53 Degrees presents...
Does It Offend You, YEAH!!
Saturday 19 March 2011
£10
Support: HOUNDS
The Hounds of Culann are a highly sought after bunch of young rogues that hail from the dark 'n' smokey back alleys of the foggy dew. The hounds music is a wild yet respectable, un-tameable yet structured whirlwind of sound that comes from a place deep, deep down in the recesses of their peaceful, gentle souls. They play the music of their City and Country.
16+
NUS/Public
Doors: 7-10.15pm
Club
“Natural talent should be rising to the top,” argues James Rushent, vehemently, “but it doesn’t anymore. The shit’s rising to the top… a lot of this album is two fingers up to a lot of people, the people that think that to be a successful band you’ve got to write soul music, which I think is fucking bollocks, you don’t have to do that… At the minute, if you conform and be really boring and obvious, you get rewarded. Do you need a heart anymore to listen to the radio? I don’t think so… It’s all the same, why are we giving awards out?... Talented artists are starting to go to the dark side. I said it to Plan B, I said ‘you’re first record wasn’t a massive hit but it was quite interesting, what are you doing now?’ He got really offended by that. I went ‘why are you getting offended by that? Is it because I’m right?’” Offended? Shocked? Confronted? You should be.
Spend an hour in the company of Does It Offend You, Yeah? and a couple of dozen pints and you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of a brilliantly bilious torrent of hatred and disgust aimed at the mass music media, major record labels, sell-out ‘underground’ acts, scene tags, and “bands who write two really good tunes and the rest of the album is pretty much the same as the other tunes but not as good - some of these bands go on and win awards, but they’ve just found a formula…” You’ll find yourself, essentially, in the company of the most uncompromising, un-corporate-cock-swallowing, angry, passionate and dedicated-to-the-cause band in the UK right now. And one who knows the pitfalls of having a gorge-like gob: “Everyone who has a strong opinion gets shot down for it.
But we’re fighting the good fight.” For DIOY,Y?, ‘twas ever thus. Forming in Reading in 2006 around the core of James and synthster Dan Coop (alongside Rob Bloomfield and guitarist Morgan Quaintance), they pricked ears with the incessant electro-sex insistence of ‘Let’s Make Out’ in 2007 – featuring vocals from Death From Above 1979’s Sebastian Grainger. But they followed its dancefloor devastation with a debut album, 2008’s ‘You Have Know Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into’, that was too spikey-around-the-edges to fit into any scene, too unpredictable to slot into a pre-conceived genre and too smothered with imagination for the mainstream to digest so easily. ‘We Are Rockstars’ splurged and frazzled like Daft Punk’s sadistic stepsons; ‘Battle Royale’ sounded like The Prodigy fighting an entire legion of Transformer arcade machines to the death; and ‘Epic Last Song’ was (relatively) self-explanatory.
As was ‘Attack Of The 60ft Lesbian Octopus’. Obviously. Confounding expectations at every turn (including their own; James has a “love/hate relationship” with their debut, claiming “there’s parts of the album I love and parts I don’t know why we did that, but I’m fond of it because it’s quite an innocent record, it’s got these big wide eyes), DIOY,Y? Blew up big. They made a huge impact on the gig scene with their incendiary live performances, remixed everyone from Muse to Bloc Party to The White Stripes, exploded all over the soundtracks of Fast & Furious, The A Team, American Teen, Gran Turismo 5 and countless US and UK TV shows and damn near broke America with a sold-out headline tour that saw James instead break his leg during the last song at LA’s Troubadour. The last gig of the debut
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