The Black Lips are a beautiful collection of misfits, the spitting, kicking bastard spawn of Joey Ramone and The Gun Club’s Jeffery Lee Pierce.
They are at once the soundtrack to a Bret Easton Ellis novel, suburban subculture teens kissing face or a sleazy, yet thrilling, sexual encounter in an underground club’s filthy bathroom.
Tonight they have come to play and so have the audience who fervently writhe and jostle from the moment the band take the stage until the lights come up.
They blast into ‘Sea of Blasphemy’ and follow it up with ‘Family Tree’, which sets the tone for the rest of the set; balloons and toilet paper fly through the air accompanied by the sweaty torso of some young dissident.
Despite touring in promotion their new album Underneath the Rainbow the set is still littered with crowd favourites such as ‘Dirty Hands’ and the rolling ‘Oh Katrina’, from 2007’s Good Bad Not Evil, serving to compliment new material such as the sublime ‘Boys in the Wood’ with its inspired lead guitar lines.
The Black Lips clearly enjoy the chaos their music provokes in their audience and the resulting stage invasion, elicited by their popular hit ‘Bad Kids’, is a beautiful mixture of wild abandon and simmering violence, which can at times unnerve the most experienced security staff.
Thankfully, the band takes all of this in their stride, having no doubt witnessed the best and worst their crowds can produce, with guitarist Cole Alexander diffusing one fans over exuberance by playfully stating “You… yes, you! I’ll see you after the show!”
There is a pure ragged beauty to every song in this set and the performances are pitch perfect in their dirty, fuzzy execution; bands like The Black Lips come around far too infrequently, yet when they do we simply must give in to them, roll with them, drawl with them, and dance our stupid fucking asses off.
Words: David Mcphee
Photos: Michael Gallacher
