Gay For Johnny Depp release career-spanning retrospective
Manthology: A Tireless Exercise in Narcissism
Featuring Gay for Johnny Depp’s Excellent Cadavers
Less a greatest hits set and more a badly-edited VHS clip compilation of your favourite squirt-shots, New York quartet Gay For Johnny Depp return to release career-spanning retrospective Manthology and tour the UK’s tawdry grief-holes.
As I was just saying earlier to Ramone, my Malaysian house boy – he’s mute, but he’s very attentive – Manthology should finally clear up all the great questions once and for all, not just about the shady entity known as Gay For Johnny Depp, but about life itself, for example: who are we? Where are we going? And why are we here? (The answers of course being: humans / to bed to fuck / for endless, unfettered pleasure).
The Bible and the Koran are OK, but Manthology is better.
An utterly indulgent compilation with the sub-title, ‘A Tireless Exercise in Narcissism Featuring Gay for Johnny Depp’s Excellent Cadavers’, Manthology brings together Gay For Johnny Depp’s entire recorded output to date on one bit of plastic so cheap and so culturally devalued – that would be a compact disc – it currently has all the artistic value and credibility of a used jimmy hat resting on the end of your bedstead, in an airless room, in direct sunlight.
Nevertheless: it is still the greatest collection of music ever recorded – of that we are all agreed. This will be confirmed in person during November and December 2009 when Gay For Johnny Depp attempt to keep us all warm in the winter when they tour their second home, the United Kingdom.
So what’s the small print, uncle? Well, this is the skinny my boys and – if we must – girls. Manthology features the band’s two highly-sought after EPs Erotically Charged Dance Songs for the Desperate (2004) and Blood: The Natural Lubricant (2005), their debut album The Politics of Cruelty (2007), brand new EP The Ski Mask Orgy (2009), a remix of their single ‘Shh, Put The Shiv To My Throat’ by Blacksmoke (who have also remixed everyone from A-Ha to Emperor) and tracks from a very rare tour single, of which only 100 copies ever existed. Geek out!
The cover art-work was photographed by Bert Queiroz, whose pictures of bands such as Bad Brains, Fugazi and Dag Nasty are some of punk rock’s most definitive. This one features a portrait of hero of the underground Ian Svenonius at a younger age.
Here’s the less sexy bit: Gay For Johnny Depp formed in New York in 2004 with the sole mission of healing the wounds of a city that had been rocked to its very foundations. Sexual healing was the method deployed and soon their abrasive sound and deeply spiritual songs about fisting went global. They band are Marty Leopard (vocals), Sid Jagger (guitar), Chelsea Piers (bass) and JJ Samanen (drums).
They toured the UK and US many times and made lots of friends and also some enemies. Their music was a machine gun rat-a-tat fire of short, sharp songs with a very well hidden yet deeply intellectual core, and described as “hardcore – in all ways”. Shock! Outrage! And Boys! followed them everywhere. Some people wanted to punch GFJD (which has happened, frequently) others want to love them deeply.
Their live shows soon passed into mythical status – sometimes before they had even happened. Which is weird, but good-weird. Gay For Johnny Depp’s 2007 debut album The Politics Of Cruelty gained almost blanket positive coverage in publications such as NME, Q, The Guardian and Uncut, and also received multiple plays on Radio 1 – a triumph given the abundance of curse words and subject matter (Johnny Depp, mainly).
The band’s approach has been consistently unflinching. Promotional records have come with ‘gay gift hampers’ featuring bottles of amyl nitrate, surgical gloves and visual ‘sauce material’ to aid the listening experience. They have also been known to circulate letters from their most ardent fan, a teenager called Bradley, whose love of the band is matched only by his love of banging sailors in downtown YMCAs, and whose angelic face can be seen in the front row of all their shows.
Gay For Johnny Depp are the perfect symbiotic melding of GG Allin, Marquis De Sade, Quentin Crisp, Jeff Stryker, The Germs and, as Ramon so succinctly just intimated, their music clearly represents that point at which the nihilism and paranoia of the late 90s/early 00s consumer-driven milieau dissipates and gives way to post-recession, pan-international feelings of ‘hope’ and ‘change’, and ‘more sex’ for everyone.
Rare it is that the innovators and pioneers get recognized in their own time, yet Gay For Johnny Depp are changing opinions concerning sexual politics, censorship, public in/decency, international relations, gender and religious divisions and the capacity for the human ear to accept music at deafening volume levels one by one. At this rate the sky it the limit. Maybe not even that.
Yet as we prepare to enter the second decade of the third millennium, one glaring question remains unaddressed: is America ready for its first gay commander- in-chiefs?
Manthology is released 30th November 2009, CD/ Download
The Ski Mask Orgy EP is released 23rd November, Download only
Triple Threat Tour 09 with Blakfish and Outcry Collective
NOVEMBER
13 PLYMOUTH White Rabbit
14 BRISTOL Louisiana
15 SOUTHAMPTON Talking Heads
16 BIRMINGHAM Flapper & Firkin
17 NOTTINGHAM Seven
18 BRIGHTON The Engine Room
19 GUILDFORD Boileroom
20 OXFORD Bullingdon
21 HIGH WYCOMBE Nags Head Loft
22 SOUTHEND Chinnerys
23 BOURNEMOUTH iBar
24 DERBY The Royal
25 GLASGOW Ivory Blacks
26 MANCHESTER Satan’s Hollow
27 LUTON UBSU
28 SHEFFIELD Leadmill
29 YORK Fibbers
30 NEWCASTLE The Cluny 2
DECEMBER
01 LEEDS Cockpit
02 CARDIFF Barfly
03 EXETER Cavern
04 LONDON Borderline
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