Down the strip from the lake of gigantic fountains dancing gracefully to Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ – past the thirty foot bronze lion outside the MGM Grand and the enormous neon Stratocaster that appears to have been smashed into the Hard Rock Hotel’s reception by some gargantuan member of …Trail Of Dead – an alien sex Pepperami called Angus Andrew is towelling himself off with money.
“Vegas is one of those places you can argue is the epitome of America,” he considers. He’s fresh from a dive-bombing rampage in a motel swimming pool that he’s just “rocked like it’s never been rocked before”; now he’s being dried by his dollar-print towel, the harsh Nevada sun and the afterwash from the low-flying jets ferrying more slavering slot-fodder into the casinos. “There’s something in Las Vegas that speaks to the very heart of American culture, y’know?” Vegas is a vampire. Glamorous and seductive, it lures you in with promises of financial immortality, sucks you dry, then spits you out like so much human gristle. It’s a Disneyland of devastation; a shiny slice of ready-cooked American Dream held out before the greedy and the gullible. This is a town where a tacky miniature replica of the Statue Of Liberty outside the New York, New York casino has become a shrine to September 11. Not too political, then, nothing too clever.
“But these are the things that you end up loving about America,” argues Liars’ Melbourne-born singer Angus, who’s here as opener on a West Coast tour with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Yeah Yeah Yeahs that should blast the Sunny States out of their jock-metal stupor. “The bad TV, the bad food, everything. Even the war. As an outsider it’s really interesting. Being able to step away from it, in a sense, makes you think ‘well let them go to war, see what happens’. I mean, America has got to go down sometime. I’ve always been fascinated with how the world would change if, say, China was leader. I feel personally that what Bush is trying to do now is spelling the demise of that and I like that. When that election was on, secretly you did want Bush to win because it meant something to fight against. It’s like Giuliani turned New York into a fight for your own rights and look what happened in Brooklyn – people took things into their own hands and put stuff on in their own lofts to fuck the clubs.”
In the shadow of the pyramidal Luxor hotel – the only place on Earth where you can get fleeced by a Pharoah – the new slum punk of New York City feels as filthy and as nail-yer-eyelids-open fascinating as a John’n’Edwina internet porn clip. JON SPENCER howls like a hellcat with herpes, wears plastic trousers and falls over from too much blues (which is brilliant). YEAH YEAH YEAHS re-instate themselves at the best live band on the planet after their Reading no-show – Karen O, crooked as a coathanger, flamenco struts and kung fu kicks around the stage in her Amazing Disintegrating Catsuit, starting the gig as a super-sexy Batman villain called Spindlywoman and ending it looking like Chrissie Hynde after a savage bear attack. They unveil Siouxie-goes-U2 new single ‘Machine’, a totally awesome frazzled-Pretenders love song called ‘Maps’ and most of what’s already been voted ‘the best album of 2003’ by the New Clairvoyancy Express. Like, um, wow, like, y’know…
If YYYs are the It Shouldn’t Happen To An Indie Goddess of Channel Nu Garage tonight, then LIARS are its ER. “I would advise you all not to jump off the stage,” winces Angus, hauling himself back up the eight-foot drop with a severely fucked ankle. He then proceeds to fuck it further by electric-shock jerking about on it, riding the bass drum like a bucking bronco during ‘Mr Your On Fire Mr’ and performing a bizarre series of mimes: trapped in glass box, face suddenly full of bees, hit by extremely slow asteroid. He might appear to have gotten dressed in the dark in 1982 but Liars are an engrossing spectacle; the menacing art-ska of Gang Of Four or Wire performed by men whose guitars, microphones and ESG-sampling gadgets are trying to escape. But it’s not the lunacy that makes Liars so intoxicating, it’s the shrouded political undertones, the way they chant “We’ve got our finger on the pulse of America!/Call the surgeon!” and call the resulting song ‘Grown Men Don’t Fall In The River, Just Like That’.
“If you wanna break it down, okay,” says Angus back in the tourbus, healing his ankle with the traditional touring first-aid of Massive Bong Chuffing. After all, it’s a minor setback for Liars – on their last US tour they were held up at gunpoint in New Orleans (“I got kicked in the nuts something savage, our drummer got pistol-whipped”) and narrowly avoided the rectal horrors of a Texan jailhouse (“there were three cops and a dog in our van, and a lot of weed…”).
“We know what’s happening with America, it’s going down the tubes. So should we that name the song ‘Terror In America! It’s Over!’ or something, or have the idea of the grown man falling in a river , something representative of this large lumbering country? It’s all about trying to get you to somewhere. I guess that’s our idea rather than writing a song about making out with your girlfriend at the drive-in and calling it ‘Make-Out With Suzie’.”
In the City Of The Obvious, something subversive slithers. You better believe it.
Mark Beaumont