STUFF WE SHOULD REALLY GET RID OF

We'd totally bin this, but we're waiting for a Letraset Haunted House Action Transfers Panorama Set to turn up on e-bay, as the opportunity of combining the two is something we just can't resist.

Gary Glitter for your watch and finger nails? Well, fair exchange is no robbery.

UP THE SPOUT

The members of TOMTIT recently convened at the bucolic, bubonic Cottage of Electric Hell for a weekend of hiking, drinking and sheep worrying. At around 3.30 one morning we decided to watch the film of David Bowie’s Glass Spider Tour. No, wait, come back, we can explain…actually, we can’t. It was a mad decision, utterly devoid of logic. It was, of course, all Fearlono’s idea.

The Glass Spider Tour took place in 1987, in support of a pretty mediocre but relatively well selling album called ‘Never Let Me Down’. It was a tour of excess: the most expensive ever staged, with an enormous amount of money spent on an vast illuminated spider that stood over the stage and the performers and was so big that it wouldn’t fit into most venues, so they had to build another, smaller one.

The tour was an amalgam of music, theatre, dance and, gulp, mime and, to be frank, was shit. Virtually every single thing about it detracts from the power and beauty of Bowie’s music, from the insistence on performing mediocre tracks from the new album to fucking up stone cold classics with unsympathetic arrangements and embarrassing dance routines. Special attention should be paid to a really dire version of ‘Rebel Rebel’ in which David and dancers high kick their way around the stage like demented Moulin Rouge dancers who have been co-opted into the Nazi party. The song ends with one last stupendous, stratospheric kipper splitting kick from Dave, which the film makers freeze and fade out on, inadvertently giving the impression that Bowie has kicked a hole in the fabric of time and space, and is now stuck in some sort of aerobic limbo.   

David Bowie, usually so cool, looks ridiculous, his hair teased into a huge quiff, wearing a disgusting red suit with matching boots tipped and heeled in silver. He keeps smiling, too, but it is not a smile of joy or contentment, it is an apologetic, embarrassed smile, a sheepish, conciliatory smile, as if he knows that he is desperately wrong but hopes that you love him enough to forgive him.

The music never stops – it’s all obligato, no staccato – and everyone on stage (about thirty people it seems) are all playing, all the time, filling every millisecond of music with a noodle or a paradiddle. When the tireless Carlos Alomar and indefatigable Peter Frampton (who resembles Jack from ‘On The Buses’) solo it is like being trapped in a lunatic’s migraine.  

We are huge fans of David Bowie, but we are also purists, and deeply suspicious of his post ‘Scary Monsters’ output. The ninety minutes we spent gawping at the Glass Spider Tour more than justify that stance. It is not that we didn’t enjoy it, in fact we found it utterly fascinating and gobsmackingly compelling, like the Hindenberg disaster. Oh, the humanity!

Anyway, here’s something we made, culled from the audio track of the tour. If you have any issues with it, contact David directly: he said these things, we just stuck them together. If Iman answers – hang up.  

HE IS SO TOUGH

This isn't a particularly good record, but who cares with a sleeve like this? From the 1977 film 'Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century'.

The obverse carries the lyrics, which are brilliant.

GREAT BALLS OF FYRE

No smartarse comments from us required. General mood after listening to this ten times: FUCK THE WORLD.

TEUTONIC INFERNO

Electric Orange are from Westphalia in Germany. The title of one of their albums is 'Krautrock from Hell', which perhaps sums up their mix of drifting psychedelic jam music and occasionally crunching riffage. 

Lots of stuff here and on You Tube, which has several of their albums in their entirety, including 'Platte', a record that sounds like Pompeii era Pink Floyd but without the gongs and afghan hounds.  

PLAY THAT FUNKY MUSIC, WHITE GIRL

(((TOMTIT))) are  currently composing. A word to the wise: whatever we're doing won't be anywhere near as good as what this young woman is playing, so prepare yourself for a disappointment.

HE WILL NOT ANSWER YOU

You can ask Uri Geller about his special powers, he will be delighted to tell you all about them. You can ask him about his charity work, he will happily give you the details. You can ask him about his friendship with Michael Jackson, he will speak eloquently and sincerely on the matter. But if you ask him about his 1974 album, and what the fuck he was thinking, HE WILL NOT ANSWER YOU.

