Inside The Noise Floor: Kettle’s On — Paul Gascoigne Ain’t No David Gascoigne (VVR018)
Keith Murphy aka Kettle’s On turns council-flat misery and boredom into hilarious rants set to hip beats, angular guitar, post-punk basslines, and several cups of Lipton’s tea.
A dented kettle sits on a rickety table, too exhausted to whistle, too bothered to reheat. Obsessing over the second-hand “collectible”, a withered man with died black hair and indoor sunglasses mutters unintelligible nothings about having to pay his bin rates and getting his Vauxhall fixed. “Hasn’t run for twenty-five bleeding years, why should I fix it now?” On the dated linoleum floor, brown, a bill from Wandsworth city council exclaims in red rates overdue! And Keith Murphy aka Kettle’s On, he’s not about to bloody pay them.
“Why should I pay me bin rates? Three of them I’m forced to ‘ave! One with a red lid, one yellow, one green. I don’t even have any lawn.”
Kettle’s On begins where creativity goes to die — the Roehampton back blocks. A juxtaposing hodgepodge of government-induced low-class living, leafy quaintness, and suicide options, Roehampton nestles snugly near the more sane district of Putney, in London’s south west. Keith tells people he lives in Putney. It sounds better.
Murphy’s music, let’s call them belligerent vignettes, is the result of a life that has too much time and bugger all money. He records vocals in real-time after overhearing a neighborly argument or realizing his local store is out of Lipton’s tea, lyrics resembling Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood if it had a kebab and a wank and went to bed as a reward. It’s comedy in its rawest form — an improvisational poke at housing placement, bureaucratic entanglement and human behavior boiled down into a sharp, albeit rambling, observation.
Pre-recording his backing tracks before any rant comes to light, Murphy boasts a retro-grim setup worthy of kings, stinking of paupers:
Battered mic with indistinguishable branding
The rude simplicity of a Korg Monotron bass
Squier Strat copy
Yamaha PSR-series keyboard (the next step up from the 1980s Casiotone)
The bargain-bin genius of a Zoom RT-123 drum & bass box
Old JVC deck for tape saturation
Boss SE-50 effects module
He doesn’t have a girlfriend.
To be fair, the street-level genius of Keith Murphy deserves a lot more credit. To dismiss him as the poor man’s John Cooper Clarke would be too easy, lazy, despite the remarkable resemblance. His work stands alone: punk-poetry built from lowbrow detail, delivered with exquisite timing, and a brutal ear for extracting the comedy from dire situations. He speaks from external survival and internal demons, turning his experiences into sharp, punchy, danceable post-punk/funk tracks without edit, keeping the bleak bits human and the human bleakness funny.
She turns on the TV to drown out the drumsHe yells to himself to drown out the tvI trigger the alarm to drown out the yellingThe dog howls at the moon to drown out the alarmI guess I’ll die.Displaying the demeanor of a man who might either murder someone or offer them a cup of tea, Murphy remains seated while ranting about Sleaford Mods. His stage persona is not an act:
“Sleaford Mods ripped off me sound. I mean, they started many years before I did, but I’ve ‘ad that sound in me head for decades. That Williamson twat just minced in and stole it. They’re a good band.”
At fifty-three years old, after years of grafting through working men’s clubs, bingo halls, and student unions (including the notorious Roehampton University) Keith Murphy has finally recorded his debut album, under the moniker of Kettle’s On. Paul Gascoigne Ain’t No David Gascoigne is ten tracks of groove and hilarity, including a cover of Alexei Sayle’s Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?, an interpretation reeking of the Murphy playbook. A subtle titling tweak (Ullo John? Gotta New Motor!) is just the beginning; Kettle’s On’s slowed version strips away the absurdity of Sayle’s lyrical tone, transforming it into a biographical passage of a regular Keith Murphy day. The lyric, “your goat made a mess of the carpet” suddenly seems believable.
Motors are a recurring theme on Paul Gascoigne Ain’t No David Gascoigne, with mentions of his clapped-out Vauxhall (his Mum’s old car that he doesn’t know how to fix or drive) threaded through the album, and the Motorhead dedication Lemmy Your Motor’s Head (Mine Ain’t Built For Speed), featuring lyrics such as, “The bus driver raises his eyebrows at my putrid breath because toothpaste is expensive so I just use Crisco” and “I listened to Motorhead again and the guy said the snake eyes are watching me and I just got scared.”
