100 Greatest Songs of The 20’s So Far #72 The Mysterines – Life’s A Bitch (But I Like It So Much)

Released: 2022

Are you never much more or less than where you’re from? For a musician that’s an impossible one to answer, such is the itinerant nature of the life. The Mysterines are from Liverpool – although singer Lia Metcalfe and bassist George Favager called the Wirral home, a peninsula which sometimes pleads culural independence from it’s metropolitan neighbour.

Either you can choose to pay your dues or otherwise. Interviewed in their rehearsal space in 2022 prior to the release of their debut album Reeling, the duo both denied that the phrase scrawled on the wall demanding “Bring me the head of Paul McCartney on Heather Mills Wooden peg” was down to them. Whatever the truth, it was evidence that some legacies can’t not be confronted.

Reeling began with Life’s A Bitch (But I Like It So Much), a throaty yowl on which Metcalfe reprised Courtney Love and Brody Dalle at their most feral, the sense of abandonment palpable. In form it could’ve been from Seattle or Strawberry Field, but identity goes deeper than noise, so put a pin down on the map and have done with it.