Deth Before Christmas

It’s nearly Christmas. I know this because there are lights and trees and all manner of other festive crap adorning the towns, cities and villages of this country. I also know it’s nearly Christmas because Lawnmower Deth had scheduled a one-off gig in London tahn.

Lawnmower Deth. They’re a joke band, right? Ha ha! Well, they perhaps once were, but they’re still here thirty years later, so who’s laughing now?

I bought a copy of the seminal Ooh Crikey... when I was about 16 and me and my mates at the time absolutely loved it. We loved daft songs like Did You Spill My Pint? and Duck Off and we actually managed to get Satan’s Trampoline played a few times at a local rock night in Darlington. But despite them regularly adorning the pages of metal periodical, Kerrang, they were still seen as being a joke.

Follow-up album Return of the Fabulous Metal Bozo Clowns marked an improvement musically. They inherited Acid Reign guitarist Kev and created a much more metal sound. They were still a joke though. Short classics Be Scene, Not Heard and Egg Sandwich were not to be taken seriously. But I still thought it was all quite fucking brilliant.

Billy came out a few years later and sounded like a So-Cal skate-punk album. It was widely panned. Why? It was actually really good – still is. The problems with this album were the change in musical direction and fundamentally that Lawnmower Deth no longer seemed to be funny. They couldn’t win.

The band faded into obscurity. Then they suddenly started to pop up at summer festivals and one-off shows, a bit like the one I attended at Camden’s Underworld last Saturday.

There were other bands on the bill. Solitary kicked it all off, but I arrived just in time to hear pretty much the last chord they played. Xentrix were up next and it was the 90s again as we were treated to half an hour of Lancastrian thrash, most of it about whippets and hotpot, no doubt.

I was reeling from the shock of having paid £5.70 for a pint of Guinness at this point, but a bigger shock was that the inside of the club wasn’t made entirely from gold given their bar prices. Even more surprising was the audacity of having a tip jar on the bar. Pay your staff more out of your profits, you twats.

Lawnmower Deth took to the stage and opened with the snooker/Dracula-themed classic, Spook Perv Happenings in the Snooker Hall. The whole room became a gigantic moshpit and everyone knew the words, Frontman Qualcast ‘Koffee’ Mutilator, or the even more metal ‘Pete’ as he is known, had the audience eating out of his hand. He’s not your typical rock star. He had a genuine look of surprise on his face that people could be arsed to come and see them play. Especially as there were people who had travelled from France, Norway, South Africa and America for the show. Pete, you see, isn’t a cunt like some other rock types and he still has to pinch himself regularly to see that he’s not dreaming that he’s been allowed to be in a band that has amused and delighted a staggering number of people for so many years.

The band raced through classics from all albums, including Billy. “You hated it when it came out, but love it now,” laughed Pete. A new song was premiered. Was it called Into the Pit? I’m not sure as I was quite drunk, but I do remember that it was fucking excellent. The band played for an hour, apologetic that they were higher up the bill than two bands who had toiled for hours to craft their songs, while they got away with a ten second song about a sarnie. Around two thirds of their entire back catalogue was played and the evening was rounded off with a cover of Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day, which was played twice.

I’ve never seen so many people smile on their way out of a gig and I must say that Lawnmower Deth are one of the few bands who don’t take the piss with their merch prices. No £20 t-shirts and £50 hoodies on sale that night.

The only thing left to do was discuss how fantastic it was with total strangers in the street outside. Conversations with possibly-South-African-man-with-beard-who-was-an-investment-banker and Ukrainian-guy-who-sounded-like-Borat were among the highlights. But I was still thirsty and I knew on the way back to the hotel that it wasn’t too late, to get some tins, seal my fate.