OUR FAVOURITE MYSTERIOUS LOOSE AND LIMBER SEMI-STONER ROCK GROUP

Number One:

Pyramidion

OUT THERE IN INNER SPACE

Unmann-Wittering is quietly obsessed with American psychedelic drone rock group Expo 70. 

Actually, his obsession isn't quiet at all, he's always fucking going on about them. He says they're his Pink Floyd, which is confusing as he likes Pink Floyd, too. He says Expo 70 don't sound like drugs, they are drugs. He buys all of their music, in as many formats as he can, and that's a lot of stuff, as they are incredibly and wonderfully prolific. He says that they are always the same; always completely different. He probably writes letters to them. 

When asked where to start with their mammoth back catalogue, he is non-committal, saying: 'what does it matter where you start exploring the infinite from?' He's full of shit, really, but he's not wrong where Expo 70 are concerned: they are brilliant.

Here's 'Metensomatosis' from their 2009 album 'Death Voyage' which starts off like Black Sabbath playing drum and bass before evolving into an epic struggle between light and dark in which light doesn't have a hope in hell and slowly gets kicked to bits in front of you. 

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.

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.

HI FI NEWS

Apologies for the delay since the last TOMTIT musical release, but we've only just run out of money, drugs and fans to do stuff to, so, as a result, we are now compelled to return, reluctantly and angrily, to the studio. 

Don't worry, we work best in a dark cloud of simmering resentment.

THE GREAT ATTENDER

This gentleman is Paul Snowdon, an artist and musician who records under the name of Time Attendant. His new album, Bloodhounds, has been on the TOMTIT turntable and various mobile devices for weeks now, and is only just beginning to give up its mysteries.

For us, most modern electronic albums seem either glacial and ungiving or too eager to be liked, but 'Bloodhounds' bucks the trend by being a very warm, but affably ambiguous record. 

Sometimes it sounds like a partially unspooled techno tape, but it also evokes Henk Badings or Tom Dissevelt or Tristam Cary and the other greats of the post war electronic music scene. Mostly, it provides the soundscape and lets the listener provide the landscape: unlike many 21st century projects the artwork and song titles don't make it clear what you are supposed to hear, to think, to feel, to enjoy, to 'get'. Instead, Paul concentrates on intriguing and baffling and exciting the ear with a huge panoply of fascinating made noises, found sounds, field recordings, bleeps, bloops, swoops and swipes and then leaves the rest up to you. We think we identified a colony of bats leaving a cave at one point, but it might equally have been a mouse in a trap or a squeaky ducking stool.    

As an example of the immersive qualities of this superb record, Unmann-Wittering was listening to it just yesterday whilst wandering around a branch of W.H Smith, and was so transfixed by the closing track ('Fuchsia Circles') that he became dangerously over stimulated and spent £18 on stationary he didn't need and £31.75 on magazines, including one about military modelling, a pursuit he hasn't been interested in since the late eighties.

Get it here, but for pity's sake be careful. 

DAVID MUNROW BLOWS

David Munrow is one of our favourite people: clever, passionate, generous, multi-talented, his sudden death in 1976 was a tremendous loss, not only to Early Music, which he worked so hard to popularise, but to the world in general. People like David are in short supply: we can’t afford to lose them.

Not long before he died, David made a great television show called ‘Early Musical Instruments’. Each week, he would talk about a group of instruments and he and his friends would demonstrate them. Despite the paucity of that description it is absolutely riveting viewing.

The best bits are when David cuts loose on one of the many instruments that he was expert in playing – this may be music from antiquity, but David ensures it doesn’t sound like it should be in a museum. His enthusiasm and animation and immersion in the moment bring it all to life in the most vivid terms.

When David Munrow plays it, Early Music swings. No wonder he gets so puffed out.  

BONGED

Two thirds of TOMTIT went to see the mighty BONG last week. There weren’t many people there, and we were supposed to take photographs but we didn’t. Bong played one continuous piece of music occasionally interspersed with some ominous recitation and what sounded like Gregorian chant. They were extraordinary, and we left straight afterwards: we’d got what we came for.

