Rural Worcestershire, 1992-ish. A 15-year-old boy wearing a faded Guns n’ Roses t-shirt leaves Fresh Prince of Bel Air on the TV and creeps upstairs into his older brother’s bedroom. He presses play on the CD player of his brother’s new stacker hi-fi system. With a mixture of disgust, shock, amazement and hilarity, this boy hears a song about a New Yorker who – on waking up drunk after a party – has lost his penis, but finds it for sale on a market stall, buys it, washes it and reattatches it. This is King Missile. This is Detatchable Penis.
The above story is completely true, except that the t-shirt may have been a Bob Marley one. Or I might have been wearing a hawaiian shirt. Anyway, the point is, having grown up to my full five feet five and a half inches, I now eschew these items of fashion. But I still listen with glee to King Missile.
At times ear-splittingly unlistenable as all great noisemakers should be, King Missile’s raison d’etre was to create offensive, irrelevant, nonsense. They succeeded – with a huge dollop of postmodern poetical pop panache and more contemporary late 80s cultural allusions than American Psycho. This is music of it’s time: the slightly-pre-Tamogotchi era if you will.
Imagine Steven Malkmus had gone to nihilism school and started listening to Cream. Imagine Weird Al Yankovic had been funny and muscially capable and had a heroin habit. Imagine a Kurt Cobain stand-up routine consisting entirely of jokes about using joss sticks as sex toys. Imagine Ren & Stimpy had released a CD of music to be Buddhist by. Imagine the theme tune to Rocco’s Modern Life played through a smashed lava lamp. Imagine Bill Hicks played backwards to a provocative bongo accompaniment. You’re getting there.
At heart, King Missile is Greenwich Village poet John S. Hall. The band has undergone multiple mutations, putting out material from the mid 80s to as recently as 2004. King Missile’s roots, era and perhaps it’s fanbase, is superficially that which produced REM. But instead of the whiny pop-irony of Shiny Happy People, King Missile courts the unironic murderous self-harming, sexually depraved, fucked up people. Some of the silliness is very of-it’s-time, although, you can perhaps hear their influences the likes of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. King Missile’s later albums may lack some of the raw qualities that make earlier albums so great, they can feel, at times, simply like more of the same.
Its sporadic line-up, multi-instrumentalism and eclecticism means that King Missile had no consistently definable sound. Their most frequently applied approach is something akin to sub-4AD type college rock. But they were almost never about the music. This is neurotic poetry set to tunes, which makes it a hideous bore for many. Are you’re familiar with the early work of Mercury Rev? If your favourite track on their 1993 album Boces is the pianodrunk Girlfren then you’ll probably like King Missile. The novelty can really wear off. But if you dig it, stick with it.
Yet there is no denying that when applied together the music and lyrics combine to make some excellent mainstream tracks, including Happy Hour‘s I Wish, Fluting on the Hump‘s Love You More and The Neither World. They employ drone guitars, plenty of fuzz, sitars and triangles with equal aplomb. But anytime the music gets too musical and listenable, King Missile re-establish their normal self-subverting, pot-fuelled, FUBAR service with an irritating pennywhistle flutter, a harmonica squawk, or a tubafart. Meanwhile, Hall’s delivery is always somewhere near that of an extremely tetchy David Sedaris.
John S Hall
For this reason King Missile inevitably remain of cult interest only. Of their more ‘popular’ tracks The Boy Who Ate Lasagne And Who Could Jump Over A Church, is a two-part Hans Christian Anderson fairystory of a lovesong that is, at the same exact same time, touching and pointless. This features on one of their best albums, The Way to Salvation (1991), a good starting point for the uninitiated. Meanwhile, Cheesecake Truck is essentially a song about vehicle-and-confectionary theft that incorporates themes of job satisfaction, friendship, generosity and greed. It is a jangly earworm. It is possibly the most joyousest song ever made about getting the job you are simultaneuosly most and least suited to. Anyone who has worked Saturdays at, say, Games Workshop or HMV will know this feeling.
The ‘success’ of Detatchable Penis (which shows in professionalism of the sleeve art of the album Happy Hour) may have shelped the band implode. Having somehow made it to a big label, they even had airplay on MTV, including 1991’s My Heart Is A Flower . Hall has said that Detatchable Penis brought in casual listeners who weren’t interested in the rest of the band’s material. In a way this is what happens in the final episode of series one of Flight of the Conchords. And, yes, if King Missile were around nowadays they probably would have their own semifictionalised HBO sitcom.
It’s not clear whether King Missile are still going. Maybe George Bush Senior signed a disarmament treaty with Boris Yeltsin and King Missile were buried in concrete two miles underground. Who knows? The truth, you suspect, is something equally bizarre or horrendously mundane. I think I read somewhere that Hall ended up taking a law degree. Need I say more?
King Missile is probably dead. Long live the music of King Missile.
by Rob Finch
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But where in rural Worcestershire?
Wow you want me to be REALLY specific? West a bit…