King Khan was last in Australia for the festivities at Falls Festival, playing a gonzo set of RnB madness following a New Years’ set from Hilltop Hoods that could be generously described as lacklusture.

With a horns blazing version of the Saint’s classic Know Your Product – “one of my biggest influences from the beginning” – featuring at the close of the Shrines set to the ignorant bemusement of a crowd of Hilltop stragglers it’s unsurprising to hear that Khan’s memories of the festival aren’t overly flattering. As he states “spending New Years’ with Moby is not exactly my idea of New Years”.

However he did manage a new personal record on the tour by trading in his meal tickets for an “orgiastic meal” of 50 Tasmanian oysters in a single sitting. Khan swears he wasn’t competing with his band mates, it’s just the way Khan parties – “the organ player from the Shrines is French, so when we get together and if there’s oysters around…”

Orgiastic excess is nothing new for a man known for on stage lunacy, and occasional off stage legal issues; of his arrest in Kentucky last November he doesn’t have much to say – “everything’s fine. A gram of mushrooms was found in our car, and yeah, we went to prison”.

Khan was even recently “officially banned in San Francisco” after an all ages show where “we conjured GG Allin somehow… a gospel concert turned into a GG Allin concert, and it was all because of Jamieson. It was at the end of the show, me and Cole [Alexander from the Black Lips] got really crazy, there was a lot of nudity and naked stage diving. I was stage-diving in the audience four times and face-planted, and those people, they were freaking out.

Khan recommends that a look SF Weekly’s review of the show will “describe exactly what happened”. A quick scan of the comments reveals that Khan was “prosthelytizing, preaching to the crowd and being super F’d up. [He] started taking off clothes…stripped butt naked, jumped into the crowd to crowd surf, no one caught him, face planted SO HARD. Just swan dived to the ground face first. Took him 2-3 minutes to get back on stage, he was so disoriented, while BBQ kept playing and shaking his head, presumably thinking “my buddy’s an idiot”... [The Black Lip’s] guitarist was rubbing his cock in Khan’s face while he was “singing.” Pantomime butt fucking him…It was freakin nuts. And, that’s really only a summary… He hit the ground HARD a bunch of times. Farted into the mic…walking around with the mic up his ass…security got us out of there so fast after the show was over. I think they wanted to close up shop ASAP in case the cops showed, or something…”

Despite all this Khan and his friend BBQ (Mark Sultan) have been invited by Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson to bring the King Khan and BBQ Show to Sydney’s Vivid LIVE festival promising that “if the Opera House is able to get loose, we’ll be the ones to loosen it up.”

Though Khan hasn’t yet had the chance to speak to Reed, Khan is thrilled. Laughing he reveals that “when I told my family about it, their response was basically like ‘Oh well, you’ve finally achieved something!”

Picturing the famously sour Reed chatting to the authors of the hilarious and ridiculous Tastebuds might seem a little odd, but Khan believes that “of all the people in the world, Lou Reed might totally be on the same wavelength [and] completely understand what we’re doing. He’s one of our biggest influences, you know, from the beginning. I remember discovering The Velvet Underground when I was 15 or 16 years old, that pretty much changed my life and my way of seeing the world.”

Khan suggests that Reed’s influence may even have led to his decision to move to Berlin and marry a German woman “because of the accent, maybe… I remember in those early masturbatory stages, her voice was pretty tantalising!”

Though surely it’s a little messed up to be inspired by an album like Reed’s junkie opus Berlin to go and actually move to Berlin? “Oh man, it’s changed quite a bit from when he was hanging out here but it’s still got an incredibly wonderful and vibrant art scene, and I’m really happy to live here.”

Like Reed, Khan is curating a festival later this year, choosing the line up for a festival in Calgary with help from New Orleans garage rock/puppet show duo Quintron and Miss Pussycat. The bill features a list of “mostly friends and stuff” with Golden Triangle, Almighty Defenders, The Dutchess and The Duke, Bloodshot Bill, Box Elders, Georgiana Starlington, and the Spits all hitting the stage. Though, given the budget Khan’s dream line up would return the favour and give Lou Reed a spot on the bill.

