A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

CHRONIC INDIGESTION is one thing but when's the last time a light lunch landed you in hospital?

In Jim Rose's case, it was three weeks ago after an 80 watt bulb he was munching on went down the wrong way and he had to be ambulanced off to casualty suffering from stomach cramps and a bleeding bowel.

"Talk about a 'ring of fire'", laughs the 36-year-old American, "I was afraid to pass wind in case the shrapnel ripped someone's face off! We've had a few mishaps over the years but generally there's no blood in this show. Bile and bodily fluids, yes, but not blood, if we can help it."

What really intrigues me, is how on earth did a reasonably sane kid from white middle-class suburbia end up running a travelling freak show? I mean, you can hardly tell the careers guidance officer at school that you want a job that involves "eating broken glass and having darts stuck in my back" and expect them to come back with a place for you at the Iowa College of Sado-Masochism.

"Well, even though my parents were teachers, it was a bit of a family tradition. Every summer, they ran a 'dunk tank' at the various carnivals and state fairs and I'd go along and help them. My dad was a clown who sat in a cage screaming insults at people. My mother sold them balls which they threw at a target and if they hit the bullseye, splash, he was in the water! It was fun and it also gave me access to the last generation of authentic freak shows.

"I'd better qualify that - the heyday for what we're doing now was the 1930's. After that, entrepreneurial sharks infested the waters and, more and more, they became cons and hoaxes and eventually disappeared altogether. In other words, the gorilla lady was not a real gorilla lady and the only way you'd think different is if you smoked a load of pot, downed half-a-dozen gin & tonics and took off your glasses."

Maybe the brain-frazzling Arizona sun played a part but by the time Rose reached adolescence, his interest in circus culture had become an obsession and curtailing "a none too distinguished academic career", he took to the road to brush up on his technique as a street performer.

"Yeah, I was a veritable Jack Kerouac! I left home at 19 to travel round the world in search of the bizarre. I did that for a number of years - a roadie from That Petrol Emotion ran up to me recently and said, 'fuck, I remember you from Venice Beach!'. I finished my wanderings in, what, 1985, and moved to Seattle where I started playing the same clubs as the early grunge groups. We've never exploited our connections but Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam, Al Jourgensen from Ministry, Gus Cornell from Soundgarden, Flea from the Chilli Peppers and Mikki from Lush have all sampled the bile."

We'll bring the bile up again - if you pardon the expression - a little later. As anyone who's seen him in action will testify, Jim's on-stage antics are pure rock 'n' roll with the wilder excesses redolent of Iggy Pop in his Raw Power heyday. He also looks dead cool in leather trousers, so why did he choose freakdom over being in a band?

"I can't sing, I can't play but I can sure wail on a pile of glass! No, music never got to me in the same way as seeing someone punch a skewer through their face or feast on worms. That's the kind of stuff I get off on - testing the body to the outer limits of physical and mental endurance."

Although Rose has imported elements of the Circus Sideshow from literally every continent, all the members are American and share surprisingly mundane backgrounds.

"Yeah," nods the master-of-ceremonies in agreement. "You'd expect these guys to be acid casualties or to have been raised in the woods by wolves but, you know, they're not monsters. Lifto was selling car insurance, Torture King was a projectionist and Matt 'The Tube' Crowley was a pharmacist."

I can imagine Lifto was a wow at the old insurance business: "So, you'd like comprehensive cover for your Ford Fiesta? Okay, sir. I'll just unhook this Morphy Richards from my dick and be right with you."

You may not regard lifting irons with your penis as a particularly edifying way to make a living but if Lifto wants out, the bodypiercings will heal. It's the same for Torture King - he doesn't have to keep turning himself into human shish kebab every night and, if he's willing to practice, I'm sure Matt 'The Tube' could master drinking through his mouth rather than his nose. Returning to polite society won't be quite so easy, though, for The Enigma who'd need one hell of a skin graft to remove the jigsaw tattoo that covers every part of his body, naughty bits included.

"Well," Rose reflects, "if he ever decides to quit the freak show business, he's not going to get a job at McDonald's, that's for certain. Although it's brilliant from a performance point of view, I've gotta say that I never asked or encouraged The Enigma to do that to himself. He'd been threatening to get tattooed for quite a while and my attitude was, 'think about it real hard because this is going to change your life.' Anyway, we took two months off last year and when I returned from France, he'd transformed his body into a living work of art. He paid more than one person to do it and he's still getting the pieces coloured in."

Does he worry that in a couple of years time, The Enigma may regret the decision?

