w.atching the w.orld unw.ind

Being Part 2 of "Out of The Burning"

The Dickies
“Dawn of the Dickies”

999
“Emergency”

With my small ‘c’ catholic taste in music, it’s not easy finding two vinyl albums with a similar attitude, to merge onto one CD – this is the closest I could get.

I first saw the Dickies live when they were just a support band. As usual, we were getting the drinks in before the main band came on, but were universally vacuumed out of the bar by the sounds of the Moody Blues’ classic “Knights in white satin” being played at 90 m.p.h. This trademark style of the Dickies was in no way used to mask musical ineptitude – far from it - but enabled them to pack 40 minutes of album play into 30, go home early and get wrecked. Nowt wrong with that!

“Where’d his eye go?” poses the theory that monocular vision would only enable you to see the right or left side of objects, as opposed to 100% of a 2-dimensional picture – and all postured in the cryptic lyric “Now he only sees half of everything”.

“Manny, Moe and Jack” is a vocal ‘Yellow Pages’ advert for garage services –
“For the right price,
They will sell you fluffy dice”

and starts with the sound effect of a car being fired up.

(I once convinced a passenger that I’d wired the ignition into the cassette player).

There are two oriental-flavoured tracks – “(Stuck in a pagoda with) Tricia Toyota” and “I’ve got a splitting hedachi”. I never have been able to discover what a ‘hedachi’ is/was? Search engines will provide you with tons of data about the band, while their website’s being rebuilt.

And, bless ‘em, they’re still knocking stuff out – “All this and puppet stew” being their latest product.

999 were due to play at a small venue in Portsmouth, hosted by the Students Union. The doorman (euphemism for neanderthal) had unilaterally decided that unless you could produce your Union card, you weren’t getting in. The resultant ‘discussion’ with non-Student types was resolved by the band threatening that unless everyone was admitted, they wouldn’t play and so there’d be a real riot.

This totally, non-financially-based? ultimatum endeared the band to us immediately and even if they’d played crap, we’d still have begged encores.

The album has no especially memorable tracks – “I’m Alive” gently rips into the boredom of routine:
“Do the same thing all day
I can’t stay up too late
Watch out for me now
‘Cos I’m alive”

but it’s a solid piece of original work which still remains an occasional favourite.

I tacked on “Homicide” from the laughingly-entitled “20 of a different kind” – a supposed punk album which included, inter alia, Plastique Bertrand and The Jam, neither of whom would have been pleased to be categorised as Punk.

Even with the Dickies whizzing along at Warp Factor 9, I couldn’t fit any more from this particular compilation onto the CD – so that’ll be another Burns tale…