Photo: Andrew Sawyer
Duck past the two classical angels dolling out lipstick from a MacDonalds bag at the door and descend into a heaven, underground. Cotton wool clouds fill the ceiling, floating with tiny doll cherubs. The 100 Club’s notoriously intrusive pillars have become wreath-swathed Doric columns and celestial madness reigns. One support band starts their set by racing around the crowd playing an accordion and screaming “a surprise party for me? You shouldn’t have!” and ends it, trombones and foam machines full blast, trying to sound like Beirut determined to finish a twelve-minute drone song during a fire drill. The dark is clearly rising.
The architects of this archangel anarchy are HMLTD, formerly Happy Meal LTD, the multinational, pan-gender electromash six-piece who theme every gig with a distinct aesthetic (last time, B-movie horror flick; this time, God’s S&M playroom), champion flamboyant individualism and might just be the most exciting and important collective hammering at pop music’s electrified gates for a generation.
They include amongst their number one pirate dandy drummer called Achilles, one young Robert Smith on guitar, one mad professor with a bleached moustache and one sexy Stalin of a singer by the name of Henry Spychalsk, who takes the stage in scarlet plastic military garb making “choo-choo” train noises over a crazed electroclash glam racket that sounds like Dead Or Alive throwing themselves under the 5.15 from Transcentral. For the next forty minutes HMLTD look and sound like a millennial new romanticism with one perfectly painted fingernail rammed in a plug socket.
Eighties slap bass and Duran-y hooks slam up against barrages of filthy electronic noise on the their first single ‘Is This What You Wanted?’ while elsewhere their songs stalk, sizzle and explode in all directions. Some sound like The Prodigy lost in Tokyo on Spice, others like a Nintendo 64 being cruelly deflowered, still more like you’re having a nightmare about evil robots taking over all of the jobs at a haunted carnival. They twist their synthetic blades into all manner of traditional genres – the immensely catchy ‘Foxy Love’ could be DFA 1979 doing a Bond theme and new single ‘To The Door’ is a cowboy (cowperson?) stampede that takes a sharp left turn down the stairs of Hamburg’s sleaziest strip bar halfway through. As Henry prowls across the monitors with his eyes burning silver, ripping clouds from the ceiling and shouting “burn this fucker down!”, he boast the taboo-breaking allure of Ziggy Stardust, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Soft Cell, but with Lias Saudi’s scent of sweaty, unhinged sedition. Between them, HMLTD masterfully merge all of the outsider kitsch movements of the past forty-odd years and emerge looking ready to eat the Brits for breakfast. Pucker up, Britain…
