Q&A with the Kiss Ups

The Kiss Ups

The drummer flings his lanky arms above his head, smashing into his kit with rampant disregard, while singing in falsetto the synth solo from the Cars' "Just What I Needed." At least two-thirds of the crowd weren't born when this song was released. The bass player takes Ben Orr's bassline and speeds it up, interlocking with a rhythm set for derailment. There are no other musicians in the band. There is no room for any other musicians in this band.

The Kiss Ups play an hour and a half. Every original and several covers, including the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" and the Go-Go's "Our Lips Are Sealed," are performed in the truest louder, faster tradition. Snatches of lyrics remain in the collective consciousness of the heatstroked crowd long after the last note fades: "You're the girl of my dreams, you make everything so...dreamy," "I know you got some powerful stuff, let me help you, help me, help you help me too." The Kiss Ups are into elliptical thought.

A year later, the Flying Saucer is no more, but you still see kids in the region wearing the Kiss Ups t-shirts they bought that night.

Like most good things, the Kiss Ups came together by accident. Bassist Paul Heath and drummer Michael Wilcock grew up skatepunks in Scotia, outside Schenectady. Coincidence landed them both in the Hudson Valley, wandering around New Paltz and Poughkeepsie, sorting through the patchouli and jam-band casualties, looking for musicians who liked the same noise. They'd already riled up the capital region as teenagers as Doo Doo Head, an ambitious music-art project that featured four carloads of stage props to offset the band's sound.

They'd mutated into the Phlegm Chuckers, releasing a homegrown single. Their guitarist, still living in Albany, consistently made it late to band practice, so the rhythm section crafted a new sound. "It was just us improvising and recording it," says Heath. "Trying to make nasty pop songs," adds Wilcock.

"We've always been known to have the cheesiest equipment of any band we're playing with, because we're always poor," says Wilcock, who works as an illustrator, a house painter and a carpenter at present. "Other bands would have Marshall stacks, computerized guitar rigs and brand new Sonor drums. I used to gig in all these clubs in Albany on a $15 drum set that I got at a garage sale, made out of particle board."

Heath, a full-time graphic design man who self-publishes Miss Pellings Megazine, remembers, "I found it on my paper route, I saw it and I called Mike, 'There's a drum set for $15!'"

"It was better than the one I had," Wilcock explains.

Wilcock still uses an unflashy set, sturdy enough to allow his self-taught metronomic beats to mesh with his Keith Moon-like unplanned polyrhythms. Heath employs three amps through a Rat pedal to give his bass its cranky, distorted tone.

"My bass rig has taken me years to cultivate," says Heath.

"Cultivate?" cracks Wilcock.

"I have three amps and it took me a long time to find the right distortion pedal," says Heath.

"It took him a long time to get up enough money to buy that many amps," laughs Wilcock.

They rehearse "in my apartment, in my bedroom. The whole apartment is 250 square feet. Half of that is 125 square feet," Wilcock explains.

"And we only use half of that," Heath joins in.

"I face the wall when I drum. Because that's the only way my drum set fits in," says Wilcock.

"Every rehearsal is like we're playing a concert to ourselves," Heath says. "We finish a song and give each other high fives." In new-age terms endemic to the area, the Kiss Ups "found themselves" at the Flying Saucer, where each week they'd climax the Thursday night open mic with a staccato burst of three tunes. "Prior to the Flying Saucer, I was in four bands, and the Kiss Ups was one of the ones I was going to scratch off my list," says Heath. The open mic "gave us a sense of what people liked about what we did and how to do it."

The Flying Saucer has since closed its doors. In its place is a darkly painted cafe with a baby grand piano in the window, the Uptown, which surely will not have the Kiss Ups darkening its stage. So the Kiss Ups have hit the road?literally. Last month, the town closed down its Wall Street for a Saturday art festival, and invited the Kiss Ups to play. Within minutes of the first note, complaints were flying.

"There was a gallery opening and this guy was rapping on my shoulder to get my attention while I was trying to play the song," Wilcock says. "...When he left, he said something about 'talk to my lawyer.'"

With a seven-song limited edition album that sold out quickly and sadly only hints at their capabilities, the Kiss Ups are coming to Brooklyn and Manhattan, where they've played only sporadically. "I think Japan's really ready for us, because we're quirky and poppy," Wilcock says. "I think the Japanese folks would be more out to dig us than the people here."

The Kiss Ups open for the Damn Personals and the Stills this Fri., Aug. 23, at Luxx, 256 Grand St. (betw. Driggs Ave. & Roebling St.), Williamsburg, 718-599-1000.

London Is the Place for Me

Various Artists (Honest Jon's Records)

Londoner Colin MacInnes' 1957 novel City of Spades is a brilliantly observed account of the moment when two vibrant strands of UK colonialism?from the West Indies and from Africa?came home to roost. The white protagonists of the novel, a fussy civil servant named Montgomery and a BBC producer named Theodora, are mystified by the new arrivals, even as their own lives become entangled in the newly burgeoning subculture. Yet MacInnes' "Spades" are more than the hackneyed hearts of darkness replanted in the seedier parts of London. They serve as funhouse mirrors for square white Britain, capturing its decline and spiritual exhaustion in exquisitely grotesque caricatures.

