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Cancer Crew
Use Your Knob

“Trends aren’t started by ideas. They’re started by copycats.” – S. Mitrea, Mode: Cutthroat, 1998
“Scott Mitrea is a jumped-up little ratwanker” – C. Mountain, 2006

It all began with a revelation. An apotheosis of enlightenment in a squalid Nuneaton car-park. I had just been to see MC Grope, it was the early 90’s (although it felt more like 1976 had leapt up from the depths of history like an androgynous hobgoblin and shanghaied our fetid brains), and everybody was in desperate need of a faith. There I was, lying prostrate, trying to imagine what I would look like if I were standing in front of a mirror with my eyes closed, and then imagining that the rivulets of mud circumnavigating my nose were entire galaxies rushing through time and space, when suddenly, I realised that all I had to do was flop over onto my back. Then I saw it. In staring into the night sky, I touched the tangibility of my dreams: the stars were the very mirrors I required, matching my intensely focused, penetrative thoughts with their lucid single-mindedness. However, my eyes were also closed; how else could I be searching for the clearest of images yet only discovering the depthless black of our boundless universe? It fitted; now the filth I lay in had gained an almost mythical permanence and immortality: I could lie here for the rest of time and slowly be sucked into the endless ether, only comprehending entirety. I think it was at this point that my friend came up behind me and pointed out in no uncertain terms that I was blocking the exit and several drivers were getting pretty angry about it. “Come on, let’s get going” he said. My reply was as simple as it was depressingly beautiful: “No”. So I lay there, I lay there until they carried me off, and in some ways I lie there still. It was like picking ants out of my skin and finding auburn pearls beneath them.

Hip died in 2004. The languid jazz-cats picking sense and melody out of crowded pedestrian walkways, the clubs that weren’t afraid to mix their metaphors as well as their dance tracks, the sight of Lenny Kravitz trying to fit an entire Brussels sprout into his navel…it all curdled, festered, and shook its bloodied, oversized booty for quite the last time. It almost felt like the first ominous yet inexorable pangs of a strange new nausea: never before had everybody bent over in diseased unison and retched at the thought of what we were losing, what we all knew deep down we could never recover. Music itself cried for an impossible cure, to ease the pain and allow us to recover our cool, our calm, our glorious vinyl collection. Journos and DJs alike convinced us all that it could be done, and although some enlightened noiseprophets foretold of duress and oblivion (Flipscotch and Expert Sexpert Egbert to name but two), we the aural proletariat demanded, nay, beseeched the culture deities to return our hip. What empty hoots they were.

Empty hoots.

What we really needed was, in fact, an emetic. Something to force the last twisted vestiges of counterfeit sass out of our stomachs, purge our grasping gullets of their nostalgic predilections, and hurl them out of our liberated mouths into the sanitised toilet that is America, who still seem to hold the mistaken belief that hip exists (I have witnessed this myself, at a drive-in Cineplex on the outskirts of San Fran with a mass sit-in protest against rising fuel tax hitting full stride only to be interrupted when a locally celebrated bubblecore funkster named Zeno Piston mounted his Isuzu and began to play Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ backwards on a modified clarinet). Anyway, what I mean to say is that we need to be cut off from all these outdated preconceptions and tediously restricted sounds. Let us cast off the worthless robes of Belial. Do it now. Take them back to your local CD re-tailor and just leave them there. Can’t force yourself to do it? Well, in that case, Cancer Crew will do it for you. And they’ll probably steal your underwear as well whilst they’re about it.

Cancer Crew. So much pain and suffering, so much vicarious elation and selfless charity, so much adventure and nautical intrigue is conveyed by just those two astoundingly alliterative words. Straight out, let me tell you that these guys are not hip. They are not ‘cool’ in any conventional sense. What they do, instead, is short-circuit your body to remove the need for any thought or judgement: your ears, no longer attached to your brain, grow a direct connection to your gall-bladder. Which, for those of you who didn’t go to med-school, is where bile is formed. Big, thick, green, gooey bile. The kind of stuff that Jeff Buckley used to down shots of before going out to the local reserve to flame a couple of buffalo. And God does it taste good.

