Pussy Galore – NME: Total Hot Babe-Dom [2000 Words] (PRESS, UK)

Photo Caption: “Toilet rock! Pussy Galore grin and bear it”

“Total Hot Babe-Dom

Hail PUSSY GALORE, shock troops of rock ‘n’ roll! Hot babes and blaat! guitars have MARK SINKER in a tizz. Picture: BLEDDYN BUTCHER.

“Last night we were onstage, and it was like people were screaming and stuff, thrashing around – I don’t know, it’s like my initial reaction is that a gut-level indifference kicks in. Just like we’re trying to act blasé or something.

“I mean, that was actually a real nice audience, it was just unexpected and strange. If anything it reminded me of a hardcore show in the US or something. I mean, What the f—! And also these people were yelling ‘Toilet Rock!’ and stuff, I mean, do these people think we’re like GG Allen?”

So I’m sitting here, listening to Jon Spencer of Pussy Galore, and – jacked up on the insane childish charge of their music – what I’m feeling amounts to a strange queasiness. As if a new and newly unbridgeable generation gap was opening between them and me. It’s not that they’re unpleasant, or dullards, or some kind of a disappointment (they apologise at one point for being polite and friendly, and so for being a bad interview – that just isn’t a problem).

It’s simply clear that most of the things I take for granted as values in rock, and most of the things I assume are things to be hostile to, are lumped together with some entertaining dinosaur past by three of the four in Pussy Galore.

hey hate U2, and we can agree on that (and even this they qualify and soften – hatred doesn’t matter to them the way it somehow seems it ought to, to me) – but for them Jello Biafra blends into the same mythical (and so undifferentiated) past as Jim Morrison.

Bob Bert’s the exception. Former drummer with Sonic Youth, he’s lived his whole life through the rise and dispersal of punk and No Wave and noise energies in many successive New York’s, he’s ten years older than any of the others, five years older than me. Him I can make a connection with,

The others aren’t aggressive about it – confrontations belongs to the same past as Love and Peace – but they can’t see it, even if it birthed them: hardcore’s organised protests and No Wave’s in-your-face negativity don’t belong to them, any more than Draft Dodging or tune In, Turn On, Drop Out. They don’t need to comprehend them, apologise for them, juggle with their implications. They come after all that.

Two years, and Pussy Galore are the bow-wave of the future, the most perfectly formed shock-force of modern rock ‘n’ roll. That’s all it’s taken to get themselves into an impregnable position, Sonic Youth and Swans, far more extreme and innovative, in some ways, have taken six years and more to get less recognition.

Maybe Spencer and Julia Cafritz harbour unrecognised genius inside their perfectly formed bodies. it doesn’t need to be that. All they needed was ears and all they work on is sound – a furious, flat, baffling blaat! of guitar noise that works in a minor miracle of emotional complexity, from first intimations (the ‘Feel Good About Your Body’ EP on Adult Contemporary) through to the perfect Stooges-wrap Fall-thrash/rumination of ‘Right Now’ (on Product Inc). East to hear what they’ve been hearing. Much harder to pin down where they’re going with it.

Bob knows his history and plays sheets of metal instead of skins. Kurt, the newest guitar archivist, barely speaks at all, Jon winds his sentences off into bizarre tangles of failed articulation. And Julia’s a fireball of half-kidding prejudice and venom. The all-American woman-brat. Mixed in, though she probably wants it hidden, with unnerving sharpness of all girl teenage refuseniks. You can’t help liking her. Even if she tries her hardest not to let you:

“If we lived here, we’d be faggots. In general, English bands display such faggotry. I’ve been complaining about this lot. Top Of The pops is now showing in the United States – it’s the most depressing show I’ve seen in my life. Just English faggot band after English faggot band. Singing with just awful voices, two guys with synths.”

Well now, Mute and Daniel Miller – who pay for the existence of the Pussies’ present (British) record company, Product Inc – are somewhat implicated in the rise of the English Synth Sound, in the dominance of Almighty Eurodisco. I challenge them and they cheerfully acknowledge the greatest of The Normal, Fad Gadget, DAF, Non and the Birthday Party. So how exactly am I meant to translate this word ‘faggot’, Pussies? What’s it to do with?

“Homosexuality?” say Jon and Julia, simultaneously. As if to say you mean do we mean…? And Jon carries on: “…or just lameness, like weak, lame and fey.” That’s what they mean by it.

“I’m sorry,” says Julia, although she isn’t. “To me, it’s both. Whatever that makes me. I mean those people from Scotland, ‘Motortown’, those people just don’t have any balls. They’re f—ing each other up the ass. It has to do with homosexuality and just general total lameness. It’s both.”

“She’s saying she’s a total racist. She’s speaking for herself,” says Bob. Bob’s a dangerously reasonable elder citizen in this debate. He’s married. Being misunderstood worries him. At least a fraction more than it does the others.

“Well, I’m a female. I’m responding to these – OK, in America, you have a Rock Star, like David Lee Roth or whatever, with his bulging penis. he’s repulsive, buy you can tell he has hot babes on the side.”

