English Teacher
Photo by Tatiana Pozuelo
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On their 2022 EP Polyawkward, English Teacher announced themselves as a band with a dry wit and a sharp tongue, wrapping kitchen sink-style observations about the humdrum of everyday life around the jagged edges of post-punk guitars and off-kilter melodies.
Today the Leeds-based band have shared "The World's Biggest Paving Slab," a song that zeroes in on small town life and the characters who take an outsized role in those societies. It's their first release on new label Island Records but there's no been no major label makeover for English Teacher. "The World's Biggest Paving Slab" finds Lily Fontaine dropping references to obscure British actors and firing out a warning shot to "watch your fucking feet."
The song comes with a video depicting a papier mache-headed character making his way around a rural village, a bit like The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" video but with less swaggering and more shots of sheep and small chip shops. Check that out exclusively below.
"The song is about delusions of grandeur and inferiority from the perspective of a small town’s local celebrities - specifically my hometown, Colne in East Lancashire, home of the world’s biggest paving slab (allegedly)," Fonatine explained in an email to The FADER. "It’s also the location of the filming of the ‘Every sperm is sacred’ scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and I was inspired by a skit in the latter half of the film for this video.
In the scene, a waiter leads the camera from his workplace, through the city, and to a rural spot where he shows you the place he was born. Our journey begins on the street where I began singing as a child in school plays and then as a teenager in bars and restaurants, and moves through some of my favourite locations until we reach the atom at the end of the video. This is the best spot in Colne to view the famous Pendle Hill, who is an important protagonist in the music we’ve been working on, and we felt that the atomic structure spoke to the sci-fi references that also feature heavily. The design of the character was inspired by Frank Sidebottom, who, in turn, inspired the old name of the band (we used to be called Frank). We also just wanted the character to be a big slab-head man. Claryn, our director, and the whole team worked really hard to help us create something that celebrates the idiosyncrasies of Colne."