Bobby Conn (live at The Lexington)

London
23 June 2013

There is a particularly caustic line in “Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem’s scathing critique of changing musical fashion, that sums up perfectly much of what happened between the mid Nineties and the early Noughties:

I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.

After 1994, with Cobain dead by his own hand and Sonic Youth showing the first signs of possible early-onset senility with the lacklustre Experiment Jet Set, Trash and No Star (thankfully a rather premature diagnosis), guitar music seemed to be everywhere in retreat. In so many places it was in a sorry state, lying in the gutter with a stake through its heart. As nature abhors a vacuum, it became instead an era of massed turntablism, of solitary combat-trousered figures hunched over laptops, ‘mixing’ and setting everything that moved to ‘beats’, using monikers such as ‘DJ Shady’ and genre tags such as ‘Dark Ambient’. As James Murphy observed in the barbed couplet above, those were boom times for the nation’s second-hand guitar shops.

Bookending that, with the release of The Strokes’ debut album in 2001, suddenly the world and his wife and their neighbour and his friend rediscovered the joys of loud electric guitars, leather jackets, drainpipe jeans and band names that featured the definite article. Hallelujah. Sell your turntables for they are false gods. You shall worship none but the Marshall stack. Hail, hail Rock & Rock! Suddenly the Stratocasters began to move off the shelves once more, their place taken instead by phalanxes of now-homeless and unloved Technics SL1210s.

Between those two markers were some dark times, slim pickings for those who still clung to a vision of Rock & Roll that involved theatricality, ambition, idiosyncrasy and transcendence. Arthur Lee had risen seemingly from the grave in 1992, reanimated from the deepest depths of the (pre-internet) afterlife to play in Liverpool and send shockwaves out across the entire nation – “Jesus, this is what Rock music can really be.” Lee went on to describe the gig as “the most memorable of my life.” But in the years that followed, not many were willing, or able, to follow where the greats such as Lee had shown the path.

In those leanest of lean years, Bobby Conn played at a former light industrial unit in Stoke Newington (ironically, being home territory of London’s mighty no-compromise sonic war machine Penthouse, one of the few places Illbient, Drum & Bass et al could had not overtaken completely). For those that were there that night, witnessing Bobby’s demented show proved beyond doubt that there was life in the Rock and Rock genre yet. With a dazzling and high-octane fusion of musical genres, a propensity for baffling political, religious and social agit-prop, mad staring eyes, garish make-up and love of static-inducing viscose clothing, this was no techno-geek standing inert behind a laptop, this was a man who was living Jon Spencer’s pronouncement that “Rock & Roll is about wearing stupid shoes.” That night Bobby made a roomful of life-long converts to his cause, and subsequently, for the faithful, his albums became battleflags to rally beneath. For those that weren’t at the show the word could be spread through a video recording (a video recording!) of Bobby’s truly deranged performance of “Never Get Ahead” on children’s TV dance show Chic-A-Go-Go (all fellatio references tastefully amended). One thing you could be absolutely certain of… Bobby Conn was never, ever, ever going to sell his guitars and buy turntables.

Not having seen Bobby Conn live since the “Night of the Long and Furry Paws” at the Notting Hill Arts Centre in the late Nineties, I approach The Lexington on a gloomy Sunday night with a strange feeling of trepidation in the pit of my stomach. Will the faithful have turned out after a day of such indifferent weather? Will the battleflag still flutter with such bright colours? Will Bobby have grown older and mellower to the point where such a gig will be merely ‘OK’?

Will he fuck.

The first thing I see as I reach the top of the stairs is the ever-wonderful Monica BouBou, dressed in a backless black evening gown and white kitten heels, hoiking a box of Macaroni in the other direction. The second is that the place is absolutely heaving. The congregation are here in numbers. It’s time to testify.

First out are the rhythm section, dressed – bizarrely – in matching striped jersey, neckerchief and sailor hat combinations that suggest that Gabey and Chip have wandered out of On the Town and into a Rock & Roll band. I half expect them to burst into a hoofer’s rendition of “New York, New York”, but instead, with BouBou rosining up her bow stage right, Bobby Conn saunters out to take centre stage. I can’t decide whether I am disappointed that he is not also dressed as a member of the US Navy, or delighted that he has maintained such fidelity to gaudy artificial fibre casual wear. Perhaps a bit of both. Either way, despite the somewhat limited space on offer, Bobby nonetheless leads the audience through a quick warm-up route of calisthenics and even indulges an audience member’s call for a press-up by dutifully performing one, although a press-up of the orthodox variety as opposed to “one of those clappy ones,” braggadocio around which, he explains, once got him into decidedly hot water.

