Cover art for Tiny Tim’s Songs of an Impotent Troubadour by Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound

Another one of those things they don’t teach you in school: Current 93 and Nurse With Wound collaborated with Tiny Tim on a song called “Just What Do You Mean by ‘Antichrist’?”

David Tibet’s Durtro label released a few Tiny Tim albums. The first of these was Songs of an Impotent Troubadour, a career-spanning collection of solid gold Tiny Tim hits like “I Used To Love Jessica Hahn, But Now I Love Stephanie Bohn,” “Santa Claus Has Got the AIDS This Year,” and “She Left Me with the Herpes.” “Just What Do You Mean by ‘Antichrist’?” ended the album; it consisted mostly of those TG-style glissandi that make your intestines cramp a bit, laid over a tape collage of Tibet and Tiny’s phone conversations about the latter’s bizarre eschatological views.
 

Cover for the Durtro release of Tiny Tim’s Christmas Album
 
The definitive book about the Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound gang, England’s Hidden Reverse, reports that Tiny Tim’s crackpot opinions about gay people provided the occasion for a break between Tibet and his close friend, Douglas P. of Death in June:

Not everyone in the Current circle swooned before Tiny Tim’s bigheartedness. Douglas Pearce took his views on homosexuality as an excuse to irrevocably cut all ties with Tibet, on the grounds that friendship with both Tiny Tim and himself was incompatible.

Tibet had become obsessed with Tiny Tim in the mid-90s after listening to his work on the recommendation of Boyd Rice. And it was Rice who suggested Tibet call Tiny up:

On Rice’s suggestion, Tibet made contact through Big Bucks Burnett, who ran Tiny Tim’s fan club. To his surprise, Burnett suggested that Tibet call Tiny right away, as he loved to talk on the phone. It was the start of a beautiful long distance telephone relationship. ‘I rang up his hotel, where he had checked in under the name Peter Poker,’ Tibet recalls. ‘Straight away he was like ‘Hi, Mr. Tibet, nice to speak to you, have you got a girlfriend? What does she look like?’ His phone calls always lasted at least an hour.’ Tibet and Tiny Tim only met once, when he flew over to play at London’s Union Chapel in 1995, in a mismatched lineup that featured Red Dwarf‘s Norman Lovett and Al Murray, ‘the comedy landlord’. As a result, Time Out listed the concert in their comedy section.

 

The posthumously released Live in London, recorded at Tiny’s 1995 London show
 
Discogs says “Just What Do You Mean by ‘Antichrist’?” is over eleven minutes long on the CD, so what’s embedded below might not be the full track. Anyway, they don’t write ‘em like this anymore.