I’ve had this running theory for the last few years that most (if not all) of the arts are the direct result of mental illness. Need evidence? Look no further than pretty much every single creative output you’ve ever seen in the last 50 years. Consider the visual arts: Jackson Pollack, Brett Whiteley, the performance art of Stellarc, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and a whole host of copycat artists pissing into jars and shitting on canvases. Consider the performing arts: William Shatner, Pee Wee Herman, Angelina Jolie, film directors Quentin Tarentino and Michel Gondry, pretty much ANYTHING Tom Cruise has done in the last 10 years and the all kinds of batshit insane that is Crispin Glover. Consider Hunter S Thompson. Consider Gordan Ramsay. Consider the humble street mime. Consider the idiot who chooses to write THIS blog each week. Consider the ENTIRE fashion industry. Arts as a whole is absolutely crawling up the walls and licking the light sockets with howling dysfunction. And clearly I’ve left the best till last, for how could we forget the music industry! Built on the very foundations of blowing out your own head with a shotgun, overdosing on heroin, dying from autoerotic asphyxiation and choking on in a pool of your own vomit (and need I mention, Michael Jackson?). Yeah fucked if I know where I’m going with all this right now but bear with me here; I’m sure it’ll all make sense soon enough.
So here we are at The Ed Castle for another lazy Saturday night. Seriously, is it just me or has Friday become the new “Saturday” and Saturday become the new “Sunday”? Fuck. Maybe I’ve been waking up in the afternoon and going to sleep in the morning for far too long and now my entire compass is blown, who knows? Either way there’s a stillness in the air tonight. You can see it on the streets, you can smell it in the air: part of it’s the Olympics, part of it’s winter, a large portion of it is everyone getting five flavours of twatted on a Friday night and now they’re too fucked to walk. Can’t blame them really. To think I got home at 7 this morning and I’m doing this again tonight? sheeeeiiiit! wait.. where was I? Oh yeah! The Ed Castle. And in no relation to anything insane I’ve just written we present tonight’s live music entertainment: Billy Bishop Goes To War and The Waterslides. You’ve probably never heard of either of them (shit, even I didn’t know who they were a month ago). But trust me, give them a year and we’ll ALL be hearing about them. Oh yes! Soon these two bands will be the talk of legend!
Billy Bishop Goes To War
Our opening act for the night Billy Bishop Goes to War could loosely be described “shoegaze” in quite the same way that George W Bush could loosely be considered “president” of The United States. We all know it’s not true, but for the sake of argument let’s just pretend that they ARE. Granted they still have a great many things in common WITH the sounds of shoegazer. Their thick guitar sound that swoons and soars with layer upon layer of melodious feedback and dreamlike echo delay. Their predilection for addressing the floor as their audience (and not the one hundred of so people that may happen to be standing right in front of them). How one song ever so effortlessly flows into the next. And the fact that Spoz is one lazy music journalist. No this isn’t quite shoegazer, this is something else altogether. The key is in their lead singer Josh. You may remember him as that idiot with the shitcrazy haircut from Poly & The Statics, you may also remember for not necessarily “singing” but shrieking like a bag of cats fighting. It’s the sort’ve straightjacket mania that appears to draw from many influences: Darren Cross from Gerling, Yoko Ono from the Plastic Ono Band and Bobcat Goldthwait from Police Academy. You’d probably think a howling mental patient like this would be the last thing that shoegaze would ever need (and don’t get me started on the rest of the band) but in the case of Billy Bishop Goes To War it’s just one of many things that makes them all the more awesome!
