If you spent any time in west London in the early 90s you may have come across two extraordinary street musicians. Known to commuters simply as ‘The District Line Buskers’, this duo were recognisable for just two distinctive songs: ‘This Train is Going to Richmond, This Train’, and ‘If You Can’t Have a Shave in a Toilet (Where Can You Have a Shave?)’. In over twenty years of visiting Chiswick, I never heard the group play a third.

Of the two, it was the second track that came back to me most readily when listening to Beans On Toast’s latest album, The Grand Scheme of Things. ‘If You Can’t Have a Shave in a Toilet’ is a protest song – a rousing argument against the puritanism of mid-80s England and its approach to the country’s homeless and down-and-outs. It’s a simple number – it’s pretty much just a chorus repeated over and over again until the question sufficiently bores its way into your upper cortex and jellifies with the other detritus of a life spent on trains. But I think of those gentlemen often and wonder how they’re getting on. I wonder if the song has in some way contributed to a lessening of the stickers in public bathrooms forbidding the act of shaving, or if the comparative rarity of the stickers is simply a sign that twenty-first century England has simply given up on bathroom etiquette altogether and decided to concentrate its efforts on bigger game – like Miley Cyrus, or Ebola.

Beans on Toast is a perfectly fine protest singer. He’s tuneful and charming; he picks topics ranging from battery farming, the depletion of childhood through technology, the war on terror, the war on drugs, war in general, self-deprecation, his lack of culinary skills, homophobia, racism, bigotry, sex, urban gentrification, and friendship as the backbone to his music, and that’s swell. Honestly. He’s persuasive, he’s musically adept, he’s full of character and I don’t think there’s a single thing that he sings about that isn’t, in the universal sense, true.

Now here’s the ‘but’: in the eleven tracks that I repeatedly listened to in anticipation of this review, I failed to think of an occasion on which I would play any of them by choice. I’m not saying I’d avoid them – I wouldn’t. Nor am I saying that they’re avoidable, or without merit. They’re great. They’re good protest songs – I like them. But when does a protest song cross the boundary between being a protest song and being a well-crafted song in its own right?

Take the lyrics to opening track, ‘Folk Singer’: it’s a self-referential number (or so I infer), and old Beans tells us “In fact sometimes I feel like I’m a tool/’cause I gaffer-tape my soul to the same old chord”, but I’d say that’s a little harsh. ‘Folk Singer’ has at least four chords in it, Beans – be proud. ‘The War on War’ follows with an upbeat hoe-down number about – you guessed it – how war could be avoided if everyone just ‘sparked up this spliff’. Hmm. Yeah that’s an idea. Not sure about the next bit though, where Beans’s suggestion of how to tackle the Israel/Palestine crisis involves taking “the boom box out of boom town, and put[ing] it in the Gaza Strip” so that his mate, Mike, can DJ it and “drop some heavy shit”. For the sake of journalistic transparency, I should say that he goes on to qualify this as sounding “like a fucking stupid, ignorant idea”, but that it’s essentially as ludicrous as the current method. Fair enough.

If this is starting to sound like your old chum, Gaz, from school, who smoked too much green and lamented the insistent human race’s dedication to not fulfilling world peace – you may not be far off. One song, however, stands out in all this. ‘Fuck You Nashville’ isn’t exactly miles away from the others out of the bunch in terms of style and tone, but the rhythm fits. It’s an ode to disappointment rather than a medicated lambaste against inequity, and that’s actually more relatable when set in this man’s terms. It even has a Nashville feel to it, and what could be more protest song than that: using the antagonist’s design against him.

There’s something begrudgingly likeable about The Grand Scheme of Things. I’m not going to say that it’s the album to make the decade – it isn’t – but perhaps the cheeky Essex-boy charisma of man himself, Beans, is enough to crack a smile occasionally. A nice bloke doesn’t necessarily make for great music, but somewhere in the corners of that adolescent world view, there might just be a genuine folk singer looking to burst forth.

Let’s hope he makes it out in time. There’s plenty to sing about.

Pete Cary

@PeterCary1