Can Can

The French horn melody that opens this is absurd in the best possible way — triumphant, ridiculous, completely committed to its own excess. Bad Manners took a century-old piece of cancan music and fed it through the ska machine, somehow making it feel both ancient and like something happening right now at full volume. Buster Bloodvessel's bass voice is the anchor of a controlled disaster: deep and commanding, leading a band that sounds perpetually on the edge of flying apart but never quite does. The arrangement layers horns over horns over horns until the sound becomes almost architectural in its density, a pyramid of brass held together by a drumbeat that doesn't quit. There's no emotional content here in the conventional sense — the song is pure spectacle, a daring act performed at maximum effort for its own sake. Bad Manners occupied a deliberately ridiculous corner of the Two-Tone era, less concerned with social commentary than with the proposition that music could be an act of physical comedy. This was the carnival side of the ska revival — rollicking, irreverent, faintly anarchic. The song belongs at a carnival, a football terrace, a raucous pub where someone has pulled a table out of the way to clear a dance floor. It rewards people who are willing to look silly and don't care who's watching. Joy delivered by brass section, no apologies offered.