Somewhere at the centre of the Venn diagram of every circle of cool sits Kid Congo Powers, the link in the chain between The Cramps, Nick Cave and The Gun Club. He’s strode down his own path since the seventies, making music that’s resolutely his own, and tonight the legendary guitarist and vocalist, angelic in a white suit, is gracing the Garage in London with his presence.
Even though he’s touring with the Pink Monkey Birds, there’s no mistaking Powers’ roots. From the moment he opens his mouth on The Boy Who Had It All, we’re hit with the full force of the classic American punk sound: a rasp, a garage roughness that clashes with the smoothness of his appearance and his combover, confidence exuding from every off-beat dance pose. Silver For My Sister, only released a few months ago, stands up as a highlight of the set. Powers is a natural storyteller, sarcastic in his wit and howling distorted stretched guitar, wild but crammed his song into a theatrical, doomed package to present to us. “You know, I had a dream…that the comedienne Phyllis Diller was on a date with Jerry Lee Lewis,” he jokes, “and in my dream I said to myself, that makes perfect sense! Killer Diller!” Green and purple lit, he deals in the surreal, fully self aware and maintaining a leash on his own darkness. Sometimes ironic, never lost in his own distortion or hype, Powers’ newer songs stand up on their own against his formidable back catalogue. The guitarist smiles warmly as the last chords fade out: “crazy dream, imagine it!”
Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds @ The Garage, London - 2024.09.20
Judging by the amount of Cramps t-shirts in the crowd, most of us are here to celebrate one particular era of Powers’ career, and he doesn’t disappoint. “At one point, when I was very young, I went into a recording studio for the first time ever. I had no idea what was going on, but I know I played this song,” explains Powers to introduce his version of Goo Goo Muck. It’s a parallel version of how the Cramps’ version of the song could have been, and there’s no loss of intensity for how it’s performed by the Pink Monkey Birds, a grimy window into the potential Powers saw in the song. It still has the wildness we love tethered by the bass, Powers’ voice twitching into life like a reanimated heart. “When I was in the Cramps, one of the last things I recorded was…,” he shares, leaving the words Good Taste to our imagination. The older songs lend him a different energy as he beams and enjoys the raucous magic his songs can pull from the smoky air. Disjointed and bent out of shape, Good Taste still delights.
He draws from his time in The Gun Club too, nonchalantly but formally introducing She’s Like Heroin To Me: he wants us to understand but also doesn’t care that much if we only lean back and enjoy without full comprehension, pulling loose and re-knitting the threads that brought so much joy in the originals. Powers shows his full showman side on Thunderhead, a creator slicing up the image his music brings with each razor guitar stroke. Finally, he launches into a solo and it’s just enough of an unexpected innovation to remind us of his outsider talent.
Of course, the frontman isn’t just in town to reminisce. His latest album, That Delicious Vice, naturally features heavily in his set. The Smoke Is The Ghost is more dreamlike live, wrapped in elegant sepia, it’s jasmine-scented echoes pulsing like hammers from his guitar. It’s a gorgeous moment of American gothic, long and epic in its distortion, and perhaps the most experimental song of the set. Hollow percussion and a brief Spanish lesson draw us into Ese Vicio Delicioso, and Powers takes pleasure in distortion, dancing like a puppet under his own strings. A Beast A Priest is like a squat celebration, serving fat slices of bass with a side of fuzzy buildup and endless tension. Returning the his Gun Club era, he closed with Sex Beat, and it’s riotous as he casually flings out insults with each strum, holding up his guitar to pose before crisply walking away.
Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds @ The Garage, London - 2024.09.20
The encore could stand on its own as a manifesto about where Powers stands today. A retune, a disco bongo beat, and they’re back. “I’m not one to tell people how to live their lives,” announces Powers before we’re hit with the Cramps’ Primitive. His take is fabulous and iconic, boiling the song down until only the essentials remain. A bluesy modern openness cracks the oppression of the garage guitar, and waves of bobbing heads crest among the crowd. “This song’s about a spider,..we have a few songs about spiders,” he laughs and shares the story of La Araña.”She ended up at a party at my house, and we said ‘Queen of the underworld, so psychedelic, we love you!’” Powered up with a technicolour glory, his fingers twist to mine the spider queen’s crawl in a perfect combination of latin folk tale and furious originality, Never Said, from his latest release, is romantic and cinematic, a remembered anecdote wrapped in retelling.
As quickly as Kid Congo and the Pink Flying Birds swoop in, they’re gone. Between the ramshackle joy in his modern storytelling, a past in some of the most influential and iconic acts of the eighties, and an undeniable gift for world-building, you can’t help but feel tremendously lucky to have caught Kid Congo and the Pink Flying Birds live.
If you’re into garage punk, we recommend you check out the Monsters live on 23rd November 2024 at the Moth Club for a night of ‘one-riff, chainsaw massacre, no bullshit, primitive garage punk rock‘n‘roll trash’!
Review of Kid Congo And The Pink Flying Birds at the Garage, London on 20th September 2024. Words by Kate Allvey, photography by Pauline Di Silvestro.
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