BITING TONGUES
Manchester Band On The Wall

SEEMS WE hadn't seen the last of Crispy Ambulance after all. The band that glimmered briefly in the wake of the Amazing Dangling Curtis Group have re-appeared as part of this assembly of un-named musicians who cluttered up the first half of the programme. Wanna name, boys?)-low about 'Love-In'? Slang, says the Oxford English Dictionary, for a gathering of hippies. Their act boasted a large set of bells on a frame, bells which should have taken their rightful place around their ankles. If you've always wanted to know what it's like to take a manned voyage into an upset stomach, don't miss them next time.

This is a question for Vlth formers only. Do you sit next to the type of insufferable teenage experimentalist who writes essays this way: "i am a pretentious little git i am a camera" etc? Then meet Kenneth. Kenneth is lead voice with Biting Tongues and he is a studiously sick-making experience. Ditto guitarist Graham, nincompoop. Remember that funky little jig, The Honky Elbow, Popularised by Mark Pop Group and Simon Certain Ratio? Ya flap your left wing out, ya flap your left wing in, ya makes like a turkey and ya gangle all about. Used to denote the idea that the action is like. physical. Let us wishfully think that we do not really people the same planet as our first two heroes.

Biting Tongues are heartily adept at the sport of kitchen-sink tribalism. Lots of intrepid multi-instrumentalism in a percussive gain, a strong showing for the motif of the eighties . . . the hammering of an unlikely object. Never has a cowbell meant so much to so many. There were Tongues swarming all over the pace, A+ for use of space and for the martial artiness of their sock-banging routine.

Wuz I rilly the only one willing Ken's partner to (whoops-a-daisy!) brain him in the name of culture? At their best, BTs are saxophonist Howard Walmsley and drummer Eddie Sherwood, whose work is free enough of the dread shackles of self-consciousness for them to legally adventure into a state of improvisation.
' The Gareth Sager Wet Patch award for being an onstage prat goes to Graham who actually mounted his instrument and writhed to and fro without playing a note for at least a minute. Snip!

Kenneth still comes on as Peter O'Sullivan reading from 'The Atrocity Exhibition'. In a tinny Apollo XIII voice-over, our protagonist narrates snatches of distant monochrome fantasies, staged in either an ill-lit warehouse (bare boards, of course) or a railway station. Boring old Boys' Own world of car crash fetishism. This man was a cliche two years ago. But Biting Tongues .. . great!

Cath Carroll