Spinal Tap are remembering the old days. It was 1966, and the young beat group from Squatney in east London – still, at that point, the Thamesmen – were honing their act in the tough clubs of the Benelux circuit. A young band from Britain could learn a lot, facing up to riotous crowds of Dutch, Flemings, Walloons and Luxembourgers. What lessons did Tap take from that year?
“If you speak really loudly, it’s all right if you don’t have any of the local language,” says David St Hubbins, Tap’s leonine lead singer.
“The Belgian beer is very good,” offers Nigel Tufnel, the lead guitarist who inspired legions. “And if you’ve had enough of them, you can pretty much speak the language.”
And is it true what they say about women from Luxembourg?
“The few women I met from Luxembourg, you’d do a gig and a girl comes up and says something to you, and you say something to her. And she says: ‘Not bloody likely,’” Tufnel says. “That’s mostly what it was.”
“They’re not like the girls from Liechtenstein.” That’s Derek Smalls, bassist, pipe-smoker, vinegar expert, and enigma wrapped inside a riddle wrapped inside a moustache. “Don’t even talk about the girls from Liechtenstein.”
“Well, there’s that Bertrand Russell quote about the Liechtenstein women,” Tufnel says. “But I can’t quote it, because it’s rude.”
What a thrill it is to hear these three undersung pioneers of British rock back together again, albeit briefly. In 1984, Marty DiBergi’s documentary This Is Spinal Tap captured the band falling apart on a disastrous US tour, and somehow revived their flagging career. Now the film-maker and band have reunited, capturing the Tap reassembling for one final contractually obliged show in New Orleans, in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
The biggest shock is not that Tap reunited – Hope Faith, daughter of their former manager Ian, had the legal power to force them to do so – but that they allowed DiBergi to document it. The first film had painted them as buffoons – for years afterwards the band complained that he only showed the times they got lost on the way to the stage, never the times they made it. It seemed fitting that DiBergi’s own career should have stalled after his next film, Kramer vs Kramer vs Godzilla, and fitting, too, that it should take Tap to revive his dreams. But why let him back on board?
“When Hope Faith came to us and told us we owed one more gig, we thought we might turn it into a piece of change, and the only director we knew personally was this man that we had decades of negotiations with to have both his name and ours removed from the first film,” St Hubbins says. “So we said: ‘Let’s give him a call.’”
“Nobody else wanted to do it.” Smalls says. “We thought, after four decades, maybe he’s learned something.”
He hasn’t, has he?
“No, clearly.”
This Is Spinal Tap inadvertently became a classic, not as a filmic equivalent of Ian Hunter’s Diary of a Rock’n’Roll Star – his account of touring the US with Mott the Hoople – but as a comedy. DiBergi’s knack – if he had one – was to miss all the moments of triumph and capture only the bathos. The film won Tap a huge new following – enough for them to headline arenas again, and play Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage – but the audience all believed they were watching comedians.
“Listen,” St Hubbins says, “we’ve got their money and they can take away whatever they want. Hopefully, some merchandise.”
People said This Is Spinal Tap had to have been faked, that no one is that vain, stupid and pretentious in real life. “Well, truth is stranger than fiction,” Tufnel says. “Fiction has to make sense. And if there’s one thing that we brought to that film, it was a sort of senselessness.”
The film’s success meant Tap were in the peculiar situation of being far more popular in that follow-through part of their career, rather than when they were sitting on the creative throne itself, during the 1970s. Their popularity is in inverse proportion to the amount of music they record. Why did that happen?
“I think the answer is two words: reverse magnetism,” Smalls says.
And if you could use two more words to expand on that?
“I’d say polar opposites. OK, it’s scientific. If you look at science – and it’s in all the books – people look at it and they say: ‘Look what it says here.’ Polar opposites, reverse magnetism. If you read what those mean, it will become clear to you.”
Almost all Tap’s catalogue has been unavailable since release (at one point their then label, Megaphone, took legal action to prevent them making any music at all). From 1967’s Spinal Tap Sings (Listen to the) Flower People and Other Favourites to 1982’s Smell the Glove, the band made 11 studio albums (plus four rumoured unreleased records), two live albums, as well as Tufnel’s solo project Clam Caravan.
Yet since 1984 all that has been available has been the soundtrack to the film, featuring a selection of songs from those albums, then 1992’s Break Like the Wind, a mixture of new tracks and re-recordings, then a similar melange on 2009’s Back from the Dead. The problem is that for nearly 50 years, ownership of Tap’s catalogue has been scattered. At one point it was owned by shadowy Iranian operatives, before Ian Faith faked his own death and distributed the songs around assorted faded celebrities, including Mario Andretti and Billie Jean King. Now, even if Tap wanted to rerelease the catalogue, they couldn’t find it to buy it back.
