A Friday night gig! It's quite refreshing being able to sleep a hangover off and not worry about work for a change. We'd all been looking forward to this gig for a while. We were a group of six for this show, most of us Zodiac regulars but some newbies too. We had a couple of cheeky pints at the Nags Head and then it was off to the upstairs (even though it was advertised on their website as being in the main room) part of the O2 Islington for the show.
Being a Friday night the doors opened early at 6.30pm.
According to our tickets there was supposed to be a band called Circles on first but I guess they were dropped or just didn't show. Bubblegum Screw were due on at 7.15pm but didn't come on until almost 8.00pm which was cool because we had well and truly started to get oiled up for this gig. And on they came... Bubblegum Screw. This is possibly the most ridiculous band I've ever seen. For the longest time I thought they were a piss take akin to Spinal Tap. This is ludicrous glam rock performed in an astonishingly cringey way. Camp is an understatement for this lot. The front man Mark Thorn looked as if he was wearing his little sister's clothes and pranced around the stage with his hand on his hip showing us just how limp his wrist could be. The rest of the band looked either like incredibly old Izzy Stradlin clones or young Hannibal Lecter in the film Hannibal Rising, seriously weird. It just got more and more comical as the exhibition went on. The band kept tripping over each other and screwing up their songs. It all climaxed when some strange fan wandered onto the stage. The band tried to ignore him but when he managed to get on the drums at the end of the last song, bashing away like some kind of retarded primate, had us falling all over the place. When they finally managed to get him to stop he stumbled up to the front of the stage and what seemed as if purposely fell face first into the ground in a sort of attempted stage dive that was more of a belly flop than a dive. We were laughing so hard I thought we were going to piss ourselves. Classic... No, not just classic, genius. Check out their best bits in the video below (including the weird drumming fan).
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| Mark Thorn & Ty "The American" |
So what do I have to say about Zodiac Mindwarp? What a letdown. We have been going to their gigs since the early nineties and have never seen them perform like this. To be fair to the band, they were up to scratch and did their jobs to the usual high standard, but it was Zodiac that spoiled it. We paid £16 (about $26) per ticket for a show upstairs at the O2 Islington, which is more expensive than the average band that plays in that room, so we expected the performance to be worth at least that. Zodiac stumbled on to the stage completely wasted.
He's really aged badly and instead of looking the cool rock star he did years ago, he looks more like a seedy old man who likes to holiday in Bangkok by himself. He slurred through his words, he fell over and he had to keep himself balanced on the rigging at the side of the stage throughout the show. I'm sure he thought he was amazingly stylish gesturing towards his cock and then pointing at various women in the audience. I felt sorry for him and annoyed for the people I had convinced to see this band for the first time. The last time I saw them was at The Borderline in 2010. That was an excellent gig, but I think more for the fact that The Treatment were supporting. The rest of the band are wasting their time with Zodiac in my opinion, particularly "The Cat" on drums who stole the show again. Quite frankly we think he's a tosser and so did the rest of our group. We definitely won't be rushing out to see them again, very disappointing to say the least.
Boojay
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| Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction |
Boojay
