Destination Zululand

Grab a granny night at The Gardens Nightclub, Yeovil. Everyone's just come off the slow dance specials with Phil Collins's In The Air Tonight still pasted around their ears. A few Goths lurk in the corner, pretending to be vampires and rubbing fake kohl wounds into each others' bodies.

King Kurt comes on and the Psychobillies hit the floor. There's a three ton of hairspray here tonight, quiffing hair into medieval siege machines; hair meeting skin at abrupt angles and Golden Ratios.

Wah oo... Wah oo...

The song starts and they kick the hell out of each other, bony elbows forming lethal corners; a little guy doing an Ian Curtis spazzathon on the outskirts is caught in the tidal flow of limbs and pinballed across the room, landing in the lap of a girl who thinks she looks like Demi Moore circa About Last Night but in fact looks like Kirstie Alley circa half ten yesterday evening.

It's fun, but it is fighting. Teeth are dislodged, eyes are moved about the face, toes stubbed, jaws locked.

King Kurt's grap of complex cross-cultural understanding seems to come from a time beyond PC (only at Bridgwater Carnival and BNP Rallies will you see more flagrantly flaunted racial stereotyping), when Zulus wore leopardskins and ate people and where Michael Caine is still stumbling about shooting through windows and keeping the buoys together.

King Kurt - Destination Zululand
(this is a Rapidshare file and thus download accelerators probably won't work)

Still, I flirted briefly with a King Kurt fixation; bought a few T-Shirts and most of the records, had a half hearted Bryl cream sculpt with my hair (abandoned almost immediately afterwards for fear of Ozone depletion and mockery) and thought vaguely about the merits of owning a motorbike.

Bad ideas all and by fourteen the kick was more or less over.

But still, I have fond memories of King Kurt. For one, they (alongside Madness etc) allowed boys to dance in ways they'd never imagine until Acid House came along and their songs were all ridiculously catchy - I'm almost sure I remember every lyric to Ooh Wallah Wallah and Big Cock.

And, every once in a while, after too much Gin and too little sleep I hear Phil Collins, Pavlov my way to the dancefloor and start sharpening my elbows.