Mucky Pups

We went to see Woody out at the hospital. He’d been diagnosed as suffering from acute nervous exhaustion or something, mixed up with something or other else, and didn’t seem to be a very happy chappy. Due to lack of space, he’d been put at the end of a children’s ward decorated with creepy clowns and cheeky monkeys. Worst of all were the gaily coloured hot air balloons carrying trumpeting elephants on acid across hallucinogenic Alps to far-off planets. At least that was Woody’s interpretation, delivered with a bitter sarcastic sting. He said he was hoping for electric shock therapy, but it wasn’t on the menu. The kiddies didn’t need it, they were bouncing around like lubricated loonies, and the nurses tended to get mad with them. Of course, Woody had previously known nothing about Honeysuckle, he’d been too busy ripping his scalp to shreds to notice. He showed no interest in my blossoming lovelife other than a few sarcastic glares, but that was his tough luck (as well as mine), because he had to sit there and listen to Mungo and Stewpot taking the piss out of me for the entire duration of visiting time. Woody’s parents were away in Japan or China or Vietnam or Borneo, some East Asian enclave, his dad was some sort of diplomat, and he didn’t have any brothers and sisters, just a load of waster mates like us. In short, he’d got the short straw. I think that was part of his problem really, his folks being so far away. There’s not a lot you can do, so we sat there making lewd suggestions about the nurses, quietly so that the children and, more importantly, their mummies and daddies wouldn’t hear, but Woody wouldn’t laugh, would Woody? We were just sniggering into the abyss, us and our Alfie fantasies. “What’s it all about, eh?” as Michael Caine asked so poignantly. I like that film Alfie, and I like Michael Caine too. I saw him on the telly once, doing an acting masterclass with a bunch of drama school charlies, and they had to do scenes from Alfie. Michael Caine was about a million times better than the young hopefuls. Then there was the time he was on Jim’ll Fix It. A little boy wanted to be a cinema manger, so Jim fixed it for him to be the manager of a big fucker in Leicester Square on the day of a big premiere. They introduced him to Michael Caine, explaining the wee chap’s dream, and Michael answered “Well, you won’t be starting here, sonny” and walked off. Most admirable. I told all this to my companions and we all ended up doing poor quality Michael Caine impersonations. It’s funny what people’ll do in hospitals. Woody didn’t join in of course. He didn’t like the children’s ward at all, and hoped to be moved soon. He told us he’d better bloody be somewhere else next time we came. The children’s ward reminded me of when I had to go into hospital when I was little, to have my tonsils out. My mum came to visit me every day, at least two hours on the bus, just so I wouldn’t be on my own. Mums, eh? One of life’s mysteries. What’s it all about? Buses and bridges, judging from our tortuous trek home that evening. I didn’t say anything, but I got the feeling we wouldn’t be visiting Woody very often, it was too much trouble and nobody liked him that much anyway, if the truth be told. Not a lot of people know that. Still, the clogged up city traffic system provided me with the perfect excuse to shake off Stewpot and Mungo that night. I said I was sick of sitting on buses and I was going to walk, but really I was going to wait for Honeysuckle after work, ask her to go for a drink, all that kind of thing. I think the others knew, but they didn’t say anything, for a change. Mungo just hummed and Stewpot fiddled with his corkscrew fringe.

