Hogging The Big Apple

"I DID what any serious musician would do in that situation. I took my dick out and pissed on them."
Oneida mainman, and professional sideburn-owner Papa Crazy is recalling a particularly troublesome gig that the band played last year in Fort Collins, a Coloradan town where the Ku Klux Klan is as easy to join as the local library.
"The 'really cool show' that the promoter asked us to come down and do turned out to be death metal night in Club Hell," he winces. "I can't remember the name of the bands, but one of them had a song called 'Human Heroin' which was about stealing adrenaline from corpses and injecting it into your veins. Anyway, the crowd - average age 15 and planning their own personal Columbine massacre - took one look at Jane in his dress and decided that the only freak show they were into was their own. By the time him and me start getting it on in front of them, they're apoplectic with rage and threatening to tear us limb from limb.
"Leaving us, therefore, with two courses of action. The sensible one - getting the fuck out of there - and the Oneida one which is to freak 'em out completely. Having weighed the situation up, I decided, 'Okay, wee-wee time!'"
But I thought being urinated on was the sort of thing that death metal fans love?
"Yeah, but not coming from a faggot dick. I don't know if this was news in Ireland, but a couple of days before that gig, a gay guy from near Fort Collins, Matthew Shepard, was beaten unconscious and crucified on a barbed-wire fence. Some redneck asshole he'd come onto in a bar flipped and rounded up a lynch mob."

Gigging is an altogether safer option in their native New York where a growing number of people are beginning to recognise Oneida for what they are - the best band in America who've yet to give up their day jobs. The reason for this continued 9 to 5-dom is their refusal to become whatever it is major record companies are looking for this month.
"At the moment, the best way to get signed is to either be a Britney Spears clone, or do the rap-metal-thing-with-piercings like Limp Bizkit," the Crazy-one continues. "Great as he looks in a frock, there's no way Jane's going to pass for an 18-year-old chick, which leaves the Limp Bizkit option. Or rather, non-option. I don't want to be in a band that's deemed a failure if it doesn't sell five million records. Soul is what's important, not gold discs.
"We're not exactly the same as somebody who's already being played to death on MTV, so we're not going to be signed by Geffen or Interscope. It doesn't matter because we've got a small label here in New York, Turnbuckle, who are happy to release our records. We don't sit comfortably on the four band bills that the Manhattan clubs put together. Fine, we'll find a space here in Brooklyn and do our own word-of-mouth show."
With mouths one of the things that there's an abundance of in Brooklyn, this means up to 1,000 people jamming into a disused factory, or a warehouse whose night watchman has just happened to 'phone in sick. Bring in a P.A. and a truck-load of beer which you sell for half the six bucks a bottle they're charging uptown, and hey, who needs the Madison Square Garden?
There are other reasons, besides the Yellow Pack booking policy of its venues, why Oneida don't care too much for central Manhattan. Take away the visceral thrill of the tall buildings, and the to-die-for whiff of the peanut stands, and what you're left with is a bland commercial district that very few people call "home". For the real action - musical or otherwise - you've got to jump on to the subway and head to the parts of town where Condé Nast travellers fear to tread.
In the five years since Mayor Rudolph Guiliani took over in City Hall, the per capita murder rate has decreased to the point where you're now more likely to buy the farm in Boise, Idaho. The downside is that this has been achieved on the back of savage public spending cuts - each new cop on the beat meaning that a three-year-old in the Bronx suddenly has no pre-school to go to. Giuliani hasn't cleared all the garbage off the streets, though, as myself and Hot Press lensman Peter Matthews discover when we go to the predominantly Puerto Rican area below Harlem.
Having spent a year in San Juan during his student activist days - yup, H.P. has a Che Guevara in its midst - the boy Matthews ensures that we're soon best mates with all the Spanish-speaking staff in Ecco-La's Diner. The bloke sitting next to us in the red hoodie seems pretty friendly too, until he leans over and says in his best Boyz In The Hood voice: "I think you're okay, but some of my friends . . .they don't like white boys. If somebody asks you the time, you keep walking."
Why's that?
"When you look down at your watch, they'll cut you from here to here (runs a heavily-ringed finger from his left-ear to his chin). They don't want you in their neighbourhood. Enjoy your day in New York city."
After consulting my more streetwise colleague, I realise that we've likely as not just been threatened by a member of the Bloods - the notorious LA street gang which is now gaining a toehold among the East Coast's Latino community. Not wanting to compromise the Clarkian good looks - or underwear - we skip dessert, and catch the Express Train to 190th Street where the light relief of a Dominican bikini contest awaits. A sort of Miss Ballinaturbet with two-for-the-price-of-one rum cocktails, it's multi-cultural America at its finest.
"This city is full of weird shit, which is probably why we all ended up here," enthuses Oneida's gender-bending guitarist, Hanoi Jane. "Not only is it one of the most racially-integrated places in the world, but a man wearing high-heels and a dress isn't automatically going to have the crap beaten out of them. That's important to me 'cause I don't want to have to make my choices based on what's between my legs. When you have the fine Irish calves I have, you want to flaunt them. The boys love 'em, the girls love 'em. Everybody's a winner!"
While all of this hints at a modern day Velvet Underground, Jane (not his real name) insists that Oneida are no Warhol superstar wannabes.
"The only people who bring Andy Warhol into the equation, no offence, are journalists," he continues. "It's not a factor for us or the kids who come to see us. I mean, they weren't even born when those guys were doing their thing in the Village.
"My cross-dressing isn't about shocking people or getting attention for the band. We're gigging tomorrow and if I'm not in the mood, I'll go on wearing a shirt and trousers."

