THERE AIN’T NO SANITY CLAUS
Have a go at their name at the great music blog aggregator Hype Machine, and you will probably draw a blank. It has been claimed again and again that they started as a joke, that they were a joke, but the very few songs they made are classic 1977 UK punk, so much void of the standard viciousness and the rest of the formulaic crap of that era.
The Snivelling Shits were formed by two London music journos, headed by the late Giovanni Dadamo and his smart tirades, which challenged the destructive negativity of that movement in the UK. He sang about fornication, bad drugs and chopping the head off a Japanese extreme rightist, all right – but with such an ironical glint, like a bastard Howard Devoto during his Magazine days. Their only record, “Terminal Stupid”/“I Can’t Come”, became Single of the Week in October that year in NME, painfully unbeknownst to the editors that it was their rivals at Sounds who were behind it.
The songs are reissued today on the Damaged Goods album I Can’t Come, which compiles every snivel the group ever taped. The session demos are quite flat, and “Crossroads” is nothing but a blatant copy of Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man”. But if you love the punk greatness of The Damned’s “New Rose”, then so you will love The Snivelling Shits’ ”Bring Me the Head of Yukio Mishima” and their bed of smutty flowers.
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
It was here that the spaceman bid farewell to his wife and children, and then lost himself forever. Parts of The Man Who Fell to Earth were filmed in this otherworldly immensity of glistering whiteness. The sand looks like powder snow when the strong winds drive it around in waves across the desert in south-central New Mexico, relentlessly slumping and rebuilding the world’s largest gypsum dune field.
When crossing the desert alone, wanderers have always carried along a compass – and a little bell attached to their clothes, as to prevent themselves from going mentally snowblind in this optically clean and dazzling environment, that even robs you of your own fresh footprints. It is here that the existential sound of bells warrants a lost soul a swift return to the world again.
