The War On Drugs // Cargo, 13 September 2011

Pumping gas in a desolate thoroughfare. Eating ‘grits’ in a sinister trucker’s café. Being chased through overgrown backwoods by a toothless gun-toting simpleton in dungarees. Yes, the image of the fabled ‘life on the road’ in America is as informed by Kerouac/Twin Peaks/Texas Chainsaw clichés as ever; constructed from hand-me-down Springsteen albums and copies of low-budget Alabaman horrors. Fortunately, one gang who don’t take such dim-witted notions on-board is The War On Drugs – bona-fide Americans who have birthed the soundtrack to the most fucked-up psychedelic road movie you’ve never seen in ‘Slave Ambient’.

Considering they’ve made one of 2011’s finest albums, you could be forgiven the band would introduce themselves with a chest-beating, ostentatious fanfare. Not so. Their on-stage demeanour is certainly inauspicious, and their ‘banter’ consists of chat about guitars and, erm, jeans. Still, TWOD are all about the music – free of the soaked-in-oats, plaid shirt bullshit that such a horrific phrase evokes.

And what music: they filter the best in ‘heartland’, Uncut Magazine favourites – Neil Young, Dylan, The Boss – through a shoegaze filter, pebble-dashing it with Krautrock blobs. At their best (‘Your Love Is Calling My Name’) this seemingly hellish prospect is seamless, like Route 66 gently shifting into the motorik rhythms of the Autobahn. The FX-soaked ‘Come To The City’ and ‘Baby Missiles’ might not have any choruses as such, but are peculiarly catchy all the same, featuring some gloriously shabby harmonica stabs and some dazzling wig-outs. There’s still a certain traditionalist, porch song air at times (‘I Was There’) and Granduciel’s voice (an amalgamation of Dylan and former TWOD bandmate Kurt Vile) is somewhat reedy, but they’re still a great deal spacier than most. The bleeding-knuckle encore is certainly more Hawkwind than Tom Petty.

Indeed, while The War On Drugs may happily flirt with the some of the facets of ‘respectable’ American music – the backdrops of mountains and open-road, their relaxed stoner disposition, song titles like ‘Buenos Aires Beach’ – theirs is a novel take on seemingly rigid source material, like frazzling an old photographic slide under the sun. When their fuzzy road-trip winds up in your town it may not roll-up with all guns blazing, but they’ll quietly go about their business all the same. This is a thing of ragged glory. Join the crusade.

Originally appeared in CLASH Magazine

Wu Tang Clan // London Forum, 11 June 2011

You may find this hard to believe, but hip-hop existed long before gushing hacks were wiping their weeping bellends on Odd Future’s altar. Although it was released almost 18 years ago, Wu-Tang’s astonishing debut LP still sits as uneasily today with OFWGKTA’s dubious mix of schlocky horror and queer-bashing as it did against the G-Funk onslaught back in 1993. Their stoned mysticism, obsession with obscure Kung-Fu films and horrifying accounts of life in the Staten Island slums were the stuff of middle-class, white boy dreams. Even this bitter scribe can remember when the only two albums everyone owned in school were ‘(What’s The Story) Morning Glory’ and the Wu’s gargantuan second effort ‘Wu-Tang Forever’. Christ, how many groups can even claim to have their own (hysterically awful) Playstation game, as they did with ‘99’s ‘Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style’?

Although hardly unusual for hip-hop, live gigs for Wu-Tang always seemed like something of a grudging obligation; an excuse to send grim hangers-on called things like Intrepid Foxx over to mumble their way through an embarrassing masquerade of a show. Indeed, from the off tonight, Wu-Tang are as reliably unreliable as ever – what’s billed as a ‘full reunion’ is lacking the group’s de facto leader RZA (unable to leave California due to ‘contractual commitments’, apparently), Raekwon and Inspectah Deck. Once inside, the proceedings follow a strict tick list of half-arsedness. They’ve neglected to bring any merchandise over. There’s a fuck-awful nu-metal band supporting. And the warm-up DJs spend half the time placating the crowd. Good start, lads.

When they predictably saunter on at well-past the advertised stage time (fucking hell, does ANYONE in hip-hop own a clock other than Flavor Flav?! ), the Wu announce their arrival with a flatulent, bass-heavy grunt from the PA. Make no mistake, the sound tonight is laughable; so bad, in fact, that it would reinforce your dad’s notion of the genre – that it’s all a bunch of indecipherably angry blokes shouting into a wind tunnel.

