X
X RAY SPEX
GERM FREE
ADOLESCENTS
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF DRUNKEN VINYLS
- Thou shalt play both sides of the record in their entirety
- Thou shalt drink one can of Fosters or its alcohol equivalent per song
- Thou shalt record ramblings as they occur to thee for the duration of the running time
- Thou shalt edit out the swearing the next day
- Thou shalt not suffer a Blueberry user to live
- Thou shalt not pose stupid questions in song lyrics: Are you with me, Doctor Who? Are you really just a shadow of the man that I once knew? Are you crazy are you high? Or just an ordinary guy? Well, yes Steely Dan, you fuckwits, of course he isn‘t ‘An Ordinary Guy’ he’s a bloody TIMELORD. And a gentleman to boot!
First a WORD from our SPONSORS:
This week we are proud to be drinking:
PEARLA Whitening Mouthwash
We’re QUITE SURE it’s good for our
teeth, if nothing else.
And at 64% less expensive than
Listerine, what’s to complain?
Hello you, and welcome to X in
our exhausting quest to bring you all known vinyls ever made or known to man
and get pissed whilst reviewing them. How easy it would have been to download
them straight to your brain via unspeakable devil technologies, but that would
have been cheating, oh yes!
So every week we have been
scouring Charity Shop bargain bins, getting out the Windolene to clean up the
mouldy old vinyl and whacking them on the turntable for your delight. So whilst
you set your own record players up and dig out your copy for a dust down, let’s
while away the hour by reflecting on recent and momentous moments in British
history.
Disgraced cycling star and
alleged drug cheat Lance Armstrong
was forced to change the title of his new autobiography, detailing his recent
swimming career against ‘considerably older people’ from: ‘It’s Not about the
Swimming Pool’ to ‘I’m Not Even Allowed IN the Swimming Pool’ when officials complained about his participation.
Justly and fairly, in our opinion.
Worthy but dull shitcast Comic Relief turned up YET again to
clog up the airwaves for an evening like a nose congested with unwanted and
unnecessary snot and raised some money. Highlights probably included Lenny
Henry leering at the camera whilst making whooping noises, somebody’s trousers
falling down and a comedy vicar saying ‘Oh, Pardon?’ a lot but we couldn’t
swear to it because we went down the boozer to avoid it. To our dismay there
were some amateur comedians there as well, rattling buckets, and behaving in a
manner liable to cause offence to 99.9% of the public - until we threatened to
nail their testicles to the toilet wall.
In a brilliant bid to cure
the woes of all us living, nay existing, from hand to mouth, on all the scraps
we can find, in ‘Cash Strapped Britain’
the Chancellor brings in a new tax designed to raise literally hundreds of
pounds and cause merriment and fun by getting everybody to move house. In a
nutshell this new BEDROOM TAX is
not, as you might reasonably suppose, a levy on love making, no. Instead it
makes it illegal to live in a house with ‘more bedrooms than people’ without
paying £9.25 extra a year (or something). Therefore a family of three, let’s
say, with four bedrooms must move immediately if they wish to avoid the BEDROOM BAILIFFS and their tooled up
henchmen Wilf and Stan. But where do they move to? Well, it’s perfectly simple,
they move to next door’s house which has three bedrooms but four occupants
whilst they simultaneously move into yours – everybody gets a room! Not only
that, it gives a massive boost to David Cameron’s ‘BIG SOCIETY’ because all and
sundry in the street must help everybody else move into each other’s houses for
free! Imagine the frolicks and fun! This is a plan of such breathtaking genius
we here at Drunken Vinyls are surprised that nobody has thought it up before! We also feel it should be applied in other
areas and we are pleased to offer, free of charge, the following other tax
ideas:
CUPBOARD OF BEAN TINS TAX: Everybody with extra capacity tins of beans must
donate one tin of surplus beans to those with less beans in their cupboard in
order to even out beans distribution or pay a surcharge of 49 pence per extra
tin of beans husbanded.
POLYGAMY TO BIGAMY TAX: All those with two or more extra wives should move
into one less wife forthwith and donate surplus wife to members of the
community with less wives than they can comfortably accommodate or pay a
taxable penalty of three sticky buns; those that the Chancellor is partial to
for elevenses.
BANKERS ARE WANKERS TAX: All Bankers with more than two banks in their
mansions must move another banker into their extra bank whilst simultaneously
downsizing their bonus bank before passing go, claiming two hundred pounds,
proceeding to jail and bankrupting the country by lending stupidly large
amounts of money to build duck islands or to bankroll dodgy foreign regimes.
Any banker failing to do so must forfeit a deposit of self produced seminal
fluid which should be flushed straight into the Thames
lest it is inadvertently used to produce more Bankers of the same ilk.
