Nemesis To Go - Live: Drop Dead Festival 2007

Drop Dead Festival 2007
Rock Café, Prague
Day 3: Saturday November 3 2007

Bands in order of appearance:
Naughty Zombies
Sixteens
Din Glorious
Antiworld
Charles De Goal
Norma Loy
Lene Lovich

Day three of our rock 'n' roll excursion to Prague, and I approach the Naughty Zombies with caution. As with Moldig, the name doesn't quite work for me. Naughty Zombies? What is this, a comedy act? Some sort of novelty band for children? I am British and I don't do twee!

Fortunately, and also much like Moldig, the Naughty Zombies transcend their name - in this case, with a beat box-driven rampage through the fuzz-punk zone. The instrumentation is minimal: just that thumping beat, overdriven guitar from a punkish plank-spanker stage left, and, occasionally, a bit more guitar, played by the singer when she's not shrieking around the stage and taking her clothes off.

There's also a random backing shouter (I can hardly call him a singer) whose sole function seems to be to holler out each line of lyric two seconds after the lead vocalist sings them. As he has bandages wrapped around his face for most of the set, his enunciation is hardly crystal clear, but it seems making a faintly disturbing shouty noise is the main intention. It's as if Mark E. Smith of The Fall's loony brother has got up on stage. Strange though it may seem, the cumulative madness of all this works. I don't know what the Naughty Zombies are on, but I'm not sure if they took too little of it or too much tonight.

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The appearance of the Sixteens at Drop Dead this year seems to be an oddly moveable feast. Depending on which bit of publicity bumph you happen to pick up, the band are either on stage late tonight - or right now.

Well, here they come, assembling their cat's cradle of wires, stacking up the boxes of tricks. Now it is, then. With a clank and a thump and a bump and a grind they're away, Kristo Bal weaving behind a bass, Veuve Pauli frowning at his keyboards. All of a sudden we're shaking our booties at the weirdo disco.

For the genius of the Sixteens is that no matter how outré they might get, the foundation of their sound is that implacable take-no-shit beat, which serves to keep at least one toe in the accessible zone even as the music calls itself a taxi and heads off into the left-of-left-field. In short, you can dance to it.

And, here at Drop Dead, where just about every band we've seen so far is firmly rooted in ye olde rock 'n' roll, the sudden appearance of the Sixteens, art concepts to the fore and off-kilter rhythms jockeying for position in the mix, is a welcome jolt in the direction of un-rock 'n' roll.

If all of this suggests that the Sixteens have a struggle on their hands to entertain the rocked-up hordes of Drop Dead, let's put that one to bed right now. The band are received with keen enthusiasm by a crowd that is - I suspect - rather relieved to have something unequivocally different served up for their entertainment after all the punk rockin'. It's also pertinent to note that although the Sixteens hail from San Fransisco, they have toured Europe extensively, and even based themselves in Berlin for a while. These adventures have given the band a useful profile and a healthy fanbase on this side of the Atlantic.

Old Europe knows the Sixteens and digs their crazy shit - and a good chunk of the Sixteens Euro Army is down the front right now, kicking out the jams to the mutant disco sound, quailing in mock horror as Kristo brandishes a banana over the monitors. I suspect all this is something that the Drop Dead crew, who, as I've noted previously, regard everything from an American perspective, didn't really anticipate. If they'd realised how popular the Sixteens were in Europe these days, I suspect the band would not have been shunted into such an early slot.

As things stand, the band even suffers the indignity of getting the set cut short - bang on the intro to 'Ventilation Fans', too. Suddenly, the sound goes down, and it's all over. What happened? A technical hitch? Or did the plugs get pulled? Nobody's saying. But it's hard to escape the feeling that one of the leading bands at the festival just got short changed.

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I believe I mentioned, with reference to the Sixteens, that the Drop Dead crowd seemed keen to see something different. Well, now things get really different. Din Glorious might take their name from the Virgin Prunes, but they take their stage act from the fine traditions of vaudeville slapstick.

Now, I don't know if Din Glorious themselves would agree with that - I suspect the band probably sees itself in the art-industrial lineage of Test Dept and Einsturzende Neubauten. There's certainly a bit of metal-bashing taking place on stage.

Various found objects get a gleefully destructive walloping - a shopping trolley, some chemical cans, a length of ventilation duct, a Shure SM58 microphone - but it's all done in the spirit of circus clowning, as if the Din Glorious chaps can't help their inner merry pranksters from showing through.

Somewhere under the smashing and bashing and the larking and the barking, Din Glorious make a robustly rhythmic racket that hangs together rather well - in fact, I suspect they spend much time and effort on songwriting, rehearsals, arrangements, and all that traditional musician-type stuff, just like a normal band. Then they get on stage, hurl scrap metal around, cover themselves with shaving foam and body paint, and take all their clothes off.

Yes, indeed, we get full-frontal nudity as a bonus, as two of the Din Glorious gents take it upon themselves to show us their tackle, to the accompaninent of shrieks of either horror or delight (I shall tactfully refrain from being specific there) from the ladies present. The band even gets an encore, which I suppose is a suitable reward for getting their bollocks out. Perhaps the Sixteens Antiworld should've stripped off, too - then maybe they would've got a full length set.

