Kiria
Stash
Mötley Künst
St. Moritz Club, London
Friday June 29 2011
Back to the St. Moritz tonight - that scaled-down model of a night club that currently keeps the rock 'n' roll fire burning in the back streets of Soho.
And you can't get much more röck 'n' röll than Mötley Künst, who are - wait for it - an all-girl Mötley Crüe covers band. Now, as a general rule, I don't do covers bands. But Mötley Künst are so entertainingly conceptual that I think I'll make an exception.
It also helps that I don't actually know any of the Crüe's hair-metal anthems (I've led a sheltered life). Which means that to me the Künst come across as a feisty and energetic glam unit, slamming out stripped-down Runaways-style rock with suitable quantities of take-no-shit-ness. It's a shame, in a way, that the band's stripped-down Runaways rock is not actually original material. If it was, that would be a pretty good premise for a kickin' rock band. Hey, it worked for the Runaways.
With a name like Stash you'd expect our next band to be some sort of stoner outfit. But fortunately, the band doesn't live up to (or down to) its name. Stash, in fact, inhabit some sort of sixties garage - look, there they are, lurking behind the Ford Cortina. They sound like The Count Five in a pub brawl with Joe Meek. The guitar sounds like Keef Richards wading through a Louisiana swamp, the drums are loose-limbed and staccato - every snare shot sounds like a handclap - and the whole rackety, lo-fi noisefest is presided over by a punk rock Barbarella, who lets rip a glorious howl of a vocal while giving a vintage synthesizer a good seeing-to. That's when she's not accosting the audience and hurling herself off stage.
All due respect to the human beings on stage, but the vintage synthesizer is the star of the Stash show. It emits a horrorshow range of wails and shrieks and hisses, as if demons lurk inside its white-painted case. Its low-end distort-o-rumble, which in the world of Stash stands in for conventional basslines, is a foundation-shaking sonic discharge that could probably reduce concrete to a liquid state.
For all Stash's knowing sixties-isms, their gung-ho willingness to push it all out there makes the band a counter-intuitively contemporary proposition. After all, here we are in the twenty-first cerntury - a sci-fi century if ever there was one. And that's not a bad place to be if Stash are providing the soundtrack.
Tonight's gig marks the last appearance of Kiria's pop-punk-a-go-go show, apparently. She's hatched a plan to swerve in a new, more rockabilly direction, we're told.
That's a musical area hedged about with plenty of stylistic rules and traditions, of course. But I'm sure Kiria's take on rockabilly won't be too restricted by the conventions of the genre, just like her take on pop-punk is very much her own.
Tonight she comes barrelling off the starting line like a rock 'n' roll hot-rod, bouncing guitar riffs off the walls and instantly owning the room.
Kiria is so tall in her pink heels that she can only just fit under the low ceiling - there'll be no pogoing tonight, that's for sure - but it's her sparkily assertive presence that fills the place. You'd almost believe Marilyn Monroe's rock chick sister is leading the band tonight.
'Jelly Baby' is, as ever, a raucous romp that builds insistently to its naggingly catchy chorus, although the song's central character, the giant pink foam jelly baby that usually accompanies Kiria like a surrealist playmate, isn't here tonight. The St. Moritz club is too small to accommodate oversized confectionery.
But it's 'Live Sex On Stage' that provides the best ruckus of the night. The song is a Carry On-style cakewalk that manages to be gleefully cynical - "It's not about the music!" - as well as neatly demonstrating the way Kiria can wrap barbed humour in punchy, punky fun. By the end of the song Kiria is rolling around on the stage - no mean feat on the St. Moritz club's postage stamp - and mayhem has definitely descended. The rockabilly crowd don't know what's about to hit them.
Kiria:
Stash:
Mötley Künst:
