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.  

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.

FLASH OF RECOGNITION

'Starblazer' never really got the credit it deserved for its innovative artwork. Here it completely updates the 1980 Flash Gordon film poster by merely adding a beret and a couple of spooky looking skulls, thereby making it at least 26,000 times better.

What's the difference between an android and a cyborg? An android is a robot who looks like a man; a cyborg is a man with mechanical parts who, clearly, needs chasing by a 'one many army'. 13p well spent.

PEOPLE CRINGED

'In a world predating history as we know it, 

the people cringed under an evil rule. 

Black clad warlocks enslaved anybody useful to them, 

and spilled the blood of those that were not'.  

That's the back cover blurb for a remarkably contemporary sounding tale from a 1987 edition of 'Star Blazer' .

Essentially a sci fi companion to publisher D.C Thompson's much more successful 'Commando'* imprint, 'Star Blazer' suffered from poor distribution and the fluctuating fortunes of the fantasy market, but still managed to run from 1984 to 1991, racking up 281 easy-and-cheap-to-find-on-ebay editions.  

* The indomitable 'Commando' started publication in 1961, and is still going strong - with over 4,500 issues to date.