Polio

Michael Television, November 2024:

Time for Michael Television's Interloper to stage a comeback! Sadly Victorian diseases are also making a comeback due to closed minds and misinformation, so we went and wrote Polio.

Please note: This track includes satirical content. We are NOT anti-vaxers!

Misc and I went to a couple of gigs recently. One, Zheani where we felt like the oldest guys in the room. We were the oldest in the room. We were the only guys in the room. Two, we went to see Ringo Deathstarr. We decided that we were massively inspired by both. In particular the intensity of the beats and the wash of reverb-y shoegaze. We were fascinated that such a classic genre was having a resurgence. We talked about what it would be like to write lyrics in middle-age and pondered if there was anything we felt strongly enough about that captures the content and delivery of when we were in our 20s, 30s.

I was watching a recent video whilst doom-scrolling and it was of a vaccine specialist talking about how the general vaccine sentiment had grown so cynical, that so many people were opting out of vaccines and as a result, we were seeing the return of cases of Polio in children. Something that would have been a common issue from the Victorian era even up to the ‘50s. We had a collective disbelief that this was the world we would end up in: where the telephone game of fiction becomes facts. Where proven knowns become questions. Where the greatest invention in medicine, possibly ever is treated with suspicion.

Misc sent me a track simply called Polio and I replied something not unlike 'I'd like to rap some mad shit on that'. We'd like to think we're live and let live people, but it seemed a little like something that got under our skin enough to say, there's sort of a line that is slightly crossed where society is so detached from the experts and people who give their lives to improve ours. That there is a special arrogance and hubris that drags your own people back into darker times. We wouldn't force something on anyone, so this seemed like a funny thing to do; write a song insisting that people shut up and take their medicine.

Anyway, inspired to write new beats with washed out guitars, we used neither and wrote a track that picks up from where we left off. Same old venom, same old grudges, same old Interloper. We hope you enjoy it. If not, then we don't care because now the kids have polio, again assholios.

Miscellaneous Files:

My first ever guitar was a classical Spanish instrument handed down to me by my cousin Michael (not Television). While studying for his post-grad in the ’90s, he suddenly fell ill and died of meningitis within a few days, aged in his mid-20s. Around the same time, a school friend lost her teenage sister to the exact same disease. Just a few years later, meningitis vaccines were standardized across the UK on the NHS, a breakthrough that came too late for Michael, but no doubt saved countless others.

Because of that history, the guitar Michael gave me has always been a reminder of how real and devastating those preventable diseases are. So when Mikee suggested using sketch of a track I’d sent him to call out the absurdity of the anti-vax movement, I was fully on board. The idea that anyone would willingly opt their child out of something that could literally save their life hit a deeply personal nerve, and I wanted to throw everything I had into the message.

I offered to write and ‘sing’ a verse in the guise of Assholio the Anti-vaxer, acting as a ridiculous counterpoint to Mikee’s words, in order to expose the absurdity of the logic. Unable to deliver it in my normal voice, I channelled an “I don’t get it” persona inspired by Barry Shitpeas, peppered the lyrics with Beavis and Butt-Head references, and spat out a barrage of obvious untruths.

Flipping out of character and back to my own voice, I added some layers of reinforcement backing vocals to a certain section of the track.

GET THIS SHIT INSIDE YOU!