Fragmentary Explorations of London in T.S. Eliot’s 'The Waste Land' and Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy (Nuxx)’

 by Isaac Mead

The line ‘A heap of broken images’ from T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Waste Land came to mind when listening to Underworld’s techno anthem ‘Born Slippy (Nuxx)’ during a rewatching of Trainspotting over the weekend. The ‘stream of consciousness’ ramblings driven by experiences in London seemed to parallel many of the aspects of Eliot’s seminal poem. 

‘Born Slippy (Nuxx)’ is a single released by Underworld in 1995, featuring an internal monologue narrating the trajectory of a chaotic night out, underpinned by celestial chords placed against clattering beats. The song reached number 2 in the UK charts in 1996 after featuring on Danny Boyle’s iconic film Trainspotting, where the lyrics were constructed by vocalist Karl Hyde after going out in Soho, with an aim to recreate how ‘a drunk sees the world in fragments’ (similar to Eliot’s ‘heap of broken images’). 

The Waste Land is a poem by T.S. Eliot that was published in 1922. It quickly became a talking-point among readers, buried in numerous allusions to untangle that characterise the modern world as disjointed and fractured. Much like the ‘energy of movement, and of time and place’ that Rick Smith of Underworld suggests ‘Born Slippy’ held being an emblem of the Cool Britannia generation of the late 90s, Eliot’s poem captured the general sense of disillusionment of the post-war generation. It is split into five sections, titled ‘I. The Burial of the Dead’, ‘II. A Game of Chess’, ‘III. The Fire Sermon’, ‘IV. Death by Water’ and ‘V. What the Thunder Said’ that encapsulate the disparate pieces of culture stringing our existence together. The multiple perspectives which the poetic voice shifts between is summarised by the working title Eliot employed ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, a quotation taken from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, a book which itself features depictions of scenes that arise in a Thames-side pub, strengthening comparisons with ‘Born Slippy’s ramblings from a night out. However, whilst connections can be made between the song and poem, I should probably note that The Waste Land delves far deeper into the philosophical questions that underpin human existence, the place the poem is rooted in acts as a more fluid entity than simply London, and the ability as a reader to repeatedly decode Eliot’s complex tapestry of metaphors and references far surpasses Karl Hyde’s incoherent recollections of a night of drinking. 

With that clarified, I’ll now use examples to offer some comparison between the two. Below is an extract from The Wasteland: 

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!

“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

[...]

“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!

Within this portion of the poem, the general sense of meaninglessness to life is mirrored, where there is a suggestion that people are alive in a physical sense but dead in all others, as the poetic voice states “I had not thought death had undone so many”. The merging of voices, such as the excerpt from Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘To the Reader’ (‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!’) reflects the collage of conversations incorporated into ‘Born Slippy’. This line directly addresses the reader, translating to ‘Hypocrite reader, — my fellow, — my brother!’, potentially proposing that critics can be seen as hypocrites, who are in the position to examine literature and art whilst not creating it themselves. This notion of the disconnection between an artist’s intended meaning and the interpretation of art by a broad audience links to Karl Hyde’s unhappiness at the simplification of the line ‘Shouting Lager Lager Lager’ in his song very quickly becoming a drunken cry. His original intention was for the portion of the song to be a desperate repetition of a one take vocal, as he asserts himself that he ‘was horrified because I was still deep into alcoholism. It was never meant to be a drinking anthem; it was a cry for help.’ 

Going back to Romford, mega, mega, mega

Going back to Romford, hi mum, are you having fun?

And now are you on your way to a new tension headache?

In this section of lyrics, the reference to a specific place in London, ‘Romford’, echoes the allusions to ‘London Bridge’ and ‘King William Street’ in the previous passage. The rhetorical questioning offers a confrontation of the listener, just like the quotation taken from Charles Baudelaire in The Waste Land. Moreover, the suggestion of the future, ‘a new tension headache’ to follow the events which unfolded over a night, parallels the fluidity of time in Eliot's poem. 

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

Within this excerpt, there is ambiguity as to which narrative voice is asserting the personal pronoun ‘I’, much like merging of perspectives in ‘Born Slippy (Nuxx)’. The use of dialect grounds the narrative voice of the passage in a range of classes, with the repeated imperative call ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME’ marking the closure of the pub. The repetition of the singular ‘TIME’ throughout the extract undermines how definite it is, similar to the timeframe in constant flux in Underworld’s song. However, unlike ‘Born Slippy’, Eliot connects his poem to a rich literary history through his allusion to the character Ophelia Shakespeare’s Hamlet with the quotation ‘‘Good night, sweet ladies’ that draws upon her madness and images of submersion and drowning which appear throughout the poem. 

A final comparison can be made between the trance-like beat of Underworld’s techno-anthem and the final part of the poem, ‘V. What the Thunder Said’. Informed by a breakdown Eliot suffered from in 1921, the section ends with the Sanskrit: ‘Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih’, translating in a rather basic form to ‘Let go’. Eliot later told Virginia Woolf that he wrote this part ‘in a trance’, not very far from Karl Hyde’s scribbling of lyrics on the same night he’d been out in Soho. Whilst more philosophical questions are explored at varying depths in the poem versus the song, the essence of both remains the same - to capture the fragmented nature of human existence.