NAKED BUNCH

Rip It Up, Issue 179, 1 June 1992, Page 16

NAKED BUNCH

TO, Saturday night, and two members of Head Like A Hole are perched on couch of TVFM s new-look set for the show's inaugural interview. Contrary to popular expectation they are not naked. Booga is wearing a horrible grey pinstripe suit and his hair is slicked back in a ponytail like a member of Heaven 17. Hidibeast looks normal —skull and bones round his neck, dreads down his back, fresh tatts. Manager Gerald Dwyer keeps a beady eye on proceedings, but tonight his boys are behaving themselves. Despite nerves, Booga doesn't let off so much as one tiny fart. A rare feat of uncharacteristic forbearance as anyone who knows him will attest.

Half of Head Like A Hole are up here from Wellington for a weekend of interviews because their debut single 'Fish Across Face'

is number nine in the charts and their album, Thirteen (12 songs!) will be on a record shop shelf near you by the time you read this. This is a big deal

for a band who only started a year ago, minus firm ideas about how they wanted to sound. How they sound on record is ''awesome!" The aural equivalent of being run over by a high-speed juggernaut. A demented, multi-rhythmical guitar / bass / drums /vocal beast which chews through metal guitar riffs, tribalistic drum patterns, vocal distortion and Sesame Street samples like a rat at a rubbish tip. Oh yeah, and the lyrics are crazy — Hidee says it takes him months to figure out what Booga is on about. Hardly surprising when you consider the poetic sources of inspiration tapped by Booga. For . example, we're sitting in the RIU office when Booga leaps out of his chairand rips a Pussy Galore poster off the wall. \ , 'That's the poster that 'Afro t •_ ~ Surprise' came from," explains Hidee. Oh yeah? Booga is pawing at it in an excited manner. 'Me and Nigel were tripping one night and I was looking at this poster and we spotted all these things and I wrote this song. See this here, can you see these two eyes?" (He points to a millionth of a millimetre segment of afro on the man's head) 'See there, two eyes and a nose and that's like a bowler hat and there's his ear and here's a guy's hair and an eye, a meat pattie eye. That's his nose and there's his mouth and he's going 'yeoghhhhhh' and vomiting all over the place and he's being held up by this dude and that's how the songs goes: 'Can you see the man with the meat pattie eye?' That's the cosmic way songs are written." Which has zilch to do with afros, but I guess you had to be there inside Booga's head. "They're not really deep and meaningful lyrics,* adds Hidee unnecessarily. "They're not heart grabbers, it's just word phrases and word play." BOOGA: "Fat Little Man'is about babies and how they've got it sweet, they just sit back and fart and drink and gurgle and mother has to do everything." What about 'Fish Across Face'. Is that a 90s take on 'I Love Rock 'ri Roll'? The boys giggle. HIDEE: "No, it's not an anthem for a new genertion, definitely not." For all their absurdist tendencies, their wacky publicity photographs, their fart samples and deliberately ridiculous stage moves (Booga running around in a skirt, guitarist Datehole and Hidee generally taking to the stage completely starkers) Head Like A Hole have turned out one hell of a ballistic > album. "A lot of it was to do with the amazing talents of Brent McLaughlin,' says Hidee. 'Cos even

though Writhe is only a 16-track studio and they haven't got all that much there, he knows all the ins and outs of what is there and it sounds just as good as quite a lot of real . high-budget recordings in slickness and stuff like that. It's a very digital kind of sound to me, it sounds very precise." Are you that slick on stage? BOOGA: "We always have technical problems, our guitarist goes flying through the air and his chord goes bink and someone's plugging it back in the wrong way. Some of the songs we play are quite tight, but other ones we just tend to sort of get a bit carried away and we don't concentrate.' .. ; HIDEE: "But to me, playing live and in the studio is a completely different kind of media, because live you've got all the visuals and total theatre kind of thing as well. The music is really important, but you've got something to look at. In the ; 3 studio it's different, you've got to convey that energy with just audio things. It's a lot more sterile environment, plus you can hear everything you do really well so you're sort of trying to play a bit nicer." Head Like A Hole consider themselves at their best live, but while in the studio they were . i ■■ ; pleased to discover they could actually play their songs tight and tune their guitars properly (even though Datehole is half deaf with itchy ears, according to Booga). They don't go near a drum machine. Hidee's ferocious rhythms and stylistic variety add a lot of texture to the music. "That just stems from all the kinds of music I've been in and out of all my life,' he says. "Really diverse music, from jazz to reggae, death metal, industrial music, drum machines, heaps of different things.' Nor are the samples and distorted vocals on the album key parts of any of the songs. "Live we don't do any of those samples, we just thought we may as well go for as many studio kind of things as possible and make this a studio album instead of trying to capture us live." ■ As for being industrial metal, ex-Sabbath freak Booga says 'No way!'. Nor are they funk metallers . (they played that card out on their independent tape release Shitnoise, although there's a lingering whiff of it still on 'Fish Across Face 1 Booga's fave NZ bands are SPUD and the 3 Ds, he also likes Cop Shoot Cop and Jesus Lizard. Hidee listens to a lot of death metal (Gorefest, Skinchamber) and industrial stuff like Einsturdenze Neubaten. "I guess it does have a bit of an influence," he concedes. "But life influences us more than any particular music."