Everyone laughs. There’s something brilliant and desperate about this defence, as if she’s taking on a loser’s argument for the thrill of it. Maybe she half believes half of what she’s on about. Even Jon, who feels about as morally impelled to take stands as she does, generally, can’t help protesting:

“Yeah, but the thing is, most of these guys they’re the biggest faggots of all, they’re totally into cock rock and strutting onstage. Like Loverboy and shit. Shit like that. That stuff, those guys are the biggest faggots of all.”

“Lover boy, are those guys that hired those girls to give them blowjobs while they were doing their background vocals on their album?”

Bob’s got himself back in Julia’s camp. She pounces:

“That’s what I’m saying. They’ve got hot babes falling around them. but those guys on Top Of The pops, you just know there aren’t hot babes waiting for them offstage.”

“Yeah, but they don’t want them,”

“I know, I’m speaking for myself. You guys don’t sit at home watching that shit.”

“I do. I watch more of it than you do.”

If hot babes on the side is what gives Loverboy whatever it is they have over the rest, what’s the equivalent for Pussy Galore?

Julia looks at me for a long moment. “Hot babes on the side”

But Loverboy are multimillionaires.

“We still try for total hot-babe-dome.”

“No we don’t.” Bob belongs with me in an old people’s retreat, away from all this double-edged self-destruct sarcasm. Julia starts again witheringly: “Obviously…”

But doesn’t finish. Under her breath, she sighs: “Nah…”

“I think that the difference between us and Loverboy is that we stand for something.” As usual, by the time he’s finished his sentence, Jon’s already lost the mood he started out with, the seriousness. I press him anyway. What do Pussy Galore stand for.

“Hot babes”

Pussy Galore’s first touch of notoriety came when word started to get round that they’d trumped Sonic Youth’s daft ace and bootlegged a brutal, brittle cover of the entire ‘Exile On Main Street’ LP. The quintessential underground LP, made by the – then – ruling queen-pins of rock ‘n’ roll as rebellion, this is a record that seems to prefigure the most extraordinary aspects of what was to come.

The Stones themselves didn’t even like it much – they never did anything afterwards to touch it. And no one really followed up its darkest and most important strands until ‘Sister’ and ‘Fruenf Auf Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala’…or at least that’s the way it seemed. In the mainstream.

Pussy Galore’s ‘Exile’ is a wicked, almost unlistenable bastardisation that revels in its own vicious limitations. An unholy juicing of the music that the rhetoric of the underground was invented to contain, the record that – against all the conscious instincts of its makers – made possible the wave that turned on them,

Long after that wave, and no longer a part of it, look back and laugh. Because from its kick-off incantation to the blasts of explosive feedback that obscure the songs they couldn’t be bothered to work out, it’s the funniest and truest celebration of tradition – as pastiche, perversion and parable – that there’ll ever be.

Julia: You can tell the songs where we had no idea. Because it just goes PZCHCHCHCH – we just f—– it up. There’s a couple of songs that are so totally lame we couldn’t deal with them.

Jon: And then we just f—ed with the mix, so that you couldn’t hear it.

We live in a bend world. Where the forces of law and order and morality chase after Ozzy Osbourne (!) and Elton John (!!) when they want to make an example of someone walking on the wild side. PG called their Vinyl Drip LP compilation ‘Groovy Hate F—‘. The first three cuts are ‘Teen Pussy Power’, ‘You Look Like A Jew’ and ‘C— tease’. They’re not going to win prizes in civics, these heralds of the new breed. And in the bent world around them, the post-hardcore Diaspora, drugs are on the way back.

Bob: I think so. Especially psychedelic drugs. When we toured in the Midwest, this girl came up to me and said, God, Sonic Youth were such a rip off the last time they came to town. I took five hits of acid and hey only played for forty minutes, and I had to stay up the rest of the night.

Are things getting better from your point of view?

Bob: Are things getting better? No, I don’t think so. I think they’re taking much shittier drugs, and they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s just like these idiots with rings through their noses taking everything they can, f—ing around where they can. I think it’s sad.

Julia: Bob’s a concerned adult.

Jon: It’s part of there being no unified thing.

Bob: Right, in the ’60s it was all the mind-expanded thing. Not that they accomplished anything.

Jon: I mean, what the f—! We can’t talk about it. Our perception of the ’60s…

Julia: …is from TV, from out parents.

Bob: They’re never even seen Shindig or Hullaballoo.

Nothing to pick them up on. Nothing to disagree about. We’re talking different languages. Our hard-won violence of expression is their common sense: self-censorship’s the enemy, and people need to be shaken, especially older people. That’s as it should be.

All this surface prejudice is classic underclass coding, a way of keeping out those not in the know. If I’m shocked, if i can’t see that their unhinged but lightly wielded vitriol is a weird expression of their decency, it’s because I’m not one of them. It’s probably dangerous, but so’s anything that relies on ‘them and us’ for its cohesion. Difference isn’t about to go away, or shift its modes of operation.

Julia: I hated music before.

So what made you start liking it?

Julia: I don’t particularly like it.

Jon: She’s into the hot babes.

Bob: Muff diving.

Julia: I couldn’t bear to have the radio on. I like TV. Still, if I’m in my apartment, I’d put the TV on, or put on some dance music. That might elevate my spirit. (She chuckles.) But when my boyfriend comes round and plays his Slayer record, I have to leave.

Bob: Go pick up some hot babes.

Julia: Yeah. I don’t like music.”