BACK TO BASICS
Crikey, it's a bullock day, lads, after so many good whizzes together, alas poor Pitumbo recently received news that he has the HIV and oh the guilt that your worldly Queen-loyal Prof may have given it to him in one of his horned-up tizzies!
I regret to report back to my fellow tinkle-mongers that ANVIL's
Back To Basics," in these, the most dire of circumstances, has not tickled my fancy the way me Pa did back in the old days, or in the way you would expect from a metal band that's been lurking in the back alleys since the late 70s.
Such a pity, that I've heard more honest and eloquent expressions of dismay when Pitumbo gets his shriveled little body stuck under an old madame's skirt and it turns out that she has a twig and berries, and that by golly, we are accidentally queuing up for an Eddie Izzard concert!
I must say, it's quite hard for yours truly to keep a straight face when "Song Of Pain" wants us immune system-challenged listeners to feel a pang with the words, "Once bit twice shy, just the average kind of guy" and get choked to bits with the chorus "sing me a love song, song of pain." My word, is this a wretched Beatles rip-off or a hardcore sausage party gone awry? Even Pitumbo wept great crocodile tears of laughter at "Can't Catch Me" (which, to my great relief, that mossy-toothed, low T-cell-count curmudgeon hasn't been able to do yet).
Behind Glenn Five's narcoleptic one-chord bass guitar work, a lead singer named "Lips" (I kid you, not, my fellow piss-hounds that IS what they call
him) sings, "When you are a cheat, you will be beat / self-defeat." It brings me back to my days growing up in Cheshire when me mum would read me my favorite Dr. Seuss bit over and over: "no Sam-I-Am, I do not like green eggs and ham!" Ah, it was so comforting after me Pa would come in and give me a lesson.
Sad to say, blokes, if there were Angels in America and Canada (where ANVIL
formed) and Europe, they would have smitten this group before completing their latest work or at least had a crazed gunman run onstage while they were on tour. Oh why, dear lord, why could they have not gotten crap test results, and not my beloved Pitumbo! (In the course of our present intercontinental piss-tour, in spite of the news, we continue to participate in Red Cross blood drives, being so short of semen-tained supplies as they are).
I guess it's the price you pay for spending years running and pissing all over the African plains and sticking your dingle in the natives. Pitumbo and I are happy at least that we can pop on this album and share a good laugh and cry, all at the same time.
