Reviewed on Saturday July 23
We were halfway through ‘Auto Neutron’, Fat White Family’s first song, when the absinthe took hold. My psychiatrist-turned-gig-partner and I had imbibed some three straight bottles of the wretched stuff, having decided the only way to truly experience the band was while rip-roaring drunk. And yet we hadn’t taken the proper precautions – we were now out in public, exposed, fighting off the jibbers with a strength bordering on the superhuman.
Thankfully, the Family were supremely loud, so my gig partner’s relentless screams were mostly ignored. There were an extraordinary number of freaks crowding the stage, two or three armed with white-eyed snakes disguised as guitars, the rest with Uzis and broken bottles. They played with a singularly grotesque intent to cause harm – precisely, a crack squad on crack.
It was something else, man – the mosh pit was a human meat grinder and the scene onstage was even worse. The guitarist attempted to swallow his mic whole during ‘Bomb Disneyland’, the fat bulb of the thing getting caught in his gullet, and the pale thin spook fronting the outfit removed first his jacket, then the very uppermost layer of his skin, before leaping into the audience and crushing a small, cross-eyed photographer wielding a polaroid camera. All the while, half-naked, crowd-surfing Courtney Love types did battle with the brawny fascists posing as security guards, both demented factions fighting for control of the front of house.
By this point my senses could no longer be trusted. Over there, for example, stood Nigel Farage, playing the tambourine and mumbling the lyrics to ‘Cream Of The Young’, his eyes rolled back in his head. Farage? What was a belching fascist like Farage doing performing with Britain’s premier anarcho-punk band?
But then it hit me: the point of the evening, and the jangling threat buried inside ‘The Whitest Boy On The Beach’. The right and the left are not distinct – they are the same threat spewed from two different mouths. Human experience is an apolitical jaunt from bloody birth to gruesome death, and any attempt to rationalise the essential horror of being and then suddenly not being is as foolhardy as moralising a hammered thumb.
I suppose the gig ended at some point. When we emerged outside it was to discover that a riot was in full swing – several black armbanded members of the National Guard were beating down protesters from the safety of horseback. We hotwired a motorcycle, stole two crates of red wine and Farage’s tambourine and then headed north, to freedom.
