A WARNING...

Ten people downloaded our 'Power of the Pyramids' track. Ten. And it was really good and totally free of charge. 

So, thanks to your overwhelming apathy, TOMTIT are now called (((TOMTIT))) and the next track we present to you will be the nastiest piece of work we can muster. We've no firm dates, we may even taken a whole year to do it but, when we do, you'll regret it. You may even shit yourself - if we can get the sub-frequencies right. 

In the mean time, why not buy our 2015 annual? It is fucking Christmas, after all. 

A CORPSE FOR GIRLS

Another successful seance led us into further discussions with our astral newsagent and tobacconist, P. Parsons. We asked him which items he was selling during the festive shit, and he told us that this annual for young girls was proving very popular.

He then sent us some 10p lucky bags that were crammed full of real cigarettes, lighters, air-bomb repeaters and asbestos.

WHY DON'T YOU?

Just one of the exciting projects to try during the upcoming school holidays. We've already harvested three kilograms between us, so what are you waiting for ?

SUPERHUMANS

That there is a new comic about a 1970's gorilla biker gang is pretty astounding in itself, but the fact that it is (so far) superb and has a variant cover that pays tribute to 'Psychomania' colours us pink and purple. 

CELESTIAL NEWSAGENT

During our annual TOMTIT seance meeting on Halloween, we achieved contact with the spirit of P. Parsons, a deceased newsagent and tobacconist. He spoke to us of his celestial newsagents shop, and the many publications he sold to the dead.

One thriving magazine he mentioned was 'TOMTIT Computer', and after a great deal of screaming, he began to send us pages from a 1984 edition via a circle of printers we'd arranged within a chalk pentagram. Sadly, Unmann-Wittering aggressively broke wind before page 2 arrived, and disrupted the proceedings. Contact with Parsons was halted as a result. 

Here is a scan of the spectral printout, which has been examined by a cross section of respected ghost hunters and paranormal experts, all of whom expressed a desire that we don't waste their time any further.

What fools these mortals be !

DATA ENTRY / WORKING LUNCH

We like everything about this picture, including her jumper and her contemplative expression, although a special mention must also go to her earthenware mug, which has a face on it and, no doubt, contains Cup A Soup.  

BAUCH TUCKER

 

Ein interessantes Artefakt aus einer lange verschwundenen Ära zu präsentieren, wenn Menschen behandelt Übung als etwas beschämend Aktivität hinter verschlossenen Türen - und "in das absolute Minimum Bekleidung' durchgeführt warden - die K-TEL MULTI TRAININGSGERÄT – AUF DEUTSCH!

Es ist tragisch, aber wir haben eine Sammlung davon. Wir haben auch 'Krieg der Welten' von einem Spanier lesen. Es ist zu spät für uns, aber vielleicht unserem Beispiel sparen andere.

Wie auch immer, zu erhalten, sich fit halten, das ist ein Befehl.

ADVENTURES FROM HISTORY

Horatio Nelson loses his eye, arm and life, respectively. He did his duty, as expected.

31ST

 

MASKS

THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE KILLRAVEN

 

Unmann-Wittering used to read Killraven as a kid. He liked it, but never really understood the story, or the characters, or the dialogue, or what any of it meant. 

Nearly forty years later, confident that the intervening years had brought increased wisdom, perception and greater understanding, U-W had another try, with exactly the same results: total and utter incomprehension. 

Which is brilliant.

RAZOR TOOTHED FRENZY

ALLIGATORS (1987)

‘Alligators’ is great. It follows one of the classic Guy N. Smith formulas: wild animal runs riot, many people die horribly, screaming for their lives. As you might expect, the wild animals in this book are Alligators, specifically Caimans, including a female who has a memory of eating children before she was captured and fondly recalls the taste of human flesh.

The alligators are released from a local zoo by a gang of animal activists, two of which are immediately torn apart and eaten. Alligators are not known for their gratitude, although they clearly have a highly developed sense of irony. From here on in, it’s textbook Smith: guts fly, faces are shredded, severed heads roll, legs and arms are chomped down like twiglets. It’s a blood bath.

Our continuity is provided by a thoughtful vet and his new girlfriend, a former animal activist turned receptionist / sex toy. Their relationship is interesting, not least because he is permanently distracted by his job, leaving their trysts saying that a sick goat needs him, or basking in the afterglow of their lovemaking by thinking about delousing a donkey.

