Electrowerkz, London
21 June 2014
This was something I never dreamt I would ever see. I stare at the ticket in my hand and still can’t quite believe what the lettering says: “Chrome – doors open 7pm.” I would have been less surprised to have found myself standing atop the cliffs at Beachy Head with Chris Marker’s cat Guillaume-en-Egypt, looking out to sea whilst the Kraken rose from the watery depths to wreck terrible vengeance on the south coast of East Sussex: “You know Guillaume, I half expected that this would happen one day.”
Despite the last two and half decades having provided the opportunity to witness the reanimated antics of everyone from The Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges to The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Black Sabbath, I was still utterly wrong-footed by this one. Chrome? CHROME? Really? You must be joking. This can only be a mistake. Like last year, when I was tipped off that Japan would be playing, only to log on to the venue’s website and read that “This band are FROM Japan. They are not THE BAND Japan.” Oh, OK, as you were. But this is no mistake. Tonight, Helios Creed marches the Chrome Police right into the heart of London N1.
And I have absolutely no idea what to expect. Really. Less than zero. This is the band whose demented alien soundtracks appeared in the Bay Area seemingly without precedent, like a giant meteorite crashing into the water next to the Golden Gate Bridge, spume flying everywhere, its white hot body turning the water into a steaming, boiling cauldron.When Chrome’s first album appeared in late in 1976, amidst all the hoopla of America’s bicentennial celebrations, it felt like the musical equivalent of another debutant the following year – David Lynch’s Eraserhead. What the two works shared was a sense of their utter uniqueness, of visions each so singular that they placed their respective works utterly outside any continuum, any set of peers of influences. Both stood alone in their glorious, crazed isolation. And for the next seven years, Chrome continued to exist in such a space, becoming ever more extreme, ever more unclassifiable, ever more like the bad noises in your head made sound. I still remember buying my first Chrome album, drawn to take a blind punt by a great name and an intriguing and exciting sleeve. I ended up bringing home a copy of Half Machine Lip Moves, and after a single play found my ears smouldering and my mind assaulted. It took me about fifteen years to even begin to understand it. This was truly crazy shit, and I loved it.
But a lot of years have passed since then. Other bands. New technologies. Other bands using new technologies. It’s a whole lifetime away from those years of the late 1970s. What will Chrome offer us now? How will they sound? And in truth, there were later albums over which the quality control was, frankly, not up to par. Such albums meant that, as Julian Cope once pointed out, latecomers who purchased them had no more ability to judge the band’s high watermark glory days that those buyers who bought Saw Delight in the hope of knowing the true CAN. Is this what we will receive tonight? Faint after-echoes of the firebomb that was Chrome at their best? After all, Damon Edge has been a long time dead. Talking with Clive in the pub beforehand, he wisely sets the bar low, but says that nevertheless he could just not countenance the idea of missing it, and will be happy just to hear some “demented sounds”. Yes, I think, draining the last of my gin and tonic and feeling the bitter sting of lime on my lips, a wise approach. Some demented sounds – that will surely be enough.
Just as we arrive, Chrome take to the stage. The band look young, lean and tight: second guitarist, bass player, sample master and drummer. Both the sample master and the drummer trigger tape loops and assorted sound effects, and instruments are run through complex series of chains and micro-processors. And there at the front is Helios Creed, resplendent in an Our Man in Havana Panama hat. It looks both completely fitting and strangely incongruous at the same time, as if Alec Guinness has just wandered out onto the stage to pick up a Stratocaster and play “I am The Jaw” at us.
Is it a set? It’s hard to say. The whole thing feels like being slowly dunked into molten lava. There are driving rhythms, huge, cavernous bass sounds, rushing backwards tape loops, screaming, tortured guitar feedback, and vocals that veer between a malevolent Donald Duck one minute and ED-209 from Robocop the next; “You have twenty seconds to comply”. Helios Creed’s wah-wah pedal is rocked all the way back, then all the way forward, violating our ears with alternate walls of treble and sheets of low end. The string scrape intro to “TV As Eyes” yields to that riff, and the sweat runs down my back. Wow, this is FIERCE. Clive announces that “when it’s this good [I] wants to feel as bad as possible” and so moves forward to burrow his way into the heart of the thrashing, perspiring, pogoing crowd like a faithful Chrome mole.Creed announces that “This is a new one” and there are no issues around inferior later material here. Whatever it is (and unfortunately the PA doesn’t exactly lend itself to clarity for Creed’s between-song explanations), it’s a massive sonic cudgel with which Chrome proceed to smack us repeatedly round the head. It feels like having your brain bashed out with the sleeve of “3rd From the Sun” wrapped round a house brick. Clive returns, battered and elated, and I lean over and bellow into his ear: “I could listen to this for another four hours.”
Sadly that won’t be possible. Though at 61* Creed manages a Hell of a shift under the scorching lights in this sauna of an enclosure, eventually the band finish and remove themselves from the stage. The rapturous applause that drags them back out for an encore speaks volumes for how this evening has felt. More than one person comments on the disjuncture between how malevolent the music is, yet how friendly the mood seems, how tonight feels like a massive party of old school London weirdos, drawn together in celebration of a band that always felt like the ultimate expression of outsider weirdohood. And the faithful are rewarded as Creed strikes up the chords to “Chromosome Damage.” Christ on a bike, this is awesome.Afterwards everyone spills out into the warm London night, shirts soaked through, gasping for oxygen. Its feels like a party on the street, everyone uplifted by the show, talking, drinking, exchanging opinions. We are asked for a light by a woman who then hugs us she is so happy at what she’s heard – “My husband is a massive fan of Chrome, and so am I.” The atmosphere is really something special, something to be cherished.
You’ve been duplicated. Not this band. Not ever.
-David Solomons-
* Earlier on, during an intro, Creed announces: “We thought this was too commercial at the time, so we never released it. But I’m 61 now, so fuck it.”
