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 the horrors
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Darkness visible. Jerking like a puppet in front of a barrage of strobes, Faris Rotter screams, “Draw Japan with a ravenous pen!” at a thousand Horrors acolytes. Headlining their first show at The Coronet – a semi-dilapidated South London Victorian theatre - must be a delicious triumph after playing third on the bill to arms-crossed Twang fans on the NME tour.  They look like “the remnants of Tim Burton’s dressing-up box”/“extras from the Thriller video”/“Victorian undertakers”… Granted, one doesn’t dress as a Goth if one wishes to be taken entirely seriously, but there’s an astonishing amount of flannel written about The Horrors by a copy-hungry music press. “It’s not like we sit around drinking f**king virgins’ blood,” sniffs Faris. Indeed, they’re basically a really tight punk band with good record collections. And, in 2007, being a music enthusiast is something of a rarity. The main thing is to be in a band, to get your myspace pimped and work out the music later. “We’re not one of those bands who are really into the idea of being in a band,” says Faris. “Or who try and bash together two random genres like trance and metal.”  The Horrors live in an alternate reality before the mainstream absorption of the underground. Their world is one of 80s-style fanzines, 70s punk, stretching all the way back to 60s producers like Joe Meek – pioneers who built their own instruments and tweaked studios to try and replicate the wild sounds they heard between their ears. And it works. Draw Japan is an arpeggiated synth banger with cavernous death-march backing vocals while the thrash-punk boogie of Sheena Is A Parasite – which imagines the sorry state of the Ramones’ heroine 30 years later. Not that they’re trying to proselytize hardcore punk or extreme electro. Says Faris, “people can do what they f**king want.”
James Cowdery
The Horrors – Strange House, released 23 April 07 on Loog.
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