Every now and again, we are privileged to get inside the alligators heads, and it’s a revelation. As befitting a species that is around 37 million years old, Smith gives the alligator an archaic sounding, rather formal turn of thought, as in the wonderful scene where the female tells the male to sling his hook:

‘The mating season is gone. I have no 

further need of you. Be gone!’

I’d have liked to have heard Johnny Morris narrate that in one of his funny voices.

Smith saves most of his ire for animal activists, here presented as an ugly, dirty lunatic fringe led by a scarred and psychotic sadist called Maurice Jones. Jones once contaminated some cottage cheese with urine, so you know he means business. After much unpleasantness, including rape, murder and multiple threats of castration, Jones' beloved alligator stands on him, squishing his guts out in a long, spurty thread of ‘ow’-ness. It’s no less than he deserves, he's behaved like a right shithouse.  

Unusually, Smith resists the temptation to finish the book with a paragraph setting up a sequel, a crying shame as he has already established that the female is fertile and that there is a nuclear power station in the area. It’s not like Guy to pass up the opportunity for a book about radiation fuelled monster gators, so perhaps he thought the idea had run its course. Shame, as ‘Alligators’ is ace.

PYRAMIDAL POWERAGE

It’s taken us over seven months to fashion a follow up to Lucid Droning, or, at least, that’s how long has elapsed since that release. To be honest, we didn’t do anything for a long while, and then thought we’d better do something, so Power of the Pyramids came to pass. We skimmed through a magazine article about the olden days not that long ago, so this was an inevitable progression, really*.  

Amusing anecdote: Unmann-Wittering had a vision of the jackal headed God Anubis during the recording session, which so freaked him out that he had to banish the cruel and supernatural deity from his head by thinking about his beloved Miniature Dachshund, Monty, who has a similar head but a very different temperament. 

You can get the track that drove one of TOMTIT to the edge of sanity HERE.

Thanks to Jon Kelly and Higher Rhythm for the use of the facilities. 

 * We are of the Iron Maiden school: everything we read, watch, hear or see is turned into a song that simply relates what we have read, watched, heard or seen.

THE HARD STARE OF SCIENCE

These plants have no right to privacy, science is being done. The fellow second to right isn't actually pointing at anything specific, he's just showing off his signet ring. Oh, and surely there is a set of identical twins in the picture, thinking that they can fool us by standing in different corners? We've spotted you. How do YOU like being under the big microscope thingy?

ADVENTURES FROM HISTORY

A baby Oliver Cromwell is kidnapped by his Grandfather's pet monkey.

SHIT BEAST

We couldn't decide whether this unpleasant and hungry looking creature was a cat, a dog, a mutated rabbit, a 'mind spider' or a Taiwanese poster for 'Gremlins' before realising that it was just a rubbish painting and not worth the six and a half hours we'd just spent arguing about it.

FANATICS

We sometimes appear to be a bit hard on Guy N. Smith - but know that it comes from a good place: we love the man and his work, and derive endless enjoyment from it. We wouldn't join a fanatic's club, though, even though, according to our research, membership includes an annual meet with Mr. Smith - at his house. 

HOTEL HELL

MANIA (1989)

The best Guy N. Smith novels are the ones with a simple premise, the sort of thing that can be summarised in a few words – big, nasty crabs, for example, or deadly locusts, killer Mummy, evil Punch and Judy Show, etc. This list is not exhaustive. It’s difficult to sum up ‘Mania’ so succinctly, but it’s something along the lines of ‘snow storm forces normal people to take refuge in a guest house in Donnington run by sadists and populated by lunatics and perverts. Oh, and Satan has made one of the residents pregnant’.  

The hellish hotel / asylum is only sketchily realised, a kind of ‘Fawlty Towers’ where Basil is a religious maniac and flasher, Sybil a torturer, Manuel an occult book collector, Polly a compulsive masturbator and Terry the chef a lascivious alcoholic tramp. The heating doesn’t work, the toilets won't flush, the Devil lives in the basement and there’s always stodgy pie and cold chips for tea. 

‘Mania’ is rambling and muddled but, rather in the style of a good shaggy dog story, it does keep your attention as it is being told, even though you know it’s ultimately going to end with the realisation that you’ve been wasting your time. Its main issue is that it is rather subdued, as if Smith didn’t necessarily have enough confidence in the story and characters to do what he does best: put his foot down and go fucking mental.    

Naturally, that doesn't stop Guy from hyping his own work from the very beginning, over egging this particular souffle with the following startling, completely untrue pre-prologue statement: 

You are about to embark upon a journey into the darkest recesses of the human mind, an exploration of the unknown. Travel at your peril for your safety, your sanity cannot be guaranteed. For some there may be no return. 

