Hymns, Very Modern, Revised & Charred
In early 2001, JTA was just starting his A-levels, and found himself on a course for Biology which rapidly became dull and, in consequence, skipped every lesson. As Christmas approached, simply bunking off and writing Passenger began to bore him, and so, for inspiration, he dug out his regulation school issue hymn book, with a burn right through the middle after it got rammed onto the edge of a poker.Charred though the book was, it was still able to provide JTA with some inspiration, and he began to re-write the words of some of the songs and carols to create slightly more sarcastic variations with which to entertain his friends, until they got bored, told him he couldn’t sing, and got him to go away and re-write something else.
Owing to JTA’s palpable lack of musical talent, many of the re-written verses did not entirely work unless, as JTA explained you “take care to emphasise that word just right - it’s about as long again, because you draw out the ‘quan’ in ‘quantum’. ‘Quaaaaantum’, that’s it.”. Still, the work created some small amusement, until JTA ran out of ideas for new verses and left the printed copy of the Hymns lying the the breast pocket of his blazer, occasionally digging it out to scrawl notes on, and never really thinking about what it was.
However, ollowing a review of all of The Statto-JTA Publishing Corporation’s previous works for this edition of the Factbook in December 2005, the original Word document was dug out of the electronic archive, and deemed to “have potential” with the result that a slightly re-worked selection of the funnier and cleverer re-writes JTA created in 2001 will now be availiable on the web, accessible at www.ktab.co.uk/hymns.