HLAH started out just wanting to ►

► play originals without any stylistic boundaries. They knew they were going to be loud because they all listened to metal. Songs are crowded with riffs, rhythms and vocal blasts going off in a million directions at once —that's because the boys have a short attention span and must always be doing something different in every song. And because when they started out they were less a band than a bunch of noisy individuals all clamouring to get their own bits squashed into one song. Now they listen to each other . better, but things are still changing with every song they write. Booga (whose mother is an opera singer) is learning to use his voice as an instrument in order to inject more melody into proceedings. There's no doubt that Head Like A Hole are high on energy and low on the old emotional content. HIDEE: "That's just the way it's happened so far, like being possessed to write songs we can't really help, we haven't any say in what we do, it just happens." , Is your music violent? HIDEE: "Not violent, but aggressive." BOOGA: Tn a full-on kind of way, not a violent kind of way, like music to inspire mass murderers or anything. Sometimes it reminds me of someone throttling someone else. Other songs are happy and bouncy, other ones are just funny for the sake of being funny. Some of them are really moody. Like we're playing live, and I imagine these two gigantic hands coming out from the stage and sucking people up by the head and going (here he imitates a loud crunching noise)." Then there's the famous on-stage nudity which has cynics muttering 'oh . yeah, Lubricated Goat revisited', but the boys say the difference is that they're not doing it to get attention, they're just doing it cos it feels good. Besides, it was their manager Gerald's idea (as an ex-member of punk shock merchants Flesh Device, he knows about this kind of thing).

He suggested Datehole play naked while HLAH were on the Shihad tour. Hidee (who is vegetarian and interested in things of a tribal / occult nature) soon followed in his birthday suit, decking himself out in body paint to psyche himself up for the stage. He couldn't give a shit about the boguns who come along to shows and complain that men's bodies are ugly and should be covered up and only women should dare appear naked in public. Besides, the nudity led to a great little article about the band in Australia's high-class People magazine, which also made much of the band's fascination with flatulence. Well, Booga's at least, who proceeds to tell us about his hero Mr Bujeau, a 17th century Frenchman with a "wicked talent* for sucking air up his bum and blowing it back out again to play tunes and blow out candles." Yep, deep and meaningful Head Like A Hole are not. But various band members are interested in starting sideline projects where they can express their more deeper selves. Datehole and guitarist John Toogood from Shihad have formed a three-piece called SML Hidee wants an outlet for his "dark, moody, serious" side and Booga says he wants to do something that sounds like Pavement. "Jangly, but not typical New Zealand jangly. I'd like to do a song that was just sort of slapped together really slap-happy, but it sounds good, like the vocals haven't been 1 dwelled on. But I don't think I could start up anything like that. If there was someone in Wellington that would play guitar how I'd like them to I would have met them by now." Meanwhile, the philosophical tone is set by such HLAH anthems as 'Narcotics, Noise and Nakedness' and Booga's lyrical preoccupations continue along their famously unsavoury course. "Have you heard the story of 5 'Peanut'S Me and Dave went out and got really drunk. We went back

to his mother's place and had a comed beef sandwich about an inch and a half thick and it was really gross, but we ate it anyway because we were really hungry. Then I started feeling really sick. I got up and vomited and then I went back into the 100 and just blacked out. I woke up in the morning lying in the middle of the bathroom floor going 'where the hell am I?' still quite drunk. And then I looked around the room and it was like shit all over the walls and toilet and the carpet and I was going 'how the hell did that get here' and then I stood up and it was all over me as well. I'd had some sort of accident and went bonkers with it and sort of decided to hit it. So I wrote this song called 'Peanut' about that with the line 'l've got a peanut in my eye'. It's got nothing to do with peanuts as in the ones that you eat but that's what I sing about, sort of, as a bit of a twist to it* How charming. Almost as appealing as the lines he's reciting about nose hairs. Booga certainly has a knack for attractive subject matter. . 'I can't think of anything else to write about!" he protests. "I don't want to say Tve got this feeling' you know, because how many other people say that? I was writing down some stuff last night about how I always get really sweaty palms." 'Everyday stuff that people take for granted put in a different context can be really funny because everyone associates with it whether they know it or not," explains Hidee. By now it's time for the boys to leave for the airport and the Windy City they call home. We say our goodbyes in the RIU foyer, Gerald with mobile phone and briefcase hovering anxiously nearby. They'll have to boot the rental car to get to the airport on time. But Booga wants to go to the toilet. Gerald says firmly no he cannot, he can go on the plane. I breathed a sigh of relief, I can tell you. —... /

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