The Nips - Rock Garden Source: NME Date: March 22, 1980 Author: Adam Sweeting Copywrite: © NME 1980 Photo: by Justin Thomas. Caption: "O'Holligan's last nip." IT TOOK a perverse sense of humour to book The 45s as support to The Nips who, far from getting bigger, have packed it in altogether. The 45s play ostensibly ingenuous pop; bright, breezy and utterly meaningless. Last song? 'Fun Fun Fun'. Huh. One puff and it's gone. A glance round the Rock Garden at the mixed clientele during the closing phases of the 45s suggested that they were going down quite well and would be back for an encore. Not so. Sterner stuff was the order of the day. Thus The Nips, condemned to play the last gig of a three-year career at the Rock Garden. They were fronted by Shane O'Hooligan, the sort of performer it's impossible to miss. He's got big ears which stick out at right angles and too many teeth; a heady combination which readily calls to mind Plug in the Beano. Shane was angry and frustrated and mounted a fearsome assault which was sustained until the very last mauled and mangled semi-quaver. Spitting and snarling, he turned everything around him into the blandest of Co-Op wallpaper. Chiswick single 'Gabrielle' served as curtain-raiser, with O'Hooligan blitzkrieging away at the front and mowed-headed guitarist Fritz tackling a none-too-docile change of tempo midway. Fritz's pimply R'n'B guitar was consistently wrenching throughout. Certainly it was a passionate set, though much of the energy was of the same genre as an exploding box of ammunition - potentially lethal fragments shooting everywhere. Songs like 'Fuss And Bother' and 'I Don't Want Nobody' were rammed home with brute force, lacking any visible distinguishing marks. Not songs really, just crude and ordinary slogans: stuff 'em. The most successfull parts stemmed from O'Holligan. He sang lines like "Got no reason for living / Got no reason to die" with his finger poised dramatically over the 'Abort' button, he gestured violently at the hecklers, he even threw in Winston Churchill's cliche about this being "Only the end of the beginning" with apparently passionate conviction. Let's face it, the boy's a slob but he's got... well, not style exactly, but a sort of natural megahyperbole. A neat touch was The Nips' inclusion of Gary Glitter's 'Rock & Roll' as an encore. This was, I'd like to think, aimed at the disgusting bunch of leathered oafs in the corner who spent the whole gig screaming "Rock and roll!" Whether The Nips were playing this or not. Nurse, the elephant gun. Impressive too was a spoof funk number which had Shane delivering a talk-over about going back to Detroit and keeping God in your heart. Fritz and bassist Shane were too bad to be serious but much better than awful. 'Can't Say No' was very like the Pistols' 'Submission', with the strangely normal Mark Harrison's drums providing forward motion. And there we have it. The Nips are splitting because of lack of cash and other basic problems. Plans are already being laid, though, for the re-emergence of the members under different guises. There's power worth harnessing in there somewhere. Adam Sweeting