by Cassie Fox

LA’s Broken Baby provide our video of the day today – ‘Get the Piss Up’ is out now, along with a whole album, Late Stage Optimism, from this super-exciting band.

This lead single has everything that makes my heart flutter – dancey drums, punkrock guitars, pop vocals, hooks and a proper goddam chorus I’ll be singing all day. But I’ll be buggered if I know what it means. “Get the Piss Up” – I fear this has been lost in translation somewhere between LA and London.

I wondered, does it mean they’re going to get drunk? But no, that’s the British meaning … when our American friends e.g. Salt’n’Pepa say “better make it fast or else I’m gonna get pissed”, they’re talking talking about getting angry pissed, rather than wankered pissed.

So if we ‘get the piss up’ are we getting angry? There’s certainly some excellent screaming in this song, but it seems more exuberant than furious. It’s ‘piss up’, not ‘pissed off’. I don’t think feather-spitting’s the vibe here.

(I mean, I could just email the band and ask them … but that just wouldn’t be cricket.)

Let’s have a look at the lyrics:

Come and get it up
Get it up 
Gonna muscle up 
You can suck it up suck it up
But it’s not enough
Come and get it up
Get it up 
Gonna muscle up 
You can suck it up suck it 
Get the piss up 

Broken Baby – Get the Piss Up

Hmm. Call me an tarty old Doris with her mind in the gutter, but that sounds a bit blue to me. All those muscles and sucking, crikey. I’m clutching my pearls here and starting to wonder exactly what it is that the silver-tongued frontperson, Bollinger, wants to get up, and where it should go. Nurse!

Google didn’t give me much help with this either. Lots of entries for ‘piss-up’, as in a Blackadder 2 style ale-drinking contest.

An online slang dictionary suggested it has something to do with the expression ‘go piss up a rope’:

To tell someone to go piss up a rope means to tell someone to go ahead with their current course of action, but expect a negative result.

onlineslangdictionary.com

This cheerfully reminds me that I’ve sung similar lyrics myself – in I, Doris‘ ‘The Girl From Clapham‘, the words:

Sold the telly for a pony
Then pissed it up with Tony

I, Doris – The Girl From Clapham (lyrics by Janine Booth)

So. Are we getting drunk? Vexxed? Getting a bit of hot peen action? Set to fail? Squandering all our money on shite? Despite this rigorous exercise in Anglo-American linguistic research, I’ve still not got the foggiest.

American readers – if you’ve managed to read this far I salute you and your fine nation. Do us a solid and tell us in the comments – what the feck does ‘Get the Piss Up’ mean??

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