If City of Spades had a soundtrack, it certainly would have been the sassily insouciant calypso that swept into postwar Britain with the immigrants who populate MacInnes' book. Calypso, too, was a wackily distorted mirror, celebrating the era's great events and odd mundanities with outlandish panache and humor. (Those mundane eccentricities of mid-50s Britain would soon be given one of the catchiest and most apt theatrical monikers of the 20th century?"kitchen sink.")

London's calypso scene?long overshadowed by other, later Caribbean musical exports such as ska, rock steady and reggae?now has been compiled on London Is the Place for Me. The disc has the whiff of a time capsule to it, with songs celebrating Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and Ghanaian independence. Yet, this music's brash forthrightness and undeniable charm make London Is the Place for Me more than a mere history lesson. These songs possess an exuberant friction sparked by cultural clashes filtered through a sophisticated musical sensibility.

Calypso arrived in Britain almost a decade before MacInnes' book appeared. It was carried there?along with a group of West Indian veterans of World War II and other assorted immigrants?on the Empire Windrush. The ship docked in the UK on June 21, 1948, and along for the ride were two men who became calypso's first British celebrities: Aldwyn Roberts (known as "Lord Kitchener") and Egbert Moore (who bore the moniker "Lord Beginner").

Kitchener is the better known of the two artists, due mostly to his astounding success later in life as a Trinidadian carnival king. (Kitchener won the island's "Road March" title 10 times in the years after 1963.) In fact, Kitchener was already a calypso star in the Caribbean when he stepped off the boat. He quickly became a celebrity in the UK too, peddling songs such as "London Is the Place for Me" and "My Landlady" ("On the walls she stick up a notice/No lady friends, not even a princess").

In fact, the collection's title song became one of Kitchener's trademark compositions. Its deadpan opening and closing (a piano plunking out the chimes of Big Ben) bookend a ragged shuffling rhythm and goofily exaggerated view of London's charms ("I have every comfort and every sport/And my residence is at the Hampton Court"). Even taken at face value, it remains an inspired bit of nonsense. Kitchener's other eight songs on the collection possess a similar melody and fluency (one song even celebrates bebop with snippets of quotation eerily close to "sampling"), but he occasionally employs them in a more sardonic manner. For instance, on the deceptively lilting "If You're Not White You're Black," Kitchener assails 50s-era racism with a contemptuous sneer:

Your father is an African

Your mother may be Norwegian

You pass me when you say goodnight

Feeling you are really white

Your skin may be a little pink

And that's the reason why you think

The complexion of your face

Can hide you from the Negro race

That's pretty strong stuff for any sort of pop song in 1953. Yet, as good as the Lord Kitchener songs are?and most of them are not available elsewhere, despite his fame?the true revelation on London Is the Place for Me is Lord Beginner, whose five tracks on the collection are astounding. Lord Beginner's voice is deeper and more insistent. His songs don't sport the sheer fluency of Kitchener's work, but they often prove to be more musically intricate and clever. For instance, his take on race in Britain, "Mix Up Matrimony," is a marvelous syncopated essay on racially mixed marriages, with a chorus chanting "incorporate and amalgamate" behind Beginner as he slyly notes that racial segregation will end because:

Mixed marriage is the passion

And the world is saying so

Lovers choosing partners

Of every kind you know

This is freedom from above

So what they're thinking of

Is to grab the one that they love

Beginner's tunes are more bound up in their time than Kitchener's songs are, but the bizarre touches of brilliance in each composition push the listener past the fading sepia of their occasion. "Victory Test Match" is the singer's subtly rollicking tribute to the West Indies' stunning 1950 cricket victory over England, which opens with Beginner's charmingly odd incantation, "Cricket, lovely cricket!" Or check out the swirling rush of woodwinds that seeks to mimic a storm on Beginner's "Jamaica Hurricane," discomfiting the listener until the expected calypso strum and rhythm suddenly swoop in.

Kitchener and Beginner dominate London Is the Place for Me, contributing 14 of its 20 tracks. Yet there are other gems, including the mellifluous (and not so aptly named) Mighty Terror's wryly somber "No Carnival in Britain" and Young Tiger's po-faced tribute to the pomp and ceremony of royal Britain, "I Was There (at the Coronation)." The latter song giddily piles on the details of the size of the crowd and the formal titles of attendees at Elizabeth II's crowning ("The Duke of Edinburgh, dignified and neat/Sat beside her as Admiral of the Fleet") until the tune nearly topples under its own unabashed glee.

One of the offbeat byways of the collection is that it also features a song ("Aguiti") by Lord Invader ("Rupert Grant"), who's better known as co-author of the Andrews Sisters' 1944 hit "Rum and Coca Cola." Initially Invader wasn't credited for the lyrics to the massive U.S. hit, which had been swiped and copyrighted by comedian Morey Amsterdam. Invader and the author of the song's music later sued for plagiarism and won substantial damages, but only after a lengthy battle in the U.S. courts.

The historical import of Kitchener and Beginner's music is difficult to underestimate. They paved the way for other Caribbean music to come to Britain and elsewhere, and London Is the Place for Me is a missing link in the chain from Caribbean folk music to dancehall. But the ambling charm of these songs has considerable appeal beyond their historical value. Yes, it's great summer music, but what makes it amazing is that it was conjured in the kitchen sink of cold and gloomy 1950s Britain.

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