I waited on the other side of the road for Honeysuckle to finish work. It wasn’t really a road, or at least it used to be, but now it was for pedestrians only, trotting, hopping, stomping or shuffling, with zigzagging red bricks and a surprising number of puddles where lorries had had to come in for some reason and the bricks hadn’t been able to support their colossal weight. People were doing their shopping or heading home. Some looked like they’d had enough, grim-faced and not talking to each other. Others looked like satisfied customers, smug, crammed full of purchasing pleasure. A few had pub faces, sweaty and steaming, and then there was a steady trickle of tramps and the nouveau homeless, screaming “BIG ISSUE!!!” at stragglers who hadn’t managed to avoid them. I tended to carry a rolled-up copy with me, so I could brandish it in fake solidarity and get a “cheers mate!” and occasionally a scruffy pat on the back. I watched all this hustle and bustle with one eye, while the other eye never strayed from the bug effect glass door. They were big and bulbous, the doors, made to look like the protective shell of a giant beetle, part of the overall organic vibe the architects were after. Money down the bloody drain, my grandmother would have said. I was bundled up in my big coat. I wasn’t cold, but my stomach felt like feeding time in the piranha pool, so I hunched my shoulders up, James Dean style, hoping to make the unpleasant sensation skidaddle. It didn’t work. I’d been looking at my watch every two minutes since I’d taken up position. That seemed absolutely ridiculous, so I started checking every thirty seconds instead. The lights in the sky-high gallery were still leering brightly, but sad shapes were being spewed out of the doors. The shops were shutting, from the looks of things, but the café stayed open later. Honeysuckle hadn’t come out yet, or if she had, I hadn’t seen her. Which meant she hadn’t, because I’d been watching the door all the time. But you never know, that’s the trouble. You look at something for too long and it tends to drift out of focus and you don’t know what you’ve seen and haven’t seen, like when you’re reading, and then you look up to see what time it is, but you can’t see properly, because your eyeballs are still stuck on the tiddly printed words, not the big fuck-off clock covering half the wall. This problem can be solved by looking at your watch instead. So I did. Or buying a cuckoo clock, which I didn’t. I moved across to the benches in the middle of the street and sat down, slowly, like it was a bed of nails. I kept my eyes on the door instead of looking at where I was sitting, moving very gingerly. It’s a good job there was no dogmuck or tramp phlegm on the bench. I must’ve looked like a dog crouching down to do its business. I pulled my woolly bobble hat out of my pocket and pulled it on, down over my ears. Just for something to do. It was red and blue, my hat. Time for a watch check. The strap was getting a bit cruddy, and the date was wrong. Stood up. I mean I started to worry about being stood up, I didn’t stand up, I kept right on sitting down. A Tie Rack bag, one of those slimline plastic ones, and a curious pigeon came within kicking range. I was tempted. The bloke carrying the plastic bag had just stopped to blow his nose, and was soon off. The pigeon was getting a bit cocky and looked likely to eat my bootlaces, so I stomped my foot and it flapped off clumsily. I had frightened it. This made me feel better, power balance, I belive it’s called. I told myself to calm down, I’d just come on the off-chance hadn’t I? You can’t be stood up if you haven’t arranged anything beforehand. Ha ha, that’s all we need, getting stood up without having a date. Being stood up’s rubbish, a really poor quality way to spend two or three hours. I’ve heard there are people who give up waiting after fifteen or twenty minutes, dignity almost intact, but I find it hard to believe. I was just waiting and waiting, like Simon of the Desert. Mitch of the Lampost. I had no idea what time she finished work anyway. I just assumed it would be when the shops shut, but the lights were still on up there, and it was beginning to freak me out a bit. Who was going to go up there when the shops were shut? What’s the point? And it must cost a bomb to employ the security guards that makes sure nobody pees in the potted palms or through the keyhole of Choo-Choo Toys. I’ve wazzed through a few keyholes in my time, but Woody was the undisputed king of keyhole widdlery. He shoved his tiny dinkle through the letter box of the Orange Lodge down by the park, and had a Jimmy Riddle on the carpet. It was like the Co-op horse, never would have guessed that such an insignificant appendage could lead to such an ample bladder. Must’ve looked funny from the inside. Good job they didn’t have a guard dog, or it would’ve been goodbye Woody’s willy. His chippolatta would have been chewed by the gristle-hungry hound. If they’d caught him, they would’ve paraded his head round the city on a spike on June the twelfth or July I don’t know which. Nice summery feeling, whenever it is. Once we were in a taxi, on the way to a typically poor quality concert out at Barrowlands, the famous former ballroom turned beer-soaked concert hall, and all the drivers were holding their walkie-talkies out of the windows. So we got to hear this thunderous cacophony of marching bands, all piled on top of each other, aurally if not physically, playing “The Sash My Father Wore” and all that cobblers, like Scout bands, only more vicious. Who invented those stand up xylophones, the ones that look like demented flagpoles? If a scout wanted to be vicious he could do a lot of damage with one of those stand up xylophones. A clonk on the head with one of them could be fatal, as well as making a major contribution to the development of free jazz. Some scouts just snap, look at the number of scout huts that get burnt down! They can’t all be accidents. In many cases it’s calculated arson to destroy evidence that the vicar’s been fiddling with the cubs’ woggles. Besides, all that dib-dib-dobbing’s got to take its toll sooner or later, discipline’s like a leaky dam just waiting for the flood—there was Honeysuckle, skipping out of the door, the security slob leering after her. I’ll sort him out later, the big ape! Blimey, she moves fast! Penelope Pitstop without the helmet or height.