Suitably limbered up, the band burst straight into the opening numbers, “We Come in Peace” and “Greed.” What is immediately, glaringly, frighteningly apparent is how fucking good it is. The sound is immense, the bass rumbling the floor, Conn’s guitar cracking like an axe splitting wood, and BouBou’s violin skittering away over the top. Although the role of ‘protest singer’ often sat uneasily with Conn – and no-one was ever going to be mistaking him for Pete Seeger – songs like this, beneath their patina of mascaraed Ziggy glam, are deeply political, marking Conn out as very distinct from the deracinated, depoliticised vanilla Rock music that surrounded him. The video for “We Come in Peace” may resemble one of the more hallucinogenic episodes of Space 1999, but there was no accident in the imagery of Abu Ghraib that permeated through it as subtext. As if reaching a suitable juncture to highlight this, Conn growls “This one’s for representative democracy” to introduce the next track, “Govt.,” with its mournful Mitteleuropa violin motif and hollow politician’s refrain that “we’re working hard for you people.”

Conn outroduces “Face Blind” as “about when you don’t know your neighbours and there’s trouble afoot in the flat next door,” his beautiful yet worrying falsetto perfectly conveying the tale of a life of quiet desperation. “The Truth” (“A dancing song for dancing people”), with its almost Afrobeat stylings, proves Conn right at every turn by immediately getting the entire room shaking on down, save for those at the edges who content themselves with nodding and tapping their feet. “More Than You Need”, “Macaroni” and “Underground Vktm” are blistering, Bobby trashing away at his Les Paul, and BouBou playing some sublime violin on the recent album’s title track.

Bobby then tells us that “I really wanted to do this one in Liverpool, but it was wet and we ran out of time.” Well, Liverpool’s loss is London’s gain, and I wonder for instant whether the somewhat elderly PA might actually expire at the point. Mercifully it holds out, and that is all the more something to be thankful for in light of what comes next, a real curveball, pitched perfectly into the audience with audacious aplomb – an inspired cover of The Eurhythmics’ “Love is a Stranger.” Many of that band’s latter waxings were often so atrocious that it’s easy to forget that in their early days Lennox and Stewart recorded some deliciously left-field pop, all queasy synth lines and dark lyrics hinting at boiling (and possibly unwholesome) passions lying beneath. With BouBou singing the lead and Bobby adding falsetto backing vocals, the dark passions here are not so much hidden as fashioned in mile-high flashing neon, the song turned in their hands into an unsettling glimpse into the monomaniacal mental maelstrom of a stalker – “And I want you, and I want you, and I want you, so it’s an obsession.” Conn’s simple assessment, “Ah, the Eighties” draws a wistful nod from those members of the audience who remember that truly perplexing decade – Hypnagogic Pop ain’t just for SoCal twentysomethings, I guess.

A brilliant version of “Disaster” is followed by a new song “about TS Elliot, the inspiration of Cats”. Banishing thoughts of Lloyd Webber, over the track’s snarling metal Bobby works in references to Elliot’s famous 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” and in an age when Britain is presided over by such political titans as David Cameron and Nick Clegg, rarely can such allusion be more apposite. The song ends, mostly definitely, with a bang not a whimper. The set closes, praise be, with a brilliantly over the top version of “Never Get Ahead,” complete with ridiculous faux operatic ending. A quick glance across the sea of humanity filling the room confirms that to a (wo)man, everyone is singing along as one, united in their gusto and abandon. Tomorrow is Monday morning, and it seems likely that, if only for one day, the man will be getting just a little less head than usual.

Summoned back to the stage by deafening calls for an encore, the band delight by delivering two more thundering numbers, including a stand-out version of “Angels” from The Golden Age album. Amidst the musical crescendo, with Bobby intoning “Don’t turn out the lights” like a mantra, the crowd finally achieved its state of grace. Bobby asks “You’re all winners here I take it?” and tonight the answer can only be a resounding yes.

And as the old adage says, it takes one to know one.

-David Solomons-