Cancer Crew. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Or maybe I’ll scream it next time. Many have of course criticised this most ephemeral and esoteric of entities with outrageous comments such as ‘They only play one chord per song!’ or ‘Just one note played exceedingly loudly!’ but that is only because these people do not understand who the Cancer Crew are. Are they not men? That may be the question, but it in no way submits itself to mere answering, to mere response; one must not challenge CC’s identity but simply accept them as a figment of one’s intellectual libido. Are they not men? More like, are they not, and then? They are, in fact, perhaps, and what they have done is take ‘pop’ beyond the commonplace and the mainstream, and into the choppier waters of your bedroom sink, mingling with the chyme you so passionately expunged but three paragraphs ago, revitalising the dead nutrition into a living miasma of infinite possibility. They have recognised the elegant beauty and seductively decadent idolatry of the solitary chord, standing bleakly yet rousingly sentinel upon the apex of human consciousness like a futile conceit, and multiplied its power with raw, slightly detuned guitars and ‘offensive’ lyrics. I myself do not find the lyrics at all disturbing; the strength of the language adopts a solipsistic, almost Wildean paradigm, in matching the strength of the music. Anyway, if you don’t want to listen to ‘mutherf***ing babyf***ers’, well, go back to your Radiohead and your Arcade Fire, who honestly must have been strategically designed to appeal to the sorts of people who enjoy sticking their genitalia into wildebeest. In other words, faggots. Oh, shit, I just wrote something homophobic. Report this publication to the commission for racial cocking equality or whatever it is they call it these days…what you ramcunting fucknozzles need to realise is that it doesn’t matter; what I’m demonstrating here is that whilst under the influence of such a primal force of nature (as CC undoubtedly are), it is the ugly as well as the good that is birthed as a result; there’s no compromise, only truth. A truth in which motherfucking babyfuckers mingle with MOR wuvvy-dovey star-crossed adult contemporaries in an alternate rock reality the listening public has merely dreamed of for far too long.

This particular record, Use Your Knob, is unquestionably the Crew’s greatest work. There will always be those who claim that their original 7” single ‘Goat Goat Goat WOLF’ was the purest rendition of their omnipoetic synergy, and the alt-electro-goth crowd have long harboured sympathy towards their 2001 avant-dork masterpiece ‘Masturbation Monkey-Wrench’, but, coming off the back of 2004’s return-to-roots concept opus ‘Who Needs Love When You’ve Got Cancer?’, an album of such staggering invention, astronomical relevance, and subversive acerb that Melody Maker was moved to write that it ‘makes me weep that such…music could be unleashed upon us’, UYK raises the bar to a whole new high, and then brings it down with an almighty judder upon the asses of every single other act out there. It features an idea that must rank up with Glutinous Bodymash’s epoch-defining 2002 offering Mutilate To Titillate, an album composed entirely from digitally-manipulated samples of a team of bodybuilders literally fucking a Moroccan whore to death. The idea is ridiculously simple, but utterly brilliant: the album consists of one track repeated fifteen times.

One might describe this approach as ‘cheap’ or ‘minimalist’, but that misses the point entirely. You see, the band have advised on the liner notes that the song, ‘Let Me Rip Your Head Off, Girl’, should be played ‘quietly’ at the start of the album, but as the listener progresses and ‘catches more layers of the music’, he should ‘crank up the volume big time’ until by Track 15, he is positively ‘s******g himself in awe of the sonic terror unleashed before his very ears’. “That’s why it’s called ‘Use Your Knob, yeah,’ wryly comments frontman Cock Mountain, “’cos you gotta use your f*****g volume knob, yeah?” Not so much a spokesman as a thinksman for his era, this veritable giant of modern popular music does not so much present us with the truth as slam it into our face like a broken beer-bottle. Fifteen times. When I myself first listened to the album, I felt as though John Lennon himself was saluting me from the deep recesses of my testicular sac. Since then I have experimented with different methods, and found a lush plateau of exotic structures, mind-warping cadences, and orgasmic swells. For instance, suddenly turning the sound down two and a half minutes into track eleven before slowly building it back up evokes the claustrophobic stench of a crowded Islington bar. Played alongside The Beatles, it triggers the most transcendental of coughing-fits. And I cannot actually put into words the feeling I got when I listened to Tracks 4-9 on full blast before having a gigantic wank. Whilst Jeff Buckley was out nailing oversized quadrupeds and getting himself killed, Cock Mountain and his talented friends were gathering pace, flowering from their North London roots into the fabulous nontet coming to a venue near you. Should you take up my sage advice and witness their new songs in action, I wouldn’t put it past you to discover the faith we all so desperately needed back in 1992 and now, eerily, again in 2006. Failing that, though, there’s always this compact disc (and I will need to buy a new one myself after widening the hole on my copy in order that I might channel its aphrodisiac qualities in the form of a penis-ring). There’s nothing more to it. Or rather, there’s nothing more to it? Come and get yourself some Cancer!