo a high bit in the middle eight
 * Ruthless Modern Pirates: "The Pirate Song", a Now Show song that included the lyrics "On land they'd recognise us for the psychos that we are" and "The papers call us pirates tho' we're muggers in a boat / Armed robbery is jolly when it's done while you're afloat".
 * Self-Demonstrating Song: Many, such as "Boy Band", "Stay The Hell Away From Hallelujah" (to the tune of "Hallelujah", of course) and "Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now":

then yooooou have almost solved the riddle of just how...

to sound like Coldplay now.""

"Why are the BNP all so overweight
 * Self-Deprecation: In "Why Are The BNP So Fat?"

I know that I'm on pretty thin ice asking this but wait"

"This is a great big opening song"
 * Shout-Out: Quite a few. 'Hardest Song in the World to Find', for example, has a Shout-Out to The Ring.
 * Singing To Himself: In a song about Johnny Cash's house burning down, he sings both parts of a duet between the house and Barry Gibb - the lyrics of which state that the house comitted suicide rather than be lived in by Gibb.
 * Subliminal Seduction: "Please Don't Release This Song" ends with a backmasked version of the chorus of "We Haven't Got A Clue".
 * Take That: Expected, as many of the Now Show songs are political. "Why Are The BNP So Fat?" springs to mind.
 * This Is a Song: "West End Musical".

"Something's farting way out there in space
 * For balance there is also his Very Happy Ending Song
 * This Is Wrong On So Many Levels: "Stay The Hell Away From Hallelujah"
 * To the Tune Of: "Now Coldplay Sound Like Everything Else" (to the tune The Jimmy Hart Version of 'Viva la Vida', which Coldplay were accused of plagiarising)
 * Toilet Humour: The discovery of methane on an extra-solar planet led to this song:

it's hitherto unknown to science

someone's letting off gas giants."

"It's my Port-a-Loo, it's got Nothing to do with You.
 * More literally, there's the song he wrote when Bob Dylan was sued by his neighbours because of the smell from the outdoor toilet on Dylan's malibu property:

Except when the Smell comes a-blowing on the Wind !"

"We've got Nowhere To Boldly Go
 * And when the International Space Station had problems with its lavatory

We're Lost in Space without a Lav"


 * Truck Driver's Gear Change: Lampshaded in "Boy Band" with "Off the stools!"
 * True Meaning of Christmas: a song called "The True Meaning of Christmas".