“Motors have been a big part of me life. I used to sell used carpets out the back of a Hyundai. Me boss Dennis had to drive it, but me and that car were simpatico. I got the idea for Lemmy Your Motor’s Head while sittin’ in me mam’s Vauxhall looking for the bonnet lever.”
But it’s the irresistible trio of Claim Denied, Rates, and Naybahz, that forms the album’s spine, with track two Eye Dylsexic taking out both groove and poem of the year. The half-relatable punkish romp sees our hero drunk on a wet lawn, making out with a “spotty girl”, lamenting her “septic breath” and “drool galore” only to find by the light of day that she’s a Dalmation.
Rates is pure Kettle’s On fuel. An unstructured rant about bin rates that distracts itself with commentary about his looks: “I think I’m a solid six, you think I’m a five, I suppose I do have that scar on me left cheek”, COVID: “Ivermectin got me through, horses my arse, didn’t mind wearing a mask because I’m ugly, I’m a solid five”, and home maintenance: “Shower leaks into the cupboard and it builds up in mold and then dropped foodstuff sticks to the mold and that attracts the ants but I don’t mind the ants because they have a system, I’m not a communist but if I was an ant I would be.”
The sleazy funk of Naybahz and Dury-esque meter is bedroom fodder if your partner was a drummer named Gary who lives upstairs. Here, the entire apartment block is a background character, littered with petty, loud, unavoidable, and occasionally endearing characters, amid mundane household rigamarole: “The landlady warned me of an impromptu inspection next bloody week, next bloody week passes and hey there’s still two bloody leaks, I don’t really understand because I haven’t even paid the bill, anyway the ceiling stain looks like David Gascoigne and that gives me a thrill, the bucket in the corner fills slow and that’s just fine with me, I ain’t buying another bloody bucket these vouchers are for curry.”
Claim Denied takes the frustration of red tape, stripping the outlook to barebone comedic observation. Set to a circling bass romp, percussive loop with sax incantations spradically throughout, bureaucracy has never been sexier: “Outside the job centre a woman argues with her snotty kid, dresses him in a red skivvy I mean what the fuck, she says it’s not time for chips, kid screams because I reckon he wants some chips, she stares straight ahead and waits for it to end, poor cunt.”
Ultimately, it’s the running gag on Paul Gascoigne Ain’t No David Gascoigne that seals the album’s fate as comedy gold — Keith’s insistence that he sounds nothing like Sleaford Mods while still claiming that the duo stole his sound. On Sleaford Mods Records, we witness our hero in next-level logic mode, quipping that, “Yep yep Sleaford Mods are a pretty good band, I don’t know anybody who sounds like them kettle’s on” and “Me mate Glen reckons Sleaford Mods are a proper banger, me other mate Paul reckons I ripped them off, so I went back home and unliked him on Soundcloud”.
Sonically, Paul Gascoigne Ain’t no David Gascoigne moves with urgent immediacy, boasting a scrappy production that belongs in the space it was made in. Recorded in the Murphy boudoir because “it’s the only room that has a table with no kettles on it, the album maintains a tight grip on momentum, understanding its currency, knowing its master has no spare change. The glitches are real on this one, made by an eccentric man who’s learned to work with what’s in front of him.
And just who is David Gascoigne?
Many of us may know Paul Gascoigne as the bad-tempered English footballer with immense talent who drank way too much alcohol. Is David his brother? No. According to Keith, he’s “the plumber who cleared his bog at three in the morning.” I guess the title is true: Paul Gascoigne really ain’t no David Gascoigne.
Kettle’s On is currently in the process of recording a Viz comic tribute album, referencing all the main characters with reverence and an incredible story-telling ability. It differs to Paul Gascoigne Ain’t No David Gascoigne, less a rant, more a cohesive concept taking the listener through the wild antics of a bad-curry-induced fever dream, during a kip on the bog with a Viz comic on the sistern. Due for release in late 2026.
Paul Gascoigne Ain’t No David Gascoigne is available now via Bandcamp and is well worth the free streaming it offers.
Follow Keith Murphy’s Instagram here. It’s ridiculous.
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