Spinal Tap: Have They Sold Out?

Cafe Society
1

Personal musical taste is a subjective conceptual idea which for each individual can be eternal or ephemeral, depending upon how long it lasts for.

There is little doubt in my mind that Spinal Tap were the most important band to emerge since the previous most important band immediately before them, whoever they were, and this importance, in the esoteric sense, cannot be overestimated or repeated too often.

They truly were that important.

Tap have recently been experiencing a creatively fallow period in their existence where very little, and not even that really, has gone right for them. Even the dismal failures which have gone spectacularly wrong have not been entirely in their favour.

With the passage of time taking its inevitable toll on the aging process which personifies life in the music industry, St. Hubbins and Tufnell have changed direction and are now pointing west. Their latest album Tapped Out is Spinal Pap’s most inaccessible recording so far, mainly because Virgin have placed it on the Top Shelf on the second floor of all their megastores.

In a marked change from raunchy numbers about women with large bottoms who live on sex farms near bitch schools, Tap show their ill-found maturity on Tapped Out with poignant love songs about the sanctity of marriage in a sexual context.

This is the lyric of Stroke The Tit, a pathetically sentimental little ditty which extols the virtues of wedded bliss as opposed to obsessive masturbatory behaviour. This sets the tone for the whole album only because it is the first track on the record.

Stroke the Tit (St. Hubbins & Tufnell). To the tune of Pink Floyd’s Money.

*Marriage, right away,
Get a good wife who’s a good lay and does foreplay.
Marriage, it’s a hit,
Stroke the tit, feel the slit, kiss the hairy armpit.
My love, turtle dove, she’s a top chick
Think we’ll have us a good shag now quick.

Marriage, wedding band,
Ain’t just no one night stand with your hand on your gland.
Marriage, hit the sack,
You’ve a knack with the smack on the butt-crack, Jack.
We all had the sick mix of the six chicks on the skinflicks
And I think we don’t need these kicks.

Marriage, take the vow,
Say it’s OK now when she’s being a right cow.
Marriage, getting laid,
Is the reason why us guys are made.
But if she has a period it’s no surprise if you
Start shagging the maid, the maid, the maid, the maaaaiiiid.

Fadeout*.

If this schmaltzy love song is any guide to the rest of Stroke The Tit, and believe me it is, I for one will be turning my back on Tap until Tap get turned back on to their musical heritage.

A truly awful album.

2

My feelings exactly. Tap has been tapped out for years.

3

I’ve just got two words…
Shit Sandwich.

4

I heard that St. Hubbins is back in rehab, trying to get that spandex monkey of his back. He thought he could control it. Bicycle pants never hurt anyone, have they? Before you know it, he was knee deep in tiger skin prints.

So sad.

5

Ever since Vic Savage left/exploded, it’s been all down hill.

–Cliffy

6

The real old school Tap was great, but they started to suck with “Listen to the Flower People” and it’s been all downhill since then.

7

I dunno, I think sex farm had its own appeal.

8

(sneering:) Oh, I used to like Spinal Tap. Back before they sold out. You know, when they used to play clubs.

:wink:
-Ben

9

Well, shit, if you want to go back that far you might say they never did as well as when David and Nigel were playing together as “The New Originals,” but that’s a whole different scene than what made them famous.

–Cliffy

10

Im just trying to figure out what Sammy Davis Jr’s book “Yes I Can” should have been titled.

11

That recent remark that “We may not have been as big as the Beatles, but it looks like we’ll outlive them” – well, I thought that was pretty petty and crass and showed just how embarrassed they are about their own lack of talent.

12

I’ve always thought that the level of pure musicmanship evidenced by the band has remained at a remarkably high level throughout their career. The major and minor tonics (not the gin and tonics, although, really, those are important too), the modal modes, and the musical notes really, for me, meld the music into an harmonic dissident which must be experienced to be really heard. However, I tend to agree that the subjects touched upon by the band have been more broadly appealing and less universal in recent years, ever since, well, really, ever since the fiasco in Japan. Tragic really.