At once I sensed something that I’d never noticed before, not the other day when Woody went doolally, and certainly not before then—Honeysuckle was better than me. Instead of shooting out a cheery salute, my mouth clamped slobbery shut and my feet dragged dozily. To make matters worse, a dog in front of me assumed the snail on tiptoes position and started heaving out a huge jobby. I had to try and hop over him, much to the surprise of the dog, who tried to move out of the way on tiptoes just as the turd was touching the floor, tangling me up in its lead and angering the owner, whose left training shoe had sunk into the trailing mess like a hippo in a mudhole. As a consequence, Honeysuckle, Speedy bloody Gonzalez, was off down the street, dodging sweet puddles of Highland Spring water, and I was stood like a plank, just like I had been all my short and endlessly miserable godforsaken life. I brushed these bad vibes aside like a shit-clogged tail shooing flies from a cow’s bumhole, and shuffled off after Honeysuckle like a mazy Maradona dribble, dodging between happy shoppers and office zombies, so as not to lose sight of sweet her. It was grim, the end of the world. I asked myself if I were a man or a mouse, and decided that the answer was somewhere between the two. It’s now or never, I thought, as she headed for the roaring pit of the underground entrance, and I willed the spirit of Elvis Presley to take over my Anthill Mob member’s body. To my immense surprise, and that of everyone around me, it worked like a dream. My oversized gangster’s hat disappeared and my midget stature was miraculously inflated to that of a fifties rock’n’roll god. I swivelled my hips erotically, like a possessed white savage, television cameras panned quickly upwards so as not to shock the nation, and, unaware that I had turned into Bill Haley instead of Elvis, I bellowed huskily, “Honeysuckle! I’m just a hunk-a-hunk o’ burnin’ love!”

I didn’t really shout the last bit, just “Honeysuckle!”, but it was enough of a miracle, and enough to make her come to a halt and twizzle elegantly round on her Air-Wear bouncing soles, puzzlement dissolving like Lemsip into a warm, soothing welcome, smiles and surprise.

“What’re you doing here?” said her grin, wonky toothed. Lord, protect her flaxen fringe from the Arch-Fiend!

“Not very much. Window shopping, I suppose,” I fibbed, casual, suave, Bill Haley’s kiss curl plastered to my forehead. I’d never been window shopping in my life.

“Do you want to go for a coffee or something?” she giggled. That’s perhaps worth an action replay, just in case you didn’t notice that she asked me, not the other way round. I had trouble comprehending her offer.

“Aren’t you sick of the sight of coffee?” I blurted, my cool facade crumbling like the aftermath of a camping gas explosion. All my hours of practice in front of the mirror gone for a burton. Now I looked like a football manager as ninety thousand fans howl for his head. Louis Van Gaal, he looks like Bill Haley.

She nodded, “But it doesn’t matter. Let’s go and see if anybody’s skating.”

“You’re on,” I beamed, and off we trotted, side by side, gospel choirs massed in my head, in the direction of the new shopping centre (Oh Happy Day!), a kind of glass Millennium Falcon, marooned in the clinging grottiness of the bus station. I couldn’t believe everything was going so well, and all thanks to Bill Haley. I felt like climbing up a double bass, leaping off it spectacularly and spinning it round and round, round and round.

A funny looking green machine, like a street sweeper, was pirouetting on the ice, brushes whirling impressively, fat, unshaven driver leaning imprudently from his cab, consciously unconscious of the elegance of the lines he was pretending not to draw. It was a bit like cutting the grass on a cricket pitch, but it was a novelty job, with a bit of status, especially with everyone watching. Later, when he’d finished, youngsters would pour onto the ice, hurtling hither and thither, showing their tight-jeaned bums and falling on their faces. For some reason there were never any good skaters here. Perhaps it was too small, or maybe the thought of being gawked at by the curious and uncommitted put them off. Normally ice rinks are full of speed-skating rastafarians kicking up the ice at the tottering twerps like myself. They were absent here though, which is just as well, otherwise all the drinks would be turned into Slush Puppies by their splendid, shard-propelling arcs of light.

