Jesse Hughes is all mock outrage and Carolinean twang. “What’s that baby? You wanna… lick my moustache?! Well, that is a request that I am able to oblige!”
Sans Eagle #2 and bestie Josh Homme, Hughes – that dancing preacher, that overgrown high-school clown – is charming the hecklers and leading Eagles Of Death Metal on a tour in support of their superb latest album Zipper Down.
Just three days ago his unironic performance of Save A Prayer with Duran Duran on TFI Friday went viral, and Bristol is a swirling, churning sell-out. From the moment he, Dave Catching (bald, barbed, armed with a Flying V), A Perfect Circle’s Matt McJunkins and The Whigs’ Julian Dorio troop out to Pilot’s cheese-fest_ Magic_, they have us in their hands.
Hughes confesses he’s smoked a whole bag of Bristol weed, and when he tells us they’re having “so much fucking fun’ and they’re ‘gonna burn this motherfucking house down!” you know it’s schtick, but you love it all the same.
Sweaty in the pits, itchy in the crotch, new songs (Complexity, Got The Power) and old favourites (I Want You So Hard,_ Just 19)_ are unreconstructed rock’n’roll with an edge (one comment about Hughes’ ex-wife hints at a river of bile bubbling beneath blue California skies).
A whole ton of fun, lickable ‘tache ‘n’ all.
