New York had seen a lot by the latter half of the 20th century, but it had never witnessed anything quite like the New Wave Vaudeville, a “freak show” art collective that began operating out of an East Village church basement in 1977.
New Wave Vaudeville was the anti-Studio 54 – a Stygian space where people gathered to shock, offend and create art for art’s sake. “A place to be optimistic, to be goofy and colourful at a time when the outside world wasn’t always hospitable,” is how the regular Ann Magnuson described it in an article on New Wave Vaudeville and its subterranean home, which was soon christened Club 57.
Regulars included the graffiti artist Keith Haring and the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. But it was in 1978 that the stardust rained down in earnest, when New Wave Vaudeville hosted Klaus Nomi, a synth-pop musician from southern Bavaria.
He was best known for appearing as a backing singer to David Bowie when he sang The Man Who Sold the World on Saturday Night Live in 1979. (Bowie was dressed in a black-and-white boiler suit that made him look like HR Giger’s idea of a Teletubby.) At New Wave Vaudeville, Nomi arrived in a “skin-tight spacesuit” and plastic cape: the performance made him a leading light of the New York avant-garde.
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New Wave Vaudeville would be gone by 1983, a victim of the Manhattan real-estate boom and of the HIV epidemic ripping through the East Village’s artistic community. (Nomi died of Aids that same year.) But its spirit is conjured anew by the Dublin songwriter Aaron Corcoran, who performs as Skinner and whose debut album is named New Wave Vaudeville in honour of the club’s ethos of “celebrating the weird part of who you are and being proud of it”.
Corcoran has coined the term “slouch rock” for his music, which he sees as following in the tradition of the Manhattan no-wave scene, a nonconformist offshoot of punk that embraced improvisational anarchy and rejected punk’s haughtiness toward blues and jazz.
Saxophone, country guitars, raucous vocals that owe more to Little Richard than to Iggy Pop … all were incorporated into no wave. Skinner embraces the sound with gusto, beginning with a rollicking title track that arrives in an explosion of fretwork and unhinged sax (played by Corcoran, who taught himself the instrument).
He’s off to a breathless start. The tempo is ratcheted up further on Tell My Ma, a blitz of chaotic guitar that doubles as a rockabilly deconstruction of the old folk song I’ll Tell Me Ma (“the boys won’t leave the girls alone”). The melody and the lyrics of the original are fed into a relentless maw of tumult and red-eyed zeal. It’s all fuelled by a shrieked vocal style that Corcoran perfected after training with Dara Kiely of the Dublin noise-rock group Gilla Band.
It’s striking, but it isn’t always pretty. Jesus Wore Drag, for instance, spirals into raw fury as Corcoran imagines Christ trying to get by in 21st-century Dublin. “Look what being myself has cost me,” Corcoran’s Jesus howls.
Here and elsewhere, Skinner is upfront about not pandering to the delicate listener. “My music isn’t for everyone,” Corcoran told the Dublin Gazette in October. “My favourite music is unlistenable, and the weirder and more distinct it is, the more I am drawn to it. I like to deviate from the norm.”
New Wave Vaudeville is a long way from unlistenable. Nor does it draw exclusively from no wave and the late 1970s (though the eye-popping cover art is an explicit tribute to Haring). Before it all goes up in flames at the end, Jesus Wore Drag evokes the gutbucket, bargain-basement 1990s indie of Sebadoh and early Pavement. Meanwhile, on Here Comes the Rain, the album’s closing track, Skinner sounds like Dublin’s answer to the indie weirdo Ben Kweller (or a lo-fi Beck).
“Peaceful like a body floating upside down in lukewarm oceans,” he hums as the LP winds down in a dreamy haze – a balmy end to an album that roils with ferocity and is propelled by the belief that art’s first duty is to make the listener sit up and give their full attention.
New Wave Vaudeville is a spasmodic shot of art rock that is in places frantically catchy but also walks the tightrope between high culture and backstreet scuzz, cheerfully unconcerned about losing its balance or tipping headfirst into the unknown. Skinner is a risk-taker for whom the possibility of everything splodging out of control is part of the fun. Ireland could do with more artists like him.
New Wave Vaudeville is released via Faction Records on Friday, January 10th
