Sharp Shell Shocked (I think)

Factual Questions
1

Pink Floyd utters a phrase like this and Michelle Shocked titled an album with similar words. What is the exact phrase, and what does it mean? WAG: Beyond shell-shocked?
(Is it a British expression, perhaps?)

If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat? -P. Floyd

2

I think it’s “Short, Sharp, Shock”. To make the album, Roger Waters went out interviewed different people on different topics, stressful things, like time and money, what fights you have been in. Excerpts from the taped interviews can be heard throughout the album. I think that came from a guy (maybe a roadie named Roger the Hat?) talking about a fight, but I’m not sure.

3

Interesting! Is it describing quick jabs? Is it a common phrase in boxing or street figting?

4

For a while in Britain they ran a scheme to combat overcrowding in their prisons called the Short, Sharp, Shock.

Rather than send offenders away for 12 months in a normal prison they were sent for 3 months in something like a boot camp.

5

Don’t know about that, that was just my WAG on what the phrase actually means. It sounds to me like he says, “I gave him a quick, short, sharp, shock” (I think…I don’t have the album with me right now, or I’d listen to it to check). After that it just sounds to mumbled for me to make sense of more than a scattered word here and there.

6

There is also a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson called A Short, Sharp Shock.

If I was discussing Lucy Lawless but I wrote Lucy Topless, would that be a Freudian typo?

7

Bobinelli is right.

The phrase, “a short, sharp shock” was used by Mrs Thatcher’s first Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw. He used it to describe a new system of juvenile detention which combined shorter sentences with a tougher prison regime. The stated aim was deterrence but, as Bobinelli suggests, a reduction in prison numbers (and therefore costs) was widely assumed to be the ulterior motive.

It didn’t work, and juvenile crime continued to rise through the 1980s, fuelled partly by high unemployment.

Pop trivia: The phrase also appears in the Billy Bragg song, It Says Here:

Billy Bragg toured with Michelle Shocked in the US, and it is (WAG) entirely possible that she picked up the phrase from him.

8

The phrase comes from Gilbert & Sullivan’s opera The Mikado(c. 1885). It is sung by Poo-Bah, Ko-Ko and Pish-Tush who are contemplating the joys of having one’s head chopped off:

To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,
In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!

http://math.boisestate.edu/GaS/mikado/html/proud.html

9

There was a similar scheme in the US for a while called “Scared Straight”.

“Drink your coffee! Remember, there are people sleeping in China.”

dennis@mountaindiver.com
www.mountaindiver.com

10

I just copped on…

Dark Side of the Moon was released in 1973, Thatchers Conservatives were elected in 1979.

So I’m wrong. Anyone know if Waters/Gilmour/Wright/Mason is a Gilbert & Sullivan fan?.

11

Well, it’s not often I get to trot out my knowledge about Michelle Shocked these days…

Her album of the name is the same title and had a similar cover as a bunk band before her, leading people in the punk community to hate her, though I believe she said it was an accident.

Yer pal,
Satan

12

The michelle shocked album is “Short, sharp, shocked” and, whether it resembles another album cover or not, I’m pretty sure that the picture is one taken of her being apprehended by the police at a protest rally. I’ll have to check.

13

Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was based on (mostly) the story of a severely disturbed man, (some say ex-Floydy Syd Barrett)and his time in a institution. Short, sharp shock is a term for electroconvulsive, or shock, therapy. There’s also a reference in a song late in the album to lobotomy,“You raise the blade, you make the change, you rearrange me 'til I’m sane.” Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” has references to ES therapy, too. Scary stuff.

AskNott

14

ok I checked and the cover picture is indeed her being arrested by riot police. you can see the original picture and the album cover at http://members.xoom.com/g_limbo/bio.htm. Don’t remember how to make that a link, too long since I did anything with html.
A big light bulb light up when I read there that Michelle had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and changed her name to reflect (in questionable taste) her experience with electroconvulsive therapy in a mental ward. “Aha! It all makes sense now!”

15

hmm it linked automatically. lucky me

16

I was just in a bookstore today and ran across “The Pink Floyd Encyclopedia” by Vernon Fitch. It gave the entire Roger the Hat “short, sharp, shock” quote, which is hard to follow on the album:

So apparently on DSOTM he’s referring to a fight he was in. Whether he intentionally lifted the three word phrase from Gilbert and Sullivan or not, I don’t know.