Rubbing the face of the present day in the rotten corpse of its past since 2008.
"The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing! If we don't stop them, they could rewrite history - all of history! One song at a time..."
The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing is a Steampunk band formed in London in 2008 by Andrew O'Neill and Andy Heintz. They've described their genre as "crusty punk meets cockney sing-songs meets grindcore in the 1880s" - their music uses the history of Victorian Britain for satire and contemporary social commentary, making fun of famous (and less-famous) historical events, and often focusing on the era's macabre side. More recent albums have drawn increasingly from a variety of punk and alternative music genres.
Current members include Andrew O'Neill (they/them, vocals and guitar), Andy Heintz (he/him, vocals and musical saw), and Marc Burrows (he/him, bass guitar). Ben Dawson played drums until he left in 2010, and was replaced by Jez Miller, who remained with the band until 2021.
Discography:
- The Steampunk Album That Cannot Be Named for Legal Reasons note (2010)
- A Very Steampunk Christmas EP (2010)
- Anachrony in the UK: Live in London (2011)
- This May Be the Reason Why The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing Cannot Be Killed by Conventional Weapons (2012)
- The Gin Song/Third-Class Coffin EP (2013)
- Not Your Typical Victorians (2015)
- Double Negative (2018)
These are the tropes that will not be listed for nothing:
- Afterlife Express: The London Necropolis Railway is the topic of "Third-Class Coffin". The deceased singer is insulted to realise that each of the upper-class dead gets an entire train carriage for their mourners to accompany them, while the poor are stacked like freight.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: "Vive La Difference Engine" indicates that Babbage actually completed the difference engine, but kept it secret out of some vague premonition of the future of computing - not for fear of thinking machines themselves, but that the technology would fall into the wrong hands before it could be perfected.Vive la Difference Engine, Engine!Lurking in a Limehouse backstreet shed!Future events are set in motion -Watch the machine's first faltering steps!
- Amazon Chaser: "Goggles" sings the praises of women who can win fistfights and strip engines.
- Anachronistic Soundtrack: "Sewer" and "Free Spirit" both had special releases on wax cylinders, the first audio-recording format invented, which had been obsolete for decades.
- Badass Boast: Isambard Kingdom Brunel tersely refuses to let the failures of others stop him from any engineering project he sets his mind to.I looked him up and down, and then replied"A lot of men tried, and a lot of men died!""Yeah? Well... I'm not a lot of men."
- Brain Fever: "Charlie" came home from the tropics babbling insulting nonsense about being descended from monkeys. Too much time in the sun, clearly.
- Bring My Brown Pants: Queen Victoria's black mourning attire disguises the bloodstains left when she brings Prince Albert his dinner.
- Came Back Wrong: "Victoria's Secret" is that she used occult forces to bring back Prince Albert as a Flesh-Eating Zombie, whom she keeps in the palace basement, sating his hunger with commoners' brains.
- The Cameo: Sylvester McCoy voices the intro to ...Cannot Be Harmed by Conventional Weapons.
- The Complainer Is Always Wrong: Everyone in "Margate Fhtagn" treats Cthulhu devouring everyone who goes for a swim as a nuisance on the same level as high temperatures and sore feet; the Nan is the only one whining about it all, and everyone is happier when she gets eaten.
- Crappy Carnival: "The Worst Sideshow Ever" is trying to pass off a slightly overweight man as the Astounding Blob, a goat with a hunting trophy strapped to its arse as a Pushme-Pullyou, a girl in a sleeping bag as Lady Caterpillar, etc.
- Creepy Doll: The cover of Not Your Typical Victorians features two large relatively normal dolls, and a third smaller one sitting between them with a toothy vertical slit mouth and a long Maniac Tongue.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: The obstinate vacationers in "Margate Fhtagn" initially respond to R'lyeh surfacing off the coast of Margate with a Stiff Upper Lip, but eventually decide it's for the best:The next time I see that deity I'll shake him by the tentacle!I'll call him my friend, I'll thank him again, and buy the old bugger a pint!
- Disproportionate Retribution: In "Margate Fhtagn", Nan insisted on coming on vacation and spends the entire time complaining about everything... so Pa tricks her into getting eaten by Cthulhu. The lingering question of how he knew what an Elder God was suggests he may have anticipated this when he planned the trip.
- The Freakshow: "The Worst Sideshow Ever" doesn't actually have any freaks, and the audience finds its pickled gherkins with fake eyes and ears glued on unconvincing.
- Haunted House: Subverted. "This House Is Not Haunted". There's a perfectly scientific explanation for everything from the cold draft in the hallway to the mysterious bumps in the night... so surely there must also be one for the bleeding walls and the midnight shadow standing in the bedroom.
- I Love the Dead: "Victoria's Secret" is that she loved Prince Albert too much not to try to revive him with witchcraft and voodoo.
- Immune to Bullets: The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing cannot be harmed by conventional weapons, according to the album This May Be the Reason Why The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing Cannot Be Harmed by Conventional Weapons, and that "this" may be the reason why... whatever "this" is.
- Literary Allusion Title: The band takes its name from the Goulston Street graffito
, sometimes claimed to be a clue to the identity of Jack the Ripper: "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing". The band treats it like the name of a group of anti-establishment Victorian time travellers on the album ...Cannot Be Harmed By Conventional Weapons. - Madness Mantra: The sceptic in "This House Is Not Haunted" becomes increasingly desperate to reassure himself that "everything's alright - no God, no ghosts, no afterlife".
- Madwoman in the Attic: Zombie Prince Albert, whom Queen Victoria keeps in the basement.
- One-Steve Limit: "Steph(v)enson" is about George and Robert Stephenson, the father and son who co-invented the first commercial steam locomotive; not to be confused with Robert Stevenson, a lighthouse engineer who also worked on trains; not to be confused with Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde and Treasure Island."Well, how d'you tell 'em apart?""Well, that's pretty straightforward. A simple matter of spelling.""Witchcraft?!""No, not that sort of spelling. They spelt their surnames differently. George and Robert Stephenson spelt it with a 'ph' - the other Robert spelt it with a 'v'.""Oh, I see - 'Vephenson'!"
- Police Are Useless: "Occam's Razor" is a tirade against true crime enthusiasts and Ripperologists in particular, for sensationalising Jack the Ripper as some diabolical mastermind and exploiting his mystery to sell wildly speculative books, rather than admitting he was probably nobody special and the police didn't do their jobs.
- Real Men Wear Pink: Andy Heintz performs with his ragged sideburns and handlebar moustache dyed pink.
- Serial Killer: "Occam's Razor" is about Jack the Ripper, or rather, his mythification. "Baby Farmer" is about the less-famous but deadlier Amelia Dyer.
- Song Style Shift: "Margate Fhtagn" goes back and forth between 'jaunty seaside tune' and 'guttural cosmic horror black metal' and eventually settles somewhere in the middle.
- Steampunk: Emphasis on the punk.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: "This House Is Not Haunted" ultimately remains ambiguous because the sceptical narrator is thoroughly convinced that the supernatural isn't real and therefore he must be mad.
- The Trope Formerly Known as X: Following a lawsuit by EMI Records, the album Now That's What I Call Steampunk! was retitled The Steampunk Album That Cannot Be Named for Legal Reasons.
- Young Future Famous People: No one in "Charlie" takes Charles Darwin's theory of evolution seriously.
