„Across the album, there are cameos and fleeting glimpses of powerful historical figures, many with blood on their hands: Donald Rumsfeld, the Ku Klux Klan, Attila the Hun, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Julius II, and the ‘Conducator’, a title used by both Ceausescu and his predecessor King Carol II. Sterzing, the Tyrolean village mentioned in ‘Corps De Blah’, was notorious as a bolthole for Nazi war criminals in the aftermath of the Second World War.
At the same time, Scott takes a delight in crude humour, and the album is awash with insults and sardonic put-‐downs, slapstick, body parts and bad smells (check the tight-‐sphinctered emissions of ‘Corps De Blah’). There’s plenty of rough and tumble and visceral argy-‐bargy, too. ‘Epizootics!’ (as well as recalling 1940s hipster slang, the word means an unusually high rate of new infections within an epidemic – appropriately for a man who once had a hit with a song called ‘The Plague’, Scott’s music has often touched on disease) soundtracks its descriptions of sweaty street hassle with swinging, strident percussion and the raucous sub-‐tones of the rare brass instrument, the tubax, played by Pete Long. “It’s a combination of a tuba and a saxophone,” explains Scott, “and there’s only two in the country. It’s a monster thing, you actually have to sit on the floor, it’s enormous. But it means you can get below the bass, very very deep.”“ (Rob Young, one more time)