Are bands too nice? The campaign to bring back scowling

Er yeah, are they? Are bands too nice these days? Nice. In particular, do they - quite a lot of them - dutifully thank the other bands, the audience and the promotors midway through their sets? Yes, yes they do. Good manners: it's the British disease (on top of a knee-jerk post-empire superiority syndrome). Thank you. No, not at all, thank you. On stage, all these pleasantries are boring and overly-cosy. Fine, the other bands may have been good (or tolerable), and the fact that a few dozen people have dragged themselves along to the gig is also OK, but it's nothing especially noteworthy. And likewise the promoters are ... just doing their thing. Promoting. Maybe even making a little bit of money. Ditto the people running the venues. I reckon this over-thanking behaviour is especially rife in the DIY/small venue scene. Everyone knows everyone else. They're often doing stuff against the (economic) odds. It can lead to an overflow of gratitude, which ... grates. No, too much niceness is essentially anti-art. Live music is a performance and I think musicians should break the fourth wall relatively sparingly. If at all. A lot of the most memorable performers act accordingly: David Thomas Broughton behaving in his quirky odball way as if there's no audience there at all; The Rebel doing 20 minutes of crunching Game Boy beats and droned anti-singing before he acknowledges the audience (usually with an inscrutable "joke"); Selfish Cunt strutting the stage as if he's on a queeny catwalk, achingly superior to those who've paid to attend; early Fat White Family shows conjuring up a faint feeling of menace; The Jesus And Mary Chain's famous backs-turned-to-the-audience shows played in a squall of unfriendly feedback; Johnny Rotten berating bewildered Sex Pistols' audiences (Kenneth Williams voice: "oh, they don't like us"). An interesting example is the new incarnation of Autocamper. As I said in a post last year, to my mind their jangle-with-edge sound really works, both on record and live. The edge, the hint of anger/bitterness, was, I reckon, already in the music as well as in their stage presence ("bittersweet", as they say). Now, having somewhat reinvented themselves as a psych-jangle juggernaut, they've built more of that implicit anger into their overall show. Last week in east London they played for 35 minutes without ever addressing (much less thanking) the audience beyond a cryptic remark about a missing band member having "broken his back". Add to this the fact that any gaps between (mostly long) songs were filled with brooding low-level feedback, keyboard drones and snippets of voices ripped from (I think) TV programmes, and in effect they'd built an impenetrable wall between themselves and the audience. They'd er, barricaded the fourth wall. Which is fine with me. I'm not going to gigs to be part of a jamboree of thankfulness (a fanks festival). So yeah, the next time I'm at a show and the singer starts thanking all and sundry as if they're at the BAFTAs ("and also thanks to my mum and dad, who are here tonight"), I'm going to be my usual unimpressed self. Yep, I'll do my one-hand-clapping Niluccio applause thing. After all, I'm not there to be nice. I'm there to check out the music. With a scowl on my face ...    

No niceties: Autocamper bring the psych-jangle noise to east London