This is a particular indignity as the 75-minute set leans heavily on ‘36 Chambers’, exactly as the fanboys would hope. That album’s rough, skeletal, cold-sweat production is hopelessly lost tonight, to the point where only the most antagonistic numbers (‘Shame On A Nigga’, particularly) have any impact. Indeed, GZA – perhaps the most considered, intricate MC in the collective, so valued that they once remarked, “We form like Voltron, and GZA happens to be the head” – is completely mislaid in the mix altogether. Those who were arsed to get out of bed and get on the plane shamble around like old biddies in a supermarket, stumbling into and barking over one another’s rhymes. The crude cacophony of sound benefits the more aggro MCs, such as Ghostface Killah and Method Man to some extent, however. Perhaps predictably for a man who missed the Wu’s last London appearance to film an episode of CSI, Method trowels some Hollywood pizzazz over the evening; scurrying around the stage, diving into the crowd, and supplying the set’s undisputed highlight with his own ‘Method Man’, an absolutely fucking electric slab of self-aggrandisement.

Unfortunately, the Wu spend a large chunk of a relatively short set doing what can only be described as ‘bollocking around’. An ODB tribute is to be expected, but do we really need a shout-out to seemingly every rapper who ever died? Do we expect those from the ‘Slums of Shaolin’ to be bigging-up William & Kate? Do the audience need to hear about your fucking Twitter pages or gripes with the promoter? Tonight reaches a nadir in one of the most absurd stabs at product placement imaginable, when a flunky holds aloft a t-shirt at the back of the stage WHILST WU-TANG PERFORM. It goes without saying that Wu-Tang have never been adverse to expanding their market (the countless solo albums, the film scores, the clothing line attest to this), but they’ve lost their crucial element: danger.

There’s no sense that they’re doing this out of necessity any longer. In their mid-90s prime the Clan was the result of a bunch of enormously talented individuals fashioning their skills into something cooperatively great. Now, they have the demeanour of a lethargic travelling circus, slothfully reeling-out their back catalogue to the devotees, provided ‘outside interests’ do not deem otherwise. Those who still worship at the temple of Wu – who are animated and adoring throughout tonight – deserve better than this wet fart of a show for their 35 quid.

As ‘Triumph’ and a messy take on ‘Hand On The Pump’ ring-out, there’s only one question left to answer. Wu-Tang Forever? Nah, you’re alright, love. Let’s just remember the good times.

Originally appeared in CLASH Magazine

We're All Going To Die

Who Do Voodoo? You Do?

Why a magazine ever felt compelled to publish the lyrics to THIS I'll never know, but at least it contains a fascinating fact-filled sidebar.

"Now he works in McDonalds on Saturday nights to earn money to make super singles like this one!"

La Shark

Extraterrestrial jug-band mantras? Chaos-strewn gigs? Upsetting fans of twee popstrels? Pretty standard fare for London's most adventurous new band...

** Also featured in a forthcoming issue of Volume Magazine **
** Pictures by Dan Wilton - http://danwilton.zenfolio.com - 07779 101241**



The ginger-haired old temptress Vivienne Westwood once remarked that “eccentricity is such a badge of honour to be given in these conformist times”. Doubtlessly, she wasn’t making reference to the increasingly greying world of indie rock, but she should’ve been. What’s left of Britain’s sordid hovels of torment – masquerading as gig venues – are plagued more than ever by beleaguered music Nazis, all debating the latest Joy Division-aping shitehawks. Lazy journalists would perhaps claim it’s indicative of the dreaded ‘current climate’, but yours truly wouldn’t be so trite. We’ll merely suggest it’s Fallout 3 as orchestrated by the indie shitterati.

La Shark are comparable to Terminator’s John Connor; a beacon of hope in an apocalyptic wasteland. This 5-piece Vaudevillian, labyrinthine pop marvel, formerly called Le Shark before a clothing company intervened, have been a vibrant alternative to their naval-gazing contemporaries in London for a while now. For a group so arresting and ostentatious live, they had rather humble beginnings. “I hadn’t really a background in any kind of band whatsoever”, admits lead singer Samuel Deschamps. “I’d been writing hip-hop for 2 years. I was just used to spoken word, I used to rap. So for my first project I just did that with piano, and then I got Nick (Buxton) to drum on it, and then Louis (Maynard) on bass. It took until Ben (Markham, guitarist) to join before it started taking shape”.