Honeysuckle came back with our second cup of frivolously frothy cappuccino. To my horror, I’d discovered that I didn’t have much to say, but Honeysuckle seemed to be more than capable of saying enough for two or three or four, so my semi-silence was comfortably absorbed. She just seemed to be gifted in the art of talking, never dull, just a light and babbling brook, leading to a slothful pond of peace. No, that’s not right either. She didn’t seem to mind me not talking, there weren’t any awkward silences, just silences. Whatever it was, it was great, it echoed my love for her, here beside the empty ice rink, by the empty shops. It was a transitional time, the tables filling up with epileptically dressed youngsters, all hyperventilating at the prospect of chasing each other around the ice on skates, holding hands and spinning round, grabbing boobs and bums, the kind of things kids do to a disco beat on ice. When the green machine had gone away, the music came on and all the youngsters flew onto the ice. A gang of lads caught my eye because they were so spotty, totally encrusted with terminal acne, all of them. Each one looked as if you could put them on the bathroom scales, note down their weight, then get them to squeeze all their spots, splattering up the bathroom mirror. When they’d done that you could weigh them again and their weight would be about two stone less now that they weren’t heaving all that pus about. I couldn’t be sure, and I wouldn’t really want to be, but as one of them was bombing round the rink, it looked to me as if he was picking away at his spots and eating the gunk. None of which helped the state my stomach was in, so I tried to concentrate on dazzling Honeysuckle with my sparkling and sophisticated conversation.

We the undersigned, Tuppenny Rice and Treacle, do solemnly declare that we want to go ice-skating this afternoon. So we bloody well are going. We ARE going. Just try stopping us, Fatty. We’re going to the one in the shopping centre because it’s bloody good and there are people and shops ’n’ stuff ’n’ that.

Tuppenny Rice and Treacle had decided to go ice skating that afternoon. They’d had their hair cut and dyed the same and tucked up in funny pigtails, so Mitch didn’t recognise them at first, he just thought they were two daft lassies giggling and gliding around the rink, puffa jackets protecting them from bumps whilst deftly exposing their backsides. This was distracting for Mitch, who was having a first tea-time date with Honeysuckle, the most breathtakingly beautiful tea-room waitress he’d ever seen. She wasn’t anything out of this world, not to look at anyway, but he fancied her like mad. She reminded him of sunshine and haystacks. What’s more, they were getting on all right, something Mitch found difficult to capture with his brain. Nevertheless, the unrecognised botties of Tuppenny Rice and Treacle kept attracting his roving eye and adversely affecting his hormones, which were already in bra-induced turmoil. The little devils must have been doing a manic hormone jig, like a lunatic let loose with a theremin phased to fuck through a fuzzbox. He thought Tuppenny Rice and Treacle’s bottoms were the beginning of the end, like plump peaches, and that Honeysuckle’s cheeks were beautiful beyond comprehension, like down covered baby peaches, and that peaches were the finest fruit on the lower shelves of the supermarket, with the possible exception of big ripe juicy melons. He thought of a poem and scrolled down it in his head, printed words impressed in his memory. He hardly knew any poems, wasn’t too keen on them, after all, a spade’s a spade, but he knew this poem very well:

