The Twanglehumpingtons featuring Geenerica: “Spazztiddleupaguffagus” (B is for Boingafriend)

While a costive antichildlikishness may or may not be but finally is the preserve only of the venomously small of soul, the Twaglehumpingtons oeuvre (for oeuvre it is, be ye naysayer or gainsayer, for an oeuvre can not be made without a breaking of eggs) does, within the confines of its Lego-flavoured quadrangle, convey an infinitely schoolyard brightness caught in the looming shadow of arch New Cerebralarian (and who can not have had the infinitely remote corners of their late-seventies souls invigorated by their fiercely tremulous New Cerebralarian manifesto?) stalking-horse Pitt Humphrey’s, whose louche curlicues of trombone effluvium as part of the long-forgotten, forlornly suburban melancholics “Andy’s Knee-socks”, cut a dapperly Flapperesque Fitzgeraldian swathe through post-punk's oikishly prole-cult Piltdownmanisms.

Notunwithstanding the enmanglement of syntaxt here is to be found an infinitely admirable use of foot neither Goosey-Lucily enwebbed not reductively dactylic. In (On? Under? Between? Such is the prepositional befuddlement any encounter with the Twanglehumpingtons portends) tracks such as the infinitely and admirably ample “Oompa, oompa, (carpet-bombing Kuala Lumpur)” performed here in a veritable Glasnost of thawed Coldwarisms by Russian R and B Divotchka, the purringly wolfish Beeee-atchnik whose stirringly whimsical, Harrison-Birtwhistle-down-the-when-I’m-cleaning-Windows-isms tingle and roost like an itchy chicken in the fox-worried coop of the modern mind. Any notion of pastiche or parody or is soon frogmarched to the scaffold of judgement by the baying mob of refined sensibility as “Thwank, Thwank, Thwank” frugs frugally with a gamine’s insouciant obviousness, standing as a close but unmarried cousin to both The Hydrocephalous Foreheads “I’m in love with a girl who works down our chip shop and swears she’s Hitler“ and The Triple X Chromosomes architec-tronically plates-of-meat shifting “Cyborgasm”, a white-funk Fandango from the bitterly harvested anus horibilus of 1981, number one only in my grey Oxbridgian bedsit world of late night radio and suet-flavoured spangles sucked to keep the drabness at bay perhaps, even if in the world of those self-appointed arbiters of taste, the British public, it reached only number 332 in the hairycornflakian doldrums of that year’s Hit Parade.

A whipperwhilling stampede of sugar-frosted Melismatron heralds the entrance of finely-boned Negro songstress (and isn’t Negro, more than Negress so apposite, so Some-Earth-Mother’s-Do-‘Ave-‘Em right in this context. Are Frank and Herbert Spencer but two sides of the same prodigiously, infinitely orotund coin?) Kanbi with “Scouts On Her” a Baden-Powell-to-the-people jam-and-marmite-with-the-crusts-cut-off, Black Mother’s Pride sandwich of a track, as profound in it’s own way as the works of Plato. For as perspicacious readers of “The Purple Prose of Cairo” will recall my having sagaciously observated, all of western pop is but a footnote to “Itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow (and yet why “yellow”?? and yet further, why “itsy”) polka dot bikini.”

A further footnote, perhaps, yet a footnote noted for not only it’s feet, but also its handsomely shaped leg, the infinitely generous modesty of it’s hips (they yield yet also clamp, as with the gripping, velveteen, vaginissimus of preteen, polka-inflected number “ Well Hungarians (all the blonde girls love)” For had the Twanglehumpingtons not existed to whom would the infinitely ample perspicacity of soul have been granted in order that they should have been invented?