The original trio of Samuel, Nick and Louis were formerly the backing-band for magnificently-coiffured folk minstrel Josh Weller, an experience which “tightened us up” musically. Since concentrating on their own group, and armed with Ben and keyboardist Tyler Spitchwick, they’ve carved-out a sound that “is less ramshackle, but in no way less energetic” than their early forays. Indeed, their grand dram-pop is light years away from the diet-schmindie or plodding sub-Goth guff peddled by a worrying majority. There’s slight elements of other sources – the cold stare of Sparks’ Ron Mael, the cosmic whimsy of the first Coral LP, even the ‘Brechtian punk cabaret’ of Dresden Dolls – but nothing more than hints.

However, at the minute their work can only be experienced live, bar a couple of “crappy home demos”. Ben even claims their original concept was “being a live band with no recorded songs”; an idea which they’ve now budged on. These gigs are an absolute spectacle, with Deschamps a twitchy and captivating ringmaster. “There’s not really many bands that think about their aesthetic on-stage”, says Ben. “When you go and see a band live you want them to put on a show, rather than see them standing still and looking at their feet. It’s boring, you might as well just buy the fucking CD – or download it for free!” Performances have featured costumes, make-up, mannequins and frequent outbursts in French. “I do think of things very visually”, says Sam. “I can’t settle with things looking shit. I’ve always been really interested in drama”. La Shark’s experiments with the more theatrical elements of their live show continue to progress, but they weren’t always so successful. “The more extreme statement you make visually, the more people are weary of it”, Sam admits. “We went way over-the-top for one gig and wore Kiss make-up. It was ridiculous, and there were people in the audience going ‘this isn’t music!’, but it sounded exactly the same; it was just the fact we were wearing certain stuff. We haven’t backed away from it, but we’re starting to re-think things a lot more. I mean, before we used to go around and be like ‘let’s buy a shitload of fruit and throw it all over the stage’, and we did that, but we didn’t want to start associating it with the music and all-round message”.



The diligent chaps are currently finishing music degrees, under the tutorage of “the Satan and Jesus of Goldsmiths University”. “I’ve an amazing teacher called Simon Deacon”, laughs Sam. “He showed me a picture of himself the other day as a full-out drag queen; he’s just a bloody character. I started off doing piano lessons and it kind of turned into singing lessons…I don’t even know if he knows how to teach singing, but we kind of have conversations…he’s quite sexual”. These penniless years as grubby tax-dodgers have only augmented their self-belief. “The good thing about Kiss (was) they didn’t have any money but they made out like they did by having the most ridiculous fucking live show ever; literally people lifting the drum kit on two sides of the stage to make it look more spectacular than it actually was. I think that’s a great way to think of things; if you act like you’re the most famous band in Britain in your live show then in some ways that’s how people start thinking of it”.

Like all the finest beat combos, La Shark carve-out their own universe. It’s certain that there won’t be any lily-livered indifference towards them; they’re very much a love/hate proposition. Fortunately, this seems to be something they relish. Discussing a recent support-slot with Those Dancing Days, Deschamps says, “I’d never have expected the audience of a Swedish all-girl pop-band to get so violent and aggressive. That was pretty funny. We got a message the next day from this girl, she was a big Those Dancing Days fan, and she said ‘I’m never going to get that half-an-hour back’. How did we upset them so much?”

The group will be upsetting and delighting audiences (most likely the latter) throughout 2009, including a May support tour with the Maccabees. There remains the feeling that things will only get increasingly extravagant and otherworldly. “I think that things are going to get pretty messy in the next couple of years”, acknowledges Sam. “I just want to stand out from these armies of bands that just become associated with each other and are just part of scenes. I want be some kind of blossom. It’s not just some walk-in-the-park where we go out and get pissed every night and think ‘this might be a cool idea’; we try and think of as many different angles as we can. We haven’t got any kind of forcefield (or) settled into any kind of safety zone”. Ben pipes-up. “There’s a lot of genre-rules in popular music, but we try and avoid all those rules, and that’s the only way you can make anything worthwhile really’. Expect gibbering hacks to be pulling fuck-awful shark puns from infested waters very soon indeed.

www.myspace.com/lasharkband

Unhappiness In Magazines (The Enemy of The Enemy)

A while back I was unfortunate enough to attend the premier celebration of mediocrity and ‘special school’ haircuts, the NME Awards. Why? Call me misanthropic. Or a knobend – your choice.

