Just how thin can a joke wear before it ceases to be a joke at all? James Berry finds out.
10/06/2004
Some way across town, on the other side of the river, another clinically obese man with a guitar strapped around his neck is simultaneously wheezing his way through a separate clutch of eccentrically proportioned punk rock music. That much of this audience – Crud included – would much rather be there instead, getting a lung-full of Black Francis’ airborne sweat, is probably a given.
But that doesn’t matter quite as much as it did before tonight, because now we’ve got our very own fat guitar playing dude. Vigilante Carlstroem hyperventilates, lunges and violently-perspires his way through this 60-minute comeback set, but still shrieks the chorus to ‘Die, All Right!’ like the Devil recently garrotted him with a short length of electrically charged barbed wire. And he’s wearing a suit. He is the embodiment of The Hives’ OTT cartoon existence. And, as with his colleagues, is just great to watch. “We love you Vigilante” hollers one likeminded soul, even if it is on the rebound. Quite.
The Hives, then, are back. They’ve got a huge red neon scrawl of their name across the back wall to announce this. And a lead singer to remind you during every last song break. “Have you heard!?” screams Howlin’ Pelle, “have you heard, Landawn!?”. London, it seems, has heard something. “Have you heard about the new record from The Hiiiiiiiieves!?”. Cue the sort of fevered mass riposte that could have been canned in a studio. “I had it in my hands just five minutes ago, backstage… the holy grail!”. If we weren’t stood in the middle of it all we’d be looking for the boom-mic falling into the top of the shot. They then play a new song that sounds like an old song, but we can’t help endorsing his own appraisal: “short and sweet, just the way you like it”.
See, try and remake or update any cartoon and it just gets embarrassing. The Jetsons were never The Flintstones, Futurama a pale extension of The Simpsons with malfunctioning bells on and who didn’t cringe at the big screen adaptation of Scooby-Doo? I mean, please. So it’s with surprising relief that we announce, despite the major label deal and ever swelling delusions of grandeur, The Hives have barely changed. Yeah, the new single ‘Idiot Walk’ has switched one of their six figurative strings to incorporate the jarring theatrics of The Who, and we swear one of the new ones was approaching official ballad status, but rest assured it is still the same old joke.
We thought the joke was wearing thin by the time they were hauling themselves on a self-styled victory lap of the festivals the summer before last, but it’s amazing what some time away does for you. There’s no denying they’re using the same shade, but it is a new pot of paint. And it’s still funny. This time around there is definitely one difference though. They now know that you already know, even if you’re not letting on. They’re going to play with you, they’re going to enjoy it and so are you. “Aren’t we doing well Lawndon,” asks Pelle mid-way through, rhetorically. Without wanting to encourage the flagrant attention-seeker, you have to agree.
Relevant sites:
http://www.hives.com
James Berry for Crud Magazine 2004©