The Horrors, London Electric Ballroom
The Horrors' Faris Badwan
June 5, 2009
Mass hysteria has surrounded The Horrors’ Primary Colours, an astonishing second album to succeed the hype and frenzy that the Southend five-piece found themselves swathed in first time around. While Strange House is portrayed by those late to the party as little more than a cod-goth side project by a group of Mighty Boosh cameoists (and I can hardly defend it implicitly – truth be told I’d only heard ‘Sheena Is A Parasite’, ‘Jack The Ripper’ and ‘She Is The New Thing’ until about one month ago), the reality provides that it was one of the most snarling, striking and inventive albums to have cut the grade over the past few years. Not so much aping psychobilly, The Cramps and The Birthday Party, The Horrors challenged our expectations and eardrums with a sound of their own.
Two years on, and just like the rest of the music press, I have been labelling Primary Colours with extortionate levels of hyperbole. This path was carved out neatly until I purchased the latest issue of Plan B (RIP), wherein the first negative review I had come across existed; the critic focused on The Horrors’ try-hard ethos, in a way their dictatorial stance. The way they’d put their influences through a sieve and a magnifying glass, and then dumbed them down into some sort of step-by-step guide. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist. A small halt in the love affair, I thought, until I re-listened, once again, and accepted that yes, The Horrors are trying hard but why shouldn’t they? Yes, The Horrors issue a diktat on your reactions to their kraut disco arpeggios, but isn’t that great? And yes, The Horrors’ influences are right there for all to see, but damn straight, they seem to know their music and what the hell’s wrong with that?
It induced a further question on whether it’s better to jump on or off of the bandwagon – that their sound draws on influences not recently hyped in reinvented form potentially justifies the brouhaha surrounding Primary Colours. If you jump on, you’re either of your time or adhering to convention; if you jump off, you’re ‘making a statement’. The reason why The Horrors have suddenly gone big-scale is because they have introduced a bandwagon all of their own, refining it as their catalogue expands.
The glissando-shrouded stick insects hit the Electric Ballroom’s stage at around 9pm, sheathed in the fuzz of the red filter; the crowd are wild for them, and you can tell by the sneer in frontman Faris Badwan’s eyes that he’s thinking, “gosh, look at you all, an amass of subjects flailing exactly like we planned, bobbing up and down precisely how we predicted you would”. They’re so unburdened by this; it’s the ethos spurring them on. Bassist Spider Webb (who played synths on the first album) is decked out in a Hawaiian shirt and high-waisted 80s cocktail waiter trousers, his angular pudding bowl hair cutting a fine silhouette to accompany his inconceivably Human League-esque posturing; Von Grimm on guitars is nigh-on subsumed into his instrument; Badwan is possessed, fixated on the songs, occasionally holding his arms up to the front few rows as if he’s the second coming. This is a band to watch almost as much to listen to.
The sullen darkness of Primary Colours is crystal clear on the stage tonight – the band are super-tight. On ‘New Ice Age’, the convenient bridge between The Horrors’ two albums, Badwan’s Germanic screaming on “THE AGONY!!!” refrain is staggeringly desperate. The sound is like a sonic cavern, turning into itself with the closing of every bar.
That ever-long intro on ‘Sea Within A Sea’ sees my heart thumping out of my skin, waiting for the ecstasy. It’s lyrically sublime too, talk of a “scraping sky” and dreams staying “rooted in the shallows” piling image upon image on top of the already almost overwhelmingly intangible fuzz. Their outlines are iconoclastic, the strobes adding to the fervour. ‘Who Can Say’ is a romantic rather than romanticised collision of lines and emotions, Badwan reproaching the mic stand entirely unhinged, all eyes on him.
The mess of ‘I Only Think Of You’, the sound and vision of guitar lines being virtually carved out on ‘Do You Remember’, the passionate urgency of ‘Three Decades’ and the softer-edged subversive joie de vivre of ‘Scarlet Fields’ – the set is full of contrasts overlaid by a deep, uninhibited vision of darkness. While Primary Colours sounds ferocious on record, the excitement emitted by the band on the stage is of another world. The pitch-bending so clearly encouraged by producer (and Portishead pioneer) Geoff Barrow brings the sound of ‘The Rip’ even closer to its audience, yet somehow even further away.
The encore comprises songs from Strange House. Sounding altogether more unfinished, less tight, it’s clear to see that this band know exactly what they’re doing at all points – and where next? ‘Sheena Is A Parasite’ oozes the infamous staccato goth like an illicit pleasure, a black-eyed lovechild knowingly awkward in its existence, put out there by the five incarnations of The Horrors in a way they’re continually trying to plan. Quite simply, this show is one of the finest scenes a person could ever expect to bear witness to.
In case you didn’t get it, The Horrors are truly something to be excited about – not just as a deliberately po-faced a route to krautrock, Holger Czukay, Bauhaus, My Bloody Valentine and a whole bunch more, but as way more than adequate ends in themselves. The Horrors are, quite simply, The Horrors; they’ve the balls and brains to tell you exactly how to react, and you’re just a sponge to it all.
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