“There I was, smoking methamphetamine, and now here I am on this big stage with my stupid friends,” grinned Viagra Boys’ frontman Sebastian Murphy to a sold out Brixton Academy: the Swedish punk band’s largest UK headline show of their ten year career to date.
Topless, covered in tattoos, and sporting sunglasses and a pair of Adidas tracksuit bottoms — Murphy’s de facto uniform — it might have made for an unlikely hero’s journey but it encapsulated the lawless and frequently hilarious spirit of the sextet perfectly.
Viagra Boys’ are the opposite of an industry safe bet. Their skulking, musically sleazy tales of cocaine and conspiracy theorists tread a strange and brilliant line between astute anti-establishment intelligence and ridiculous laughs. They look like a bunch of men that concerned curtain-twitchers would call neighbourhood watch on, should they move in next door. But for those who worship at the altar of life’s outliers, there’s no one doing freaky excellence as well as Viagra Boys right now.
For this step up to bigger venues — a jump that came in support of semi-self-titled recent fourth album Viagr Aboys — the band had blown their entire budget on the sort of punishing, intense lasers that turned Brixton’s indoor architecture into a heavy, hedonistic club. On Dirty Boyz, they pulsed an ominous shade of slime green as keyboard player Elias Jungvist wiggled around in a pair of denim hotpants; on the swaggering rock’n’roll of Waterboy, they bathed the stage in red. Most effectively, as the main set reached a feral culmination with the apocalyptic intro and prolonged wild jam of Research Chemicals, they made the whole room feel like Glastonbury’s most chaotic night in the South West Corner.
High-functioning chaos is, undoubtedly, something Viagra Boys do very well. Natural successors to Iggy Pop and The Stooges, Murphy might not be throwing himself off balconies (although he does manage an impressive crowdsurf) but his idiosyncratic brand of strange charisma was beguiling. He shuffled around, doing a little dance, and the crowd threw themselves at his feet.
It all worked because it was all so self-aware. “You wouldn’t download a car! You wouldn’t download somebody else’s dog! You ain’t no motherf***ing thief!” he declared, taking the infamous TV advert into surreal new territory before launching into the pummelling Ain’t No Thief. “And on a more serious note, here’s a song about sports,” he intoned as the band began their delirious 2018 breakthrough single Sports — a track whose lyrics largely comprise a list of athletic equipment.
Beneath the gags, there was still plenty of substance — not just in the genuine musicality of the band but in the real world ire that nestled just below the piss-taking surface. “A few years ago when I thought things had reached their peak of dumb-fuckery I was writing about all the troglodytes in the world,” he began before Troglodyte, “but they seem to have expanded in their masses. Free Palestine.”
The combination was a wholly intoxicating one: a band from the underbelly raised up to the big stages by a congregation craving the exact mix of anger, humour and fun that can often seem like the only reasonable reaction to a world gone mad.
Your nan might not approve of Murphy and co, but in their own surreal way, Viagra Boys are speaking perfect sense.
