You might've seen the pinballing Afros of At The Drive-In, the blood-soaked mania of Amen, the wilful destructiveness of ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, even the penis of Queens Of The Stone Age's bassist. Nothing from the glut of all-action American bands who've reinvigorated rock of late quite prepares you, however, for Les Savy Fav's Tim Harrington.
Harrington, the singer in this vicious artpunk band from New York, is probably fairly young, but does everything to disguise the fact. For his latest visit to the UK, he's dyed his radically receding hair and voluminous beard jet black, which makes him look like either a prancing Satanic priest or Demis Roussos with his bum on fire.
To attend a Les Savy Fav show is to run the risk of being mugged by a scary clown. Harrington is one of those frontmen physically incapable of staying onstage for very long, preferring to clench his mic between his teeth and flap about in the audience. Previous London shows have seen him dance on a bar and fall in the sink, throw shoes around, and lug his monitor on his shoulder whilst singing, less like Iggy Pop, more like Iggy's problem uncle.
Tonight, he's in relatively restrained mood, but still utterly compulsive. There's a brief crack at dismantling the lighting rig, and a lot of stealing cameras down the front, which sees one photographer going back to work with a lot of pictures of Harrington's crotch. His finest trick, however, is to compel the entire venue to kneel down with him during 'Asleepers Union', achieved by humiliating anyone with the audacity to stand.
Oh yeah, the music. It helps, obviously, that Harrington has a superb band to complement the freakshow. Les Savy Fav are a peculiarly wired and powerful quartet who mix deranged hardcore (The Jesus Lizard's the closest comparison) with a brittle, dry sound reminiscent of early '80s New York artfunk, even Talking Heads.
It all reaches its apotheosis on 'Rome', the title track of their last EP, where Seth Jabour's slashing guitar is engulfed in the kind of monstrous avant-dub noise patented by PIL. "Passion's so retro," raves Harrington, cleverer than the average wildman, an honours graduate in rock'n'roll absurdity. His genius circus returns in February: keep your heads down for it.
