Hangover Square

Album: 1,2, Kung Fu (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • Boy Azooga is a four-piece Welsh band lead by Davey Newington. This song from the quartet's debut album 1,2, Kung Fu was inspired by Patrick Hamilton's 1941 novel Hangover Square, which is about a drunkard's adventures in the days preceding Britain declaring war on Germany.
  • Newington was given the Hangover Square book by his father, a former violinist with BBC National Orchestra of Wales. "And now he plays the strings on that song, the singer told Q magazine, "it's wicked."
  • In Hangover Square, the protagonist, George Harvey Bone has a series of schizophrenic episodes, referred to in the text as "dead moods." Newington explained to Drowned in Sound that "the repetitive ending of the song is supposed to represent being trapped in one of George's dead moods."
  • There's a second song inspired by Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square on our database. Check out Detroit punk band Protomartyr's track "Maidenhead."

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