Nunc Est Bibendum

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a Latin lesson, interrupted by a brass band)
This one is not a person at all. That's why it's here.

[Verse 1]
Everyone else on this record is a human being
worn down into an abbreviation nobody unpacks —
and then there's this, which went the other way entirely:
a stack of tyres, given a Latin name and a monocle,
and treated by the world for a hundred and thirty years
as though he were a gentleman with opinions about dinner.

[Chorus]
NUNC EST BIBENDUM! Now is the time to drink!
It's a line of Horace, in an ode, about a dead queen!
They put it on a poster of a man made out of tyres
holding a champagne glass of nails and broken glass!
Nunc est bibendum. That's his actual name.
Bibendum. The drinking one. A pile of rubber rings.

[Verse 2]
And the joke — the actual joke, which nobody remembers —
is that the tyre "drinks up" the obstacles in the road,
the nails and the glass, and doesn't puncture, and drinks on,
so the toast is the tyre's toast and the glass is full of hazards.
It's a good joke! It's genuinely a good joke!
And it's been running since eighteen ninety-eight without a laugh.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
So here's the inversion that earns this one its place:
the humans got compressed into initials and forgotten,
and the pile of tyres got given Latin, and a face,
and a personality, and a hundred and thirty years of life,
and now he awards the stars that make and break the world's kitchens.
Nobody wore down. He only ever got more real.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the brass band, the Latin lesson resuming)
He's a stack of tyres.
He decides which restaurants are the best on earth.