"Yeah, but what's done is done and I'm really not their mothers or their fathers. I know this show is safer than it could be because I say 'no' to many things. When I first met him, for example, he never used to clean his swords off after swallowing them which is something I now insist that he does. If he's going to kill himself, let it be on stage, not in a hospital ward suffering from blood poisoning."

While The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow is still very much a cult affair on this side of the Atlantic, back home they've become a multi-media phenomena with their own telly show, a comic book, and a forthcoming horror flick which Jim describes as "The Night Of The Living Chainsaw Massacre."

"I often think of what we do," he confides, "in terms of those kitsch 'B' movies which were so popular in the fifties and sixties. There's stuff in the show which scares you shitless and makes you want to hurl, sure, but there's also a lot of humour. Nine times out of ten, the complaints we get are from people who've never actually seen us perform but have heard there's a guy who sticks hooks in his eyes and reckon that's kind of perverted."

Bearing in mind that bodypiercing and mutilation are both synonymous with the S&M scene, is it possible that a section of their audience come along for purely voyeuristic reasons?

"Maybe but, if that is the case, I reckon it's only a tiny percentage. We're not sexually explicit and in the States we get Guns 'n' Roses fans sitting next to housewives and business people rubbing shoulders with bikers. That's because the one subject we all have in common is the human body and what we're saying is, 'forget what you thought you knew, we're tearing the anatomy book up!' We're the freakiest circus ever on one fucking stage. You would've had to go through fifty tents in the old days to see this show."

Having watched Lifto at painfully close quarters, I've come to the conclusion that himself, and the other members of Rose's menagerie, rely far more on physical dexterity than they do illusions or conjuring tricks. I know we're entering the realm of trade secrets here but is there an element of showbiz jiggerypokery involved?

"Dizzy Gillespie was not born with big cheeks. Sumo wrestlers are not naturally 700 lbs. The body and mind can be conditioned to do some remarkable things. You wouldn't believe how elastic skin can be or how much pain the nervous system can tolerate. The key is timing and having your mental shit together. We were in Paris a while ago. I wasn't feeling too good - hell, there was diarrhoea coming out my butt - and when it came to the part where I hammer a screwdriver up my nose, I fucked up. Man, that sucker was pumping like a firehose!"

Although The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow would appear to be perfect tabloid fodder, there have been surprisingly few stories of the 'stop this filth' variety and despite the proliferation of phalluses, they've only ever had to cancel a handful of gigs.

"Ireland," he reveals, "has been particularly good in that respect. I know they're supposed to be real conservative but, in our experience, Catholic countries are far less uptight than Protestant ones. For instance, we get hassled all the time in England over the bile and The Enigma eating live insects. We got banned in Belfast, where I'm told the council are notorious for being killjoys, but in Dublin and at Féile, we've been pretty much left to our own devices. The only concession we've had to make is Lifto covering his dick with shaving-foam which is no big deal."

From where I was standing in Thurles, it looked an extremely big deal but enough penile humour, onto the bile! When Matt 'The Tube' Crowley goes on the tear, he doesn't let the drink touch the side of his mouth. Nope, he loads six pints of beer into a stomach pump, adds a bottle of ketchup for seasoning and a liberal dash of milk of magnesia to insure against indigestion, and flushes the cocktail down through his nose and into the lower intestine.

After letting the mixture marinade for a few minutes, he sucks it back up with an added ingredient - his dinner. At Semple Stadium, this comprised of a hearty Irish Stew which, among others, 2FM's Ray Darcy got to sample.

"Oh yeah," enthuses Rose, "you Irish go crazy for the bile. That stuff really is special brew!

"If you think this show is extreme, wait till next year. We're going to come back with big screen projection that shows everything in glorious technicolour close-up. If The Enigma's snacking on a maggot, you're going to see that little devil wiggling on the way down. Our current obsession is power tools - everybody loves power tools. We're going to play chainsaw rugby and balance a lawnmower on our chins and let the audience throw heads of cabbage at it. We discovered that if you let a lawnmower come up and hit your leg just right, it doesn't slice the limb off but leaves a little shaved area. Hey ladies, no more waxing!"

Now, there's an idea. The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow & Hair Removal Salon. The Philip's Ladyshave could become obsolete overnight. With the stunts becoming more and more extreme, has Jim gotten to the point where he's no longer shocked by anything?

"No, there's still a lot of shit to explore out there. The day I become unshockable is the day I become as jaded and blasé as just about everyone else who's been western-educated and thinks they've seen it all. I have to keep on believing that the world has some amazing things to offer, otherwise I'd be better off in real estate."

Here's hoping that Jim never loses the faith!