According to a blog post by Bishop Jim Swilley, of Georgia's non-denominational Church in the Now, Atlantan garage rock band the Black Lips are "a well-known and sometimes controversial alternative rock band". In fairness, they are probably not that well known. But "controversial" is putting it mildly. Most retro, punk-ish bands are feted for their iconoclasm and commitment to playing hard, fast and loud. Whatever the current fashion, garage rock is a danger-courting genre that never really goes away. There's a resurgence of sorts in the States at the moment, with outfits such as Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall and the People's Temple being three notable exemplars.
But Black Lips have become known, the bishop continues carefully, "for something other than the music". Gigs by bassist Jared Swilley, guitarist Cole Alexander, guitarist Ian St Pé and drummer Joe Bradley can involve broken instruments, spitting into one another's mouths, male-on-male snogging, nudity, penile guitar-playing and stage invasions. They are banned from a long list of venues – including London's Heaven, which witnessed Black Lipped high jinks in 2008. The Black Lips' tour of India in early 2009 ended in a hurried dawn flight from the country after the band indulged in some bum-baring and tongue-kissing onstage in Chennai. Rather than risk jail for lewd behaviour, the band scarpered, not before an altercation with the promoters over passports and cash turned ugly.
Bassist Jared Swilley, is of course, Bishop Swilley's son, and has caused the bishop no end of grief with the faithful. "I get a good bit of prayer offered to me for the salvation of my son," he notes wryly, before going on to declare his love for his son, and his support for Swilley the younger's creative efforts.
Tonight's sweaty, sold-out show is big on flying beer, stage-diving and an aerial ballet of toilet-roll missiles ("Not like that," admonishes Cole Alexander. "They're supposed to stream!"). You occasionally catch a glimpse of Ian St Pé's grill – his lower row of teeth is plated in gold, like a southern rapper's. The Georgians, though, remain fully clothed – except for Jared, that is, who loses his shoes while crowd-surfing. (He gets them back at the end.) And actually, St Pé has the words "thank you" masking-taped on to the back of his guitar, which he flips up between songs to acknowledge applause. Alexander even apologises for stepping on a fan's fingers.
Despite this outbreak of good manners, the show is far from a let-down. In all the fuss over their badassness, the Black Lips' actual songs are often overlooked. But they are catchy rackets, recalling 90s garage-rock linchpins Rocket from the Crypt, the Ramones and even the Beatles, often all at once. A rare slow song, "Dirty Hands", asks: "Do you really wanna hold my dirty hands?" while the moshpit subsides for a minute's respite. "Bad Kids", by contrast, is a rallying cry that gets everyone pinballing around again.
For all their shock tactics, Black Lips' music is only intermittently aggressive, drawing on tuneful 60s good-time soundtracks more than it does on punk misanthropy. Their much-lauded and accessible 2007 album was even called Good Bad Not Evil (the Lips being good bad, not evil). Many garage bands are inherently unambitious; you suspect the Lips would like their notoriety to turn to proper fame.
Unfortunately, their momentum slackened with their last album, the heady but inchoate 200 Million Thousand (2009). But the imminent release of Arabia Mountain (out 6 June) seeks to redress things with a set of even more nagging pop songs, part-produced by Mark Ronson. They never thought he'd say yes, but Ronson kept Beyoncé waiting to work on it. The Lips repaid Ronson by hospitalising him with food poisoning, caught off the raw liver the band enjoyed while recording a song called "Raw Meat".
Ronson's involvement is hardly the guarantee of a hit – for all his kudos for Amy Winehouse's best work, his recent output with Duran Duran, the Like, and his own Business International record has not, thus far, hit multi-platinum levels. But there is no ignoring the pop instincts of a song such as "Go out and Get It", ramshackle and joyous tonight. And while garage-punk purists may decry the Black Lips' sell-out in working with Ronson, breathless gigs such as this one prove that this is a band whose maverick spirit is hard to tone down.
