This is Gay For Johnny Depp: a man with the microphone stalks around the stage in front of the drumkit dressed in a black button-down shirt and stars’n’stripes boxer shorts, alternating between calling the crowd “babies” and making obtuse statements about abortion. To his left, an intense skinny guy standing behind a guitar takes the spaces in the dialogue for himself and fills them with a contrasting mellow campness, while to his right a lanky bassplayer in the trousers that the Summer Of Love forgot pays close attention to his battered Rickenbacker.
As far as looks and behaviour are concerned, then, Gay For Johnny Depp are not your average post-hardcore band. Musically we’re on more familiar territory, however; it’s an angular and punky attack with some groove to the bottom end, topped off by almost incoherent screeching from frontman Marty Leopard. And while guitarist Sid Jagger is a foil to his act (the Cannon to his Ball, perhaps), it’s all about Leopard. He is the focus; he is the conduit; he is Gay For Johnny Depp.
Which means that Gay For Johnny Depp is essentially a bucketful of condensed controversy thrown at the face of the audience like pig entrails at a vegan peace march. The stage show and the songs are engineered with ideological confrontation in mind, which puts Gay For Johnny Depp in a lineage that features such notable bands as Fugazi and Consolidated. Or at least it would do, if it wasn’t for the fact that there seems to be very little substance below the surface.
Watching Gay For Johnny Depp is like playing Red-State Conservative Knee-Jerk Bingo. Acting like homosexuals? Check. Saying bad things about Jesus? Check. Frequent (and seemingly context-free) mentions of abortion? Check. Denigration of the glorious name and reputation of the United States Of America, her flag and her freedom? Checkity-check-check – these here boys need ‘em a good hiding, yessah.
However, assuming that Gay For Johnny Depp are trying to challenge reactionary political attitudes, it doesn’t seem to have the desired effect on this side of the pond. This probably has a lot to do with the fact the the British, while sadly no strangers to reactionary behaviour, respond to different triggers compared with Middle America. Camp humour has been mainstream here since before the sixties; no one here goes so far as to bomb abortion clinics because they’re pro-life (not yet, at least). And as far as defaming the Ol’ Stars And Bars goes, it’s a daily occurrence – at least outside of 10 Downing Street. As Jane’s Addiction once sang, “nothing’s shocking”; no one here tonight is offended.
In fact, the majority of the audience are more amused than anything else, with a scattering of people cat-calling in an attempt to goad greater aggression out of the band. Which would be quite the accomplishment – Leopard is a ball of energy from the moment the music starts, starting off dressed as a priest and ending up in shirt and shorts. He leaps onto and off of the drumkit; he flails about wildly at the stage edge; he sits on the pit barrier and howls into a photographers lens; he prowls the among the audience and gets in people’s faces (and loses his temper when someone fronts up). There’s no faulting the energy or commitment of Gay For Johnny Depp.
But the sincerity, well, that I’m not so sure about. I can’t help but feel that Gay For Johnny Depp are confrontational for the sake of being confrontational, rather than for the sake of actually having anything deeper to say. Sure, they are talking about issues that have currency, but they’re not actually addressing them at all – it’s all “hey, look – bad stuff! Ignorance! Whatchagonnadoo?”
Perhaps we’re supposed to do our own thinking, but I’d have been more politically stimulated by an approach that involved more than making sure that most of the songs have the word “fuck” in the title and chorus. Of course, the possibility remains that Gay For Johnny Depp are not actually taking themselves as seriously as I’ve assumed they are - but comedy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
The lyrics of the penultimate song of the set seal my opinion; this sort of high-school political angst has to be a piss-take. The chorus runs:
“I’m so angry, just can’t ignore / fuck the revolution, let’s start a war”
How can you take that seriously? Gay For Johnny Depp come across like an energetic caricature of Electric Six as a hardcore band, but not so funny … and Electric Six were never all that funny to start with.
Related articles:
Posted in Live reviews |
Tags: Gay For Johnny Depp, hardcore, political, spazzcore
