Featured image: Ryan Mole
Walls painted black. Hefty drapes. Tiffany-style gourd lamps dripping from a ceiling finished in faux gold leaf. The upstairs venue in Gullivers would make a great place for a seance or, failing that, a goth’s boudoir.
It’s a pertinent setting for Big Cat Chic, a gang of five trans and queer misfits whose very existence would be enough to ignite a war.
Chief sass machine, Eliza Waite, leads the ramshackle charge as the band negotiate broken drumsticks and water spillages, the latter prompting MMU’s very own Waite to sashay with a handful of paper towels draped around their shoulders like a soggy feather boa.
New drummer Robyn is tremendous behind the kit, eyelashes long enough to decorate your living room, and a certified badass who almost levitates from their stool as they build up a head of steam.
“I’m cheering for my own band,” Waite says before wrapping things up. “How cool is that?”
You know you’re in safe hands when a band’s intro tape is the monk’s chant from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
“Pie Jesu domine, dona eis requiem,” comes the refrain, as six Australians dressed in messianic robes stride through their disciples and onto Gullivers’ bijou stage. Frontman Sam Frank augments his outfit with a horned hat, keytar player – yes, a keytarist – Billy O’Key has a pair of homemade angel wings flapping from his back. If their tongues were lodged any further into their cheeks they’d burst through the other side.
Musically, they’re a pastiche of early ‘80s NWOBHM, complete with twin guitar solos, foot-on-monitor riffs and absurd fantasy lyrics. It’s supreme nonsense throughout, with a single choreographed air-punch during ‘I Am the Vomit’ followed by Frank incanting a fiery solo from Daniel Willington’s mesmerised fingers.
The animations on the background screen are no less ironic. Volcanoes explode, vortices swirl, crosses glow and a fearsome squadron of pterodactyl firehawks scorch through the sky during, well, ‘Pterodactyl Firehawk’.
‘I Speak Tongues’ sees Frank doing just that before he delivers a sermon during ‘Motorgut’, in which the rest of the band continue to play while they – and the entire crowd – kneel in his presence.
The keytar doubles up as a bazooka during ‘The Atomic Plough’, firing sonic booms into the devotees ahead of O’Key removing his cassock and clambering onto the fire exit in just his boots and undercrackers. Frank disrobes to his smalls, too, as they segue from ‘Nightmare King’ into a cover of AC/DC’s ‘Let There Be Rock’ while being carried shoulder-high around the venue. It’s beyond ridiculous, beyond brilliant, beyond anything a ‘joke band’ should be capable of.
Metal, so often po-faced, needs the likes of Battlesnake to relieve the pressure; a group of musicians who know the genre’s tropes backwards and never hesitate to milk them until the udder runs dry. They’d have gone down an absolute storm in Sodom and Gomorrah.
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