What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons, as I pass,

Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

He pictured himself cupping Honeysuckle’s face in his hands and leaning forward to kiss her lightly on the cheek, and he pictured himself grappling gracelessly with the four bumcheeks bouncing into the barriers around the rink, before he forced himself to snap out of it, or at least to try to. The lacy frivolities around Honeysuckle’s brassiere were scarcely visible through her cream coloured blouse, but they made Mitch feel like slowly bubbling tomato soup. He successfully kept this information to himself. Honeysuckle smiled, just like girls always smile in books written by men of a certain disposition—beautifully, lop-sided, shy haystack smiles. The girl skaters were very close to each other, that much Mitch could tell. They only loosened their clasped hands when gravity curdled their fun and one or the other of them took a tumble, prompting the other to pull the tumbler back up and laughingly touch the wet buttocks through the black bumtight pantaloons both were sporting. Mitch looked back at Honeysuckle and tried to concentrate on her chirpy pitter-patter, about records and books and holidays and her dog. Yes, his insides were being rendered unstable to the point of implosion, like a smokestack about to be tackled by Fred Dibnah. He had tortuously worked out, like a child doing sums before calculators had been invented, that this was love, something he’d felt before but briefly, for Mungo’s sister. Unrequited. She used to flirt with him, and he’d get his bedclothes in a terrible tangle thinking about her. But he hadn’t seen her for ages, not since Mungo was poorly with BSE or whatever it was called. That thing where it took him an hour to get out of his jim-jams and another hour to put his vest and pants on, and by the time he’d finished he was so knackered he had to go back to bed for the rest of the day. Until even that was out of the question and he just had to lie back in bed while his girlfriend at the time, Zippy, talked and talked (as was her wont) without even a reply for her trouble. She didn’t seem to mind much at the time, but she ended up pissing off with some poxy twerp anyway. The same goes for Flopsy, Mungo’s sister. She got married to somebody with brighter prospects. Mitch decided to try and weigh the matter up at the Cock-in-Hand public house later on. That was what witty Mungo called their local pub, which occupied a prominent corner in the West End of the city, because of the large gay presence, mainly old buggers, who they fondly imagined made a trip to the toilets quite an adventure. They didn’t, most of them were past anything other than lewd comments anyway. He looked back into Honeysuckle’s Tupperware eyes and stopped listening, and when he started listening again, she’d stopped talking. After a pause she clicked her slender fingers in front of Mitch’s nose and said, “Hey! Snap out of it! I asked you a question!”

“Oh, I was thinking about something else. Ha ha. Sorry.”

“Something important?”

“Yes. No. Yes. No,” stammered Mitch.

“In that case answer my question, Dumbo!” she laughed.

“What question?”

“Who are those two girls?” she fired.

“Two girls? I don’t know any two girls. Honest.”

“Well, you’ve had your eyeballs firmly parked between their bumcheeks for long enough. Those two that look exactly the same.”

“What two that look exactly the same?” countered Mitch, suave, quick-witted bastard.

“Those two girls that’re whizzing round and whispering and pointing over here, wearing Michelin man jackets. Bum freezers my mum calls ’em. I think they must know you. Either that or they fancy you, and to be honest I don’t think you’re their type. They’d eat you for breakfast! Ha ha!”

Mitch hauled his heavy eyes round towards the ice rink and the penny dropped like the Devil’s crane cargo come loose. It was Tuppenny Rice and Treacle, two girls from Mungo’s group, his mad music group, Ding Dong, formerly known as Ding Dong Merrily On High. They changed the name hoping that something a bit snappier would bring them a bit more good luck, but did it fuck as like. They were just as unpopular as ever, even The Spazzies had refused to take them under their wing, and they were famous for mollycoddling any old crap. Ding Dong had even released their own manifesto, describing themselves as a technicolour exclamation mark, but hardly anyone apart from their friends and immediate families cared. And the consensus was by no means 100 per cent in those two reduced groups. They gave Mitch a headache and Stewpot just shook his halo hair sadly whenever he saw them. He was particularly scathing when it came to Tuppenny Rice and Treacle. Mitch didn’t mind them so much, but they weren’t the ideal garnish to a first date, not if you wanted a second date anyway.

“Oh shit, it’s Tuppenny Rice and Treacle. Friends of Mungo. You know. They’re in his group. Music group. Pop group. Rubbish, have you seen them? Their hair... cut... bleached blonde? Pigtails. They look funny now.”

“Do you like them?” quizzed Honeysuckle, eyebrows in orbit.

“Yes. No. Yes, but not like that. I can’t make head nor tail of them. Strange girls, nice looking, quite good looking, they kiss each other and stuff. Funny. They look nicer than they used to.”

“You were looking at their bums!” laughed Honeysuckle, sparkling like someone who’d just passed their Corona fizzycal with flying colours.

“Wer-hurrr!” guffawed Mitch, soup boiling over. “I wasn’t really, you know, they’re just quite eye catching, dressed the same and what-not. They’re the only people I know who can talk at the same time and still understand what the other’s saying! Ha!”

“My mum and her sister can do that. It’s dead freaky.” chirrupped Honeysuckle happily, “I thought they were the only ones...”

THUNK! “Ouch!”

THUNK! “Oooouuuuch!”

