We live in a time of low inflation, but this is not a concept with which the (don’t mention the) Warlocks are familiar. There are loads of unnecessary members, notably one hapless guitarist who cringed against the wall throughout in order to avoid being splatted in the face by the bassist. And two drummers … well, very few bands apart from Pavement benefit from such excess, and this one certainly doesn’t. To produce the monotonous, tub-thumping beat maintained by the Warlocks throughout their entire set, one drummer is an elegant sufficiency, thank you very much.
In the front bar, the video was showing Black Grape, up at the Railway the Equidistant Sound were re-creating the Happy Mondays, so it was spooky that Warlocks singer Bobby Hecksher bases most of his oeuvre (apart from the bits where he imitates Chris Martin) on the talents of Shaun Ryder. But there’s more: The Warlocks have their very own Bez, in the form of an embarrassed-looking Laura Grigsby, who bangs inaudible tambourine and occasionally waves a finger, Linda McCartney style, at a keyboard.
The Warlocks are from California, usually rather a friendly place, but tonight they seem a pretty fed up bunch. This is a band whose idea of musical subtlety is to play for an hour without a single change of pace, whose idea of lighting ambience is to keep the strobe on the entire evening, and whose idea of audience communication is to bark “More Monitors” (not a hint of a please) at the sound engineer.
The only entertaining moment came as they left the stage to a ripple of applause and huddled beside the stage for a moment (the Joiners exposes such things) before rushing on for an undemanded encore. Suddenly, Hecksher, in a Michael Jackson falsetto, had something to say: “Oh, sometimes this shit can be so hard …” Poor lamb, he must have had all of 20 yards to walk to his luxury tour bus.
From LOGO magazine