As I’m not even a feature on the indie ‘Zzz’ list (in the popularity stakes, I’m somewhere in-between Jonathan King and the drummer from Half Man Half Biscuit) I sat amongst the great unwashed – the troglodytes incarnate – in the upstairs section. This was a bit like some hellish indie Apartheid. The ‘sleb/pleb entrances were separated by giant wooden slabs, and cloven-fisted brick shithouses ensured we didn’t get within 300 yards of him from Gay Dad. People were ACTUALLY clambering on one-another (like extras from Zombie Holocaust) just to peer through cracks and get a glimpse of Rick Witter. After genocide, nuclear warfare and Snog, Marry Avoid on BBC3, this represented a new low for humankind.

I don’t really like people, so I haven’t a great deal of experience of these horrible self-aggrandizing rallies; these flagrant feasts of backslapping. However, when watching this repugnant spectacle live, you realise how much time is spent sat around scratching a collective arse. Booming announcements over the PA suggest how weighty and epoch-making tonight’s shambles is, as if you’re there to witness a brave new dawn for mankind. Arcane footage that should have been long consigned to the vaults of hell tries to skate over any reference to Ultrasound or Terris. Some poor hired hand guides everyone through the Health and Safety procedure – which is actually a great deal more entertaining than anything else seen that night. Surely though, if he was giving any rational (mental) health guidance, he’d advise you get the fuck out before this shitstorm began. John Niven’s wonderful book ‘Kill Your Friends’ suddenly has even more gravitas in this setting.

Host Mark Watson (Welsh chap from Mock The Week) does the standard slack-jawed, Club 18-30 style hosting (“So who’s pissed? Who’s going to eat cat food with a spade?” etc.) and is pish poor. Admittedly, trying to peddle a comedy routine to the glazed expressions of members from Piccadilly Bedpan and The Neurotic Shinpads is a thankless and unenviable task. Musicians don’t laugh, don’t you know – as they are pondering Sartre and the great mysteries of the cosmos (and where to buy horse tranquilisers after the show). Fortunately, Watson soon realises this and loses his rag, quietly raging against feckless indie whilst looking a tad flustered. It’s a bit like that episode of Father Ted when Henry Sellars comes to visit.

In-between his meanderings we’re treated to various meaningless non-celebs (‘Wow, some bint from Skins!’) presenting various meaningless non-awards (‘Best DVD packaging!’ ‘Sexiest ankles!’) whilst the cameras pan around various meaningless non-entities (‘Is that really the bongo player from The Paddingtons?’). NME’s Editor, the Crown Prince of Cock, seems chronically incapable of reading various hollow platitudes from an autocue. This is a man whose ‘fame’ means he could, most likely, demand oral sex from whichever girl featured in Nuts magazine he liked, despite the fact he looks like a jug-eared freak from Troll 2. You could feasibly dig U2 a grave in 5 minutes using his nose as a shovel. Plus, he definitely got binned at school. He has even possessed Steve Lamacq – whose sledgehammered face means he could challenge McNicholas in the beauty stakes – and uses his sexy dulcet tones to read abject tedium in the manner of a cyborg, a sort of indie-rock take on 2001’s Hal.

Because it’s all about the muzak, maaaan, we get performances from White Lies (N-Sync covering Echo & The Bunnymen), Elbow (fantastic, actually), Franz Ferdinand (good, but needed the bog), Friendly Fires (doing the kind of drum-heavy jam you might expect from one of the lesser nations at a World Cup – like Trinidad), Glasvegas and a woman with orange hair (slo-mo Elvis cover, dreary) and ‘Blur’ (Coxon and Albarn, minus cheese farmer and The Other One) playing ‘This Is A Low’ acoustically – a fantastic song, reproduced in a frankly lacklustre fashion.

