Wednesday 13 + Glamour of the Kill + The Chelsea Smiles
Glasgow Cathouse, 30th March 2009
Oh my God, look at what the bats dragged in…
Yes, the delightful Wednesday 13 is back in town (so soon!), dragging in his bloody wake a really quite fine brace of support acts.
First up are LA glammies the Chelsea Smiles. Their name may conjure images of Vespas and sharp suits, but in the flesh they're an unashamed cross between the Ramones and my beloved Hanoi Rocks ('Little Misfit' could have been penned by Mike Monroe himself). They're young, fresh and fun, and they finish with a (somewhat over-extended) cover of Mike's 'Dead, Jail or Rock'n'Roll', so what more do you want? Fake blood? Well, there's plenty of it around…
Next we have up and coming Brit rockers Glamour of the Kill. True, they can't seem to decide whether they favour head banging, full-on, virtuoso thrash or '80s hair metal, combining Slipknot-style growling with the cheapass wail of Too Fast For Love, but they look darn fine and they even get a mini moshpit going with final, Wednesday-esque number 'Rise from your Grave', so good for them.
And so for the main event. Roaring through a high octane mix of material, the king of teenage horror kixx seems determined to keep the moshpit moving, eschewing his more eerie numbers for air-punching, horn-waving anthems like 'I Want You Dead', '1976' and 'Die My Bride'. So no 'Haunt Me', 'Skeletons' or 'Curse of Me' (boo!), but we do get B-movie classics like 'House by the Cemetery', 'I Walked with A Zombie' and 'Faith in the Devil' (proving that, in his own crass way, Wednesday is as much the poet as Milton) alongside all-American parodies 'Home Sweet Homicide', 'Happily Ever Cadaver' and that sensitive tribute to that unfortunate incident at Camp Crystal Lake, 'To Death Do Us Party'. And we even get one from the vaults of the Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet 13, in the form of the bluesy 'Scary Little Song'. Cool!
But the youth of today have short attention spans, and nobody understands the kids like Wednesday, so before we know it, it's all over, bar the inevitable 'I Love to Say Fuck' (I know, I know, it was funny the first time but now it just makes me feel old. But at least the daft umbrella has gone.) And then he's off, rock music's dishevelled, skinny-ass answer to the Addams family: creepy, kooky, spooky and ooky, but endlessly entertaining.
Wednesday 13 + Hanoi Rocks + The Haze, 31st October 2008
Wednesday 13 + Sign + Exoterik, 20th May 2008
