Live Review

Gay For Johnny Depp – Relentless Garage, London

• 15th Dec 2010

I’ve never really got the cult of Johnny Depp to be honest. Is he really that attractive? I look at him and think of a petulant teenager. He’s probably alright in real life I suppose, although he could equally well be a bit of a dick. I think I would call my band ‘Gay for Gerard Pique’. Well I probably wouldn’t really, but you know what I’m saying.

Anyway, that’s not the point. Gay for Johnny Depp are. They’re playing with Pulled Apart by Horses, and this London date is to be the last – and presumably biggest – date of the bands’ UK tour. PABH are getting ruddy massive, and so it’s clear that this is going to be a big ‘un. The Garage, which I’ve not previously had the pleasure of visiting, is a fittingly ruddy massive space. So ruddy massive that it’s not really a surprise that breathing room is easy to come by during GFJD’s support slot. PABH are, if not chart bothering, at least club night bothering. The kids, they love ‘em. Gay for Johnny Depp, are, well, Gay for Johnny Depp. They’re for fans of…

…actually, what are they? I’ve never been able to place them. I don’t do genres, after sitting through one too many boring debates about the intrinsic nature of emotional hardcore, but I thought it’d be wise to ask my companion for the evening. The internet had only yielded ‘homoerotic spazzcore’, which sounds like how a football hooligan from the 70s would describe Arsenal’s modern day game. He came up with the much more palatable (!) ‘sexual grindcore’. I hope that clears it up for the uninitiated?

Anyway, as soon as singer Marty Leopard took to the stage, dressed in only a sleeveless denim jacket and with an inverted cross strapped to his microphone a smile cemented itself to my face. It would stay there until they wrapped it up 12 short songs later. They’re juvenile, sleazy and ridiculous – Leopard seems to take many of his cues from the legend that is Rob Halford, and guitarist Sid Jagger does his best to put the sexual into sexual grindcore by spending the duration of the set leering over his microphone, suggestively raising his eyebrows, but they are immensely fun.

It’s quite a performance. Leopard is a bit like an escaped mental patient, climbing the rafters, running unadvisedly into the crowd and stroking an audience member’s hair. But there’s more to it than that, and to focus on this side of GFJD would be reductive. Jagger is a superb guitarist, and their compositions are surprisingly well put together, as well as being satisfyingly brutal. There’s a distinct New Yorkiness about their sound too; that evocative sparseness that manages to be both cold and warm at the same time and which seems to inform the sound of so many bands from the city. Opener ‘Cumpassion’ (which includes the words “all over your face”. You can work out the rest) and ‘Pink Flag’ are highlights.

Some representatives from PABH join them for the closing number, a cover of Slade’s ‘Come on, Feel the Noise’ (and that’s the way I’ll continue to spell it, thank you very much), which makes the now hefty audience nice and happy. GFJD repay the favour during PABH’s closing number ‘Punch a Lion in the Throat’, the performance of which might be one of the most enjoyable things I’ve seen all year – and I’m not even that crazy for PABH. All in all, a night that was a brilliant advertisement for live music.