Reviews
27 Aug 2010 by Cath Aubergine
manchestermusic.co.uk
Three years ago, almost to the very day, MM was summoned to The Castle on Oldham Street by an ex-member of recently defunct and very good local post-rock type band Duty Now, who informed us his new "project" would be opening that evening's charity musical event. Now when members of post-rock type bands tell you they have a new "project" you do naturally have certain preconceptions. It will probably be impressively intricate and may well involve a laptop, and might not involve actual tunes in the conventional sense. Even the project's name - The Fucking Kings - didn't really change our expectations: this was the year, after all, of Holy Fuck and Fuck Buttons' debut albums; having the once-feared expletive in your name seemed almost obligatory in the genre of experimental electronics. And then they came onstage wearing shiny red capes and pointy masks and proceeded to sing - wilfully badly - a collection of insanely catchy pop songs; some featuring lyrical laughs, others which could have been chart hits in another life. "They are the best worst band ever, well this week anyway. If David Lynch made boy-bands, they might be something like this - and the world would be a much better place for it" was our verdict.
Now around the same sort of time, MM was sent the first demo by The Lancashire Hotpots. It was duly listened to, we had a good laugh at "Chippy Tea", then it went in the "Not Reviewing" pile. Yep, we could have been claiming "remember where you heard of 'em first" about said remarkably successful festival act (at this year's Kendal Calling you couldn't get near the tent when they were on, never mind actually in it) but we're a music site, not a comedy site. And yes, there's occasional crossover but comedy bands generally don't have much shelf-life: thousands of people bought Mark Radcliffe and Marc Riley's Shirehorses album in the mid-1990s, but I suspect you could count on one finger the number of copies that have had a spin this century outside of "ironic" student parties. For some reason though we couldn't keep away from The Fucking Kings. Even when, a couple of gigs later, they changed their name to throw us off the trail and became what they'd been dressing as since that first outing: Plague Doctors. We have, collectively, seen them rather a lot of times since then - and remarkably, they've not once failed in making us laugh our faces off.
This is not - they assure us - the last ever Plague Doctors gig. They may, however, be less frequent in the future as apparently one of the Doctors is departing for Nottingham. A likely story, that - we never got a satisfactory answer as to what they did with the third member. As ever, the Roadhouse contains a number of people who have never yet experienced the Plague Doctors phenomenon. People who have just come out to watch their mate's band or headliners Edith Fiore. They look at the stage, and try and work out what's going on...
Due to the secretive nature of The Plague Doctors' organisation, it was only possible to catch this clandestine image. (OK, we forgot to put batteries in the camera). Still, if they looked mad with all three (or two) of them cloaked up, if anything they look even madder with the big one in "civvies". And "Wasting My Time", that tune we said three years ago "could have escaped from a boy-band song factory" is still the most gloriously warped piece of electropop you'll hear. Andrew Lloyd Webber laughed at them when they submitted it for Eurovision - but as the UK has managed to come last in said contest in two of the last three years we still reckon he should have taken a chance on them. And as a light-hearted, throwaway pop song it's damn near close to perfection. Possibly less suitable for primetime TV is "Je M'Appelle", which seems to centre around unspecified (and indeed specified) sexual perversions. Our Friday night regular punters now won over, it's time for the Doctors to unleash their real agenda...
"We Killed Everyone at Radio One" - the title being somewhat self-explanatory - has gained some new lyrics whereby one of the provocations for its grisly massacre is that the station is "playing Mumford And Sons again" - and it also strikes us that The Big Non-Masked One is actually not a bad rapper at all these days, if a little camp for normal circles. Sci-fi fantasy "Diana Two-Point-Zero" has the uninitiated almost in tears of laughter (not the first time this has happened) - and even to seasoned observers of Manchester's favourite pretend-Bavarians "Scorpion Birthday" is, not to beat about the bush, just fucking demented. And they end the set as they did that very first time, with the gruesome if rather surreal mini-goth-opera "Snipping Off Your Face". We look around and the expressions we see are a fairly close approximation of ours way back in August 2007 - "did that actually just happen"? Well yes, it did; it may not be happening as often in the future but that's a very good reason to ensure your presence when it does.