TOILET POO POO TAX: All those prone to three or more daily dumps in their
two toilets must dump once in their neighbours’ solo toilet whilst inviting the
neighbour to put one surplus poo poo on their front door step or be taxed by
sending not less than, or equal to, one poo poo in a brown envelope to number
10 Downing Street. This to be addressed to ‘Those Rich Bastards at Number Ten’
Can You Hear Me, Doctor Who?
It cannot have escaped your
notice, readers, that the Doctor is back on television.
Now we here at Drunken
Vinyls disapprove of television in much the same way we disapprove of most of
MODERN LIFE. For us, life was best experienced back in the 1970s, through a
haze of Sobraine pipe smoke (no father,
please don’t spank us!) with the crackling sound of the light programme on
the radio, or wireless as we used to refer to it. For treats we expected no
more than a quarter of an orange – a luxury in those days you understand. We
had never heard of bananas or pizza, subsisting of a diet, as we did, of beef
olives, pea and ham soup, tapioca and that salty ham with suspicious white
sauce ladled over it. We were genuinely excited when the likes of chicken
supreme and black forest gateau hove into view.
Like life today, television
is best avoided. Whenever we pass on in a ‘Radio Rentals’ shop it is invariably
showing Geordie prats in a jungle or in front of a sign proclaiming ‘Saturday
Takeaway’; unemployed yipetty yoys shouting at each other about whether or not
they’re the father and disputing the results of lie detector tests, or some effeminate
scientists being Mr Spock. What’s wrong with the REAL Mr Spock, anyhow?
No, television is BEST
AVOIDED, except, and here’s the thing, except when THE DOCTOR is on. We, here
at Drunken Vinyls, have always been big fans of Doctor Who, so much so that
before we invented DeeVees, we flirted with the idea of getting drunk to every
episode of the good Doctor’s travels instead. But as some of them were in black
and white we couldn’t be arsed.
Here’s The History
Doctor Who was invented by
Verity Lambert in 1947 to replace the much loved comedian ‘Sykes’ and his
sidekick ‘Korky’ an infuriating and unfunny policeman who ruined every episode
by being in it.
Famously she came up with
the idea of flying around in a cupboard when she was inadvertently locked in a
cupboard herself! Whilst stumbling around, putting her feet in tin buckets,
falling over mops and avoiding bleach (it was a cleaner’s cupboard) she decided
that there wasn’t enough room to swing a cat. Thus it was she invented the less
than loved character ‘Professor Clean’ and his sidekick, a robot cat called
‘Feel 9’ who would be useful in a scrape which involved mice or any other
hordes of alien rodent invaders from Mars. Needless to say, the whole idea was
scrapped almost immediately after the first episode, with literally dozens of
letters of complaint sent to Barry Took on ‘Points of View’ generally bemoaning
the waste of licence fee payers money and demanding ‘Reality’ shows involving
members of the public in airports.
Undeterred by failure, Verity
did not let the grass grow under her feet and pitched the idea for a ‘pilot’
(which was produced for the ‘Out of the Unknown’ science fiction anthology
series) called ‘Practitioner Poo’ a down on his luck futuristic stool doctor
from Dudley who examined excrement for a living inside a gigantic box, utilised
to shield the stench from the rest of the medical practice. Unsurprisingly this
was not taken to the nation’s heart either and was dubbed ‘shit’ which was
accurate if a little unfair.
But the seeds were sewn and,
with a little imagination the Practitioner became ‘Doctor’ and the gigantic box
became the TARDIS. This time the show was a runaway success and history, as
they say, was made.
We mention this with good
reason. Once we discovered the Doctor was back, we didn’t wait! We immediately
submitted loads of brilliant ideas for new stories in the hope that one would
be picked up and produced:
- The Daleks invade Earth and plan to pilot it around the cosmos with a gigantic motor.
- Aliens produce a complete replica of Earth and transport all the peoples there, where they live without knowing this and steal the original Earth to drive it round the cosmos with a gigantic motor.
- The Doctor lands on the Moon and discovers some hostile aliens called ‘Moonians’ plotting to attach a gigantic motor to the Earth and pilot it around the cosmos for a bit until they get bored.
- The Doctor is on holiday but stumbles across ‘a gigantic motor factory’ which is secretly being run by hostile aliens who have a terrible plan!
To our disappointment, the
bastards at the BBC sent all our great ideas back in an unpaid envelope and
told us to sod off! But never fear. We now reproduce our Doctor Who story for
you: ‘Doctor Who and The Infinity Rooms'.
Steven Moffat, Eat Your Heart Out!
Unlike the television, Episode TWO follows Almost Immediately! Bet you can't wait!!
AND NOW! The exciting Denouement! DOCTOR WHO episode Three!
X
X RAY SPEX
GERM FREE
ADOLESCENTS
What’s the Story?
