Melvins / Big Business / Porn – Manchester 02/10/08
The Academy 3, Manchester 02/10/08
The last time I saw legendary rock beasts the Melvins was the 1992 Reading Festival. Now sixteen wasted years later, its time to meet up again with the godfathers of sludge. Wiser, greyer, meaner, and with the reality shock of having an adolescent metal loving son in tow, I entered the dark confines of Academy 3 to be assaulted by a raging electronic maelstrom in the form of Porn. Yowza! This was fucking hyper intense and required me to focus and get a good grip on myself, the usual reaction when confronted with porn. Floppy hat and Wizard beard main man Tim Moss was hulking over seemingly thousand of pounds worth of Dr Who-like equipment whilst an anonymous but eminently competent Billy Anderson replacement savagely pissed around with his bass and hurt my particularly vulnerable left inner ear. The rhythmic limp haired legend known only as Dale Crover, clumped on stage and joined in the fray and the band really started to roll.
Porn took off like protons in a super collider with the charging instrumental ‘Succulento’ (the terrific opener off their last album), Crover’s astonishingly powerful and adept drumming providing two million brake horsepower to the inter stellar grunge buggy that is Porn. No vocals, unlike their recorded stuff, just noise and fury and brute psychedelia…plus samples of a baby crying interspersed with gunshots (that one really made my son grin like a crack gibbon). Much of what they did made me fondly think of the Butthole Surfers in their heyday, crossed with early Hawkwind, Merzbow and the Vietnam war. More porn please, vicar.
Time for a quick piss and a Red Bull and Big Business were up on stage, belting out big-arsed rock numbers like the bastard mutant offspring of Ted Nugent and Noddy Holder. Chunky glam rock pile drivers like ‘Grounds For Divorce’, ‘Just As The Day Was Dawning’ and the immense closing track ‘The Drift’, made the crowd bounce around and fist punch the air like horny metal loving Neanderthals. Hefty bass playing singer Jared Warren (great voice) and power drummer Coady Willis made the sound of many strong men and delivered extra large cheesy rock thrills to an audience who wanted to move their pelvis’s like bored suicide chimps in a run down zoo. There is nothing particularly deep or genius about Big Business and their forcefully brash stompcore, but there is nothing wrong with it either. Hot and solid, loud and loveable: Tommy Vance would’ve creamed his ripped wranglers.
Another piss and another drink and the Melvins were on in no time at all: twin drummers of the experimental rock implosion Dale and Coady booming out the intro to ‘Nude With Boots’, then enter the toad god with the frizzed hair apocalypse: the near mythical and distinctly cartoon-like Buzz Osborne, a.k.a. ‘King Buzzo’, who belted into song with his characteristically strong and resonant voice. BB’s bassist Jared was doubling up on vocals, so you had two men shouting and two men drumming (at times it sounded like Adam and the Ants on mushrooms). Most of the set was culled from the last two albums (oddcore belters like ‘Billy Fish’, ‘Civilized Worm’, ‘The Hawk’ and ‘Suicide In Progress’) plus a few choice old beauties like ‘Eye Flys’ (which sounded utterly superb in a creepy loner type of way), ‘Honey Bucket’ and ‘Boris’ were slipped in to remind the crowd of their twenty plus years of musical pioneering. Me and the young ‘un were right down the front for the first half, lapping up the historical vibes of the world’s first and foremost proto-sludgers, drinking in the quirky power of genuine American rock eccentricity.
It would be a stupid and sad cop-out for the ever inventive Melvins to tour a crowd pleasing ‘greatest hits’ package like many ‘old’ bands do. They’re above that kind of lame showbiz shit. Time moves on, and so have these babies. They are still a mightily progressive force, and in many listeners opinions have recently recorded two of their strongest albums of the last ten years or so. Their name is legend, their back catalogue stretches on for miles, their influence immortal – although no one at my son’s school had heard of them when he told them where he was going tonight. I blame ‘The X Factor’.
Scribed by: Adam Stone
Photos by: Lee Edwards