The bill gathers together several members of the *Kukamonga Death Cul*t – a loose collective of musicians who bow to the altar of garage rock and soul. According to Khan the Kukamonga congregation heard the call and “gave up the idea of having a normal life and just chose music as a weapon and means of survival.”

The gospel Khan preaches doesn’t include Black Masses – “although maybe if we got more organised that could be fun!” – but even without rituals, Khan explains that playing live feels “pretty magical and there is something kind of like a spirit that’s summoned.”

At a recent gig in Memphis Khan’s music summoned the spirit of the late garage rock renegade Jay Reatard. “The first time I had returned to Memphis with Jay [Reatard] having passed away. In the last song of the set I threw my hands in the air, and said ‘this song is dedicated to Jay Reatard from Memphis, Tennessee, one of the greatest punk rockers ever,’ and everyone was cheering. As I was doing that, I could see at the back of the bar, this guy punched the owner of the bar in the face, and this tornado of fists started going around.

Eventually, while we were playing the song, the fighters got kicked out of the bar, and then it started pissing rain outside as soon as they got kicked out. Like boom, and then rain. It really felt like Jay coming down and giving me a hug, like ‘fuck you Memphis!’ Kind of just sending a reminder that he’s still around and that he can still fuck up Memphis! My tour manager broke into tears as soon as it happened, she was like ‘It’s Jay!’”

After playing with Reatard and Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox as part of an impromptu supergroup christened ‘Buttflower’ at Pitchfork music Festival, the trio had planned to record together. While Reatard’s death put an end to those plans, Khan still has plenty of side projects to keep him more than occupied. Both Khan and BBQ have side projects with their friend Bloodshot Bill; BBQ and Bloodshot as The Ding Dongs, and Khan and Bloodshot as Tandoori Knights who Khan describes as “old-school, kind of Bollywood rockabilly rock’n’roll”.

Khan has also been collaborating with the genius behind one of his favourite rap albums Liquid Swords – Wu Tang’s GZA. The unlikely pairing came about after Fab Five Freddy from Furious 5 was dragged to a King Khan and BBQ show in Toronto. As Khan excitedly recalls “[Freddy] totally flipped out! He really loved it.”

The next day, Freddy and GZA were doing a press conference for this big music festival on the history of hip-hop and invited Khan along, surprising Khan with a shout out. As Khan explains; “there were all these rap fans and rap journalists in there who had no idea what he was talking about.”

“After that I was hanging out with [GZA] and we were cracking up like crazy. I had a guitar with me, I was showing him some ideas, I had some riffs and he was freestyling over them. I ended up smoking weed with him for like, five or six hours…”

A typical day working with a founding member of the Wu Tang Klan then, even with the constant presence of several huge black minders from a sub-group of the Nation of Islam, called the Nation of Gods and Earths. “They just kept peeking in and nodding their heads, saying ‘Yeah man, that’s amazing’. I never imagined that I would be a part of the rap world in this way, [but] we’re supposed to collaborate for his next album. He said something about flying me in and doing some studio sessions and stuff, so I’m totally excited about it and I think that he’s amazing.”

According to Khan, GZA definitely has some of the Kukamonga sprit flowing in his sound “the way Wu-Tang Clan recorded, they would actually put stuff through the guitar amps and shit like that to make it more rough, more old-school, so in a way it’s not very far away from what our approach is to music. The rawness, and also taking old soul music and R’n’B music to that new ground.”

Let the Kukamonga spirit of raw soul and r’n’b move you as the King Khan and BBQ Show tours in June.

Wednesday 2nd June – The Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Thursday 3 June – Vivid LIVE, Sydney
Friday 4 June – Vivid LIVE, Sydney