This song is a sigh.

This song has a twinkle in its eye.

This song is all the better for the northern accent that is indelibly baked into its lyrics.

This song is a sigh of weary resignation.

Well now then Mardy Bum
Oh I’m in trouble again, aren’t I?
I thought as much
Cause you turned over there
Pulling that silent disappointment face
The one that I can’t bear

This song is a sigh of incomprehension in the face of irreconcilable gender incompatibility.

Men and women get upset by different things. What matters to one is trivial to the other. Men don’t talk enough. Women bear interminable grudges. These are the dried-in stains on a relationship that even the most powerful biological empathy powder can’t shift.

Mardy Bum is a song about those stupid, unnecessary and unproductive arguments that creep insidiously into a relationship, like ground ivy taking over a lawn.

And I can’t be arsed to carry on in this debate
That reoccurs,
Oh when you say I don’t care
Well of course I do
Yeah I clearly do!

By rights a twenty year old Alex Turner should have been too young to write this song from personal experience. The idea that a fresh-faced boy, barely out of his teens, should have cohabited long enough to have had a relationship turn this stale makes me all melancholic.

Now then Mardy Bum
I see your frown
And it’s like looking down the barrel of a gun
And it goes off
And out come all these words

The alternative explanation is that he is a song-writing prodigy, and that Mardy Bum was early evidence of mildly McCartney-esque powers of observation.

Mardy Bum is no Yesterday, the musicality and the instrumentation are crude by comparison, but the deft handling of its subject matter requires a similar type of talent. There is the maturity required to deliver such wry social commentary at a conceptual level. And there is the devil in the detail accuracy of phrases like, “I clearly do,” which give the lyrics their plaintive authenticity.

Turner also pulls a neat trick by simultaneously acting as participant and observer. He is obviously playing the protestant in this argument. He’s maybe playing himself. But he is also playing every bloke ever. He’s playing you. Or your man. There is a clever duality to his protestation. The lad doth protest two ways.

This song is a sigh.

But this song also has a twinkle in its eye.

The male protagonist hopes against hope that the descent into routine bickering is not inevitable. Maybe a dose of overt optimism, a cheeky smile and a playful nudge can pull things back from the brink.

Can’t we laugh and joke around
Remember cuddles in the kitchen, yeah
To get things off the ground
And it was up, up and away

His palpable frustration is tempered with tenderness.

Oh there’s a very pleasant side to you
A side I much prefer

Indeed, Mardy Bum itself is a nickname of backhanded affection.

Sadly this well-intentioned solicitude is misguided. Using a pet name in these circumstances is likely to make matters worse rather than better. When men attempt to make light of situations like this it only serves to confirm that we don’t appreciate their gravity.

This song is a sigh.

This song has a twinkle in its eye.

And this song has a wonderful northern (Sheffield) accent, whose endearing idiosyncrasies add to the sense of intimacy.

Some of that accent is embedded in the lyrics.

For instance, in addition to the song’s title, there are expressions like “you’ve got the face on”.

My maternal grandparents lived in Sheffield and this song reminds me of my cousins bemoaning the instances when their mother, my aunt, had her face on. There was a very pleasant side to her too but you didn’t mess with “the face”.

And some of the accent is pure Alex Turner delivery.

The way he pronounces “right hard”, for example, is all of Yorkshire condensed and concentrated into two words.

Still it’s right hard to remember that
On a day like today
When you’re all argumentative
And you’ve got the face on