The Killer B’s have been heralded as a kind of alternative supergroup (their line-up consisting of ex-members of The Screaming Blue Messiahs, Chicken Legs Weaver and The Men They Couldn’t Hang) so my expectations last night were high. But a poor sound system, in conjunction with the band’s desire to play much too loud for that poor sound system, ended up making it very hard to judge whether I was hearing the future of rock’n’roll or just another pub rock band.
The irony with full-on raucous rock‘n’roll is that it’s a fine art. You might think that it’s just about plugging a cheap guitar into a cheap amp and letting rip, but the truth is that guitarists like Chris Thompson of The Killer B’s have probably spent years twiddling knobs, adjusting sustain pedals, and pushing distortion to the right extreme so that the physical heft of the sound doesn’t just dissipate in a dust storm of distortion. It’s about being a perfectionist in imperfection; you need to be able to both hear and feel the smack round the head of those bar-room bar chords.
I’d experienced that slap round the head on the band’s recent album, Love is a Cadillac Death is a Ford, but I’d hoped that that was going to be a mere love pat in comparison to the sound beating that would be metered out to me and the heat-weary crowd jammed into The Blues Kitchen in Camden last night. But perhaps because of those precise sonic calculations such a band make under controlled conditions, the noise that greeted me fell somewhat short of imperfect perfection.
The Killer B’s certainly look like a formidable proposition: the frontline of Chris Thompson on lead guitar, Andy Weaver on rhythm and vocals and Ricky McGuire on bass convincingly exudes a Dr Feelgood/Reservoir Dogs cool. Weaver was particularly good in this department, with his dark shiny suit and a trilby half hiding his frozen mask of a face. Occasionally glimmers of what they actually have to offer penetrated the painful glare of noise: a Bo Diddley-inspired riff here, and a gritty, almost Public Image Limited groove there, but with the vocals too quiet and the guitars too loud, it was difficult to judge their new material with an objective ear.
But I will say that on the strength of last year’s album, The Killer B’s have more going for them than, say, The Jim Jones Revue, who they superficially resemble. The JJR are on the surface anarchically abrasive but underneath they are a dusty period piece. If we can even use the word “subtle” in relation to this kind of psychotic full-on garage rock, The Killer B's are a subtler proposition in that their songs are more likely to have a tasty Beefheartian bent rather than be underpinned by boring old boogie-woogie; a style I personally find corny and dated. I should also add that almost as soon as they came on, a bunch of punters rushed down to the front to shake, rattle and nod like crazy; a sure sign that a band have got something right.
Finally, a briefly mention for the support act, John Fairhurst. Looking every inch the quintessential guitar hero, circa 1971, this denim-clad bluesman attacked his guitar like a man possessed, his bottleneck a light-catching blur, and his mass of corkscrew hair continually obscuring his face, as one would expect. But putting aside such superficialities, he was a breathtakingly fluid instrumentalist who seemed to be striving to transcend the far too familiar clichés of the form. His up-tempo numbers came at you like frisky greyhounds bursting free of their starting boxes.
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