Songfacts®:

• Splodgenessabounds is a British punk rock band fronted by Max Splodge. Said Splodge: "One night I rushed into the Crown in Chislehurst waving a pound note, trying to buy two pints of lager and a packet of crisps. The bell rang and the bloke wouldn't serve me. The next day I put down a drum track and bass line and just shouted, 'Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps please.' Mike Reid played it on Radio 1 and it started selling 17,000 copies a day." (courtesy: One Hit Wonders, by Chris Welch and Duncan Soar.)
• This song was originally the B-side of "Simon Templar," a rocked-up version of the theme tune of the television program starring Roger Moore, The Saint.
• This is the song that inspired the name of the BBC2 comedy also called Two Pints Of Lager and A Packet Of Crisps.
• In 1852, a part-Native Indian chef George Crum invented potato crisps by accident, thanks to a fussy customer. Industrialist Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt came to the Moon Lake House Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Crum was a chef and ordered "thinner than normal French fried potatoes." Vanderbilt kept sending them back to Crum, protesting that they were too thick. Finally, out of spite the chef sliced the potatoes paper-thin, so that he wouldn't be able to eat them with a fork, then fried them to a crisp in oil, and splashed salt on them. The fussy industrialist loved them. These "potato crunches" as Crum called them became a regular feature of the hotel's menu. (From the book Food for Thought: Extraordinary Little Chronicles of the World by Ed Pearce)