Yet for hard rock fans, this is a tragedy. Because the sliver of music we have available tells us that Tap were among the greats of hard rock. Tonight I’m Going to Rock You (Tonight) is a riff to rival Whole Lotta Rosie; Stonehenge crams more ideas into its running time than Francis Ford Coppola did in 10 hours of Godfather films.
The more anal obsess over the pioneering three-bass arrangement of 1970’s Big Bottom, but think instead of the ecstatic release of its chorus. The astonishing America lasts only three and a half minutes but seems to go on so much longer (“It feels like an hour,” observes Smalls). The 1992 single The Majesty of Rock is one of the greatest singles of its decade (St Hubbins says there might be some money in it for me if a mention of it gooses the streaming figures).
When the first film came out, hard rock was critically disdained – John Paul Jones spoke of being untouchable after Led Zeppelin split; Black Sabbath were a shocking mess; AC/DC were regarded as troglodytes. Now all are seen as legends, and had Tap albums such as Intravenous de Milo, Brainhammer and Silent But Deadly been given the deluxe box set treatment, they might be seen as the equals of Physical Graffiti, Sabotage and Back in Black. Or at least the equals of In Through the Out Door, Headless Cross and Fly on the Wall.
And, oh, to have seen the band in full flight in 1969, when they recorded the Silent But Deadly album live, the two-hour guitar tour de force Short and Sweet edited down to just under 19 minutes.
“Silent But Deadly was an ironic title,” St Hubbins says. “Ironic because it was quite loud and no one was killed. I do remember one section, Nige, where you played the same note for seven minutes. It was remarkable: like an Andy Warhol film. You go, Thank God that’s over. But at the same time you feel edified.”
While St Hubbins and Tufnel shredded, Smalls says: “I was trying to send messages with my mind: Play longer! Play shorter! Get off! I think it communicated. I don’t know. They would know.”
With instrumental sections lasting two hours, audiences had the opportunity to really make an evening of it, the band recall. Fans would leave the venue for dinner, then return for the end of the set. “The one thing you don’t want is a hungry audience,” Smalls says. “So the fact they could go away and come back sated was crucial.”
“Hail sated!” St Hubbins says.
These days the threesome are scattered, but St Hubbins and Tufnel have known each other since infancy, when they were nextdoor neighbours in poverty-stricken Squatney. The area no longer exists – presumably written out of history in the 1974 local government reorganisation – but some detective work can reveal where it once was.
The 1994 concert video The Return of Spinal Tap showed the pair returning to their old street, and in the background stood a pub called The Gun. That same pub is now a gastropub, and it is on the east of the Isle of Dogs (“However advertised as showing England v Sweden tonight for the women Euros. In reality an average-sized TV with no sound,” says Cameron on Tripadvisor).
“Gastro? What does that really mean except, you know, bad?” Tufnel asks.
“Here’s a clue,” Smalls says. “Gastrointestinal. You want to eat in a pub that named itself after that? No.”
“The entire north end of Squatney is a giant Sainsbury’s now,” St Hubbins says. “Whether that’s an improvement or not …”
“But that tells you something,” Tufnel insists. “Because it’s not a Waitrose.”
No, but it’s not Lidl or an Aldi.
“And it’s not a Tesco either,” St Hubbins says. “It’s very specific.”
Tap, it would be fair to say, are not the greatest communicators with either each other, or anyone else, a tone set by Tufnel and St Hubbins’ sparring. When did they realise, beneath the banter and the joshing, that there was a deep and genuine dislike between them?
“It’s not a dislike!” Tufnel protests.
“No, it’s an animus,” St Hubbins agrees. “I like to call it an animus or an enmity, just because they have more syllables.”
Perhaps that failure to communicate led to one of Tap’s Born in the USA moments, when they – like Bruce Springsteen – had a song catastrophically misinterpreted. Bitch School, from Break Like the Wind, was widely and wrongly condemned for being sexist, portraying women as animals, just because people were too stupid and lazy to pay attention to the lyrics. The video was even banned from one of Australia’s smaller video channels.
“You’ve hit upon it exactly: stupid and lazy,” Tufnel says. “It’s obvious what that song is about, and it’s so frustrating.”
The real sadness is that the song is more necessary and relevant than ever: in an age of news stories about bully XLs and status dogs, we need pop songs that stress the need for canine training. “The real problem,” Smalls says, “is that they’re closing those songs because they’re running out of funds to teach bitches.”
“There was a fourth verse, which was specifically about spaying and neutering,” St Hubbins says. “That might have made things even worse.”
I know where I think Tap stand in the British rock pantheon. But where do they think they rank, assuming the Beatles are No 1 and the Stones No 2?
“Are you making a comparison to the Premier League and then going down from there?” Tufnel asks. “We might be in mid-League One. With the hope of moving up, but the assurance that you’re not going to go down to the Northern League. I’d say 77th.”
“We’re standing on the shoulders of They Might Be Giants,” St Hubbins says.
It’s great to have them back. Tonight they’re going to rock you (tonight).
