Live Review : Twin Temple + The Violent Hearts @ The Deaf Institute, Manchester on January 27th 2020

You can’t help but feel sorry for Brummie support act the Violent Hearts. Their brand of goth inspired post-punk is really rather dandy and brings to mind a halfway house between Orange Juice and the Chameleons but this is so not their audience. In fact, I am rather nonplussed what or who this audience actually is. It is a about 25% curious metalheads, 25% Wicca and 50% hipster (the immaculately manicured beards and the pints of Porter (the new IPA) are a plenty). The Violent Hearts got politely clapped and, if you are into retro-indie, are well worth a look up. But this is a curious and quizzical crowd, not quite sure why they are here at all or what they are about to witness (as our venerable snapper proclaims midway through the support set “This isn’t Metal, why are we covering this show?’”).

Rock n’ Roll has always aimed to shock, that is its defining parameter. From Elvis’s gyrating pelvis (censored on American TV) and John Lennon proclaiming himself and his Liverpudlian mates to be bigger then Jesus, through Ozzy biting heads off bats and the Beastie’s topless cage dancers, to The Dillinger Escape Plan defecating on stage and Cradle of Filth trolling poor Jesus (him again, he really does get a raw deal) by calling him the c-word. The thing with gimmicks though is that they don’t mean jack if you haven’t got the tunes (just ask Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Red Patten Leather Angels or any masked Nu-metal band that isn’t Slipknot). Twin Temples debut album was a gloriously authentic slice of smooth fifties rock n’ roll, spliced with lyrics that Behemoth would reject as too evil and risqué but the question is how would it work live. The answer is magnificently. This is one of the best examples of rock n’ roll as high camp theatrics that I have witnessed in a long time. Billed as half gig and half black mass, this is actually a gloriously entertaining romp that is highly aware of its own ridiculousness. .

Their backing band look like they have been dragged out of an alternative universe where the forces of darkness have overrun Las Vegas. And then, there is Alexandra and Zachary James, bonded in unholy matrimony and a shared love of primal rock ‘n roll and satanism. Their entrance is pure performnce art; ritualistic and dosed in post modern irony. However, the best bits of tonight’s show are when Alexandra’s sex witch personna drops and she laughs along with us all about the spectacularly ridicllous nature of the whole thing. She admits to being from Lancastrian stock and shares that the night before Zachary and herself had tea with her grandad in Preston. She also drags a petrified lad from the audience (the aptly named Gabriel) up onto stage, blindfolds him and teases that she is going to sacrifice him to Babylon. It is that blatant self-awareness that makes this all so fun, we are all in on the joke and all invited to be part of their distorted universe. They may say that the biggest trick the devil pulled off was persuading us all that he never existed. Clearly no one has informed our Alexandra of this, as at every opportunity we are encouraged to yell out Satan and Lucifer like we are in some faustian pantomime. 

It is brilliant theatre but it only works because the music is so good. This is Amy Winehouse reimagined as some alluring dark priestess, tempting vacuous men with illgotten desires (think “Back to Black Mass”). Alexandra has an amazing set of pipes and her vocals are full of alluring emotion. She burns of the stage, a charismatic evil temptress. Zachary’s surf guitar twanking feels thoroughly vintage and full of passion, channeling the very essence of Dick Dale. This is no promotional stunt, this dude can play guitar. In answer to my photographic friend, this is as Metal as fuck, it just isn’t using Metal music as we know it. The attitude and outlook though is thoroughly in our world and we are constanly asked to throw the horns like we are at a Sabbath gig.

It concludes in a flurry of organised chaos as Zachary plunges an inverted cross in a chalice of “blood” and Alexandra precedes to anoint the foreheads of all and sundry (including a confused looking bouncer) with the blood. The girl next to me gets it smeered all over her face and swears it tastes of peppermint. In the end, Twin Temple add up to majestically silly occult-themed entertainment, tethered to wonderful harmonious and sexually charged raw rock n’ roll. Think Nancy Sinatra, meets Ghost with shades of Erotica-era Madonna. They have just been unceremoniously added to the bill for this year’s Download and my advice is get yourself in to that tent no matter what cost or who you need to crawl over, as they will be the performance that everyone will be talking about and my dear you simply have to be there.