06 January 2019 (gig)
09 January 2019
Let me take you on a journey. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there existed a period when music was uplifting and vital and going to a gig was fun. The advent of the anguished singer-songwriter awaits its sterile future and the angry nihilism of punk is firmly planted in the past.
In this musical golden age the beat and the groove was everything and the right attitude atoned for every fashion faux pas.
Sounds good doesn't it? Well, if you missed out first time around or simply want to relive the super sonic sounds of your youth, get to see King Kong Company.
The Waterford-based troop took their brand of ass-kicking beats to Belfast as part of the Out to Lunch Festival and sold out the venue – not bad given it is the first weekend in January.
The band take to the stage in trademark costumes - this times in grotesque masks evoking a perverted Witchsmeller Pursuivant. The sound builds and then... nothing. A power cut kills the buzz stone dead.
Vocalist Mike Graham pulls out a megaphone and asks: “Does anyone have a fucking fuse on them?”
Fortunately someone does and ten minutes later the packed audience are immediately back in the moment and moving frantically to the electronica of Ipop.
Unfortunately the electrical hic-cup put paid to some of the stage visuals but this was offset by the willingness of the band to dress to impress, taking to the stage in a variety of guises including the wearing of a huge cardboard cassette head and stalking the stage dressed as a death-ray wielding space cadet.
It is all part of KKC party first ethos which is urgently urged along with the brass infused Scarity Dan which then neatly melds into a twisted version of the Human League's Don't You Want Me?
Vocalist and trumpet player Susan O'Neill takes the Cure's A Forest and reconfigures it as an 808 State composition replete with sweeping horns, bubbling synth and babbling bongos.
A terrific rendition of Spacehopper brings the curtain down on a fantastic night and soon we are out on the cold, dark streets of a dystopian 2019. Give me the unrestrained joy and the madness of 1989 everytime.
King Kong Company play the Camden Assembly, London on St Patrick's day.
