Shooting stars ... Semi Precious Weapons in concert at Safari Sams in Los Angeles. Photograph: BP Fallon
Semi Precious Weapons are the most important band in America. They're not interested in being cool and they don't want to sell 10m records. In fact, they don't want to sell any records.
Voted Best New York Band in the Village Voice Readers Poll, their provocative music is spreading on the web via MySpace, YouTube and bloggers like Perez Hilton. They've played incendiary gigs and have made a brilliant album: We Love You, executive produced by Tony Visconti, who's worked with T Rex, Bowie, Thin Lizzy and Morrissey. It's made up of ten contagious, killer tracks of filth and fury. Oh, and it's free. The band fund everything by selling jewellery.
Skilful but abandoned, vulgar and loud but intelligent, everyone smiles when Semi Precious Weapons play. "It's not my fault I look better in her party dress!" declares singer Justin Tranter at the top of Magnetic Baby while the band's signature song Semi Precious Weapons kicks off with him announcing "I can't pay my rent but I'm fucking gorgeous!" The music has aptly been described as "prime-time Bowie escaped from the lunatic asylum parachuted into AC/DC playing with Led Zeppelin" and fronting it all is this Justin figure, a mix of young Iggy, Ziggy and Twiggy gone mesmerisingly bonkers.
Tranter is a total star. The word charisma was invented for him. When he walks into a room, heads turn at this six-foot plus platinum-blonde-haired creature in the blood-red stiletto boots and just-so makeup. Camper than a row of tents and of variable sexuality, he's currently walking out with the American actress Anne Malinowsky, the Anna Nicole Smith lookalike who features in the Magnetic Baby vid.
After Perez Hilton linked to the video on his blog, it received 57,000 hits in 24 hours and caused a cacophony of comments declaring that this was either the worst band that ever existed or the greatest musical combo the world has ever seen.
Semi Precious Weapons have been compared to everyone from the Scissor Sisters - though they're nothing like them - to the New York Dolls, with whom they share a certain sleaziness. Dolls guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Steve Conte are among the band's biggest fans - the pair backed Tranter when he stole the show on a bill with Patti Smith, Moby and Jake Shears at the Marc Bolan And T Rex 30th Anniversary Concert in New York's Central Park.
Managed by one of rock'n'roll's most celebrated characters, BP Fallon, the band were wooed by Sony and Interscope Records but Fallon decided that a first-class suite on the Titanic was not the way forward. Instead, Tranter came up with the idea of designing SPW jewellery to sell at gigs, then doorstepped the Urban Outfitters chain until they agreed to try the line in their stores. 80,000 pieces later via Urban Outfitters, Hot Topic and a high-end line in Barneys, the proceeds pay for the money-gobbling machinations of a new band breaking out their music. Now when you buy a piece of Semi Precious Weapons jewellery at Urban Outfitters or from the band's website you get a hard copy of the new album for free. Or simply download it from their site - free, of course. SPW are not yet established artists like Radiohead, Prince, Trent Reznor and the Charlatans (whom I manage), who are all jumping the digital divide by giving away their music for free. However, the logic is the same: get the music out there to make money on live gigs and merchandise. As an amused Tranter points out, you can't download a necklace.
Pop culture has become neutered. The danger and madness has largely been tamed. Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, Marc Bolan, the Sex Pistols, Nirvana - electric outlaws out there on the frontiers - would have had a hard time making it in the homogenised world of today. We need a return to the gory glory days when the sanctimonious elders were horrified at the emerging new noise, appalled at the lyrics, the language, the look and the carry-on of these new young bucks. Like rock'n'roll's answer to Lazarus, Semi Precious Weapons are rock's resurrection.
