For anybody who has never listened to The Nips (a.k.a. The Nipple Erectors), this is the band that Shane MacGowan spent his time on before helping to carve out a legacy by birthing a new type of Punk Rock with The Pogues. The Nips, formed in 1976 are probably one of the most unknown and underrated Punk bands of all time, and if you haven’t heard them yet you should probably be filled with a deep sense of shame.
“Bops, Babes, Booze and Bovver” is an ideal place to start with this outfit, a retrospective collection of singles, it is only eight tracks in length and contains not one filler. The lyrics range from the violent resentment of “Vengeance” to the hauntingly creepy yet youthful feel- good sentiments of “King Of The Bop”. The sound is clean yet subversive, and it only helps to articulate the powerful emotions and fresh lyrical genius the group bring to our ears. The Nips characterise and epitomise everything that Mod Rock in the 60’s could have been had it had the heart of the Irish and the balls of Punk. What the listener hears is a strange noise that sounds like The Kinks and Dr Feelgood penning love songs and rhymes of resentment with Boris Karloff and Elvis Costello- in short; fucking inspirational.
The best track on the album is, for me at least, the beautiful “All The Time In The World” which is a tumbling ballad of erratic sexual obsession and devotional infatuation. Successfully combining the raw grunt of sexuality (“I’ve been dreaming of your picture, baby, creaming over you”) with a ruthless love, this isn’t topped by any other song on this album. There are of course contenders, however, from “Vengeance” to “Gabrielle”.
If you like original and ballsy Punk Rock with absolutely no pretention and are looking for something vastly difference from the mediocre horseshit that clogs the propeller of the Punk scene, The Nips will do just fine! One of my favourite albums to date.
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