Tuppenny Hangover

Описание: Music Video

Written & Performed by Expungers

Hanging on a rope, was the way poor people slept in the Doss Houses of Britain's slums. This song depicts the daily toil and biting mental pressure that knowing another night on the rope was to come and maybe eternal rest upon the Tuppenny Hangover.

Well, apparently, there was once a sleeping system like that indeed. The rooms were not heated and the person running the place unhooked the rope and kicked everyone out a 6am. Almost every morning some old timer would not get up, dead and frozen. The principal reference for such an establishment is George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London of 1933:

“At the Twopenny Hangover, the lodgers sit in a row on a bench; there is a rope in front of them, and they lean on this as though leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the valet, cuts the rope at five in the morning. I have never been there myself, but Bozo had been there often. I asked him whether anyone could possibly sleep in such an attitude, and he said that it was more comfortable than it sounded

It is also mentioned in a work from a century earlier, The Magic Skin by Honoré de Balzac: “We … made it a point of honour to find out whether you were roosting in a tree in the Champs-Elysées, or in one of those philanthropic abodes where the beggars sleep on a twopenny rope.”