Guy McKnight and his gothic cohorts never fail to entertain…

Date: October 26, 2010

Venue: Rescue Rooms

If you couldn’t see The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster you’d swear that the hounds of hell, the four horseman of the apocalypse and pack of rutting dinosaurs had mounted the stage for a huge brawl such is their brutal outlay.

But they are visible, in all their caliginous glory, and leading man, Guy McKnight, is a terrifyingly intense amalgam of Jesus, Roy Wood from Wizzard and Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro, with the low, resonant tones of Nick Cave.

In fact, his inner Cave shines through on new single So Long Goodnight, which channels the spirit of the lumbering Aussie at his murderous best and sounds like a punk rock version of Where The Wild Roses Grow, without the help of a diminutive antipodean pop pixie, obviously.

Elsewhere, old favourites ‘Celebrate Your Mother’ and ‘Psychosis Safari’ froth with a depraved malevolence, as Guy slays his audience with his guttural, reverb-heavy vocals while unnerving them with a piercing stare, and confusing them with his alarmingly vacant and detached disposition.

Seriously, he’s like a man possessed. We hope it’s just a show and not a public airing of his unhinged mental state, but it’s both entertaining and uncomfortable in equal measures either way.

He spends most of his time oscillating between crowd and stage, while adoring hands clamber for a quick feel. Twice he enters the throng, parting the crowd like a punkcore Moses. Not to be outdone, guitarist Marc Norris ends the gig by diving into the moshpit mid-song and exiting the room via the doors at the rear.

With raging buzz saw guitars, shards of feral white noise, trembling bass and a drum kit pummelled to within an inch of its life, the whole thing is a fiendish mathematical equation which reads something like: loud and intense garage punk + dark and twisted fist-clenching gothabilly = nefarious entertainment in abundance.