Kap Bambino at Cargo

Kap Bambino at Cargo

17 June, 2009
by: Tom Jeffreys

I remember reading something about music once. It went roughly like this: 'When the Sex Pistols screamed "We mean it, maaaaaan!" they underlined the first rule of punk – Thou Shalt Not Fake It.' The problem, of course, with this is that at the exact moment when Johnny Rotten seems to be at his most 'authentic' his words are in fact dripping with sarcasm, coming as they do immediately after 'God save the Queen'. Oh the ironies inherent in popular music...

Thoughts roughly akin to this dribbled through my mind after seeing Kap Bambino at Cargo last night. The performance certainly seems very angry, very 'genuine'. Front lady Caroline Martial leaps about the bare stage, rushes in and out of the crowd, jumps up and down, falls over, all the while screaming incomprehensibly. But if indeed she is angry, what on earth is she angry about? Perhaps somebody spilt her first-growth Château Margaux. That would certainly drive me nuts...

That is the nature of performance I guess. Performance by its very nature always involves irony (or at the very least the potential for duality of meaning – or 'iterability' in Derrida parlance). But in a performance like that of Kap Bambino one can never precisely identify the location and extent of the irony. Basically they totally rule.

There's no chatting or inter-song conversation: just a relentless rampage of electro noise, courtesy of long-haired music-making fellow Orion Bouvier. They play tracks from their last three albums, but they're all pretty similar – loud, frantic and quite splendid. There's no let-up. Make-up smudged and sweaty, Martial – something of a Dazed wet-dream – stirs the crowd into a trendy frenzy. Occasional stage invasions are politely broken up, and everyone gets on with the pleasurable experience of sharing in vicarious rage.

It's all very amicable and fun – not punk then, but a performance of punk (which itself was probably always something of a stage-act). But when you're jumping up and down and a crazy lady is jumping with you, none of these fiddly thoughts really matter much at all.

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Tom Jeffreys