Twisted like a train wreck

Envision, if you will, the late great Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth hunched in his workshop in a creaky castle on the edge of town, stencilling one of his madcap images onto the door of a vintage dragster as a Halloween storm brews outside. A fork of lightning cleaves the sky, strikes the bell tower and then shoots down into the bowels of the building, animating the demon ink. The image comes alive in Ray Harryhausen stop-motion; the dragster undergoes self-ignition and roars off through the walls, belching clouds of sulphurous carbon monoxide, hell-bent on stinky carcinogenic autogeddon.

The soundtrack to such a scenario could only be provided by the 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster, a weird misgeneticisation of bone-through-the-nose Birthday Party rhythms, Dead Kennedys rapid cycling, Gun Club and Cramps blues – a bona-fide lysergic psychobilly west coast nightmare. The quintet’s debut album Horse Of The Dog was the most savagely driven 25 minutes and 20 seconds of noise released in 2002, and when your reporter saw their lean and jagged live set at Witnness last summer, he thought he’d died and been reincarnated in the Lyceum circa 1981.
“Filthy loose noise,” is how singer Guy McKnight – who provides a sort of ill Jim Morrison contrast to his cohorts’ spindly-legged Blixa Bargeld demeanour – characterises the sound they make. But how does a bunch of 20-something pups from Brighton rumble on such a lurid vision of trashy Amarikana?
“Completely unintentionally,” McKnight says. “We were listening to Captain Beefheart, The Doors, Guns ‘N’ Roses, Stooges, Pixies, loadsa stuff, and just made the music we always envisioned. I think initially we thought we were going to be a kind of dark psychedelic band and we transformed into a dark psychotic band. A big influence was the 13th Floor Elevators. When people started saying stuff like Birthday Party, Joy Division, Gun Club, Dead Kennedys, The Damned, we’d never really listened to any of those bands. The tunes off Horse Of The Dog are really influenced by not just music from different sources but also the experience we had together growing up as a gang of mates.”
So, like the Stones recreating themselves as bad blues buzzards from an imaginary south, or an Indiana hick like Axl appropriating LA flash and trash, the B-Line Disaster create their own unreality trip.
“I think say, with The Stones, the reason why they could play (American blues music) and it would be sincere is because they came from a working class and middle class environment and lived together in a shithole for a few years and got the vibe going. I think that’s kind of what we did, we just had a party for a few years and it turned into hell.”
The band are currently recording their second album in the same LA studio that birthed Nevermind, with Masters Of Reality man Chris Goss producing. The first trailer for the new material is the current single ‘Mister Mental’, a song that may or may not be a paean to the sort of extreme reactions their live shows provoke. Case in point: T In The Park last summer.
“I got in a fight with some bloke in the audience who grabbed me by the hair and punched me in the eye,” Guy recalls. “I think he just got the wrong end of the stick, ’cos when we play, even though there’s a lot of violence in the music, we really want to inspire and excite, but some people can get a bit too excited and express it the wrong way. It’s probably what happens with bands of our pedigree I suppose.”

‘Mister Mental’ is out now on No Death, distributed by Universal/Island