WHAT: Inertia Showcase

WHERE: The Oxford Arts Factory

“And You Can Testify That All Words Here Are a Lie”

-          From Ernst Lubitsch’s 1920 film Anne Boleyn, inexplicably and repetitively playing on the wall on stage left.


 

ALL THE COLOURS

All the Colours lift their guitars over their shoulders, smoothing down their white jackets. There’s a nodding between them, half words that convey just enough meaning to produce further nodding. Shaking hands open a warm beer. Their shattered nerves a conspiracy of their distance from a good night’s sleep and their proximity to smouldering stage lights with highly flammable Mexican hair lacquer.

            But after the first “1,2,1,2,3,4” the air thickens. All 32 fingers and 8 thumbs on stage move with the power of possession, band members snaking about the stage, fluid and haunted. It feels less like their building songs in front of audience, more like they’re unfurling sinewy coils of antique rope. The lead singer struggles with his guitar like a drowning snake handler, crouching with it writhing towards the roof, twisted behind his back, grappling it with one hand—the other changing keyboard settings. It’s a habit he’s been unable to drop since being hunted by the Church of SONOS [1], 2 continents and 3 lifetimes ago, when the Lord[2] using a clandestine union of experimental morphology and black sorcery, actually tried converting their instruments into live snakes. All the Colours are stained by their history. Their expansive double-barrelled song structures a sonic testament to SONOS’ glowing twin suns[3], the toes of their shoes are still stained red from the desert crossing they made following their harrowing escape from The Pit of Vipers[4], the Vegas club they found themselves hostage in, but what has resulted in them being the effortless volcano of rock and roll they are today. But it wasn’t always this way.

THE APES

            Before they were All the Colours, they called themselves the Apes. Their white jackets were balled inside olive green duffle bags as they prowled the streets of the Haight-Ashbury growing as much facial hair as physiologically possible (a modest collection of muttonchops and scattered islands of fur) and smoking whatever cigarettes they could coax out of strangers. They were laying low. And it was fairly easy at first, playing torrid club shows and dating girls without surnames. Their best disguise was their sound. A raw, thudding garage and wild, flesh-raking vocals. They learned to sink into their own sound, wading lugubriously around the stage through dense, clothy waves of distortion and feedback. The lead singer’s wide-open jaws found their scream after SONOS managed to find them at a coffee shop on Ashbury. The Lord[5] simply stared through the greasy window, a smile spreading slowly over his Holy Face. The next time the Apes opened their guitar cases they were filled with live vipers. And every time the lead singer tried to sing for the next four years, a blood-draining howl would escape his mouth. SONOS, having found them, drove them out of San Francisco and hunted them as far as the Mojave desert, where he left them exiled, but vowed to one day use their music in the services of SONOS once more. It was in the desert that they were forced to pull out their white jackets and play in dust-encrusted truck stops to stay alive, until they worked their way all the way to Las Vegas, booking their first show in the world’s first Disco-Diner™— a joint called the Viper Club. But they weren’t always in hiding.    

THE DELTA RIGGS

Long before they were called the Apes, they had just hung up their fresh white jackets, left the Church of SONOS and called themselves the Delta Riggs. Now draped in black, they let their hair grow out, hanging it in lank curtains over their faces. The Church[6] forbade drinking, forbade fornication or even the insinuation of it. Many had been condemned to the Viper Pit for simply watching a show on the community television about grasshopper reproduction. The Delta Riggs embodied everything SONOS had forbade. They writhed around under red, blinking lights in tight jeans, spat mouthfuls of straight whisky into the cloud of steam wrapped around the stage. Their songs thrashed against every article in the Book of SONOS, with snarling guitars, cursing symbols and ragged tambourines acting as cloak against their Demons. It was a perfectly executed ruin, a compelling spectacle. SONOS was displeased.     

GLASS TOWERS

Before they were the Delta Riggs, before they left the Church of SONOS, they went under the SONOS appointed, ecclesiastic moniker ‘Glass Towers’. Their reputation spread like a vapour. Permeating the deepest fissures and chasms of the SONOS legion. They secretly pioneered a style of music that many years later (in 2004) would be described as ‘dance punk’. The drums are rhythmically organised like this:

 

They were the Chosen Ones, the Golden Children of SONOS. Their audiences tangled themselves adoringly in front of the stage, in awe of their youthful fashion, their perfect skin, their pearly smiles. SONOS was smiling too. Surely this was the music of promise, the sound that could be a smelter for all longing, all heartache, all youthful exuberance? All Glass Towers shook limbs all over the stage, SONOS believed he had found the key. The key to a new way of life. The sound of SONOS Youth[7]. “This is The Beginning” he spat. “As it has been written in the Blood of the Old Gods…”