Schlock therapy!

If you didn’t know better, you’d think Kid Congo Powers had walked straight out of a Barry Gifford novel. There’s the Molotov cocktail of Mexican-Apache blood in his veins, the spiv moustache on his lip, the red pimp shirts on his back, the guitar in his hand and a chuckle so dirty you want to swab your ears with antibacterial soap after exposure to it.

Added to this is a criminal record with some of the most volatile blues-noise mutations in rock ‘n’ roll: The Cramps, The Gun Club, The Bad Seeds, Congo Norvelle and the Knoxville Girls, plus collaborations with acts like Mark Eitzel, Michael Gira, Diamanda Galas, Greg Garing, Inger Lorre, Anita Lane, Die Haut, Barry Adamson and Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins.

Here’s a guy with a history.

He and the late Gun Club singer Jeffrey Lee Pierce grew up one suburb away from each other, 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

Kid was blooded at LA dives like Rodney’s English Disco, bearing witness to the golden (okay, piss-yellow) age of Iggy, The Dolls and The Runaways. He later became sold on late 70s punk acts like The Germs, X, the Plugz and the early Go-Gos, and from there got sucked into New York’s No Wave scene of bands such as The Contortions and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks plus their British counterparts The Pop Group and The Slits. When Powers went back to LA in the early 80s he got press-ganged by The Cramps, who had also moved from the East Coast, enamoured with Chicano/East Hollywood subculture: Mexican garage punk bands, Forest Lawn Cemetery, the whole schlock aesthetic.

“Hey,” exclaims Kid, “quit calling it schlock! I’d been playing guitar for a year when I started in The Cramps. In The Gun Club Jeffrey literally handed me a guitar and said, ‘Here, do this and we’ll make a band’, which, y’know, was de rigueur for the day.”

Given his cadaverous bone structure and wardrobe, it was only a matter of time before Powers, like sticksman Jim Sclavunos after him, made the jump from The Cramps to The Bad Seeds. Since then Powers has busied himself as a guitar for hire and sometime actor. His latest hook-up is with Turkish/Finnish ambient producer and fellow gorehound Khan (or Can Oral), resulting in last May’s No Comprendo album, a cheerfully depraved stroll through a whole slew of styles and sounds, featuring cameos from Jon Spencer, Andre Williams and Françoise Cactus. However, the heart of the album is a brace of tracks by Julee Cruise (‘Say Goodbye’) and Diamanda Galas (‘Aman’).

“That’s actually why I put them together, because they’re both really sick,” Khan says. “Julee has that weird sexual/rapist thing going on, she’s really like, ‘Oh, I’m a little girl, come and rape me’. Diamanda has a totally different but sick tension in her voice, she’s as classical as Julee is in a way, they just bring it in two totally different directions. But I think the core art is very similar in the end, they’re very independent, strange human beings.”

Both Khan and Kid have lived in a range of different cities over the last two decades, none of them places you’d want to bring your mother: downtown New York, Mexico City, Berlin. Reflecting this, No Comprendo takes in everything from swampy blues to the French chanteuse tradition to wigged-out krautrock.

“Yeah, that’s the thing that actually attracted me to Khan,” says Powers. “There’s a central theme to what he’s doing, but it also goes in many different directions and that’s very attractive to me. Something exciting is happening.”