A guest posting by Fraser Pettigrew
I’ve been to a few gigs over the years. Not as many as some readers here, for sure, but the list includes artists from the globally stellar to the defiantly cult. I’ve seen Prince and Bob Dylan, Comsat Angels and Pere Ubu. The majority of these concerts have followed the time-honoured format and mostly don’t deserve description beyond the fact of being there, it was great, Bob wore a black suit and sang through his nose for two hours.
There are some gigs, however, that ought to be filed under ‘unusual’ for various reasons.
One of the most seriously out-of-the-ordinary shows I went to was The Residents at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall in June 1983. I knew very little about them at the time. I’d seen a video on the Old Grey Whistle Test of their alien interpretation of the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction, heard a few other snippets on John Peel and that was about it. I’ve still never bought any of their records. But they were legendary for their uncompromising avant-garde obscurity, reclusiveness and personal anonymity. I was a moth to the flame.
For those of you that have never encountered them, The Residents are noted for never appearing unmasked in public, usually to be seen in promo photos or album artwork wearing top hats and tails with giant eyeballs where their heads should be. To us, children of the punk revolution, such anti-fame was deserving of high respect. And the music was staunchly uncommercial, surreal-satirical, the epitome of American weird, refreshing the parts that even Zappa and Beefheart couldn’t reach.
I’ve subsequently dipped into The Residents’ back-catalogue thanks to Spotify and while I can’t offer a complete summary of so many dozen albums, much of what I hear casts them firmly in the role of electronic-industrial pioneers, experimenting with synthesisers and treatments that warp familiar forms into a disquieting zone of creepy twilight jitters. It’s like listening to Dome or Cabaret Voltaire playing Roald Dahl poetry in the style of Sun Ra. It’s not unreasonable to argue that those groups show the influence of The Residents, as do the likes of Throbbing Gristle, Pere Ubu and Devo, albeit in (sometimes) much more accessible form.
Prior to the extensive European tour that brought them to Edinburgh, The Residents had played barely a handful of live shows over their decade-long existence. This was seen as part of their studied obscurity, but in fact it was driven as much by the difficulty the group itself perceived in reproducing their studio music on a live stage. Advances in early sampler technology in the early 80s presented a solution, and the Mole Show was born.
The Queen’s Hall is not your typical rock venue, which seems entirely appropriate for a band like The Residents. It’s a former presbyterian church with no real backstage area or clear division between auditorium and the stage, a low platform projecting into the seated area and overlooked on both sides by the upper balcony. Ironically, however, The Mole Show was clearly designed with a more traditional theatre in mind and the stage end of the Queen’s Hall had to be screened off with a huge improvised white curtain that would ordinarily hang handily across the proscenium arch.
The show started with the curtain still closed, lights blazing behind it and some quasi-industrial music kicking in. Eventually the curtain parted to reveal… another curtain! Or at least a rough sackcloth screen held up on a large gantry behind which the band members could be made out, backlit and silhouetted as they played. A group of dancers occupied the area in front of the screen, writhing about with a large eyeball held in each hand. So far, so weird.
To be honest, I don’t remember that much about the music or all the barmy things that happened in the show. I do remember that when band members finally emerged from behind the screen they weren’t eyeball-headed but wore those joke plastic Groucho Marx glasses-nose-moustache masks to obscure their faces. There was an MC who explained to the audience what was going on at various points. I have subsequently learned that the MC was none other than Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame, before anyone in the UK knew who Penn and Teller were. Towards the end of the show, after he had spent the evening using his role to sarcastically deride the performers, he was brought back onto the stage gagged and tied to a wheelchair. Apparently, during a performance in Spain, Jillette was attacked by an irate audience member while thus bound and gagged. No such assault occurred in Edinburgh, however.
Fortunately, to make up for my feeble recollection, there is a video on YouTube of an entire performance of The Mole Show
It was recorded in Madrid for an arts TV programme, so we can all marvel at the impenetrable insanity of the whole thing. (The show starts at about 8m30s. The role of MC is played by the tour manager in this recording, as Penn Jillette was ill).
There is also an excellent fan website here that relates the complete logistical and financial nightmare of the tour, an experience of mismanagement that reads like the most typical rock’n’roll thing The Residents have ever done.
It’s the familiar story of setting out to tour as a way of generating income, but designing a show that cost more to stage and transport than came in at the box office, having to sell the merchandising rights to generate funds but thereby losing out on the substantial income stream from merch sales, and finally their tour manager failing to pay the UK shipping company who impounded all their gear until he was paid, requiring The Residents to rebuild all their sets for one last money-spinning performance back in America, eating into the fee for that. Two days before this final show, the original sets and gear arrived from the UK.
Despite ending up penniless from this exhausting experience, The Residents have gone on to embrace live performance over subsequent years, mounting elaborate stage shows that have managed to actually make money on occasion. They have also managed to remain anonymous, with the exception of founding member Hardy Fox, although his identity as one of the band’s primary composers was only revealed on account of his death in 2018. He had previously been openly associated with the group as one of the ‘Cryptic Corporation’, a group of people supposedly brought in to manage and represent the band.
As I mentioned above, even the experience of The Mole Show didn’t motivate me to seek out any of their records. It was as though the gig was more of a theatrical experience than a musical one, and certainly almost all of The Residents’ LPs can be defined as ‘concept’ albums, like little theatrical creations of their own. Consequently, it’s very difficult to pick out any kind of representative sample of tracks, so I’ve confined it to a couple of pieces from Mark of the Mole, the album that spawned the whole idea of the show, plus a couple of other pieces from the same era. The Commercial Album (1980), whilst laughably un-commercial (natch!) at least has the virtue of limiting each track to exactly one minute, and as a consequence is more listenable than a lot of their others. I’d be hard pushed to say I was recommending any of this mind you, but if your tastes take you to some wilder shores then you might enjoy. Or you’ve been there already. Plus, if you were canny enough to buy a copy of the Satisfaction single in 1976 you could possibly raise anything between £400-800 for it these days.
mp3: The Residents – Voices of the Air (from Mark of the Mole, 1981)
mp3: The Residents – Another Land (from Mark of the Mole, 1981)
mp3: The Residents – Amber (from The Commercial Album, 1980)
mp3: The Residents – Perfect Love (from The Commercial Album, 1980)
mp3: The Residents – Satisfaction (single, 1976)
The long history of The Residents is a furiously complex web of personas, mythologies, conceptual contrivances and symbolism that makes the KLF look like part-timers. The fact of having seen them live illuminates none of this really. It was just one incarnation of an endlessly morphing artistic project that has rolled along for around fifty years, the product of a group of people with singular imaginations and a lifelong dedication to their concept. I still feel privileged to have witnessed them perform live at that time, when few others ever had. For all the mainstreaming of what was once avant-garde in the decades after punk, I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like it since.
