Pussy Galore – NME: Mean Fiddler [Review] (PRESS, UK)

Review: Dele Fadele
Photo: Chris Clunn

This show was released on the Cum Into My Mouth bootleg album.

FORGET THE convor-belt mentality and face up to the facts: using the latest fancy gadgets and accoutrements doesn’t automatically make you contemporary or a late ’80s innovator. It’s a question of attitudes and your relationship with the past.

Pussy Galore are immense; coming across like some bastard Kraftwerk with the aid of conventional instruments. They exist in subterranean netherworlds where everything’s gone askew, the telescreens are blank and our deranged minds are at the end of their tether. All preconceptions about ‘the guitar’ are turned around and sold down the river. In their place, shrouded figures wearing death-masks pray for the new sun.

Excuse me if that sounds purple, but we should really use all power at our disposal to draw apathetic people’s attentions towards this melting-pot of New York sewage rock. They’ve been going for years; only recently seized upon by the likes of Village Voice as personifying the post-everything state of being. And tonight’s bloodletting was shoddily attended considering how many mutilated bodies usually drag themselves down for the latest bar-band with an American stamp on it. Of course, this would please those butterfly collectors who like to pick on things at an infantile stage then discard them with the first breath of popularity.

If you want consistency and highly focussed currents of dislogic so caustic they hurt, look no further. Pussy Galore, knowing post-modernists, deal in abstraction and deconstruction of familiar images (read riffs) and end up slobbering from every orifice, with some uncanny burlesque lilt to their cartoon-style two-minute capsules. Their minds are in the gutter, but caviar and champagne must be provided as well. Each song is distilled from several hundred different sources and yet comes together just when you thought it would fall apart.

Vaudeville entertainers never had it so good. Raw, synchronised chaos spreads and you’re left wondering why something so intrinsically perfect could be given such short shrift. Where’s justice when you need it?

Dele Fadele”