Released in 1978 this was the debut album by madcap American punks The Dickies and it reached No.18 in the UK national charts during a five month run in the Top 40.

Available now on stand-alone CD in a slip case, six bonus tracks have been added and the album includes the National Chart hit singles ‘Silent Night’ (No.47), ‘Banana Splits’ (No.7) and ‘Paranoid’ (No.45).

It also comes with a booklet including lyrics to all the songs plus repros of sleeves and memorabilia from the time and original vocalist Leonard Graves Phillips and guitarist Stan Lee still lead The Dickies to this very day.

1. GIVE IT BACK
2. POODLE PARTY
3. PARANOID
4. SHE
5. SHADOW MAN
6. MENTAL WARD
7. EVE OF DESTRUCTION
8. YOU DRIVE ME APE (YOU BIG GORILLA)
9. WATERSLIDE
10. WALK LIKE AN EGG
11. CURB JOB
12. SHAKE & BAKE
13. RONDO (THE MIDGETS REVENGE)
14. I’M OK YOU’RE OK [Bonus Track]
15. SILENT NIGHT [Bonus Track]
16. THE SOUND OF SILENCE [Bonus Track]
17. BANANA SPLITS (THE TRA LA LA SONG) [Bonus Track]

The USA’s The Dickies were a clone of The Stooges, The Clash and the Buzzcocks, which was never going to be a bad thing musically, and which they brought to the fore brilliantly on their 1979 debut, The Incredible Shrinking Dickies.

A standard power-chord affair with a fanfare-like intro and various parody elements, their monster hit was a cover of the 1968 pop theme song for the children’s television program The Banana Splits, the exhilarating The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana), which is included here as a bonus track.

Eagerly riding the coattails of the first wave of LA punk, every song they came up with was a stupid, and wholly endearing bout of musical skullduggery, and listening to them today still never ceases to put a smile on my face.

I mean, come on now, Walk Like An Egg is a perfect example of what I’m talking about, as is Waterslide. So much so that they come together to actually manage to match the first Ramones album for sheer wtf’ness!

All the songs on this album are frantically fast and very short, with over half the selections here having run times of under two minutes, and only the instrumental number Rondo is itself longer than three minutes.

But if standout covers, done in a way that you have to hear them to believe them, is your cup of tea, well tune in here for their cover of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, the Monkees’ She, Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence, and Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction, which are all given the same dizzy treatment as everything else brought forth.

And so on an album that is vibrantly good, outlandishly crazy, honkingly stupid fun, you will find that every track is worth the price of admission!

Official Purchase Link