It's like putting a 'Danger of Drowning' sign on a foot spa. 

One non-rhyming couplet from this somewhat tame offering has entered our Guy N. Smith Hall of Fame, however, and we are happy to reproduce it here, for you, and for the ages. 

Book early to avoid disappointment.

A TYPICAL TOMTIT SESSION

Our latest recording is coming along nicely, thank you. It's about pyramids, and their power. We'll let you know when it's done.

ANTS IN PANTS

Alan Landsburg served as executive producer on ‘Ants! It Happened At Lakewood Manor’, one of three creepy crawly creature features that he worked on in 1976 / 77 (the others were ‘The Savage Bees’ and ‘Tarantula: Deadly Cargo’ – yes, we know bees aren’t really creepy crawlies under normal circumstances, but these are SAVAGE, so all bets are off). 

The ever canny Landsburg then wrote a book called ‘The Insects Are Coming’ about the mini-beast threat, citing the three films that he’d just made as evidence. We really miss that guy.  

In ‘Ants!’*, the construction of a casino next to an old family hotel unearths a colony of mutated ants who are immune to normal insecticides and really pissed off at being disturbed. Equipped with a poisonous bite and, of course, strength in numbers, the ants proceed to swarm over people and, by sheer tenacity, toxic mandibles and the liberal use of slow motion, manage to overcome their much larger human enemies. 

Hairy building site manager Robert Foxworth does his best to stop the attack by tearing up their nest with a bulldozer but, funnily enough, this just makes it worse. Much worse.

The film follows an almost hypnotically soothing pattern: characters are introduced, we are shown close ups of ants doing stuff, we get to know the characters, they are killed by ants. For a story set on a building site it’s not exactly ground breaking (yes, that is clever wording, thanks), but it’s compelling viewing, especially when they try and combat the ant invasion by digging a trench around the building, filling it with petrol and setting it alight.  

    

In the end, the surviving protagonists are reduced to hiding at the very top of the hotel, holding what look like enormous joints in their mouths and hoping that the ants will be pacified by the smoke until they can be rescued. It all seems a bit pathetic, really – they’re only fucking ants, after all.  

* We’ll dispense with the somewhat superfluous suffix now – Lakewood Manor is a made up place, so who cares what happened there? If it was, say, ‘Ants! It happened at Disneyland’, it would be a different matter.)

OLD AND MYSTERIOUS

Here’s a book by the late Alan Landsburg from the Alan Landsburg Wing of what we are now calling The Alan Landsburg Memorial Library. It’s a fascinating read, and the writing of it (as part of the ‘In Search Of…’ TV show) took him all over the world, which is nice. As Alan writes in the introduction -

The passage is worth posting in order to illustrate two of Alan’s greatest qualities: his enthusiasm, and his imagination.

WHAT NEXT, ALAN?

We have just found out that prolific writer, producer, director, documentary maker  and pseudoscientific genius Alan Landsburg died on August 13^th. We are desolate.  

Landsburg worked for Time Life and National Geographic; he worked with Jacques Cousteau; he worked with Leonard Nimoy. He wrote a dozen books and gave us over 2,000 hours of edutainment, including around fifty television films including ‘Tarantula: Deadly Cargo’, ‘The Savage Bees’, ‘Burned At The Stake’ and ‘Mysterious Island of Beautiful Women’.

He was a hero to us because he KNEW that the Earth is an even weirder place than it already appears: place where the ancient past and the distant future are inextricably linked, where ghosts are real, where mysterious animals roam the uncharted wildernesses of the world, where aliens pop by whenever they feel like it, where the human mind can kill or cure or set something on fire, where nature is always one step away from utterly engulfing civilisation -  and because Landsburg KNEW this, his greatest work starts with the premise that the weirdest answer is always right then works backwards, pouncing on every scrap of evidence as justification for his faith.

His most famous show, ‘In Search Of…’ might as well have been called ‘Ipso fucking Facto’, so eager is it to present theory as reality - and reality as something that is infinitely complex and utterly bizarre. As you might expect, that had an enormous influence on our world view.

Rest in peace, dear Alan. You’ll have all the answers by now, we hope you’re not disappointed.

THE TERRIFYING AND UNKNOWABLE FACES OF PREHISTORY

Number Four:

A terracotta portrait of the god Turms

(Etruria) circa 500 BC

NO ADDITIONAL CAPTION REQUIRED