Of course, the main attraction is Fat Bob Smith and The Cure. According to the En-em-my, goff is coming back in a big way, which would explain the presence of numerous aging lardarses with awful backcombed barnets and smeared lipstick, accompanied by waddling tarts squeezed into ill-fitting corsets. Now, verily, is the time to pretend you cut yourself with a potato peeler at 16 because your dad wouldn’t let you tattoo eyeliner on your mush. Rather than that penis from Type O Negative, we have Tim Burton – TIM BURTON! – presenting The Cure with the ‘Best Ever Band in The History of the Universe, EVER’ award. Whoever thought you’d get the two worst haircuts in the galaxy together in the same place? Burton has the look and air of a man who’s been rudely awakened in a bin round the back of the venue, before being dragged on-stage and forced to bestow an award at gunpoint. Compared to the band, though, he looks positively radiant. Robert now looks like a shrivelled bollock with a haircut atop it, whilst the bald guitarist appears to have daubed on his bonce in biro. Their rather amiable, half-arsed trundle through da hitz leaves me cold.

Of course, nothing leaves me quite as Arcticly cold as the news that Oasis were, apparently, the best British group of the past year. Bonehead is turning in his grave and he isn’t even dead yet. Fortunately, even the cloth-eared luddites on the top deck recognise the injustice of this and boo unremittingly, which restores a molecule of my faith in humanity. Some payback after being subjected to a mole’s-eye view all night, and sound that can only be compared to listening to a transistor radio through the wall of a bank vault. All-in-all, this ghastly Nazi spunkfest has made want to hibernate under my dining table, surrounded by a protective layer of barb wire, far from the world of monosyllabic acceptance speeches and magazine editors that look like malformed hobbits. I would genuinely rather have been at the Brit Awards. Of course I’m even referring to the year when booze was banned. The enemy is amongst us. Public NME Number 1, please step forward in our time of need.

Hot Wax

I’ve been terrified of many things in my life – rollercoasters, girls, scrambled egg – but nothing makes me quite as anxious as waxwork models. Those shiny exteriors, the glazed stares, their creepy immobility – it’s just like your average indie rock gig in London. The (dreadful) teen-shlock film ‘House of Wax’ (based on an old Vincent Price number) suggested that the architects of such work are shit-eatingly demented cellar dwellers, and there’s surely some truth to that. I’m just glad I can reap logic from a movie that features Paris Hilton being skewered with a pickaxe.

‘Louis Tussauds House of Wax’ is, I’d wager, one of the closet real-life examples to the museum portrayed in that film. I’d never been there (I’ve never had any reason to visit Great Yarmouth – just like every other human being that hasn’t emerged from some primordial soup), which is a good thing - as judging by the works on display I doubt the proprietor would let me leave. Every detail I can dig-up on this chap screams ‘3rd-rate B-movie staple villain’; the kind who’d wear a blood-soaked sack-cloth and have a face like a wizened bollock. The man in question claims to be called ‘Peter Hayes’ – though I imagine he adopts the moniker ‘Vigo Vikernes the Usurper’ or suchlike on museum tours – is 80 years old, has run the museum for half a century and is named after Madame Tussauds’ great grandson. We might as well get some bint who used to be in Dawsons Creek to turn-up in Norfolk and run around screaming in a gore-splattered bikini.

Peter’s work is so stupefyingly abominable that it almost causes the universe to implode in on itself, though you have to give him some leeway being that he’s probably a hunchback, has a golden nugget instead of an eyeball and is forced to go about his drudgery using the two protruding stumps he was gifted instead of hands. His creations include Chris Tarrant and Anthea Turner – revolting, malformed beings that stepped straight from The Satanic Bible, and those are just the originals. Legend has it he has forgotten who some of his creations were meant to resemble, and that visitors to the museum are welcome to speculate. Incorrect guesses result in the tourist behind sent to an airless chamber beneath the museum, which they must share for eternity with Simon Weston – whose charred face is the only logical inspiration for this whole shambles.

I apologise profusely for the Hate Mail links (I am certainly no advocate of Oswald Mosley), but HERE are some more details about the exhibits, plus a couple of examples of the dark lord’s handiwork;




The main reason I have dragged-up Hayes’ corrupt conceptions (these were first passed around viral emails years back) is that Madame Tussauds – supposedly the uberlords of uncanny wax tributes – have been half-inching his work. They have just unveiled a homage to Jonathan Ross which is frankly identifiable only by the studio façade that surrounds the waxwork. Once more the money-churning machine rips-off ‘the little guy’. Although if Hollywood were to document this fable, Hayes would be anything but little…