Tonight we are reviewing a
bona fide punk rock classic album, warts and all, coming to it fresh from the
perspective of the twenty first century. Three singles were lifted from the LP,
the album artwork is instantly recognisable, we shall treat it with reverence
and respect, so we shall.
Let’s imagine, for a minute,
that we are all Doctor Who in his magical time machine called the TARDIS from
television’s ‘Doctor Who’ (we wanted to write for the programme – but their
loss is your…well you know. We’re not bitter). We step into our transport and
are whisked into a meringue like frenzy, all stiff peaks and white froth, back,
back to the exciting world of 1978 – a vintage year!
Let us gaze in wonder at the
amazing sights we behold! It is universally grainy, dark and dingy with
mountains of plastic dustbin sacks piled atop of rats and other fetid creatures
because the bin men have been on strike all winter. On every corner small gangs
of ill fed youths with spiked haircuts and safety pins through their cheeks
gaze malevolently with the intensity of hungry cannibals, licking their lips
and sharpening their forks and knives to eat their bacon.
Ignoring them, because we
are a Time Lord, we rush straight for the nearest bin bag and tear it open with
feverish hands. Disregarding the impulse to put it on – because bin-bag chic
was fashionable then as opposed to bow ties and a fez – we seize the nearest
Beezer, Dandy or Hornet and flick through the grubby pages. And, towards the
back of the comic, there it is! The advertisement page! Not, as with these
days, pages of 0898 hot numbers to telephone for a date, some sex with an old
dear or dirty talk; no the adverts for jokes, pranks and exciting novelties.
Soap that gives you a black eye! Pills that make you bigger than the playground
bully! Sweets that render you unable to talk! Mr Snappy chewing gum that
delivers a painful shock to the unwary chewer who tries to extract some! And –
best of all – X Ray Spex.
Yes, wear these, and you can
actually see through clothes! Bare bodies and everything Now which adolescent
schoolboy didn’t secretly dream of being able to use a pair of these in class
during French lessons? You can see, from the picture, the delight that owning a
pair would bring and the admiration from friends and foes alike! Certainly, as
Doctor Who, you would frown upon such an idea – because, in any case, you can
most probably turn yourself invisible, but for the 1970s schoolboy these were
the must-have fashion accessory of the day.
However, what have these ‘X
Ray Spex’ to do with our album tonight? Well, dummbkopf, it’s only the name of
the band, isn’t it? And our singer called herself Poly Styrene, which
interestingly is what the spex in question arrived in should you order them.
A word of caution, however.
One of us admits to owning a pair of ‘X Ray Spex’ and now tells us they were
completely useless and didn’t actually work – in fact they were plastic with
tissue paper lenses and were better suited to harmonising to tunes with like
some mad, proto kazoo.
Let’s hope this isn’t a portent for tonight’s LP.
X
X RAY SPEX
GERM FREE
ADOLESCENTS
Side One
"Art-I-Ficial" - 3:24
"Obsessed with You" - 2:30
"Warrior
in Woolworths" - 3:06
"Let's Submerge" - 3:26
"I Can't Do Anything" - 2:58
"Identity"
- 2:25
Side two
"Genetic Engineering" - 2:49
"Germfree
Adolescents" - 3:14
"Plastic Bag" - 4:54
The Final Word
You own this, right? If you don't do your ears a favour. Go out and get it! Quite the most brilliant LP we have ever reviewed! Which is handy because there's only a couple left before we finish forever and the tower is closed down.
So…what have
we learnt tonight?
Not much. In order to obtain
this record beginning with X one of
us had to scour the charity shops in a well known Cornish seaside town
beginning with F. We’ll send the LP to the person who guesses correctly which one.
Visiting a record shop in
this town, whilst fending off vicious seagulls called Beaky, your host was
struck by the utter crap on sale at exorbitant prices. Vinyls – yes – but not
ones you’d actually want to own – far removed from our collection – they were;
to a plastic piece, complete shite. Expensive shite as well. Do you want to own
‘Rancheros’ by Don McClean for £35? No? Well neither do we Mr Record Seller
Rip-Off Man.
This disheartened your host
so much that he, upon exiting, was forced to order an ice cream – a ‘Mr Whippy’
with chocolate sauce, nuts and a flake. To his disgust, it was served with a
napkin. A napkin? Since when was a napkin required to eat an ice cream? What
kind of a society have we become that we are so pampered that we need such a
thing to wipe up icy dribbles from our hands?
Actually, like so many
things in modern life, the napkin might have been useful as the chocolate
sauce, nuts et al became entangled and matted into your host’s beard – might
have, but for the fact that it was completely inadequate to the task and merely
exacerbated the problem by adding broken wafer biscuit cone to the bird’s nest
of hair - the day the beard became day-glo indeed – and the more the napkin was
dabbed into the beard, the worse the beard-pie became.
Which is rather like North Korea
Anon anon anon, you buttered buns, you!
