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Madness reigns at the Smiling Buddha, an unassuming art gallery slash restaurant slash show venue nestled at the far end of College. I like these kind of places. They're out of the way, cosy and usually packed with the most batshit freaking insane stuff you'll ever see.

Scutt came back from the bathroom. "There's a goth guy in the guys room doing lines of something," she said. Apparently he looked up, nostrils flared, with "guilty eyes" (coke eyes) as she passed on by. Minutes later, a man with streaked face paint took the stage and immediately began screaming and lurching around. In the background his chunky accomplice thrashed a guitar without melodic concern, throwing walls of noise up against sampled speeches droning through the PA. Behind the madmen glowed a screen depicting an eerily smiling fat doll. Cocaine King Goth then roared incoherently for fifteen minutes, wrapped his mic cord around his throat and screamed "Fuck off, cunts!" That was his performance. Scutt wondered whether the cocaine led him to believe that was his BEST SHOW EVER.

Shortly after, electronic ambience crawled slowly up the walls of the Smiling Buddha. Someone wearing a leather bag on their head jerked spasmodically to their feet, grasping face with one hand in a show of tortured existence. Then the bag was whipped off, the dude beneath asked for his mic levels to be turned up and he proceeded to karaoke his way through a Bruce Springsteen tune. Bag Man danced like a wild, sweating automaton until he fell to his knees, exhausted. That was his performance.

Several other 'normal' bands followed, but they were too normal to be remembered. The final act in this alternative reality experiment was the evening headliner: a band named Garbage! Violence! Enthusiasm! loosely defined as electro-pop by one of the triad. I don't really know what electro-pop entails, but I do know that it probably wasn't what we saw.

What we SAW was two bearded men and a girl wearing crash helmets and bouncing across the stage, stopping periodically to scream into their microphones in accompaniment to some digitized beats. This task was rendered more difficult by the fact that whenever one band member was screaming/singing/whatever, the other two were vigorously assaulting them. They were thrown into walls and the drum kit, hit from behind with what appeared to be computer keyboards and "baby-doll leg nunchucks", and hurled into the audience. The name Garbage! Violence! Enthusiasm! suddenly made perfect sense.

Presumably the small crowd was expecting this kind of scenario, as several onlookers came equipped with bags of rice. These fans would occasionally take a break from rocking out to dash onstage and smash a band member in the back with their rice bag. The band retaliated in kind, hurling a variety of on-stage weapons into the crowd. The band savagely rushed off the stage from time to time to crash through their audience, who hooted and hollered and wrestled them to the ground and hit them in the head with pieces of styrofoam. That was their performance.

It was the most entrancing, bizarre live music act I've ever seen. I couldn't fucking look away, not even for a second, not even when I wanted to. I didn't buy a CD, but I sure as hell would've bought a videotape.

Note: this is not my movie but YouTube knows what's up.

Posted by Chris at 02:30 PM >> Commentations (3)