Mclusky - Exeter Cavern - 22/5/03
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
You feel dirty, abused, beaten up and shattered. Like someone's just repeatedly taken a brick to your head, played drums with your face and is now standing above you laughing. And you, you masochistic fool, you want more of it. You want lots more of it. Some bands connect with their audience through love, mutual respect and admiration. But Mclusky, they want to have a fight. So we call them names and insult their appearance, because we want a fight with them too, even though we know we'll lose. We want to make Mclusky angry, because when Mclusky are really pissed off, when they look as if they're just about to spit in your face, is exactly when they're most unstoppable.
Mclusky gigs are akin to hearing stabs of melody trying to escape from underneath earthquake rubble but getting stamped down before they reach daylight. It's intense, powerful, hideously noisy stuff... You know that voice you do when you're singing a song with the sole intention of mocking it? Mclusky's songs actually go like that.
Without exception, every one they play tonight is a near-perfect gem of ugly rock nonsense. They start with 'Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues', a mere few minutes of stop-start rock insanity which steamrollers over the audience before peeling them off the floor, slapping them round the face and continuing. Next, it's 'Collagen Rock', and the process happens all over again. It's an exhausting experience, but we're only human, and we love things that are bad for us. Mclusky are addictive.
We taunt them. They take too long between songs, they talk to each other about nothing and laugh at their own jokes. They start telling us about the town we live in, and it's all rubbish. We prefer them singing about nonsense, because at least then we can join in. So we shout at them to get a move on. Boy, was that a mistake. 'Shut up! We've got forty five f**king minutes, OK?' A look of disgust at his own harsh comments overcomes bassist Jon Chapple's face. 'Sorry, how's it going, alright?'
He's forgiven, and so it proceeds. Andy Falkous looks like alcoholism and sings 'Gareth Brown Says' through a deliberately distorted microphone that makes whatever he's shouting make even less sense. You can just about decipher something about your mother being a ballpoint pen thief. Mclusky are full of statements, none vague and nothing hidden. Granted, a high proportion of them are ridiculously surreal (new track '1956 & All That' boasts about murder and tells you 'your son looks like Michael Jackson'), but the simple ones have the most effect. 'To Hell With Good Intentions' arrives in all its brutal glory and Falkous tells it to us straight - 'my band is better than your band'. Nobody argues.
Simply, you have to get used to reverse definitions with these guys. It's ugly, which is beautiful. In places, it's almost un-listenable, yet that just makes you want them to play louder... And, yes, they're despicable. Which, somehow, is exactly what enables Mclusky to be so brilliant.
Artists in this article: Mclusky
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