Listening to Bong is like finding yourself caught in the path of a tornado. Just as you resign yourself to being torn apart and thrown to the four corners of the Earth, the tornado stops, or rather it stops advancing and whirls and rages just a few inches from you. All you can do is watch, and feel your body shake.  Bong don’t rock, they reverberate; they are not heavy, they are dense, like stars, like the holes in space where stars used to be.

After a period of time which couldn’t necessarily be measured by human clocks (about forty minutes), the tornado receded, and we watched it go, ours jaws hanging open and our hair in a mess. It was a religious experience, the ancient religion of trees and the sun and knowing the awesome dread and wonder of nature. It also seemingly cured a bout of back ache that one of us had been experiencing.

So: fear, dread, wonder, vibrations, a spiritual awakening, a direct line to prehistory and neuromusculoskeletal therapy. Not bad for nine quid.

BLAKES SEVEN INCHES

Oh, for a world where Blakes 7 is popular enough to warrant its theme tune appearing on not one seven inch single but TWO. Especially if one is a disco version. The mind boggles, then pops and fizzles out, never to work properly again.

This is the original, as written by Australian composer Dudley Simpson. It loses a bit of vitality by being considerably longer than the on air version, but then who would buy a slab of vinyl featuring a piece of music that was only about thirty seconds long? Apart from us, that is. 

This is the disco version by Federation. To be searingly honest, it's actually hugely boring once the initial novelty dissipates but we don't care about that; the fact that this artefact even exists is good enough for us. 

As an added bonus, here's yet another version, this time from the majestic Geoff Love. We love Love. This track appeared on his 'Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Other Galactic Disco Themes' album, which is seminal stuff and should be in every collection of music BY LAW.

SABBATICAL ON MARS

We always think of Black Sabbath as a musical aperitif: listening to the no nonsense crunch of their best stuff immediately clears the palate, providing a simple but exhilarating antidote to fussy, over-produced music, a freshener that cuts to the very essence of what rock should be: hard, direct, relentless, evil. 

There’s more to the Sabbath songbook than just bludgeoning riffs, however, although, of course, their riffs are superlatively good. What does resonate throughout their work is a kind of oppressive darkness, whether caused by man, woman, bomb, demon or boot wearing fairy: a nihilistic revelry in death and destruction. 

There is no darkness to ‘Planet Caravan’, though, only diffused and abstracted light, cosmic (in both senses of the word) rays seen through a heat haze or a drug haze or a drug daze. The drifting, swirling music recall camels and shifting sands, but whether they are of the Sahara or the Olympus Mons is unclear. We have always assumed the latter, as the disembodied vocals suggest transmissions from another planet, radio waves floating through space, only received long after the sender has died and turned to dust. 

In an alternate time stream, Sabbath recorded a whole album like this, full of textures and mystery and dreams. It went to number one and everyone in the world heard it and became a better and more spiritual person, and every government added Friday to the weekend so that we could all stay up late on Thursday and sit around on beanbags and listen to its strange magic.

OUR FAVOURITE RADIOPHONIC RAVE GROUP WITH A DANCING APE VIDEO

Number One: 

Das Dots

HORRIBLE DISCO

Disco was a hungry, omnivorous beast, chewing on the bones of every musical genre and cultural artifact it could get. It very quickly slung its gob around horror, and the result was a number of strange, generally terrible hybrid tracks that usually featured maniacal laughter and added the prefix ‘Disco’, ‘Soul’ ‘Funky’ or ‘Sexy’ to the names of established horror icons. The Japanese, those compulsive seekers of novelty, lapped this crazy shit up - as do we, of course.

Please note, these are from Unmann-Wittering's ACTUAL record collection. How sad is that? 

TERRESTRIALS EXTRA

The Sunn0))) / Ulver collaboration ‘Terrestrials’ has been a compulsive spin at the TOMTIT underground facility in the last few weeks, so much so that we have mixed feelings about sharing it with people like you.

The music is immense enough to evoke seismic shifts and cosmological events, but would also make an interesting soundtrack for a film about Vikings fighting robots. Four years in the making, it’s a stupendous piece of work. 

Here's the opening track, in which Miles Davis seemingly improvises a theme for the creation of the world.

We have reason to believe that God is listening to this album right now and thinking it is awesome.