To imagine Billy Bishop Goes To War is to start with something simple like say Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation” or My Bloody Valentine. Then throw in the howling melancholy of The Arcade Fire’s “Funeral”, the bi-polar disorder that is Modest Mouse, the hippy free-for-all of Gerling, and the gypsy folk of Beirut (especially in their final song). Add a dash of Lou Reed in the vocals of their bass guitarist, Tom. Set it adrift on a leaky 15th century Portugese sailing vessel and then set it on fire. Watch as the band scurry about like rats, bump into each other and lurch about like drunks. Sense the rising panic that builds from something that once so serene. Then watch it all degenerate into a cavalcade of noise at the end of it all as barely a word spoken between band and audience. Yup, clearly there’s something just a little bit “wrong” here: but it’s in all these apparent dysfunctions and howling insanity that true genius is found..
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Billy Bishop Goes To War finish a jaw dropping set, make their way off the stage and file out’ve the room silently, only to pause briefly as Josh experiences a little trouble “finding the exit”, bumps into the wall over and over like a malfunctioning robot making whimpering sounds, until their manager Matt Hayward finally spots him, herds him out of the room and packs him back into his box. A rather lengthy changeover then occurs as a series of keyboards, samplers, drumpads, turntables and whatnot are loaded onto stage: followed by even more befuddling and insane array of smoke machines, sirens, strobe lights, a ceiling mounted bubble machine, and a home made contraption that appears to be a mix between a cardboard box and a leaf blower that I’m told is a confetti cannon.. Sheeeiiit! I don’t know about you, but I’m frightened!
This is course could be nobody else but The Waterslides. You’ve probably never heard of them before, and chances are the few of you who HAVE heard of them before are probably still locked up in a loony bin somewhere rocking back and forth in foetal position and shrieking shit about aliens. So allow for me a brief introduction. Three members of The Waterslides: Tim Whitt on vocals, Jimmy Beano on bass and Luke Eygenraam on drums used to be in an infamous act known as Central Deli Band. A band that some of you may remember as the support act to The Grates back when they toured Adelaide in October 2006, whilst most of the rest of you will only remember this shit after intense hypnotherapy sessions with your hospital psychiatrist.
The Waterslides
They say you should never work with children or animals. Into this list, as a rock photographer, I’d also like to include: smoke machines, strobe lights, sirens, confetti cannons or pretty much everything else these lunatics threw at me tonight. Not only has age not mellowed them, it has actually made them MORE hyperactive. They’re a mashup act: parts electro, funk, bigbeat and hiphop. They’re a block rocking party band shamelessly ripping samples from just about any song you can think of and making it their own. They’re every single one of your orifices being gang fucked by clowns. You could probably throw a kitchen sink worth of influences at this band and it would stick, but the clearest indicators appear to be The Avalanches, Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers (circa 2003-2008), a smidgen of Basement Jaxx and all those braindamaged techno jams Regurgitator used to love doing (ie, see: “G7 Dick Electro Boogie” off their Tu Plang Kon Uauk album or “Are You Being Served?” off of Art). Either way they make the spastic hissyfit of The Grates look like Sigur Rós, they make Rage Against The Machine sound like Air, and they make my brain collapse into a blackhole singularity just thinking about it.
The last time they played here, five of them jumping about managed to cause a stage collapse, they smoked out the room to the point you couldn’t see anything two metres past your face and a few wildly unsubstantiated rumours even claim that someone actually shat themselves in the audience. YEEOUCH ! To say that this would be a photography challenge tonight would be THE understatement of the decade. From all those idiots flapping their arms about, to the drummer hidden under an impenetrable veil of fog, to the flashing strobes, to the screaming throng behind me dancing up a storm, sometimes I’d almost forgot there was any music out there. Although granted, in comparison to Central Deli Band, at least these freaks can actually HOLD a tune. In fact, save for the occassional sampler malfunction, it was surprisingly well put together!
Of course I realise 90% of this shit is nothing but smoke and mirrors. I realise it’s a circus act bordering on a joke. I also realise without all this, if I judged them on the merits of their music and their performance alone this shit WOULDN’T be worthy of such a high rating. But when it’s this fucking crazy? who fucking cares! Say what you will about The Waterslides but they sure know how to throw one FUCK of a party. And lets face it, sometimes that’s all we need!
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to listen to their music now on 
