Thoroughly Probed!

Here's one of Liverpool's most enduring institutions.

Probe Records has been "the semi-official control room of Liverpool music" for the past 40 years according to Scouse music journo Paul Du Noyer.

Now in it's fourth location, Probe has been very much at the heart of the city's hippy, punk, dance and alternative music scenes/cultures and continues to do business at a time when independent record shops (like book shops) are going under left, right and centre.

Former employees include Wah! Heat's Pete Wylie, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Paul Rutherford and Dead or Alive's Pete Burns.

Probe's founder Geoff Davies also founded the Probe Plus record label, most famously the home of those "Four lads who shook the Wirral", Half Man Half Biscuit. Altogether now...

Unemployment's rising in the Chigley end of town
And it's spreading like pneumonia
Doesn't look like going down
There's trouble at the fire station someone's had the sack
And the lads are going to launch a scheme get rid of Captain Flack

Tell PC McGarry to get himself a mate
And arm themselves with CS gas
They're gonna be out late
We've had Cant conformism since 1966
And now subversion's in the air in the shape of flying bricks

Someone get a message through to Captain Snort
That they'd better start assembling the boys from the fort
And keep Mrs Honeyman right out of sight
'Cos there's gonna be a riot down in Trumpton tonight

All this aristocracy has really got to stop
We can overthrow the surgery and kidnap Dr Mopp
And Chippy Minton's Socialists could storm the Market Square
And make plans to assassinate our autocratic Mayor

Windy Militant leads his Basque-like corn grinders to war
With windmill sails and bombs with nails they smash the town hall door
But Snorty and his boys arrive with one big erstwhile crew
Whereupon they bring about a military coup

Someone get a message through to Captain Snort
That they'd better start assembling the boys from the fort
And keep Mrs Honeyman right out of sight
'Cos there's gonna be a riot down in Trumpton tonight

The Trumpton Riots - Half Man Half Biscuit

(I realise that this is likely to mean nothing to anyone unfamiliar with British children's television programmes of the 1960s!)