Liner notes by the Wetherby Market Cheese Man, September 2020:

Summer 2020, driving one of the band from Yorkshire to London. The pandemic’s still on and he’s on the back seat, barely audible behind his facemask with damp M1 air blasting into the car at 70mph. Words and meaning obscured. An apt way to talk about the Bibliographic Services Unit.

“Have you seen that our record’s out?”

“Yeah, a mutual friend wants to know if she can support it without listening to it…”

“Absolutely, in fact, that’s recommended. Don’t buy it, listen to it or promote it. Don’t try to understand it. Don’t do anything that might in any way disseminate or encourage it.”

You wouldn’t want to understand it. And it’s not that sort of band. However, for the record, through the hazy fog of contested memory:

The band was established in March 2014. Another band cancelled so they had to make their own evening entertainment. They tried to persuade a waitress in the curry house near The Fenton to sing but she said "No".

They have some guiding principles, such as "Work with what you’ve got" (inspired by Dean Blunt) and "Bogaty smak" which is a rallying cry.

Shelf Ready is a sort of greatest hits. All five recordings were mastered by Hazlitt.

The band is currently dormant but not officially disbanded.

If all that doesn’t help – and what does? – then try another image. A snapshot of conversation from a gig, perhaps their first one. It was one band member’s first live gig as singer, the other’s first gig in seven years, first one since their lifetime ban from the Bristol Academy. And they even had some fans.

“So what’s your favourite one of their songs?”

“Favourite!?! Fuck me, I’m here aren’t I!?! You didn’t tell me I had to do fucking homework as well!”

As I say, they’re not that kind of band. And if you’re still not getting it then good, we’re entering into the right territory. But try a few memories of what went into the cauldron, from someone who went walking with the band back in the day. Libraries are part of it, obviously, what’s left of them in these times. And West Yorkshire urban noire, all motorway mist and flyover bridges.

And whale graffiti and an eye for the absurd. And a singer in a fugue state and a guitarist who has to play well to play so bad. And walking, lots of walking, across the M62, down to Canterbury and up to the Roman Wall. And the growing disenchantment of thirty-something longhairs, aware deep down that if fate wasn’t robbing them then they’d find a way to rob themselves. And psychogeography and dérives and all of that other pretentious shite I later saw on a colleague’s list of relationship red flags.

Still, underlying that, there must be something I’m not quite getting, not managing to capture in words, because none of those ingredients explain why the band and – a few – others seem to consider it all worthwhile. Nothing new there, of course. You either get it or you don’t, like Dylan sneered back in ’65. “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” And that’s the salient point about the BSU. That it sounds absurd, pun intended. But there may still have been something going on in the libraries and side streets of West Yorkshire, once upon a time. Something which seemed to hold some kind of meaning for some of those who came into contact with it.

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s all just a load of bollocks. After all, as one of them has said: “It’s true that nobody asked for any of what we were ‘offering’ but the recordings are a testament to what the two of us went through during that heady period, as well as the things we definitely didn’t go through, in spite of the best intentions. The sound of the band has always had a vitality and sense of economy that stems directly from the fact that the people involved could only really do what you hear here. I still can’t decide all these years later if that’s a commendable thing or not. But then, that’s not really for me to say. It never was.”

So that’s all cleared up nicely then. Cheers. Time to get back on the motorway.

Summer 2017, on the M1 again, with the pandemic a world away, driving one of the BSU to a band night in Huddersfield. A more than usually odd assortment. The talented organiser, alternative type. Local band, too cool for the venue. Singer-songwriter, so desperate to be Richard Hawley it hurts. More alternatives. And last on the bill, The Bibliographic Services Unit, booked because no-one had ever heard anything like them before. It was late in the evening before they got to play, half the audience had already gone and more were soon preparing to leave, but some had travelled from Leeds and Manchester to see this – and they said it felt worthwhile.

Bogaty smak.