13

I personally lost faith in the once mighty Tap in the early nineties, when they gave in to political correctness and started writing songs about dog training facilities (Bitch School) instead of the sexy lyrical approach we’ve expected of them all along.

I mean, where’s the wit of an Intravenous De Milo? Where’s the passion of a Stonehenge? They’ve become cartoon characters of themselves ever since they appeared on that Simpsons show. It used to be about the music. Now it’s all about the hair.

My autographed copy of the Dave St Hubbins Autobiography is being actioned on ebay if anyone wants it. (It’s signed by a guy who played drums with them for 4 weeks in 1971, but it’s still a collectors item)

14

It’s not about fame or popularity, it’s about the music. The Tap used to know that. They used to have integrity. Now they’re just another act.

But speaking of the old days, why have we yet to see a Lovely Lads compilation CD?

15

I think you all have just been “whooshed” by the glory that is Spinal Tap.

“Tapped Out” isn’t just pretentious, crappy music with poorly written lyrics. It’s intentionally pretentious, crappy music with poorly written lyrics. This is their response to the current blandness and over-commercialization of music, a response that only Tap could craft.

Of course they’ve become cartoon characters of themselves; of course it’s now all about the hair! That’s the whole point! They have so successfully parodied the crap that’s out there today that they’ve become that crap!

In fact I’ll say this album is nothing short of brilliant, and in 5 years all the so-called music critics will be falling all over themselves to agree with me. Mind you, no one will actually want to listen to the album even then, but it’s absolutely brilliant.

16

Upon reading this thread last night, night in this context being the UK night as opposed to anyone else’s night (except possibly those countries in the same night zone like the North Pole and Spitzbergen), I was overcome with a nostalgic feeling of yearning for the return of past circumstances which caused it (the nostalgia).

I located my Digital Versatile Disc version of This Is Spinal Tap (1984, Rob Reiner) and watched it until the tears ran down my trousers. Oh yes.

A strange sense of deja vu appeared in my brain, firstly because I have seen the film many times before (deja vu means already seen) and secondly for a completely different reason to the first one.

During the final credits of this paean to punctuality, as we call it in our house, Tufnell is asked what he would do if he couldn’t play rock music on his guitars. Tufnell tells DiBergi that, subject to the hours of attendance being acceptable to him, he would not be averse to working in a Chapeau Shop. They are normally 9am to 5.30pm with an hour for lunch, and some of them are closed on Wednesday afternoons except on the run up to Christmas. Many of them also hold staff training sessions every Tuesday between 9am and 10am, so if you want to buy a hat on a Tuesday you might as well have a lie-in.

Tufnell then practises selling Chapeaux by saying:

What size do you wear, sir?

I now discover to my chagrin that Ringo Starr said exactly the same thing in 1964 when he was asked the same question about his drum kit, one minor difference being that Starr expressed a preference to enter the hairdressing trade which, by the way, works its employees much harder by making them do overtime on Thursday evenings. Starr then practises his latent hairdressing skills by saying:

Would you like a cup of tea, Madam?

This revelation stunned me to the depths of my profundity, because deep down I now realise that Tap are not legendary musicians who fused together their various musical influences gained by unprincipled borrowing of several styles and genres belonging to other artistes without asking permission. Oh no. They are just musical plagiarists whose plagiarism extends to plagiarising other people’s interviews, in this case Ringo Starr, the former Beatle and future hair stylist.

And so, a band which I have admired ever since they literally burst on the stage at Hammersmith Palais leaving an unsightly mess for the cleaners, has now become persons non grata in my collection of rock oeuvres.

Sometimes the many and varied Disappointments which afflict one’s musical enjoyment as it reaches the ears can be too much to cope with in the sense of not being able to handle things in the practical sense.

I think I’ll go and lie down now.

17

I also think that Spinal Tap might have been more successful if they had spent more time developing their own material, instead of playing Ruttles songs over-and-over, looking for riffs to steal!