But here's a thing. If Din Glorious are serious about carving out a future as a band, I think they need to rein in their lark-about tendencies, entertaining though these are. If Din Glorious are going to make it, it'll be on the basis of the music, not the slapstick or the clowning or the gratuitous display of the band members' dicks. Put 'em away, lads!

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Antiworld are one of those reliable bands which always deliver the regular show, come rain or shine, hell or high water. You know you're going to get pacy punkisms with horror-schmorror lyrics rattled out in a pell-mell rant. You know it'll be fast and trashy, you know everyone on stage will be rockin' like a Halloween party round at Ed Wood's house. You know how it's going to be, before the first note is struck.

In short, Antiworld rock it up, horror style, with such dependable reliability that it's almost superfluous to describe individual performances. Here, Antiworld do their thing with their customary dash, but as with Ausgang I've seen this show a few too many times to get particularly excited. Even the sequence in which vocalist Grandma Fiendish brandishes a severed head on a tea tray has to my certain knowledge been part of the act for at least half a decade. The band rattle out their trademark spook-punk well enough, but frankly I think they could do it in their sleep by now. One new element to note is the band's new guitarist, but when the most interesting thing you can say about a band is 'They've got a new guitarist' it's probably time to find another band.

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And here comes another band. Charles De Goal comprise a collection of scruffy blokes who look like they've just strolled in from the pub, but under the defiantly image-free exterior of this band there beats a collective heart of stripped-down minimalist new wave. A beat box duels with a human drummer; two guitars fight it out. The bass nails the beat to the floor, the vocals are a gruff chant.

Now, all that might not sound like the stuff of which wild excitement is made, but when all those elements are unceremoniously slapped together with a healthy dose of exprimento-wave attitude, the overall result is a heady brew. With the brutal brevity of Wire, the staccato beats of the Gang Of Four, and the gung-ho bash-it-out approach of Metal Urbain (who were, perhaps significantly, Charles De Goal's contemporaries on the new wave scene of 80s Paris) Charles De Goal strip ye olde rock music to the bone, and then flay the bone to the marrow. And they do it all while looking like a bunch of schoolteachers on a day off.

If you suggested to this band that they should get themselves some mohawks and tart up in fishhnet, I think you'd get a very dusty answer. And yet in some ways they're the punkiest punks at the festival. Charles De Goal prove that less is more. And I think we need more of that.

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Although you could be forgiven for thinking that Norma Loy is a female solo artist, in fact the name conceals a band - apparently old-skool heroes from the French art-punk scene, or something, although I confess I've never heard of them before.

If truth be told, I don't think I've missed much, for Norma Loy strike me as a risibly pretentious outfit - the complete antithesis of Charles De Goal's effective minimalism. Less is more? Here, more is more.

Fronted by a bald bloke who's given to melodramatic gestures and much angst-ridden grandstanding as he hollers out the lyrics (he also looks irresistably like Shrek when he steps into the green light), Norma Loy veer alarmingly close to the prog rock zone as they thunder grandly through a selection of frankly pompous histrionics, thinly disguised as rock songs.

Sometimes, Norma Loy sound like a heavy metal Genesis, and that's the good stuff. At other times, it's just tiresome drama school rock. For additional art points (at least, I assume that's the theory) the band even have a mime artist on stage. As the music thunders, a woman in a diaphanous white dress assumes a variety of agonised poses and comically tormented facial expressions, which suggest she's in the throes of acute bowel trouble. After enduring an entire set of Norma Loy's ridiculously over-affected bombast, I know how she feels.

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After all that, it's a relief to find that Lene Lovich proposes to give us the minimalist version of her show tonight. On stage, it's just Lene herself, plus her multi-instrumentalist collaborator Les Chappell on keyboards and guitar (but not at the same time). The lights go down: Lene steps into a pool of white. She dips into her sack of songs, pulling out oldies and newies alike, and getting a fine reaction from the crowd for everything.

It's a brave move, risking a minimal set in a headline slot, when every conventional rock 'n' roll instinct would surely be to wheel on the heavy artillery. But Lene Lovich has a voice that can rattle the beer bottles in the fridge behind the bar, and a natural stage presence which means the absence of a full band isn't even noticeable. 'Wicked Witch' is a blast, a pantomime anthem; 'The Insect Eater' is an entire compendium of Hammer Horror movies neatly rolled up into a song. 'Lucky Number' is a delightful romp, a song that can paste a grin on the most cynical face, but perhaps oddly - since it was Lene's biggest hit - it's not the climax of the set. That honour goes to 'Home', a number with more depth and darkness, and yet a song that lends itself rather well to its role as the rumbustious grand finale. And for this one, the artillery is winched into position.

To be exact, Antiworld are winched into position, and for all my carping above about Antiworld's never-changing performances of their own material, they rise to the occasion splendidly. 'Home', in the hands of the Lovich/Antiworld supergroup, is the rock 'n' roll avalanche that sweeps the evening to a close.

Essential links:

For day 4 of the Drop Dead Festival, go here.

Drop Dead Festival: Website | Myspace

For more photos from the Drop Dead Festival,
find the bands by name here.