Here’s an excerpt from my interview with Folk Uke that didn’t make the story you can read in full this weekend. Consider this a taster, come back for the main course in S on Sunday.
In the scheme of things, especially when it comes to Folk Uke – Amy Nelson and Cathy Guthrie and their parcel of outrageous, hilarious and only by accident serious songs - Starfucker is still not as offensive as Star Polka as an album title.
But still, says Nelson, “we’re not censoring ourselves”. To which the only response can be, no shit Sherlock.
“Some people were a little disappointed with our last album, that it was more implicit and explicit, so we’ve taken it back to explicit,” Nelson says of Starfucker, the most recent Folk Uke album.
“On one song, we actually recorded with my dad, called Sweet Talker, and there were no curse words in that song. We thought they might get some airplay and then my dad actually dropped the F bomb on it, so he kept it real for us.”
Guthrie points out that the album also has BJ For A DJ, co-written with an Australian songwriter, with true-to-life lines such as “Life was a sad song but I found a happy ending/I gave a BJ/To a DJ/And now I'm a radio star/You would've done it too/If you knew it would get you this far”.
It’s also a song which raises the point that no one writes similar songs about print journalists.
“We’ll write about that next,” promises Guthrie. “But what rhymes with journalists? Writer maybe. Writer, biter.” No biter on the writer maybe?
“Now we’ve got another international co-write,” celebrates Guthrie. “No biter on the writer … could we add ‘because the tooth hurts’? We could give that one to Trump too.”
It’s almost like being the back of the room while Picasso sketches out his next piece: in the presence of genius in action. This writer can’t claim any part of this beyond maybe mixing up the verbal paint for them.
“It’s funny,” says Nelson. “Both of our dads have helped us with certain lyrics and when we told them we wanted to give them credit they were like ‘no, no, no, no, please no.”