As if to prove a point, Jane turns up the following night in a cotton ensemble that's more Alan Partridge than Cindy Darling. The show in question is a fundraiser for WJMZ Radio, the Brooklyn pirate which faces a fine of $20,000 after being raided during the summer by the FCC. Unable to find a club willing to forgo their door-take, the organisers have requisitioned a basement next to the Williamsburg Bridge that normally houses the Rubulad Art Collective.
Suspicions that it's not the best of neighbourhoods are confirmed by the three spread-eagled black kids, and 12 gun-toting cops who are doing their NYPD Blue routine in the local park.
"It's only a drugs bust," says our taxi-driver in a manner which suggests that we're likely to encounter far worse later in the night. Our frayed nerves are quickly soothed by the moonshine Absinthe which is on sale inside the venue for $3 a shot. A hat-trick of doubles later and it's time to berate the boys from Kerrang! who are also in town for the weekend, and contrary to their hard-living reputation have proven to be about as hedonistic as Barney The Dinosaur.
Not only did they refuse to go head-to-head with Hot Press in a minibar-emptying competition on Thursday, but given the choice last night between catching a seriously incendiary Royal Trux at The Cooler and flouncing off to the cinema, they went for the American Pie option. Presented with a final chance to redeem themselves they get respectably rat-arsed, but even being charitable, it's 2-1 to the Irish team.
The gig proves to be a nice little earner for the WJMZ crew, with over 600 people on hand to see Oneida take to the stage. Or to be more accurate, the floor. Wanting to be in the thick of things, Papa, Jane, drummer Kid Millions and organ grinder Bobby Matador have decided to set up in the middle of one of the workshops.
After chain-listening to their Enemy Hogs album for the past couple of weeks my expectations are high, but nothing could've prepared me for how awesome they are with a crowd in front of them. Having initially scrawled "The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on a mad bender with The Doors" into my notebook, I find myself adding the Stones, Suicide, New York Dolls and, ahem, Gary Glitter to the list of people that they've stolen from. It's a superior knock-off job, though, with the parts being reassembled in a way that's fully Y2K compatible.
Visually we're talking Iggy ... The Stooges at zero gravity - Papa and Jane executing the sort of moves that scream "groin strain!" There's also a spot of mutual breast-fondling which has the photographers down the front furiously jockeying for position. I'm pleased to report that it's another victory for Hot Press, with the Kerrang! sharpshooter no match for Peter Matthews' elbows. However frenetic things get, the quality of Oneida's songwriting always shines through, with 'Bombay Fraud' and 'Turn It Up (Loud)' as nifty a pair of tunes as you'll hear this or any other year.
"We're not going to jump through hoops for anyone, but at the same time I'd hate to think that we'll only ever have an underground following," proffers a sweat-soaked Papa Crazy afterwards. "I could definitely handle a Nirvana sort of big - y'know, selling ten million copies of a record that still manages to get up people's noses. The sad thing about Nirvana is that, ultimately, they only made American radio worse. Instead of going, 'Hey, let's see what else is out there', stations filled their playlists up with really, really bad grunge bands who've now been replaced by really, really bad rap metal bands.
"The thing I like about hip hop radio is that it's so blatantly commercial. It's calmed down a bit now, but for two or three years, everybody was competing to see who could discover the next hot track. Which in turn lead to the same raising of the bar that occurred during the '60s when Stax and Motown were constantly trying to outdo each other."
Papa is also a Spice Girls fan for what he claims are totally non-ironic reasons.
"Man, I cried when I couldn't get a ticket for Mel C the other night at Irving Plaza. I'm not going to identify it because we'll get sued, but one of our songs is basically a rip-off of a Spice Girls riff and an Oasis riff. 'Say You'll Be There', 'Wannabe', it's B-side 'Bumper To Bumper' . . . they're all fucking vintage songs. They also happen to be funny and interesting, which are two pretty rare commodities."

Having previously been ignored by the local media, Oneida are about to become only the second band to make it onto the cover of New Yorker magazine. Given that the first was Nirvana, it's quite a coup.
"What'd be really cool is if I could get into parties on my own."
You what?
"This is only being published in Ireland, right?" Papa checks. "Okay, whenever there's a big showbiz party I want to crash, I bring along this guy I know who's the spitting image of Chris Isaak, and pretend to be his publicist. The velvet rope comes straight down, and before you know it you've got your own table and as much free champagne as you can drink. I tell you, everybody should have a superstar lookalike friend."
Oneida insist that their own A-List celebrity status will be achieved in tandem with Turnbuckle, the New York independent which is incapable of releasing a duff record.
"The deal is we do what the fuck we want, and they pick up the bills," he laughs evily. "The other clause in the contract is that we have to make them rich, or die in the attempt. We've got too much living to do, so I guess it'll have to be making 'em rich." n