The police report into the shooting of Mark Saunders should have been another sad story of our times. That was until yesterday's bizarre news about the placing of various song titles into official inquest evidence.
It was especially strange for me, because in the frankly weird selection featuring Chris de Burgh, Journey, Donna Summer and Buzzcocks was a track from my band, the Membranes. The track, Fuck My Old Boots, was tucked away on a 1987 album called Kiss Ass Godhead. It was a popular live number at the time for chemically imbalanced crazies, but not something I expected to think about 23 years later, certainly not in this context. Somehow the song title had, along with other tracks, been worked into a transcript of the inquest. The passage in which the song features runs: "I switched the light on, he turned towards me and I thought, 'Fuck my old boots, I've got a gun trained on me.'"
An afternoon of intense Twitter debate followed. Some thought the story was a hoax while others pointed out that dropping song titles into reports is pretty common. Insiders told me this is not the first time they've heard pop culture references in official documents. They say it's a way to let off steam in a tense work environment – and although rarely picked up on, it's backfired this time.
Many people were baffled by how someone could like such a bizarre ruckus of music. My guess is this was probably a pooled effort, although Donna Summer and noisy post-punk were always bedfellows in my world. Duran Duran's Point of No Return fits in there somewhere, but it's Chris de Burgh that really confuses me – it's not even Lady in Red, but Quiet Moments, a track that surely nobody outside of the WI has ever heard of. Elsewhere, Journey's Line of Fire is sat next to Kicking Myself by As Tall As Lions. It certainly makes for a confused compilation album.
