Butthole Surfers frontman in town with new band

• 19th Oct 2004

Brash 6ft 5 singer Gibby Haynes, who as anarchic and enigmatic frontman for the Butthole Surfers created a dazzling and unsettling psychedelia meets the avant-garde and punk rock template that's unmatched to this day, arrives in London on the 28th of November for a performance at The Mean Fiddler in support of his latest 'Gibby Haynes And His Problem' CD on Surfdog Records.

The album collects 11 new Haynes songs performed by a coterie of like-minded Texas music iconoclasts: His Problem band mate's guitarist Kyle Ellison, drummer Shandon Sahm (the late Doug Sahm's son) and bassist Nathan Calhoun plus friend's keyboard legend Augie Meyers and Haynes's Butthole Surfers bandmate Paul Leary, who mixed half the tracks and guests on keyboard. From opener “Kaiser” to the last of the 11 songs, “Redneck Sex,” the album displays Haynes's provocative, absurdist lyrics, his famous “Gibbytronix” bullhorn voice manipulator and an acid-drenched heaping dose of heavy duty rock and roll.

Beginning in the early 1980s with a string of albums and EP's and literally incendiary live shows that are the stuff of legend (Haynes was wont to spark a flaming pyre of lighter fluid using upturned cymbals), Texas' Butthole Surfers promulgated a sound that was “jagged, brutal, loud and nasty” according to Michael Azerrad in his chapter on the band in 2001's “Our Band Could be Your Life.”. As Azerrad wrote, their shows were “depraved acid hallucinations of transgression and horrors that were often physically dangerous to band and audience alike.”

In the 1990s, the Butthole Surfers — startlingly – broke through to the mainstream with a mainstage slot on the first Lollapalooza tour in 1991, and in the wake of Nirvana, a pair of radio hits mid-decade alongside other unlikely South-western alt-rock chart compadres Meat Puppets and Flaming Lips.

GIBBY HAYNES AND HIS PROBLEM live 28th November London Mean Fiddler.