THE LUCKY NINE are, apparently, a UK rock/metal/hardcore/emo (call it what you will, I don’t know) supergroup, featuring members of A Hundred Reasons, Cable and A. They have certainly drawn a big crowd for such an early spot in the cavernous Academy, which is either due to their renown or the fact that the majority of the audience appears to be 15 and are probably making the most of the evening before they have to catch that pesky last train.
Fortunately The Lucky Nine don’t disappoint, serving up big plates full of Korn/Deftones-style rawk. Vocalist Colin Doran gives great guttural growling, providing a nice counterpoint to the band’s very English between song banter (‘Get lost big nose’ being as aggressive as they get with hecklers).
Next up are ELECTRIC EEL SHOCK, a three-man Japanese stoner rock combo, who RULE. Their concise, blistering set includes such self-penned delights as ‘Bastard’ and ‘Beat me’ as well as a great cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’.
To the delight of the audience, drummer Gian (who plays with four sticks – hurrah!) spends most of the gig naked save for a roll of toilet paper to save our blushes. In case we hadn’t noticed, at the end of Electric Eel Shock’s set he waves it about saying ‘Hey everyone look at my penis.’ Cheers, but I was trying not too.
Lead singer Aki proves himself to be a charismatic frontman throughout, using his (admittedly limited) English to whip the crowd into a frenzy, chanting ‘Heavy metal time’, ‘You are bastard’ and other such gnomic nuggets and ending the night holding his Flying V guitar with teeth alone. Now that’s got to hurt.
Aki is soon back on stage, introducing his ‘round-eyed friends’ THE BLOODHOUND GANG, who waste no time in setting their (particularly filthy) stall out. Within one song someone has thrown a vibrator on stage, with which lead singer Jimmy Pop Ali proceeds to mix his drink, pausing only to remark that he would rather it had been ‘in the butt of some fag from Manchester’ than used by ‘some fat girl from Liverpool’.
Overweight women and gay people seem to be particular enemies of Jim and his gang. They also don’t like people who don’t dance at their gigs, the NME, Muslims and ooh, so many others. They like breasts, drink, partying and The Office. One of the weirdest moments of what was for me the weirdest gig I’ve ever been to was their cover of David Brent’s ‘Free love on the free love highway.”
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There are too many moments of shock and outrage to mention, but to give you a sense of what was going on, here are a few of the quotes projected on the Bloodhound Gang’s backdrop throughout tonight’s entertainment: ‘Jimmy is gayer than Canal Street’; ‘The front row smells worse than Mel C’s fanny’; and the rather prosaic ‘Hail Satan’. At one point, Jimmy offers any male in the audience £25 to dance naked for the duration of a song. Amazingly, there are three volunteers who are of course roundly abused by the band throughout. The crowd absolutely loves everything that is (sometimes quite literally) thrown at them, making me wonder why Manchester should be such a magnet for masochists.
Their music is hardly worth remarking upon – suffice to say it does not deviate from the excruciatingly tedious nu/rap-metal template, which briefly threatened to take over the world in the late 1990s. The night ends with the group’s big UK hit ‘Bad Touch’ and bassist Evil Jared Hasselhoff projectile vomiting everywhere, including inside Jimmy’s pants. Nice.
The Bloodhound Gang are buffoons, and not particularly amiable ones at that. They embody a particularly American kind of party hearty nihilism, which this young crowd appears all too willing to embrace. They are, however, much as I hate to admit it, quite funny in a nasty, liberal-baiting sort of way. Shame about the ‘music’ though.
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