Andrew Hickey

speaker

2,253 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Andrew Hickey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs · Song 185: “Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

Some of these desires, particularly relating to father-daughter incest, are described in deliberately shocking ways.

And while I think it's very artistically valid, and used to a much more serious purpose than some of Zapper's later shocking or offensive humour,

I know of a few people who've had a very bad time listening to the track because it's brought up past traumas.

To be very clear, I'm not being censorious here.

There are some Zapper lyrics, particularly in the late 70s and early 80s, which, while I would defend his right to write them on free speech grounds, I wouldn't defend on their own merit.

But Brown's Shoes Don't Make It is not one of those.

It's a very, very powerful piece of work, but precisely because of that power, it's a work that might reopen old traumas.

and the album finishes up with a return to America Drinks, this time renamed to America Drinks and Goes Home.

Supposedly, some of those crowd noises are by Terry Gilliam, though his memory of attending a Mother's session and making noises might instead refer to Return of the Son of Monster Magnus on the Freakout album.

I've seen the claim made about both tracks, and Gilliam has only ever talked about being at one Mother's recording session in interviews I've seen.

Zappa talked about the layers of invention that went into those crowd noises in his autobiography, saying in part, We spent hours putting that together.

Herbie Cohen was playing the cash register.

We rehearsed the crowd noises.

The talk track is funny because they are saying things like, I got a new Mustang, and the girls are saying, Sally, will you go with me to the bathroom?

You know, that stuff.

The crowd mumble was carefully programmed, like choreographed.

We had the crowd separated into two rooms.

In the main studio we had ten people sitting around the microphone doing these lines on cue, with the cash register over here and the glass on one microphone.

Then in the vocal booth off to one side we had Ray Collins and Jimmy Carl Black and Roy Estrada going through this number.

We had Bunk Gardner trying to pick up two girls.

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