Mitch and Honeysuckle turned their heads like slow-motion reflected owls, and saw the beaming, spotless and scrubbed faces of Tuppenny Rice and Treacle, pig tails seeming to grip the barrier that ran around the ice rink, making sure the skaters stayed on the ice and the shoppers steered clear of a potential flying fruit disaster. But it hadn’t saved Mitch from this.

“Hello Mitch, hello Mitch, who’s your girlfriend? Who’s your girlfriend? Tell us, go on, tell us!” they blurted almost simultaneously, causing many a tea-drinker and skater to turn around and look at the human rhubarb crumble that Mitch had metamorphosed into and his ice cream companion, unflustered, even delighted, by the appearance of this eccentric double act hauling themselves ever further across the barrier and oozing inch by inch towards the table. Treacle had just about managed to clamp the barrier between her thighs and was hauling her leg over when one of the spotty lads walloped right into her at high speed, the impact loosening the ripened head of a big plook on his acne-scarred forehead. It shot its yellowish load all down Treacle’s right-hand pigtail. The glass roof of the shopping centre rattled to the howls and shrieks of Treacle, and the mingled cries of apology and pain as Tuppenny Rice tried to mutilate the poor boy with her skate-clad boots. Honeysuckle came to wailing Treacle’s aid with a handful of Kleenex, screaming “GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”, while Mitch tried to reason with the now psychotic Treacle. She seemed intent on hacking off the spotty boy’s bony fingers, the ice turning red with blood and yellow with pus, which was dripping steadily from his face, like viscous yellow tears.

“I saw you picking your zits and eating it!” screeched Tuppenny Rice.

She had big jugs, and they were wobbling as she stomped away. Mitch was too scared to touch her, and the boy’s mates had frozen, eyes protruding even more than their acne eruptions. Security staff were rattling their way through tables and chairs, and the maintenance man from the green machine was inching his way gingerly across the ice, fearful of falling, and from the wild look in his eye, secretly hoping someone else would reach the freaking out banshee before he could get there. Tuppenny Rice’s pigtails looked to be possessed by innumerable evil spirits, shaking them this way and that at unnatural speed. Honeysuckle was now hugging Treacle and comforting her. She was shuddering and sobbing, and Honeysuckle was wondering what to do with the pus-soaked mass of Kleenex she had in her hand. In the end she gave it to Mitch, who was in a trance and absent-mindedly shoved it into his inside pocket, where he found it a few weeks later when they were all visiting Mungo in the hospital.

Tuppenny Rice and Treacle were more or less inseparable. They were responsible for all the freaky percussion and schoolkid stuff in Mungo’s pop group. Mungo didn’t like people calling it his group, but he was just pretending really, and besides, he can sod off because no one gave a monkey’s. They were terrible. Fun but terrible. Anybody with half a brain could see that Mungo was behind it, and that he had long since ceased to be a full shilling. It had taken him a long time to get it together, which is hardly surprising really. You’d run away as well if some nutter in shiny silver pants and a Russian bearskin hat came up to you asked you to be in his band. He spent short afternoons in the watery weak winter sun composing watery weak tunes that rambled and roamed all over the place like a wounded buffalo, with lyrics like Spaghetti Junction on a wet weekend when West Bromwich Albion have lost at home, all turgid romance and porridge philosophy. One day it seemed to click, at least in his deluded head, so he started to look for chums to play with, but they all ran away for reasons outlined earlier. Eventually he met like-minded people (nutters). The last pieces of the neo-psychedelic jigsaw were Tuppenny Rice and Treacle, well-known lumps around town, a bit on the distaff side lover-wise, not unknown for them to have it off with a boy, but always together, just as it is not unknown for mighty lions to leap on slim and lovely antelopes. They liked to see the spunk fly, but rarely did they meet their match in terms of sexual appetite. Most boys ended up a quivering wreck, at least according to local legend. Mungo was in their sights once, but he squirmed his way out by shepherding them back to his bachelor pad and introducing them to his astounding array of weird instruments, and the predatory conversation slowly gave way to an ecstatic frottageing of musical mayhem, a rhapsody of thumps and grunts, squeals and sobbing. Just what Mungo was looking for as the bedrock of his sound, and quite a pleasant change for Tuppenny Rice and Treacle, who fell in love with Mungo and his music.