Having seen that MOUSTACHE OF INSANITY were on this bill I had to make sure I was there early enough to see them. Hey, any band with a name as good as that needs to be seen at least once, right?!!
Well it was duo's night at the Lexington and brought to us by the wonderful people at Upset The Rhythm as a warm up gig for Jad Fair's appearence at the All Tomorrows Party festival this weekend.
Moustache Of Insanity style themselves as being at the forefront of the Transglobal Casio Pop Gameboy Bleep Boom Ninja Revolution. Well of course they are. That description does neatly sum them up as from the opening of Those Hissing Days they were endlessly charming and very funny. Singer and keyboards guy Nik played a handheld Casio keyboard that made some great cheap sounds alongside Bill's nice basic guitar playing. The second song Postcards To Strangers made us laugh with it's premise of trawling the internet to find people to send postcards to or have them send you one and the dangers of giving strangers your address. They then had their Dinner Party where the imagine who they will invite to it and tell them that they hope they like fish and wine etc. It actually made the dinner party sound like a lot of fun.
They explained that the new album is called The Album Of Death: a good slice of which they played including there own philosophy "We Need More Awesome" and who could argue with that. I think that was when Nik switched to playing his gameboy and let's face it playing music on it is a good thing, right? It worked well on the love song Let's Get Married and what I have down as The Monkey & The Princess. That was better than the name suggests, though the highlight of the set was the Jad Fair song Drew Me A Duck and the story that introduced it wherein Nik goes to See Jad in America and afterwards buying a CD and Jad Fair drawing a duck on the cover for him. You'd have to write a song about that if you were in a band wouldn't you?
Nik outed himself as Swedish before they did Cactus and explained that it was a cover of an obscure Swedish Punk band's song and that he had taught Bill to sing it in Swedish even though Bill doesn't speak Swedish. It was way punkier than the rest of the set sounding a bit like Ebba Gron meets Dag Vag and it led us to the last song of the set there Horrorcore song Aaaargh! Noooooo! whose chorus is those two words screamed at top volume at us as a response to any number of horror movie cliches. MOI are well worth checking out if you want some good humoured low-fi action at www.moustacheofinsanity.com
Next Duo on were THE LOVELY EGGS from Lancaster who looked like they would be a garage rock duo with a love of the The Playne Jane meets the White Stripes, being a drums and guitar duo only with the girl Holly doing the singing and guitar playing and David on the drums and vocals. The opening salvo of People Are Twats soon put that preconception to bed as it opened with some squalling feedback from Holly as she rammed her Fender guitar into her Selmer amp before coming across almost all Tori Amos on us in the quiet bits. They were a bit 'out there' in many ways but then my plus one for the evening still can't get People Are Twats out of his head and as in his musical career he worked with among others U2/Brian Eno, The Levellers and Jimmy Nail that can't be a bad thing.
I Like Birds but I like Other Animals too was a bit odd in its' almost Black Sabbath riffs meets Tori Amos whimsy approach and quite funny with it. You What was pretty good and its' title is as good a question as any to ask a band like this as to why they do what they do. Fuck It, a song about doing what the hell you like, was a bit Voodoo Queens meets Younger Younger 28's in style as was In The Morning: a song about having bad hangovers and it would make a good riposte to The Younger Younger 28's We're Going Out.
In between songs they tried to make us laugh and failed and the worst failure was the intro to Olive as it really showed the North South divide as she went on about an expensive sandwich that cost her £3 and contained Olives and Olive Oil among other things and most of us were like, umm "£3 is a cheap sandwich" and trying to equate an olive falling out of a sandwich with its's place in the universe sort of failed as they tried to rework the Spider and the Fly style scenario. Panic Plants was just plain odd and Don't Look At Me I Don't Like It is an odd sentiment for someone in a band to sing about.
Scraggletooth saw them walk out into the audience with David playing a ukelele. Itwas sort of ok. They finished with Digital Accordian: a song that featured an electric Kazoo and much screaming and anger like it was a death metal lo fi homage to the accordian - most odd in a strangely compellingly Northern way. Find out more at www.thelovelyeggs.co.uk
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Final duo of the night was JAD FAIR playing about 300 yards away from where I first saw him at the old Islington Powerhaus. That is now a bank of all things to turn a legendary pub rock venue into. It has been about 20 years since I last saw Jad live and it was great to get the chance to see him again accompanied by a nameless drummer. He opened with Shake Baby Shake and sounds unchanged after all these years: all high-pitched faux naive vocals and effects covered custom built guitar. He soon led straight into the first hit of the set, Cherry Pie, the old Half Japanese classic that still sounds great.
All or a good slice of hs back catalogue is due for re-issue next year and if you can't wait that long go over to www.jadfair.org where you can buy downloads of all the Jad Fair you could ever want.
This set was rapid and they went almost straight into Go See My True Love and with barely a breath between he did Go Tell Ma if that title is correct. I think it was introduced as being a Daniel Johnston song, either way he had me hooked straight in as the drummer kept up his strong backbeat for whatever way Jad was going to take it. They went back to the roots of Rock & Roll with a very odd version of Round and Round that had loads of distorted guitar and straining vocals that took that old classic in new directions.
Red Dress still sounds like a great song to me as did the classic King Kong. There wasn't much time to pause before they did My Baby Is A Roadrunner which may have been the first song of the night to feature Jad's special guitar trick of having the guitar neck on a hinge so you can move it forwards and make the strings real loose and well distorted. I thought it was an optical illusion the first time he did it.
The hits kept on coming with I Got An Angel and I Wanna Be Your Superman, both of which still sound cool. One of the odder covers of the night was Sunny side Of The Street that didn't sound all that sunny but rather angst filled even though Jad looked like he was really enjoying himself and in no need of a Rocking Chair. Maybe that was because he was singing I Don't Care Anymore. Well I have to say the audience certainly did care.
Chicago My Kind Of Town has rarely sounded like it did tonight but the lo-fi fuzz of it certainly sounded like some parts of Chicago that I've been to. That was followed by a great stop start version of I'll Change My Style which is one of my favourite Jad Fair Half Japanese songs. He kept making the gaps between finishing the lines a bit longer and it worked to great effect. It was then time for Jad to bring the Funk to us with a cover of the Bootsy Collins theme tune to Caspar The Friendly Ghost. In Jad's hands it sounded a whole lot less friendly and well fuzzed and distorted. It was great to hear it totally assaulted like that.
What's that we hear (yes it is) Sounds Of Joy & Love that could almost be a Rotary Connection style tune in the right hands but these are not those hands and instead it is full of lo-fi madness and greatness and more guitar neck bending antics. Roman Candle lights the room up and brings us to the set closing Broken Dreams which is something I doubt Jad has many of having managed to produce music for over 35 years and also having countless Art exhibitions and books out there. It all finished in a hail of screams and distortion with Jad completely removing the neck from his guitar.
He was soon back for an acapella encore of New Orleans that he sang while wandering around the front of the audience and with us clapping along at the end, he sat at the edge of the stage and invited anyone who wanted to to go and shake his hand.
Great to see Jad again and thanks to everyone involved in putting on this very enjoyable show.
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